The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-19 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

TlMES.—Cardinal Wiseman has delivered an ex-
cellent lecture on " Self-culture" before the members
of the Hartley Institution at Southampton. Amidst
the present superfluity of lecturers, most of them
showing and communicating book information only,
this lecture stands oat and has a character of its
own, as obviously giving the experience of
an eminent man upon a question which
touches everybody's interest and curiosity—the
important question how he is to make the most
of himself. The Cardinal evidently let us a
little into his own personal history, into his own
work of intellectual self discipline. He is certainly
one of the men of the day : he has attained a high
position, he is a man of varied and wide powers, a
literary man, a scientific man, a linguist, a man of
the world, an ecclesiastical leader, an orator. All
this makes a considerable whole. And this, too, of
itself is another of the Cardinal's powers—that he
has contrived to make a whole of himself. He has
not separated into parts and fragments, or gone off at
a tangent upon this or that favourite point. He has
evidently a horror of this tendency in human nature;
it is one of his great cautions. The moment a fa-
vourite thought begins to haunt the mind, when it
returns again and again with new vigour, and
the mind takes a pleasure in gazing upon it, it
should be checked without a moment's hesita-
tion, and cut away." Cardinal Wiseman has not
been run away with by this tendency, but has subor-
dinated all hie great gifts to the attainment of an
effective position, enabling him to wield a great
authority and influence, and establishing him as the
representative of a powerful communion. A lecture
from such a man on "self-culture," which evidently
gives his own experience of the process of self-direc-
tion and self-management, the rules which he found
necessary to impose on himself, and the checks he
put upon his thoughts, or the stimulus and force he
applied to them, according as the case might be—an
explanation of such a process and work of inward for-
mation from so successful and eminent a man, and
one of the workers of the day in his own way and
calling, raises a real interest and commands atten-
tion. Anybody who wants to make the most of him-
self, and thinks the Cardinal, as he undoubtedly
is, a good authority on the subject, will be curious
to know his Eminence's rule and methods. Even if
he discards his Eminence as an authority on religi-
ous questions, he will admit his great weight upon
this important practical subject. The rules, then,
which Cardinal Wiseman gives for the individual's
management of himself, control of his own thoughts
and imagination, and guidance of them into proper
channels, are excellent, and evidently come with the
stamp of reality and experience upon them: They
are entirely free from pretence, and are as simple,
as plain, and as stern as rules can be. They allow
of no subterfuge, but are real lessons of discipline.
The lecturer begins with drawing a most vivid
picture of that perpetual stream and current of
thought in the human mind which is the subject
matter of disciplinarian treatment,—its electric
versatility and slipperiness, its indoinitab:e flow,
its vivacity, and its susceptibility to every call and
image, and liability to slide into endless barren in-
consecutiveness. How is this current to be arrested
then, and turned into fixed channels ? How is
this quick element of thought to be mastered, made
to go in one direction, stopped in others, fixed on
one point out of a thousand, made to rest upon it ?
The Cardinal replies that a force is to be applied to
it, and that it is the force of the will. He takes
the subject into various departments, and shows how
the highest and most successful Self-culture cannot
be carried on without the constant use of this force,
either as checking or propelling. It a very true
penetrating lesson. We must, however, remark,
to begin with—and it is a remark the truth of which
we are sure the Cardinal will admit without any
reluctance—that the lecture's standard on this sub-
ject is a very high one—too high, we fear, for the
mass. This is a lecture which is addressed to the
few, not to the many, though it was delivered to a
crowd. How many of that crowd, we should like
to know, would follow the Cardinal's rules for one
single day without a weariness which would leave
them Yawning for a fortnight afterwards? How
many could follow them for one day, or one morn-
ing A mind here and there, that knows its own
strength, is aspiring, and has resolved to attain a
Position and make itself felt, will feel its chords
F truck by a master hand when the Cardinal lays
down his laws of Self-culture. Such a mind will
intuitively see the truth of his rules, and their bear-
ing upon the proposed result, and will estimate the
amount of the ordeal, and not think it too great a
sacrifice for the prize. But it must be frankly con-
fessed that to the ordinary human mind there is
nothing so hateful as this control of thought—this
dissevering thought from this, fixing it upon that,
rnaking it rest and, in short, do whatever IS wan t
It is an odious process to nineteen-twentieths of the
human race. They can by a great effort, and when
circumstances compel them, apply this control—
when, for once in a life, a trade has to be learnt, or
a language learnt, or when some momentary act
hes to be done. But as for their sustaining as a
constant every-day work this rigid mental discip-
line, which requires this most slippery element of
thought to be fastened in a succession of vices all the
day long for life, they would as soon make up their
minds at once to live in the stocks. It is impossible
for anybody to go through such work as this, ex-
cept he has, together with great strength of will,
an overpowering motive for it, either a religious
or a secular one—a determination to gain some
great object either for himself or for society or a
community. Create a motive strong enough,
whether it be a great position for the individual
or some vast improvement for mankind which
kindles a permanent zeal, and it is astonishing
what a yoke persons will submit themselves to.
But to quiet persons, who are content to live and
die like their neighbours, the Cardinal's picture of
Self-culture is rather terrific. This constant wrest-
ing, twisting, bending, and griping of that electric
material called the human mind is formidable.
Among the instruments of torture found in the
Tower in Elizabeth's reign" was a cell called Little
Ease.' It was of so sma;l dimensions and so con-
structed that the prisoner could neither stand, walk,
sit, or lie down at full length." The rigorous con-
finement of the mind within the grooves of con-
stant successive acts of attention would be a per-
petual " little ease" to certainly the largest and
perhaps not the least worthy part of mankind ; and
they will be, we are afraid, very indifferent pupils
of the Cardinal, and attain but to an inferior form
of Self-culture. There is another remark that we
will make on the Cardinal's scheme of Self-culture,
besides the complimentary one we have just made
on its high standard. The lecturer's scheme per-
haps hardly makes allowance enough for the advan-
tageous pursuit of particular ideas by persons whose
natural genius leads them into particular regions of
thought. It is true such persons are not perfect
wholes; but there is a kind of erratic and eccentric
type of thought which though it makes the indi-
viduals one-sided, is a benefit to the community, by
the magnificent products of these divergent sub-
terranean passages in the great mine of in-
tellect, A great deal of the highest inspiration in
art, poetry, and philosophy has something akin to
the erratic. The Cardinal looks upon particular
ideas laying hold upon minds too exclusively as
only an illegitimate " indulgence" in fancy, and as
the source of " monomanias." It may be this, and
often has been ; but yet if we were to try to make
everybody an harmonious whole, to construct him
with proper proportions, and to forbid solitary
flights and fancies, we should be cutting off one of
the richest sources of the elevation of human nature,
and the expansion of human literature and
philosophy.

HERALD, Though the season may be dull, and
news rare, there is no need just now for ingenious
reporters to invent, as they are said to do, those
marvellous stories ofshowers of frogs, big hailstones,
and little fishes, to enliven during the autumn the

columns of journals which are half-starved for want
of intelligence. There is another kind of shower

to occupy us; it rains diplomatic dispatches. In
Poland during the last two months men have been
fighting, bleeding, and dying. In London and
Paris, in Vienna and St. Petersburg, during the
last two months men have been writing long letters
.about Poland. If we supposed that all this
diplomacy had had, or could have had, any
result at all, any tendency to mitigate the horrors
of this bloody civil war, we should regard this cor-
respondence in another light altogether. But we
know that it has done no good, and it is quite clear
that it never could have done any good. It would
have been far otherwise if the letters of the elcquent
spokesmen of the Three Powers had been understood
to herald an active intervention on their part in the
affairs of Poland in case of the non-compliance of
the Russian Government with their demands. In
that case either Russia would have yielded without
further parley, or she would have resisted, and the
war would have assumed European proportions, to
the immediate relief of the insurgents now in arms.
As the Powers had no intention of going to war
this voluminous correspondence was but a av
. aste of
ink and paper at the best. Worse than this, has
given the Russian Government an opportunity of
administering a rebuff to the would-be triumvirate
which must be felt as a national
humiliation by
France, England, and Austria. Russia has, in fact,
told the Powers that they would do well to mind
their own business, and leave her to settlei her own
aff sirs in the manner she thinks best. The answers
of Prince Gortochakoff to the irfit collective repro-