Autobiography
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.
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
_Mémoires_, 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 burden 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.
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 I 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 I for enjoyment; that is, for the great majority of mankind.
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.
I had now learnt by experience that the passing 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 undervalue, 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 1 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 be 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.
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.
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 of 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