Archives for March 2023

John Agresto: The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What To Do About It. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

 

In the United States, “the halcyon days of liberal education are over,” John Agresto writes, citing the facts: the business of America being business, “by far the foremost major chosen by undergraduates is business, and “almost 50 percent of all students focus on just five areas: business, education, computer science/technology, engineering, and the health professions.” In graduate schools, education and business predominate. Only five percent of U.S. institutions of higher education are small, residential, liberal arts colleges—many of them in name only, one might add, having given themselves over to pre-professional training within (for example) the English departments, where ‘business writing’ more than edges out John Milton.

Agresto has long experience in higher education, including the presidency of St. John’s College Santa Fe campus, where a ‘Great Books’ program has prevailed for decades. His first task here is to curb some of the guff surrounding the liberal arts. Contrary to those who claim that a liberal education “makes us finer people—more sensitive, more concerned, more humane”—he sees no evidence that plumbers and pipefitters are less morally fine than your average Classics professor. But if so, one must then ask, “what good the liberal arts might be.” Why bother with them, at all?

And what are they? Although derived, loosely, from the medieval trivium and quadrivium, the modern liberal arts at the college and university level consist roughly of the humanities and of those elements of the natural and social sciences which lend themselves to treatment by one or more of the humanistic disciplines—for example, topics that begin with the phrase, ‘philosophy of….’ Liberal education is “rooted in thinking rather than doing,” a thinking aimed primarily of understanding ‘Why’ questions, “search[ing] out arguments and reasons rather than rest[ing] on received opinion.” Liberal education does this by having students read books, look at paintings, listen to music, solve mathematical problems, and undertake scientific experiments that focus their minds on those questions. In doing so, they learn that many of those questions are much controverted. Doctrinaire claims do not suffice, when faced with contradiction. This makes the liberal arts, as they have been practiced in the modern period, irritating. One does not savor being contradicted, yet a liberal education introduces us, so to speak forces upon us, the annoying truth that there have been persons in this world who are much smarter than we, who disagree with our opinions.

The liberal arts therefore run against the pragmatic American grain. Agresto nonetheless insists that defenders of liberal education appreciate the worth of the American grain, American practicality. “Unless we see the virtues of other forms of education besides a liberal arts education, we’ll never quite understand what our own excellence might be nor understand how we, as liberal arts professors, might actually use the liberal arts to contribute—as these others do—to the greater good.” Correlative to this is understanding the weight of the critique of liberal education. First of all, liberal education is no less expensive than any other kind, and more expensive than many other kinds. Such an education “costs as much today as getting an engineering degree but with little of the hope of secure future recompense.” Wouldn’t it be better to attend classes at a local ‘community college’ and get trained for a career in nursing? Second, the liberal arts seem useless not only to individuals but to society. What can I learn from “cloistered and inward-looking intellectuals” that can advance the cause of social justice, or even build a better mousetrap?

In sum, “the liberal arts in this country are declining because most Americans don’t see the point of them.” 

It is easy for liberally educated persons to draw themselves up from such questions and to prate about learning for learning’s sake, or some such thing. In this, one stands against (for example) Thomas Jefferson and indeed all of the prominent Founders of the American regime, who “seemed never to look at liberal education as a stand-alone project,” but happily “combin[ed] farming and philosophy” or, in the case of that city-dweller Franklin, philosophy with printing. True, the artes liberales traditionally hold themselves apart from the artes serviles, but the distinction sounds priggish to American ears and in any event, can the arts befitting a free man who is serious really fail to appreciate the arts that a free man intends to govern? And if, in a democracy, we are all free men in many ways, can liberally educated men and women avoid thinking about the several ways of freedom and the ways in which they might be organized for better or for worse? Before learning, I need humility—to know that I do not know and to understand my ignorance as a defect better remedied than concealed. 

To remedy ignorance, to gain knowledge, one needs to know how to learn but if “skills are important,” “substance is prior.” It won’t do to tout the liberal arts as the way to learn how to learn. “If we insist on seeing or making liberal education primarily ‘preparatory,’ we have narrowed and made small the true value, the true uses, of a liberal education.” “Through your reading and study, you would watch arguments being developed and challenged; you might see the tragic results of one awful mistake or how good might lead to an even greater good,” “not simply in one field or area but in many” and while attending “to clear, persuasive, and even beautiful language.” It is that substance which once made liberal education “the entry for any number of exciting and important careers.” In doing so, a liberal education offered a counterweight to the allures of “the reigning culture” in which that career would be situated. “Today’s students get more from their peers, the chaos of internet apps, music, and popular culture than from academic instruction,” but what kind of people will write the songs the whole world sings? They, and those who sing them, will have mastery of technique, but mastery of technique, however indispensable, isn’t substance. “Our students don’t usually need to ‘think like a historian’; they need to learn about and from history compellingly presented. they want to learn from fine literature and have their eyes opened.”

The dominant catchphrases in education (and much else) in the past half-century have been ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism.’ “Nothing I can think of has transformed the nature of virtually all education more than the idea and the demand for diversity,” and “I honestly do not believe there will be any turning back, at least not anytime soon.” The movement may be said to have surfaced most strikingly in the Stanford University demonstrations against the long-time required course on Western civilization, a course which was as it were shouted down and into oblivion with the slogan, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Although the course was the immediate target, the civilization itself was the real one. “Those who fought against ‘Western Civ’ saw it not as central to understanding our culture but only as whiteness, sameness, and hypocrisy,” the “academic mausoleum of dead white men,” and instrument of oppression. The problem was that they didn’t really know the thing they were shouting against. 

It was then, and is now, obvious that the demonstrators derived their protest from the civilization they were attacking—neo-Marxist egalitarianism not being a major feature of any other civilization other than that of the contemporary West. Agresto doesn’t want to get to that point, immediately, being a gentler soul than some of us. [1] He begins by remarking “two things all educated people must know: First, they must first know their own. Second they must also know what is not their own.” Without knowing a substantial amount about western civilization, demonstrators were not ‘critiquing,’ they were flailing. In Agresto’s more decorous language, “What was lost with the ‘going’ of Western Civilization was the opportunity for Stanford students and then many others to start on the path to being liberally educated and to see the growth and grand sweep of the finest literature and most pivotal thinking and arguments that shaped our culture and, most importantly, shaped their own lives.” Or again, “if we fail to know our own civilization—its hopes, its principles, its reasons, and its greatness—we will not be able to make comparisons that are even worth a dime.” [2]

“If you want to trace the start of political correctness, speech codes, and identity politics in higher education, begin by looking at the rise and then degradation of ‘multiculturalism’ in colleges and universities.” The educational ‘power vacuum’ caused by the demotion of Western civilization in college and university curricula soon filled with “the empowerment of, and thus the politics, of, special interest groups,” as ‘diversity’ came to mean not the comparative study of the varieties of political regimes and world civilizations but a retreat into exclusionary academic enclaves—’black studies,’ ‘women’s studies,’ ‘queer studies,’ and so on. “What began as a movement toward openness and inclusion”—ostensibly—instead “heightened the divides and made rigid the separations” among students and faculty. Multiculturalism means the multiplication of monocultures. Of course, the real monoculturalism of multiculturalism has been its pervasive political leftism, but Agresto makes the intellectual point: “Perhaps part of the reason why a true multiculturalism failed to take hold in higher education was because, properly pursued, it could easily teach a myriad of inconvenient truths,” such as “understand[ing] American slavery in the light of Islamic slavery, African slavery, and the slavery and oppression under various other ideologies,” surely not excluding Marxism. What is more, true multiculturalism could hardly ignore religion, a topic anathematized by faux multiculturalists, who are almost invariably secularists.

“On an even deeper level, an honest multiculturalism might give our students the opportunity to ask a truly serious question. Is oppression cultural—as so many seem to believe, formed by society and social structures and ‘systemic’ to that culture—or something intrinsic to the character of humanity itself?” And if so, “what moral teachings, whether from the West or the East, have been seemingly so powerful that they have been able to modify our natures such that racial and sexual are increasingly (though hardly universally) seen as unjust and slavery is now almost everywhere understood as evil?” This may be a bit optimistic. It has been the claim of the Left that ‘systemic racism’ hasn’t declined at all, but has only intensified, sometimes overtly (police brutality! gun violence!), more often covertly (triggering! hate speech!). 

This notwithstanding, Agresto is well aware of the political character of the attacks on liberal education, devoting his central chapter to “identity politics” and its pedagogical techniques, “part of the larger issue of the politicization of higher education and the decline of liberal education today,” which includes “the movement to penalize and purge from the university any positions, books, thoughts, and arguments that run contrary to student sensitivities or current social and political orthodoxies.” One is tempted to suggest that ‘politicization’ is not only unavoidable but good if one understands politics as Aristotle understands it, as ruling and being ruled in turn. But the ‘politicization’ Agresto describes misunderstands politics as the exercise of power, simply, and that is the root of the problem.

Because they (mis)understand politics as merely the exercise of power, today’s politicizers cross the “fine line between educating our students so they soon have the wherewithal to possess their own minds and trying to possess our students’ minds themselves” in an attempt “to capture minds rather than to free them.” “For a teacher to have the passion of St. Paul is one thing; to have the aims of Paul to instruct in order to convert or capture is something else”; it is indoctrination, not education. (“Is it so far beyond comprehension that one might ask students to read something so that they might take seriously the arguments and understand what is being said?”) The problem has been most acute in the humanities, which have “always tried to understand important political and social ideas such as justice and merit, freedom and community, good and evil,” all with the understanding that “much may well hinge on whether the next generation embraces a teacher’s particular views.” For three generations now, many college and high school teachers have ‘politicized’ the humanities and social sciences (and even, increasingly, the physical sciences)—successfully, in the sense that their ‘side’ has won, but at the cost of marginalizing the liberal arts. “The broader culture, which had its doubts about the value of the liberal arts even in the best of times, has now simply walked away and left the corpse to the victors.” After all, “just as dogs know the difference between being tripped over and being kicked, students know the difference between being taught and being indoctrinated, know the difference between ideas examined and ideas thrust.” 

It must be replied, however, that the corpse is rather lively. Although fewer and fewer students ‘major’ in the liberal arts, the ideas purveyed by teachers in the humanities and social sciences exert an extraordinarily high degree of influence in the regime. American citizens may have walked away from their classes, but they have increasingly seen neo-Marxist claims accepted by school administrators, business executives, and, of course, the news and entertainment media. Agresto acknowledges this, when it comes to the schools: “pick up virtually any College of Education catalogue of any major university and take in the full compendium of courses on race, privilege, whiteness, and grievance activism being taught as part of the curriculum of our teachers.” The old ‘core’ has been replaced by a new ‘core’ promulgating doctrines of social justice, diversity, environment, globalism, and race/class/gender analysis. [3] “What began as a plea for diversity now lives on as constant sameness.”

Why does the Left attempt this? The American regime is, among other things, a commercial republic. This hasn’t always been a regime favorable to liberal education, but it has at least been tolerant of it, even a bit admiring of it. But the Left opposes nothing more than the ‘bourgeois values’ of commercial republicanism, “the common views of right and wrong held by ordinary citizens” promoted “by conventional Western religious understandings.” By staging American history “as a battle between oppressors and the oppressed,” and moreover by claiming that the American regime, including the American way of life, ‘systemically’ sides with the oppressors, the Left ignores that today, it is “the ordinary view that slavery and racism are betrayals of our founding principles of liberty and equality,” and that “merit, achievement, moral responsibility and character are all to be assessed and assigned according to our actions as individuals, not by our race , ethnicity, religion, or any other form of collective identity.” By claiming “that our shortcomings result not from our principles but from our failure to live up to our principles,” the Left “leave[s] these sentiments and beliefs not only rejected but, perhaps worse, unexamined.” This gives a new and perverse meaning to Socrates’ stricture, that the unexamined life is not worth living. The aim of the academic Left “is not simply to upend the course of collegiate studies, nor to convert conservatives to progressives, nor even to push every student to become a social justice warrior, but, beyond all those, to change the culture itself,” by which Agresto means to change the American regime itself by changing the opinions by which its citizens orient themselves as they live their lives. Unlike Socrates, who seeks to know what justice is, today’s educators suppose that they know what it is, and that their sole remaining tasks are to tell their students what it is, leaving to school administrators to make them conform to it. They attempt the Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all values’ in a manner that Nietzsche himself would have utterly despised.

As an (old) Leftist once asked, What is to be done? “To use education as a vehicle for finding the truth about the world and about ourselves is the greatest good of liberal education.” That isn’t the same, Agresto rightly insists, as ‘learning about’—learning “about history or philosophy or art and learning from those subjects.” The main reason to learn about, for example, Descartes’ philosophic antecedents isn’t to better to understand Descartes but rather to better understand Descartes in order to see if his critique of his antecedents is valid. “Contrary to all high-blown ‘academic’ teachings, a work of literature is great not because it has a long pedigree of precursors influencing its writing, not because it reveals to us ever so much about its time and place, and not because its author is a fit study for numberless biographical or psychological musings” but because “it talks about great things,” making important claims about them. “Our first task as teachers is not to hide this truth, not to reduce it, not to minimize it,” not “to learn all about an author and shrink from learning from an author.” Agresto asks, did Nathaniel Hawthorne write The Scarlet Letter primarily in order to squabble or concur with others, or did he write primarily “about devotion and hypocrisy and fear of being found out,” about “evil and sin and loyalty,” about “community needs, community standards, and the demands of conscience,” about “the different and conflicting parts of the human soul”? And which approach to his novel do students actually care about?

Students do ask, ‘Why read old books?’ One is tempted to tell them, if you don’t want to read old books, what are you doing in my class? Agresto is too temperate man to say such a thing. First, read old books because you should “learn what is ours”; the U.S. Constitution belongs to us, and so does its finest explication, The Federalist. Study them, in order to know who you are. “To be blunt…it is simply more important—initially—for an American to Know the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address than to know the principles of Eastern mysticism.”  More, read such books to learn “views and insights different from our own,” including views and insights contained in the Constitution and The Federalist which are no longer much honored today. Constitutional law rests on certain claims about human nature, and “if human nature doesn’t change all that much over time, if it’s possible that good and evil exist independent of societal customs, if the matters and madness of the human heart seem to be as much ancient as modern, why would we willingly cut ourselves off from learning wherever we can?” That is, “by trying to grasp the minds of the finest thinkers and writers who have lived, we might, for the first time, come to possess our own minds.” Aristotle is indeed a dead, white male, but his death was an event that happened to his body. The thoughts generated by his mind are still right there for you to consider. In this sense, “we can possess the mind of perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived.”

In so possessing the thoughts of that mind, you can test them against your own thoughts and, if graced with a touch of humility, you may well learn a thing or two. In comparing and contrasting what you think you know with what Aristotle thinks, you are replacing the acceptance of the opinions of “parents, patriots, priests, peers, and professors” with the activity of finding out for yourself. Agresto thus refines his definition of the liberal arts as “a way of understanding the most important questions of human concern through reason and reflection.” Although many students prefer to accept received opinions and get on with making money, teachers who present them with the frameworks in which the things they’ll be spending time and money on will spark dissatisfaction with predigested claims. They are the students who are, or will become, “forever inquisitive, who view the world with wonder.” “In the hope of cultivating independent thought, students should question everything, ferret out every real or imagined contradiction, expose all supposed weak spots, and, perhaps above all, shame hypocrisy Isn’t this, we are told, what Socrates did?”

Agresto does not, however, confuse Socrates with Descartes. It was not fear, in the form of radical doubt, “that pushes Socrates,” but Eros, “the desire to find out what people actually did know and could defend.” We hear a lot about ‘critical thinking’ from ‘educators.’ Real critical thinking aims at “understanding an author as he understands himself”; in “seeing “the complexity of an event or era”; in comprehending “the various threads of causality”; at understanding “”human motives mixed and pure”; at seeing “in great literature the immensity of our human imaginations”; at “thinking that has some sympathy for the various problems we humans have faced and know[ing] that options are often limited”; and, “above all, thinking that tries to comprehend the reasons for this idea, this action, or this event.” Under the current educational regime, however, “all too often to read critically means to approach a text looking for biases or errors, or how little the author knew compared to us.” Teachers and students should do exactly the reverse. They should assume that they are the ones hobbled by biases and errors. Begin with wonder. “Socrates began with the knowledge of his ignorance, and from a wonder at what is and why it might be so.” If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom in a life lived in accordance with the way, the regime, of God, wonder is the beginning of wisdom “in the liberal arts.” That beginning gives students the chance “to find what they think is weak or strong and show it up for what it is.” 

With all this in mind, and returning to Agresto’s original question, of what use is liberal education? What’s it good for? 

For individuals, a liberal education serves the desire to know. In so doing, it helps the student understand himself, to understand “what he might be and do.” It guides the student in how to think and, by making him more thoughtful it teaches the virtue of moderation, even as readers who follow the quest for justice in Plato’s Republic may discover moderation, something they didn’t set out to find at all. “We live, as we all recognize, in a most immoderate age. Too much is passion, too much is commitment.” One of Agresto’s early teachers advised students to “Deny little, Affirm less, and in all cases Make Distinctions!” Agresto still goes with that, writing that moderation and self-restraint are highly conducive to liberal learning,” as they are conducive to citizenship. 

For the United States, liberally educated persons are positioned to think seriously about the “what characteristics we should want our co-rulers to have,” to distinguish between those who know what the American regime is. [4] It wasn’t Aristotle but James Madison who wrote, “What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?” Or, in Agresto’s words, “If a barbarian is a person on whom no argument makes an impression, then one fruit of the liberal arts is to de-barbarize civil life and give it some notions of rationality and beauty.” In this, he resists the claim that ‘we egalitarians’ “cannot stand to have greatness stand above us.” If we can’t, then how will we consent to the rule of a Lincoln or a Churchill, against the enemies of democratic egalitarianism? 

Practically speaking, liberal arts college boards of trustees and administrators need to recognize that their students will likely make less money in their lives than graduates of technical and pre-professional schools will do. The policy consequence of this fact should be that liberal arts students should be charged lower tuitions. “To ask liberal arts majors to pay even close to what those in more remunerative fields pay is to beggar the poor to support the future wealthy.” Trustees and administrators and the teachers they hire also need “to show that there can actually be an American liberal education—one that helps civilize all of us by preserving the finest in our culture’s literature, art, music, and philosophy and that offers them [to] all students,” along with the already well-established offerings in science and mathematics. Such a liberal education will live up to “the Founders’ hopes.” 

 

 

Note

1. He rather reserves the point for a footnote in one of the valuable appendices to the book: “Multiculturalism may look like cultural relativism on the surface, but it is far from that in fact.”
2. One of Agresto’s best anecdotes: “I once met a professor of Latin who taught Roman literature with great misgivings. The Romans kept talking about such unmodern notions as manliness, virtue, the deepest of friendships, nobility, baseness, revenge, honor. It made him uneasy.” And rightly so, Agresto affirms, as “this unease, not vocabulary building or the chance to play in togas, is the true value of Latin and Greek.”
3. “There are even some dogmatic conservative and sectarian colleges that may think of themselves as defenders of liberal education but are as doctrinaire as the most left-leaning colleges.” Agresto names none, and it would be interesting to know if he has Hillsdale College in mind as one of these. Hillsdale is an institution with which I have some familiarity, and while it is true that many teachers there advocate certain doctrines in defense of (for example) the principles of the American Founders and of free-market economics, it is also true that they present the claims of rival principles in the terms of their advocates by assigning writings by those advocates—which is exactly what Agresto wants to see. And while it is unquestionably true that Hillsdale College ‘stands for’ the preservation of those principles, this may now be politically necessary, given the weight the ‘woke’ Left currently throws around. Putting it differently, if one compares the capacity of (for example) the two more-or-less apolitical St. John’s College programs (Annapolis, Santa Fe) with the Hillsdale College program, can there be any doubt that the Hillsdale approach has done substantially more to defend the liberal arts? As Agresto well knows, Socrates was not simply a philosopher but a political philosopher, but an urgent political-philosophic task today isn’t so much to bring philosophy down from the heavens as to bring it up from the gutter. In this sense, the debate between ‘St. John’s College’ and ‘Hillsdale College’ reprises the debate between Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa.
4. Agresto answers with two rhetorical questions: “Do we look for neighbors who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else? Who in the world would want to be ruled by people like that?” The answer is: people who are crude, blind to the beautiful, devoted to their own daily tasks and little else. This is a caricature of the human type cultivated by democratic regimes, but, as the arguments and actions of Plato’s Socrates show, there is an element of truth in this, as in any recognizable caricature. The further question then becomes, how does a liberally educated citizen talk with his neighbors? Socrates shows how, if you want to get yourself killed, but the benefits of martyrdom in the service of thought have their limits. Agresto himself makes an excellent start of this, in recommending that liberally educated persons learn to appreciate the smarts of ordinary citizens and to respect their common sense. And he goes on to caution that by ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ he doesn’t mean “the Roman sense of ‘common'” but the Greek apeirokalia, “the lack of experience with things that are beautiful.”

 

Philip Gilbert Hamerton: An Autobiography 1834-1858. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.

Eugénie Gindriez Hamerton: A Memoir by His Wife 1858-1894. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896.

John Gross: The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature. London: The Macmillan Company, 1969.

 

Artist and art critic, moralist, political essayist, a Lancashire man who spent much of his life in Scotland and France (where he met his devoted wife), Philip Gilbert Hamerton wrote one indispensable book, The Intellectual Life, and several other good ones. His life spanned the years 1834-1894, nearly coinciding with the reign of Queen Victoria. He thus flourished in the heyday of the English man of letters, the topic of Mr. Gross’s book, which gives a good sense of the ethos of this dimension of the English regime of that time.

Gross describes how the literary review emerged as “a really powerful institution” in that century, spurred by the regime’s ever-increasing democratization, a trend marked by the great English Reform Acts which arrived at about one per generation. Democratization of course saw “the growing importance of public opinion,” which review editors and the authors they published sought to shape, rather in the manner Tocqueville hoped French aristocrats would do in his own country. Opinion about how public opinion should be shaped predictably varied, from Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, where “the chief use he made of his prestige was to uphold the conventional, the anemic, the decorously second-rate” in “his role of spokesman for the approved view of things, the polite consensus,” to Thomas Carlyle, whose long career saw him swing from calling literature “a branch of religion” to a celebration of the hero as man of action and condemnation of Jews as money-changing anti-heroes (he seems to have coined the term “anti-semitic,” and did not use it as a pejorative). In between these extremes, readers of the English reviews saw what one might as well call, with Gross, English liberalism, exemplified by several types: a philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who urgently tried “to reconcile the artist and the philosopher, to heal the breach between thought and feeling” in an attempt to settle what Socrates called the old quarrel between poetry and philosophy; by the “breadth, sanity and thoroughness,” and the “kindliness” of the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who celebrated high culture while cheerfully admitting that “Doors that open, windows that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear, watches that go. and a thousand more such good things, are the invention of the Philistines,” not the Oxonians; and even that rare thing, a literate political scientist, Walter Bagehot, a Burkean (“famous for talking about stupidity as though it were virtually synonymous with instinctive wisdom”), whose The English Constitution remains a model of its genre. On Bagehot, Gross remarks, “At the most fundamental level, subsequent events have vindicated him: one of the more attractive features of English life remains, as Orwell put it, our habit of not killing one another.” Liberalism, indeed, fostered by a guiding aristocracy of sorts.

“By subsequent standards the Victorian intellectual aristocracy seems remarkably small and tightly-knit: everyone knew everyone else, and was somebody else’s brother-in-law.” Fissures in the edifice, leading to its decline, can be seen in the writings of John Morley, editor of the Fortnightly Review, a democratic Hegelian who “contrived to give his readers the sense that they were riding a great central wave of Progress, intellectual, scientific and political all in one” (his American contemporaries began to call themselves Progressives). In a word, Morley although Morley “spelt God with a small ‘g'” while the sometime Prime Minister William Gladstone spelled it “with a big ‘G,'” there was little difference between them. Morley promoted writers “chiefly in so far as they can be said to urge forward ‘the central current of thought’ in their society,” what Hegel called the Zeitgeist. “For all things tend toward a final liberation of the spirit,” a liberation to be advanced gradually with “social energy” to change the world tempered by “social patience,” the willingness “to seize the chance of a small improvement, while working incessantly in the direction of great ones”—a lesson American Progressives have more or less taken to heart in the century and a half since Morley taught it. Gladstone road the same tide in politics, albeit with a more decided show of piety.

Eventually, such democratized Hegelianism would collide with the First World War, scattering the prevailing liberalism of the English literary men, mercury-like, into a hundred globules. Even before that, a George Saintsbury seems to have wanted to pull back a bit from such soaring optimism, preferring connoisseurship to grand historical narrative, and the ebullient Catholic, G. K. Chesterton, would have none of such stuff at all. Nonetheless, the capacious, humane, morally and politically moderate atmosphere of Victorian literary life proved a comfortable point of departure for Hamerton, who nonetheless, proving more restless than his contemporaries, ranged into art (as did the more famous John Ruskin and Walter Pater), continental European culture, and even philosophy—if not so much as a system-builder in the manner of Mill than as a defender of philosophy as a way of life—the best of his generation on that topic. Hamerton also maintained a distinct independence from his generation of literati, staying clear of London and the universities. He lived a life off to one side, giving himself the chance to breathe different air.

“My principal reasons for writing an autobiography are because I am the only person in the world who knows enough about my history to give a truthful account of it, and because I dread the possibility of falling into the hands of some writer who might attempt a biography with inadequate materials,” a writer tempted to fill the lacunae “with conjectural expressions which he only intends as an amplification, yet which may contain germs of error to be in their turn amplified by some other writer, and made more extensively erroneous.” A few articles by well-intentioned biographers had convinced him of this. As for the autobiographer’s hazard—presenting “an untrue representation of its subject as no man can judge himself correctly,” any autobiographer “must be unconsciously revealing himself all along, merely by his way of telling things.” He promises to maintain “a certain reserve” with respect to others: “My rule shall be to say nothing that can hurt the living, and the memory of the dead shall be dealt with as tenderly as may be compatible with a truthful account of the influences that have impelled me in one direction or another.” After all, “I have all the more kindly feelings towards the dead, that when these pages appear I shall be one of themselves, and therefore unable to defend my own memory as they are unable to defend theirs.” The prospect doesn’t unsettle him. “The notion of being a dead man is not entirely displeasing to me,” inasmuch as no one will be able to inflict “any sensible injury” upon him, and, regarding his reputation, by issuing his memoir d’outre tombe, “with six feet of earth above me to deaden the noises of the upper world, I feel quite a new kind of security.” He guards himself with a comprehensive agnosticism, writing that “it is reasonable to suppose that whatever fate may be in store for us, a greater or less degree of posthumous reputation in two or three nations on this planet can have little effect on our future satisfaction; for if we go to heaven ,the beatitude of the life there will be so incomparable superior to the pleasures of earthly fame that we shall never think of such vanity again; and if we go to the place of eternal tortures they will leave us no time to console ourselves with pleasant memories of any kind; and if death is simply the ending of all sensation, all thought, memory, and consciousness, it will matter nothing to a handful of dust what estimate of the name it once bore may happen to be current amongst the living.”

Hamerton’s father was an attorney who courted the better-born Miss Anne Cocker, somewhat to the consternation of the young lady’s mother, who had duly noted the aspirant’s “rather dissolute habits.” John Hamerton was “a good horseman, an excellent shot, looked very well in a ball-room,” but “these, I believe, were all his advantages, save an unhappy faculty for shining in such masculine company as he could find in a Lancashire village in the days of George IV.” He was, one might say, a man of the gentry class with the habits of the English aristocracy. As things turned out, Mother had a point, but she bent to the determination of her daughter (“a young lady with a will of her own,” albeit one with “a very sweet and amiable disposition”) and to prudence of the young attorney, who assured her that “at my request your daughter will have all her property settled upon herself, so that I can have no control over it—thus leaving it impossible that I should waste it.” He added a promise to reform himself, which he evidently did, so long as his wife lived. In accordance with his own promise to speak as well as possible of the dead, Hamerton remarks, “It is difficult for us to understand quite accurately the social code of the Georgian era, when a man might indulge in pleasures which seem to us coarse and degrading, and yet retain all the pride and all the bearing of a gentleman.” The rise of ‘the democracy’ coincided with the revival of Christian morality, in his lifetime.

But his mother died at the age of 24, two weeks after bearing her son, having been weak and perhaps consumptive during her pregnancy. “No portrait of my mother was ever taken, so that I have never been able to picture her to myself otherwise than vaguely,” although as a child he was told he resembled her. “There are no letters of hers except one or two formal compositions written at school under the eye of the mistress, which of course express nothing of her own mind or feelings,” so he is left with the memories of those who described her as “a very lively and amiable, person, physically active, and a good horsewoman.” “The knowledge that my mother had died early cast a certain melancholy over my childhood,” feeling “vaguely that there had been a great loss, though unable to estimate the extent of it.” 

“The effect of the loss upon my father was utterly disastrous,” ruining his hopes and causing him to lose interest in lawyering and finally to drink himself to an early death. A reader of law books and newspapers (“this absence of interest in literature was accompanied by that complete and absolute indifference to the fine arts which was so common in the middle classes and the country aristocracy of those days”), his loss of any desire to make money (“almost the only recognized object in the place where he lived”), and with his “youth too far behind him for any joyous physical activity,” he “was condemned to seek such amusements as the customs of the place afforded, and these all led to drinking.” “Had they drunk light wines like French peasants, or beer like the Germans, they might have lasted longer, but their favorite drink was brandy in hot strong grogs, accompanied by unlimited tobacco.” Sufficiently well off not to need steady work, “he fell into a kind of life that placed intellectual and moral recovery alike beyond his reach.” He did offer his son a bit of hardheaded advice, to wit, “I should never be a lawyer, on the ground that a man had enough to plague him in his own concerns without troubling his mind about those of other people.”

It was well that he shipped his son off to live in the town of Burnley with his two unmarried sisters, who lived with their mother at any estate called Towneley Park. Burley was one of Lancashire’s “very aristocratic neighborhoods” at a time when “nobody thought of disputing the supremacy of the old houses.” “There was something almost sublime in the misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues.” His doting aunts “remained all their lives aristocratic in their feelings, and rather liked to enjoy the hospitality of the great houses in the neighborhood,” even as his uncles, along with his father, “abandoned all aristocratic memories and aspirations, and entered frankly into the middle class.” Hamerton prefers his aunts’ choice, thinking that they “showed better taste in liking refined society than my father did in lowering himself to associate with men of an inferior stamp in rank, in manners, and in habits.” “I distinctly remember how one of my aunts told me that somebody had made a remark on her liking for great people, and the only comment she made was, that she preferred gentlefolks because their manners were more agreeable. She was not a worshipper of rank, but she liked the quiet, pleasant manners of the aristocracy, which indeed were simply her own manners.”

At the local Grammar School, Hamerton took to reading English but ran against a wall when “set to Latin,” which was taught, incomprehensibly, by giving the child a Latin grammar written in Latin. Under the circumstances, “my progress in Latin was very slow, and the only result of my early training was to give me a horror of everything printed in Latin, that I did not overcome for many years.” His native language remained his preference for the rest of his life. He could read in it, he explains, whereas he could only conjugate in Latin and Greek.

As to his father, he seldom could conjugate with him, either. An exception was a trip to Wales, in the company of his favorite Aunt, Mary, in the summer of 1842. Aunt Mary, who had become a mother to him, required him to keep a journal; reading it in the 1850s, he’s struck by the way he expressed himself. “Being accustomed to live with grown-up people, and having no companions of my own age in the same house, I had acquired a way of talking about things as older people talk, so that the journal in question contains many observations that do not seem natural for a child,” likely repetitions of comments made by the adults who accompanied him. But he was also “very observant on my own account,” leaving the first recorded impressions of his love of “old castles and cathedrals” and of landscapes. “I had a topographic habit of mind even in childhood, which made every fresh locality interesting to me and engraved it on my memory.” He also took the future artist and arts connoisseur’s interest in the “beautiful materials” things were made of—the wool on the furniture in the great houses, the ebony chairs in the Penrhyn Castle dining room and “the old oak in the dining-room at Trelacre.” “The interest in materials is a special instinct, a kind of sympathy with Nature showing itself by appreciation of the different qualities of her products,” an “instinct [that] has always been very strong in me,” which “I have often noticed in others, especially in artists” and craftsmen. As for his father, “whilst we were in Wales together he conducted himself as a man ought to do who is travelling with a lady and a child.” This year, 1842, was “absolutely the last year of my life in which I could live in happy ignorance of evil and retain all the buoyancy of early boyhood.” The next year, “quite the most important of my early boyhood, have had a most powerful and in some respect a disastrous influence over my whole life.” 

“Notwithstanding my father’s kindness to me during our Welsh tour, my feelings towards him were not, and could not be, those of trust and confidence.” His father was a mean drunk; “when inflamed with brandy he became positively dangerous, and I had a well-founded dread of his presence.” The boy needed the protection of his aunts when he went to visit the man at his home, Ivy Cottage, in Shaw, but in June 1843 that protection was abruptly withdrawn. “Declaring, in terms which admitted of no discussion, that although a child might live with ladies it was not good for a boy,” and so “he had determined to have me for the future under his own roof.” [1] This “separation from [Aunt Mary] in childhood was the most bitter grief that could be experienced by me.” This notwithstanding, given over to his father’s “Spartan severity,” a discipline sharply contrasting to the man’s own perfect indiscipline, Hamerton sees that this “was not ill-calculated for the formation of a manly character,” which might not have developed under the kind tutelage of his beloved aunts. And his father imparted one habit of his old legal training, understanding “the importance of applying the mind completely to the thing which occupied it for the moment.” “If he saw me taking several books together that had no connection with each other, he would say, ‘Take one of those books and read it steadily, don’t potter and play with half-a-dozen.'” “A Philistine in neglecting his own culture, he had not the real philistine’s contempt for culture in others and desired to have me well taught.” He also “accustom[ed] me to money matters” by “plac[ing] gold and silver in my keeping” and demanding an account of his use of it. “In this way money was not to be an imaginary thing for me, but a real thing, and I was not to lose the control of myself because I had my pocket full or sovereigns.” Although Hamerton takes this to have been “a very original scheme in its application to so young a child,” it is actually quite like the method commended by Locke in his book on the education of “the young Gentleman,” published a century and a half earlier. 

But nothing could really compensate for the alcoholism. “My existence at Ivy Cottage was one of extreme dullness varied by dread.” He recalls a night when the full moon illuminated the garden’s trellis work. “My father’s cruelty had then reached its highest point,” in the aftermath of yet another beating. “The situation had become absolutely intolerable, the servants were my only protectors and though devoted they never dared to interfere when their master was actually beating me.” He had those sovereigns in his pocket; he could have mounted a horse and made his escape. But he had nowhere to go and would have been disinherited at the age of ten. He seems not to have thought of returning to his aunts, perhaps because they would have little choice but to return him to his father, who retained the legal knowledge that would have been necessary to make that happen. 

What law and custom could not do, nature did. After his father succumbed to a fit of paranoid delusion, his Aunt Mary arrived. “I did not even know she had been sent for; but the sweet reality entered into my heart like sunshine, and throwing my arms about her neck I burst into a passion of tears…. It had only been six months in all, but it had seemed longer than any half-dozen years gone through before or after.” His father died of “apoplexy” a short time later, at the age of 39.

Aunt Mary was named his guardian. She had her own plans for him—far kinder but not a fit for his character. She wanted him to become a clergyman, sending him to Doncaster School as the first step towards entering Oxford. This was not to be, but his initial feeling was that “it seemed rather hard” to be separated from her at a boarding school. “But she thought the separation necessary, as there was nothing in the world she dreaded more than that her great affection might spoil me”—a worry that probably had afflicted his father, too—evincing her “remarkable firmness of character,” enabling her to “act, on due occasion, in direct opposition both to her own feelings and to mine, if she believed that duty required it.” 

An usher at the school delivered himself of the opinion that “the establishment of religious toleration in England had been a deplorable mistake, and that Dissent ought not to be permitted by the Sovereign.” Although “my principal feeling about the matter was the prejudice inherited by young English gentlemen of old Tory families, that Dissent was something indescribably low, and quite beneath the attention of a gentleman,” the policy of “compel[ling] Dissenters by force to attend the services of the Church of England did seem to me rather hard.” Some years later, this sensibility would take him in a firmer direction, away from the Church of England and indeed from Christianity altogether. But for the time, he was “extremely religious, having a firm belief in providential interferences on my behalf, even in trifling matters.” His required summaries of Sunday sermons were supplemented by some of his own thoughts, to the point that he once “produced a complete original sermon, which cost me a reprimand, but evidently excited the interest of the master.”

He found the beautiful church at Doncaster “a powerful stimulus to an inborn passion for architecture.” He considered the school’s ruling amusement, the game of cricket, a bore (“I hated the game from the very beginning, and it was pure slavery to me”), and the poems of Sir Walter Scott compensatorily exciting. “Nothing in the retrospect of life strikes me as more astonishing than the rapid mental growth that must have taken place between the date of my father’s death and its second or third anniversary. When my father died I was simply a child, though rather a precocious one, as the journal in Wales testifies; but between two and three years after that event the child had become a boy, with a keen taste for literature, which, if it had been taken advantage of by his teachers, ought to have made his education a more complete success than it every became.” The problem was that the Greek and Latin classics were taught philologically, “dissected by teachers who were simply lecturers on the science of language, and who had not large views even about that.” Literature was lost in its wrong-headed study. For relief from his consequent headaches, he came into the habit of taking long walks. 

Doncaster was a prep school for Cambridge. After the death of the headmaster, Hamerton transferred to Burley, a prep school for Oxford, likely to the satisfaction of Aunt Mary, but he interrupted his studies to care for her during the last months of incurable heart disease.  This hiatus put the last nail in the coffin of his attempts to learn the classical languages, a deficiency which “at the same time left my mind more at liberty to grow in its own way.” He was happily encouraged to write poetry by one of his teachers, “a practice that I followed almost without intermission between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.” “The best that can be expected from the poetry of a boy is that he should give evidence of a liking for the great masters, and in my case the liking was sincere.” 

Thanks to his reading of Scott, “in those days I lived, mentally, a great deal in the Middle Ages,” a habit “also due in some measure to a romantic interest in the history of my own family, and of the other families in the north of England with which mine had been connected in the Past.” He learned about heraldry, drawing and coloring “all the coats of arms that had borne by the Hamertons in their numerous alliances” and dreamed of taking up falconry (he bought all the accoutrements, but his family never got round to giving him a falcon). “For the Greeks and Romans I cared very little; they seemed too remote from my own country and race, and the English present, in which my lot was cast, seemed too dull and unpicturesque, too prosaic and commonplace.” He indulged his tastes in the school library, “which is rich in old tomes that few people ever read,” and in the library of his uncle’s brother-in-law. Edward Alexander had taken a near-paternal interest in the boy and guided him to a highly useful lifelong habit. “He rigorously exacted order in his library; I might use any of his books, but must put them all back in their places. Perhaps my present strong love of order may be due in a great measure to Mr. Alexander’s teaching and example. Among the friends of my youth there are very few whom I look back to with such grateful affection.”

“The reader will see that up to this point my tastes had been conservative and aristocratic. Then there came a revolution which was the most important intellectual crisis in my life.” At Burley, he listened to the sermons of James Bardsley, “a man of very strong convictions of an extreme Evangelical kind,” a “really eloquent” man who “possessed in a singular degree the wonderful power of enchaining the attention of his audience.” “His longest sermons were not felt to be an infliction; one might feel tired after they were over, but not during their delivery”—praise, indeed. The Reverend Bardsley’s “power was best displayed in attack, and he was very aggressive, especially against the doctrines of the Church of Rome, which he declared to be ‘one big Lie.'” For her part, Aunt Mary, “with her usual good sense, did not approve of this controversial spirit” when her ward brought it home on break; “she was content to be a good Christian in her own way and let the poor Roman Catholics alone.” In order better to combat Catholic doctrine and to prevent the prospect “that the power of the Pope might one day be re-established in our country,” Hamerton began to inquire into the controversy. He learned, in time, a disappointing lesson: “The spirit of inquiry is not considered an evil spirit so long as it only leads to agreement with established doctrines,” a limitation that tends to blunt the spirit of inquiry. Exposed to the teachings of “German neology”—the claim that Scripture is not inspired by God—he began to think that “Protestantism is an uncritical belief in the decisions of the Church down to a date which I do not pretend to fix exactly, and an equally uncritical skepticism, a skepticism of the most unreceptive kind, with regard to all opinions professed and all events said to have taken place in the more recent centuries of ecclesiastical history,” and that “the Church of Rome, on the other hand, seemed nearer in temper to the temper of the past, and was more decidedly a continuation, though evidently at the same time an amplification, of the early Christian habits of thinking and believing.” (To say nothing of the Roman Church’s superior cathedral architecture.) “If devotional feelings had been stronger” in him “than the desire for mental independence, I should have joined the Church of Rome.” “My decision, therefore, for some time was to remain in a provisional condition of prolonged inquiry”—a prayerful condition, he carefully adds. At the time, the English Protestant “believe[d] his religion as firmly as he believe[d] in the existence of the British Islands,” a “matter-of-fact temper” that “in more recent times” has been largely replaced by “a more hazy religion.” The young Hamerton was in this instance ahead of his time. “The reader is to imagine me as a youth who no longer believed in the special inspiration of the Scriptures, or in their infallibility, but who was still a Christian as thousands of ‘liberal’ Church people in the present day are Christians.”

Adding to his determination to remain independent in his judgments was his acquaintance with an atheist, a man whose good character “enabled me to estimate the vulgar attacks on infidels at their true worth.” Although “my own theistic beliefs were very strong, I knew from this example that an atheist was not necessarily a monster.” Mr. Utley based his atheism on what he considered the probabilistic argument that “the self-existence of the universe” was easier to believe than the notion that “a single Being,” equally “without a beginning,” “could create millions of solar systems.” As for himself, Hamerton found it “much easier to refer everything to an intelligent Creator than to believe in the self-existence of all the intricate organizations that we see.” At the same time, it also “seemed to me quite natural that thoughtful men should hold different opinions on a subject of such infinite difficulty.” To this lesson in religious toleration, he eventually added the thought that both Protestant and Catholic clergy have “take[n] up and consecrate[d] popular beliefs that may be of use, and that they drop and discard, either tacitly or openly, those beliefs which are no longer popular.” As remarked above, Hamerton’s life coincided with England’s social and political democratization, so the thought may have been suggested by the ongoing regime change itself.

The year 1851 saw the opening of the Great Exhibition in London, that celebration of modern science and its technology that the City exemplified, along with the spirit of commerce. “My first impression of London was exactly what it has ever since remained”: “the most disagreeable place I had ever seen.” “I wondered how anybody could live there who was not absolutely compelled to do so.” Indeed, despite his patriotic feelings, “the real exile for me would be to live in a large town.” Admittedly, there is one, and only one, “reason for living in London, which is the satisfaction of meeting with intelligent people who know something about what interests you and do not consider you eccentric because you take an interest something that is not precisely and exclusively money-making,” but the noise, hurry, and dirt of a big city tend to overwhelm that attraction. During this tour, he did see some pictures by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, then on exhibit at the Royal Academy. “I distinctly remember the exact sensation with which my young eyes saw these works; so distinctly that I now positively feel those early sensations over again in thinking about them. All was so fresh, so new!” Against his resolution never to return to London weighed that excitement, and of course he would return once his interest in painting intensified.

By now, entrance to Oxford University and the fulfillment of Aunt Mary’s ambition for him as a clergyman loomed. “That was her plan; and a very good scheme of life it was, but it had one defect, that of being entirely inapplicable to the human being for whom it was intended.” He was, as it were, saved by Oxford’s requirement that entering freshmen sign the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles of faith,” an act Hamerton “could not do conscientiously, and would not do against the grain of my conviction.” Against Oxford there was also “a difficulty in my own nature, which is a rooted dislike to everything which is done for social advancement.” Nor did he relish the thought of further study of the classics, and his tutorship under a clergyman from Yorkshire reinforced his aversion, the man having “the usual characteristic of the classical scholars of his generation, a compete ignorance and misunderstanding of the fine arts.” “The extreme narrowness of his literary tastes led me to place a higher value on my own increasing knowledge of modern literature, and conclusively proved to me, once for all, that a classical education does not necessarily give a just or accurate judgment,” lacking “the virtue of opening the mind which is ascribed to it.” Nor did his tutor’s “injustice towards Dissenters and unbelievers” do more than arouse “in me a profound sympathy for these aligned and despised people.” “In a word, my tutor made me dislike the very things that it was his business to make me like.” By the end of the year, Hamerton’s guardian also saw “that it was useless to prepare me any further for Oxford.” In that time in England, among persons “of our class in society,” “education and the clergy were looked upon as inseparable, even by myself.” Soon, he returned to education “with fresh energy on my own account, and I am still working at it, in various directions, at the mature age of fifty-two.”

The religious way of life foreclosed, what way of life would he choose? Not the law: by precept and by example, his father had warned him off that. Despite the mill on the family property, “the cotton trade required a larger disposable capital than I possessed, to start with any chance of success.” Worldly success in general seemed unlikely, inasmuch as “it seemed to me that the liberty of thought which I valued above everything was incompatible, in England, with any desire to rise in the world, as unbelievers lay under a ban, and had no chance of social advancement without renouncing their opinions.” (In social gatherings, “I had one merit, that of being an excellent listener, and that has been a great advantage to me through life.”) He might, as so many men of his class in fact did, “have made use of the Church as an instrument, have given himself the advantages of Oxford, married for money, offered his services to the Conservative party, and gone into Parliament.” But how dishonest, and how tedious. Fortunately, he “had independent means,” along with membership in “one of the oldest and best-descended families in the English untitled aristocracy.” This being so, a life devoted to the two things he really liked, literature and painting, required no more armature than that. “I decided to try to be a painter and to try to be an author and see what came of both attempts.” Looking back on his choice, he concedes that “I have been sometimes represented as an unsuccessful painter who took to writing because he had failed as an artist,” but so what? “The exact truth is that a very moderate success in either literature or art would have been equally acceptable to me, so that there has been no other failure in my life than the usual one of not being able to catch to hares at the same time.”

His misjudgment came not so much in his underlying choice but in overestimating his ability to paint. “Constantly attempting what was far too difficult for me in art,” unable “to find any one ready and willing to put me on the right path,” he turned to John Ruskin’s Modern Painters for guidance and corresponded with him for a time. Ruskin proved an excellent literary influence, “as anything Mr. Ruskin has to say is sure to be well expressed,” and Ruskin did direct his readers’ “attention to certain qualities and beauty in nature.” “But in art this influence was not merely evil, it was disastrous,” as Ruskin “encourag[ed] the idea that art could be learned from nature,” an “immense mistake” since “nature does not teach art, or anything resembling it; she only provides materials.” His future wife concurred in this judgment, writing that “the main reason for his failing to express himself in art, is that he was too much attracted by the sublime in Nature, and that the power to convey the impression of sublimity has only been granted to the greatest among artists.” 

Attraction to the sublime in nature led him to the Scottish Highlands and Loch Lomond. Approaching the mountains by steamer “was a revelation of Highland scenery.” “A rugged hill with its bosses and crags was one minute in brilliant light, to be in shade the next, as the massive clouds flew over it, and the colors varied from pale blue to dark purpose and brown and green, with that wonderful freshness of tint and vigor of opposition that belong to the wilder landscapes of the north. From that day my affections were conquered; as the steamer approached nearer and nearer to the colossal gates of the mountains, and the deep water of the lake narrowed tin the contracting glen, I felt in my heart a sort of exultation like the delight of a young horse in the first sense of freedom in the boundless pasture.” He made sketches and kept a journal, which he now pores over with wonder at “how a youth with so little manifest talent as may be found in these sketches and journal could indulge in any artistic or literary ambition.” And “besides this, I was living, intellectually, in great solitude.” A well-meaning uncle prevailed upon his guardian to buy him a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Aunt Mary prevailed upon him to join the local militia, likely in the hope of curtailing his dreamy self-indulgence. As of age nineteen, “I had not found my path, and was always dissatisfied with my studies”—not surprising, as “young men both overestimate and underestimate their own gifts”; “they do not know themselves, as indeed how should they?” 

At the end of 1853 he ventured to London to study landscape painting. But of course, he selected for a tutor a man who shared his devotion to nature studies, one who moreover “had no education, either literary or artistic, and very little imaginative power.” Knowing “little of those necessities and conditions that make art a different thing from nature,” he led Hamerton “to nature instead of leading me to art and this was a great misfortune for me, as my instincts were only too much in the same direction already.” “Mr. Pettit taught me to draw in a hard, clear, scientific manner…. The ideas of artistic synthesis, of seeing a subject as a whole, of subordination of parts, of concentration of vision, of obtaining results by opposition in form light and shade, and color, all those ideas were foreign to my master’s simple philosophy of art.” Several years later, his young French wife, accustomed to viewing the masterpieces in the Louvre, looked at the Pre-Raphaelites her husband admired; “I did not understand it as art,” and “it was for my eyes what unripe fruit is for the teeth.” “The most famous specimens” of the Pre-Raphaelite style “only awoke an apprehension as to what I might think of his own pictures when they were shown to me.” Indeed, a wife well chosen.

The benefit of attending to nature inhered in his writing, not his painting. After meeting R. W. Mackey, author of The Progress of the Intellect, a fairly typical product of nineteenth-century English liberal faith in the advancement of science at the expense of religion, Hamerton concluded that there was no sense in “going painfully over the whole theological ground and explaining every belief and phase of belief historically and rationally,” rather in the manner of Hegel, but that “the true liberation must come from the enlargement of the mind by wider and more accurate views of the natural universe,” whereby “medieval beliefs must drop away of themselves.” That is, Mr. Mackey was a victim of his own “excessive culture,” having “withdrawn [himself] to much from commonplace reality” and instead seeming “to be moving in a dream.” “All the culture in the world, all the learning, all the literary skill and taste put together, are not so well worth having as the keen and clear sense of present reality that common folks have by nature.” In his own books, most notably The Intellectual Life, a topic that lends itself to Mackeyism, he resists by staying close to practical matters. This inclines him to a certain tough-mindedness. Upon being told by the painter C. R. Leslie that geniality “is of great value to a poet,” that Byron might have been another Shakespeare had he “possessed the geniality of Goldsmith,” Hamerton judges that “Leslie probably underestimated the literary value of ill-nature,” as “much of Byron’s intensity and force is due to the energy of malevolence.” He agrees with the classical scholar Watkins Lloyd, who replied to his thought that “undeserved diseases seemed to me clear evidence of imperfection in the universe,” that “we receive many benefits from the existing order of things that we have not merited in any way, so we may accept those evils that we have not merited either.” “This struck me as a better reason for resignation than the common assertion that we are wicked enough to deserve the most frightful inflictions. We do not really believe that our wickedness deserves cancer or leprosy.”

Polite society punished him for such heterodox thoughts by imposing a degree of social ostracism, among neighbors and even family. Invitations to dine decreased in number, and he worried that this might “indirectly be injurious to my guardian,” Aunt Mary, “and her sister, and I began to feel that I had become a sort of social disgrace and impediment for them.” When it transpired that Aunt Mary shared the general view, her complaints “were infinitely painful to me, as coming from the person I most loved and esteemed in all the world.” The good woman went so far as to regret that he had a close friend in town, “not for any harm that my friend was likely to do me but because with my ‘lamentable opinions’ I might corrupt his mind.” This “cut me to the quick, and then I knew by cruel experience what a dreadful evil religious bigotry is.” Years later, another family member ventured to tell his wife that “she hoped my books had not an extensive sale, so that their evil influence might be as narrowly restricted as possible.”

In the case of his first book, published on his twenty-first birthday, the lady need not to have worried. Out of a run of two thousand copies, “exactly eleven were sold in the real literary market.” Looking back, he recommends that “poetic aspirants” have one hundred copies printed and sent to publishers, who either accept or (more likely) reject the collection. “If they all declined, my loss would be the smallest possible, and I should possess a few copies of a rare book.” He headed off to Paris, later that year, to give painting another go.

There, a military officer gave him a ticket to a ball in honor of Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel of Italy. “We who saw the sovereigns of France and Sardinia walking down that ball-room together, little imagined that would be the ultimate consequences of their alliance—the establishment of the Italian kingdom, then of the German Empire, with the siege of Paris, the Commune, and the total destruction of the building that dazzled us by its splendor, and of the palace where the sovereigns slept that night.” More lasting but no less predictable was the result of a chance meeting back at the hotel with a man who had been a member of the French General Assembly and opposed the coup d’etat that brought the lesser Napoleon to the throne. M. Gindriez had fled to Belgium but was allowed to return to Paris “on condition that he did not actively set himself in opposition to the Empire.” Gindriez “had in the utmost strength and purity the genuine heroic nature,” and invited him to dine with his family. His eldest daughter, then sixteen, eventually became his wife, although “it did not occur to me that we were likely ever to be anything more than friends,” an “international marriage” seeming quite implausible to him at the time. “She, with a woman’s perspicacity, knew better.” His main evident benefit from his brief stay in France came not in his painting (he was still laboring under the illusion that he might make a good landscape artist) but in improving his French. “The best French criticism on the fine arts is the most discriminating and the most accurate in the world, at least when it is not turned aside from truth by the national jealousy of England and the consequent antipathy to English art.” And then “there are qualities of delicacy and precision in French prose which it was good for me to appreciate, even imperfectly.”

Upon returning, “I remained working in the north of England, discouraged, as to literature, by the failure of the book of verse, and without much encouragement for painting either.” He began to find his way when he took it into his head to spend the autumn on moors in Yorkshire. “The physical work attendant upon encamping, and the constant attention that must be given to such pressing necessities as shelter and food, give exactly that contact with reality that educates us in readiness of resource, and they have the incalculable advantage of making one learn the difference between the necessary and the superfluous.” Solitude and silence amidst “leagues of fragrant heather” cheered him (“towns are depressing to me—even Paris”), and it reinforced his sense of the distinction between “the natural and the artificial in landscape.” Yorkshire was also the place his ancestors had lived, with the home of Richard de Hamerton, the first known member of the family, still partially intact after seven centuries. “The Hamertons do not seem to have distinguished themselves in anything except marrying heiresses, and in that they were remarkable successful.” They lost many a fortune so gained thanks either to confiscation or imprudence, and in the end “they have not kept their lands.” 

The next summer, now aged twenty-three, he spent “encamping,” this time along Loch Awe in the Scottish Highlands with “only one servant.” He seems to have done nothing artistically memorable—he makes his excuse, that the weather was too changeable to capture on canvas, that he should have fitted himself out for sketching, not painting—but he wrote up the experience and the result was his first literary success: A Painter’s Camp. In the 1850s, no one ‘camped out’ for recreation’s, or creation’s, sake. “The novelty of camp life by choice seems to have interested many readers, though they must have been already perfectly familiar with camp life by necessity in the practice of armies and the experience of African travelers.” Like sailing, hunting, and fishing, camping is deeply connected “to the memory of the race”—the human race—as such, exerting an “intense attraction” to the human spirit. And for himself, although his ‘Romantic’ fondness for Sturm und Drang weather further delayed his artistic development, “what is called dreary, wild, and melancholy scenery afforded me, at that time, a kind of satisfaction more profound than that which is given by any of the human arts.” In his mature years he would come to prefer the brighter landscape of southern France.

Aunt Mary could not bring herself to approve. “My guardian, like all women, had an objection to what was not customary, and as my camp was considered a piece of eccentricity, she wanted me to take a house on Lockaweside,” which he did. She also wanted him to marry. “Though she had prudently avoided marriage on her own account, she thought it very desirable for me,” contending that since she wouldn’t live forever, her beloved ward ought “to have the stay and anchorage of a second affection that might make the world less dreary for me after she had left it.” She also “may be suspected” of having “looked to marriage as the best chance of converting me to her own religious opinions, or at least of obtaining outward conformity.” As for himself, he remained unenthusiastic, primarily because Aunt Mary was right: “So far as I could observe married men in England, they enjoyed very little mental independence, being obliged, on the most important questions, to succumb to the opinions of their wives, because what is called ‘the opinion of Society’ is essentially feminine opinion.” True, “no mother was ever loved by her son more devotedly than my guardian was by me, and yet her intolerance would have been hard to bear in a wife”; “I determined that if I married at all it should not be to live under perpetual theological disapprobation.” Plus, he would have needed a bigger income, the acquisition of which would have precluded a life lived in front of a canvas or at a writing desk. 

A solution occurred to him. Marriage to an Englishwoman being so unattractive, why not a foreigner? He remembered Mlle. Eugénie Gindriez, who “had read more and thought more than other girls her age,” which by now had reached the marriageable point. Not only did she ‘have conversation,’ but she had been running the household for several years in lieu of her mother, who suffered from bad health. He booked passage for France, returning with the bride who had in the meantime “waited patiently” for him to come to her own conclusion. She being Catholic, he being agnostic, the wedding in France proved a disappointment to the guests, who “expected a grand ceremony in the church” instead of “a brief benediction in the vestry.” Upon the couple’s return to England, Aunt Mary was pleasant but Aunt Susan much less so, disgruntled at any family tie with a Papist. For her part, Mrs. Hamerton was fortunate to cross the Channel in fine weather, “all a wonderful play of pale greens and blues, like turquoise and pale emerald,” but “she had lived in a great artistic center” and to her eye English painting was too bright, London too dingy. Back at Loch Awe, “I set myself to do what had never been done—to unite the color and effect of nature to the material accuracy of the photograph.” 

There Hamerton’s autobiography breaks off. Whether intentionally unfinished or not, it stands as a guide and encouragement to any young person who prefers to live a bit to the side. His wife took up the narrative after he died, and carried it from the year of their marriage, 1858, to his sudden death in 1894.

He had been quite honest with her. The Scottish Highlands are not the boulevards of Paris; this will be a drastic change, he told her. And “already his devotion to study was such that he requested me to promise not to interfere with his work of any kind that he deemed necessary—were it camping out, or sailing in stormy weather to observe nature under all her changing aspects, either of day or night.” These sober cautions notwithstanding, “he was so sensitive to the different moods of nature that his descriptions gave to a town-bred girl like me an intense desire to witness them with my own eyes, and when I did see them there was no désillusion, and the effect was so overpowering that it seemed like the revelation of a new sense in me.” Once settled, she set to work organizing the household. She even managed, eventually, to win over Aunt Susan, who seems to have found a real Catholic girl far less appalling than such a creature contemplated in the abstract. Eventually, she “became my most faithful friend.”

The American Civil War and the consequent interruption of the trade in cotton caused economic depression in England; the Hamerton family mill had nothing to work on. They decided to move to France, with Hamerton to partner with her father in the family wine business. They would need more income, as the first two of three children had already been born in England. When her father died shortly after their arrival, Hamerton partnered with a family friend but that business, too, collapsed a few years later. 

The “almost unexpected” financial success of A Painter’s Camp saved them from ruin. As it happened, its setting in the Highlands caught the eyes of Mr. Macmillan, the eminent publisher; “being a Scotsman, he was in immediate sympathy with so fervent an admirer of the Highlands as my husband, and had at once agreed to publish the book.” The American firm, Roberts Brothers, perhaps in consideration of the substantial Scottish population in that country, won an audience for it there, and publishing contracts for subsequent manuscripts followed. 

His family prospects improved, Hamerton refused to give up on art. He took up etching—of all the visual arts aside from sculpture the best adapted to the precision he aspired to achieve. “His main thought, as I thought”—and one is inclined to trust her judgment—was “attempting too much finish and effect, and I used to tell him so.” To this he gave verbal assent, but he simply could not resist retouching and retouching until the picture was ruined. “The amount of labor bestowed upon etching by my husband was stupendous, as he had to seek his way without help or advice” from any etcher. Once again, his literary skills averted the family from bankruptcy, as he was appointed art critic for the Saturday Review and won a contract for his second (real) book, Etching and Etchers. Now in his mid-thirties, he moved with, and introduced his wife to, several of the literary lions and lionesses of the time, including George Eliot (très aimable“) and Tennyson (“I was greatly impressed by the dignity of his simple manners and by the inscrutable expression of the eyes, so keen and yet so calm, so profound yet so serene”), Louisa May Alcott, who reported that Emerson was among her husband’s American readers, and Robert Louis Stevenson (“What a bright, winning youth he was!” even if he smoked too many cigarettes). Hamerton became so busy that he began to suffer occasional bouts of nervous exhaustion, so he cut back on work and railway travel. It must be said that he was a highly productive writer, nonetheless, producing two novels and a dozen or so books on art, literature, and politics, while editing (beginning in 1870) The Portfolio, which he founded and made into the preeminent English-language arts journal of the time. “It was indeed difficult to give rest to a mind incessantly thirsting for knowledge.” 

The most jarring political and military event in France in their lifetimes was the Franco-Prussian War. “Just at the beginning of the hostilities, my husband had deprecated the rashness of the French people, which was blinding them to the unprepared state of their army and to its numerical inferiority when compared with the German force. But when he saw that, although the King of Prussia had said that the war was not directed against the French people, he was still carrying it on unmercifully after the fall of Napoleon III, his sympathies with the invaded nation grew warmer every day, and he did all that was in his power to spare from invasion that part of the country where we lived, and which we knew so well.” He wrote to one of the French generals to explain how the German camp at Autun could best be approached and attacked. In the event, the family watched the battle from the garret window of their house, watching as the German forces gradually fell back. 

In anticipation of continued threats from now-united Germany, and with respect to his happy marriage and the future of his two sons, especially the two sons, he became increasingly concerned by the “jealous hostility between France and England,” which had never disappeared since the Napoleonic Wars. He hoped to found “an Anglo-French Society or League, the members of which should simply engage themselves to do their best on all occasions to soften the harsh feeling between the two nations.” Matthew Arnold’s complaints about the French as a nation “sunk in immorality” had particularly offended him: “The French expose themselves very much by their incapacity for hypocrisy—all French faults are seen.” Although he had no stomach for “the heavy correspondence” such an enterprise would impose upon him, he wrote, “peace and war hang on such trifles sometimes, [and] a society such as I am imagining might possibly on some occasion have influence enough to prevent a war.” Staying more within his métier, he was moved to write a book, French and English, in which he gave “an impartial comparison of the habits, institutions, and characteristics of the two nations, on account of his sympathies with both, and his intimate knowledge of the French language and long residence in France.” He wanted no two-front war, and by 1887 he wrote to a friend, saying “we are rather troubled by the possibility of a war between France and Germany,” as “my sons would probably both volunteer into the French army in defense of their mother’s country, as it would be a duel of life and death between German and France this time,” not only a territorial dispute over the governance of Alsace and Lorraine. Without foreseeing the mass wars and mass murders of the next century, he anticipated the beginnings of them clearly enough.

The 1870s and 1880s saw a continuous production of books. One of them, Human Intercourse, a commercial success “in spite of its cold reception by the Press,” drew the criticism that he “had no genius.” He groused, with equanimity, “I don’t pretend to have genius; I never said I had; then why make it a reproach?” Not for him the preening of his younger contemporary, Mr. Wilde. “He certainly cared infinitely and incomparably more for his reputation—such as he wished it to be, pure, dignified, and honored—than for wealth, his only desire about money, often expressed, was ‘not to have to think about it.'” By now, he seldom needed to. The family suffered the loss of their younger son, Richard, who committed suicide in 1888. He designed Richard’s grave marker, inscribing it with the word, “Peace,” which was the wish the young man had expressed to him in their last serious conversation.

He wrote to a friend, “For my part, I don’t know what to think of the future. Long ago I used to hope for a true religion, but now I see that if it is to be freed from mythology, it ceases to be a religion altogether, and becomes only science, which has nothing of the heating and energizing force that a real religion certainly possesses. Neither has science its power of uniting men in bonds of brotherhood, and in giving them an effective hostile action against others as religious intolerance does.” He died of a heart attack in 1894, “still in the full possession and maturity of his talents, and in the active use of them” and “conscious of a useful and blameless life.”

 

 

 

Note

1. The contemporary distinction between a “child” and a “boy,” equivalent to today’s distinction between a boy and a youth, or adolescent, or ‘teenager,’ evidently registers the assumption that children before puberty are innocent because supposedly sexless, whereas nature then differentiates them more clearly between boys and girls.