| |
| FOR some years after this I wrote very
little, and nothing regularly, for publication: and great were the
advantages which I derived from the intermission. It was of no common
importance to me, at this period, to be able to digest and mature my
thoughts for my own mind only, without any immediate call for giving
them out in print. Had I gone on writing, it would have much disturbed
the important transformation in my opinions and character, which took
place during those years. The origin of this transformation, or at
least the process by which I was prepared for it, can only be explained
by turning some distance back. | 1 |
| From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and
especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what
might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.
My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this
object. The personal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow
labourers in this enterprise. I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers
as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent personal
satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed on this; and I
was accustomed to felicitate myself on the certainty of a happy life
which I enjoyed, through placing my happiness in something durable and
distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could
never be exhausted by complete attainment. This did very well for
several years, during which the general improvement going on in the
world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to
promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated
existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream.
It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as
everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or
pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at
other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think,
in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first
“conviction of sin.” In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the
question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in life
were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which
you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very
instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my
heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was
constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the
continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how
could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have
nothing left to live for. | 2 |
At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself;
but it did not. A night’s sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller
vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed
consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all
companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me
even a few minutes oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to
grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge’s “Dejection”—I was
not then acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:| | “A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, |
| A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, |
| Which finds no natural outlet or relief |
| In word, or sigh, or tear.+” |
| 3 |
| In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those
memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always
hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling,
or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I
became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its
own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to
others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make
confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the
condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting, or in
any way respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract
sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most
precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my
thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope
of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me
to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to
whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced
me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering
from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not
the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his
work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its
ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of
thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably
irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his
remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any
hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abundantly
intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more hopeless
it appeared. | 4 |
| My course of study had led me to believe, that all mental and
moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were
the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another,
take pleasure in one sort of action or contemplation, and pain in
another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to
those things, from the effect of education or of experience. As a
corollary from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father, and
was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form
the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations
of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain
with all things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but
it now seemed to me, on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied
themselves but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up
these salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to
the old familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment.
Now, I did not doubt that by these means, begun early, and applied
unremittingly, intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of
pain, might be created, and might produce desires and aversions capable
of lasting undiminished to the end of life. But there must always be
something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. The
pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not
connected with them by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought,
essential to the durability of these associations, that they should
have become so intense and inveterate as to be practically
indissoluble, before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis had
commenced. For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before
received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to
wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is
cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural
complements and correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued)
is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of
prejudice; that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have
only casually clung together: and no associations whatever could
ultimately resist this dissolving force, were it not that we owe to
analysis our clearest knowledge of the permanent sequences in nature;
the real connexions between Things, not dependent on our will and
feelings; natural laws, by virtue of which, in many cases, one thing is
inseparable from another in fact; which laws, in proportion as they are
clearly perceived and imaginatively realized, cause our ideas of things
which are always joined together in Nature, to cohere more and more
closely in our thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the
associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend
altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere
matter of feeling. They are therefore (I thought) favourable to
prudence and clear-sightedness, but a perpetual worm at the root both
of the passions and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine
all desires, and all pleasures, which are the effects of association,
that is, according to the theory I held, all except the purely physical
and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to make life
desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than I had. These were the
laws of human nature, by which, as it seemed to me, I had been brought
to my present state. All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion
that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which
made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale,
the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of
happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a
feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.
My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in
sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis,
while the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made
precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I
was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my
voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without
any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out
to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just
as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed
to have dried up within me, as completely as those of benevolence. I
had had (as I reflected) some gratification of vanity at too early an
age: I had obtained some distinction, and felt myself of some
importance, before the desire of distinction and of importance had
grown into a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet
having been attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too soon, it
had made me blasé and indifferent to the pursuit. Thus neither
selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. And there seemed
no power in nature sufficient to begin the formation of my character
anew, and create in a mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh
associations of pleasure with any of the objects of human desire. | 5 |
These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry heavy
dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826–7. During this time I was
not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them
mechanically, by the mere force of habit. I had been so drilled in a
certain sort of mental exercise, that I could still carry it on when
all the spirit had gone out of it. I even composed and spoke several
speeches at the debating society, how, or with what degree of success,
I know not. Of four years continual speaking at that society, this is
the only year of which I remember next to nothing. Two lines of
Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description
of what I felt, were often in my thoughts, not at this time (for I had
never read them), but in a later period of the same mental malady:| | “Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, |
| And hope without an object cannot live.” |
In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I fancied it,
and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state;
but the idiosyncrasies of my education had given to the general
phenomenon a special character, which made it seem the natural effect
of causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently
asked myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life
must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I
did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however,
not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of
light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s
“Memoires,” and came to the passage which relates his father’s death,
the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by
which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be
everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost. A
vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was
moved to tears. From this moment my been grew lighter. The oppression
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no
longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed,
some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all
capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense
of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary
incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again
find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in
sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and
that there was, once more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in
exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good. Thus the
cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I had
several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was
as miserable as I had been. | 6 |
| The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on
my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a
theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and
having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never
heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never,
indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all
rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end
was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are
happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than
their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of
mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as
itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness
by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are
sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant,
without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are
immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing
examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be
so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external
to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your
scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if
otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the
air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without
either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal
questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life.
And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a
moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment, that is,
for the great majority of mankind. | 7 |
| The other important change which my opinions at this time
underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among
the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of
the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the
ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being
for speculation and for action. | 8 |
| I had now learnt by experience that the passive
susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active
capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as
guided. I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or under-value, that
part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to
intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of
analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social
improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to
be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The
maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of
primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the
cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts
and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed
capable of being instrumental to that object. | 9 |
| I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read or
heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human
culture. But it was some time longer before I began to know this by
personal experience. The only one of the imaginative arts in which I
had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of
which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in
exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an
elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this
excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its
utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times. This
effect of music I had often experienced; but like all my pleasurable
susceptibilities it was suspended during the gloomy period. I had
sought relief again and again from this quarter, but found none. After
the tide had turned, and I was in process of recovery, I had been
helped forward by music, but in a much less elevated manner. I at this
time first became acquainted with Weber’s Oberon, and the extreme
pleasure which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by
showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as susceptible as ever.
The good, however, was much impaired by the thought, that the pleasure
of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere
tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by
intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very
characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my
mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the
thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave
consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put
together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small
proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have
been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long
succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done,
entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source
of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the
philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It
was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the
only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way
honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could
not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I
thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in
general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my
own. I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself;
that the question was, whether, if the reformers of society and
government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the
community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures
of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease
to be pleasures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some
better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must
continue; but that if I could see such an outlet, I should then look on
the world with pleasure; content as far as I was myself concerned, with
any fair share of the general lot. | 10 |
| This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my
reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an
important event in my life. I took up the collection of his poems from
curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had
before resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my
depression, I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to
try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that
of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be
expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet’s
state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had
worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who
possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid,
uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the
same burthen on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to
derive any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or
the sullenness of his Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not
suit my condition, Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into
the Excursion two or three years before, and found little in it; and I
should probably have found as little, had I read it at this time. But
the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which
little of value was added in the latter part of the author’s life),
proved to be the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular
juncture. | 11 |
| In the first place, these poems addressed themselves
powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities,
the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been
indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite
recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In
this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for
taking pleasure in Wordsworth’s, poetry. the more so, as his scenery
lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean
excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would never
have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me
beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this still better
than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more
effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for
my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but
states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the
excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the
feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a
Source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which
could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with
struggle of imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement
in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to
learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the
greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at
once better and happier as I came under their influence. There have
certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but
poetry of deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that
time what his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real,
permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me
this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased
interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And
the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this
sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of
analysis. At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely
called Platonic, “Intimations of Immortality:” in which, along with
more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the
two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I
found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had
felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not
lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the
way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I
gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was
never again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth less
according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure of what he had
done for me. Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the
poet of unpoetical natures, possessed of quiet and contemplative
tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic
cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give,
than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he. |