2 April 1866 – 8 April 1866

The snow is melting and a damp fog is spread over everything. The asphalt gallery which runs along the salon is a sheet of quivering water starred incessantly by the hurrying drops falling from the sky. It seems as if one could touch the horizon with one’s hand, and the miles of country which were yesterday visible are all hidden under a thick gray curtain. This imprisonment transports me to Shetland, to Spitzbergen, to Norway, to the Ossianic countries of mist, where man, thrown back upon himself, feels his heart beat more quickly and his thought expand more freely—so long, at least, as he is not frozen and congealed by cold. Fog has certainly a poetry of its own—a grace, a dreamy charm. It does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the mind toward meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegaic and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart—so says the moralist.

The novel by Miss Mulock, “John Halifax, Gentleman,” is a bolder book than it seems, for it attacks in the English way the social problem of equality. And the solution reached is that every one may become a gentleman, even though he may be born in the gutter. In its way the story protests against conventional superiorities, and shows that true nobility consists in character, in personal merit, in moral distinction, in elevation of feeling and of language, in dignity of life, and in self-respect. This is better than Jacobinism, and the opposite of the mere brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging everybody down, the author simply proclaims the right of every one to rise. A man may be born rich and noble—he is not born a gentleman. This word is the Shibboleth of England; it divides her into two halves, and civilized society into two castes. Among gentlemen—courtesy, equality, and politeness; toward those below—contempt, disdain, coldness and indifference. It is the old separation between the ingenui and all others; between the [Greek: eleutheroi] and the [Greek: banauphoi], the continuation of the feudal division between the gentry and the roturiers. What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently he is the free man, the man who is stronger than things, and believes in personality as superior to all the accessory attributes of fortune, such as rank and power, and as constituting what is essential, real, and intrinsically valuable in the individual. Tell me what you are, and I will tell you what you are worth. “God and my Right;” there is the only motto he believes in. Such an ideal is happily opposed to that vulgar ideal which is equally English, the ideal of wealth, with its formula, “How much is he worth?” In a country where poverty is a crime, it is good to be able to say that a nabob need not as such be a gentleman. The mercantile ideal and the chivalrous ideal counterbalance each other; and if the one produces the ugliness of English society and its brutal side, the other serves as a compensation. The gentleman, then, is the man who is master of himself, who respects himself, and makes others respect him. The essence of gentlemanliness is self-rule, the sovereignty of the soul. It means a character which possesses itself, a force which governs itself, a liberty which affirms and regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. Such an ideal is closely akin to the Roman type of dignitas cum auctoritate. It is more moral than intellectual, and is particularly suited to England, which is pre-eminently the country of will. But from self-respect a thousand other things are derived—such as the care of a man’s person, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his body and over his soul; dominion over his instincts and his passions; the effort to be self-sufficient; the pride which will accept no favor; carefulness not to expose himself to any humiliation or mortification, and to maintain himself independent of any human caprice; the constant protection of his honor and of his self-respect. Such a condition of sovereignty, insomuch as it is only easy to the man who is well-born, well-bred, and rich, was naturally long identified with birth, rank, and above all with property. The idea “gentleman” is, then, derived from feudality; it is, as it were, a milder version of the seigneur. In order to lay himself open to no reproach, a gentleman will keep himself irreproachable; in order to be treated with consideration, he will always be careful himself to observe distances, to apportion respect, and to observe all the gradations of conventional politeness, according to rank, age, and situation. Hence it follows that he will be imperturbably cautious in the presence of a stranger, whose name and worth are unknown to him, and to whom he might perhaps show too much or too little courtesy. He ignores and avoids him; if he is approached, he turns away, if he is addressed, he answers shortly and with hauteur. His politeness is not human and general, but individual and relative to persons. This is why every Englishman contains two different men—one turned toward the world, and another. The first, the outer man, is a citadel, a cold and angular wall; the other, the inner man, is a sensible, affectionate, cordial, and loving creature. Such a type is only formed in a moral climate full of icicles, where, in the face of an indifferent world, the hearth alone is hospitable. So that an analysis of the national type of gentlemen reveals to us the nature and the history of the nation, as the fruit reveals the tree.

If philosophy is the art of understanding, it is evident that it must begin by saturating itself with facts and realities, and that premature abstraction kills it, just as the abuse of fasting destroys the body at the age of growth. Besides, we only understand that which is already within us. To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence. Instead, then, of first dismembering and dissecting the object to be conceived, we should begin by laying hold of it in its ensemble, then in its formation, last of all in its parts. The procedure is the same, whether we study a watch or a plant, a work of art or a character. We must study, respect, and question what we want to know, instead of massacring it. We must assimilate ourselves to things and surrender ourselves to them; we must open our minds with docility to their influence, and steep ourselves in their spirit and their distinctive form, before we offer violence to them by dissecting them.