and a frequenter of cultured society pleads in
these pages the attractions of an intellectual bias or life-training:
he pleads to all accessible classes--to the curate and to the
nobleman, "to a country gentleman who regretted that his son had the
tendencies of a dilettante," "to a lady of high culture who found it
difficult to associate with persons of her own sex," and so on.
Over seventy different addresses are included, each in the form of a
letter, which, though not necessarily ever posted, is really aimed at
a specific person known to the author and distinctively spoken to. The
effort is to reconcile culture with the world of practice and morals,
and answer or forestall the objections of religion or utilitarianism.
Mr. Hamerton talks with great self-possession to the highest class
within ear-shot, and matches a late stricture of Mr. Ruskin's--that
English noblemen exist to shoot little birds--with another on the
influence of railways in sending back the upper ranks to a state of
nomadic barbarism. "Their life," he says, "may be quite accurately
described as a return, on a scale of unprecedented splendor and
comfort, to the life of tribes in that stage of human development
which is known as the period of the chase: they migrate from one
hunting-ground to another as the diminution of the game impels them."
He points out a curious reaction in the spirit of this class: formerly
they loved to lard their speech with Latin and Greek to keep the
ignorant in their places; but now, that cheap education has endowed
the tradesman with Latin and Greek, there is a tendency to feel toward
intellectual culture much as the barons did away back in the Dark
Ages, and to outdazzle by mere show of costly pleasure the class they
can no longer excel in learned polish. After all, the great question
in recommending culture is the question of its effect on morals: if
the effect of poetry and art is weakening to the moral sense, as many
have claimed from Socrates to Augustine, then letters have no ethical
reason for existence. Our author, who has a habit of continually
turning his tapestry to see the aspect of the other side, is very
sensible of a characteristic in people of extreme culture to allow
Nature her most contradictory reactions. This tendency, opposed as
it is to all our ideal conceptions of the intellectual life, is
the merest commonplace of biography. "The most exquisitely delicate
artists in literature and painting have frequen