67-4
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is the faith of the self-educated man that nothing is beyond
his means, that all knowledge must submit to a firm will and good
sense. This is also the creed of the amateur. The English essayist,
like Stephen, whose relation to ideas is that of a self-educated intel–
lectual, may best be thought of as a professional amateur, a type
familiar to Americans in certain sports.
The professional bearing of the Victorian intellectual is so con–
spicuous that his amateur status is apt to be overlooked. This pro–
fessionalism is exhibited in the regularity and facility of his writing,
qualities that accredit him, perhaps even more than his social position,
as a genuine, working intellectual. There cannot have been many
writers like Anthony Trollope, who kept a schedule and a watch in
front of him to make sure that he turned out his 250 words every
quarter of an hour for a minimum of three hours. But the sense of
writing as a regular occupation, rather than as the erratic outburst
. '
of inspiration, was and still is typical among English intellectuals.
Stephen himself was no more productive than many others; he aver–
aged three or four eight-thousand-word articles a week (each at one
sitting, it is, incredibly, reported), apart from incidental writing tasks.
This was the sportsmanlike way of writing: no fuss, no anguish; the
game is played at the appointed time, so many minutes to the period,
so many periods to the game.
As a writer, then, the Victorian intellectual was very much the
professional; it was as a thinker that he tended to be amateur, and
largely for the reason that he was so professional in his writing. No
one could write profoundly, on subjects which he must have gotten
up for the occasion, at the rate of 25 thousand words a week. And
even
if
he could, the essayist would not have wanted to enter too
profoundly into his subjects. There was something unsporting, to his
mind, in the way a German philosopher (or these days, the English
complain, an American academician) would worry an idea, strain for
a meaning, deliberately cultivate the far-fetched and the extreme.
The essayist preferred to be reasonable and urbane, to preserve the
amenities of discourse as would two gentlemen conversing in the
presence of ladies. Ideas were picked up, played with and dropped,
without great passion or enthusiasm, until the contracted number of
pages were filled. Where there was a show of passion
it
was against
those who, by affronting common sense, had ruled themselves out of
