t in earnest six or eight hours
a day, the more Society amused you the better. The danger in your case
is that your whole existence may take a fashionable tone.

The _esprit_ or tone of fashion differs from the intellectual tone in
ways which I will attempt to define. Fashion is nothing more than the
temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal
business to study the external elegance of life. This custom incessantly
changes. If your habits of mind and life change with it you are a
fashionable person, but if your habits of mind and life either remain
permanently fixed or follow some law of your own individual nature, then
you are outside of fashion. The intellectual spirit is remarkable for
its independence of custom, and therefore on many occasions it will
clash with the fashionable spirit. It does so most frequently in the
choice of pursuits, and in the proportionate importance which the
individual student will (in his own case) assign to his pursuits. The
regulations of fashionable life have fixed, at the least temporarily,
the degree of time and attention which a fashionable person may devote
to this thing or that. The intellectual spirit ignores these
regulations, and devotes its possessor, or more accurately its
_possessed_, to the intellectual speciality for which he has most
aptitude, often leaving him ignorant of what fashion has decided to be
essential. After living the intellectual life for several years he will
know too much of one thing and too little of some other things to be in
conformity with the fashionable ideal. For example, the fashionable
ideal of a gentleman requires classical scholarship, but it is so
difficult for artists and men of science to be classical scholars also
that in this respect they are likely to fall short. I knew a man who
became unfashionable because he had a genius for mechanics. He was
always about steam-engines, and, though a gentleman by birth, associated
from choice with men who understood the science that chiefly interested
him, of which all fashionable people were so profoundly ignorant that he
habitually kept out of their way. He, on his part, neglected scholarship
and literature and all that "artistry of life," as Mr. Robert Lytton
calls it, in which fashionable society excels. Men are frequently driven
into unfashionable existence by the very force and vigor of their own
intellectual gifts, and sometimes by external circumstances, apparently
most