[60] _Autobiography of Isaac Williams_, p. 132. This letter was written in 1863.
CHAPTER XII
THE MANAGEMENT OF CHARACTER
Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognise his powers for good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognise that this power is not unlimited. Man is like a card-player who receives from Nature his cards--his disposition, his circ.u.mstances, the strength or weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skilful or unskilful regimen, physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral const.i.tution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.
It has often seemed to me that diversities of taste throw much light on the basis of character. Why is it that the same dish gives one man keen pleasure and to another is loathsome and repulsive? To this simple question no real answer can be given. It is a fact of our nature that one fruit, or meat, or drink will give pleasure to one palate and none whatever to another. At the same time, while the original and natural difference is undoubted, there are many differences which are wholly or largely due to particular and often transitory causes. Dishes have an attraction or the reverse because they are a.s.sociated with old recollections or habits. Habit will make a Frenchman like his melon with salt, while an Englishman prefers it with sugar. An old a.s.sociation of ideas will make an Englishman shrink from eating a frog or a snail, though he would probably like each if he ate it without knowing it, and he could easily learn to do so. The kind of cookery which one age or one nation generally likes, another age or another nation finds distasteful.
The eye often governs the taste, and a dish which, when seen, excites intense repulsion, would have no such repulsion to a blind man. Every one who has moved much about the world, and especially in uncivilised countries, will get rid of many old antipathies, will lose the fastidiousness of his taste, and will acquire new and genuine tastes.
The original innate difference is not wholly destroyed, but it is profoundly and variously modified.
These changes of taste are very a.n.a.logous to what takes place in our moral dispositions. They are for the most part in themselves simply external to morals, though there is at least one conspicuous exception.
Many--it is to be hoped most--men might spend their lives with full access to intoxicating liquors without even the temptation of getting drunk. Apart from all considerations of religion, morals, social, physical, or intellectual consequences, they abstain from doing so simply as a matter of taste. With other men the pleasure of excessive drinking is such that it requires an heroic effort of the will to resist it. There are men who not only are so const.i.tuted that it is their greatest pleasure, but who are even born with a craving for drink. In no form is the terrible fact of heredity more clearly or more tragically displayed. Many, too, who had originally no such craving gradually acquire it: sometimes by mere social influence, which makes excessive drinking the habit of their circle; more frequently through depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures, if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case with all our pleasures. Many are keenly enjoyed when present, yet not seriously missed when absent. Sometimes, too, the effect of over-indulgence is to vitiate and deaden the palate, so that what was once pleasing ceases altogether to be an object of desire. This, too, has its a.n.a.logue in other things. We have a familiar example in the excessive novel-reader, who begins with a kind of mental intoxication, and who ends with such a weariness that he finds it a serious effort to read the books which were once his strongest temptation.
Tastes of the palate also naturally change with age and with the accompanying changes of the body. The schoolboy who bitterly repines because the smallness of his allowance restricts his power of buying tarts and sweetmeats will probably grow into a man who, with many shillings in his pocket, daily pa.s.ses the confectioner"s shop without the smallest desire to enter it.
It is evident that there is a close a.n.a.logy between these things and that collection of likes and dislikes, moral and intellectual, which forms the primal base of character, and which mainly determines the complexion of our lives. As Marcus Aurelius said: "Who can change the desires of man?" That which gives the strongest habitual pleasure, whether it be innate or acquired, will in the great majority of cases ultimately dominate. Certain things will always be intensely pleasurable, and certain other things indifferent or repellent, and this magnetism is the true basis of character, and with the majority of men it mainly determines conduct. By the a.s.sociations of youth and by other causes these natural likings and dislikings may be somewhat modified, but even in youth our power is very limited, and in later life it is much less. No real believer in free-will will hold that man is an absolute slave to his desires. No man who knows the world will deny that with average man the strongest pa.s.sion or desire will prevail--happy when that desire is not a vice.
Pa.s.sions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life. Here, as in most other things, opposite exaggerations are to be avoided. There is such a thing as looking forward too rigidly and too exclusively to the future--to a future that may never arrive. This is the great fault of the over-educationist, who makes early life a burden and a toil, and also of those who try to impose on youth the tastes and pleasures of the man.
Youth has its own pleasures, which will always give it most enjoyment, and a happy youth is in itself an end. It is the time when the power of enjoyment is most keen, and it is often accompanied by such extreme sensitiveness that the sufferings of the child for what seem the most trivial causes probably at least equal in acuteness, though not in durability, the sufferings of a man. Many a parent standing by the coffin of his child has felt with bitterness how much of the measure of enjoyment that short life might have known has been cut off by an injudicious education. And even if adult life is attained, the evils of an unhappy childhood are seldom wholly compensated. The pleasures of retrospect are among the most real we possess, and it is around our childish days that our fondest a.s.sociations naturally cl.u.s.ter. An early over-strain of our powers often leaves behind it lasting distortion or weakness, and a sad childhood introduces into the character elements of morbidness and bitterness that will not disappear.
The first great rule in judging of pleasures is that so well expressed by Seneca: "Sic praesentibus utaris voluptatibus ut futuris non noceas"--so to use present pleasures as not to impair future ones.
Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, habitual extravagance and self-indulgence, if they become the pleasures of youth, will almost infallibly lead to the ruin of a life. Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.
In starting in life we are apt to attach a disproportionate value to tastes, pleasures, and ideals that can only be even approximately satisfied in youth, health, and strength. We have, I think, an example of this in the immense place which athletic games and out-of-door sports have taken in modern English life. They are certainly not things to be condemned. They have the direct effect of giving a large amount of intense and innocent pleasure, and they have indirect effects which are still more important. In so far as they raise the level of physical strength and health, and dispel the morbidness of temperament which is so apt to accompany a sedentary life and a diseased or inert frame, they contribute powerfully to lasting happiness. They play a considerable part in the formation of friendships which is one of the best fruits of the period between boyhood and mature manhood. Some of them give lessons of courage, perseverance, energy, self-restraint, and cheerful acquiescence in disappointment and defeat that are of no small value in the formation of character, and when they are not a.s.sociated with gambling they have often the inestimable advantage of turning young men away from vicious pleasures. At the same time it can hardly be doubted that they hold an exaggerated prominence in the lives of young Englishmen of the present generation. It is not too much to say that among large sections of the students at our Universities, and at a time when intellectual ambition ought to be most strong and when the acquisition of knowledge is most important, proficiency in cricket or boating or football is more prized than any intellectual achievement. I have heard a good judge, who had long been a.s.sociated with English University life, express his opinion that during the last forty or fifty years the relative intellectual position of the upper and middle cla.s.ses in England has been materially changed, owing to the disproportioned place which outdoor amus.e.m.e.nts have a.s.sumed in the lives of the former.
It is the impression of very competent judges that a genuine love, reverence and enthusiasm for intellectual things is less common among the young men of the present day than it was in the days of their fathers. The predominance of the critical spirit which chills enthusiasm, and still more the cram system which teaches young men to look on the prizes that are to be won by compet.i.tive examinations as the supreme end of knowledge, no doubt largely account for this, but much is also due to the extravagant glorification of athletic games.
If we compare the cla.s.s of pleasures I have described with the taste for reading and kindred intellectual pleasures, the superiority of the latter is very manifest. To most young men, it is true, a game will probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified this predominant pa.s.sion. But while the tastes which require physical strength decline or pa.s.s with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself but enhances many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form the great world-drama around us.
To acquire this taste in early youth is one of the best fruits of education, and it is especially useful when the taste for reading becomes a taste for knowledge, and when it is accompanied by some specialisation and concentration and by some exercise of the powers of observation. "Many tastes and one hobby" is no bad ideal to be aimed at.
The boy who learns to collect and cla.s.sify fossils, or flowers, or insects, who has acquired a love for chemical experiments, who has begun to form a taste for some particular kind or department of knowledge, has laid the foundation of much happiness in life.
In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to the others; that different pleasures should not clash, but rather cover different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements of happiness as mere amus.e.m.e.nts can ever furnish. One set of pleasures, however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better things, exercise an injurious influence on character. Habitual novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious literature, and few things tend so much to impair a sound literary perception and to vulgarise the character as the habit of constantly saturating the mind with inferior literature, even when that literature is in no degree immoral. Sometimes an opposite evil may be produced.
Excessive fastidiousness greatly limits our enjoyments, and the inestimable gift of extreme concentration is often dearly bought. The well-known confession of Darwin that his intense addiction to science had destroyed his power of enjoying even the n.o.blest imaginative literature represents a danger to which many men who have achieved much in the higher and severer forms of scientific thought are subject. Such men are usually by their original temperament, and become still more by acquired habit, men of strong, narrow, concentrated natures, whose thoughts, like a deep and rapid stream confined in a restricted channel, flow with resistless energy in one direction. It is by the sacrifice of versatility that they do so much, and the result is amply sufficient to justify it. But it is a real sacrifice, depriving them of many forms both of capacity and of enjoyment.
The same pleasures act differently on different characters, especially on the differences of character that accompany difference of s.e.x. I have myself no doubt that the movement which in modern times has so widely opened to women amus.e.m.e.nts that were once almost wholly reserved for men has been on the whole a good one. It has produced a higher level of health, stronger nerves, and less morbid characters, and it has given keen and innocent enjoyment to many who from their circ.u.mstances and surroundings once found their lives very dreary and insipid. Yet most good observers will agree that amus.e.m.e.nts which have no kind of evil effect on men often in some degree impair the graces or characters of women, and that it is not quite with impunity that one s.e.x tries to live the life of the other. Some pleasures, too, exercise a much larger influence than others on the general habits of life. It is not too much to say that the invention of the bicycle, bringing with it an immense increase of outdoor life, of active exercise, and of independent habits, has revolutionised the course of many lives. Some amus.e.m.e.nts which may in themselves be but little valued are wisely cultivated as helping men to move more easily in different spheres of society, or as providing a resource for old age. Talleyrand was not wholly wrong in his reproach to a man who had never learned to play whist: "What an unhappy old age you are preparing for yourself!"
I have already mentioned the differences that may be found in different countries and ages, in the relative importance attached to external circ.u.mstances and to dispositions of mind as means of happiness, and the tendency in the more progressive nations to seek their happiness mainly in improved circ.u.mstances. Another great line of distinction is between education that acts specially upon the desires, and that which acts specially upon the will. The great perfection of modern systems of education is chiefly of the former kind. Its object is to make knowledge and virtue attractive, and therefore an object of desire. It does so partly by presenting them in the most alluring forms, partly by connecting them as closely as possible with rewards. The great principle of modern moral education is to multiply innocent and beneficent interests, tastes, and ambitions. It is to make the path of virtue the natural, the easy, the pleasing one; to form a social atmosphere favourable to its development, making duty and interest as far as possible coincident. Vicious pleasures are combated by the multiplication of healthy ones, and by a clearer insight into the consequences of each. An idle or inert character is stimulated by holding up worthy objects of interest and ambition, and it is the aim alike of the teacher and the legislator to make the grooves and channels of life such as tend naturally and easily towards good. But the education of the will--the power of breasting the current of the desires and doing for long periods what is distasteful and painful--is much less cultivated than in some periods of the past.
Many things contribute to this. The rush and hurry of modern existence and the incalculable mult.i.tude and variety of fleeting impressions that in the great centres of civilisation pa.s.s over the mind are very unfavourable to concentration, and perhaps still more to the direct cultivation of mental states. Amus.e.m.e.nts, and the appet.i.te for amus.e.m.e.nts, have greatly extended. Life has become more full. The long leisures, the introspective habits, the _vita contemplativa_ so conspicuous in the old Catholic discipline, grow very rare. Thoughts and interests are more thrown on the external; and the comfort, the luxury, the softness, the humanity of modern life, and especially of modern education, make men less inclined to face the disagreeable and endure the painful.
The starting-point of education is thus silently changing. Perhaps the extent of the change is best shown by the old Catholic ascetic training.
Its supreme object was to discipline and strengthen the will: to accustom men habitually to repudiate the pleasurable and accept the painful; to mortify the most natural tastes and affections; to narrow and weaken the empire of the desires; to make men wholly independent of outward circ.u.mstances; to preach self-renunciation as itself an end.
Men will always differ about the merits of this system. In my own opinion it is difficult to believe that in the period of Catholic ascendency the moral standard was, on the whole and in its broad lines, higher than our own. The repression of the sensual instincts was the central fact in ascetic morals; but, even tested by this test, it is at least very doubtful whether it did not fail. The withdrawal from secular society of the best men did much to restrict the influences for good, and the habit of aiming at an unnatural ideal was not favourable to common, everyday, domestic virtue. The history of sacerdotal and monastic celibacy abundantly shows how much vice that might easily have been avoided grew out of the adoption of an unnatural standard, and how often it led in those who had attained it to grave distortions of character. Affections and impulses which were denied their healthy and natural vent either became wholly atrophied or took other and morbid forms, and the hard, cruel, self-righteous fanatic, equally ready to endure or to inflict suffering, was a not unnatural result. But whatever may have been its failures and its exaggerations, Catholic asceticism was at least a great school for disciplining and strengthening the will, and the strength and discipline of the will form one of the first elements of virtue and of happiness.
In the grave and n.o.ble type of character which prevailed in English and American life during the seventeenth century, the strength of will was conspicuously apparent. Life was harder, simpler, more serious, and less desultory than at present, and strong convictions shaped and fortified the character. "It was an age," says a great American writer, "when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the ma.s.sive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these rude sh.o.r.es, having left king, n.o.bles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him, bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience; on endowments of that grave and weighty order which give the idea of permanence and come under the general definition of respectability.
These primitive statesmen, therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers,--who were elevated to power by the early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety rather than activity of intellect.
They had fort.i.tude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the State like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide."[61]
The power of the will, however, even when it exists in great strength, is often curiously capricious. History is full of examples of men who in great trials and emergencies have acted with admirable and persevering heroism, yet who readily succ.u.mbed to private vices or pa.s.sions. The will is not the same as the desires, but the connection between them is very close. A love for a distant end; a dominating ambition or pa.s.sion, will call forth long perseverance in wholly distasteful work in men whose will in other fields of life is lamentably feeble. Every one who has embarked with real earnestness in some extended literary enterprise which as a whole represents the genuine bent of his talent and character will be struck with his exceptional power of traversing perseveringly long sections of this enterprise for which he has no natural apt.i.tude and in which he takes no pleasure. Military courage is with most men chiefly a matter of temperament and impulse, but there have been conspicuous instances of great soldiers and sailors who have frankly acknowledged that they never lost in battle an intense const.i.tutional shrinking from danger, though by the force of a strong will they never suffered this timidity to govern or to weaken them. With men of very vivid imagination there is a natural tendency to timidity as they realise more than ordinary men danger and suffering. On the other hand it has often been noticed how calmly the callous, semi-torpid temperament that characterises many of the worst criminals enables them to meet death upon the gallows.
In courage itself, too, there are many varieties. The courage of the soldier and the courage of the martyr are not the same, and it by no means follows that either would possess that of the other. Not a few men who are capable of leading a forlorn hope, and who never shrink from the bayonet and the cannon, have shown themselves incapable of bearing the burden of responsibility, enduring long-continued suspense, taking decisions which might expose them to censure or unpopularity. The active courage that encounters and delights in danger is often found in men who show no courage in bearing suffering, misfortune, or disease. In pa.s.sive courage the woman often excels the man as much as in active courage the man exceeds the woman. Even in active courage familiarity does much; sympathy and enthusiasm play great and often very various parts, and curious anomalies may be found. The Teutonic and the Latin races are probably equally distinguished for their military courage, but there is a clear difference between them in the nature of that courage and in the circ.u.mstances or conditions under which it is usually most splendidly displayed. The danger incurred by the gladiator was far greater than that which was encountered by the soldier, but Tacitus[62] mentions that when some of the bravest gladiators were employed in the Roman army they were found wholly inefficient, as they were much less capable than the ordinary soldiers of military courage.
The circ.u.mstances of life are the great school for forming and strengthening the will, and in the excessive compet.i.tion and struggle of modern industrialism this school is not wanting. But in ethical and educational systems the value of its cultivation is often insufficiently felt. Yet nothing which is learned in youth is so really valuable as the power and the habit of self-restraint, of self-sacrifice, of energetic, continuous and concentrated effort. In the best of us evil tendencies are always strong and the path of duty is often distasteful. With the most favourable wind and tide the bark will never arrive at the harbour if it has ceased to obey the rudder. A weak nature which is naturally kindly, affectionate and pure, which floats through life under the impulse of the feelings, with no real power of self-restraint, is indeed not without its charm, and in a well-organised society, with good surroundings and few temptations, it may attain a high degree of beauty; but its besetting failings will steadily grow; without fort.i.tude, perseverance and principle, it has no recuperative energy, and it will often end in a moral catastrophe which natures in other respects much less happily compounded would easily avoid. Nothing can permanently secure our moral being in the absence of a restraining will basing itself upon a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong, upon the firm groundwork of principle and honour.
Experience abundantly shows how powerfully the steady action of such a will can operate upon innate defects, converting the const.i.tutional idler into the indefatigably industrious, checking, limiting and sometimes almost destroying const.i.tutional irritability and vicious pa.s.sions. The natural power of the will in different men differs greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable amelioration is very rare. Sometimes the strong influence of religion effects it. Sometimes it is effected by an illness, a great misfortune, or the total change of a.s.sociations that follows emigration. Marriage perhaps more frequently than any other ordinary agency in early life transforms or deeply modifies the character, for it puts an end to powerful temptations and brings with it a profound change of habits and motives, a.s.sociations and desires. But we have all of us encountered in life depraved natures in which vicious self-indulgence had attained such a strength, and the recuperating and moralising elements were so fatally weak, that we clearly perceive the disease to be incurable, and that it is hardly possible that any change of circ.u.mstances could even seriously mitigate it. In what proportion this is the fault or the calamity of the patient no human judgment can accurately tell.
Few things are sadder than to observe how frequently the inheritance of great wealth or even of easy competence proves the utter and speedy ruin of a young man, except when the administration of a large property, or the necessity of carrying on a great business, or some other propitious circ.u.mstance provides him with a clearly defined sphere of work. The majority of men will gladly discard distasteful work which their circ.u.mstances do not require; and in the absence of steady work, and in the possession of all the means of gratification, temptations a.s.sume an overwhelming strength, and the springs of moral life are fatally impaired. It can hardly be doubted that the average longevity in this small cla.s.s is far less than in that of common men, and that even when natural capacity is considerable it is more rarely displayed. To a man with a real desire for work such circ.u.mstances are indeed of inestimable value, giving him the leisure and the opportunities of applying himself without distraction and from early manhood to the kind of work that is most suited to him. Sometimes this takes place, but much more frequently vicious tastes or a simply idle or purposeless life are the result.
Sometimes, indeed, a large amount of desultory and unregulated energy remains, but the serious labour of concentration is shunned and no real result is attained. The stream is there, but it turns no mill.
Most men escape this danger through the circ.u.mstances of life which make serious and steady work necessary to their livelihood, and in the majority of cases the kind of work is so clearly marked out that they have little choice. When some choice exists, the rule which I have already laid down should not be forgotten. Men should choose their work not only according to their talents and their opportunities, but also, as far as possible, according to their characters. They should select the kinds which are most fitted to bring their best qualities into exercise, or should at least avoid those which have a special tendency to develop or encourage their dominant defects. On the whole it will be found that men"s characters are much more deeply influenced by their pursuits than by their opinions.
The choice of work is one of the great agencies for the management of character in youth. The choice of friends is another. In the words of Burke, "The law of opinion ... is the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind, and more of the happiness and unhappiness of man reside in that inward principle than in all external circ.u.mstances put together."[63] This is true of the great public opinion of an age or country which envelops us like an atmosphere, and by its silent pressure steadily and almost insensibly shapes or influences the whole texture of our lives. It is still more true of the smaller circle of our intimacies which will do more than almost any other thing to make the path of virtue easy or difficult. How large a proportion of the incentives to a n.o.ble ambition, or of the first temptations to evil, may be traced to an early friendship, and it is often in the little circle that gathers round a college table that the measure of life is first taken, and ideals and enthusiasms are formed which give a colour to all succeeding years. To admire strongly and to admire wisely is, indeed, one of the best means of moral improvement.
Very much, however, of the management of character can only be accomplished by the individual himself acting in complete isolation upon his own nature and in the chamber of his own mind. The discipline of thought; the establishment of an ascendency of the will over our courses of thinking; the power of casting away morbid trains of reflection and turning resolutely to other subjects or aspects of life; the power of concentrating the mind vigorously on a serious subject and pursuing continuous trains of thought,--form perhaps the best fruits of judicious self-education. Its importance, indeed, is manifold. In the higher walks of intellect this power of mental concentration is of supreme value.
Newton is said to have ascribed mainly to an unusual amount of it his achievements in philosophy, and it is probable that the same might be said by most other great thinkers. In the pursuit of happiness hardly anything in external circ.u.mstances is so really valuable as the power of casting off worry, turning in times of sorrow to healthy work, taking habitually the brighter view of things. It is in such exercises of will that we chiefly realise the truth of the lines of Tennyson:
Oh, well for him whose will is strong, He suffers, but he will not suffer long.
In moral culture it is not less important to acquire the power of discarding the demoralising thoughts and imaginations that haunt so many, and meeting temptation by calling up purer, higher and restraining thoughts. The faculty we possess of alternating and intensifying our own motives by bringing certain thoughts, or images, or subjects into the foreground and throwing others into the background, is one of our chief means of moral progress. The cultivation of this power is a far wiser thing than the cultivation of that introspective habit of mind which is perpetually occupied with self-a.n.a.lysis or self-examination, and which is constantly and remorsefully dwelling upon past faults or upon the morbid elements in our nature. In the morals which are called minor, though they affect deeply the happiness of mankind, the importance of the government of thought is not less apparent. The secret of good or bad temper is our habitual tendency to dwell upon or to fly from the irritating and the inevitable. Content or discontent, amiability or the reverse, depend mainly upon the disposition of our minds to turn specially to the good or to the evil sides of our own lot, to the merits or to the defects of those about us. A power of turning our thoughts from a given subject, though not the sole element in self-control, is at least one of its most important ingredients.
This power of the will over the thoughts is one in which men differ enormously. Thus--to take the most familiar instance--the capacity for worry, with all the exaggerations and distortions of sentiment it implies, is very evidently a const.i.tutional thing, and where it exists to a high degree neither reason nor will can effectually cure it. Such a man may have the clearest possible intellectual perception of its uselessness and its folly. Yet it will often banish sleep from his pillow, follow him with an habitual depression in all the walks of life, and make his measure of happiness much less than that of others who with far less propitious circ.u.mstances are endued by nature with the gift of lightly throwing off the past and looking forward with a sanguine and cheerful spirit to the future. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the different degrees of suffering the same trouble will produce in different men, and it is probable that the happiness of a life depends much less on the amount of pleasurable or painful things that are encountered, than upon the turn of thought which dwells chiefly on one or on the other. It is very evident that buoyancy of temperament is not a thing that increases with civilisation or education. It is mainly physical. It is greatly influenced by climate and by health, and where no very clear explanation of this kind can be given it is a thing in which different nations differ greatly. Few good observers will deny that persistent and concentrated will is more common in Great Britain than in Ireland, but that the gift of a buoyant temperament is more common among Irishmen than among Englishmen. Yet it co-exists in the national character with a strong vein of very genuine melancholy, and it is often accompanied by keen sensitiveness to suffering. This combination is a very common one. Every one who has often stood by a deathbed knows how frequently it will be found that the mourner who is utterly prostrated by grief, and whose tears flow in torrents, casts off her grief much more completely and much sooner than one whose tears refuse to flow and who never for a moment loses her self-command.
But though natural temperament enables one man to do without effort what another man with the utmost effort fails to accomplish, there are some available remedies that can palliate the disease. Society, travel and other amus.e.m.e.nts can do something, and such words as "diversion" and "distraction" embalm the truth that the chief virtue of many pleasures is to divert or distract our minds from painful thoughts. Pascal considered this a sign of the misery and the baseness of our nature, and he describes as a deplorable spectacle a man who rose from his bed weighed down with anxiety and grave sorrow, and who could for a time forget it all in the pa.s.sionate excitement of the chase. But, in truth, the possession of such a power--weak and transient though it be--is one of the great alleviations of the lot of man. Religion, with its powerful motives and its wide range of consolatory and soothing thoughts and images, has much power in this sphere when it does not take a morbid form and intensify instead of alleviating sorrow; and the steady exercise of the will gives us some real and increasing, though imperfect, control over the current of our feelings as well as of our ideas.
Often the power of dreaming comes to our aid. When we cannot turn from some painfully pressing thought to serious thinking of another kind, we can give the reins to our imaginations and soon lose ourselves in ideal scenes. There are men who live so habitually in a world of imagination that it becomes to them a second life, and their strongest temptations and their keenest pleasures belong to it. To them "common life seems tapestried with dreams." Not unfrequently they derive a pleasure from imagined or remembered enjoyments which the realities themselves would fail to give. They select in imagination certain aspects or portions, throw others into the shade, intensify or attenuate impressions, transform and beautify the reality of things. The power of filling their existence with happy day-dreams is their most precious luxury. They feel the full force of the pathetic lines of an Irish poet:[64]
Sweet thoughts, bright dreams my comfort be, I have no joy beside; Oh, throng around and be to me Power, country, fame and bride.
To train this side of our nature is no small part of the management of character. There is a great sphere of happiness and misery which is almost or altogether unconnected with surrounding circ.u.mstances, and depends upon the thoughts, images, hopes and fears on which our minds are chiefly concentrated. The exercise of this form of imagination has often a great influence, both intellectually and morally. In childhood, as every teacher knows, it is often a distracting influence, and with men also it is sometimes an obstacle to concentrated reasoning and observation, turning the mind away from sober and difficult thought; but there is a kind of dreaming which is eminently conducive to productive thought. It enables a man to place himself so completely in other conditions of thought and life that the ideas connected with those conditions rise spontaneously in the mind. A true and vivid realisation of characters and circ.u.mstances unlike his own is acquired. The mere fact of placing himself in other circ.u.mstances and investing himself with imaginary powers and functions sometimes suggests possible remedies for great human ills, and gives clearer views of the proportions, difficulties and conditions of governments and societies. Much discovery in science has been due to this power of the imagination to realise conditions that are unseen, and the habit or faculty of living other lives than our own is scarcely less valuable to the historian, and even to the statesman, than to the poet or the novelist or the dramatist. It gives the magic touch which changes mere lifeless knowledge into realisation.
Its effect upon character also is great and various. No one can fail to recognise the depraving influence of a corrupt imagination; and the corruption may spring, not only from suggestions from without, but from those which rise spontaneously in our minds. Nor is even the imagination which is wholly pure absolutely without its dangers. It is a well-known law of our nature that an excessive indulgence in emotion that does not end in action tends rather to deaden than to stimulate the moral nerve.
It has been often noticed that the exaggerated sentimentality which sheds pa.s.sionate tears over the fict.i.tious sorrows of a novel or a play is no certain sign of a benevolent and unselfish nature, and is quite compatible with much indifference to real sorrows and much indisposition to make efforts for their alleviation. It is, however, no less true, as Dugald Stewart says, that the apparent coldness and selfishness of men are often simply due to a want of that kind of imagination which enables us to realise sufferings with which we have never been brought into direct contact, and that once this power of realisation is acquired, the coldness is speedily dispelled. Nor can it be doubted that in the management of thought, the dream power often plays a most important part in alleviating human suffering; illuminating cheerless and gloomy lives, and breaking the chain of evil or distressing thoughts.
The immense place which the literature of fiction holds in the world shows how widely some measure of it is diffused, and how large an amount of time and talent is devoted to its cultivation. It is probable, however, that it is really stronger in the earlier and uncultivated than in the later stages of humanity, as it is more vivid in childhood and in youth than in mature life. "A child," as an American writer[65] has well said, "can afford to sleep without dreaming; he has plenty of dreams without sleep." The childhood of the world is also eminently an age of dreams. There are stages of civilisation in which the dream world blends so closely with the world of realities, in which the imagination so habitually and so spontaneously transfigures or distorts, that men become almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the fict.i.tious. This is the true age of myths and legends; and there are strata in contemporary society in which something of the same conditions is reproduced. "To those who do not read or write much," says an acute observer, "even in our days, dreams are much more real than to those who are continually exercising the imagination.... Since I have been occupied with literature my dreams have lost all vividness and are less real than the shadows of the trees; they do not deceive me even in my sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed to call up figures at will before my eyes, which stand out well defined and coloured to the very hue of their faces.... The less literary a people the more they believe in dreams; the disappearance of superst.i.tion is not due to the cultivation of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to the mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually puts figures and aerial shapes before the mental gaze that in time those that occur naturally are thought no more of than those conjured into existence by a book. It is in far-away country places, where people read very little, that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of fate. Their dreams are real."[66]
The last point I would notice in the management of character is the importance of what may be called moral safety-valves. One of the most fatal mistakes in education is the attempt which is so often made by the educator to impose his own habits and tastes on natures that are essentially different. It is common for men of lymphatic temperaments, of studious, saintly, and retiring tastes, to endeavor to force a high-spirited young man starting in life into their own mould--to prescribe for him the cast of tastes and pursuits they find most suited for themselves, forgetting that such an ideal can never satisfy a wholly different nature, and that in aiming at it a kind of excellence which might easily have been attained is missed. This is one of the evils that very frequently arise when the education of boys after an early age is left in the hands of women. It is the true explanation of the fact, which has so often been noticed, that children of clergymen, or at least children educated on a rigidly austere, puritanical system, so often go conspicuously to the bad. Such an education, imposed on a nature that is unfit for it, generally begins by producing hypocrisy, and not unfrequently ends by a violent reaction into vice. There is no greater mistake in education than to a.s.sociate virtue in early youth with gloomy colours and constant restrictions, and few people do more mischief in the world than those who are perpetually inventing crimes. In circles where smoking, or field sports, or going to the play, or reading novels, or indulging in any boisterous games or in the most harmless Sunday amus.e.m.e.nts, are treated as if they were grave moral offences, young men constantly grow up who end by looking on grave moral offences as not worse than these things. They lose all sense of proportion and perspective in morals, and those who are always straining at gnats are often peculiarly apt to swallow camels. It is quite right that men who have formed for themselves an ideal of life of the kind that I have described should steadily pursue it, but it is another thing to impose it upon others, and to prescribe it as of general application. By teaching as absolutely wrong things that are in reality only culpable in their abuse or their excess, they destroy the habit of moderate and restrained enjoyment, and a period of absolute prohibition is often followed by a period of unrestrained license.
The truth is there are elements in human nature which many moralists might wish to be absent, as they are very easily turned in the direction of vice, but which at the same time are inherent in our being, and, if rightly understood, are essential elements of human progress. The love of excitement and adventure; the fierce combative instinct that delights in danger, in struggle, and even in destruction; the restless ambition that seeks with an insatiable longing to better its position and to climb heights that are yet unscaled; the craving for some enjoyment which not merely gives pleasure but carries with it a thrill of pa.s.sion,--all this lies deep in human nature and plays a great part in that struggle for existence, in that harsh and painful process of evolution by which civilisation is formed, faculty stimulated to its full development, and human progress secured. In the education of the individual, as in the education of the race, the true policy in dealing with these things is to find for them a healthy, useful, or at least harmless sphere of action. In the chemistry of character they may ally themselves with the most heroic as well as with the worst parts of our nature, and the same pa.s.sion for excitement which in one man will take the form of ruinous vice, in another may lead to brilliant enterprise, while in a third it may be turned with no great difficulty into channels which are very innocent.