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Title: The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 12 (of 12)
Author: Hazlitt, William
Language: English
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THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT
IN TWELVE VOLUMES
VOLUME TWELVE
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration:
_Grace Hazlitt,
Mother of William Hazlitt
(1747–1837)_
_From an oil painting by John Hazlitt_
]
[Illustration:
_Rev. William Hazlitt.
(1737–1820.)_
_Father of William Hazlitt_
_From a miniature by John Hazlitt._
]
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT
EDITED BY A. R. WALLER
AND ARNOLD GLOVER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
W. E. HENLEY
❦
Fugitive Writings
❦
1904
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Of the essays in this volume some have already been published in
_Literary Remains_, _Sketches and Essays_, or _Winterslow_ (see
Bibliographical Note to Vol. XI.), and the rest (with one exception) are
now reprinted for the first time. The exception is ‘The Sick Chamber’
which was published by Mr. Ireland in his _William Hazlitt Essayist and
Critic, Selections from his Writings_. Some of the essays now
republished for the first time have been attributed to Hazlitt by Mr. W.
C. Hazlitt (_Memoirs_, 1867, 1. xxii-xxxii—Chronological Catalogue), or
by Mr. Ireland (_List of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh
Hunt_); others have not before been identified. The Editors, however,
have not included any essay as to Hazlitt’s authorship of which any
reasonable doubt can exist.
Reference may here be made to a few essays which, though they may have
been written by Hazlitt, have been excluded from the present volume,
because the evidence of their authorship was not sufficiently strong.
They are arranged in the following list under the heading of the
Magazine in which they first appeared.
I. In _The New Monthly Magazine_.
1. Four papers entitled ‘The Confessional’ (1822, vol. IV. pp. 349,
450; vol. v. pp. 54, 406) which read very much as if they were
written by Hazlitt during the _Liber Amoris_ period.
2. An essay entitled ‘Social Grievances’ (1822, vol. v. p. 412).
3. An essay on ‘The Influence of Books on the Progress of Manners’
(May, 1828, vol. xxii. p. 409).
II. In _The Liberal_.
1. In _The Liberal_ (vol. 11. 1823) appeared an essay entitled ‘A
Sunday’s Fête at St. Cloud’ which was reprinted (without
mention being made of its source) under the title ‘A Fête
at St. Cloud’ and attributed to Hazlitt in a volume of
miscellanies called ‘The Talisman; or Bouquet of Literature and
the Fine Arts’ (1831), edited by Mrs. Alaric A. Watts. The
essay shows no trace of Hazlitt’s handiwork, and seems to have
been written ‘under a foreign sky,’ whereas Hazlitt did not
start for his tour in France and Italy till after the
publication of the essay in _The Liberal_. An editorial
paragraph published in _The London Magazine_ for October 1824,
under the heading of ‘The Lion’s Head,’ would seem to show that
the writer of the sketch had sent it to that magazine for
publication. ‘_The Fête of St. Cloud_’ (the paragraph runs),
‘though not unamusing, would not suit our pages. French
subjects, as all Editors and Kings can testify, are lively and
dangerous. They are very irregular, or very poor.’ The editor
of _The London Magazine_, though he had at the time a grievance
against Hazlitt (see Vol. XI. note to essay on ‘Peveril of the
Peak’), would hardly have spoken so patronisingly of one of his
most distinguished contributors.
III. In _The London Weekly Review_.
1. An essay entitled ‘Brummelliana’ (Feb. 2, 1828).
IV. In _The Atlas_.
1. ‘Manners make the man’ (March 29, 1829).
2. ‘Mr. Jeffrey’s Resignation of the Editorship of the Edinburgh
Review’ (June 21, 1829).
3. ‘Autographs’ (June 28, 1829).
4. ‘A Hint upon Education’ (Aug. 9, 1829).
5. ‘A Newspaper Sketch’ (Oct. 18, 1829).
CONTENTS[1]
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
PAGE
The Fight 1
Merry England 15
Of Persons One would Wish to have Seen 26
On the Conversation of Lords 38
On a Sun-dial 51
Why the Heroes of Romance are insipid 59
The Shyness of Scholars 68
The Main-Chance 78
Self-Love and Benevolence 95
The Same Subject continued 104
*The Free Admission 119
The Sick Chamber 125
Footmen 131
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE MONTHLY MAGAZINE
On the Want of Money 136
On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth 150
On Reading New Books 161
On Disagreeable People 173
On Means and Ends 184
On Personal Identity 198
*Aphorisms on Man 209
A Chapter on Editors 230
The Letter-Bell 235
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE LIBERAL
On the Spirit of Monarchy 241
*On the Scotch Character 253
My First Acquaintance with Poets 259
*Pulpit Oratory 275
*Arguing in a Circle 285
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE LONDON WEEKLY REVIEW_
*Queries and Answers 296
On Knowledge of the World 297
The Same Subject continued 301
The Same Subject continued 306
On Public Opinion 311
On the Causes of Popular Opinion 316
A Farewell to Essay-writing 321
*Byron and Wordsworth 328
On Cant and Hypocrisy 330
The Same Subject continued 336
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE ATLAS
*Poetry 339
*English Grammar 342
*Memorabilia of Mr. Coleridge 346
*Peter Pindar 348
*Logic 350
*The Late Mr. Curran 353
*The Court Journal—A Dialogue 354
*The Late Dr. Priestley 357
*Sects and Parties 360
*Conversations as Good as Real (1) 363
*Conversations as Good as Real (2) 369
Trifles Light as Air 370
*Common Sense 377
*The Spirit of Controversy 381
Envy 386
On Prejudice 391
The Same Subject continued 394
The Same Subject continued[2] 396
On Party-Spirit 402
_MISCELLANEOUS_
Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation 405
On the Conduct of Life; or, Advice to a Schoolboy 423
Belief, whether Voluntary 439
Definition of Wit 445
Personal Politics 456
*The Emancipation of the Jews 461
*On the Punishment of Death 466
NOTES 473
Addenda to the Notes in Vols. I.–XI. 504
Index to Titles of Hazlitt’s Writings 508
FUGITIVE WRITINGS
THE FIGHT
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_February, 1822._
‘——The _fight_, the _fight’s_ the thing,
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.’
_Where there’s a will, there’s a way._—I said so to myself, as I walked
down Chancery-lane, about half-past six o’clock on Monday the 10th of
December, to inquire at Jack Randall’s where the fight the next day was
to be; and I found ‘the proverb’ nothing ‘musty’ in the present
instance. I was determined to see this fight, come what would, and see
it I did, in great style. It was my _first fight_, yet it more than
answered my expectations. Ladies! it is to you I dedicate this
description; nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the
exploits of the brave. Courage and modesty are the old English virtues;
and may they never look cold and askance on one another! Think, ye
fairest of the fair, loveliest of the lovely kind, ye practisers of soft
enchantment, how many more ye kill with poisoned baits than ever fell in
the ring; and listen with subdued air and without shuddering, to a tale
tragic only in appearance, and sacred to the FANCY!
I was going down Chancery-lane, thinking to ask at Jack Randall’s where
the fight was to be, when looking through the glass-door of the _Hole in
the Wall_, I heard a gentleman asking the same question _at_ Mrs.
Randall, as the author of Waverley would express it. Now Mrs. Randall
stood answering the gentleman’s question, with the authenticity of the
lady of the Champion of the Light Weights. Thinks I, I’ll wait till this
person comes out, and learn from him how it is. For to say a truth, I
was not fond of going into this house of call for heroes and
philosophers, ever since the owner of it (for Jack is no gentleman)
threatened once upon a time to kick me out of doors for wanting a
mutton-chop at his hospitable board, when the conqueror in thirteen
battles was more full of _blue ruin_ than of good manners. I was the
more mortified at this repulse, inasmuch as I had heard Mr. James
Simpkins, hosier in the Strand, one day when the character of the _Hole
in the Wall_ was brought in question, observe—‘The house is a very good
house, and the company quite genteel: I have been there myself!’
Remembering this unkind treatment of mine host, to which mine hostess
was also a party, and not wishing to put her in unquiet thoughts at a
time jubilant like the present, I waited at the door, when, who should
issue forth but my friend Jo. Toms, and turning suddenly up
Chancery-lane with that quick jerk and impatient stride which
distinguishes a lover of the FANCY, I said, ‘I’ll be hanged if that
fellow is not going to the fight, and is on his way to get me to go with
him.’ So it proved in effect, and we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to
discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new,
and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only
when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to
impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in
his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he
meets. Toms and I, though we seldom meet, were an _alter idem_ on this
memorable occasion, and had not an idea that we did not candidly impart;
and ‘so carelessly did we fleet the time,’ that I wish no better, when
there is another fight, than to have him for a companion on my journey
down, and to return with my friend Jack Pigott, talking of what was to
happen or of what did happen, with a noble subject always at hand, and
liberty to digress to others whenever they offered. Indeed, on my
repeating the lines from Spenser in an involuntary fit of enthusiasm,
‘What more felicity can fall to creature,
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?’
my last-named ingenious friend stopped me by saying that this,
translated into the vulgate, meant ‘_Going to see a fight_.’
Jo. Toms and I could not settle about the method of going down. He said
there was a caravan, he understood, to start from Tom Belcher’s at two,
which would go there _right out_ and back again the next day. Now I
never travel all night, and said I should get a cast to Newbury by one
of the mails. Jo. swore the thing was impossible, and I could only
answer that I had made up my mind to it. In short, he seemed to me to
waver, said he only came to see if I was going, had letters to write, a
cause coming on the day after, and faintly said at parting (for I was
bent on setting out that moment)—‘Well, we meet at Philippi!’ I made the
best of my way to Piccadilly. The mail-coach stand was bare. ‘They are
all gone,’ said I—‘this is always the way with me—in the instant I lose
the future—if I had not stayed to pour out that last cup of tea, I
should have been just in time’—and cursing my folly and ill-luck
together, without inquiring at the coach-office whether the mails were
gone or not, I walked on in despite, and to punish my own dilatoriness
and want of determination. At any rate, I would not turn back: I might
get to Hounslow, or perhaps farther, to be on my road the next morning.
I passed Hyde Park Corner (my Rubicon), and trusted to fortune. Suddenly
I heard the clattering of a Brentford stage, and the fight rushed full
upon my fancy. I argued (not unwisely) that even a Brentford coachman
was better company than my own thoughts (such as they were just then),
and at his invitation mounted the box with him. I immediately stated my
case to him—namely, my quarrel with myself for missing the Bath or
Bristol mail, and my determination to get on in consequence as well as I
could, without any disparagement or insulting comparison between longer
or shorter stages. It is a maxim with me that stage-coaches, and
consequently stage-coachmen, are respectable in proportion to the
distance they have to travel: so I said nothing on that subject to my
Brentford friend. Any incipient tendency to an abstract proposition, or
(as he might have construed it) to a personal reflection of this kind,
was however nipped in the bud; for I had no sooner declared indignantly
that I had missed the mails, than he flatly denied that they were gone
along, and lo! at the instant three of them drove by in rapid,
provoking, orderly succession, as if they would devour the ground before
them. Here again I seemed in the contradictory situation of the man in
Dryden who exclaims,
‘I follow Fate, which does too hard pursue!’
If I had stopped to inquire at the White Horse Cellar, which would not
have taken me a minute, I should now have been driving down the road in
all the dignified unconcern and _ideal_ perfection of mechanical
conveyance. The Bath mail I had set my mind upon, and I had missed it,
as I missed every thing else, by my own absurdity, in putting the will
for the deed, and aiming at ends without employing means. ‘Sir,’ said he
of the Brentford, ‘the Bath mail will be up presently, my brother-in-law
drives it, and I will engage to stop him if there is a place empty.’ I
almost doubted my good genius; but, sure enough, up it drove like
lightning, and stopped directly at the call of the Brentford Jehu. I
would not have believed this possible, but the brother-in-law of a
mail-coach driver is himself no mean man. I was transferred without loss
of time from the top of one coach to that of the other, desired the
guard to pay my fare to the Brentford coachman for me as I had no
change, was accommodated with a great coat, put up my umbrella to keep
off a drizzling mist, and we began to cut through the air like an arrow.
The milestones disappeared one after another, the rain kept off; Tom
Turtle, the trainer, sat before me on the coach-box, with whom I
exchanged civilities as a gentleman going to the fight; the passion that
had transported me an hour before was subdued to pensive regret and
conjectural musing on the next day’s battle; I was promised a place
inside at Reading, and upon the whole, I thought myself a lucky fellow.
Such is the force of imagination! On the outside of any other coach on
the 10th of December, with a Scotch mist drizzling through the cloudy
moonlight air, I should have been cold, comfortless, impatient, and, no
doubt, wet through; but seated on the Royal mail, I felt warm and
comfortable, the air did me good, the ride did me good, I was pleased
with the progress we had made, and confident that all would go well
through the journey. When I got inside at Reading, I found Turtle and a
stout valetudinarian, whose costume bespoke him one of the FANCY, and
who had risen from a three months’ sick bed to get into the mail to see
the fight. They were intimate, and we fell into a lively discourse. My
friend the trainer was confined in his topics to fighting dogs and men,
to bears and badgers; beyond this he was ‘quite chap-fallen,’ had not a
word to throw at a dog, or indeed very wisely fell asleep, when any
other game was started. The whole art of training (I, however, learnt
from him,) consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence
and exercise, repeated alternately and without end. A yolk of an egg
with a spoonful of rum in it is the first thing in a morning, and then a
walk of six miles till breakfast. This meal consists of a plentiful
supply of tea and toast and beef-steaks. Then another six or seven miles
till dinner-time, and another supply of solid beef or mutton with a pint
of porter, and perhaps, at the utmost, a couple of glasses of sherry.
Martin trains on water, but this increases his infirmity on another very
dangerous side. The Gas-man takes now and then a chirping glass (under
the rose) to console him, during a six weeks’ probation, for the absence
of Mrs. Hickman—an agreeable woman, with (I understand) a pretty fortune
of two hundred pounds. How matter presses on me! What stubborn things
are facts! How inexhaustible is nature and art! ‘It is well,’ as I once
heard Mr. Richmond observe, ‘to see a variety.’ He was speaking of
cock-fighting as an edifying spectacle. I cannot deny but that one
learns more of what _is_ (I do not say of what _ought to be_) in this
desultory mode of practical study, than from reading the same book twice
over, even though it should be a moral treatise. Where was I? I was
sitting at dinner with the candidate for the honours of the ring, ‘where
good digestion waits on appetite, and health on both.’ Then follows an
hour of social chat and native glee; and afterwards, to another
breathing over heathy hill or dale. Back to supper, and then to bed, and
up by six again—Our hero
‘Follows so the ever-running sun
With profitable _ardour_‘—
to the day that brings him victory or defeat in the green fairy circle.
Is not this life more sweet than mine? I was going to say; but I will
not libel any life by comparing it to mine, which is (at the date of
these presents) bitter as coloquintida and the dregs of aconitum!
The invalid in the Bath mail soared a pitch above the trainer, and did
not sleep so sound, because he had ‘more figures and more fantasies.’ We
talked the hours away merrily. He had faith in surgery, for he had had
three ribs set right, that had been broken in a _turn-up_ at Belcher’s,
but thought physicians old women, for they had no antidote in their
catalogue for brandy. An indigestion is an excellent common-place for
two people that never met before. By way of ingratiating myself, I told
him the story of my doctor, who, on my earnestly representing to him
that I thought his regimen had done me harm, assured me that the whole
pharmacopœia contained nothing comparable to the prescription he had
given me; and, as a proof of its undoubted efficacy, said, that, ‘he had
had one gentleman with my complaint under his hands for the last fifteen
years.’ This anecdote made my companion shake the rough sides of his
three great coats with boisterous laughter; and Turtle, starting out of
his sleep, swore he knew how the fight would go, for he had had a dream
about it. Sure enough the rascal told us how the three first rounds went
off, but ‘his dream,’ like others, ‘denoted a foregone conclusion.’ He
knew his men. The moon now rose in silver state, and I ventured, with
some hesitation, to point out this object of placid beauty, with the
blue serene beyond, to the man of science, to which his ear he
‘seriously inclined,’ the more as it gave promise _d’un beau jour_ for
the morrow, and showed the ring undrenched by envious showers, arrayed
in sunny smiles. Just then, all going on well, I thought on my friend
Toms, whom I had left behind, and said innocently, ‘There was a
blockhead of a fellow I left in town, who said there was no possibility
of getting down by the mail, and talked of going by a caravan from
Belcher’s at two in the morning, after he had written some letters.’
‘Why,’ said he of the lapels, ‘I should not wonder if that was the very
person we saw running about like mad from one coach-door to another, and
asking if any one had seen a friend of his, a gentlemen going to the
fight, whom he had missed stupidly enough by staying to write a note.’
‘Pray, Sir,’ said my fellow-traveller, ‘had he a plaid-cloak on?’—‘Why,
no,’ said I, ‘not at the time I left him, but he very well might
afterwards, for he offered to lend me one.’ The plaid-cloak and the
letter decided the thing. Joe, sure enough, was in the Bristol mail,
which preceded us by about fifty yards. This was droll enough. We had
now but a few miles to our place of destination, and the first thing I
did on alighting at Newbury, both coaches stopping at the same time, was
to call out, ‘Pray, is there a gentleman in that mail of the name of
Toms?’ ‘No,’ said Joe, borrowing something of the vein of Gilpin, ‘for I
have just got out.’ ‘Well!’ says he, ‘this is lucky; but you don’t know
how vexed I was to miss you; for,’ added he, lowering his voice, ‘do you
know when I left you I went to Belcher’s to ask about the caravan, and
Mrs. Belcher said very obligingly, she couldn’t tell about that, but
there were two gentlemen who had taken places by the mail and were gone
on in a landau, and she could frank us. It’s a pity I didn’t meet with
you; we could then have got down for nothing. But _mum’s the word_.’
It’s the devil for any one to tell me a secret, for it’s sure to come
out in print. I do not care so much to gratify a friend, but the public
ear is too great a temptation to me.
Our present business was to get beds and a supper at an inn; but this
was no easy task. The public-houses were full, and where you saw a light
at a private house, and people poking their heads out of the casement to
see what was going on, they instantly put them in and shut the window,
the moment you seemed advancing with a suspicious overture for
accommodation. Our guard and coachman thundered away at the outer gate
of the Crown for some time without effect—such was the greater noise
within;—and when the doors were unbarred, and we got admittance, we
found a party assembled in the kitchen round a good hospitable fire,
some sleeping, others drinking, others talking on politics and on the
fight. A tall English yeoman (something like Matthews in the face, and
quite as great a wag)—
‘A lusty man to ben an abbot able,’—
was making such a prodigious noise about rent and taxes, and the price
of corn now and formerly, that he had prevented us from being heard at
the gate. The first thing I heard him say was to a shuffling fellow who
wanted to be off a bet for a shilling glass of brandy and
water—‘Confound it, man, don’t be _insipid_!’ Thinks I, that is a good
phrase. It was a good omen. He kept it up so all night, nor flinched
with the approach of morning. He was a fine fellow, with sense, wit, and
spirit, a hearty body and a joyous mind, free-spoken, frank,
convivial—one of that true English breed that went with Harry the Fifth
to the siege of Harfleur—‘standing like greyhounds in the slips,’ &c. We
ordered tea and eggs (beds were soon found to be out of the question)
and this fellow’s conversation was _sauce piquante_. It did one’s heart
good to see him brandish his oaken towel and to hear him talk. He made
mince-meat of a drunken, stupid, red-faced, quarrelsome, _frowsy_
farmer, whose nose ‘he moralized into a thousand similes,’ making it out
a firebrand like Bardolph’s. ‘I’ll tell you what my friend,’ says he,
‘the landlady has only to keep you here to save fire and candle. If one
was to touch your nose, it would go off like a piece of charcoal.’ At
this the other only grinned like an idiot, the sole variety in his
purple face being his little peering grey eyes and yellow teeth; called
for another glass, swore he would not stand it; and after many attempts
to provoke his humourous antagonist to single combat, which the other
turned off (after working him up to a ludicrous pitch of choler) with
great adroitness, he fell quietly asleep with a glass of liquor in his
hand, which he could not lift to his head. His laughing persecutor made
a speech over him, and turning to the opposite side of the room, where
they were all sleeping in the midst of this ‘loud and furious fun,’
said, ‘There’s a scene, by G—d, for Hogarth to paint. I think he and
Shakspeare were our two best men at copying life.’ This confirmed me in
my good opinion of him. Hogarth, Shakspeare, and Nature, were just
enough for him (indeed for any man) to know. I said, ‘You read Cobbett,
don’t you? At least,’ says I, ‘you talk just as well as he writes.’ He
seemed to doubt this. But I said, ‘We have an hour to spare: if you’ll
get pen, ink, and paper, and keep on talking, I’ll write down what you
say; and if it doesn’t make a capital ‘Political Register,’ I’ll forfeit
my head. You have kept me alive to-night, however. I don’t know what I
should have done without you.’ He did not dislike this view of the
thing, nor my asking if he was not about the size of Jem Belcher; and
told me soon afterwards, in the confidence of friendship, that ‘the
circumstance which had given him nearly the greatest concern in his
life, was Cribb’s beating Jem after he had lost his eye by
racket-playing.’—The morning dawns; that dim but yet clear light
appears, which weighs like solid bars of metal on the sleepless eyelids;
the guests drop down from their chambers one by one—but it was too late
to think of going to bed now (the clock was on the stroke of seven), we
had nothing for it but to find a barber’s (the pole that glittered in
the morning sun lighted us to his shop), and then a nine miles’ march to
Hungerford. The day was fine, the sky was blue, the mists were retiring
from the marshy ground, the path was tolerably dry, the sitting-up all
night had not done us much harm—at least the cause was good; we talked
of this and that with amicable difference, roving and sipping of many
subjects, but still invariably we returned to the fight. At length, a
mile to the left of Hungerford, on a gentle eminence, we saw the ring
surrounded by covered carts, gigs, and carriages, of which hundreds had
passed us on the road; Toms gave a youthful shout, and we hastened down
a narrow lane to the scene of action.
Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to come,
at least if it is a fight like that between the Gas-man and Bill Neate.
The crowd was very great when we arrived on the spot; open carriages
were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing, and the country
people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions, to see
their hero beat or be beaten. The odds were still on Gas, but only about
five to four. Gully had been down to try Neate, and had backed him
considerably, which was a damper to the sanguine confidence of the
adverse party. About two hundred thousand pounds were pending. The Gas
says, he has lost 3000_l._ which were promised him by different
gentlemen if he had won. He had presumed too much on himself, which had
made others presume on him. This spirited and formidable young fellow
seems to have taken for his motto the old maxim, that ‘there are three
things necessary to success in life—_Impudence! Impudence! Impudence!_’
It is so in matters of opinion, but not in the _Fancy_, which is the
most practical of all things, though even here confidence is half the
battle, but only half. Our friend had vapoured and swaggered too much,
as if he wanted to grin and bully his adversary out of the fight. ‘Alas!
the Bristol man was not so tamed!’—‘This is _the grave-digger_’ (would
Tom Hickman exclaim in the moments of intoxication from gin and success,
shewing his tremendous right hand), ‘this will send many of them to
their long homes; I haven’t done with them yet! ‘Why should he—though he
had licked four of the best men within the hour, yet why should he
threaten to inflict dishonourable chastisement on my old master
Richmond, a veteran going off the stage, and who has borne his sable
honours meekly? Magnanimity, my dear Tom, and bravery, should be
inseparable. Or why should he go up to his antagonist, the first time he
ever saw him at the Fives Court, and measuring him from head to foot
with a glance of contempt, as Achilles surveyed Hector, say to him,
‘What, are you Bill Neate? I’ll knock more blood out of that great
carcase of thine, this day fortnight, than you ever knock’d out of a
bullock’s!’ It was not manly, ’twas not fighter-like. If he was sure of
the victory (as he was not), the less said about it the better. Modesty
should accompany the _Fancy_ as its shadow. The best men were always the
best behaved. Jem Belcher, the Game Chicken (before whom the Gas-man
could not have lived) were civil, silent men. So is Cribb, so is Tom
Belcher, the most elegant of sparrers, and not a man for every one to
take by the nose. I enlarged on this topic in the mail (while Turtle was
asleep), and said very wisely (as I thought) that impertinence was a
part of no profession. A boxer was bound to beat his man, but not to
thrust his fist, either actually or by implication, in every one’s face.
Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if
he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no
gentleman. A boxer, I would infer, need not be a blackguard or a
coxcomb, more than another. Perhaps I press this point too much on a
fallen man—Mr. Thomas Hickman has by this time learnt that first of all
lessons, ‘That man was made to mourn.’ He has lost nothing by the late
fight but his presumption; and that every man may do as well without! By
an over-display of this quality, however, the public had been prejudiced
against him, and the _knowing-ones_ were taken in. Few but those who had
bet on him wished Gas to win. With my own prepossessions on the subject,
the result of the 11th of December appeared to me as fine a piece of
poetical justice as I had ever witnessed. The difference of weight
between the two combatants (14 stone to 12) was nothing to the sporting
men. Great, heavy, clumsy, long-armed Bill Neate kicked the beam in the
scale of the Gas-man’s vanity. The amateurs were frightened at his big
words, and thought that they would make up for the difference of six
feet and five feet nine. Truly, the FANCY are not men of imagination.
They judge of what has been, and cannot conceive of anything that is to
be. The Gas-man had won hitherto; therefore he must beat a man half as
big again as himself—and that to a certainty. Besides, there are as many
feuds, factions, prejudices, pedantic notions in the FANCY as in the
state or in the schools. Mr. Gully is almost the only cool, sensible man
among them, who exercises an unbiassed discretion, and is not a slave to
his passions in these matters. But enough of reflections, and to our
tale. The day, as I have said, was fine for a December morning. The
grass was wet, and the ground miry, and ploughed up with multitudinous
feet, except that, within the ring itself, there was a spot of
virgin-green closed in and unprofaned by vulgar tread, that shone with
dazzling brightness in the mid-day sun. For it was now noon, and we had
an hour to wait. This is the trying time. It is then the heart sickens,
as you think what the two champions are about, and how short a time will
determine their fate. After the first blow is struck, there is no
opportunity for nervous apprehensions; you are swallowed up in the
immediate interest of the scene—but
‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.’
I found it so as I felt the sun’s rays clinging to my back, and saw the
white wintry clouds sink below the verge of the horizon. ‘So, I thought,
my fairest hopes have faded from my sight!—so will the Gas-man’s glory,
or that of his adversary, vanish in an hour.’ The _swells_ were parading
in their white box-coats, the outer ring was cleared with some bruises
on the heads and shins of the rustic assembly (for the _cockneys_ had
been distanced by the sixty-six miles); the time drew near, I had got a
good stand; a bustle, a buzz, ran through the crowd, and from the
opposite side entered Neate, between his second and bottle-holder. He
rolled along, swathed in his loose great coat, his knock-knees bending
under his huge bulk; and, with a modest cheerful air, threw his hat into
the ring. He then just looked round, and began quietly to undress; when
from the other side there was a similar rush and an opening made, and
the Gas-man came forward with a conscious air of anticipated triumph,
too much like the cock-of-the walk. He strutted about more than became a
hero, sucked oranges with a supercilious air, and threw away the skin
with a toss of his head, and went up and looked at Neate, which was an
act of supererogation. The only sensible thing he did was, as he strode
away from the modern Ajax, to fling out his arms, as if he wanted to try
whether they would do their work that day. By this time they had
stripped, and presented a strong contrast in appearance. If Neate was
like Ajax, ‘with Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear’ the pugilistic
reputation of all Bristol, Hickman might be compared to Diomed, light,
vigorous, elastic, and his back glistened in the sun, as he moved about,
like a panther’s hide. There was now a dead pause—attention was
awe-struck. Who at that moment, big with a great event, did not draw his
breath short—did not feel his heart throb? All was ready. They tossed up
for the sun, and the Gas-man won. They were led up to the
_scratch_—shook hands, and went at it.
In the first round every one thought it was all over. After making play
a short time, the Gas-man flew at his adversary like a tiger, struck
five blows in as many seconds, three first, and then following him as he
staggered back, two more, right and left, and down he fell, a mighty
ruin. There was a shout, and I said, ‘There is no standing this.’ Neate
seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round which the Gas-man’s
blows played with the rapidity of electricity or lightning, and you
imagined he would only be lifted up to be knocked down again. It was as
if Hickman held a sword or a fire in that right hand of his, and
directed it against an unarmed body. They met again, and Neate seemed,
not cowed, but particularly cautious. I saw his teeth clenched together
and his brows knit close against the sun. He held out both his arms at
full length straight before him, like two sledge-hammers, and raised his
left an inch or two higher. The Gas-man could not get over this
guard—they struck mutually and fell, but without advantage on either
side. It was the same in the next round; but the balance of power was
thus restored—the fate of the battle was suspended. No one could tell
how it would end. This was the only moment in which opinion was divided;
for, in the next, the Gas-man aiming a mortal blow at his adversary’s
neck, with his right hand, and failing from the length he had to reach,
the other returned it with his left at full swing, planted a tremendous
blow on his cheek-bone and eyebrow, and made a red ruin of that side of
his face. The Gas-man went down, and there was another shout—a roar of
triumph as the waves of fortune rolled tumultuously from side to side.
This was a settler. Hickman got up, and ‘grinned horrible a ghastly
smile,’ yet he was evidently dashed in his opinion of himself; it was
the first time he had ever been so punished; all one side of his face
was perfect scarlet, and his right eye was closed in dingy blackness, as
he advanced to the fight, less confident, but still determined. After
one or two rounds, not receiving another such remembrancer, he rallied
and went at it with his former impetuosity. But in vain. His strength
had been weakened,—his blows could not tell at such a distance,—he was
obliged to fling himself at his adversary, and could not strike from his
feet; and almost as regularly as he flew at him with his right hand,
Neate warded the blow, or drew back out of its reach, and felled him
with the return of his left. There was little cautious sparring—no
half-hits—no tapping and trifling, none of the _petit-maitreship_ of the
art—they were almost all knock-down blows:—the fight was a good stand-up
fight. The wonder was the half-minute time. If there had been a minute
or more allowed between each round, it would have been intelligible how
they should by degrees recover strength and resolution; but to see two
men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the
breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the
shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage, stand steady
to inflict or receive mortal offence, and rush upon each other ‘like two
clouds over the Caspian’—this is the most astonishing thing of all:—this
is the high and heroic state of man! From this time forward the event
became more certain every round; and about the twelfth it seemed as if
it must have been over. Hickman generally stood with his back to me; but
in the scuffle, he had changed positions, and Neate just then made a
tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful
whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a
second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and
with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw any thing more terrific
than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural
expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a
death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose
streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual
man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the
figures in Dante’s _Inferno_. Yet he fought on after this for several
rounds, still striking the first desperate blow, and Neate standing on
the defensive, and using the same cautious guard to the last, as if he
had still all his work to do; and it was not till the Gas-man was so
stunned in the seventeenth or eighteenth round, that his senses forsook
him, and he could not come to time, that the battle was declared
over.[3] Ye who despise the Fancy, do something to shew as much _pluck_,
or as much self-possession as this, before you assume a superiority
which you have never given a single proof of by any one action in the
whole course of your lives!—When the Gas-man came to himself, the first
words he uttered were, ‘Where am I? What is the matter?’ ‘Nothing is the
matter, Tom,—you have lost the battle, but you are the bravest man
alive.’ And Jackson whispered to him, ‘I am collecting a purse for you,
Tom.’—Vain sounds, and unheard at that moment! Neate instantly went up
and shook him cordially by the hand, and seeing some old acquaintance,
began to flourish with his fists, calling out, ‘Ah you always said I
couldn’t fight—What do you think now?’ But all in good humour, and
without any appearance of arrogance; only it was evident Bill Neate was
pleased that he had won the fight. When it was over, I asked Cribb if he
did not think it was a good one? He said, ‘_Pretty well!_’ The
carrier-pigeons now mounted into the air, and one of them flew with the
news of her husband’s victory to the bosom of Mrs. Neate. Alas, for Mrs.
Hickman!
_Mais au revoir_, as Sir Fopling Flutter says. I went down with Toms; I
returned with Jack Pigott, whom I met on the ground. Toms is a rattle
brain; Pigott is a sentimentalist. Now, under favour, I am a
sentimentalist too—therefore I say nothing, but that the interest of the
excursion did not flag as I came back. Pigott and I marched along the
causeway leading from Hungerford to Newbury, now observing the effect of
a brilliant sun on the tawny meads or moss-coloured cottages, now
exulting in the fight, now digressing to some topic of general and
elegant literature. My friend was dressed in character for the occasion,
or like one of the FANCY; that is, with a double portion of great coats,
clogs, and overhauls: and just as we had agreed with a couple of country
lads to carry his superfluous wearing apparel to the next town, we were
overtaken by a return post-chaise, into which I got, Pigott preferring a
seat on the bar. There were two strangers already in the chaise, and on
their observing they supposed I had been to the fight, I said I had, and
concluded they had done the same. They appeared, however, a little shy
and sore on the subject; and it was not till after several hints
dropped, and questions put, that it turned out that they had missed it.
One of these friends had undertaken to drive the other there in his gig:
they had set out, to make sure work, the day before at three in the
afternoon. The owner of the one-horse vehicle scorned to ask his way,
and drove right on to Bagshot, instead of turning off at Hounslow: there
they stopped all night, and set off the next day across the country to
Reading, from whence they took coach, and got down within a mile or two
of Hungerford, just half an hour after the fight was over. This might be
safely set down as one of the miseries of human life. We parted with
these two gentlemen who had been to see the fight, but had returned as
they went, at Wolhampton, where we were promised beds (an irresistible
temptation, for Pigott had passed the preceding night at Hungerford as
we had done at Newbury), and we turned into an old bow-windowed parlour
with a carpet and a snug fire; and after devouring a quantity of tea,
toast, and eggs, sat down to consider, during an hour of philosophic
leisure, what we should have for supper. In the midst of an Epicurean
deliberation between a roasted fowl and mutton chops with mashed
potatoes, we were interrupted by an inroad of Goths and Vandals—_O
procul este profani_—not real flash-men, but interlopers, noisy
pretenders, butchers from Tothill-fields, brokers from Whitechapel, who
called immediately for pipes and tobacco, hoping it would not be
disagreeable to the gentlemen, and began to insist that it was _a
cross_. Pigott withdrew from the smoke and noise into another room, and
left me to dispute the point with them for a couple of hours _sans
intermission_ by the dial. The next morning we rose refreshed; and on
observing that Jack had a pocket volume in his hand, in which he read in
the intervals of our discourse, I inquired what it was, and learned to
my particular satisfaction that it was a volume of the New Eloise.
Ladies, after this, will you contend that a love for the FANCY is
incompatible with the cultivation of sentiment?—We jogged on as before,
my friend setting me up in a genteel drab great coat and green silk
handkerchief (which I must say became me exceedingly), and after
stretching our legs for a few miles, and seeing Jack Randall, Ned
Turner, and Scroggins, pass on the top of one of the Bath coaches, we
engaged with the driver of the second to take us to London for the usual
fee. I got inside, and found three other passengers. One of them was an
old gentleman with an aquiline nose, powdered hair, and a pigtail, and
who looked as if he had played many a rubber at the Bath rooms. I said
to myself, he is very like Mr. Windham; I wish he would enter into
conversation, that I might hear what fine observations would come from
those finely-turned features. However, nothing passed, till, stopping to
dine at Reading, some inquiry was made by the company about the fight,
and I gave (as the reader may believe) an eloquent and animated
description of it. When we got into the coach again, the old gentleman,
after a graceful exordium, said, he had, when a boy, been to a fight
between the famous Broughton and George Stevenson, who was called the
_Fighting Coachman_, in the year 1770, with the late Mr. Windham. This
beginning flattered the spirit of prophecy within me and rivetted my
attention. He went on—‘George Stevenson was coachman to a friend of my
father’s. He was an old man when I saw him some years afterwards. He
took hold of his own arm and said, “there was muscle here once, but now
it is no more than this young gentleman’s.” He added, “well, no matter;
I have been here long, I am willing to go hence, and I hope I have done
no more harm than another man.” Once,’ said my unknown companion, ‘I
asked him if he had ever beat Broughton? He said Yes; that he had fought
with him three times, and the last time he fairly beat him, though the
world did not allow it. “I’ll tell you how it was, master. When the
seconds lifted us up in the last round, we were so exhausted that
neither of us could stand, and we fell upon one another, and as Master
Broughton fell uppermost, the mob gave it in his favour, and he was said
to have won the battle. But,” says he, “the fact was, that as his second
(John Cuthbert) lifted him up, he said to him, ‘I’ll fight no more, I’ve
had enough;’ which,” says Stevenson, “you know gave me the victory. And
to prove to you that this was the case, when John Cuthbert was on his
death-bed, and they asked him if there was any thing on his mind which
he wished to confess, he answered, ‘Yes, that there was one thing he
wished to set right, for that certainly Master Stevenson won that last
fight with Master Broughton; for he whispered him as he lifted him up in
the last round of all, that he had had enough.’”’ ‘This,’ said the Bath
gentleman, ‘was a bit of human nature;’ and I have written this account
of the fight on purpose that it might not be lost to the world. He also
stated as a proof of the candour of mind in this class of men, that
Stevenson acknowledged that Broughton could have beat him in his best
day; but that he (Broughton) was getting old in their last rencounter.
When we stopped in Piccadilly, I wanted to ask the gentleman some
questions about the late Mr. Windham, but had not courage. I got out,
resigned my coat and green silk handkerchief to Pigott (loth to part
with these ornaments of life), and walked home in high spirits.
P.S. Toms called upon me the next day, to ask me if I did not think the
fight was a complete thing? I said I thought it was. I hope he will
relish my account of it.
MERRY ENGLAND
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_December, 1825._
‘St. George for merry England!’
This old-fashioned epithet might be supposed to have been bestowed
ironically, or on the old principle—_Ut lucus a non lucendo_. Yet there
is something in the sound that hits the fancy, and a sort of truth
beyond appearances. To be sure, it is from a dull, homely ground that
the gleams of mirth and jollity break out; but the streaks of light that
tinge the evening sky are not the less striking on that account. The
beams of the morning sun shining on the lonely glades, or through the
idle branches of the tangled forest, the leisure, the freedom, ‘the
pleasure of going and coming without knowing where,’ the troops of wild
deer, the sports of the chase, and other rustic gambols, were sufficient
to justify the well-known appellation of ‘Merry Sherwood,’ and in like
manner, we may apply the phrase to _Merry England_. The smile is not the
less sincere because it does not always play upon the cheek; and the
jest is not the less welcome, nor the laugh less hearty, because they
happen to be a relief from care or leaden-eyed melancholy. The instances
are the more precious as they are rare; and we look forward to them with
the greater good will, or back upon them with the greater gratitude, as
we drain the last drop in the cup with particular relish. If not always
gay or in good spirits, we are glad when any occasion draws us out of
our natural gloom, and disposed to make the most of it. We may say with
_Silence_ in the play, ‘I have been merry once ere now,’—and this once
was to serve him all his life; for he was a person of wonderful silence
and gravity, though ‘he chirped over his cups,’ and announced with
characteristic glee that ‘there were pippins and cheese to come.’
_Silence_ was in this sense a merry man, that is, he would be merry if
he could, and a very great economy of wit, like very slender fare, was a
banquet to him, from the simplicity of his taste and habits.
‘Continents,’ says Hobbes, ‘have most of what they contain’—and in this
view it may be contended that the English are the merriest people in the
world, since they only show it on high-days and holidays. They are then
like a schoolboy let loose from school, or like a dog that has slipped
his collar. They are not gay like the French, who are one eternal smile
of self-complacency, tortured into affectation, or spun into languid
indifference, nor are they voluptuous and immersed in sensual indolence,
like the Italians; but they have that sort of intermittent, fitful,
irregular gaiety, which is neither worn out by habit, nor deadened by
passion, but is sought with avidity as it takes the mind by surprise, is
startled by a sense of oddity and incongruity, indulges its wayward
humours or lively impulses, with perfect freedom and lightness of heart,
and seizes occasion by the forelock, that it may return to serious
business with more cheerfulness, and have something to beguile the hours
of thought or sadness. I do not see how there can be high spirits
without low ones; and every thing has its price according to
circumstances. Perhaps we have to pay a heavier tax on pleasure, than
some others: what skills it, so long as our good spirits and good hearts
enable us to bear it?
‘They’ (the English), says Froissart, ‘amused themselves sadly after the
fashion of their country’—_ils se réjouissent tristement selon la
coutume de leur pays_. They have indeed a way of their own. Their mirth
is a relaxation from gravity, a challenge to dull care to be gone; and
one is not always clear at first, whether the appeal is successful. The
cloud may still hang on the brow; the ice may not thaw at once. To help
them out in their new character is an act of charity. Any thing short of
hanging or drowning is something to begin with. They do not enter into
their amusements the less doggedly because they may plague others. They
like a thing the better for hitting them a rap on the knuckles, for
making their blood tingle. They do not dance or sing, but they make good
cheer—‘eat, drink, and are merry.’ No people are fonder of field-sports,
Christmas gambols, or practical jests. Blindman’s-buff,
hunt-the-slipper, hot-cockles, and snap-dragon, are all approved English
games, full of laughable surprises and ‘hairbreadth ‘scapes,’ and serve
to amuse the winter fire-side after the roast-beef and plum-pudding, the
spiced ale and roasted crab, thrown (hissing-hot) into the foaming
tankard. Punch (not the liquor, but the puppet) is not, I fear, of
English origin; but there is no place, I take it, where he finds himself
more at home or meets a more joyous welcome, where he collects greater
crowds at the corners of streets, where he opens the eyes or distends
the cheeks wider, or where the bangs and blows, the uncouth gestures,
ridiculous anger and screaming voice of the chief performer excite more
boundless merriment or louder bursts of laughter among all ranks and
sorts of people. An English theatre is the very throne of pantomime; nor
do I believe that the gallery and boxes of Drury Lane or Covent Garden
filled on the proper occasions with holiday folks (big or little) yield
the palm for undisguised, tumultuous, inextinguishable laughter to any
spot in Europe. I do not speak of the refinement of the mirth (this is
no fastidious speculation) but of its cordiality, on the return of these
long looked-for and licensed periods; and I may add here, by way of
illustration, that the English common people are a sort of grown
children, spoiled and sulky perhaps, but full of glee and merriment,
when their attention is drawn off by some sudden and striking object.
The May-pole is almost gone out of fashion among us: but May-day,
besides its flowering hawthorns and its pearly dews, has still its
boasted exhibition of painted chimney-sweepers and their
Jack-o’-the-Green, whose tawdry finery, bedizened faces, unwonted
gestures, and short-lived pleasures call forth good-humoured smiles and
looks of sympathy in the spectators. There is no place where trap-ball,
fives, prison-base, foot-ball, quoits, bowls are better understood or
more successfully practised; and the very names of a cricket bat and
ball make English fingers tingle. What happy days must ‘Long Robinson’
have passed in getting ready his wickets and mending his bats, who when
two of the fingers of his right hand were struck off by the violence of
a ball, had a screw fastened to it to hold the bat, and with the other
hand still sent the ball thundering against the boards that bounded _Old
Lord’s cricket-ground_! What delightful hours must have been his in
looking forward to the matches that were to come, in recounting the
feats he had performed in those that were past! I have myself whiled
away whole mornings in seeing him strike the ball (like a countryman
mowing with a scythe) to the farthest extremity of the smooth, level,
sun-burnt ground, and with long, awkward strides count the notches that
made victory sure! Then again, cudgel-playing, quarter-staff, bull and
badger-baiting, cock-fighting are almost the peculiar diversions of this
island, and often objected to us as barbarous and cruel; horse-racing is
the delight and the ruin of numbers; and the noble science of boxing is
all our own. Foreigners can scarcely understand how we can squeeze
pleasure out of this pastime; the luxury of hard blows given or
received; the joy of the ring; nor the perseverance of the
combatants.[4] The English also excel, or are not excelled in wiring a
hare, in stalking a deer, in shooting, fishing, and hunting. England to
this day boasts her Robin Hood and his merry men, that stout archer and
outlaw, and patron saint of the sporting-calendar. What a cheerful sound
is that of the hunters, issuing from the autumnal wood and sweeping over
hill and dale!
——‘A cry more tuneable
Was never halloo’d to by hound or horn.’
What sparkling richness in the scarlet coats of the riders, what a
glittering confusion in the pack, what spirit in the horses, what
eagerness in the followers on foot, as they disperse over the plain, or
force their way over hedge and ditch! Surely, the coloured prints and
pictures of these, hung up in gentlemen’s halls and village alehouses,
however humble as works of art, have more life and health and spirit in
them, and mark the pith and nerve of the national character more
creditably than the mawkish, sentimental, affected designs of Theseus
and Pirithous, and Æneas and Dido, pasted on foreign _salons à manger_,
and the interior of country-houses. If our tastes are not epic, nor our
pretensions lofty, they are simple and our own; and we may possibly
enjoy our native rural sports, and the rude remembrances of them, with
the truer relish on this account, that they are suited to us and we to
them. The English nation, too, are naturally ‘brothers of the angle.’
This pursuit implies just that mixture of patience and pastime, of
vacancy and thoughtfulness, of idleness and business, of pleasure and of
pain, which is suited to the genius of an Englishman, and as I suspect,
of no one else in the same degree. He is eminently gifted to stand in
the situation assigned by Dr. Johnson to the angler, ‘at one end of a
rod with a worm at the other.’ I should suppose no language can show
such a book as an often-mentioned one, ‘Walton’s Complete Angler,’—so
full of _naïveté_, of unaffected sprightliness, of busy trifling, of
dainty songs, of refreshing brooks, of shady arbours, of happy thoughts
and of the herb called _Heart’s Ease_! Some persons can see neither the
wit nor wisdom of this genuine volume, as if a book as well as a man
might not have a personal character belonging to it, amiable, venerable
from the spirit of joy and thorough goodness it manifests, independently
of acute remarks or scientific discoveries: others object to the cruelty
of Walton’s theory and practice of trout-fishing—for my part, I should
as soon charge an infant with cruelty for killing a fly, and I feel the
same sort of pleasure in reading his book as I should have done in the
company of this happy, child-like old man, watching his ruddy cheek, his
laughing eye, the kindness of his heart, and the dexterity of his hand
in seizing his finny prey! It must be confessed, there is often an odd
sort of _materiality_ in English sports and recreations. I have known
several persons, whose existence consisted wholly in manual exercises,
and all whose enjoyments lay at their finger-ends. Their greatest
happiness was in cutting a stick, in mending a cabbage-net, in digging a
hole in the ground, in hitting a mark, turning a lathe, or in something
else of the same kind, at which they had a certain _knack_. Well is it
when we can amuse ourselves with such trifles and without injury to
others! This class of character, which the Spectator has immortalised in
the person of Will Wimble, is still common among younger brothers and
gentlemen of retired incomes in town or country. The _Cockney_ character
is of our English growth, as this intimates a feverish fidgety delight
in rural sights and sounds, and a longing wish, after the turmoil and
confinement of a city-life, to transport one’s-self to the freedom and
breathing sweetness of a country retreat. London is half suburbs. The
suburbs of Paris are a desert; and you see nothing but crazy wind-mills,
stone-walls, and a few straggling visitants in spots where in England
you would find a thousand villas, a thousand terraces crowned with their
own delights, or be stunned with the noise of bowling-greens and
tea-gardens, or stifled with the fumes of tobacco mingling with fragrant
shrubs, or the clouds of dust raised by half the population of the
metropolis panting and toiling in search of a mouthful of fresh air. The
Parisian is, perhaps, as well (or better) contented with himself
wherever he is, stewed in his shop or his garret; the Londoner is
miserable in these circumstances, and glad to escape from them.[5] Let
no one object to the gloomy appearance of a London Sunday, compared with
a Parisian one. It is a part of our politics and our religion: we would
not have James the First’s ‘Book of Sports’ thrust down our throats: and
besides, it is a part of our character to do one thing at a time, and
not to be dancing a jig and on our knees in the same breath. It is true
the Englishman spends his Sunday evening at the alehouse—
——‘And e`en on Sunday
Drank with Kirton Jean till Monday’—
but he only unbends and waxes mellow by degrees, and sits soaking till
he can neither sit, stand, nor go: it is his vice, and a beastly one it
is, but not a proof of any inherent distaste to mirth or
good-fellowship. Neither can foreigners throw the carnival in our teeth
with any effect: those who have seen it (at Florence, for example), will
say that it is duller than any thing in England. Our Bartholomew-Fair is
Queen Mab herself to it! What can be duller than a parcel of masks
moving about the streets and looking as grave and monotonous as possible
from day to day, and with the same lifeless formality in their limbs and
gestures as in their features? One might as well expect variety and
spirit in a procession of wax-work. We must be hard run indeed, when we
have recourse to a pasteboard proxy to set off our mirth: a mask may be
a very good cover for licentiousness (though of that I saw no signs),
but it is a very bad exponent of wit and humour. I should suppose there
is more drollery and unction in the caricatures in Gilray’s shop-window,
than in all the masks in Italy, without exception.[6]
The humour of English writing and description has often been wondered
at; and it flows from the same source as the merry _traits_ of our
character. A degree of barbarism and rusticity seems necessary to the
perfection of humour. The droll and laughable depend on peculiarity and
incongruity of character. But with the progress of refinement, the
peculiarities of individuals and of classes wear out or lose their
sharp, abrupt edges; nay, a certain slowness and dulness of
understanding is required to be struck with odd and unaccountable
appearances, for which a greater facility of apprehension can sooner
assign an explanation that breaks the force of the seeming absurdity,
and to which a wider scope of imagination is more easily reconciled.
Clowns and country people are more amused, are more disposed to laugh
and make sport of the dress of strangers, because from their ignorance
the surprise is greater, and they cannot conceive any thing to be
natural or proper to which they are unused. Without a given portion of
hardness and repulsiveness of feeling the ludicrous cannot well exist.
Wonder, and curiosity, the attributes of inexperience, enter greatly
into its composition. Now it appears to me that the English are (or
were) just at that mean point between intelligence and obtuseness, which
must produce the most abundant and happiest crop of humour. Absurdity
and singularity glide over the French mind without jarring or jostling
with it; or they evaporate in levity:—with the Italians they are lost in
indolence or pleasure. The ludicrous takes hold of the English
imagination, and clings to it with all its ramifications. We resent any
difference or peculiarity of appearance at first, and yet, having not
much malice at our hearts, we are glad to turn it into a jest—we are
liable to be offended, and as willing to be pleased—struck with oddity
from not knowing what to make of it, we wonder and burst out a laughing
at the eccentricity of others, while we follow our own bent from
wilfulness or simplicity, and thus afford them, in our turn, matter for
the indulgence of the comic vein. It is possible that a greater
refinement of manners may give birth to finer distinctions of satire and
a nicer tact for the ridiculous: but our insular situation and character
are, I should say, most likely to foster, as they have in fact fostered,
the greatest quantity of natural and striking humour, in spite of our
plodding tenaciousness, and want both of gaiety and quickness of
perception. A set of raw recruits with their awkward movements and
unbending joints are laughable enough: but they cease to be so, when
they have once been drilled into discipline and uniformity. So it is
with nations that lose their angular points and grotesque qualities with
education and intercourse: but it is in a mixed state of manners that
comic humour chiefly flourishes, for, in order that the drollery may not
be lost, we must have spectators of the passing scene who are able to
appreciate and embody its most remarkable features,—wits as well as
_butts_ for ridicule. I shall mention two names in this department,
which may serve to redeem the national character from absolute dulness
and solemn pretence,—Fielding and Hogarth. These were thorough specimens
of true English humour; yet both were grave men. In reality, too high a
pitch of animal spirits runs away with the imagination, instead of
helping it to reach the goal; is inclined to take the jest for granted
when it ought to work it out with patient and marked touches, and it
ends in vapid flippancy and impertinence. Among our neighbours on the
Continent, Moliere and Rabelais carried the freedom of wit and humour to
an almost incredible height; but they rather belonged to the old French
school, and even approach and exceed the English licence and
extravagance of conception. I do not consider Congreve’s wit (though it
belongs to us) as coming under the article here spoken of; for his
genius is any thing but _merry_. Lord Byron was in the habit of railing
at the spirit of our good old comedy, and of abusing Shakspeare’s Clowns
and Fools, which he said the refinement of the French and Italian stage
would not endure, and which only our grossness and puerile taste could
tolerate. In this I agree with him; and it is _pat_ to my purpose. I
flatter myself that we are almost the only people left who understand
and relish _nonsense_. We are not ‘merry and wise,’ but indulge our
mirth to excess and folly. When we trifle, we trifle in good earnest;
and having once relaxed our hold of the helm, drift idly down the
stream, and delighted with the change are tossed about ‘by every little
breath’ of whim or caprice,
‘That under Heaven is blown.’
All we then want is to proclaim a truce with reason, and to be pleased
with as little expense of thought or pretension to wisdom as possible.
This licensed fooling is carried to its very utmost length in
Shakspeare, and in some other of our elder dramatists, without, perhaps,
sufficient warrant or the same excuse. Nothing can justify this extreme
relaxation but extreme tension. Shakspeare’s trifling does indeed tread
upon the very borders of vacancy: his meaning often hangs by the very
slenderest threads. For this he might be blamed if it did not take away
our breath to follow his eagle flights, or if he did not at other times
make the cordage of our hearts crack. After our heads ache with
thinking, it is fair to play the fool. The clowns were as proper an
appendage to the gravity of our antique literature, as fools and dwarfs
were to the stately dignity of courts and noble houses in former days.
Of all people, they have the best right to claim a total exemption from
rules and rigid formality, who, when they have any thing of importance
to do, set about it with the greatest earnestness and perseverance, and
are generally grave and sober to a proverb.[7] Poor Swift, who wrote
more idle or _nonsense_ verses than any man, was the severest of
moralists; and his feelings and observations morbidly acute. Did not
Lord Byron himself follow up his Childe Harold with his Don Juan?—not
that I insist on what he did as an illustration of the English
character. He was one of the English Nobility, not one of the English
People; and his occasional ease and familiarity were in my mind equally
constrained and affected, whether in relation to the pretensions of his
rank or the efforts of his genius.
They ask you in France, how you pass your time in England without
amusements; and can with difficulty believe that there are theatres in
London, still less that they are larger and handsomer than those in
Paris. That we should have comic actors, ‘they own, surprises them.’
They judge of the English character in the lump as one great
jolter-head, containing all the stupidity of the country, as the large
ball at the top of the Dispensary in Warwick-lane, from its resemblance
to a gilded pill, has been made to represent the whole pharmacopœia and
professional quackery of the kingdom. They have no more notion, for
instance, how we should have such an actor as Liston on our stage, than
if we were to tell them we have parts performed by a sea-otter; nor if
they were to see him, would they be much the wiser, or know what to
think of his unaccountable twitches of countenance or nondescript
gestures, of his teeth chattering in his head, his eyes that seem
dropping from their sockets, his nose that is tickled by a jest as by a
feather and shining with self-complacency as if oiled, his ignorant
conceit, his gaping stupor, his lumpish vivacity in Lubin Log or Tony
Lumpkin; for as our rivals do not wind up the machine to such a
determined intensity of purpose, neither have they any idea of its
running down to such degrees of imbecility and folly, or coming to an
absolute _stand still_ and lack of meaning, nor can they enter into or
be amused with the contrast. No people ever laugh heartily who can give
a reason for their doing so: and I believe the English in general are
not yet in this predicament. They are not metaphysical, but very much in
a state of nature; and this is one main ground why I give them credit
for being merry, notwithstanding appearances. Their mirth is not the
mirth of vice or desperation, but of innocence and a native wildness.
They do not cavil or boggle at niceties, and not merely come to the edge
of a joke, but break their necks over it with a wanton ‘Here goes,’
where others make a _pirouette_ and stand upon decorum. The French
cannot, however, be persuaded of the excellence of our comic stage, nor
of the store we set by it. When they ask what amusements we have, it is
plain they can never have heard of Mrs. Jordan, nor King, nor Bannister,
nor Suett, nor Munden, nor Lewis, nor little Simmons, nor Dodd, and
Parsons, and Emery, and Miss Pope, and Miss Farren, and all those who
even in my time have gladdened a nation and ‘made life’s business like a
summer’s dream.’ Can I think of them, and of their names that glittered
in the playbills when I was young, exciting all the flutter of hope and
expectation of seeing them in their favourite parts of Nell, or Little
Pickle, or Touchstone, or Sir Peter Teazle, or Lenitive in the Prize, or
Lingo, or Crabtree, or Nipperkin, or old Dornton, or Ranger, or the
Copper Captain, or Lord Sands, or Filch, or Moses, or Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, or Acres, or Elbow, or Hodge, or Flora, or the Duenna, or
Lady Teazle, or Lady Grace, or of the gaiety that sparkled in all eyes,
and the delight that overflowed all hearts, as they glanced before us in
these parts,
‘Throwing a gaudy shadow upon life,’—
and not feel my heart yearn within me, or couple the thoughts of England
and the spleen together? Our cloud has at least its rainbow tints; ours
is not one long polar night of cold and dulness, but we have the
gleaming lights of fancy to amuse us, the household fires of truth and
genius to warm us. We can go to a play and see Liston; or stay at home
and read Roderick Random; or have Hogarth’s prints of _Marriage à la
Mode_ hanging round our room. ‘Tut! there’s livers even in England,’ as
well as ‘out of it.’ We are not quite the _forlorn hope_ of humanity,
the last of nations. The French look at us across the Channel, and
seeing nothing but water and a cloudy mist, think that this is England.
——‘What’s our Britain
In the world’s volume? In a great pool a swan’s nest.’
If they have any farther idea of us, it is of George III. and our Jack
tars, the House of Lords and House of Commons, and this is no great
addition to us. To go beyond this, to talk of arts and elegances as
having taken up their abode here, or to say that Mrs. Abington was equal
to Mademoiselle Mars, and that we at one time got up the ‘School for
Scandal,’ as they do the ‘Misanthrope,’ is to persuade them that Iceland
is a pleasant summer-retreat, or to recommend the whale-fishery as a
classical amusement. The French are the _cockneys_ of Europe, and have
no idea how any one can exist out of Paris, or be alive without
incessant grimace and _jabber_. Yet what imports it? What! though the
joyous train I have just enumerated were, perhaps, never heard of in the
precincts of the Palais-Royal, is it not enough that they gave pleasure
where they were, to those who saw and heard them? Must our laugh, to be
sincere, have its echo on the other side of the water? Had not the
French their favourites and their enjoyments at the time, that we knew
nothing of? Why then should we not have ours (and boast of them too)
without their leave? A monopoly of self-conceit is not a monopoly of all
other advantages. The English, when they go abroad, do not take away the
prejudice against them by their looks. We seem duller and sadder than we
are. As I write this, I am sitting in the open air in a beautiful
valley, near Vevey: Clarens is on my left, the Dent de Jamant is behind
me, the rocks of Meillerie opposite: under my feet is a green bank,
enamelled with white and purple flowers, in which a dew-drop here and
there still glitters with pearly light—
‘And gaudy butterflies flutter around.’
Intent upon the scene and upon the thoughts that stir within me, I
conjure up the cheerful passages of my life, and a crowd of happy images
appear before me. No one would see it in my looks—my eyes grow dull and
fixed, and I seem rooted to the spot, as all this phantasmagoria passes
in review before me, glancing a reflex lustre on the face of the world
and nature. But the traces of pleasure, in my case, sink into an
absorbent ground of thoughtful melancholy, and require to be brought out
by time and circumstances, or (as the critics tell you) by the _varnish_
of style!
The _comfort_, on which the English lay so much stress, is of the same
character, and arises from the same source as their mirth. Both exist by
contrast and a sort of contradiction. The English are certainly the most
uncomfortable of all people in themselves, and therefore it is that they
stand in need of every kind of comfort and accommodation. The least
thing puts them out of their way, and therefore every thing must be in
its place. They are mightily offended at disagreeable tastes and smells,
and therefore they exact the utmost neatness and nicety. They are
sensible of heat and cold, and therefore they cannot exist, unless every
thing is snug and warm, or else open and airy, where they are. They must
have ‘all appliances and means to boot.’ They are afraid of interruption
and intrusion, and therefore they shut themselves up in in-door
enjoyments and by their own firesides. It is not that they require
luxuries (for that implies a high degree of epicurean indulgence and
gratification), but they cannot do without _their comforts_; that is,
whatever tends to supply their physical wants, and ward off physical
pain and annoyance. As they have not a fund of animal spirits and
enjoyments in themselves, they cling to external objects for support,
and derive solid satisfaction from the ideas of order, cleanliness,
plenty, property, and domestic quiet, as they seek for diversion from
odd accidents and grotesque surprises, and have the highest possible
relish not of voluptuous softness, but of hard knocks and dry blows, as
one means of ascertaining their personal identity.
OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_January, 1826._
‘Come like shadows—so depart.’
B—— it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence
of Guy Faux, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would
undertake neither, I suppose I must do both—a task for which he would
have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of
his pen—
‘Never so sure our rapture to create
As when it touch’d the brink of all we hate.’
Compared with him I shall, I fear, make but a common-place piece of
business of it; but I should be loth the idea was entirely lost, and
besides I may avail myself of some hints of his in the progress of it. I
am sometimes, I suspect, a better reporter of the ideas of other people
than expounder of my own. I pursue the one too far into paradox or
mysticism; the others I am not bound to follow farther than I like, or
than seems fair and reasonable.
On the question being started, A—— said, ‘I suppose the two first
persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in
English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?’ In this A——, as
usual, reckoned without his host. Every one burst out a laughing at the
expression of B——’s face, in which impatience was restrained by
courtesy. ‘Yes, the greatest names,’ he stammered out hastily, ‘but they
were not persons—not persons.’—‘Not persons?’ said A——, looking wise and
foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. ‘That
is,’ rejoined B——, ‘not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac
Newton, you mean the Essay on the Human Understanding, and the
_Principia_, which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is
nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see any
one _bodily_ for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the
individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are
curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller’s
portraits of them. But who could paint Shakspeare?’—‘Ay,’ retorted A——,
‘there it is; then I suppose you would prefer seeing him and Milton
instead?’—‘No,’ said B——, ‘neither. I have seen so much of Shakspeare on
the stage and on book-stalls, in frontispieces and on mantle-pieces,
that I am quite tired of the everlasting repetition: and as to Milton’s
face, the impressions that have come down to us of it I do not like; it
is too starched and puritanical; and I should be afraid of losing some
of the manna of his poetry in the leaven of his countenance and the
precisian’s band and gown.’—‘I shall guess no more,’ said A——. ‘Who is
it, then, you would like to see “in his habit as he lived,” if you had
your choice of the whole range of English literature?’ B—— then named
Sir Thomas Brown and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as
the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter
on the floor of his apartment in their nightgown and slippers, and to
exchange friendly greeting with them. At this A—— laughed outright, and
conceived B—— was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example,
he thought there might be something in it, and waited for an explanation
in a state of whimsical suspense. B—— then (as well as I can remember a
conversation that passed twenty years ago—how time slips!) went on as
follows. ‘The reason why I pitch upon these two authors is, that their
writings are riddles, and they themselves the most mysterious of
personages. They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark
hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them the meaning of
what no mortal but themselves, I should suppose, can fathom. There is
Dr. Johnson, I have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty about him: he
and Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what
passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently
explicit: my friends, whose repose I should be tempted to disturb, (were
it in my power) are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable.
“And call up him who left half-told
The story of Cambuscan bold.”
‘When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition (the
_Urn-burial_) I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom
of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately
labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the
spirit of the author to lead me through it. Besides, who would not be
curious to see the lineaments of a man who, having himself been twice
married, wished that mankind were propagated like trees! As to Fulke
Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own “Prologues spoken by the
ghost of an old king of Ormus,” a truly formidable and inviting
personage: his style is apocalyptical, cabalistical, a knot worthy of
such an apparition to untie; and for the unravelling a passage or two, I
would stand the brunt of an encounter with so portentous a
commentator!’—‘I am afraid in that case,’ said A——, ‘that if the mystery
were once cleared up, the merit might be lost;‘—and turning to me,
whispered a friendly apprehension, that while B—— continued to admire
these old crabbed authors, he would never become a popular writer. Dr.
Donne was mentioned as a writer of the same period, with a very
interesting countenance, whose history was singular, and whose meaning
was often quite as _uncomeatable_, without a personal citation from the
dead, as that of any of his contemporaries. The volume was produced; and
while some one was expatiating on the exquisite simplicity and beauty of
the portrait prefixed to the old edition, A—— got hold of the poetry,
and exclaiming ‘What have we here?’ read the following:—
‘Here lies a She-Sun and a He-Moon there,
She gives the best light to his sphere,
Or each is both and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe.’
There was no resisting this, till B——, seizing the volume, turned to the
beautiful ‘Lines to his Mistress,’ dissuading her from accompanying him
abroad, and read them with suffused features and a faltering tongue.
‘By our first strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which thereof did ensue,
By our long starving hopes, by that remorse
Which my words’ masculine persuasive force
Begot in thee, and by the memory
Of hurts, which spies and rivals threaten’d me,
I calmly beg. But by thy father’s wrath,
By all pains which want and divorcement hath,
I conjure thee; and all the oaths which I
And thou have sworn to seal joint constancy
Here I unswear, and overswear them thus,
Thou shalt not love by ways so dangerous.
Temper, oh fair Love! love’s impetuous rage,
Be my true mistress still, not my feign’d Page;
I’ll go, and, by thy kind leave, leave behind
Thee, only worthy to nurse in my mind.
Thirst to come back; oh, if thou die before,
My soul from other lands to thee shall soar.
Thy (else Almighty) beauty cannot move
Rage from the seas, nor thy love teach them love,
Nor tame wild Boreas’ harshness; thou hast read
How roughly he in pieces shiver’d
Fair Orithea, whom he swore he lov’d.
Fall ill or good, ’tis madness to have prov’d
Dangers unurg’d: Feed on this flattery,
That absent lovers one with th’ other be.
Dissemble nothing, not a boy; nor change
Thy body’s habit, nor mind; be not strange
To thyself only. All will spy in thy face
A blushing, womanly, discovering grace.
Richly cloth’d apes are called apes, and as soon
Eclips’d as bright we call the moon the moon.
Men of France, changeable cameleons,
Spittles of diseases, shops of fashions,
Love’s fuellers, and the rightest company
Of players, which upon the world’s stage be,
Will quickly know thee.... O stay here! for thee
England is only a worthy gallery,
To walk in expectation; till from thence
Our greatest King call thee to his presence.
When I am gone, dream me some happiness,
Nor let thy looks our long hid love confess,
Nor praise, nor dispraise me; nor bless, nor curse
Openly love’s force, nor in bed fright thy nurse
With midnight startings, crying out, Oh, oh,
Nurse, oh, my love is slain, I saw him go
O’er the white Alps alone; I saw him, I,
Assail’d, fight, taken, stabb’d, bleed, fall, and die.
Augur me better chance, except dread Jove
Think it enough for me to have had thy love.’
Some one then inquired of B—— if we could not see from the window the
Temple-walk in which Chaucer used to take his exercise; and on his name
being put to the vote, I was pleased to find that there was a general
sensation in his favour in all but A——, who said something about the
ruggedness of the metre, and even objected to the quaintness of the
orthography. I was vexed at this superficial gloss, pertinaciously
reducing every thing to its own trite level, and asked ‘if he did not
think it would be worth while to scan the eye that had first greeted the
Muse in that dim twilight and early dawn of English literature; to see
the head, round which the visions of fancy must have played like gleams
of inspiration or a sudden glory; to watch those lips that “lisped in
numbers, for the numbers came”—as by a miracle, or as if the dumb should
speak? Nor was it alone that he had been the first to tune his native
tongue (however imperfectly to modern ears); but he was himself a noble,
manly character, standing before his age and striving to advance it; a
pleasant humourist withal, who has not only handed down to us the living
manners of his time, but had, no doubt, store of curious and quaint
devices, and would make as hearty a companion as Mine Host of Tabard.
His interview with Petrarch is fraught with interest. Yet I would rather
have seen Chaucer in company with the author of the Decameron, and have
heard them exchange their best stories together, the Squire’s Tale
against the Story of the Falcon, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue against the
Adventures of Friar Albert. How fine to see the high mysterious brow
which learning then wore, relieved by the gay, familiar tone of men of
the world, and by the courtesies of genius. Surely, the thoughts and
feelings which passed through the minds of these great revivers of
learning, these Cadmuses who sowed the teeth of letters, must have
stamped an expression on their features, as different from the moderns
as their books, and well worth the perusal. Dante,’ I continued, ‘is as
interesting a person as his own Ugolino, one whose lineaments curiosity
would as eagerly devour in order to penetrate his spirit, and the only
one of the Italian poets I should care much to see. There is a fine
portrait of Ariosto by no less a hand than Titian’s; light, Moorish,
spirited, but not answering our idea. The same artist’s large colossal
profile of Peter Aretine is the only likeness of the kind that has the
effect of conversing with “the mighty dead,” and this is truly spectral,
ghastly, necromantic.’ B—— put it to me if I should like to see Spenser
as well as Chaucer; and I answered without hesitation, ‘No; for that his
beauties were ideal, visionary, not palpable or personal, and therefore
connected with less curiosity about the man. His poetry was the essence
of romance, a very halo round the bright orb of fancy; and the bringing
in the individual might dissolve the charm. No tones of voice could come
up to the mellifluous cadence of his verse; no form but of a winged
angel could vie with the airy shapes he has described. He was (to our
apprehensions) rather “a creature of the element, that lived in the
rainbow and played in the plighted clouds,” than an ordinary mortal. Or
if he did appear, I should wish it to be as a mere vision, like one of
his own pageants, and that he should pass by unquestioned like a dream
or sound—
——“_That_ was Arion crown’d:
So went he playing on the wat’ry plain!”’
Captain C. muttered something about Columbus, and M. C. hinted at the
Wandering Jew; but the last was set aside as spurious, and the first
made over to the New World.
‘I should like,’ said Miss D——, ‘to have seen Pope talking with Patty
Blount; and I _have_ seen Goldsmith.’ Every one turned round to look at
Miss D——, as if by so doing they too could get a sight of Goldsmith.
‘Where,’ asked a harsh croaking voice, ‘was Dr. Johnson in the years
1745–6? He did not write any thing that we know of, nor is there any
account of him in Boswell during those two years. Was he in Scotland
with the Pretender? He seems to have passed through the scenes in the
Highlands in company with Boswell many years after “with lack-lustre
eye,” yet as if they were familiar to him, or associated in his mind
with interests that he durst not explain. If so, it would be an
additional reason for my liking him; and I would give something to have
seen him seated in the tent with the youthful Majesty of Britain, and
penning the Proclamation to all true subjects and adherents of the
legitimate Government.’
‘I thought,’ said A——, turning short round upon B——, ‘that you of the
Lake School did not like Pope?’—‘Not like Pope! My dear sir, you must be
under a mistake—I can read him over and over for ever!’—‘Why certainly,
the “Essay on Man” must be masterpiece.’—‘It may be so, but I seldom
look into it.’—‘Oh! then it’s his Satires you admire?’—‘No, not his
Satires, but his friendly Epistles and his compliments.’—‘Compliments! I
did not know he ever made any.’—‘The finest,’ said B——, ‘that were ever
paid by the wit of man. Each of them is worth an estate for life—nay, is
an immortality. There is that superb one to Lord Cornbury:
“Despise low joys, low gains;
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous, and be happy for your pains.”
‘Was there ever more artful insinuation of idolatrous praise? And then
that noble apotheosis of his friend Lord Mansfield (however little
deserved), when, speaking of the House of Lords, he adds—
“Conspicuous scene! another yet is nigh,
(More silent far) where kings and poets lie;
Where Murray (long enough his country’s pride)
Shall be no more than Tully or than Hyde!”
‘And with what a fine turn of indignant flattery he addresses Lord
Bolingbroke—
“Why rail they then, if but one wreath of mine,
Oh! all accomplish’d St. John, deck thy shrine?”
‘Or turn,’ continued B——, with a slight hectic on his cheek and his eye
glistening, ‘to his list of early friends:
“But why then publish? Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write;
Well-natured Garth inflamed with early praise,
And Congreve loved and Swift endured my lays:
The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read,
Ev’n mitred Rochester would nod the head;
And St. John’s self (great Dryden’s friend before)
Received with open arms one poet more.
Happy my studies, if by these approved!
Happier their author, if by these beloved!
From these the world will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks.”’
Here his voice totally failed him, and throwing down the book, he said,
‘Do you think I would not wish to have been friends with such a man as
this?’
‘What say you to Dryden?’—‘He rather made a show of himself, and
courted popularity in that lowest temple of Fame, a coffee-house, so
as in some measure to vulgarize one’s idea of him. Pope, on the
contrary, reached the very _beau-ideal_ of what a poet’s life should
be; and his fame while living seemed to be an emanation from that
which was to circle his name after death. He was so far enviable (and
one would feel proud to have witnessed the rare spectacle in him) that
he was almost the only poet and man of genius who met with his reward
on this side of the tomb, who realized in friends, fortune, the esteem
of the world, the most sanguine hopes of a youthful ambition, and who
found that sort of patronage from the great during his lifetime which
they would be thought anxious to bestow upon him after his death. Read
Gay’s verses to him on his supposed return from Greece, after his
translation of Homer was finished, and say if you would not gladly
join the bright procession that welcomed him home, or see it once more
land at Whitehall-stairs.’—‘Still,’ said Miss D——, ‘I would rather
have seen him talking with Patty Blount, or riding by in a
coronet-coach with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu!’
E——, who was deep in a game of piquet at the other end of the room,
whispered to M. C. to ask if Junius would not be a fit person to invoke
from the dead. ‘Yes,’ said B——, ‘provided he would agree to lay aside
his mask.’
We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding was mentioned as
a candidate: only one, however, seconded the proposition.
‘Richardson?’—‘By all means, but only to look at him through the
glass-door of his back-shop, hard at work upon one of his novels (the
most extraordinary contrast that ever was presented between an author
and his works), but not to let him come behind his counter lest he
should want you to turn customer, nor to go upstairs with him, lest he
should offer to read the first manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison,
which was originally written in eight and twenty volumes octavo, or get
out the letters of his female correspondents, to prove that Joseph
Andrews was low.’
There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any one
expressed the least desire to see—Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank,
rough, pimply face, and wily policy;—and one enthusiast, John Bunyan,
the immortal author of the Pilgrim’s Progress. It seemed that if he came
into the room, dreams would follow him, and that each person would nod
under his golden cloud, ‘nigh-sphered in Heaven,’ a canopy as strange
and stately as any in Homer.
Of all persons near our own time, Garrick’s name was received with the
greatest enthusiasm, who was proposed by J. F——. He presently superseded
both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on
condition that he should act in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the
farce, Lear and Wildair and Abel Drugger. What a _sight for sore eyes_
that would be! Who would not part with a year’s income at least, almost
with a year of his natural life, to be present at it? Besides, as he
could not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory things, what a
troop he must bring with him—the silver-tongued Barry, and Quin, and
Shuter and Weston, and Mrs. Clive and Mrs. Pritchard, of whom I have
heard my father speak as so great a favourite when he was young! This
would indeed be a revival of the dead, the restoring of art; and so much
the more desirable, as such is the lurking scepticism mingled with our
overstrained admiration of past excellence, that though we have the
speeches of Burke, the portraits of Reynolds, the writings of Goldsmith,
and the conversation of Johnson, to show what people could do at that
period, and to confirm the universal testimony to the merits of Garrick;
yet, as it was before our time, we have our misgivings, as if he was
probably after all little better than a Bartlemy-fair actor, dressed out
to play Macbeth in a scarlet coat and laced cocked-hat. For one, I
should like to have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears. Certainly,
by all accounts, if any one was ever moved by the true histrionic
_æstus_, it was Garrick. When he followed the Ghost in Hamlet, he did
not drop the sword, as most actors do behind the scenes, but kept the
point raised the whole way round, so fully was he possessed with the
idea, or so anxious not to lose sight of his part for a moment. Once at
a splendid dinner-party at Lord ——’s, they suddenly missed Garrick, and
could not imagine what was become of him, till they were drawn to the
window by the convulsive screams and peals of laughter of a young negro
boy, who was rolling on the ground in an ecstasy of delight to see
Garrick mimicking a turkey-cock in the court-yard, with his coat-tail
stuck out behind, and in a seeming flutter of feathered rage and pride.
Of our party only two persons present had seen the British Roscius; and
they seemed as willing as the rest to renew their acquaintance with
their old favourite.
We were interrupted in the hey-day and mid-career of this fanciful
speculation, by a grumbler in a corner, who declared it was a shame to
make all this rout about a mere player and farce-writer, to the neglect
and exclusion of the fine old dramatists, the contemporaries and rivals
of Shakspeare. B—— said he had anticipated this objection when he had
named the author of Mustapha and Alaham; and out of caprice insisted
upon keeping him to represent the set, in preference to the wild
hair-brained enthusiast Kit Marlowe; to the sexton of St. Ann’s,
Webster, with his melancholy yew-trees and death’s-heads; to Deckar, who
was but a garrulous proser; to the voluminous Heywood; and even to
Beaumont and Fletcher, whom we might offend by complimenting the wrong
author on their joint productions. Lord Brook, on the contrary, stood
quite by himself, or in Cowley’s words, was ‘a vast species alone.’ Some
one hinted at the circumstance of his being a lord, which rather
startled B——, but he said a _ghost_ would perhaps dispense with strict
etiquette, on being regularly addressed by his title. Ben Jonson divided
our suffrages pretty equally. Some were afraid he would begin to traduce
Shakspeare, who was not present to defend himself. ‘If he grows
disagreeable,’ it was whispered aloud, ‘there is G—— can match him.’ At
length, his romantic visit to Drummond of Hawthornden was mentioned, and
turned the scale in his favour.
B—— inquired if there was any one that was hanged that I would choose to
mention? And I answered, Eugene Aram.[8] The name of the ‘Admirable
Crichton’ was suddenly started as a splendid example of _waste_ talents,
so different from the generality of his countrymen. This choice was
mightily approved by a North-Briton present, who declared himself
descended from that prodigy of learning and accomplishment, and said he
had family-plate in his possession as vouchers for the fact, with the
initials A. C.—_Admirable Crichton_! H—— laughed or rather roared as
heartily at this as I should think he has done for many years.
The last-named Mitre-courtier[9] then wished to know whether there were
any metaphysicians to whom one might be tempted to apply the wizard
spell? I replied, there were only six in modern times deserving the
name—Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, Hartley, Hume, Leibnitz; and perhaps
Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusets man.[10] As to the French, who talked
fluently of having _created_ this science, there was not a title in any
of their writings, that was not to be found literally in the authors I
had mentioned. [Horne Tooke, who might have a claim to come in under the
head of Grammar, was still living.] None of these names seemed to excite
much interest, and I did not plead for the re-appearance of those who
might be thought best fitted by the abstracted nature of their studies
for their present spiritual and disembodied state, and who, even while
on this living stage, were nearly divested of common flesh and blood. As
A—— with an uneasy fidgetty face was about to put some question about
Mr. Locke and Dugald Stewart, he was prevented by M. C. who observed,
‘If J—— was here, he would undoubtedly be for having up those profound
and redoubted scholiasts, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.’ I said this
might be fair enough in him who had read or fancied he had read the
original works, but I did not see how we could have any right to call up
these authors to give an account of themselves in person, till we had
looked into their writings.
By this time it should seem that some rumour of our whimsical
deliberation had got wind, and had disturbed the _irritabile genus_ in
their shadowy abodes, for we received messages from several candidates
that we had just been thinking of. Gray declined our invitation, though
he had not yet been asked: Gay offered to come and bring in his hand the
Duchess of Bolton, the original Polly: Steele and Addison left their
cards as Captain Sentry and Sir Roger de Coverley: Swift came in and sat
down without speaking a word, and quitted the room as abruptly: Otway
and Chatterton were seen lingering on the opposite side of the Styx, but
could not muster enough between them to pay Charon his fare: Thomson
fell asleep in the boat, and was rowed back again—and Burns sent a low
fellow, one John Barleycorn, an old companion of his who had conducted
him to the other world, to say that he had during his lifetime been
drawn out of his retirement as a show, only to be made an exciseman of,
and that he would rather remain where he was. He desired, however, to
shake hands by his representative—the hand, thus held out, was in a
burning fever, and shook prodigiously.
The room was hung round with several portraits of eminent painters.
While we were debating whether we should demand speech with these
masters of mute eloquence, whose features were so familiar to us, it
seemed that all at once they glided from their frames, and seated
themselves at some little distance from us. There was Leonardo with his
majestic beard and watchful eye, having a bust of Archimedes before him;
next him was Raphael’s graceful head turned round to the Fornarina; and
on his other side was Lucretia Borgia, with calm, golden locks; Michael
Angelo had placed the model of St. Peter’s on the table before him;
Corregio had an angel at his side; Titian was seated with his Mistress
between himself and Giorgioni; Guido was accompanied by his own Aurora,
who took a dice-box from him; Claude held a mirror in his hand; Rubens
patted a beautiful panther (led in by a satyr) on the head; Vandyke
appeared as his own Paris, and Rembrandt was hid under furs, gold chains
and jewels, which Sir Joshua eyed closely, holding his hand so as to
shade his forehead. Not a word was spoken; and as we rose to do them
homage, they still presented the same surface to the view. Not being
_bonâ-fide_ representations of living people, we got rid of the splendid
apparitions by signs and dumb show. As soon as they had melted into thin
air, there was a loud noise at the outer door, and we found it was
Giotto, Cimabue, and Ghirlandaio, who had been raised from the dead by
their earnest desire to see their illustrious successors—
‘Whose names on earth
In Fame’s eternal records live for aye!’
Finding them gone, they had no ambition to be seen after them, and
mournfully withdrew. ‘Egad!’ said B——, ‘those are the very fellows I
should like to have had some talk with, to know how they could see to
paint when all was dark around them?’
‘But shall we have nothing to say,’ interrogated G. J——, ‘to the Legend
of Good Women?’—‘Name, name, Mr. J——,’ cried H—— in a boisterous tone of
friendly exultation, ‘name as many as you please, without reserve or
fear of molestation!’ J—— was perplexed between so many amiable
recollections, that the name of the lady of his choice expired in a
pensive whiff of his pipe; and B—— impatiently declared for the Duchess
of Newcastle. Mrs. Hutchinson was no sooner mentioned, than she carried
the day from the Duchess. We were the less solicitous on this subject of
filling up the posthumous lists of Good Women, as there was already one
in the room as good, as sensible, and in all respects as exemplary, as
the best of them could be for their lives! ‘I should like vastly to have
seen Ninon de l’Enclos,’ said that incomparable person; and this
immediately put us in mind that we had neglected to pay honour due to
our friends on the other side of the Channel: Voltaire, the patriarch of
levity, and Rousseau, the father of sentiment, Montaigne and Rabelais
(great in wisdom and in wit), Moliere and that illustrious group that
are collected round him (in the print of that subject) to hear him read
his comedy of the Tartuffe at the house of Ninon; Racine, La Fontaine,
Rochefoucault, St. Evremont, &c.
‘There is one person,’ said a shrill, querulous voice, ‘I would rather
see than all these—Don Quixote!’
‘Come, come!’ said H——; ‘I thought we should have no heroes, real or
fabulous. What say you, Mr. B——? Are you for eking out your shadowy list
with such names as Alexander, Julius Cæsar, Tamerlane, or Ghengis
Khan?’—‘Excuse me,’ said B——, ‘on the subject of characters in active
life, plotters and disturbers of the world, I have a crotchet of my own,
which I beg leave to reserve.’—‘No, no! come, out with your
worthies!’—‘What do you think of Guy Faux and Judas Iscariot?’ H——
turned an eye upon him like a wild Indian, but cordial and full of
smothered glee. ‘Your most exquisite reason!’ was echoed on all sides;
and A—— thought that B—— had now fairly entangled himself. ‘Why, I
cannot but think,’ retorted he of the wistful countenance, ‘that Guy
Faux, that poor fluttering annual scare-crow of straw and rags, is an
ill-used gentleman. I would give something to see him sitting pale and
emaciated, surrounded by his matches and his barrels of gunpowder, and
expecting the moment that was to transport him to Paradise for his
heroic self-devotion; but if I say any more, there is that fellow G——
will make something of it. And as to Judas Iscariot, my reason is
different. I would fain see the face of him, who, having dipped his hand
in the same dish with the Son of Man, could afterwards betray him. I
have no conception of such a thing; nor have I ever seen any picture
(not even Leonardo’s very fine one) that gave me the least idea of
it.’—‘You have said enough, Mr. B——, to justify your choice.’
‘Oh! ever right, Menenius,—ever right!’
‘There is only one other person I can ever think of after this,’
continued H——; but without mentioning a name that once put on a
semblance of mortality. ‘If Shakspeare was to come into the room, we
should all rise up to meet him; but if that person was to come into it,
we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of his garment!’
As a lady present seemed now to get uneasy at the turn the conversation
had taken, we rose up to go. The morning broke with that dim, dubious
light by which Giotto, Cimabue, and Ghirlandaio must have seen to paint
their earliest works; and we parted to meet again and renew similar
topics at night, the next night, and the night after that, till that
night overspread Europe which saw no dawn. The same event, in truth,
broke up our little Congress that broke up the great one. But that was
to meet again: our deliberations have never been resumed.
ON THE CONVERSATION OF LORDS
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_April, 1826._
‘An infinite deal of nothing,’—SHAKSPEARE.
The conversation of Lords is very different from that of authors.
Mounted on horseback, they stick at nothing in the chace, and clear
every obstacle with flying leaps, while we poor devils have no chance of
keeping up with them with our clouten shoes and long hunting-poles. They
have all the benefit of education, society, confidence, they read books,
purchase pictures, breed horses, learn to ride, dance, and fence, look
after their estates, travel abroad:—authors have none of these
advantages, or inlets of knowledge, to assist them, except one, reading;
and this is still more impoverished and clouded by the painful exercise
of their own thoughts. The knowledge of the Great has a character of
wealth and property in it, like the stores of the rich merchant or
manufacturer, who lays his hands on all within his reach: the
understanding of the student is like the workshop of the mechanic, who
has nothing but what he himself creates. How difficult is the
production, how small the display in the one case compared to the other!
Most of Correggio’s designs are contained in one small room at Parma:
how different from the extent and variety of some hereditary and
princely collections!
The human mind has a trick (probably a very natural and consoling one)
of striking a balance between the favours of wisdom and of fortune, and
of making one thing a gratuitous and convenient foil to another. Whether
this is owing to envy or to a love of justice, I will not say: but
whichever it is owing to, I must own I do not think it well founded. A
scholar is without money: therefore (to make the odds even) we argue
(not very wisely) that a rich man must be without ideas. This does not
follow. ‘The wish is father to that thought;’ and the thought is a
spurious one. We might as well pretend, that because a man has the
advantage of us in height, he is not strong or in good health; or
because a woman is handsome, she is not at the same time young,
accomplished and well-bred. Our fastidious self-love or our rustic
prejudices may revolt at the accumulation of advantages in others; but
we must learn to submit to the mortifying truth, which every day’s
experience points out, with what grace we may. There were those who
grudged to Lord Byron the name of a poet because he was of noble birth;
as he himself could not endure the praises bestowed upon Wordsworth,
whom he considered as a clown. He carried this weakness so far, that he
even seemed to regard it as a piece of presumption in Shakspeare _to be
preferred before him_ as a dramatic author, and contended that Milton’s
writing an epic poem and the ‘Answer to Salmasius’ was entirely owing to
vanity—so little did he relish the superiority of the old blind
schoolmaster. So it is that one party would arrogate every advantage to
themselves, while those on the other side would detract from all in
their rivals that they do not themselves possess. Some will not have the
statue painted: others can see no beauty in the clay-model!
The man of rank and fortune, besides his chance for the common or (now
and then) an uncommon share of wit and understanding, has it in his
power to avail himself of every thing that is to be taught of art and
science; he has tutors and valets at his beck; he may master the dead
languages, he _must_ acquire the modern ones; he moves in the highest
circles, and may descend to the lowest; the paths of pleasure, of
ambition, of knowledge, are open to him; he may devote himself to a
particular study, or skim the cream of all; he may read books or men or
things, as he finds most convenient or agreeable; he is not forced to
confine his attention to some one dry uninteresting pursuit; he has a
single _hobby_, or half a dozen; he is not distracted by care, by
poverty and want of leisure; he has every opportunity and facility
afforded him for acquiring various accomplishments of body or mind, and
every encouragement, from confidence and success, for making an imposing
display of them; he may laugh with the gay, jest with the witty, argue
with the wise; he has been in courts, in colleges, and camps, is
familiar with playhouses and taverns, with the riding-house and the
dissecting-room, has been present at or taken part in the debates of
both Houses of Parliament, was in the O. P. row, and is deep in the
Fancy, understands the broadsword exercise, is a connoisseur in
regimentals, plays the whole game at whist, is a tolerable proficient at
backgammon, drives four in hand, skates, rows, swims, shoots; knows the
different sorts of game and modes of agriculture in the different
counties of England, the manufactures and commerce of the different
towns, the politics of Europe, the campaigns in Spain, has the Gazette,
the newspapers, and reviews at his fingers’ ends, has visited the finest
scenes of Nature and beheld the choicest works of Art, and is in society
where he is continually hearing or talking of all these things; and yet
we are surprised to find that a person so circumstanced and qualified
has any ideas to communicate or words to express himself, and is not, as
by patent and prescription he was bound to be, a mere well-dressed fop
of fashion or a booby lord! It would be less remarkable if a poor
author, who has none of this giddy range and scope of information, who
pores over the page till it fades from his sight, and refines upon his
style till the words stick in his throat, should be dull as a beetle and
mute as a fish, instead of spontaneously pouring out a volume of wit and
wisdom on every subject that can be started.
An author lives out of the world, or mixes chiefly with those of his own
class; which renders him pedantic and pragmatical, or gives him a
reserved, hesitating, and _interdicted_ manner. A lord or
gentleman-commoner goes into the world, and this imparts that fluency,
spirit, and freshness to his conversation, which arises from the
circulation of ideas and from the greater animation and excitement of
unrestrained intercourse. An author’s tongue is tied for want of
somebody to speak to: his ideas rust and become obscured, from not being
brought out in company and exposed to the gaze of instant admiration. A
lord has always some one at hand on whom he can ‘bestow his
tediousness,’ and grows voluble, copious, inexhaustible in consequence:
his wit is polished, and the flowers of his oratory expanded by his
smiling commerce with the world, like the figures in tapestry, that
after being thrust into a corner and folded up in closets, are displayed
on festival and gala-days. Again, the man of fashion and fortune reduces
many of those arts and mysteries to practice, of which the scholar gains
all his knowledge from books and vague description. Will not the rules
of architecture find a readier reception and sink deeper into the mind
of the proprietor of a noble mansion, or of him who means to build one,
than of the half-starved occupier of a garret? Will not the political
economist’s insight into Mr. Ricardo’s doctrine of Rent, or Mr.
Malthus’s theory of Population, be vastly quickened by the circumstance
of his possessing a large landed estate and having to pay enormous
poor-rates? And in general is it not self-evident that a man’s knowledge
of the true interests of the country will be enlarged just in proportion
to the _stake_ he has in it? A person may have read accounts of
different cities and the customs of different nations: but will this
give him the same accurate idea of the situation of celebrated places,
of the aspect and manners of the inhabitants, or the same lively impulse
and ardour and fund of striking particulars in expatiating upon them, as
if he had run over half the countries of Europe, for no other purpose
than to satisfy his own curiosity, and excite that of others on his
return? I many years ago looked into the Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Treatise
on Horsemanship’; all I remember of it is some quaint cuts of the Duke
and his riding-master introduced to illustrate the lessons. Had I myself
possessed a stud of Arabian coursers, with grooms and a master of the
horse to assist me in reducing these precepts to practice, they would
have made a stronger impression on my mind; and what interested myself
from vanity or habit, I could have made interesting to others. I am sure
I could have learnt to _ride the Great Horse_, and do twenty other
things, in the time I have employed in endeavouring to make something
out of nothing, or in conning the same problem fifty times over, as
monks count over their beads! I have occasionally in my life bought a
few prints, and hung them up in my room with great satisfaction; but is
it to be supposed possible, from this casual circumstance, that I should
compete in taste or in the knowledge of _virtù_ with a peer of the
realm, who has in his possession the costly designs, or a wealthy
commoner, who has spent half his fortune in learning to distinguish
copies from originals? ‘A question not to be asked!’ Nor is it likely
that the having dipped into the Memoirs of Count Grammont, or of Lady
Vane in Peregrine Pickle, should enable any one to sustain a
conversation on subjects of love and gallantry with the same ease,
grace, brilliancy, and spirit as the having been engaged in a hundred
adventures of one’s own, or heard the scandal and tittle-tattle of
fashionable life for the last thirty years canvassed a hundred times.
Books may be manufactured from other books by some dull, mechanical
process: it is conversation and the access to the best society that
alone fit us for society; or ‘the act and practic part of life must be
the mistress to our theorique,’ before we can hope to shine in mixed
company, or bend our previous knowledge to ordinary and familiar uses
out of that plaster-cast mould which is as brittle as it is formal!
There is another thing which tends to produce the same effect, viz. that
lords and gentlemen seldom trouble themselves about the knotty and
uninviting parts of a subject: they leave it to ‘the dregs of earth’ to
drain the cup or find the bottom. They are attracted by the frothy and
sparkling. If a question puzzles them, or is not likely to amuse others,
they leave it to its fate, or to those whose business it is to contend
with difficulty, and to pursue truth for its own sake. They string
together as many available, _off-hand_ topics as they can procure for
love or money; and aided by a good person or address, sport them with
very considerable effect at the next rout or party they go to. They do
not _bore_ you with pedantry, or tease you with sophistry. Their
conversation is not made up of _moot-points_ or _choke-pears_. They do
not willingly forego ‘the feast of reason or the flow of soul’ to grub
up some solitary truth or dig for hid treasure. They are amateurs, not
professors; the patrons, not the drudges of knowledge. An author loses
half his life, and _stultifies_ his faculties, in hopes to find out
something which perhaps neither he nor any one else can ever find out.
For this he neglects half a hundred acquirements, half a hundred
accomplishments. _Aut Cæsar aut nihil._ He is proud of the discovery or
of the fond pursuit of one truth—a lord is vain of a thousand
ostentatious common-places. If the latter ever devotes himself to some
crabbed study, or sets about finding out the longitude, he is then to be
looked upon as a humorist if he fails—a genius if he succeeds—and no
longer belongs to the class I have been speaking of.
Perhaps a multiplicity of attainments and pursuits is not very
favourable to their selectness; as a local and personal acquaintance
with objects of imagination takes away from, instead of adding to, their
romantic interest. Familiarity is said to breed contempt; or at any
rate, the being brought into contact with places, persons, or things
that we have hitherto only heard or read of, removes a certain aerial
delicious veil of refinement from them, and strikes at that _ideal_
abstraction, which is the charm and boast of a life conversant chiefly
among books. The huddling a number of tastes and studies together tends
to degrade and vulgarise each, and to give a crude, unconcocted,
dissipated turn to the mind. Instead of stuffing it full of gross,
palpable, immediate objects of excitement, a wiser plan would be to
leave something in reserve, something hovering in airy space to draw our
attention out of ourselves, to excite hope, curiosity, wonder, and never
to satisfy it. The great art is not to throw a glare of light upon all
objects, or to lay the whole extended landscape bare at one view; but so
to manage as to see the more amiable side of things, and through the
narrow vistas and loop-holes of retreat,
‘Catch glimpses that may make us less forlorn.’
I hate to annihilate air and distance by the perpetual use of an
opera-glass, to run every thing into foreground, and to interpose no
medium between the thought and the object. The breath of words stirs and
plays idly with the gossamer web of fancy: the touch of things destroys
it. I have seen a good deal of authors: and I believe that they (as well
as I) would quite as lieve that I had not. Places I have seen too, that
did not answer my expectation. Pictures (that is, some few of them) are
the only things that are the better for our having studied them ‘face to
face, not in a glass darkly,’ and that in themselves surpass any
description we can give, or any notion we can form of them. But I do not
think seriously, after all, that those who possess are the best judges
of them. They become furniture, property in their hands. The purchasers
look to the price they will fetch, or turn to that which they have cost.
They consider not beauty or expression, but the workmanship, the date,
the pedigree, the school—something that will figure in the description
in a catalogue or in a puff in a newspaper. They are blinded by silly
admiration of whatever belongs to themselves, and warped so as to eye
‘with jealous leer malign’ all that is not theirs. Taste is melted down
in the crucible of avarice and vanity, and leaves a wretched _caput
mortuum_ of pedantry and conceit. As to books, they ‘best can feel them
who have read them most,’ and who rely on them for their only support
and their only chance of distinction. They most keenly relish the graces
of style who have in vain tried to make them their own: they alone
understand the value of a thought who have gone through the trouble of
thinking. The privation of other advantages is not a clear loss, if it
is counterbalanced by a proportionable concentration and unity of
interest in what is left. The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the
man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame. A member of the
Roxburgh Club has a certain work (let it be the Decameron of Boccaccio)
splendidly bound, and in the old quarto edition, we will say. In this
not only his literary taste is gratified, but the pride of property, the
love of external elegance and decoration. The poor student has only a
paltry and somewhat worn copy of the same work (or perhaps only a
translation) which he picked up at a stall, standing out of a shower of
rain. What then! has not the Noble Virtuoso doubly the advantage, and a
much higher pleasure in the perusal of the work? No; for these are
vulgar and mechanical helps to the true enjoyment of letters. From all
this mock-display and idle parade of binding and arms and dates, his
unthought-of rival is precluded, and sees only the talismanic words,
feels only the spirit of the author, and in that author reads ‘with
sparkling eyes’
‘His title to a mansion in the skies.’
Oh! divine air of learning, fanned by the undying breath of genius,
still let me taste thee, free from all adventitious admixtures,
‘Pure in the last recesses of the soul!’
We are far at present from the style of Swift’s ‘Polite Conversation.’
The fashionable tone has quite changed in this respect, and almost gone
into the opposite extreme. At that period, the polite world seems to
have been nearly at a stand, in a state of intellectual _abeyance_; or
in the interval between the disuse of chivalrous exercises and the
introduction of modern philosophy, not to have known how to pass its
time and to have sunk into the most common-place formality and unmeaning
apathy. But lo! at a signal given, or rather prompted by that most
powerful of all calls, the want of something to do, all rush into the
lists, having armed themselves anew with the shining panoply of science
and of letters, with an eagerness, a perseverance, a dexterity, and a
success that are truly astonishing. The higher classes have of late
taken the lead almost as much in arts as they formerly did in arms, when
the last was the only prescribed mode of distinguishing themselves from
the rabble whom they treated as serfs and churls. The prevailing cue at
present is to regard mere authors (who are not also of gentle blood) as
dull, illiterate, poor creatures, a sort of pretenders to taste and
elegance, and adventurers in intellect. The true adepts in black-letter
are knights of the shire: the sworn patentees of Parnassus are Peers of
the Realm. Not to pass for a literary quack, you must procure a diploma
from the College of Heralds. A dandy conceals a bibliomanist: our belles
are _bluestockings_. The Press is so entirely monopolised by beauty,
birth, or importance in the State, that an author by profession resigns
the field to the crowd of well-dressed competitors, out of modesty or
pride, is fain to keep out of sight—
‘Or write by stealth and blush to find it fame!’
Lord Byron used to boast that he could bring forward a dozen young men
of fashion who could beat all the regular authors at their several
weapons of wit or argument; and though I demur to the truth of the
assertion, yet there is no saying till the thing is tried. Young
gentlemen make _very pretty sparrers_, but are not the ‘ugliest
customers’ when they take off the gloves. Lord Byron himself was in his
capacity of author an _out-and-outer_; but then it was at the expense of
other things, for he could not talk except in short sentences and
sarcastic allusions, he had no ready resources; all his ideas moulded
themselves into stanzas, and all his ardour was carried off in rhyme.
The channel of his pen was worn deep by habit and power; the current of
his thoughts flowed strong in it, and nothing remained to supply the
neighbouring flats and shallows of miscellaneous conversation, but a few
sprinklings of wit or gushes of spleen. An intense purpose concentrated
and gave a determined direction to his energies, that ‘held on their
way, unslacked of motion.’ The track of his genius was like a volcanic
eruption, a torrent of burning lava, full of heat and splendour and
headlong fury, that left all dry, cold, hard, and barren behind it! To
say nothing of a host of female authors, a bright galaxy above our
heads, there is no young lady of fashion in the present day, scarce a
boarding-school girl, that is not mistress of as many branches of
knowledge as would set up half-a-dozen literary hacks. In lieu of the
sampler and the plain-stitch of our grandmothers, they have so many
hours for French, so many for Italian, so many for English grammar and
composition, so many for geography and the use of the globes, so many
for history, so many for botany, so many for painting, music, dancing,
riding, &c. One almost wonders how so many studies are crammed into the
twenty-four hours; or how such fair and delicate creatures can master
them without spoiling the smoothness of their brows, the sweetness of
their tempers, or the graceful simplicity of their manners. A girl
learns French (not only to read, but to speak it) in a few months, while
a boy is as many years in learning to construe Latin. Why so? Chiefly
because the one is treated as a _bagatelle_ or agreeable relaxation; the
other as a serious task or necessary evil. Education, a very few years
back, was looked upon as a hardship, and enforced by menaces and blows,
instead of being carried on (as now) as an amusement and under the garb
of pleasure, and with the allurements of self-love. It is found that the
products of the mind flourish better and shoot up more quickly in the
sunshine of good-humour and in the air of freedom, than under the frowns
of sullenness, or the shackles of authority. ‘The labour we delight in
physics pain.’ The idlest people are not those who have most
leisure-time to dispose of as they choose: take away the feeling of
compulsion, and you supply a motive for application, by converting a
toil into a pleasure. This makes nearly all the difference between the
hardest drudgery and the most delightful exercise—not the degree of
exertion, but the motive and the accompanying sensation. Learning does
not gain proselytes by the austerity or awfulness of its looks. By
representing things as so difficult, and as exacting such dreadful
sacrifices, and to be acquired under such severe penalties, we not only
deter the student from the attempt, but lay a dead-weight upon the
imagination, and destroy that cheerfulness and alacrity of spirit which
is the spring of thought and action. But to return.—An author by
profession reads a few works that he intends to criticise and cut up
‘for a consideration,’—a _bluestocking_ by profession reads all that
comes out to pass the time or satisfy her curiosity. The author has
something to say about Fielding, Richardson, or even the Scotch novels:
but he is soon distanced by the fair critic or overwhelmed with the
contents of whole Circulating Libraries poured out upon his head without
stint or intermission. He reads for an object and to live; she for the
sake of reading or to talk. Be this as it may, the idle reader at
present reads twenty times as many books as the learned one. The former
skims the surface of knowledge, and carries away the striking points and
a variety of amusing details, while the latter reserves himself for
great occasions, or perhaps does nothing under the pretence of having so
much to do.
‘From every work he challenges _essoine_,
For contemplation’s sake.’
The _literati_ of Europe threaten at present to become the Monks of
letters, and from having taken up learning as a profession, to live on
the reputation of it. As gentlemen have turned authors, authors seem
inclined to turn gentlemen; and enjoying the _otium cum dignitate_, to
be much too refined and abstracted to condescend to the subordinate or
mechanical parts of knowledge. They are too wise in general to be
acquainted with anything in particular; and remain in a proud and
listless ignorance of all that is within the reach of the vulgar. They
are not, as of old, walking libraries or Encyclopædias, but rather
certain faculties of the mind personified. They scorn the material and
instrumental branches of inquiry, the husk and bran, and affect only the
fine flour of literature—they are only to be called in to give the last
polish to style, the last refinement to thought. They leave it to their
drudges, the Reading Public, to accumulate the facts, to arrange the
evidence, to make out the _data_, and like great painters whose pupils
have got in the ground-work and the established proportions of a
picture, come forward to go over the last thin glazing of the colours,
or throw in the finer touches of expression. On my excusing myself to
N—— for some blunder in history, by saying, ‘I really had not time to
read,’—he said, ‘No, but you have time to write!’ And once a celebrated
critic taking me to task as to the subject of my pursuits, and receiving
regularly the same answer to his queries, that I knew nothing of
chemistry, nothing of astronomy, of botany, of law, of politics, &c. at
last exclaimed somewhat impatiently—‘What the devil is it, then, you
_do_ know?’ I laughed, and was not very much disconcerted at the
reproof, as it was just.
Modern men of letters may be divided into three classes; the mere
scholar or _book-worm_, all whose knowledge is taken from books, and who
may be passed by as an obsolete character, little inquired after—the
literary _hack_ or coffee-house politician, who gets his information
mostly from hearsay, and who makes some noise indeed, but the echo of it
does not reach beyond his own club or circle—and the man of real or of
pretended genius, who aims to draw upon his own resources of thought or
feeling, and to throw a new light upon nature and books. This last
personage (if he acts up to his supposed character) has too much to do
to lend himself to a variety of pursuits, or to lay himself out to
please in all companies. He has a task in hand, a vow to perform; and he
cannot be diverted from it by incidental or collateral objects. All the
time that he does not devote to this paramount duty, he should have to
himself, to repose, to lie fallow, to gather strength and recruit
himself. A boxer is led into the lists that he may not waste a particle
of vigour needlessly; and a leader in Parliament, on the day that he is
expected to get up a grand attack or defence, is not to be pestered with
the ordinary news of the day. So an author (who is, or would be thought
original) has no time for _spare_ accomplishments or ornamental studies.
All that he intermeddles with must be marshalled to bear upon his
purpose. He must be acquainted with books and the thoughts of others,
but only so far as to assist him on his way, and ‘to take progression
from them.’ He starts from the point where _they_ left off. All that
does not aid him in his new career goes for nothing, is thrown out of
the account; or is a useless and splendid incumbrance. Most of his time
he passes in brooding over some wayward hint or suggestion of a thought,
nor is he bound to give any explanation of what he does with the rest.
He tries to melt down truth into essences—to express some fine train of
feeling, to solve some difficult problem, to start what is new, or to
perfect what is old; in a word, not to do what others can do (which in
the division of mental labour he holds to be unnecessary), but to do
what they all with their joint efforts cannot do. For this he is in no
hurry, and must have the disposal of his leisure and the choice of his
subject. The public can wait. He deems with a living poet, who is an
example of his own doctrine—
——‘That there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.’
Or I have sometimes thought that the dalliance of the mind with Fancy or
with Truth might be described almost in the words of Andrew Marvell’s
address ‘To his Coy Mistress:‘—
‘Had we but world enough and time,
This toying, Lady, were no crime;
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk and pass our love’s long day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My contemplative love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart:
For, lady, you deserve this state;
Nor would I love at lower rate!’
The aspiring poet or prose-writer undertakes to do a certain thing; and
if he succeeds, it is enough. While he is intent upon that or asleep,
others may amuse themselves how they can with any topic that happens to
be afloat and all the eloquence they are masters of, so that they do not
disturb the champion of truth, or the proclaimer of beauty to the world.
The Conversation of Lords, on the contrary, is to this like a newspaper
to a book—the latter treats well or ill of one subject, and leads to a
conclusion on one point; the other is made up of all sorts of things
jumbled together, debates in parliament, law-reports, plays, operas,
concerts, routs, levees, fashions, auctions, the last fight, foreign
news, deaths, marriages, and _crim-cons_, bankruptcies, and quack
medicines; and a large allowance is frequently to be made, besides the
natural confusion of the subjects, for _cross-readings_ in the speaker’s
mind![11] Or, to take another illustration, fashionable conversation has
something theatrical or _melo-dramatic_ in it; it is got up for
immediate effect, it is calculated to make a great display, there is a
profusion of paint, scenery, and dresses, the music is loud, there are
banquets and processions, you have the dancers from the Opera, the
horses from Astley’s, and the elephant from Exeter ‘Change, the stage is
all life, bustle, noise and glare, the audience brilliant and delighted,
and the whole goes off in a blaze of phosphorus; but the dialogue is
poor, the story improbable, the critics shake their heads in the pit,
and the next day the piece is _damned_!
In short, a man of rank and fortune takes the adventitious and
ornamental part of letters, the obvious, popular, fashionable, that
serves to amuse at the time, or minister to the cravings of vanity,
without laying a very heavy tax on his own understanding, or the
patience of his hearers. He furnishes his mind as he does his house,
with what is showy, striking, and of the newest pattern: he mounts his
_hobby_ as he does his horse, which is brought to his door for an
airing, and which (should it prove restive or sluggish) he turns away
for another; or like a child at a fair, gets into a round-about of
knowledge, till his head becomes giddy, runs from sight to sight, from
booth to booth, and like the child, goes home loaded with trinkets,
gewgaws, and rattles. He does not pore and pine over an idea (like some
poor hypochondriac) till it becomes impracticable, unsociable,
incommunicable, absorbed in mysticism, and lost in minuteness: he is not
upon oath never to utter anything but oracles, but rattles away in a
fine careless hair-brained dashing manner, hit or miss, and succeeds the
better for it. Nor does he prose over the same stale round of politics
and the state of the nation (with the coffee-house politician), but
launches out with freedom and gaiety into whatever has attraction and
interest in it, ‘runs the great circle, and is still at home.’ He is
inquisitive, garrulous, credulous, sanguine, florid,—neither pedantic
nor vulgar. Neither is he intolerant, exclusive, bigoted to one set of
opinions or one class of individuals. He clothes an abstract theory with
illustrations from his own experience and observation, hates what is dry
and dull, and throws in an air of high health, buoyant spirits, fortune
and splendid connections to give animation and vividness to what perhaps
might otherwise want it. He selects what is palpable without being gross
or trivial, lends it colour from the flush of success, and elevation
from the distinctions of rank. He runs on and never stops for an answer,
rather dictating to others than endeavouring to ascertain their
opinions, solving his own questions, improving upon their hints, and
bearing down or precluding opposition by a good-natured loquacity or
stately dogmatism. All this is perhaps more edifying as a subject of
speculation than delightful in itself. Shakspeare somewhere says—‘A
man’s mind is parcel of his fortunes,’—and I think the inference will be
borne out in the present case. I should guess that in the prevailing
tone of fashionable society or aristocratic literature would be found
all that variety, splendour, facility, and startling effect which
corresponds with external wealth, magnificence of appearance, and a
command of opportunity; while there would be wanting whatever depends
chiefly on intensity of pursuit, on depth of feeling, and on simplicity
and independence of mind joined with straitened fortune. Prosperity is a
great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind;
privation trains and strengthens it. Accordingly, we find but one really
great name (Lord Bacon) in this rank of English society, where
superiority is taken for granted, and reflected from outward
circumstances. The rest are in the second class. Lord Bolingbroke, whom
Pope idolized (and it pains me that all his idols are not mine) was a
boastful empty mouther! I never knew till the other day, that Lord
Bolingbroke was the model on which Mr. Pitt formed himself. He was his
_Magnus Apollo_; and no wonder. The late Minister used to lament it as
the great desideratum of English literature, that there was no record
anywhere existing of his speeches as they were spoken, and declared that
he would give any price for one of them reported as speeches were
reported in the newspapers in our time. Being asked which he thought the
best of his written productions, he would answer, raising his eyebrows
and deepening the tones of his voice to a sonorous bass—‘Why,
undoubtedly, Sir, the Letter to Sir William Wyndham is the most masterly
of all his writings, and the first composition for wit and eloquence in
the English language;‘—and then he would give his reasons at great
length and _con amore_, and say that Junius had formed himself entirely
upon it. Lord Bolingbroke had, it seems, a house next-door to one
belonging to Lord Chatham at Walham-Green; and as the gardens joined,
they could hear Lord Bolingbroke walking out with the company that came
to see him in his retirement, and elaborately declaiming politics to the
old lords and statesmen that were with him, and philosophy to the
younger ones. Pitt learned this story from his father when a boy. This
account, interesting in itself, was to me the more interesting and
extraordinary, as it had always appeared to me that Mr. Pitt was quite
an original, _sui generis_,
‘As if a man were author of himself,
And own’d no other kin’—
that so far from having a model or idol that he looked up to and
grounded himself upon, he had neither admiration nor consciousness of
any thing existing out of himself, and that he lived solely in the sound
of his own voice and revolved in the circle of his own hollow and
artificial periods. I have it from the same authority that he thought
Cobbett the best writer and Horne Tooke the cleverest man of the day.
His hatred of Wyndham was excessive and mutual.—Perhaps it may be said
that Lord Chatham was a first-rate man in his way, and I incline to
think it; but he was a self-made man, bred in a camp, not in a court,
and his rank was owing to his talents.[12]
ON A SUN-DIAL
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_October, 1827._
‘To carve out dials quaintly, point by point.’
SHAKESPEARE.
_Horas non numero nisi serenas_—is the motto of a sun-dial near Venice.
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought
unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. ‘I count
only the hours that are serene.’ What a bland and care-dispelling
feeling! How the shadows seem to fade on the dial-plate as the sky
lours, and time presents only a blank unless as its progress is marked
by what is joyous, and all that is not happy sinks into oblivion! What a
fine lesson is conveyed to the mind—to take no note of time but by its
benefits, to watch only for the smiles and neglect the frowns of fate,
to compose our lives of bright and gentle moments, turning always to the
sunny side of things, and letting the rest slip from our imaginations,
unheeded or forgotten! How different from the common art of
self-tormenting! For myself, as I rode along the Brenta, while the sun
shone hot upon its sluggish, slimy waves, my sensations were far from
comfortable; but the reading this inscription on the side of a glaring
wall in an instant restored me to myself; and still, whenever I think of
or repeat it, it has the power of wafting me into the region of pure and
blissful abstraction. I cannot help fancying it to be a legend of Popish
superstition. Some monk of the dark ages must have invented and
bequeathed it to us, who, loitering in trim gardens and watching the
silent march of time, as his fruits ripened in the sun or his flowers
scented the balmy air, felt a mild languor pervade his senses, and
having little to do or to care for, determined (in imitation of his
sun-dial) to efface that little from his thoughts or draw a veil over
it, making of his life one long dream of quiet! _Horas non numero nisi
serenas_—he might repeat, when the heavens were overcast and the
gathering storm scattered the falling leaves, and turn to his books and
wrap himself in his golden studies! Out of some such mood of mind,
indolent, elegant, thoughtful, this exquisite device (speaking volumes)
must have originated.
Of the several modes of counting time, that by the sun-dial is perhaps
the most apposite and striking, if not the most convenient or
comprehensive. It does not obtrude its observations, though it ‘morals
on the time,’ and, by its stationary character, forms a contrast to the
most fleeting of all essences. It stands _sub dio_—under the marble air,
and there is some connexion between the image of infinity and eternity.
I should also like to have a sunflower growing near it with bees
fluttering round.[13] It should be of iron to denote duration, and have
a dull, leaden look. I hate a sun-dial made of wood, which is rather
calculated to show the variations of the seasons, than the progress of
time, slow, silent, imperceptible, chequered with light and shade. If
our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note
of them, as the dial does of those that are clouded. It is the shadow
thrown across, that gives us warning of their flight. Otherwise, our
impressions would take the same undistinguishable hue; we should scarce
be conscious of our existence. Those who have had none of the cares of
this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse
to the hopes and fears of the next to enliven the prospect before them.
Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe,
been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time
hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of
it. The hour-glass is, I suspect, an older invention; and it is
certainly the most defective of all. Its creeping sands are not indeed
an unapt emblem of the minute, countless portions of our existence; and
the manner in which they gradually slide through the hollow glass and
diminish in number till not a single one is left, also illustrates the
way in which our years slip from us by stealth: but as a mechanical
invention, it is rather a hindrance than a help, for it requires to have
the time, of which it pretends to count the precious moments, taken up
in attention to itself, and in seeing that when one end of the glass is
empty, we turn it round, in order that it may go on again, or else all
our labour is lost, and we must wait for some other mode of ascertaining
the time before we can recover our reckoning and proceed as before. The
philosopher in his cell, the cottager at her spinning-wheel must,
however, find an invaluable acquisition in this ‘companion of the lonely
hour,’ as it has been called,[14] which not only serves to tell how the
time goes, but to fill up its vacancies. What a treasure must not the
little box seem to hold, as if it were a sacred deposit of the very
grains and fleeting sands of life! What a business, in lieu of other
more important avocations, to see it out to the last sand, and then to
renew the process again on the instant, that there may not be the least
flaw or error in the account! What a strong sense must be brought home
to the mind of the value and irrecoverable nature of the time that is
fled; what a thrilling, incessant consciousness of the slippery tenure
by which we hold what remains of it! Our very existence must seem
crumbling to atoms, and running down (without a miraculous reprieve) to
the last fragment. ‘Dust to dust and ashes to ashes’ is a text that
might be fairly inscribed on an hour-glass: it is ordinarily associated
with the scythe of Time and a Death’s head, as a _Memento mori_; and
has, no doubt, furnished many a tacit hint to the apprehensive and
visionary enthusiast in favour of a resurrection to another life!
The French give a different turn to things, less _sombre_ and less
edifying. A common and also a very pleasing ornament to a clock, in
Paris, is a figure of Time seated in a boat which Cupid is rowing along,
with the motto, _L’Amour fait passer le Tems_—which the wits again have
travestied into _Le Tems fait passer L’Amour_. All this is ingenious and
well; but it wants sentiment. I like a people who have something that
they love and something that they hate, and with whom every thing is not
alike a matter of indifference or _pour passer le tems_. The French
attach no importance to any thing, except for the moment; they are only
thinking how they shall get rid of one sensation for another; all their
ideas are _in transitu_. Every thing is detached, nothing is
accumulated. It would be a million of years before a Frenchman would
think of the _Horas non numero nisi serenas_. Its impassioned repose and
_ideal_ voluptuousness are as far from their breasts as the poetry of
that line in Shakspeare—‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank!’
They never arrive at the classical—or the romantic. They blow the
bubbles of vanity, fashion, and pleasure; but they do not expand their
perceptions into refinement, or strengthen them into solidity. Where
there is nothing fine in the ground-work of the imagination, nothing
fine in the superstructure can be produced. They are light, airy,
fanciful (to give them their due)—but when they attempt to be serious
(beyond mere good sense) they are either dull or extravagant. When the
volatile salt has flown off, nothing but a _caput mortuum_ remains. They
have infinite crotchets and caprices with their clocks and watches,
which seem made for any thing but to tell the hour—gold-repeaters,
watches with metal covers, clocks with hands to count the seconds. There
is no escaping from quackery and impertinence, even in our attempts to
calculate the waste of time. The years gallop fast enough for me,
without remarking every moment as it flies; and farther, I must say I
dislike a watch (whether of French or English manufacture) that comes to
me like a footpad with its face muffled, and does not present its clear,
open aspect like a friend, and point with its finger to the time of day.
All this opening and shutting of dull, heavy cases (under pretence that
the glass-lid is liable to be broken, or lets in the dust or air and
obstructs the movement of the watch), is not to husband time, but to
give trouble. It is mere pomposity and self-importance, like consulting
a mysterious oracle that one carries about with one in one’s pocket,
instead of asking a common question of an acquaintance or companion.
There are two clocks which strike the hour in the room where I am. This
I do not like. In the first place, I do not want to be reminded twice
how the time goes (it is like the second tap of a saucy servant at your
door when perhaps you have no wish to get up): in the next place, it is
starting a difference of opinion on the subject, and I am averse to
every appearance of wrangling and disputation. Time moves on the same,
whatever disparity there may be in our mode of keeping count of it, like
true fame in spite of the cavils and contradictions of the critics. I am
no friend to repeating watches. The only pleasant association I have
with them is the account given by Rousseau of some French lady, who sat
up reading the _New Heloise_ when it first came out, and ordering her
maid to sound the repeater, found it was too late to go to bed, and
continued reading on till morning. Yet how different is the interest
excited by this story from the account which Rousseau somewhere else
gives of his sitting up with his father reading romances, when a boy,
till they were startled by the swallows twittering in their nests at
day-break, and the father cried out, half angry and ashamed—‘_Allons,
mon fils; je suis plus enfant que toi!_’ In general, I have heard
repeating watches sounded in stage-coaches at night, when some
fellow-traveller suddenly awaking and wondering what was the hour,
another has very deliberately taken out his watch, and pressing the
spring, it has counted out the time; each petty stroke acting like a
sharp puncture on the ear, and informing me of the dreary hours I had
already passed, and of the more dreary ones I had to wait till morning.
The great advantage, it is true, which clocks have over watches and
other dumb reckoners of time is, that for the most part they strike the
hour—that they are as it were the mouth-pieces of time; that they not
only point it to the eye, but impress it on the ear; that they ‘lend it
both an understanding and a tongue.’ Time thus speaks to us in an
audible and warning voice. Objects of sight are easily distinguished by
the sense, and suggest useful reflections to the mind; sounds, from
their intermittent nature, and perhaps other causes, appeal more to the
imagination, and strike upon the heart. But to do this, they must be
unexpected and involuntary—there must be no trick in the case—they
should not be squeezed out with a finger and a thumb; there should be
nothing optional, personal in their occurrence; they should be like
stern, inflexible monitors, that nothing can prevent from discharging
their duty. Surely, if there is any thing with which we should not mix
up our vanity and self-consequence, it is with Time, the most
independent of all things. All the sublimity, all the superstition that
hang upon this palpable mode of announcing its flight, are chiefly
attached to this circumstance. Time would lose its abstracted character,
if we kept it like a curiosity or a jack-in-a-box: its prophetic
warnings would have no effect, if it obviously spoke only at our
prompting, like a paltry ventriloquism. The clock that tells the coming,
dreaded hour—the castle bell, that ‘with its brazen throat and iron
tongue, sounds one unto the drowsy ear of night’—the curfew, ‘swinging
slow with sullen roar’ o’er wizard stream or fountain, are like a voice
from other worlds, big with unknown events. The last sound, which is
still kept up as an old custom in many parts of England, is a great
favourite with me. I used to hear it when a boy. It tells a tale of
other times. The days that are past, the generations that are gone, the
tangled forest glades and hamlets brown of my native country, the
woodsman’s art, the Norman warrior armed for the battle or in his
festive hall, the conqueror’s iron rule and peasant’s lamp extinguished,
all start up at the clamorous peal, and fill my mind with fear and
wonder. I confess, nothing at present interests me but what has been—the
recollection of the impressions of my early life, or events long past,
of which only the dim traces remain in a smouldering ruin or
half-obsolete custom. That _things should be that are now no more_,
creates in my mind the most unfeigned astonishment. I cannot solve the
mystery of the past, nor exhaust my pleasure in it. The years, the
generations to come, are nothing to me. We care no more about the world
in the year 2300 than we do about one of the planets. Even George IV. is
better than the Earl of Windsor. We might as well make a voyage to the
moon as think of stealing a march upon Time with impunity. _De non
apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio._ Those who are to come
after us and push us from the stage seem like upstarts and pretenders,
that may be said to exist _in vacuo_, we know not upon what, except as
they are blown up with vain and self-conceit by their patrons among the
moderns. But the ancients are true and _bonâ-fide_ people, to whom we
are bound by aggregate knowledge and filial ties, and in whom seen by
the mellow light of history we feel our own existence doubled and our
pride consoled, as we ruminate on the vestiges of the past. The public
in general, however, do not carry this speculative indifference about
the future to what is to happen to themselves, or to the part they are
to act in the busy scene. For my own part, I do; and the only wish I can
form, or that ever prompts the passing sigh, would be to live some of my
years over again—they would be those in which I enjoyed and suffered
most!
The ticking of a clock in the night has nothing very interesting nor
very alarming in it, though superstition has magnified it into an omen.
In a state of vigilance or debility, it preys upon the spirits like the
persecution of a teazing pertinacious insect; and haunting the
imagination after it has ceased in reality, is converted into the
death-watch. Time is rendered vast by contemplating its minute portions
thus repeatedly and painfully urged upon its attention, as the ocean in
its immensity is composed of water-drops. A clock striking with a clear
and silver sound is a great relief in such circumstances, breaks the
spell, and resembles a sylph-like and friendly spirit in the room.
Foreigners, with all their tricks and contrivances upon clocks and
time-pieces, are strangers to the sound of village bells, though perhaps
a people that can dance may dispense with them. They impart a pensive,
wayward pleasure to the mind, and are a kind of chronology of happy
events, often serious in the retrospect—births, marriages, and so forth.
Coleridge calls them ‘the poor man’s only music.’ A village-spire in
England peeping from its cluster of trees is always associated in
imagination with this cheerful accompaniment, and may be expected to
pour its joyous tidings on the gale. In Catholic countries, you are
stunned with the everlasting tolling of bells to prayers or for the
dead. In the Apennines, and other wild and mountainous districts of
Italy, the little chapel-bell with its simple tinkling sound has a
romantic and charming effect. The Monks in former times appear to have
taken a pride in the construction of bells as well as churches; and some
of those of the great cathedrals abroad (as at Cologne and Rouen) may be
fairly said to be hoarse with counting the flight of ages. The chimes in
Holland are a nuisance. They dance in the hours and the quarters. They
leave no respite to the imagination. Before one set has done ringing in
your ears, another begins. You do not know whether the hours move or
stand still, go backwards or forwards, so fantastical and perplexing are
their accompaniments. Time is a more staid personage, and not so full of
gambols. It puts you in mind of a tune with variations, or of an
embroidered dress. Surely, nothing is more simple than time. His march
is straightforward; but we should have leisure allowed us to look back
upon the distance we have come, and not be counting his steps every
moment. Time in Holland is a foolish old fellow with all the antics of a
youth, who ‘goes to church in a coranto, and lights his pipe in a
cinque-pace.’ The chimes with us, on the contrary, as they come in every
three or four hours, are like stages in the journey of the day. They
give a fillip to the lazy, creeping hours, and relieve the lassitude of
country places. At noon, their desultory, trivial song is diffused
through the hamlet with the odour of rashers of bacon; at the close of
day they send the toil-worn sleepers to their beds. Their discontinuance
would be a great loss to the thinking or unthinking public. Mr.
Wordsworth has painted their effect on the mind when he makes his friend
Matthew, in a fit of inspired dotage,
‘Sing those witty rhymes
About the crazy old church-clock
And the bewilder’d chimes.’
The tolling of the bell for deaths and executions is a fearful summons,
though, as it announces, not the advance of time but the approach of
fate, it happily makes no part of our subject. Otherwise, the ‘sound of
the bell’ for Macheath’s execution in the ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ or for that
of the Conspirators in ‘Venice Preserved,’ with the roll of the drum at
a soldier’s funeral, and a digression to that of my Uncle Toby, as it is
so finely described by Sterne, would furnish ample topics to descant
upon. If I were a moralist, I might disapprove the ringing in the new
and ringing out the old year.
‘Why dance ye, mortals, o’er the grave of Time?’
St Paul’s bell tolls only for the death of our English kings, or a
distinguished personage or two, with long intervals between.[15]
Those who have no artificial means of ascertaining the progress of time,
are in general the most acute in discerning its immediate signs, and are
most retentive of individual dates. The mechanical aids to knowledge are
not sharpeners of the wits. The understanding of a savage is a kind of
natural almanac, and more true in its prognostication of the future. In
his mind’s eye he sees what has happened or what is likely to happen to
him, ‘as in a map the voyager his course.’ Those who read the times and
seasons in the aspect of the heavens and the configurations of the
stars, who count by moons and know when the sun rises and sets, are by
no means ignorant of their own affairs or of the common concatenation of
events. People in such situations have not their faculties distracted by
any multiplicity of inquiries beyond what befalls themselves, and the
outward appearances that mark the change. There is, therefore, a
simplicity and clearness in the knowledge they possess, which often
puzzles the more learned. I am sometimes surprised at a shepherd-boy by
the road-side, who sees nothing but the earth and sky, asking me the
time of day—he ought to know so much better than any one how far the sun
is above the horizon. I suppose he wants to ask a question of a
passenger, or to see if he has a watch. Robinson Crusoe lost his
reckoning in the monotony of his life and that bewildering dream of
solitude, and was fain to have recourse to the notches in a piece of
wood. What a diary was his! And how time must have spread its circuit
round him, vast and pathless as the ocean!
For myself, I have never had a watch nor any other mode of keeping time
in my possession, nor ever wish to learn how time goes. It is a sign I
have had little to do, few avocations, few engagements. When I am in a
town, I can hear the clock; and when I am in the country, I can listen
to the silence. What I like best is to lie whole mornings on a sunny
bank on Salisbury Plain, without any object before me, neither knowing
nor caring how time passes, and thus ‘with light-winged toys of
feathered Idleness’ to melt down hours to moments. Perhaps some such
thoughts as I have here set down float before me like motes before my
half-shut eyes, or some vivid image of the past by forcible contrast
rushes by me—‘Diana and her fawn, and all the glories of the antique
world;’ then I start away to prevent the iron from entering my soul, and
let fall some tears into that stream of time which separates me farther
and farther from all I once loved! At length I rouse myself from my
reverie, and home to dinner, proud of killing time with thought, nay
even without thinking. Somewhat of this idle humour I inherit from my
father, though he had not the same freedom from _ennui_, for he was not
a metaphysician; and there were stops and vacant intervals in his being
which he did not know how to fill up. He used in these cases, and as an
obvious resource, carefully to wind up his watch at night, and ‘with
lack-lustre eye’ more than once in the course of the day look to see
what o’clock it was. Yet he had nothing else in his character in common
with the elder Mr. Shandy. Were I to attempt a sketch of him, for my own
or the reader’s satisfaction, it would be after the following
manner:——but now I recollect, I have done something of the kind once
before, and were I to resume the subject here, some bat or owl of a
critic, with spectacled gravity, might swear I had stolen the whole of
this Essay from myself—or (what is worse) from him! So I had better let
it go as it is.
WHY THE HEROES OF ROMANCE ARE INSIPID
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_November, 1827._
Because it is taken for granted that they must be amiable and
interesting, in the first instance, and like other things that are taken
for granted, is but indifferently, or indeed cannot be made out at all
in the sequel. To put it to the proof, to give illustrations of it,
would be to throw a doubt upon the question. They have only to show
themselves to ensure conquest. Indeed, the reputation of their victories
goes before them, and is a pledge of their success before they even
appear. They are, or are supposed to be, so amiable, so handsome, so
accomplished, so captivating, that all hearts bow before them, and all
the women are in love with them without knowing why or wherefore, except
that it is understood that they are to be so. All obstacles vanish
without a finger lifted or a word spoken, and the effect is produced
without a blow being struck. When there is this imaginary charm at work,
every thing they could do or say must weaken the impression, like
arguments brought in favour of a self-evident truth: they very wisely
say or do little or nothing, rely on their names and the author’s good
word, look, smile, and are adored; but to all but the heroines of
romance and their confidantes, are exceedingly uninteresting and
_common-place_ personages, either great coxcombs or wonderfully insipid.
When a lover is able to look unutterable things which produce the
desired effect, what occasion for him to exert his eloquence or make an
impassioned speech in order to bring about a revolution in his favour,
which is already accomplished by other less doubtful means? When the
impression at first sight is complete and irresistible, why throw away
any farther thoughts or words to make it more so? This were ‘to gild
refined gold, to paint the lily, to smooth the ice, to throw a perfume
on the violet, or add another hue unto the rainbow, or seek with
taper-light the beauteous eye of Heaven to garnish,’ which has been
pronounced to be ‘wasteful and superfluous excess.’ Authors and
novel-writers therefore reserve for their second-rate and less prominent
characters, the artillery of words, the arts of persuasion, and all the
unavailing battery of hopeless attentions and fine sentiment, which are
of no use to the more accomplished gallant, who makes his triumphant
approaches by stolen glances and breathing sighs, and whose appearance
alone supersedes the disclosure of all his other implied perfections and
an importunate display of a long list of titles to the favour of the
fair, which, as they are not insisted on, it would be vain and
unbecoming to produce to the gaze of the world, or for the edification
of the curious reader. It is quite enough if the lady is satisfied with
her choice, and if (as generally happens both as a cause and consequence
in such cases) the gentleman is satisfied with himself. If he indeed
seemed to entertain a doubt upon the subject, the spell of his
fascination would be broken, and the author would be obliged to derogate
from the _beau-ideal_ of his character, and make him do something to
deserve the good opinion that might be entertained of him, and to which
he himself had not led the way by boundless self-complacency and the
conscious assurance of infallible success.
Another circumstance that keeps our novel-heroes in the back-ground is,
that if there was any doubt of their success, or they were obliged to
employ the ordinary and vulgar means to establish their superiority over
every one else, they would be no longer those ‘faultless monsters’ which
it is understood that they must be to fill their part in the drama. The
discarded or despairing, not the favoured lovers, are unavoidably the
most interesting persons in the story. In fact, the principals are
already disposed of in the first page; they are destined for each other
by an unaccountable and uncontrollable sympathy: the ceremony is in a
manner over, and they are already married people, with all the lawful
attributes and indifference belonging to the character. To produce an
interest, there must be mixed motives, alternate hope and fear,
difficulties to struggle with, sacrifices to make; but the true hero of
romance is too fine a gentleman to be subjected to this rude ordeal, or
mortifying exposure, which devolves upon some much more unworthy and
unpretending personage. The beauty of the outline must not be disturbed
by the painful conflicts of passion or the strong contrast of light and
shade. The taste of the heroic cannot swerve for a moment from the
object of its previous choice, who must never be placed in
disadvantageous circumstances. The top characters occupy a certain
prescriptive rank in the world of romance, by the rules of etiquette and
laws of this sort of fictitious composition, reign like princes, and
have only to do nothing to forfeit their privileges or compromise their
supposed dignity.
The heroes of the old romances, the Grand Cyruses, the Artamenes, and
Oroondates, are in this respect better than the moderns. They had their
steel helmet and plume of feathers, the glittering spear and shield, the
barbed steed, and the spread banner, and had knightly service to perform
in joust and tournament, in the field of battle or the deep forest,
besides the duty which they owed to their ‘mistress’ eyebrow,’ and the
favours they received at her hands. They were comparatively picturesque
and adventurous personages, and men of action in the tented field, and
lost all title to the smile of beauty if they did not deserve it by
feats of prowess, and by the valour of their arms. However insipid they
might be as accepted lovers, in their set speeches and improgressive
languishments by which they paid their court to their hearts’ idols, the
‘fairest of the fair,’ yet in their character of warriors and heroes,
they were men of mettle, and had something in them. They did not merely
sigh and smile and kneel in the presence of their mistresses—they had to
unhorse their adversaries in combat, to storm castles, to vanquish
giants, and lead armies. So far, so well. In the good old times of
chivalry and romance, favour was won and maintained by the bold
achievements and fair fame of the chosen knight, which keeps up a show
of suspense and dramatic interest, instead of depending, as in more
effeminate times, on taste, sympathy, and a refinement of sentiment and
manners, of the delicacy of which it is impossible to convey any idea by
words or actions. Even in the pompous and affected courtship of the
romances of the seventeenth century (now, alas! exploded) the interviews
between the lovers are so rare and guarded, their union, though agreed
upon and inevitable, is so remote, the smile with which the lady regards
her sworn champion, though as steady as that of one of the fixed stars,
is like them so cold, as to give a tone of passion and interest to their
enamoured flights, as though they were affected by the chances and
changes of sublunary affairs. I confess I have read some of these
fabulous folios formerly with no small degree of delight and breathless
anxiety, particularly that of ‘Cassandra’; and would willingly indeed go
over it again to catch even a faint, a momentary glimpse of the pleasure
with which I used at one period to peruse its prolix descriptions and
high-flown sentiments. Not only the Palmerins of England and Amadises of
Gaul, who made their way to their mistresses’ hearts by slaying giants
and taming dragons, but the heroes of the French romances of intrigue
and gallantry which succeeded those of necromancy and chivalry, and
where the adventurers for the prize have to break through the fences of
morality and scruples of conscience instead of stone-walls and
enchantments dire, are to be excepted from the censure of downright
insipidity which attaches to those ordinary drawing-room heroes, who are
installed in the good graces of their Divinities by a look, and keep
their places there by the force of _still-life_! It is Gray who cries
out, ‘Be mine to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon!’ I
could say the same of those of Madame La Fayette and the Duke de la
Rochefoucault. ‘The Princess of Cleves’ is a most charming work of this
kind; and the Duke de Nemours is a great favourite with me. He is
perhaps the most brilliant personage that ever entered upon the _tapis_
of a drawing-room, or trifled at a lady’s toilette.
I prefer him, I own, vastly to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, whom
I look upon as the prince of coxcombs; and so much the more impertinent
as he is a moral one. His character appears to me ‘ugly all over with
affectation.’ There is not a single thing that Sir Charles Grandison
does or says all through the book from liking to any person or object
but himself, and with a view to answer to a certain standard of
perfection for which he pragmatically sets up. He is always thinking of
himself, and trying to show that he is the wisest, happiest, and most
virtuous person in the whole world. He is (or would be thought) a code
of Christian ethics; a compilation and abstract of all gentlemanly
accomplishments. There is nothing, I conceive, that excites so little
sympathy as this inordinate egotism; or so much disgust as this
everlasting self-complacency. Yet this self-admiration, brought forward
on every occasion as the incentive to every action and reflected from
all around him, is the burden and pivot of the story. ‘Is not the man
Sir Charles Grandison?’—is what he and all the other persons concerned
are continually repeating to themselves. His preference of the little,
insignificant, selfish, affected, puritanical Miss Byron, who is
remarkable for nothing but her conceit of herself and her lover, to the
noble Clementina, must for ever stamp him for the poltroon and blockhead
that he was. What a contrast between these two females—the one, the
favourite heroine, settling her idle punctilios and the choice of her
ribbons for the wedding-day with equal interest, the other,
self-devoted, broken-hearted, generous, disinterested, pouring out her
whole soul in the fervent expressions and dying struggles of an
unfortunate and hopeless affection! It was impossible indeed for the
genius of the author (strive all he could) to put the prettinesses and
coquettish scruples of the bride-elect upon a par with the eloquent
despair and impassioned sentiments of her majestic but unsuccessful
rival. Nothing can show more clearly that the height of good fortune and
of that conventional faultlessness which is supposed to secure it, is
incompatible with any great degree of interest. Lady Clementina should
have been married to Sir Charles to surfeit her of a coxcomb—Miss Byron
to Lovelace to plague her with a rake! Have we not sometimes seen such
matches? A slashing critic of my acquaintance once observed, that
‘Richardson would be surprised in the next world to find Lovelace in
Heaven and Grandison in Hell!’ Without going this orthodox length, I
must say there is something in Lovelace’s vices more attractive than in
the other’s best virtues. Clarissa’s attachment seems as natural as
Clementina’s is romantic. There is a _regality_ about Lovelace’s manner,
and he appears clothed in a panoply of wit, gaiety, spirit, and
enterprise, that is criticism-proof. If he had not possessed these
dazzling qualities, nothing could have made us forgive for an instant
his treatment of the spotless Clarissa; but indeed they might be said to
be mutually attracted to and extinguished in each other’s dazzling
lustre! When we think of Lovelace and his luckless exploits, we can
hardly be persuaded at this time of day that he wore a wig. Yet that he
did so is evident; for Miss Howe when she gave him that spirited box on
the ear, struck the powder out of it! Mr. B. in ‘Pamela’ has all the
insipidity, that arises from patronising beauty and condescending to
virtue. Pamela herself is delightfully made out; but she labours under
considerable disadvantages, and is far from a _regular_ heroine.
Sterne (thank God!) has neither hero nor heroine, and he does very well
without them.
Many people find fault with Fielding’s Tom Jones as gross and immoral.
For my part, I have doubts of his being so very handsome from the
author’s always talking about his beauty, and I suspect he was a clown,
from being constantly assured he was so very genteel. Otherwise, I think
Jones acquits himself very well both in his actions and speeches, as a
lover and as a _trencher-man_ whenever he is called upon. Some persons,
from their antipathy to that headlong impulse, of which Jones was the
slave, and to that morality of good-nature which in him is made a foil
to principle, have gone so far as to prefer Blifil as the _prettier
fellow_ of the two. I certainly cannot subscribe to this opinion, which
perhaps was never meant to have followers, and has nothing but its
singularity to recommend it. Joseph Andrews is a hero of the
shoulder-knot: it would be hard to canvass his pretensions too severely,
especially considering what a patron he has in Parson Adams. That one
character would cut up into a hundred fine gentlemen and novel-heroes!
Booth is another of the good-natured tribe, a fine man, a very fine man!
But there is a want of spirit to animate the well-meaning mass. He
hardly deserved to have the hashed mutton kept waiting for him. The
author has redeemed himself in Amelia; but a heroine with a _broken
nose_ and who was a married woman besides, must be rendered truly
interesting and amiable to make up for superficial objections. The
character of the Noble Peer in this novel is _not_ insipid. If Fielding
could have made virtue as admirable as he could make vice detestable, he
would have been a greater master even than he was. I do not understand
what those critics mean who say he got all his characters out of
alehouses. It is true he did some of them.
Smollett’s heroes are neither one thing nor the other: neither very
refined nor very insipid. Wilson in Humphrey Clinker comes the nearest
to the _beau-ideal_ of this character, the favourite of the
novel-reading and boarding-school girl. Narcissa and Emilia Gauntlet are
very charming girls; and Monimia in Count Fathom is a fine monumental
beauty. But perhaps he must be allowed to be most _at home_ in Winifred
Jenkins!
The women have taken this matter up in our own time: let us see what
they have made of it. Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes and lovers are perfect in
their kind; nobody can find any fault with them, for nobody knows any
thing about them. They are described as very handsome, and quite
unmeaning and inoffensive.
‘Her heroes have no character at all.’
Theodore, Valancourt,—what delightful names! and there is nothing else
to distinguish them by. Perhaps, however, this indefiniteness is an
advantage. We add expression to the inanimate outline, and fill up the
blank with all that is amiable, interesting, and romantic. A long ride
without a word spoken, a meeting that comes to nothing, a parting look,
a moonlight scene, or evening skies that paint their sentiments for them
better than the lovers can do for themselves, farewells too full of
anguish, deliverances too big with joy to admit of words, suppressed
sighs, faint smiles, the freshness of the morning, pale melancholy, the
clash of swords, the clank of chains that make the fair one’s heart sink
within her, these are the chief means by which the admired authoress of
‘The Romance of the Forest’ and ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ keeps alive
an ambiguous interest in the bosom of her fastidious readers, and
elevates the lover into the hero of the fable. Unintelligible
distinctions, impossible attempts, a delicacy that shrinks from the most
trifling objection, and an enthusiasm that rushes on its fate, such are
the charming and teazing contradictions that form the flimsy texture of
a modern romance! If the lover in such critical cases was any thing but
a lover, he would cease to be the most amiable of all characters in the
abstract and by way of excellence, and would be a traitor to the cause;
to give reasons or to descend to particulars, is to doubt the
omnipotence of love and shake the empire of credulous fancy; a sounding
name, a graceful form, are all that is necessary to suspend the whole
train of tears, sighs, and the softest emotions upon; the ethereal
nature of the passion requires ethereal food to sustain it; and our
youthful hero, in order to be perfectly interesting, must be drawn as
perfectly insipid!
I cannot, however, apply this charge to Mrs. Inchbald’s heroes or
heroines. However finely drawn, they are an essence of sentiment. Their
words are composed of the warmest breath, their tears scald, their sighs
stifle. Her characters seem moulded of a softer clay, the work of
fairest hands. Miss Milner is enchanting. Doriforth indeed is severe,
and has a very stately opinion of himself, but he has spirit and
passion. Lord Norwynne is the most unpleasant and obdurate. He seduces
by his situation and kills by indifference, as is natural in such cases.
But still through all these the fascination of the writer’s personal
feelings never quits you. On the other hand, Miss Burney’s (Madame
D’Arblay’s) _forte_ is ridicule, or an exquisite tact for minute
absurdities, and when she aims at being fine she only becomes affected.
No one had ever much less of the romantic. Lord Orville is a
condescending suit of clothes; yet certainly the sense which Evelina has
of the honour done her is very prettily managed. Sir Clement Willoughby
is a much gayer and more animated person, though his wit outruns his
discretion. Young Delville is the hero of punctilio—a perfect
diplomatist in the art of love-making—and draws his parallels and sits
down as deliberately before the citadel of his mistress’s heart, as a
cautious general lays siege to an impregnable fortress. Cecilia is not
behind-hand with him in the game of studied cross-purposes and affected
delays, and is almost the veriest and most provoking trifler on record.
Miss Edgeworth, I believe, has no heroes. Her _trenchant_ pen cuts away
all extravagance and idle pretence, and leaves nothing but common sense,
prudence, and propriety behind it, wherever it comes.
I do not apprehend that the heroes of the Author of Waverley form any
very striking exception to the common rule. They conform to their
designation and follow the general law of their being. They are for the
most part very equivocal and undecided personages, who receive their
governing impulse from accident, or are puppets in the hands of their
mistresses, such as Waverley, Ivanhoe, Frank Osbaldistone, Henry Morton,
&c. I do not say that any of these are absolutely insipid, but they have
in themselves no leading or master-traits, and they are worked out of
very listless and inert materials into a degree of force and prominence
solely by the genius of the author. Instead of acting, they are acted
upon, and keep in the back-ground and in a neutral posture, till they
are absolutely forced to come forward, and it is then with a very
amiable reservation of modest scruples. Does it not seem almost, or
generally speaking, as if a character to be put in this responsible
situation of candidate for the highest favour of the public at large, or
of the fair in particular, who is to conciliate all suffrages and
concentrate all interests, must really have nothing in him to please or
give offence, that he must be left a negative, feeble character without
untractable or uncompromising points, and with a few slight
recommendations and obvious good qualities which every one may be
supposed to improve upon and fill up according to his or her inclination
or fancy and the model of perfection previously existing in the mind? It
is a privilege claimed, no doubt, by the fair reader to make out the
object of her admiration and interest according to her own choice; and
the same privilege, if not openly claimed, may be covertly exercised by
others. We are all fond of our own creations, and if the author does
little to his chief character and allows us to have a considerable hand
in it, it may not suffer in our opinion from this circumstance. In fact,
the hero of the work is not so properly the chief object in it, as a
sort of blank left open to the imagination, or a lay-figure on which the
reader disposes whatever drapery he pleases! Of all Sir Walter’s
characters the most dashing and spirited is the Sultan Saladin. But he
is not meant for a hero, nor fated to be a lover. He is a collateral and
incidental performer in the scene. His movements therefore remain free,
and he is master of his own resplendent energies, which produce so much
the more daring and felicitous an effect. So far from being intended to
please all tastes or the most squeamish, he is not meant for any taste.
He has no pretensions, and stands upon the sole ground of his own heroic
acts and sayings. The author has none of the timidity or mawkishness
arising from a fear of not coming up to his own professions, or to the
expectations excited in the reader’s mind. Any striking trait, any
interesting exploit is more than was bargained for—is heaped measure,
running over. There is no idle, nervous apprehension of falling short of
perfection, arresting the hand or diverting the mind from truth and
nature. If the Pagan is not represented as a monster and barbarian, all
the rest is a god-send. Accordingly all is spontaneous, bold, and
original in this beautiful and glowing design, which is as magnificent
as it is magnanimous.—Lest I should forget it, I will mention while I am
on the subject of Scotch novels, that Mackenzie’s ‘Man of Feeling’ is
not without interest, but it is an interest brought out in a very
singular and unprecedented way. He not merely says or does nothing to
deserve the approbation of the goddess of his idolatry, but from extreme
shyness and sensitiveness, instead of presuming on his merits, gets out
of her way, and only declares his passion on his death-bed. Poor
Harley!—Mr. Godwin’s Falkland is a very high and heroic character: he,
however, is not a love-hero; and the only part in which an episode of
this kind is introduced, is of the most trite and mawkish description.
The case is different in St. Leon. The author’s resuscitated hero there
quaffs joy, love, and immortality with a considerable _gusto_, and with
appropriate manifestations of triumph.
As to the heroes of the philosophical school of romance, such as
Goethe’s Werther, &c., they are evidently out of the pale of this
reasoning. Instead of being common-place and insipid, they are one
violent and startling paradox from beginning to end. Instead of being
cast in stiff unmeaning mould, they ‘all germins spill at once’ that
make mere mortal men. They run a-tilt at all established usages and
prejudices, and overset all the existing order of society. There is
plenty of interest here; and instead of complaining of a calm, we are
borne along by a hurricane of passion and eloquence, certainly without
any thing of ‘temperance that may give it smoothness.’ Schiller’s Moor,
Kotzebue’s heroes, and all the other German prodigies are of this stamp.
Shakspeare’s lovers and Boccaccio’s I like much: they seem to me full of
tenderness and manly spirit, and free from insipidity and cant. Otway’s
Jaffier is, however, the true woman’s man—full of passion and
effeminacy, a mixture of strength and weakness. Perhaps what I have said
above may suggest the true reason and apology for Milton’s having
unwittingly made Satan the hero of ‘Paradise Lost.’ He suffers infinite
losses, and makes the most desperate efforts to recover or avenge them;
and it is the struggle with fate and the privation of happiness that
sharpens our desires, or enhances our sympathy with good or evil. We
have little interest in unalterable felicity, nor can we join with heart
and soul in the endless symphonies and exulting hallelujahs of the
spirits of the blest. The remorse of a fallen spirit or ‘tears such as
angels shed’ touch us more nearly.
THE SHYNESS OF SCHOLARS
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_December, 1827._
‘_And of his port as meek as is a maid._’
Scholars lead a contemplative and retired life, both which circumstances
must be supposed to contribute to the effect in question. A life of
study is also conversant with high and _ideal_ models, which gives an
ambitious turn to the mind; and pride is nearly akin to delicacy of
feeling.
That a life of privacy and obscurity should render its votaries bashful
and awkward, or unfit them for the routine of society, from the want
both of a habit of going into company and from ignorance of its usages,
is obvious to remark. No one can be expected to do that well or without
a certain degree of hesitation and restraint, which he is not accustomed
to do except on particular occasions, and at rare intervals. You might
as rationally set a scholar or a clown on a tight-rope and expect them
to dance gracefully and with every appearance of ease, as introduce
either into the gay, laughing circle, and suppose that he will acquit
himself handsomely and come off with applause in the retailing of
anecdote or the interchange of repartee. ‘If you have not seen the
Court, your manners must be naught; and if your manners are naught, you
must be damned,’ according to Touchstone’s reasoning. The other cause
lies rather deeper, and is so far better worth considering, perhaps. A
student, then, that is, a man who condemns himself to toil for a length
of time and through a number of volumes in order to arrive at a
conclusion, naturally loses that smartness and ease which distinguish
the gay and thoughtless rattler. There is a certain elasticity of
movement and hey-day of the animal spirits seldom to be met with but in
those who have never cared for any thing beyond the moment, or looked
lower than the surface. The scholar having to encounter doubts and
difficulties on all hands, and indeed to apply by way of preference to
those subjects which are most beset with mystery, becomes hesitating,
sceptical, irresolute, absent, dull. All the processes of his mind are
slow, cautious, circuitous, instead of being prompt, heedless,
straightforward. Finding the intricacies of the path increase upon him
in every direction, this can hardly be supposed to add to the lightness
of his step, the confidence of his brow as he advances. He does not skim
the surface, but dives under it like the mole to make his way darkling,
by imperceptible degrees, and throwing up heaps of dirt and rubbish over
his head to track his progress. He is therefore startled at any sudden
light, puzzled by any casual question, taken unawares and at a
disadvantage in every critical emergency. He must have time given him to
collect his thoughts, to consider objections, to make farther inquiries,
and come to no conclusion at last. This is very different from the
dashing, _off-hand_ manner of the mere man of business or fashion; and
he who is repeatedly found in situations to which he is unequal
(particularly if he is of a reflecting and candid temper) will be apt to
look foolish, and to lose both his countenance and his confidence in
himself—at least as to the opinion others entertain of him, and the
figure he is likely on any occasion to make in the eyes of the world.
The course of his studies has not made him wise, but has taught him the
uncertainty of wisdom; and has supplied him with excellent reasons for
suspending his judgment, when another would throw the casting-weight of
his own presumption or interest into the scale.
The inquirer after truth learns to take nothing for granted; least of
all, to make an assumption of his own superior merits. He would have
nothing proceed without proper proofs and an exact scrutiny; and would
neither be imposed upon himself, nor impose upon others by shallow and
hasty appearances. It takes years of patient toil and devoted enthusiasm
to master any art or science; and after all, the success is doubtful. He
infers that other triumphs must be prepared in like manner at an humble
distance: he cannot bring himself to imagine that any object worth
seizing on or deserving of regard, can be carried by a _coup de main_.
So far from being proud or puffed up by them, he would be ashamed and
degraded in his own opinion by any advantages that were to be obtained
by such cheap and vulgar means as putting a good face on the matter, as
strutting and vapouring about his own pretensions. He would not place
himself on a level with bullies or coxcombs; nor believe that those
whose favour he covets, can be the dupes of either. Whatever is
excellent in his fanciful creed is hard of attainment; and he would
(perhaps absurdly enough) have the means in all cases answerable to the
end. He knows that there are difficulties in his favourite pursuits to
puzzle the will, to tire the patience, to unbrace the strongest nerves,
and make the stoutest courage quail; and he would fain think that if
there is any object more worthy than another to call forth the earnest
solicitude, the hopes and fears of a wise man, and to make his heart
yearn within him at the most distant prospect of success, this precious
prize in the grand lottery of life is not to be had for the asking for,
or from the mere easy indifference or overbearing effrontery with which
you put in your claim. He is aware that it will be long enough before
any one paints a fine picture by walking up and down and admiring
himself in the glass; or writes a fine poem by being delighted with the
sound of his own voice; or solves a single problem in philosophy by
swaggering and haughty airs. He conceives that it is the same with the
way of the world—woos the fair as he woos the Muse; in conversation
never puts in a word till he has something better to say than any one
else in the room; in business never strikes while the iron is hot, and
flings away all his advantages by endeavouring to prove to his own and
the satisfaction of others, that he is clearly entitled to them. It
never once enters into his head (till it is too late) that impudence is
the current coin in the affairs of life; that he who doubts his own
merit, never has credit given him by others; that Fortune does not stay
to have her overtures canvassed; that he who neglects opportunity, can
seldom command it a second time; that the world judge by appearances,
not by realities; and that they sympathise more readily with those who
are prompt to do themselves justice, and to show off their various
qualifications or enforce their pretensions to the utmost, than with
those who wait for others to award their claims, and carry their
fastidious refinement into helplessness and imbecility. Thus ‘fools rush
in where angels fear to tread;’ and modest merit finds to its cost, that
the bold hand and dauntless brow succeed where timidity and bashfulness
are pushed aside; that the gay, laughing eye is preferred to dejection
and gloom, health and animal spirits to the shattered, sickly frame and
trembling nerves; and that to succeed in life, a man should carry about
with him the outward and incontrovertible signs of success, and of his
satisfaction with himself and his prospects, instead of plaguing every
body near him with fantastical scruples and his ridiculous anxiety to
realise an unattainable standard of perfection. From holding back
himself, the speculative enthusiast is thrust back by others: his
pretensions are insulted and trampled on; and the repeated and pointed
repulses he meets with, make him still more unwilling to encounter, and
more unable to contend with those that await him in the prosecution of
his career. He therefore retires from the contest altogether, or remains
in the back-ground, a passive but uneasy spectator of a scene, in which
he finds from experience, that confidence, alertness, and superficial
acquirements are of more avail than all the refinement and delicacy in
the world. Action, in truth, is referable chiefly to quickness and
strength of resolution, rather than to depth of reasoning or scrupulous
nicety: again, it is to be presumed that those who show a proper
reliance on themselves, will not betray the trust we place in them
through pusillanimity or want of spirit: in what relates to the opinion
of others, which is often formed hastily and on slight acquaintance,
much must be allowed to what strikes the senses, to what excites the
imagination; and in all popular worldly schemes, popular and worldly
means must be resorted to, instead of depending wholly on the hidden and
intrinsic merits of the case.
‘In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness, and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tyger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage:
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it,
As fearfully, as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.’
This advice (sensible as it is) is abhorrent to the nature of a man who
is accustomed to place all his hopes of victory in reasoning and
reflection only. The noisy, rude, gratuitous success of those who have
taken so much less pains to deserve it, disgusts and disheartens him—he
loses his self-possession and self-esteem, has no standard left by which
to measure himself or others, and as he cannot be brought to admire
them, persuades himself at last that the blame rests with himself; and
instead of bespeaking a fashionable dress, learning to bow, or taking a
few lessons in boxing or fencing to brace his nerves and raise his
spirits, aggravates all his former faults by way of repairing them,
grows more jealous of the propriety of every word and look, lowers his
voice into a whisper, gives his style the last polish, reconsiders his
arguments, refines his sentiments till they evaporate in a sigh, and
thus satisfies himself that he can hardly fail, that men judge
impartially in the end, that the public will sooner or later do him
justice, Fortune smile, and the Fair no longer be averse! _Oh malore!_
He is just where he was, or ten times worse off than ever.
There is another circumstance that tends not a little to perplex the
judgment, and add to the difficulties of the retired student, when he
comes out into the world. He is like one dropped from the clouds. He has
hitherto conversed chiefly with historic personages and abstract
propositions, and has no just notion of actual men and things. He does
not well know how to reconcile the sweeping conclusions he has been
taught to indulge in to the cautious and pliant maxims of the world, nor
how to compare himself, an inhabitant of Utopia, with sublunary mortals.
He has been habituated all his life to look up to a few great names
handed down by virtue or science as the ‘Gods of his idolatry,’ as the
fixed stars in the firmament of reputation, and to have some respect for
himself and other learned men as votaries at the shrine and as
appreciating the merits of their idol; but all the rest of the world,
who are neither the objects of this sort of homage, nor concerned as a
sort of priesthood in collecting and paying it, he looks upon as
actually nobody, or as worms crawling upon the face of the earth without
intellectual value or pretensions. He is, therefore, a little surprised
and shocked to find, when he deigns to mingle with his fellows, those
every-day mortals, on ordinary terms, that they are of a height nearly
equal to himself, that they have words, ideas, feelings in common with
the best, and are not the mere cyphers he had been led to consider them.
From having under-rated, he comes to over-rate them. Having dreamt of no
such thing, he is more struck with what he finds than perhaps it
deserves; magnifies the least glimpse of sense or humour into sterling
wit or wisdom; is startled by any objection from so unexpected a
quarter; thinks his own advantages of no avail, because they are not the
only ones, and shrinks from an encounter with weapons he has not been
used to, and from a struggle by which he feels himself degraded. The
Knight of La Mancha when soundly beaten by the packstaves of the
Yanguesian carriers, laid all the blame on his having condescended to
fight with plebeians. The pride of learning comes in to aid the
awkwardness and bashfulness of the inexperienced novice, converting his
want of success into the shame and mortification of defeat in what he
habitually considers as a contest with inferiors. Indeed, those will
always be found to submit with the worst grace to any check or reverse
of this kind in common conversation or reasoning, who have been taught
to set the most exclusive and disproportioned value on letters: and the
most enlightened and accomplished scholars will be less likely to be
humbled or put to the blush by the display of common sense or native
talent, than the more ignorant, self-sufficient, and pedantic among the
learned; for that ignorance, self-sufficiency, and pedantry, are
sometimes to be reckoned among the attributes of learning, cannot be
disputed. These qualities are not very reconcilable with modest merit;
but they are quite consistent with a great deal of blundering,
confusion, and want of _tact_ in the commerce of the world. The genuine
scholar retires from an unequal conflict into silence and obscurity: the
pedant swells into self-importance, and renders himself conspicuous by
pompous arrogance and absurdity!
It is hard upon those who have ever taken pains or done any thing to
distinguish themselves, that they are seldom the trumpeters of their own
achievements; and I believe it may be laid down as a rule, that we
receive just as much homage from others as we exact from them by our own
declarations, looks, and manner. But no one who has performed any thing
great looks big upon it: those who have any thing to boast of are
generally silent on that head, and altogether shy of the subject. With
Coriolanus, they ‘will not have their nothings monster’d.’ From
familiarity, his own acquirements do not appear so extraordinary to the
individual as to others; and there is a natural want of sympathy in this
respect. No one who is really capable of great things is proud or vain
of his success; for he thinks more of what he had hoped or has failed to
do, than of what he has done. A habit of extreme exertion, or of anxious
suspense, is not one of buoyant, overweening self-complacency: those who
have all their lives tasked their faculties to the utmost, may be
supposed to have quite enough to do without having much disposition left
to anticipate their success with confidence, or to glory in it
afterwards. The labours of the mind, like the drudgery of the body,
depress and take away the usual alacrity of the spirits. Nor can such
persons be lifted up with the event; for the impression of the
consequences to result from any arduous undertaking must be light and
vain, compared with the toil and anxiety accompanying it. It is only
those who have done nothing, who fancy they can do every thing; or who
have leisure and inclination to admire themselves. To sit before a glass
and smile delighted at our own image, is merely a tax on our egotism and
self-conceit; and these are resources not easily exhausted in some
persons; or if they are, the deficiency is supplied by flatterers who
surround the vain, like a natural atmosphere. Fools who take all their
opinions at second-hand cannot resist the coxcomb’s delight in himself;
or it might be said that folly is the natural mirror of vanity. The
greatest heroes, it has often been observed, do not show it in their
faces; nor do philosophers affect to be thought wise. Little minds
triumph on small occasions, or over puny competitors: the loftiest wish
for higher opportunities of signalising themselves, or compare
themselves with those models that leave them no room for flippant
exultation. Either great things are accomplished with labour and pains,
which stamp their impression on the general character and tone of
feeling; or if this should not be the case (as sometimes happens), and
they are the effect of genius and a happiness of nature, then they cost
too little to be much thought of, and we rather wonder at others for
admiring them, than at ourselves for having performed them. ‘Vix ea
nostra voco’—is the motto of spontaneous talent; and in neither case is
conceit the exuberant growth of great original power or of great
attainments.
In one particular, the uneducated man carries it hollow against the man
of thought and refinement: the first can shoot in the _long bow_, which
the last cannot for the life of him. He who has spent the best part of
his time and wasted his best powers in endeavouring to answer the
question—‘What is truth?’—scorns a lie, and every thing making the
smallest approach to one. His mind by habit has become tenacious of,
devoted to the truth. The grossness and vulgarity of falsehood shock the
delicacy of his perceptions, as much as it would shock the finest artist
to be obliged to daub in a signpost, or scrawl a caricature. He cannot
make up his mind to derive any benefit from so pitiful and disgusting a
source. Tell me that a man is a metaphysician, and at the same time that
he is given to shallow and sordid boasting, and I will not believe you.
After striving to raise himself to an equality with truth and nature by
patient investigation and refined distinctions (which few can
make)—whether he succeed or fail, he cannot stoop to acquire a spurious
reputation, or to advance himself or lessen others by paltry artifice
and idle rhodomontade, which are in every one’s power who has never
known the value or undergone the labour of discovering a single truth.
Gross personal and local interests bear the principal sway with the
ignorant or mere man of the world, who considers not what things are in
themselves, but what they are to him: the man of science attaches a
higher importance to, because he finds a more constant pleasure in the
contemplation and pursuit of general and abstracted truths. Philosophy
also teaches self-knowledge; and self-knowledge strikes equally at the
root of any inordinate opinion of ourselves, or wish to impress others
with idle admiration. Mathematicians have been remarked for persons of
strict probity and a conscientious and somewhat literal turn of
mind.[16] But are poets and romance-writers equally scrupulous and
severe judges of themselves, and martyrs to right principle? I cannot
acquit them of the charge of vanity, and a wish to aggrandise themselves
in the eyes of the world, at the expense of a little false complaisance
(what wonder when the world are so prone to admire, and they are so
spoiled by indulgence in self-pleasing fancies?)—but in general they are
too much taken up with their _ideal_ creations, which have also a truth
and keeping of their own, to misrepresent or exaggerate matters of fact,
or to trouble their heads about them. The poet’s waking thoughts are
dreams: the liar has all his wits and senses about him, and thinks only
of astonishing his hearers by some worthless assertion, a mixture of
impudence and cunning. But what shall we say of the clergy and the
priests of all countries? Are they not men of learning? And are they
not, with few exceptions, noted for imposture and time-serving, much
more than for a love of truth and candour? They are good subjects, it is
true; bound to keep the peace, and hired to maintain certain opinions,
not to inquire into them. So this is an exception to the rule, such as
might be expected. I speak of the natural tendencies of things, and not
of the false bias that may be given to them by their forced combination
with other principles.
The worst effect of this depression of spirits, or of the ‘scholar’s
melancholy,’ here spoken of, is when it leads a man, from a distrust of
himself, to seek for low company, or to forget it by matching below
himself. Gray is to be pitied, whose extreme diffidence or
fastidiousness was such as to prevent his associating with his fellow
collegians, or mingling with the herd, till at length, like the owl,
shutting himself up from society and daylight, he was hunted and hooted
at like the owl whenever he chanced to appear, and was even assailed and
disturbed in the haunts in which ‘he held his solitary reign.’ He was
driven from college to college, and subjected to a persecution the more
harassing to a person of his indolent and retired habits. But he only
shrunk the more within himself in consequence—read over his favourite
authors—corresponded with his distant friends—was terrified out of his
wits at the bare idea of having his portrait prefixed to his works; and
probably died from nervous agitation at the publicity into which his
name had been forced by his learning, taste, and genius. This monastic
seclusion and reserve is, however, better than a career such as
Porson’s; who from not liking the restraints, or not possessing the
exterior recommendations of good society, addicted himself to the lowest
indulgences, spent his days and nights in cider-cellars and pot-houses,
cared not with whom or where he was, so that he had somebody to talk to
and something to drink, ‘from humble porter to imperial tokay’ (_a
liquid_, according to his own pun), and fell a martyr, in all
likelihood, to what in the first instance was pure _mauvaise honte_.
Nothing could overcome this propensity to low society and sotting, but
the having something to do, which required his whole attention and
faculties; and then he shut himself up for weeks together in his
chambers, or at the University, to collate old manuscripts, or edite a
Greek tragedy, or expose a grave pedant, without seeing a single
boon-companion, or touching a glass of wine. I saw him once at the
London Institution with a large patch of coarse brown paper on his nose,
the skirts of his rusty black coat hung with cobwebs, and talking in a
tone of suavity approaching to condescension to one of the Managers. It
is a pity that men should so lose themselves from a certain awkwardness
and rusticity at the outset. But did not Sheridan make the same
melancholy ending, and run the same fatal career, though in a higher and
more brilliant circle? He did; and though not from exactly the same
cause (for no one could accuse Sheridan’s purple nose and flashing eye
of a bashfulness—‘modest as morning when she coldly eyes the youthful
Phœbus!’)—yet it was perhaps from one nearly allied to it, namely, the
want of that noble independence and confidence in its own resources
which should distinguish genius, and the dangerous ambition to get
sponsors and vouchers for it in persons of rank and fashion. The
affectation of the society of lords is as mean and low-minded as the
love of that of coblers and tapsters. It is that coblers and tapsters
may admire, that we wish to be seen in the company of _their_ betters.
The tone of literary patronage is better than it was a hundred or a
hundred and fifty years ago. What dramatic author would think now of
getting a lady of quality to take a box at the first night of a play to
prevent its being damned by the pit? Do we not read the account of
Parson Adams taking his ale in Squire Booby’s kitchen with mingled
incredulity and shame? At present literature has, to a considerable
degree, found its level, and is hardly in danger, ‘deprived of its
natural patrons and protectors, the great and noble, of being trodden in
the mire, and trampled under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’—though it
can never again hope, to be what learning once was in the persons of the
priesthood, the lord and sovereign of principalities and powers. Fool
that it was ever to forego its privileges, and loosen the strong hold it
had on opinion in bigotry and superstition!
I remember hearing a lady of great sense and acuteness speak of it as a
painful consequence of the natural shyness of scholars, that from the
want of a certain address, or an acquaintance with the common forms of
society, they despair of making themselves agreeable to women of
education and a certain rank in life, and throw away their fine
sentiments and romantic tenderness on chambermaids and mantua-makers.
Not daring to hope for success where it would be most desirable, yet
anxious to realise in some way the dream of books and of their youth,
they are willing to accept a return of affection which they count upon
as a tribute of gratitude in those of lower circumstances, (as if
gratitude were ever bought by interest), and take up with the first
Dulcinea del Toboso that they meet with, when, would they only try the
experiment, they might do much better. Perhaps so: but there is here
also a mixture of pride as well as modesty. The scholar is not only
apprehensive of not meeting with a return of fondness where it might be
most advantageous to him; but he is afraid of subjecting his self-love
to the mortification of a repulse, and to the reproach of aiming at a
prize far beyond his deserts. Besides, living (as he does) in an _ideal_
world, he has it in his option to clothe his Goddess (be she who or what
she may) with all the perfections his heart doats on; and he works up a
dowdy of this ambiguous description _à son gré_, as an artist does a
piece of dull clay, or the poet the sketch of some unrivalled heroine.
The contrast is also the greater (and not the less gratifying as being
his own discovery,) between his favourite figure and the back-ground of
her original circumstances; and he likes her the better, inasmuch as,
like himself, she owes all to her own merit—and _his_ notice!
Possibly, the best cure for this false modesty, and for the uneasiness
and extravagances it occasions, would be, for the retired and abstracted
student to consider that he properly belongs to another sphere of
action, remote from the scenes of ordinary life, and may plead the
excuse of ignorance, and the privilege granted to strangers and to those
who do not speak the same language. If any one is travelling in a
foreign Diligence, he is not expected to shine nor to put himself
forward, nor need he be out of countenance because he cannot: he has
only to conform as well as he can to his new and temporary situation,
and to study common propriety and simplicity of manners. Every thing has
its own limits, a little centre of its own, round which it moves; so
that our true wisdom lies in keeping to our own walk in life, however
humble or obscure, and being satisfied if we can succeed in it. The best
of us can do no more, and we shall only become ridiculous or unhappy by
attempting it. We are ashamed, because we are at a loss in things to
which we have no pretensions, and try to remedy our mistakes by
committing greater. An overweening vanity or self-opinion is, in truth,
often at the bottom of this weakness; and we shall be most likely to
conquer the one by eradicating the other, or restricting it within due
and moderate bounds.
THE MAIN-CHANCE
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_February, 1828._
‘Search then the ruling passion: there alone,
The wild are constant, and the cunning known;
The fool consistent, and the false sincere;
Priests, princes, women, no dissemblers here.
This clue once found unravels all the rest,
The prospect clears, and Wharton stands confest.’
POPE.
I am one of those who do not think that mankind are exactly governed by
reason or a cool calculation of consequences. I rather believe that
habit, imagination, sense, passion, prejudice, words make a strong and
frequent diversion from the right line of prudence and wisdom. I have
been told, however, that these are merely the irregularities and
exceptions, and that reason forms the rule or basis; that the
understanding, instead of being the sport of the capricious and
arbitrary decisions of the will, generally dictates the line of conduct
it is to pursue, and that self-interest, or the _main-chance_, is the
unvarying load-star of our affections, or the chief ingredient in all
our motives, that, thrown in as ballast, gives steadiness and direction
to our voyage through life. I will not take upon me to give a verdict in
this cause as judge; but I will try to plead one side of it as an
advocate, perhaps a biassed and feeble one.
As the passions are said to be subject to the control of reason, and as
reason is resolved (in the present case) into an attention to our own
interest, or a practical sense of the value of money, it will not be
amiss to inquire how much of this principle itself is founded in a
rational estimate of things, or is calculated for the end it proposes,
or how much of it will turn out (when analysed) to be mere madness and
folly or a mixture, like all the rest, of obstinacy, whim, fancy,
vanity, ill-nature, and so forth, or a nominal pursuit of good. This
passion, or an inordinate love of wealth, shows itself, when it is
strong, equally in two opposite ways, in saving or in spending—in
avarice (or stinginess) and in extravagance. To examine each of their
order. That lowest and most familiar form of covetousness, commonly
called _stinginess_, is at present (it must be owned) greatly on the
wane in civilised society; it has been driven out of fashion either by
ridicule and good sense, or by the spread of luxury, or by supplying the
mind with other sources of interest, besides those which related to the
bare means of subsistence, so that it may almost be considered as a
vice, or absurdity, struck off the list, as a set-off to some that, in
the change of manners and the progress of dissipation have been brought
upon the stage. It is not, however, so entirely banished from the world,
but that examples of it may be found to our purpose. It seems to have
taken refuge in the petty provincial towns, or in old baronial castles
in the North of Scotland, where it is still triumphant. To go into this
subject somewhat in detail, as a study of the surviving manners of the
last age.—Nothing is more common in these half-starved, barren regions,
than to stint the servants in their wages, to allowance them in the
merest necessaries, never to indulge them with a morsel of savoury food,
and to lock up every thing from them as if they were thieves, or common
vagabonds, broke into the house. The natural consequence is, that the
mistresses live in continual _hot water_ with their servants, keep watch
and ward over them—the pantry is in a state of siege—grudge them every
mouthful, every appearance of comfort, or moment of leisure, and torment
their own souls every minute of their lives about what, if left wholly
to itself, would not make a difference of five shillings at the year’s
end. There are families so notorious for this kind of _surveillance_ and
meanness, that no servant will go to live with them; for, to clench the
matter, they are obliged to stay if they do; as, under these amiable
establishments, and to provide against an evasion of their signal
advantages, domestics are never hired but by the half-year. Instances
have been known where servants have taken a pleasant revenge on their
masters and mistresses without intending it; but where the example of
sordid saving and meanness set to them, having taken possession of those
even who were victims to it, they have conscientiously applied it to the
benefit of all parties, and scarcely suffered a thing to enter the house
for the whole six months they stayed in it. To pass over, however, those
cases which may plead poverty as their excuse, what shall we say to a
lady of fortune (the sister of one of their old-fashioned lairds)
allowing the fruit to rot in the gardens and hot-houses of a fine old
mansion in large quantities, sooner than let any of it be given away in
presents to the neighbours; and, when peremptorily ordered by the master
of the house to send a basket-full every morning to a sick friend,
purchasing a small pottle for the purpose, and satisfying her mind (an
intelligent and well-informed one) with this miserable subterfuge? Nay,
farther, the same person, whenever they had green-peas, or other
rarities, served up at table, could hardly be prevailed on to help the
guests to them, but, if possible, sent them away, though no other use
could now be made of them, and she would never see them again! Is there
common sense in this; or is it not more like madness? But is it not, at
the same time, human nature? Let us stop to explain a little. In my
view, the real motive of action in this and other similar cases of
grasping penuriousness has no more reference to self-love (properly so
called) than artificial fruit and flowers have to natural ones. A
certain form or outside appearance of utility may deceive the mind, but
the natural, pulpy, wholesome, nutritious substance, the principle of
vitality is gone. To this callous, frigid habit of mind, the real uses
of things harden and crystallise; the pith and marrow are extracted out
of them, and leave nothing but the husk or shell. By a regular process,
the idea of property is gradually abstracted from the advantage it may
be of even to ourselves; and to a well-drilled, thorough-bred, Northern
housekeeper (such as I have supposed), the fruits, or other produce of
her garden, would come at last to be things no more to be eaten or
enjoyed, than her jewels or trinkets of any description, which are,
professedly, of no use but to be _kept_ as symbols of wealth, to be
occasionally looked at, and carefully guarded from the approach of any
unhallowed touch. The calculation of consequences, or of benefit to
accrue to any living person, is so far from being the mainspring in this
mechanical operation that it is never once thought of, or regarded with
peevishness and impatience as an unwelcome intruder, because it must
naturally divert the mind from the warped and false bias it has taken.
The feeling of property is here, then, removed from the sphere of
practice to a chimerical and fictitious one. In the case of not sending
the fruit out of the house, there might be some lurking idea of its
being possibly wanted at home, that it might be sent to some one else,
or made up into conserves: but when different articles of food are
actually placed on the table, to hang back from using or offering them
to others, is a deliberate infatuation. They _must be_ destroyed, they
_could not_ appear again; and yet this person’s heart failed her, and
shrank back from the only opportunity of making the proper use of them
with a petty, sensitive apprehension, as if it were a kind of sacrilege
done to a cherished and favourite object. The impulse to save was
become, by indulgence, a sort of desperate propensity and forlorn hope,
no longer the understood means, but the mistaken end: habit had
completely superseded the exercise and control of reason, and the rage
of making the most of every thing _by making no use of it at all_,
resisted to the last moment the shocking project of feasting on a
helpless dish of green-peas (that _would_ fetch so much in the market)
as an outrage against the Goddess of stinginess, and torture to the soul
of thrift! The principle of economy is inverted; and in order to avoid
the possibility of wasting any thing, the way with such philosophers and
housewives is to abstain from touching it altogether. Is not this a
common error? Or are we conscious of our motives in such cases? [Or do
we not flatter ourselves by imputing every such act of idle folly to the
necessity of adopting some sure and judicious plan to shun ruin,
beggary, and the most profligate abuse of wealth? An old maid in the
same northern school of humanity calling upon some young ladies, her
neighbours, was so alarmed and scandalized at finding the _safe_ open in
their absence, that she engaged herself to drink tea the same afternoon,
for the express purpose of reading them a lecture on the unheard-of
imprudence and impropriety of such an example, and was mobbed on her way
home by the poor servant-girl (who had been made the subject of her
declamation) in return for her uncalled-for interference. _She_ had
nothing to fear, nothing to lose: _her_ safe was carefully locked up.
Why then all this flutter, fidgetty anxiety, and itch of meddling? Out
of pure romantic generosity—because the idea of any thing like comfort
or liberality to a servant shocked her economical and screwed-up
prejudices as much as the impugning any article of her religious or
moral creed could have done. The very truisms and literal refinements of
this passion are then sheer impertinence. The housekeeper came into the
parlour of a ‘_big ha’ house_,’ in the same land of cakes and
hospitality, to say that the workmen had refused to eat their
dinner.—‘Why so?’—Because there was nothing but sowins and sour
milk.—‘Then they must go without a dinner,’ said the young mistress
delighted; ‘there is nothing else in the house for them.’ Yet the larder
at that time groaned with cold rounds of beef, hams, pasties, and the
other plentiful remains of a huge entertainment the day before. This was
flippancy and ill-nature, as well as a wrong notion of self-interest. Is
it at all wonderful that a decent servant-girl, when applied to to go to
this place, laughed at the idea of a service where there was nothing to
eat? Yet this attention to the _main-chance_ on her part, had it come to
the lady’s knowledge, would have been treated as a great piece of
insolence. So little conception have such people of their own
obligations on the claims of others! The clergyman of the parish
(prolific in this sort of anecdote), a hearty, good sort of man enough,
but irritable withal, took it into his head to fly into a violent
passion if ever he found the glasses or spoons left out in the kitchen,
and he always went into the kitchen to look after this sort of
excitement. He pretended to be mightily afraid that the one would be
broken (to his irreparable loss) and the other stolen, though there was
no danger of either: he wanted an excuse to fret and fume about
something. On the death of his wife he sent for her most intimate friend
to condole and consult with, and having made some necessary
arrangements, begged as a peculiar favour that she would look into the
kitchen to see if the glasses and silver spoons were in their places.
She repressed a smile at such a moment out of regard to his feelings,
which were serious and acute; but burst into a fit of unrestrained
laughter as soon as she got home. So ridiculous a thing is human nature,
even to ourselves! Either our actions are absurd, or we are absurd in
our constant censure and exposure of others. I would not from choice go
into these details, but I might be required to fill up a vague outline;
and the examples of folly, spite, and meanness are unfortunately ‘sown
like a thick scurf o’er life!’]
Let us turn the tables and look at the other side of this sober, solid,
ingrossing passion for property and its appendages. A man lays out a
thousand, nay, sometimes many thousand pounds in purchasing a fine
picture. This is thought, by the vulgar, a very fantastical folly, and
unaccountable waste of money. Why so? No one would give such a sum for a
picture, unless there were others ready to offer nearly the same sum,
and who are likely to appreciate its value, and envy him the
distinction. It is then a sign of taste, a proof of wealth to possess
it, it is an ornament and a luxury. If the same person lays out the same
sum of money in building or purchasing a fine house, or enriching it
with costly furniture, no notice is taken—this is supposed to be
perfectly natural and in order. Yet both are equally gratuitous pieces
of extravagance, and the value of the objects is, in either case,
equally _ideal_. It will be asked, ‘But what is the use of the picture?’
And what, pray, is the use of the fine house or costly furniture, unless
to be looked at, to be admired, and to display the taste and
magnificence of the owner? Are not pictures and statues as much
furniture as gold plate or jasper tables; or does the circumstance of
the former having a meaning in them, and appealing to the imagination as
well as to the senses, neutralize their virtue, and render it entirely
chimerical and visionary? It is true, every one must have a house of
some kind, furnished somehow, and the superfluity so far grows
imperceptibly out of the necessary. But a fine house, fine furniture, is
necessary to no man, nor of more value than the plainest, except as a
matter of taste, of fancy, of luxury and ostentation. Again, no doubt,
if a person is in the habit of keeping a number of servants, and
entertaining a succession of fashionable guests, he must have more room
than he wants for himself, apartments suitably decorated to receive
them, and offices and stables for their horses and retinue. But is all
this unavoidably dictated as a consequence of his attention to the
_main-chance_, or is it not sacrificing the latter, and making it a
stalking-horse to his vanity, dissipation, or love of society and
hospitality? We are at least as fond of spending money as of making it.
If a man runs through a fortune in the way here spoken of, is it out of
love to himself? Yet who scruples to run through a fortune in this way,
or accuses himself of any extraordinary disinterestedness or love of
others? One bed is as much as any one can sleep in, one room is as much
as he can dine in, and he may have another for study or to retire to
after dinner—but he can only want more than this for the accommodation
of his friends, or the admiration of strangers. At Fonthill Abbey (to
take an extreme illustration), there was not a single room fit to sit,
lie, or stand in: the whole was cut up into pigeon holes, or spread out
into long endless galleries. The building this huge, ill-assorted pile
cost, I believe, nearly a million of money; and if the circumstance was
mentioned, it occasioned an expression of surprise at the amount of the
wealth that had been thus squandered—but if it was said that a hundred
pounds had been laid out on a highly-finished picture, there was the
same astonishment expressed at its misdirection. The sympathetic auditor
makes up his mind to the first and greatest loss, by reflecting that in
case of the worst the building materials alone will fetch something
considerable; or, in the very idea of stone-walls and mortar there is
something solid and tangible, that repels the charge of frivolous levity
or fine sentiment. This quaint excrescence in architecture, preposterous
and ill-contrived as it was, occasioned, I suspect, many a heart-ache
and bitter comparison to the throng of fashionable visitants; and I
conceive it was the very want of comfort and convenience that enhanced
this feeling, by magnifying, as it were from contrast, the expense that
had been incurred in realising an idle whim. When we judge thus
perversely and invidiously of the employment of wealth by others, I
cannot think that we are guided in our own choice of means to ends by a
simple calculation of downright use and personal accommodation. The
gentleman who purchased Fonthill, and was supposed to be possessed of
wealth enough to purchase half a dozen more Fonthills, lived there
himself for some time in a state of the greatest retirement, rose at six
and read till four, rode out for an hour for the benefit of the air, and
dined abstemiously for the sake of his health. I could do all this
myself. What then became of the rest of his fortune? It was lying in the
funds, or embarked in business to make it yet greater, that he might
still rise at six and read till four, &c.—it was of no other earthly use
to him; for he did not wish to make a figure in the world, or to throw
it away on studs of horses, on equipages, entertainments, gaming,
electioneering, subscriptions to charitable institutions, [mistresses,]
or any of the usual fashionable modes of squandering wealth for the
amusement and wonder of others and our own fancied enjoyment. Mr. F. did
not probably lay out five hundred a-year on himself: it cost Mr.
Beckford, who led a life of perfect seclusion, twenty thousand a-year to
defray the expenses of his table and of his household establishment.
When I find that such and so various are the tastes of men, I am a
little puzzled to know what is meant by self-interest, of which some
persons talk so fluently, as if it was a _Jack-in-a-Box_ which they
could take out and show you, and which they tell you is the object that
all men equally aim at. If money, is it for its own sake or the sake of
other things? Is it to hoard it or to spend it, on ourselves or others?
In all these points, we find the utmost diversity and contradiction both
of feeling and practice. Certainly, he who puts his money into a
strong-box, and he who puts it into a dice-box must be allowed to have a
very different idea of the _main-chance_. If by this phrase be
understood a principle of self-preservation, I grant that while we live,
we must not starve, and that _necessity has no law_. Beyond this point,
all seems nearly left to chance or whim; and so far are all the world
from being agreed in their definition of this redoubtable term, that one
half of them may be said to think and act in diametrical opposition to
the other.
Avarice is the miser’s dream, as fame is the poet’s. A calculation of
physical profit or loss is almost as much out of the question in the one
case as in the other. The one has set his mind on gold, the other on
praise, as the _summum bonum_ or object of his bigoted idolatry and
darling contemplation, not for any private and sinister ends. It is the
immediate pursuit, not the remote or reflex consequence that gives wings
to the passion. There is, indeed, a reference to self in either case
that fixes and concentrates it, but not a gross or sordid one. Is not
the desire to accumulate and leave a vast estate behind us equally
romantic with the desire to leave a posthumous name behind us? Is not
the desire of distinction, of something to be known and remembered by,
the paramount consideration? And are not the privations we undergo, the
sacrifices and exertions we make for either object, nearly akin? A child
makes a huge snow-ball to show his skill and perseverance and as
something to wonder at, not that he can swallow it as an ice, or warm
his hands at it, and though the next day’s sun will dissolve it; and the
man accumulates a pile of wealth for the same reason principally, or to
find employment for his time, his imagination, and his will. I deny that
it can be of any other use to him to watch and superintend the returns
of millions, than to watch the returns of the heavenly bodies, or to
calculate their distances, or to contemplate eternity, or infinity, or
the sea, or the dome of St. Peter’s, or any other object that excites
curiosity and interest from its magnitude and importance. Do we not look
at the most barren mountain with thrilling awe and wonder? And is it
strange that we should gaze at a mountain of gold with satisfaction,
when we can besides say, ‘This is ours, with all the power that belongs
to it?’ Every passion, however plodding and prosaic, has its poetical
side to it. A miser is the true alchemist, or, like the magician in his
cell, who overlooks a mighty experiment, who sees dazzling visions, and
who wields the will of others at his nod; but to whom all other hopes
and pleasures are dead, and who is cut off from all connexion with his
kind. He lives in a splendid hallucination, a waking trance, and so far
it is well: but if he thinks he has any other need or use for all this
endless store (any more than to swill the ocean) he deceives himself,
and is no conjuror after all. He goes on, however, mechanically adding
to his stock, and fancying that great riches is great gain, that every
particle that swells the heap is something in reserve against the evil
day, and a defence against that poverty which he dreads more, the
farther he is removed from it; as the more giddy the height to which we
have attained, the more frightful does the gulph yawn below—so easily
does habit get the mastery of reason, and so nearly is passion allied to
madness! ‘But he is laying up for his heirs and successors.’ In toiling
for them, and sacrificing himself, is he properly attending to the
_main-chance_?
This is the turn the love of money takes in cautious, dry, recluse, and
speculative minds. If it were the pure and abstract love of money, it
could take no other turn but this. But in a different class of
characters, the sociable, the vain, and imaginative, it takes just the
contrary one, _viz._ to expense, extravagance, and ostentation. It then
loves to display itself in every fantastic shape and with every
reflected lustre, in houses, in equipage, in dress, in a retinue of
friends and dependants, in horses, in hounds—to glitter in the eye of
fashion, to be echoed by the roar of folly, and buoyed up for a while
like a bubble on the surface of vanity, to sink all at once and
irrecoverably into an abyss of ruin and bankruptcy. Does it foresee this
result? Does it care for it? What then becomes of the calculating
principle that can neither be hoodwinked nor bribed from its duty? Does
it do nothing for us in this critical emergency? It is blind, deaf, and
insensible to all but the noise, confusion, and glare of objects by
which it is fascinated and lulled into a fatal repose! One man ruins
himself by the vanity of associating with lords, another by his love of
low company, one by his fondness for building, another by his rage for
keeping open house and private theatricals, one by philosophical
experiments, another by embarking in every ticklish and fantastic
speculation that is proposed to him, one throws away an estate on a
law-suit, another on a die, a third on a horse-race, a fourth on
_virtù_, a fifth on a drab, a sixth on a contested election, &c. There
is no dearth of instances to fill the page, or complete the group of
profound calculators and inflexible martyrs to the _main-chance_. Let
any of these discreet and well-advised persons have the veil torn from
their darling follies by experience, and be gifted with a double share
of wisdom and a second fortune to dispose of, and each of them, so far
from being warned by experience or disaster, will only be the more
resolutely bent to assert the independence of his choice, and throw it
away the self-same road it went before, on his vanity in associating
with lords, on his love of low company, on his fondness for building, on
his rage for keeping open house or private theatricals, on philosophical
experiments, on fantastic speculations, on a law-suit, on a dice-box, on
a favourite horse, on a picture, on a mistress, or election contest, and
so on, through the whole of the chapter of accidents and cross-purposes.
There is an admirable description of this sort of infatuation with folly
and ruin in Madame D’Arblay’s account of Harrel in ‘Cecilia;’ and though
the picture is highly wrought and carried to the utmost length, yet I
maintain that the principle is common. I myself have known more than one
individual in the same predicament; and therefore cannot think that the
deviations from the line of strict prudence and wisdom are so rare or
trifling as the theory I am opposing represents them, or I must have
been singularly unfortunate in my acquaintance. Out of a score of
persons of this class I could mention several that have ruined their
fortunes out of mere freak, others that are in a state of dotage and
imbecility for fear of being robbed of all they are worth. The rest care
nothing about the matter. So that this boasted and unfailing attention
to the _main-chance_ resolves itself, when strong, into mad profusion or
griping penury, or if weak, is null and yields to other motives. Such is
the conclusion, to which my observation of life has led me: if I am
quite wrong, it is hard that in a world abounding in such characters I
should not have met with a single practical philosopher.[17]
A girl in a country-town resolves never to marry any one under a duke or
a lord. Good. This may be very well as an ebullition of spleen or
vanity; but is there much common sense or regard to her own satisfaction
in it? Were there any likelihood of her succeeding in her resolution,
she would not make it: for it is the very distinction to be attained
that piques her ambition, and leads her to gratify her conceit of
herself by affecting to look down on any lower matches. Let her suffer
ever so much mortification or chagrin in the prosecution of her scheme,
it only confirms her the more in it: the spirit of contradiction, and
the shame of owning herself defeated, increase with every new
disappointment and year of painful probation. At least this is the case
while there is any chance left. But what, after all, is this haughty and
ridiculous pretension founded on? Is it owing to a more commanding view
and a firmer grasp of consequences, or of her own interest? No such
thing: she is as much captivated by the fancied sound of ‘my lady,’ and
dazzled by the image of a coronet-coach, as the girl who marries a
footman is smit with his broad shoulders, laced coat, and rosy cheeks.
‘But why must I be always in extremes? Few misses make vows of celibacy
or marry their footmen.’ Take then the broad question:—Do they generally
marry from the convictions of the understanding, or make the choice that
is most likely to ensure their future happiness, or that they themselves
approve afterwards? I think the answer must be in the negative; and yet
love and marriage are among the weightiest and most serious concerns of
life. Mutual regard, good temper, good sense, good character, or a
conformity of tastes and dispositions, have notoriously and lamentably
little to say in it. On the contrary, it is most frequently those things
that pique and provoke opposition, instead of those which promise
concord and sympathy, that decide the choice and inflame the will by the
love of conquest or of overcoming difficulty. Or it is a complexion, or
a fine set of teeth, or air, or dress, or a fine person, or false
calves, or affected consequence, or a reputation for gallantry, or a
flow of spirits, or a flow of words, or forward coquetry, or assumed
indifference, something that appeals to the senses, the fancy, or to our
pride, and determines us to throw away our happiness for life. Neither
in this case, on which so much depends, are the _main-chance_ and our
real interest by any means the same thing.
‘Now, all ye ladies of fair Scotland,
And ladies of England that happy would prove,
Marry never for houses, nor marry for land,
Nor marry for nothing but only love.’[18]—_Old Ballad._
Or take the passion of love where it has other objects and consequences
in view. Is reason any match for the poison of this passion, where it
has been once imbibed? I might just as well be told that reason is a
cure for madness or the bite of a venomous serpent. Are not health,
fortune, friends, character, peace of mind, every thing sacrificed to
its idlest impulse? Are the instances rare, or are they not common and
tragical? The _main-chance_ does not serve the turn here. Does the
prospect of certain ruin break the fascination to its frail victim, or
does it not rather enhance and precipitate the result? Or does it not
render the conquest more easy and secure that the seducer has already
triumphed over and deserted a hundred other victims? A man _à bonnes
fortunes_ is the most irresistible personage in the lists of gallantry.
Take drunkenness again, that vice which till within these few years (and
even still) was fatal to the health, the constitution, the fortunes of
so many individuals, and the peace of so many families in Great Britain.
I would ask what remonstrance of friends, what lessons of experience,
what resolutions of amendment, what certainty of remorse and suffering,
however exquisite, would deter the confirmed sot (where the passion for
this kind of excitement had once become habitual and the immediate want
of it was felt) from indulging his propensity and taking his full swing,
notwithstanding the severe and imminent punishment to follow upon his
incorrigible excess? The consequence of not abstaining from his
favourite beverage is not doubtful and distant (a thing in the clouds)
but close at his side, staring him in the face, and felt perhaps in all
its aggravations the very morning, yet the recollection of this and of
the next day’s dawn is of no avail against the momentary craving and
headlong impulse given by the first application of the glass to his
lips. The present temptation is indeed heightened by the threatened
alternative. I know this as a rule, that the stronger the repentance,
the surer the relapse and the more hopeless the cure! The being
engrossed by the present moment, by the present feeling, whatever it be,
whether of pleasure or pain, is the evident cause of both. Few instances
have been heard of, of a final reformation on this head. Yet it is a
clear case; and reason, if it were that Giant that it is represented in
any thing but ledgers and books of accounts, would put down the abuse in
an instant. It is true, this infirmity is more particularly chargeable
to the English and to other Northern nations, and there has been a
considerable improvement among us of late years; but I suspect it is
owing to a change of manners, and to the opening of new sources of
amusement (without the aid of ardent spirits flung in to relieve the
depression of our animal spirits,) more than to the excellent treatises
which have been written against the ‘Use of Fermented Liquors,’ or to an
increasing, tender regard to our own comfort, health, and happiness in
the breast of individuals. We still find plenty of ways of tormenting
ourselves and sporting with the feelings of others! I will say nothing
of a passion for gaming here, as too obvious an illustration of what I
mean. It is more rare, and hardly to be looked on as epidemic with us.
But few that have dabbled in this vice have not become deeply involved,
and few (or none) that have done so have ever retraced their steps or
returned to sober calculations of the _main-chance_. The majority, it is
true, are not gamesters; but where the passion does exist, it completely
tyrannizes over and stifles the voice of common sense, reason, and
humanity. How many victims has the point of honour! I will not pretend
that, as matters stand, it may not be necessary to fight a duel, under
certain circumstances and on certain provocations, even in a prudential
point of view, (though this again proves how little the maxims and
practices of the world are regulated by a mere consideration of personal
safety and welfare)—but I do say that the rashness with which this
responsibility is often incurred, and the even seeking for trifling
causes of quarrel, shows any thing but a consistent regard to
self-interest as a general principle of action, or rather betrays a
total recklessness of consequences, when opposed to pique, petulance, or
passion.
Before I proceed to answer a principal objection (and indeed a
staggering one at first sight) I will mention here that I think it
strongly confirms my view of human nature, that men form their opinions
much more from prejudice than reason. The proof that they do so is that
they form such opposite ones, when the abstract premises and independent
evidence are the same. How few Calvinists become Lutherans! How few
Papists Protestants! How few Tories Whigs![19] Each shuts his eyes
equally to facts or arguments, and persists in the view of the subject
that custom, pride, and obstinacy dictate. Interest is no more regarded
than reason; for it is often at the risk both of life and fortune that
these opinions have been maintained, and it is uniformly when parties
have run highest and the strife has been deadliest that people have been
most forward to stake their existence and every thing belonging to them,
on some unintelligible dogma or article of an old-fashioned creed. Half
the wars and fightings, martyrdoms, persecutions, feuds, antipathies,
heart-burnings in the world have been about some distinction, ‘some
trick not worth an egg’—so ready are mankind to sacrifice their all to a
mere name! It may be urged, that the good of our souls or our welfare in
a future state of being is a rational and well-grounded motive for these
religious extravagances. And this is true, so far as religious zeal
falls in with men’s passions or the spirit of the times. A bigot was
formerly ready to cut his neighbour’s throat to go to Heaven, but not so
ready to reform his own life, or give up a single vice or gratification
for all the pains and penalties denounced upon it, and of which his
faith in Holy Church did not suffer him to doubt a moment!
But it is contended here, that in matters not of doctrinal speculation
but of private life and domestic policy, every one consults and
understands his own interest; that whatever other _hobbies_ he may have,
he minds this as the main object, and contrives to make both ends meet,
in spite of seeming inattention and real difficulties. ‘If we look
around us’ (says a shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman) ‘and take examples
from the neighbourhood in which we live, we shall find that allowing for
occasional exceptions, diversities and singularities, the _main-chance_
is still stuck to with rigid and unabated pertinacity—the accounts are
wound up and every thing is right at the year’s end, whatever freaks or
fancies may have intervened in the course of it. The business of life
goes on (which is the principal thing) and every man’s house stands on
its own bottom. This is the case in Nicholson-street, in the next street
to it, and in the next street to that, and in the whole of Edinburgh,
Scotland, and England to boot.’ This, I allow, is a _home-thrust_, and I
must parry it, how I can. It is a kind of heavy, broad-wheeled waggon of
an objection that makes a formidable, awkward appearance, and takes up
so much of the road, that I shall have a lucky escape if I can dash by
it in my light travelling gig without being upset or crushed to atoms.
The persons who in the present instance have the charge of it, in its
progress through the streets of Edinburgh, are a constitutional lawyer,
a political economist, an opposition editor, and an _ex-officio_
surveyor of the Customs—fearful odds against one poor metaphysician!
Their machine of human life, I confess, puts me a little in mind of
those square-looking caravans one sometimes meets on the road in which
they transport wild beasts from place to place; and dull, heavy, safe,
and flat as they look, the inmates continue their old habits, the
monkeys play their tricks, and the panthers lick their jaws for human
blood, though cramped and confined in their excursions. So the vices and
follies, when they cannot break loose, do their worst _inside_ this
formal conveyance, the _main-chance_. As this ovation is to pass up
High-street, for the honour of the Scottish capital, I should wish it to
stop at the shop-door of Mr. Bartholine Saddletree, to see if he is at
home or in the courts. Also, to inquire whether the suit of Peter
Peebles is yet ended; and to take the opinion of counsel, how many of
the Highland lairds or Scottish noblemen and gentlemen that were out in
the fifteen and the forty-five, perilled their lives and fortunes in the
good cause from an eye to the _main-chance_? The Baron of Bradwardine
would have scorned such a suggestion; nay, it would have been below
Balmawhapple or even Killancureit. But ‘the age of chivalry is gone, and
that of sophists, economists, and calculators has succeeded.’ I should
say that the risk, the secrecy, the possibility of the leaders having
their heads stuck on Temple-Bar, and their estates confiscated, were
among the foremost causes that inflamed their zeal and stirred their
blood to the enterprise. Hardship, danger, exile, death,—these words
‘smack of honour,’ more than the _main-chance_. The modern Scotch may be
loyal on this thriving principle: their ancestors found _their_ loyalty
a very losing concern. Yet they persevered in it till and long after it
became a desperate cause. But patriotism and loyalty (true or false) are
important and powerful principles in human affairs, though not always
selfish and calculating. Honour is one great standard-bearer and
puissant leader in the struggle of human life; and less than honour (a
nickname or a bugbear) is enough to set the multitude together by the
ears, whether in civil, religious, or private brawls. [But to return to
our Edinburgh shop-keepers, those practical models of wisdom, and
authentic epitomes of human nature. Say that by their ‘canny ways and
pawky looks’ they keep their names out of the ‘Gazette,’ yet still care
(not the less perhaps) mounts behind their counters, and sits in their
back-shops. A tradesman is not a bankrupt at the year’s end. But what
does it signify, if he is hen-pecked in the mean time, or quarrels with
his wife, or beats his apprentices, or has married a woman twice as old
as himself for her money, or has been jilted by his maid, or fuddles
himself every night, or is laying in an apoplexy by overeating himself,
or is believed by nobody, or is a furious Whig or Tory, or a knave, or a
fool, or one envious of the success of his neighbours, or dissatisfied
with his own, or surly, or eaten up with indolence and procrastination,
never easy but bashful and awkward in company (though with a vast desire
to shine) or has some personal defect or weak side on which the Devil is
sure to assail him, and the venting his spleen and irritability on
which, through some loop-hole or other, makes the real business and
torment of his life—that of his shop may go on as it pleases. Such is
the perfection of reason and the triumph of the sovereign good, where
there are no strong passions to disturb, or no great vices to sully it!
The humours collect, the will will have head, the petty passions
ferment, and we start some grievance or other, and hunt it down every
hour in the day, or the machine of _still-life_ could not go on even in
North Britain. But were I to grant the full force and extent of the
objection, I should still say that it does not bear upon my view of the
subject or general assertion, that reason is an unequal match for
passion. Business is a kind of gaoler or task-master, that keeps its
vassals in good order while they are under its eye, as the slave or
culprit performs his task with the whip hanging over him, and punishment
immediately to follow neglect; but the question is, what he would do
with his recovered freedom, or what course the mind will for the most
part pursue, when in the range of its general conduct it has its choice
to make between a distant, doubtful, sober, rational good (or _average_
state of being), and some one object of comparatively little value, that
strikes the senses, flatters our pride, gives scope to the imagination,
and has all the strength of passion and inclination on its side. The
_main-chance_ then is a considerable exception, but not a fair one or a
case in point, since it falls under a different head and line of
argument.] The fault of reason in general, (which takes in the _whole_
instead of _parts_,) is that objects, though of the utmost extent and
importance, are not defined and tangible. This fault cannot be found
with the pursuit of trade and commerce. It is not a mere dry, abstract,
undefined, speculative, however steady and well-founded conviction of
the understanding. It has other levers and pulleys to enforce it,
besides those of reason and reflection. As follows:—
1. The value of money is positive or specific. The interest in it is a
sort of mathematical interest, reducible to number and quantity. Ten is
always more than one; a part is never greater than the whole; the good
we seek or attain in this way has a technical denomination, and I do not
deny that in matters of strict calculation, the principle of calculation
will naturally bear great sway. The returns of profit and loss are
regular and mechanical, and the operations of business, or the
_main-chance_, are so too. But, commonly speaking, we judge by the
_degree_ of excitement, not by the ultimate quantity. Thus we prefer a
draught of nectar to the recovery of our health, [and are on most
occasions ready to exclaim,—
‘An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour.’]
Yet there is a point at which self-will and humour stop. A man will take
brandy, which is a _kind of slow poison_, but he will not take _actual_
poison, knowing it to be such, however slow the operation or bewitching
the taste; because here the effect is absolutely fixed and certain, not
variable, nor in the power of the imagination to elude or trifle with
it. I see no courage in battle, but in going on what is called the
_forlorn hope_.
2. Business is also an affair of habit: it calls for incessant and daily
application; and what was at first a matter of necessity to supply our
wants, becomes often a matter of necessity to employ our time. The man
of business wants work for his head; the labourer and mechanic for his
hands; so that the love of action, of difficulty and competition, the
stimulus of success or failure, is perhaps as strong an ingredient in
men’s ordinary pursuits as the love of gain. We find persons pursuing
science, or any _hobby-horsical_ whim or handicraft that they have taken
a fancy to, or persevering in a losing concern, with just the same
ardour and obstinacy. As to the choice of a pursuit in life, a man may
not be forward to engage in business, but being once in, does not like
to turn back amidst the pity of friends and the derision of enemies. How
difficult is it to prevent those who have a turn for any art or science
from going into these unprofitable pursuits! Nay, how difficult is it
often to prevent those who have no turn that way, but prefer starving to
a certain income! If there is one in a family brighter than the rest, he
is immediately designed for one of the learned professions. Really, the
dull and plodding people of the world have not much reason to boast of
their superior wisdom or numbers: they are in an involuntary majority!
3. The value of money is an _exchangeable_ value: that is, this pursuit
is available towards and convertible into a great many others. A person
is in want of money, and mortgages an estate, to throw it away upon a
round of entertainments and company. The passion or motive here is not a
hankering after money, but society, and the individual will ruin himself
for this object. Another, who has the same passion for show and a
certain style of living, tries to gain a fortune in trade to indulge it,
and only goes to work in a more round-about way. I remember a story of a
common mechanic at Manchester, who laid out the hard-earned savings of
the week in hiring a horse and livery-servant to ride behind him to
Stockport every Sunday, and to dine there at an ordinary like a
gentleman. The pains bestowed upon the _main-chance_ here was only a
cover for another object, which exercised a ridiculous predominance over
his mind. Money will purchase a horse, a house, a picture, leisure,
dissipation, or whatever the individual has a fancy for that is to be
purchased; but it does not follow that he is fond of all these, or of
whatever will promote his real interest, because he is fond of money,
but that he has a passion for some one of these objects, to which he
would probably sacrifice all the rest, and his own peace and happiness
into the bargain.
4. The _main-chance_ is an instrument of various passions, but is
directly opposed to none of them, with the single exception of indolence
or the _vis inertiæ_, which of itself is seldom strong enough to master
it, without the aid of some other incitement. A barrister sticks to his
duty as long as he has only his love of ease to prevent; but he flings
up his briefs, or neglects them, if he thinks he can make a figure in
Parliament. [A servant-girl stays in her place and does her work, though
perhaps lazy and slatternly, because no immediate temptation occurs
strong enough to interfere with the necessity of gaining her bread, but
she goes away with a bastard-child, because here passion and desire come
into play, though the consequence is that she loses not only her place,
but her character and every prospect in life.] No one flings away the
_main-chance_ without a motive, any more than he voluntarily walks into
the fire or breaks his neck out of window. A man must live; the first
step is a point of necessity: every man would live well; the second is a
point of luxury. The having, or even acquiring wealth does not prevent
our enjoying it in various ways. A man may give his mornings to
business, and his evenings to pleasure. There is no contradiction; nor
does he sacrifice his ruling passion by this, any more than the man of
letters by study, or the soldier by an attention to discipline. Reason
and passion are opposed, not passion and business. The sot, the glutton,
the debauchee, the gamester, must all have money, to make their own use
of it, and they may indulge all these passions and their avarice at the
same time. It is only when the last becomes the ruling passion that it
puts a prohibition on the others. In that case, every thing else is lost
sight of; but it is seldom carried to this length, or when it is, it is
far from being another name, either in its means or ends, for reason,
sense, or happiness, as I have already shown.
I have taken no notice hitherto of ambition or virtue, or scarcely of
the pursuits of fame or intellect. Yet all these are important and
respectable divisions of the map of human life. Who ever charged Mr.
Pitt with a want of common sense, because he did not die worth a plum?
Had it been proposed to Lord Byron to forfeit every penny of his estate,
or every particle of his reputation, would he have hesitated to part
with the former? Is there not a loss of character, a stain upon honour,
that is felt as a severer blow than any reverse of fortune? Do not the
richest heiresses in the city marry for a title, and think themselves
well off? Are there not patriots who think or dream all their lives
about their country’s good; philanthropists who rave about liberty and
humanity at a certain yearly loss? Are there not studious men, who never
once thought of bettering their circumstances? Are not the liberal
professions held more respectable than business, though less lucrative?
Might not most people do better than they do, but that they postpone
their interest to their indolence, their taste for reading, their love
of pleasure, or other pursuits? And is it not generally understood that
all men can make a fortune or succeed in the _main-chance_, who have but
that one idea in their heads?[20] Lastly, are there not those who pursue
or husband wealth for their own good, for the benefit of their friends
or the relief of the distressed? But as the examples are rare, and might
be supposed to make against myself, I shall not insist upon them. I
think I have said enough to vindicate or apologize for my first
position—
‘Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loaths—’
or if not to make good my ground, to march out with flying colours and
beat of drum!
SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_October and December, 1828._
_A._ For my part, I think Helvetius has made it clear that self-love is
at the bottom of all our actions, even of those which are apparently the
most generous and disinterested.
_B._ I do not know what you mean by saying that Helvetius has made this
clear, nor what you mean by self-love.
_A._ Why, was not he the first who explained to the world that in
gratifying others, we gratify ourselves; that though the result may be
different, the motive is really the same, and a selfish one; and that if
we had not more pleasure in performing what are called friendly or
virtuous actions than the contrary, they would never enter our thoughts?
_B._ Certainly he is no more entitled to this discovery (if it be one)
than you are. Hobbes and Mandeville long before him asserted the same
thing in the most explicit and unequivocal manner;[21] and Butler, in
the Notes and Preface to his Sermons, had also long before answered it
in the most satisfactory way.
_A._ Ay, indeed! pray how so?
_B._ By giving the _common sense_ answer to the question which I have
just asked of you.
_A._ And what is that? I do not exactly comprehend.
_B._ Why, that self-love means, both in common and philosophical speech,
the love _of_ self.
_A._ To be sure, _there needs no ghost to tell us that_.
_B._ And yet, simple as it is, both you and many great philosophers seem
to have overlooked it.
_A._ You are pleased to be obscure—unriddle for the sake of the vulgar.
_B._ Well then, Bishop Butler’s statement in the volume I have
mentioned——
_A._ May I ask, is it the author of the _Analogy_ you speak of?
_B._ The same, but an entirely different and much more valuable work.
His position is, that the arguments of the opposite party go to prove
that in all our motives and actions it is the individual indeed who
loves or is interested in _something_, but not in the smallest degree
(which yet seems necessary to make out the full import of the compound
‘sound significant,’ _self-love_) that that something is _himself_. By
self-love is surely implied not only that it is I who feel a certain
passion, desire, good-will, and so forth, but that I feel this good-will
towards myself—in other words, that I am both the person feeling the
attachment, and the object of it. In short, the controversy between
self-love and benevolence relates not to the person who loves, but to
the person beloved—otherwise, it is flat and puerile nonsense. There
must always be some one to feel the love, that’s certain, or else there
could be no love of one thing or another—so far there can be no question
that it is a given individual who feels, thinks, and acts in all
possible cases of feeling, thinking, and acting—‘there needs,’ according
to your own allusion, ‘no ghost come from the grave to tell us that’—but
whether the said individual in so doing always thinks _of_, feels _for_,
and acts _with a view to himself_, that is a very important question,
and the only real one at issue; and the very statement of which, in a
distinct and intelligible form, gives at once the proper and inevitable
answer to it. Self-love, to mean any thing, must have a double meaning,
that is, must not merely signify love, but love defined and directed in
a particular manner, having _self_ for its object, reflecting and
reacting upon _self_; but it is downright and intolerable trifling to
persist that the love or concern which we feel for another still has
self for its object, because it is we who feel it. The same sort of
quibbling would lead to the conclusion that when I am thinking of any
other person, I am notwithstanding thinking of myself, because it is _I_
who have his image in my mind.
_A._ I cannot, I confess, see the connection.
_B._ I wish you would point out the distinction. Or let me ask
you—Suppose you were to observe me looking frequently and earnestly at
myself in the glass, would you not be inclined to laugh, and say that
this was vanity?
_A._ I might be half-tempted to do so.
_B._ Well; and if you were to find me admiring a fine picture, or
speaking in terms of high praise of the person or qualities of another,
would you not set it down equally to an excess of coxcombry and
self-conceit?
_A._ How, in the name of common sense, should I do so?
_B._ Nay, how should you do otherwise upon your own principles? For if
sympathy with another is to be construed into self-love because it is I
who feel it, surely, by the same rule, my admiration and praise of
another must be resolved into self-praise and self-admiration, and I am
the whole time delighted with myself, to wit, with my own thoughts and
feelings, while I pretend to be delighted with another. Another’s limbs
are as much mine, who contemplate them, as his feelings.
_A._ Now, my good friend, you go too far: I can’t think you serious.
_B._ Do I not tell you that I have a most grave Bishop (equal to a whole
Bench) on my side?
_A._ What! is this illustration of the looking-glass and picture his? I
thought it was in your own far-fetched manner.
_B._ And why far-fetched?
_A._ Because nobody can think of calling the praise of another
self-conceit—the words have a different meaning in the language.
_B._ Nobody has thought of confounding them hitherto, and yet they sound
to me as like as selfishness and generosity. If our vanity can be
brought to admire others disinterestedly, I do not see but our
good-nature may be taught to serve them as disinterestedly. Grant me but
this, that self-love signifies not simply, ‘I love,’ but requires to
have this further addition, ‘I love _myself_.’ understood in order to
make sense or grammar of it, and I defy you to make one or the other of
Helvetius’s theory, if you will needs have it to be his. If, as Fielding
says, all our passions are selfish merely because they are _ours_, then
in hating another we must be said to hate ourselves, just as wisely as
in loving another, we are said to be actuated by self-love. I have no
patience with such foolery. I respect that fine old sturdy fellow
Hobbes, or even the acute pertinacious sophistry of Mandeville; but I do
not like the flimsy, self-satisfied repetition of an absurdity, which
with its originality has lost all its piquancy.
_A._ You have, I know, very little patience with others who differ from
you, nor are you a very literal reporter of the arguments of those who
happen to be on your side of the question. You were about to tell me the
substance of Butler’s answer to Helvetius’s theory, if we can let the
anachronism pass; and I have as yet only heard certain quaint and verbal
distinctions of your own. I must still think that the most disinterested
actions proceed from a selfish motive. A man feels distress at the sight
of a beggar, and he parts with his money to remove this uneasiness. If
he did not feel this distress in his own mind, he would take no steps to
relieve the other’s wants.
_B._ And pray, does he feel this distress in his own mind out of love to
himself, or solely that he may have the pleasure of getting rid of it?
The first _move_ in the game of mutual obligation is evidently a social,
not a selfish impulse, and I might rest the dispute here and insist upon
going no farther till this step is got over, but it is not necessary. I
have already told you the substance of Butler’s answer to this
common-place and plausible objection. He says, in his fine broad manly
and yet unpretending mode of stating a question, that a living being may
be supposed to be actuated either by mere sensations, having no
reference to any one else, or else that having an idea and foresight of
the consequences to others, he is influenced by and interested in those
consequences only in so far as they have a distinct connexion with his
own ultimate good, in both which cases, seeing that the motives and
actions have both their origin and end in self, they may and must be
properly denominated _selfish_. But where the motive is neither
physically nor morally selfish, that is, where the impulse to act is
neither excited by a physical sensation nor by a reflection on the
consequence to accrue to the individual, it must be hard to say in what
sense it can be called so, except in that sense already exploded,
namely, that which would infer that an impulse of any kind is selfish
merely because it acts upon some one, or that before we can entertain
disinterested sympathy with another, we must feel no sympathy at all.
Benevolence, generosity, compassion, friendship, &c. imply, says the
Bishop, that we take an immediate and unfeigned interest in the welfare
of others; that their pleasures give us pleasure; that their pains give
us pain, barely to know of them, and from no thought about ourselves.
But no! retort the advocates of self-love, this is not enough: before
any person can pretend to the title of benevolent, generous, and so on,
he must prove, that so far from taking the deepest and most heartfelt
interest in the happiness of others, he has no feeling on the subject,
that he is perfectly indifferent to their weal or woe; and then taking
infinite pains and making unaccountable sacrifices for their good
without caring one farthing about them, he might pass for heroic and
disinterested. But if he lets it appear he has the smallest good-will
towards them and acts upon it, he then becomes a merely selfish agent;
so that to establish a character for generosity, compassion, humanity,
&c. in any of his actions, he must first plainly prove that he never
felt the slightest twinge of any of these passions thrilling in his
bosom. This, according to my author, is requiring men to act not from
charitable motives, but from no motives at all. Such reasoning has not
an appearance of philosophy, but rather of drivelling weakness or of
tacit irony. For my part, I can conceive of no higher strain of
generosity than that which justly and truly says, _Nihil humani â me
alienum puto_—but, according to your modern French friends and my old
English ones, there is no difference between this and the most sordid
selfishness; for the instant a man takes an interest in another’s
welfare, he makes it his own, and all the merit and disinterestedness is
gone. ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he should give his life
for his friend.’ It must be rather a fanciful sort of self-love that at
any time sacrifices its own acknowledged and obvious interests for the
sake of another.
_A._ Not in the least. The expression you have just used explains the
whole mystery, and I think you must allow this yourself. The moment I
sympathise with another, I do in strictness make his interest my own.
The two things on this supposition become inseparable, and my
gratification is identified with his advantage. Every one, in short,
consults his particular taste and inclination, whatever may be its bias,
or acts from the strongest motive. Regulus, as Helvetius has so ably
demonstrated, would not have returned to Carthage, but that the idea of
dishonour gave him more uneasiness than the apprehension of a violent
death.
_B._ That is, had he not preferred the honour of his country to his own
interest. Surely, when self-love by all accounts takes so very wide a
range and embraces entirely new objects of a character so utterly
opposed to its general circumscribed and paltry routine of action, it
would be as well to designate it by some new and appropriate
appellation, unless it were meant, by the intervention of the old and
ambiguous term, to confound the important practical distinction which
subsists between the puny circle of a man’s physical sensations and
private interests and the whole world of virtue and honour, and thus to
bring back the last gradually and disingenuously within the verge of the
former. Things without names are unapt to take root in the human mind:
we are prone to reduce nature to the dimensions of language. If a
feeling of a refined and romantic character is expressed by a gross and
vulgar name, our habitual associations will be sure to degrade the first
to the level of the last, instead of conforming to a forced and
technical definition. But I beg to deny, not only that the objects in
this case are the same, but that the principle is similar.
_A._ Do you then seriously pretend that the end of sympathy is not to
get rid of the momentary uneasiness occasioned by the distress of
another?
_B._ And has that uneasiness, I again ask, its source in self-love? If
self-love were the only principle of action, we ought to receive no
uneasiness from the pains of others, we ought to be wholly exempt from
any such weakness: or the least that can be required to give the
smallest shadow of excuse to this exclusive theory is, that the instant
the pain was communicated by our foolish, indiscreet sympathy, we should
think of nothing but getting rid of it as fast as possible, by fair
means or foul, as a mechanical instinct. If the pain of sympathy, as
soon as it arose, was decompounded from the objects which gave it birth,
and acted upon the brain or nerves solely as a detached, desultory
feeling, or abstracted sense of uneasiness, from which the mind shrunk
with its natural aversion to pain, then I would allow that the impulse
in this case, having no reference to the good of another, and seeking
only to remove a present inconvenience from the individual, would still
be properly self-love: but no such process of abstraction takes place.
The feeling of compassion, as it first enters the mind, so it continues
to act upon it in conjunction with the idea of what another suffers;
refers every wish it forms or every effort it makes, to the removal of
pain from a fellow-creature, and is only satisfied when it believes this
end to be accomplished. It is not a blind, physical repugnance to pain,
as affecting ourselves, but rational or intelligible conception of it as
existing out of ourselves, that prompts and sustains our exertions in
behalf of humanity. Nor can it be otherwise, while man is the creature
of imagination and reason, and has faculties that implicate him (whether
he will or not) in the pleasures and pains of others, and bind up his
fate with theirs. Why, then, when an action or feeling is neither in its
commencement nor progress, nor ultimate objects, dictated by or subject
to the control of self-love, bestow the name where every thing but the
name is wanting?
_A._ I must give you fair warning, that in this last _tirade_ you have
more than once gone beyond my comprehension. Your distinctions are too
fine-drawn, and there is a want of relief in the expression. Are you not
getting back to what you describe as your _first manner_? Your present
style is more amusing. See if you cannot throw a few high lights into
that last argument!
_B._ _Un peu plus à l’Anglaise_—any thing to oblige! I say, then, it
appears to me strange that self-love should be asserted by any impartial
reasoner, (not the dupe of a play upon words), to be absolute and
undisputed master of the human mind, when compassion or uneasiness on
account of others enters it without leave and in spite of this
principle. What! to be instantly expelled by it without mercy, so that
it may still assert its pre-eminence? No; but to linger there, to hold
consultation with another principle, Imagination, which owes no
allegiance to self-interest, and to march out only under condition and
guarantee that the welfare of another is first provided for without any
special clause in its own favour. This is much as if you were to say and
swear, that though the bailiff and his man have taken possession of your
house, you are still the rightful owner of it.
_A._ And so I am.
_B._ Why, then, not turn out such unwelcome intruders without standing
upon ceremony?
_A._ You were too vague and abstracted before: now you are growing too
figurative. Always in extremes.
_B._ Give me leave for a moment, as you will not let me spin mere
metaphysical cobwebs.
_A._ I am patient.
_B._ Suppose that by sudden transformation your body were so contrived
that it could feel the actual sensations of another body, as if your
nerves had an immediate and physical communication; that you were
assailed by a number of objects you saw and knew nothing of before, and
felt desires and appetites springing up in your bosom for which you
could not at all account—would you not say that this addition of another
body made a material alteration in your former situation; that it called
for a new set of precautions and instincts to provide for its wants and
wishes? or would you persist in it that you were just where you were,
that no change had taken place in your being and interests, and that
your new body was in fact your old one, for no other reason than because
it was yours? To my thinking, the case would be quite altered by the
supererogation of such a new sympathetic body, and I should be for
dividing my care and time pretty equally between them.
_Captain C._ You mean that in that case you would have taken in partners
to the concern, as well as No. I.?
_B._ Yes; and my concern for No. II. would be something very distinct
from, and quite independent of, my original and hitherto exclusive
concern for No. I.
_A._ How very gross and vulgar! (whispering to D——, and then turning to
me, added,)—but why suppose an impossibility? I hate all such
incongruous and far-fetched illustrations.
_B._ And yet this very miracle takes place every day in the human mind
and heart, and you and your sophists would persuade us that it is
nothing, and would slur over its existence by a shallow misnomer. Do I
not by imaginary sympathy acquire a new interest (out of myself) in
others as much as I should on the former supposition by physical contact
or animal magnetism? and am I not compelled by this new law of my nature
(neither included in physical sensation nor a deliberate regard to my
own individual welfare) to consult the feelings and wishes of the new
social body of which I am become a member, often to the prejudice of my
own? The parallel seems to me exact, and I think the inference from it
unavoidable. I do not postpone a benevolent or friendly purpose to my
own personal convenience, or make it bend to it—
‘Letting _I should not_ wait upon _I would_,
Like the poor cat in the adage.’
The will is amenable not to our immediate sensibility but to reason and
imagination, which point out and enforce a line of duty very different
from that prescribed by self-love. The operation of sympathy or social
feeling, though it has its seat certainly in the mind of the individual,
is neither for his immediate behalf nor to his remote benefit, but is
constantly a diversion from both, and therefore, I contend, is not in
any sense selfish. The movements in my breast as much originate in, and
are regulated by, the _idea_ of what another feels, as if they were
governed by a chord placed there vibrating to another’s pain. If these
movements were mechanical, they would be considered as directed to the
good of another: it is odd, that because my bosom takes part and beats
in unison with them, they should become of a less generous character. In
the passions of hatred, resentment, sullenness, or even in low spirits,
we voluntarily go through a great deal of pain, because _such is our
pleasure_; or strictly, because certain objects have taken hold of our
imagination, and we cannot, or will not, get rid of the impression: why
should good-nature and generosity be the only feelings in which we will
not allow a little forgetfulness of ourselves? Once more. If self-love,
or each individual’s sensibility, sympathy, what you will, were like an
animalcule, sensitive, quick, shrinking instantly from whatever gave it
pain, seeking instinctively whatever gave it pleasure, and having no
other obligation or law of its existence, then I should be most ready to
acknowledge that this principle was in its nature, end, and origin,
selfish, slippery, treacherous, inert, inoperative but as an instrument
of some immediate stimulus, incapable of generous sacrifice or painful
exertion, and deserving a name and title accordingly, leading one to
bestow upon it its proper attributes. But the very reverse of all this
happens. The mind is tenacious of remote purposes, indifferent to
immediate feelings, which cannot consist with the nature of a rational
and voluntary agent. Instead of the animalcule swimming in pleasure and
gliding from pain, the principle of self-love is incessantly to the
imagination or sense of duty what the fly is to the spider—that fixes
its stings into it, involves it in its web, sucks its blood, and preys
upon its vitals! Does the spider do all this to please the fly? Just as
much as Regulus returned to Carthage and was rolled down a hill in a
barrel with iron spikes in it to please himself! The imagination or
understanding is no less the enemy of our pleasure than of our interest.
It will not let us be at ease till we have accomplished certain objects
with which we have ourselves no concern but as melancholy truths.
_A._ But the spider you have so quaintly conjured up is a different
animal from the fly. The imagination on which you lay so much stress is
a part of one’s-self.
_B._ I grant it: and for that very reason, self-love, or a principle
tending exclusively to our own immediate gratification or future
advantage, neither is nor can be the sole spring of action in the human
mind.
_A._ I cannot see that at all.
_D._ Nay, I think he has made it out better than usual.
_B._ Imagination is another name for an interest in things out of
ourselves, which must naturally run counter to our own. Self-love, for
so fine and smooth-spoken a gentleman, leads his friends into odd
scrapes. The situation of Regulus in a barrel with iron spikes in it was
not a very easy one: but, say the advocates of refined self-love, their
points were a succession of agreeable punctures in his sides, compared
with the stings of dishonour. But what bound him to this dreadful
alternative? Not self-love. When the pursuit of honour becomes
troublesome, ‘throw honour to the dogs—I’ll none of it!’ This seems the
true Epicurean solution. Philosophical self-love seems neither a
voluptuary nor an effeminate coward, but a cynic, and even a martyr, so
that I am afraid he will hardly dare show his face at Very’s, and that,
with this knowledge of his character, even the countenance of the Count
de Stutt-Tracy will not procure his admission to the saloons.
_A._ The Count de Stutt-Tracy, did you say? Who is he? I never heard of
him.
_B._ He is the author of the celebrated ‘Idéologie,’ which Bonaparte
denounced to the Chamber of Peers as the cause of his disasters in
Russia. He is equally hated by the Bourbons; and what is more
extraordinary still, he is patronised by Ferdinand VII. who settled a
pension of two hundred crowns a year on the translator of his works. He
speaks of Condillac as having ‘_created_ the science of Ideology,’ and
holds Helvetius for a true philosopher.
_A._ Which you do not! I think it a pity you should affect singularity
of opinion in such matters, when you have all the most sensible and
best-informed judges against you,
_B._ I am sorry for it too; but I am afraid I can hardly expect you with
me, till I have all Europe on my side, of which I see no chance while
the Englishman with his notions of solid beef and pudding holds fast by
his substantial identity, and the Frenchman with his lighter food and
air mistakes every shadowy impulse for himself.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_December, 1828._
_D._ You deny, I think, that personal identity, in the qualified way in
which you think proper to admit it, is any ground for the doctrine of
self-interest?
_B._ Yes, in an exclusive and absolute sense I do undoubtedly, that is,
in the sense in which it is affirmed by metaphysicians, and ordinarily
believed in.
_D._ Could you not go over the ground briefly, without entering into
technicalities?
_B._ Not easily: but stop me when I entangle myself in difficulties. A
person fancies, or feels habitually, that he has a positive, substantial
interest in his own welfare, (generally speaking) just as much as he has
in any actual sensation that he feels, because he is always and
necessarily the same self. What is his interest at one time is therefore
equally _his_ interest at all other times. This is taken for granted as
a self-evident proposition. Say he does not feel a particular benefit or
injury at this present moment, yet it is he who is to feel it, which
comes to the same thing. Where there is this continued identity of
person, there must also be a correspondent identity of interest. I have
an abstract, unavoidable interest in whatever can befall myself, which I
can have or feel in no other person living, because I am always under
every possible circumstance the self-same individual, and not any other
individual whatsoever. In short, this word _self_ (so closely do a
number of associations cling round it and cement it together) is
supposed to represent as it were a given concrete substance, as much one
thing as any thing in nature can possibly be, and the centre or
_substratum_ in which the different impressions and ramifications of my
being meet and are indissolubly knit together.
_A._ And you propose then seriously to take ‘this one entire and perfect
chrysolite,’ this self, this ‘precious jewel of the soul,’ this rock on
which mankind have built their faith for ages, and at one blow shatter
it to pieces with the sledge-hammer, or displace it from its hold in the
imagination with the wrenching-irons of metaphysics?
_B._ I am willing to use my best endeavours for that purpose.
_D._ You really ought: for you have the prejudices of the whole world
against you.
_B._ I grant the prejudices are formidable; and I should despair, did I
not think the reasons even stronger. Besides, without altering the
opinions of the whole world, I might be contented with the suffrages of
one or two intelligent people.
_D._ Nay, you will prevail by flattery, if not by argument.
_A._ That is something newer than all the rest.
_B._ ‘Plain truth,’ dear A——, ‘needs no flowers of speech.’
_D._ Let me rightly understand you. Do you mean to say that I am not C.
D. and that you are not W. B. or that we shall not both of us remain so
to the end of the chapter, without a possibility of ever changing places
with each other?
_B._ I am afraid, if you go to that, there is very little chance that
‘_I_ shall be ever mistaken for _you_.’
But with all this precise individuality and inviolable identity that you
speak of, let me ask, Are you not a little changed (less so, it is true,
than most people) from what you were twenty years ago? Or do you expect
to appear the same that you are now twenty years hence?
_D._ ‘No more of that if thou lovest me.’ We know what we are, but we
know not what we shall be.
_B._ A truce then; but be assured that whenever you happen to fling up
your part, there will be no other person found to attempt it after you.
_D._ Pray, favour us with your paradox without farther preface.
_B._ I will then try to match my paradox against your prejudice, which
as it is armed all in proof, to make any impression on it, I must, I
suppose, take aim at the rivets; and if I can hit them, if I do not
(round and smooth as it is) cut it into three pieces, and show that two
parts in three are substance and the third and principal part shadow,
never believe me again. Your real self ends exactly where your pretended
self-interest begins; and in calculating upon this principle as a solid,
permanent, absolute, self-evident truth, you are mocked with a name.
_D._ How so? I hear, but do not see.
_B._ You must allow that this identical, indivisible, ostensible self is
at any rate distinguishable into three parts,—the past, the present, and
future?
_D._ I see no particular harm in that.
_B._ It is nearly all I ask. Well then, I admit that you have a
peculiar, emphatic, incommunicable and exclusive interest or
fellow-feeling in the two first of these selves; but I deny resolutely
and unequivocally that you have any such natural, absolute, unavoidable,
and mechanical interest in the last self, or in your future being, the
interest you take in it being necessarily the offspring of understanding
and imagination (aided by habit and circumstances), like that which you
take in the welfare of others, and yet this last interest is the only
one that is ever the object of rational and voluntary pursuit, or that
ever comes into competition with the interests of others.
_D._ I am still to seek for the connecting clue.
_B._ I am almost ashamed to ask for your attention to a statement so
very plain that it seems to border on a truism. I have an interest of a
peculiar and limited nature in my present self, inasmuch as I feel my
actual sensations not simply in a degree, but in a way and by means of
faculties which afford me not the smallest intimation of the sensations
of others. I cannot possibly feel the sensations of any one else, nor
consequently take the slightest interest in them as such. I have no
nerves communicating with another’s brain, and transmitting to me either
the glow of pleasure or the agony of pain which he may feel at the
present moment by means of his senses. So far, therefore, namely, so far
as my present self or immediate sensations are concerned, I am cut off
from all sympathy with others. I stand alone in the world, a perfectly
insulated individual, necessarily and in the most unqualified sense
indifferent to all that passes around me, and that does not in the first
instance affect myself, for otherwise I neither have nor can have the
remotest consciousness of it as a matter of organic sensation, any more
than the mole has of light or the deaf adder of sounds.
_D._ Spoken like an oracle.
_B._ Again, I have a similar peculiar, mechanical, and untransferable
interest in my past self, because I remember and can dwell upon my past
sensations (even after the objects are removed) also in a way and by
means of faculties which do not give me the smallest insight into or
sympathy with the past feelings of others. I may conjecture and fancy
what those feelings have been; and so I do. But I have no _memory_ or
continued consciousness of what either of good or evil may have found a
place in their bosoms, no secret spring that touched vibrates to the
hopes and wishes that are no more, unlocks the chambers of the past with
the same assurance of reality, or identifies my feelings with theirs in
the same intimate manner as with those which I have already felt in my
own person. Here again, then, there is a real, undoubted, original and
positive foundation for the notion of self to rest upon; for in relation
to my former self and past feelings, I do possess a faculty which serves
to unite me more especially to my own being, and at the same time draws
a distinct and impassable line around that being, separating it from
every other. A door of communication stands always open between my
present consciousness and my past feelings, which is locked and barred
by the hand of Nature and the constitution of the human understanding
against the intrusion of any straggling impressions from the minds of
others. I can only see into their real history darkly and by reflection.
To sympathise with their joys or sorrows, and place myself in their
situation either now or formerly, I must proceed by guess-work, and
borrow the use of the common faculty of imagination. I am ready to
acknowledge, then, that in what regards the past as well as the present,
there is a strict metaphysical distinction between myself and others,
and that my personal identity so far, or in the close, continued,
inseparable connection between my past and present impressions, is
firmly and irrevocably established.
_D._ You go on swimmingly. So far all is sufficiently clear.
_B._ But now comes the rub: for beyond that point I deny that the
doctrine of personal identity or self-interest (as a consequence from
it) has any foundation to rest upon but a confusion of names and ideas.
It has none in the nature of things or of the human mind. For I have no
faculty by which I can project myself into the future, or hold the same
sort of palpable, tangible, immediate, and exclusive communication with
my future feelings, in the same manner as I am made to feel the present
moment by means of the senses, or the past moment by means of memory. If
I have any such faculty, expressly set apart for the purpose, name it.
If I have no such faculty, I can have no such interest. In order that I
may possess a proper personal identity so as to live, breathe, and feel
along the whole line of my existence in the same intense and intimate
mode, it is absolutely necessary to have some general medium or faculty
by which my successive impressions are blended and amalgamated together,
and to maintain and support this extraordinary interest. But so far from
there being any foundation for this merging and incorporating of my
future in my present self, there is no link of connection, no sympathy,
no reaction, no mutual consciousness between them, nor even a
possibility of any thing of the kind, in a mechanical and personal
sense. Up to the present point, the spot on which we stand, the doctrine
of personal identity holds good; hitherto the proud and exclusive
pretensions of self ‘come, but no farther.’ The rest is air, is nothing,
is a name, or but the common ground of reason and humanity. If I wish to
pass beyond this point and look into my own future lot, or anticipate my
future weal or woe before it has had an existence, I can do so by means
of the same faculties by which I enter into and identify myself with the
welfare, the being, and interests of others, but only by these. As I
have already said, I have no particular organ or faculty of
self-interest, in that case made and provided. I have no sensation of
what is to happen to myself in future, no presentiment of it, no
instinctive sympathy with it, nor consequently any abstract and
unavoidable self-interest in it. Now mark. It is only in regard to my
past and present being, that a broad and insurmountable barrier is
placed between myself and others: as to future objects, there is no
absolute and fundamental distinction whatever. But it is only these last
that are the objects of any rational or practical interest. The idea of
self properly attaches to objects of sense or memory, but these can
never be the objects of action or of voluntary pursuit, which must, by
the supposition, have an eye to future events. But with respect to these
the chain of self-interest is dissolved and falls in pieces by the very
necessity of our nature, and our obligations to self as a blind,
mechanical, unsociable principle are lost in the general law which binds
us to the pursuit of good as it comes within our reach and knowledge.
_A._ A most lame and impotent conclusion, I must say. Do you mean to
affirm that you have really the same interest in another’s welfare that
you have in your own?
_B._ I do not wish to assert any thing without proof. Will you tell me
if you have this particular interest in yourself what faculty is it that
gives it you—to what conjuration and what mighty magic it is owing—or
whether it is merely the name of self that is to be considered as a
proof of all the absurdities and impossibilities that can be drawn from
it?
_A._ I do not see that you have hitherto pointed out any.
_B._ What! not the impossibility that you should be another being, with
whom you have not a particle of fellow-feeling?
_A._ Another being! Yes, I know it is always impossible for me to be
another being.
_B._ Ay, or yourself either, without such a fellow-feeling, for it is
that which constitutes self. If not, explain to me what you mean by
self. But it is more convenient for you to let that magical sound lie
involved in the obscurity of prejudice and language. You will please to
take notice that it is not I who commence these hairbreadth distinctions
and special-pleading. I take the old ground of common sense and natural
feeling, and maintain that though in a popular, practical sense mankind
are strongly swayed by self-interest, yet in the same ordinary sense
they are also governed by motives of good-nature, compassion,
friendship, virtue, honour, &c. Now all this is denied by your modern
metaphysicians, who would reduce every thing to abstract self-interest,
and exclude every other mixed motive or social tie in a strict,
philosophical sense. They would drive me from my ground by scholastic
subtleties and newfangled phrases; am I to blame then if I take them at
their word, and try to foil them at their own weapons? Either stick to
the unpretending _jog-trot_ notions on the subject, or if you are
determined to refine in analysing words and arguments, do not be angry
if I follow the example set me, or even go a little farther to arrive at
the truth. Shall we proceed on this understanding?
_A._ As you please.
_B._ We have got so far then (if I mistake not, and if there is not some
flaw in the argument which I am unable to detect) that the past and
present (which alone can appeal to our selfish faculties) are not the
objects of action, and that the future (which can alone be the object of
practical pursuit) has no particular claim or hold upon self. All
action, all passion, all morality and self-interest, is prospective.
_A._ You have not made that point quite clear. What then is meant by a
present interest, by the gratification of the present moment, as opposed
to a future one?
_B._ Nothing, in a strict sense; or rather in common speech, you mean a
near one, the interest of the next moment, the next hour, the next day,
the next year, as it happens.
_A._ What! would you have me believe that I snatch my hand out of the
flame of a candle from a calculation of future consequences?
_D._ (_laughing._) A. had better not meddle with that question. B. is in
his element there. It is his old and favourite illustration.
_B._ Do you not snatch your hand out of the fire to procure ease from
pain?
_A._ No doubt, I do.
_B._ And is not this case subsequent to the act, and the act itself to
the feeling of pain, which caused it?
_A._ It may be so; but the interval is so slight that we are not
sensible of it.
_B._ Nature is nicer in her distinctions than we. Thus you could not
lift the food to your mouth, but upon the same principle. The viands are
indeed tempting, but if it were the sight or smell of these alone that
attracted you, you would remain satisfied with them. But you use means
to ends, neither of which exist till you employ or produce them, and
which would never exist if the understanding which foresees them did not
run on before the actual objects and purvey to appetite. If you say it
is habit, it is partly so; but that habit would never have been formed,
were it not for the connection between cause and effect, which always
takes place in the order of time, or of what Hume calls _antecedents_
and _consequents_.
_A._ I confess I think this a mighty microscopic way of looking at the
subject.
_B._ Yet you object equally to more vague and sweeping generalities. Let
me, however, endeavour to draw the knot a little tighter, as it has a
considerable weight to bear—no less, in my opinion, than the whole world
of moral sentiments. All voluntary action must relate to the future: but
the future can only exist or influence the mind as an object of
imagination and forethought; therefore the motive to voluntary action,
to all that we seek or shun, must be in all cases _ideal_ and
problematical. The thing itself which is an object of pursuit can never
co-exist with the motives which make it an object of pursuit. No one
will say that the past can be an object either of prevention or pursuit.
It may be a subject of involuntary regrets, or may give rise to the
starts and flaws of passion; but we cannot set about seriously recalling
or altering it. Neither can that which at present exists, or is an
object of sensation, be at the same time an object of action or of
volition, since if it _is_, no volition or exertion of mine can for the
instant make it to be other than it is. I can make it _cease_ to be
indeed, but this relates to the future, to the supposed non-existence of
the object, and not to its actual impression on me. For a thing to be
_willed_, it must necessarily not be. Over my past and present
impressions my will has no control: they are placed, according to the
poet, beyond the reach of fate, much more of human means. In order that
I may take an effectual and consistent interest in any thing, that it
may be an object of hope or fear, of desire or dread, it must be a thing
still to come, a thing still in doubt, depending on circumstances and
the means used to bring about or avert it. It is my will that determines
its existence or the contrary (otherwise there would be no use in
troubling oneself about it); it does not itself lay its peremptory,
inexorable mandates on my will. For it is as yet (and must be in order
to be the rational object of a moment’s deliberation) a nonentity, a
possibility merely and it is plain that nothing can be the cause of
nothing. That which is not, cannot act, much less can it act
mechanically, physically, all-powerfully. So far is it from being true
that a real and practical interest in any thing are convertible terms,
that a practical interest can never by any possible chance be a real
one, that is, excited by the presence of a real object or by mechanical
sympathy. I cannot assuredly be induced by a present object to take
means to make it exist—it can be no more than present to me—or if it is
past, it is too late to think of recovering the occasion or preventing
it now. But the future, the future is all our own; or rather it belongs
equally to others. The world of action then, of business or pleasure, of
self-love or benevolence, is not made up of solid materials, moved by
downright, solid springs; it is essentially a void, an unreal mockery,
both in regard to ourselves and others, except as it is filled up,
animated, and set in motion by human thoughts and purposes. The
ingredients of passion, action, and properly of interest are never
positive, palpable matters-of-fact, concrete existences, but symbolical
representations of events lodged in the bosom of futurity, and teaching
us, by timely anticipation and watchful zeal, to build up the fabric of
our own or others’ future weal.
_A._ Do we not sometimes plot their woe with at least equal good-will?
_B._ Not much oftener than we are accessory to our own.
_A._ I must say that savours more to me of an antithesis than of an
answer.
_B._ For once, be it so.
_A._ But surely there is a difference between a real and an imaginary
interest? A history is not a romance.
_B._ Yes; but in this sense the feelings and interests of others are in
the end as real, as much matters of fact as mine or yours can be. The
history of the world is not a romance, though you and I have had only a
small share in it. You would turn every thing into autobiography. The
interests of others are no more chimerical, visionary, fantastic than my
own, being founded in truth, and both are brought home to my bosom in
the same way by the force of imagination and sympathy.
_D._ But in addition to all this sympathy that you make such a rout
about, it is _I_ who am to feel a real, downright interest in my own
future good, and I shall feel no such interest in another person’s. Does
not this make a wide, nay a total difference in the case? Am I to have
no more affection for my own flesh and blood than for another’s?
_B._ This would indeed make an entire difference in the case, if your
interest in your own good were founded in your affection for yourself,
and not your affection for yourself in your attachment to your own good.
If you were attached to your own good merely because it was _yours_, I
do not see why you should not be equally attached to your own ill—both
are equally yours! Your own person or that of others would, I take it,
be alike indifferent to you, but for the degree of sympathy you have
with the feelings of either. Take away the sense or apprehension of
pleasure and pain, and you would care no more about yourself than you do
about the hair of your head or the paring of your nails, the parting
with which gives you no sensible uneasiness at the time or on
after-reflection.
_D._ But up to the present moment you allow that I have a particular
interest in my proper self. Where then am I to stop, or how draw the
line between my real and my imaginary identity?
_B._ The line is drawn for you by the nature of things. Or if the
difference between reality and imagination is so small that you cannot
perceive it, it only shows the strength of the latter. Certain it is
that we can no more anticipate our future being than we change places
with another individual, except in an _ideal_ and figurative sense. But
it is just as impossible that I should have an actual sensation of and
interest in my future feelings as that I should have an actual sensation
of and interest in what another feels at the present instant. An
essential and irreconcileable difference in our primary faculties
forbids it. The future, were it the next moment, were it an object
nearest and dearest to our hearts, is a dull blank, opaque, impervious
to sense as an object close to the eye of the blind, did not the ray of
reason and reflection enlighten it. We can never say to its fleeting,
painted essence, ‘Come, let me clutch thee!’ it is a thing of air, a
phantom that flies before us, and we follow it, and with respect to all
but our past and present sensations, which are no longer any thing to
action, we totter on the brink of nothing. That self which we project
before us into it, that we make our proxy or representative, and empower
to embody, and transmit back to us all our real, substantial interests
before they have had an existence, except in our imaginations, is but a
shadow of ourselves, a bundle of habits, passions, and prejudices, a
body that falls in pieces at the touch of reason or the approach of
inquiry. It is true, we do build up such an imaginary self, and a
proportionable interest in it; we clothe it with the associations of the
past and present, we disguise it in the drapery of language, we add to
it the strength of passion and the warmth of affection, till we at
length come to class our whole existence under one head, and fancy our
future history a solid, permanent, and actual continuation of our
immediate being, but all this only proves the force of imagination and
habit to build up such a structure on a merely partial foundation, and
does not alter the true nature and distinction of things. On the same
foundation are built up nearly as high natural affection, friendship,
the love of country, of religion, &c. But of this presently. What shows
that the doctrine of self-interest, however high it may rear its head,
or however impregnable it may seem to attack, is a mere ‘contradiction,’
‘In terms a fallacy, in fact a fiction,’
is this single consideration, that we never know what is to happen to us
beforehand, no, not even for a moment, and that we cannot so much as
tell whether we shall be alive a year, a month, or a day hence. We have
no presentiment of what awaits us, making us feel the future in the
instant. Indeed such an insight into futurity would be inconsistent with
itself, or we must become mere passive instruments in the hands of fate.
A house may fall on my head as I go from this, I may be crushed to
pieces by a carriage running over me, or I may receive a piece of news
that is death to my hopes before another four-and-twenty hours are
passed over, and yet I feel nothing of the blow that is thus to stagger
and stun me. I laugh and am well. I have no warning given me either of
the course or the consequence (in truth if I had, I should, if possible,
avoid it). This continued self-interest that watches over all my
concerns alike, past, present, and future, and concentrates them all in
one powerful and invariable principle of action, is useless here, leaves
me at a loss at my greatest need, is torpid, silent, dead, and I have no
more consciousness of what so nearly affects me, and no more care about
it, (till I find out my danger by other and natural means,) than if no
such thing were ever to happen, or were to happen to the Man in the
Moon.
‘And coming events cast their shadows before.’
This beautiful line is not verified in the ordinary prose of life. That
it is not, is a staggering consideration for your fine, practical,
instinctive, abstracted, comprehensive, uniform principle of
self-interest. Don’t you think so, D——?
_D._ I shall not answer you. Am I to give up my existence for an idle
sophism? You heap riddle upon riddle; but I am mystery-proof. I still
feel my personal identity as I do the chair I sit on, though I am
enveloped in a cloud of smoke and words. Let me have your answer to a
plain question.—Suppose I were actually to see a coach coming along and
I was in danger of being run over, what I want to know is, should I not
try to save myself sooner than any other person?
_B._ No, you would first try to save a sister, if she were with you.
_A._ Surely that would be a very rare instance of self, though I do not
deny it.
_B._ I do not think so. I believe there is hardly any one who does not
prefer some one to themselves. For example, let us look into Waverley.
_A._ Ay, that is the way that you take your ideas of philosophy, from
novels and romances, as if they were sound evidence.
_B._ If my conclusions are as true to nature as my premises, I shall be
satisfied. Here is the passage I was going to quote: ‘I was only ganging
to say, my lord,’ said Evan, in what he meant to be an insinuating
manner, ‘that if your excellent honour and the honourable court would
let Vich Ian Vohr go free just this once and let him gae back to France
and not trouble King George’s government again, that any six o’ the very
best of his clan will be willing to be justified in his stead; and if
you’ll just let me gae down to Glennaquoich, I’ll fetch them up to ye
myself to head or hang, and you may begin with me the very first
man.’[22]
_A._ But such instances as this are the effect of habit and strong
prejudice. We can hardly argue from so barbarous a state of society.
_B._ Excuse me there. I contend that our preference of ourselves is just
as much the effect of habit, and very frequently a more unaccountable
and unreasonable one than any other.
_A._ I should like to hear how you can possibly make that out.
_B._ If you will not condemn me before you hear what I have to say, I
will try. You allow that D——, in the case we have been talking of, would
perhaps run a little risk for you or me; but if it were a perfect
stranger, he would get out of the way as fast as his legs would carry
him, and leave the stranger to shift for himself.
_A._ Yes; and does not that overturn your whole theory?
_B._ It would if my theory were as devoid of common sense as you are
pleased to suppose; that is, if because I deny an original and absolute
distinction in nature (where there is no such thing,) it followed that I
must deny that circumstances, intimacy, habit, knowledge, or a variety
of incidental causes could have any influence on our affections and
actions. My inference is just the contrary. For would you not say that
D—— cared little about the stranger for this plain reason, that he knew
nothing about him?
_A._ No doubt.
_B._ And he would care rather more about you and me, because he knows
more about us?
_A._ Why yes, it would seem so.
_B._ And he would care still more about a sister, (according to the same
supposition) because he would be still better acquainted with her, and
had been more constantly with her?
_A._ I will not deny it.
_B._ And it is on the same principle (generally speaking) that a man
cares most of all about himself, because he knows more about himself
than about any body else, that he is more in the secret of his own most
intimate thoughts and feelings, and more in the habit of providing for
his own wants and wishes, which he can anticipate with greater
liveliness and certainty than those of others, from being more nearly
‘made and moulded of things past.’ The poetical fiction is rendered
easier and assisted by my acquaintance with myself, just as it is by the
ties of kindred or habits of friendly intercourse. There is no farther
approach made to the doctrines of self-love and personal identity.
_D._ E., here is B. trying to persuade me I am not myself.
_E._ Sometimes you are not.
_D._ But he says that I never am.—Or is it only that I am not to be so?
_B._ Nay, I hope ‘thou art to continue, thou naughty varlet’—
‘Here and hereafter, if the last may be!’
You have been yourself (nobody like you) for the last forty years of
your life: you would not prematurely stuff the next twenty into the
account, till you have had them fairly out?
_D._ Not for the world, I have too great an affection for them.
_B._ Yet I think you would have less if you did not look forward to pass
them among old books, old friends, old haunts. If you were cut off from
all these, you would be less anxious about what was left of yourself.
_D._ I would rather be the _Wandering Jew_ than not be at all.
_B._ Or you would not be the person I always took you for.
_D._ Does not this willingness to be the Wandering Jew rather than
nobody, seem to indicate that there is an abstract attachment to self,
to the bare idea of existence, independently of circumstances or habit?
_B._ It must be a very loose and straggling one. You mix up some of your
old recollections and favourite notions with your self elect, and
indulge them in your new character, or you would trouble yourself very
little about it. If you do not come in in some shape or other, it is
merely saying that you would be sorry if the Wandering Jew were to
disappear from the earth, however strictly he may have hitherto
maintained his _incognito_.
_D._ There is something in that; and as well as I remember there is a
curious but exceedingly mystical illustration of this point in an
original Essay of yours which I have read and spoken to you about.
_B._ I believe there is; but A—— is tired of making objections, and I of
answering them to no purpose.
_D._ I have the book in the closet, and if you like, we will turn to the
place. It is after that burst of enthusiastic recollection (the only one
in the book) that Southey said at the time was something between the
manner of Milton’s prose-works and Jeremy Taylor.
_B._ Ah! I as little thought then that I should ever be set down as a
florid prose-writer as that he would become poet-laureat!
_J. D._ here took the volume from his brother, and read the following
passage from it.
‘I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by
any thing I could add on the subject, as by relating the manner in which
it first struck me. There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker
which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the
conqueror and hero—milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper
delight. And though the shouts of multitudes do not hail his
success—though gay trophies, though the sounds of music, the glittering
of armour, and the neighing of steeds do not mingle with his joy, yet
shall he not want monuments and witnesses of his glory—the deep forest,
the willowy brook, the gathering clouds of winter, or the silent gloom
of his own chamber, “faithful remembrancers of his high endeavour, and
his glad success,” that, as time passes by him with unreturning wing,
still awaken the consciousness of a spirit patient, indefatigable in the
search of truth, and the hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of
other men. I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabaud (the
author of the “System of Nature”) has put into the mouth of a supposed
Atheist at the last judgment; and was afterwards led on, by some means
or other to consider the question, whether it could properly be said to
be an act of virtue in any one to sacrifice his own final happiness to
that of any other person or number of persons, if it were possible for
the one ever to be made the price of the other? Suppose it were my own
case—that it were in my power to save twenty other persons by
voluntarily consenting to suffer for them: Why should I not do a
generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the
consequence to myself the Lord knows when?
‘The reason why a man should prefer his own future welfare to that of
others is, that he has a necessary, absolute interest in the one, which
he cannot have in the other—and this, again, is a consequence of his
being always the same individual, of his continued identity with
himself. The difference, I thought, was this, that however insensible I
may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time comes
I shall feel differently about it. I shall then judge of it from the
actual impression of the object, that is, truly and certainly; and as I
shall still be conscious of my past feelings, and shall bitterly regret
my own folly and insensibility, I ought, as a rational agent, to be
determined now by what I shall then wish I had done, when I shall feel
the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this
continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an immediate
interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes me at all
times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As, therefore, this
consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again at
all—But stop—as I must be conscious of my past feelings to be myself,
and as this conscious being will be myself, how if that consciousness
should be transferred to some other being? How am I to know that I am
not imposed upon by a false claim of identity? But that is ridiculous,
because you will have no other self than that which arises from this
very consciousness. Why, then, this self may be multiplied in as many
different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same
consciousness; which, if it can be renewed at will in any one instance,
may clearly be so in a hundred others. Am I to regard all these as
equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must
fix upon some one of them in particular as my representative and other
self, how am I to be determined in my choice? Here, then, I saw an end
put to my speculations about absolute self-interest and personal
identity. I saw plainly that the consciousness of my own feelings, which
is made the foundation of my continued interest in them, could not
extend to what had never been, and might never be; that my identity with
myself must be confined to the connection between my past and present
being; that with respect to my future feelings or interests, they could
have no communication with, or influence over, my present feelings and
interests, merely because they were future; that I shall be hereafter
affected by the recollection of my past feelings and actions; and my
remorse be equally heightened by reflecting on my past folly and
late-earned wisdom, whether I am really the same being, or have only the
same consciousness renewed in me; but that to suppose that this remorse
can re-act in the reverse order on my present feelings, or give me an
immediate interest in my future feelings, before they exist, is an
express contradiction in terms. It can only affect me as an imaginary
idea, or an idea of truth. But so may the interests of others; and the
question proposed was, whether I have not some real, necessary, absolute
interest in whatever relates to my future being, in consequence of my
immediate connection with myself—independently of the general impression
which all positive ideas have on my mind. How, then, can this pretended
unity of consciousness which is only reflected from the past—which makes
me so little acquainted with the future that I cannot even tell for a
moment how long it will be continued, whether it will be entirely
interrupted by or renewed in me after death, and which might be
multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings, and prolonged by
complicated sufferings, without my being any the wiser for it,—how, I
say, can a principle of this sort identify my present with my future
interests, and make me as much a participator in what does not at all
affect me as if it were actually impressed on my senses? It is plain, as
this conscious being may be decompounded, entirely destroyed, renewed
again, or multiplied in a great number of beings, and as, whichever of
these takes place, it cannot produce the least alteration in my present
being—that what I am does not depend on what I am to be, and that there
is no communication between my future interests, and the motives by
which my present conduct must be governed. This can no more be
influenced by what may be my future feelings with respect to it, than it
will then be possible for me to alter my past conduct by wishing that I
had acted differently. I cannot, therefore, have a principle of active
self-interest arising out of the immediate connection between my present
and future self, for no such connection exists, or is possible. I am
what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests,
must be determined by causes already existing and acting, and are
absolutely independent of the future. Where there is not an
intercommunity of feelings, there can be no identity of interests. My
personal interest in any thing must refer either to the interest excited
by the actual impression of the object, which cannot be felt before it
exists, and can last no longer than while the impression lasts; or it
may refer to the particular manner in which I am mechanically affected
by the idea of my own impressions in the absence of the object. I can,
therefore, have no proper personal interest in my future impressions,
since neither my ideas of future objects, nor my feelings with respect
to them, can be excited either directly or indirectly by the impressions
themselves, or by any ideas or feelings accompanying them, without a
complete transposition of the order in which causes and effects follow
one another in nature. The only reason for my preferring my future
interest to that of others, must arise from my anticipating it with
greater warmth of present imagination. It is this greater liveliness and
force with which I can enter into my future feelings, that in a manner
identifies them with my present being; and this notion of identity being
once formed, the mind makes use of it to strengthen its habitual
propensity, by giving to personal motives a reality and absolute truth
which they can never have. Hence it has been inferred that my real,
substantial interest in any thing, must be derived in some indirect
manner from the impression of the object itself, as if that could have
any sort of communication with my present feelings, or excite any
interest in my mind but by means of the imagination, which is naturally
affected in a certain manner by the prospect of future good or evil.’
_J. D._ ‘This is the strangest tale that e’er I heard,
_C. D._ ‘It is the strangest fellow, brother John!’
THE FREE ADMISSION
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_July, 1830._
A free Admission is the _lotos_ of the mind: the leaf in which your name
is inscribed as having the privileges of the _entrée_ for the season is
of an oblivious quality—an antidote for half the ills of life. I speak
here not of a purchased but of a gift-ticket, an emanation of the
generosity of the Managers, a token of conscious desert. With the first
you can hardly bring yourself to go to the theatre; with the last, you
cannot keep away. If you have paid five guineas for a free admission for
the season, this _free admission_ turns to a mere slavery. You seem to
have done a foolish thing, and to have committed an extravagance under
the plea of economy. You are struck with remorse. You are impressed with
a conviction that pleasure is not to be bought. You have paid for your
privilege in the lump, and you receive the benefit in driblets. The five
pounds you are out of pocket does not meet with an adequate compensation
the first night, or on any single occasion—you must come again, and use
double diligence to strike a balance to make up your large arrears;
instead of an obvious saving, it hangs as a dead-weight on your
satisfaction all the year; and the improvident price you have paid for
them kills every ephemeral enjoyment, and poisons the flattering
illusions of the scene. You have incurred a debt, and must go every
night to redeem it; and as you do not like being tied to the oar, or
making a toil of a pleasure, you stay away altogether; give up the
promised luxury as a bad speculation; sit sullenly at home, or bend your
loitering feet in any other direction; and putting up with the first
loss, resolve never to be guilty of the like folly again. But it is not
thus with the possessor of a Free Admission, truly so called. His is a
pure pleasure, a clear gain. He feels none of these irksome qualms and
misgivings. He marches to the theatre like a favoured lover; if he is
compelled to absent himself, he feels all the impatience and compunction
of a prisoner. The portal of the Temple of the Muses stands wide open to
him, closing the vista of the day—when he turns his back upon it at
night with steps gradual and slow, mingled with the common crowd, but
conscious of a virtue which they have not, he says, ‘I shall come again
to-morrow!’ In passing through the streets, he casts a sidelong,
careless glance at the playbills: he reads the papers chiefly with a
view to see what is the play for the following day, or the ensuing week.
If it is something new, he is glad; if it is old, he is resigned—but he
goes in either case. His steps bend mechanically that way—pleasure
becomes a habit, and habit a duty—he fulfils his destiny—he walks
deliberately along Long-acre (you may tell a man going to the play, and
whether he pays or has a free admission)—quickens his pace as he turns
the corner of Bow-street, and arrives breathless and in haste at the
welcome spot, where on presenting himself, he receives a passport that
is a release from care, thought, toil, for the evening, and wafts him
into the regions of the blest! What is it to him how the world turns
round if the play goes on; whether empires rise or fall, so that Covent
Garden stands its ground? Shall he plunge into the void of politics,
that volcano burnt-out with the cold, sterile, sightless lava, hardening
all around? or con over the registers of births, deaths, and marriages,
when he may be present at Juliet’s wedding, and gaze on Juliet’s tomb?
or shall he wonder at the throng of coaches in Regent-street, when he
can feast his eyes with the coach (the fairy-vision of his childhood) in
which Cinderella rides to the ball? Here (by the help of that _Open
Sessame!_ a Free Admission), ensconced in his favourite niche, looking
from the ‘loop-holes of retreat’ in the second circle, he views the
pageant of the world played before him; melts down years to moments;
sees human life, like a gaudy shadow, glance across the stage; and here
tastes of all earth’s bliss, the sweet without the bitter, the honey
without the sting, and plucks ambrosial fruits and amaranthine flowers
(placed by the enchantress Fancy within his reach,) without having to
pay a tax for it at the time, or repenting of it afterwards. ‘He is all
ear and eye, and drinks in sounds or sights that might create a soul
under the ribs of death.’ ‘The fly,’ says Gay, ‘that sips treacle, is
lost in the sweets’: so he that has a free admission forgets every thing
else. Why not? It is the chief and enviable transfer of his being from
the real to the unreal world, and the changing half of his life into a
dream. ‘Oh! leave me to my repose,’ in my beloved corner at Covent
Garden Theatre! This (and not ‘the arm-chair at an inn,’ though that
too, at other times, and under different circumstances, is not without
its charms,) is to me ‘the throne of felicity.’ If I have business that
would detain me from this, I put it off till the morrow; if I have
friends that call in just at the moment, let them go away under pain of
bearing my maledictions with them. What is there in their conversation
to atone to me for the loss of one quarter of an hour at the ‘witching
time of night?’ If it is on indifferent subjects, it is flat and
insipid; if it grows animated and interesting, it requires a painful
effort, and begets a feverish excitement. But let me once reach, and
fairly establish myself in this favourite seat, and I can bid a gay
defiance to mischance, and leave debts and duns, friends and foes,
objections and arguments, far behind me. I would, if I could, have it
surrounded with a balustrade of gold, for it has been to me a palace of
delight. There golden thoughts unbidden betide me, and golden visions
come to me. There the dance, the laugh, the song, the scenic deception
greet me; there are wafted Shakspear’s winged words, or Otway’s
plaintive lines; and there how often have I heard young Kemble’s voice,
trembling at its own beauty, and prolonging its liquid tones, like the
murmur of the billowy surge on sounding shores! There I no longer
torture a sentence or strain a paradox: the mind is full without an
effort, pleased without asking why. It inhales an atmosphere of joy, and
is steeped in all the luxury of woe. To show how much sympathy has to do
with the effect, let us suppose any one to have a free admission to the
rehearsals of a morning, what mortal would make use of it? One might as
well be at the bottom of a well, or at the top of St. Paul’s for any
pleasure we should derive from the finest tragedy or comedy. No, a play
is nothing without an audience, it is a satisfaction too great and too
general not to be shared with others. But reverse this cold and
comfortless picture—let the eager crowd beset the theatre-doors ‘like
bees in spring-time, when the sun with Taurus rides’—let the boxes be
filled with innocence and beauty like beds of lilies on the first night
of Isabella or Belvidera, see the flutter, the uneasy delight of
expectation, see the big tear roll down the cheek of sensibility as the
story proceeds—let us listen to the deep thunder of the pit, or catch
the gallery’s shout at some true master-stroke of passion; and we feel
that a thousand hearts are beating in our bosoms, and hail the sparkling
illusion reflected in a thousand eyes. The stage has, therefore, been
justly styled ‘a discipline of humanity’; for there is no place where
the social principle is called forth with such strength and harmony, by
a powerful interest in a common object. A crowd is everywhere else
oppressive; but the fuller the play-house, the more intimately and
cordially do we sympathise with every individual in it. Empty benches
have as bad an effect on the spectator as on the players. This is one
reason why so many mistakes are made with respect to plays and players,
ere they come before the public. The taste is crude and uninformed till
it is ripened by the blaze of lighted lamps and the sunshine of happy
faces: the cold, critical faculty, the judgment of Managers and
Committees asks the glow of sympathy and the buzz of approbation to
prompt and guide it. We judge in a crowd with the sense and feelings of
others; and from the very strength of the impression, fancy we should
have come to the same unavoidable conclusion had we been left entirely
to ourselves. Let any one try the experiment by reading a manuscript
play, or seeing it acted—or by hearing a candidate for the stage
rehearse behind the scenes, or _top_ his part after the orchestra have
performed their fatal prelude. Nor is the air of a play-house favourable
only to social feeling—it aids the indulgence of solitary musing. The
brimming cup of joy or sorrow is full; but it runs over to other
thoughts and subjects. We can there (nowhere better) ‘retire, the world
shut out, our thoughts call home.’ We hear the revelry and the shout,
but ‘the still, small voice’ of other years and cherished recollections
is not wanting. It is pleasant to hear Miss Ford repeat _Love’s
Catechism_, or Mrs. Humby[23] sing ‘I cannot marry Crout’: but the ear
is not therefore deaf to Mrs. Jordan’s laugh in Nell; Mrs. Goodall’s
Rosalind still haunts the glades of Arden, and the echo of Amiens’ song,
‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind,’ lingers through a lapse of thirty
years. A pantomime (the Little Red Riding-Hood) recalls the innocence of
our childish thoughts: a dance (the Minuet de la Cour) throws us back to
the gorgeous days of Louis XIV. and tells us that the age of chivalry is
gone for ever. Who will be the Mrs. Siddons of a distant age? What
future Kean shall ‘strut and fret his hour upon the stage,’ full of
genius and free from errors? What favourite actor or actress will be
taking their farewell benefit a hundred years hence? What plays and what
players will then amuse the town? Oh, many-coloured scenes of human
life! where are ye more truly represented than in the mirror of the
stage? or where is that eternal principle of vicissitude which rules
over ye, the painted pageant and the sudden gloom, more strikingly
exemplified than here? At the entrance to our great theatres, in large
capitals over the front of the stage, might be written MUTABILITY! Does
not the curtain that falls each night on the pomps and vanities it was
withdrawn awhile to reveal (and the next moment all is dark) afford a
fine moral lesson? Here, in small room, is crowded the map of human
life; the lengthened, varied scroll is unfolded like rich tapestry with
its quaint and flaunting devices spread out; whatever can be saved from
the giddy whirl of ever-rolling time and of this round orb, which moves
on and never stops,[24] all that can strike the sense, can touch the
heart, can stir up laughter or call tears from their secret source, is
here treasured up and displayed ostentatiously—here is Fancy’s motley
wardrobe, the masks of all the characters that were ever played—here is
a glass set up clear and large enough to show us our own features and
those of all mankind—here, in this enchanted mirror, are represented,
not darkly, but in vivid hues and bold relief, the struggle of Life and
Death, the momentary pause between the cradle and the grave, with
charming hopes and fears, terror and pity in a thousand modes, strange
and ghastly apparitions, the events of history, the fictions of poetry
(warm from the heart); all these, and more than can be numbered in my
feeble page, fill that airy space where the green curtain rises, and
haunt it with evanescent shapes and indescribable yearnings.
‘See o’er the stage the ghost of Hamlet stalks,
Othello rages, Desdemona mourns,
And poor Monimia pours her soul in love.’
Who can collect into one audible pulsation the thoughts and feelings
that in the course of his life all these together have occasioned; or
what heart, if it could recall them at once, and in their undiminished
power and plenitude, would not burst with the load? Let not the style be
deemed exaggerated, but tame and creeping, that attempts to do justice
to this high and pregnant theme, and let tears blot out the unequal
lines that the pen traces! Quaffing these delights, inhaling this
atmosphere, brooding over these visions, this long trail of glory, is
the possessor of a Free Admission to be blamed if ‘he takes his ease’ at
the play; and turning theatrical recluse, and forgetful of himself and
his friends, devotes himself to the study of the drama, and to dreams of
the past? By constant habit (having nothing to do, little else to think
of), he becomes a tippler of the dews of Castaly—a dram-drinker on Mount
Parnassus. He tastes the present moment, while a rich sea of pleasure
presses to his lip and engulfs him round. The noise, the glare, the
warmth, the company, produce a sort of listless intoxication, and clothe
the pathos and the wit with a bodily sense. There is a weight, a
closeness even, in the air, that makes it difficult to breathe out of
it. The custom of going to the play night after night becomes a relief,
a craving, a necessity—one cannot do without it. To sit alone is
intolerable, to be in company is worse; we are attracted with pleasing
force to the spot where ‘all that mighty heart is beating still.’ It is
not that perhaps there is any thing new or fine to see—if there is, we
attend to it—but at any time, it kills time and saves the trouble of
thinking. O, Covent Garden! ‘thy _freedom_ hath made me effeminate!’ It
has hardly left me power to write this description of it. I am become
its slave, I have no other sense or interest left. There I sit and lose
the hours I live beneath the sky, without the power to stir, without any
determination to stay. ‘Teddy the Tiler’ is become familiar to me, and,
as it were, a part of my existence: ‘Robert the Devil’ has cast his
spell over me. I have seen both thirty times at least, (no offence to
the Management!) and could sit them out thirty times more. I am bed-rid
in the lap of luxury; am grown callous and inert with perpetual
excitement.
——‘What avails from iron chains
Exempt, if rosy fetters bind as fast?’
I have my favourite box too, as Beau Brummell had his favourite leg; one
must decide on something, not to be always deciding. Perhaps I may have
my reasons too—perhaps into the box next to mine a Grace enters; perhaps
from thence an air divine breathes a glance (of heaven’s own
brightness), kindles contagious fire;—but let us turn all such thoughts
into the lobbies. These may be considered as an Arabesque border round
the inclosed tablet of human life. If the Muses reign within, Venus
sports heedless, but not unheeded without. Here a bevy of fair damsels,
richly clad, knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance, lead on ‘the
frozen winter and the pleasant spring!’ Would I were allowed to attempt
a list of some of them, and Cowley’s _Gallery_ would blush at mine! But
this is a licence which only poetry, and not even a Free Admission can
give. I can now understand the attachment to a player’s life, and how
impossible it is for those who are once engaged in it ever to wean
themselves from it. If the merely witnessing the bustle and the
splendour of the scene as an idle spectator creates such a fascination,
and flings such a charm over it, how much more must this be the case
with those who have given all their time and attention to it—who regard
it as the sole means of distinction—with whom even the monotony and
mortifications must please—and who, instead of being passive, casual
votaries, are the dispensers of the bounty of the gods, and the
high-priests at the altar?
THE SICK CHAMBER
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_August, 1830._
What a difference between this subject and my last—a ‘Free Admission!’
Yet from the crowded theatre to the sick chamber, from the noise, the
glare, the keen delight, to the loneliness, the darkness, the dulness,
and the pain, there is but one step. A breath of air, an overhanging
cloud effects it; and though the transition is made in an instant, it
seems as if it would last for ever. A sudden illness not only puts a
stop to the career of our triumphs and agreeable sensations, but blots
out and cancels all recollection of and desire for them. We lose the
relish of enjoyment; we are effectually cured of our romance. Our bodies
are confined to our beds; nor can our thoughts wantonly detach
themselves and take the road to pleasure, but turn back with doubt and
loathing at the faint, evanescent phantom which has usurped its place.
If the folding-doors of the imagination were thrown open or left a-jar,
so that from the disordered couch where we lay, we could still hail the
vista of the past or future, and see the gay and gorgeous visions
floating at a distance, however denied to our embrace, the contrast,
though mortifying, might have something soothing in it, the
mock-splendour might be the greater for the actual gloom: but the misery
is that we cannot conceive any thing beyond or better than the present
evil; we are shut up and spell-bound in that, the curtains of the mind
are drawn close, we cannot escape from ‘the body of this death,’ our
souls are conquered, dismayed, ‘cooped and cabined in,’ and thrown with
the lumber of our corporeal frames in one corner of a neglected and
solitary room. We hate ourselves and everything else; nor does one ray
of comfort ‘peep through the blanket of the dark’ to give us hope. How
should we entertain the image of grace and beauty, when our bodies
writhe with pain? To what purpose invoke the echo of some rich strain of
music, when we ourselves can scarcely breathe? The very attempt is an
impossibility. We give up the vain task of linking delight to agony, of
urging torpor into ecstasy, which makes the very heart sick. We feel the
present pain, and an impatient longing to get rid of it. This were
indeed ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished’: on this we are intent, in
earnest, inexorable: all else is impertinence and folly; and could we
but obtain _ease_ (that Goddess of the infirm and suffering) at any
price, we think we could forswear all other joy and all other sorrows.
_Hoc erat in votis._ All other things but our disorder and its cure seem
less than nothing and vanity. It assumes a palpable form; it becomes a
demon, a spectre, an incubus hovering over and oppressing us: we grapple
with it: it strikes its fangs into us, spreads its arms round us,
infects us with its breath, glares upon us with its hideous aspect; we
feel it take possession of every fibre and of every faculty; and we are
at length so absorbed and fascinated by it, that we cannot divert our
reflections from it for an instant, for all other things but pain (and
that which we suffer most acutely,) appear to have lost their pith and
power to interest. They are turned to dust and stubble. This is the
reason of the fine resolutions we sometimes form in such cases, and of
the vast superiority of a sick bed to the pomps and thrones of the
world. We easily renounce wine when we have nothing but the taste of
physic in our mouths: the rich banquet tempts us not, when ‘our very
gorge rises’ within us: Love and Beauty fly from a bed twisted into a
thousand folds by restless lassitude and tormenting cares: the nerve of
pleasure is killed by the pains that shoot through the head or rack the
limbs: an indigestion seizes you with its leaden grasp and giant force
(down, Ambition!)—you shiver and tremble like a leaf in a fit of the
ague (Avarice, let go your palsied hold!). We then are in the mood,
without ghostly advice, to betake ourselves to the life of ‘hermit poor,
‘In pensive place obscure,’—
and should be glad to prevent the return of a fever raging in the blood
by feeding on pulse, and slaking our thirst at the limpid brook. These
sudden resolutions, however, or ‘vows made in pain as violent and void,’
are generally of short duration; the excess and the sorrow for it are
alike selfish; and those repentances which are the most loud and
passionate are the surest to end speedily in a relapse; for both
originate in the same cause, the being engrossed by the prevailing
feeling (whatever it may be), and an utter incapacity to look beyond it.
‘The Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be:
The Devil grew well, the Devil a monk was he!’
It is amazing how little effect physical suffering or local
circumstances have upon the mind, except while we are subject to their
immediate influence. While the impression lasts, they are every thing:
when it is gone, they are nothing. We toss and tumble about in a sick
bed; we lie on our right side, we then change to the left; we stretch
ourselves on our backs, we turn on our faces; we wrap ourselves up under
the clothes to exclude the cold, we throw them off to escape the heat
and suffocation; we grasp the pillow in agony, we fling ourselves out of
bed, we walk up and down the room with hasty or feeble steps; we return
into bed; we are worn out with fatigue and pain, yet can get no repose
for the one, or intermission for the other; we summon all our patience,
or give vent to passion and petty rage: nothing avails; we seem wedded
to our disease, ‘like life and death in disproportion met;’ we make new
efforts, try new expedients, but nothing appears to shake it off, or
promise relief from our grim foe: it infixes its sharp sting into us, or
overpowers us by its sickly and stunning weight: every moment is as much
as we can bear, and yet there seems no end of our lengthening tortures;
we are ready to faint with exhaustion, or work ourselves up to frenzy:
we ‘trouble deaf Heaven with our bootless prayers:’ we think our last
hour is come, or peevishly wish it were, to put an end to the scene; we
ask questions as to the origin of evil and the necessity of pain; we
‘moralise our complaints into a thousand similes’; we deny the use of
medicine _in toto_, we have a full persuasion that all doctors are mad
or knaves, that our object is to gain relief, and theirs (out of the
perversity of human nature, or to seem wiser than we) to prevent it; we
catechise the apothecary, rail at the nurse, and cannot so much as
conceive the possibility that this state of things should not last for
ever; we are even angry at those who would give us encouragement, as if
they would make dupes or children of us; we might seek a release by
poison, a halter, or the sword, but we have not strength of mind
enough—our nerves are too shaken—to attempt even this poor revenge—when
lo! a change comes, the spell falls off, and the next moment we forget
all that has happened to us. No sooner does our disorder turn its back
upon us than we laugh at it. The state we have been in, sounds like a
dream, a fable; health is the order of the day, strength is ours _de
jure_ and _de facto_; and we discard all uncalled-for evidence to the
contrary with a smile of contemptuous incredulity, just as we throw our
physic-bottles out of the window! I see (as I awake from a short, uneasy
doze) a golden light shine through my white window-curtains on the
opposite wall:—is it the dawn of a new day, or the departing light of
evening? I do not well know, for the opium ‘they have drugged my posset
with’ has made strange havoc with my brain, and I am uncertain whether
time has stood still, or advanced, or gone backward. By ‘puzzling o’er
the doubt,’ my attention is drawn a little out of myself to external
objects; and I consider whether it would not administer some relief to
my monotonous languour, if I could call up a vivid picture of an evening
sky I witnessed a short while before, the white fleecy clouds, the azure
vault, the verdant fields and balmy air. In vain! The wings of fancy
refuse to mount from my bed-side. The air without has nothing in common
with the closeness within: the clouds disappear, the sky is instantly
overcast and black. I walk out in this scene soon after I recover; and
with those favourite and well-known objects interposed, can no longer
recall the tumbled pillow, the juleps or the labels, or the unwholesome
dungeon in which I was before immured. What is contrary to our present
sensations or settled habits, amalgamates indifferently with our belief:
the imagination rules over imaginary themes, the senses and custom have
a narrower sway, and admit but one guest at a time. It is hardly to be
wondered at that we dread physical calamities so little beforehand: we
think no more of them the moment after they have happened. _Out of
sight, out of mind._ This will perhaps explain why all actual punishment
has so little effect; it is a state contrary to nature, alien to the
will. If it does not touch honour and conscience (and where these are
not, how can it touch them?) it goes for nothing: and where these are,
it rather sears and hardens them. The gyves, the cell, the meagre fare,
the hard labour are abhorrent to the mind of the culprit on whom they
are imposed, who carries the love of liberty or indulgence to
licentiousness; and who throws the thought of them behind him (the
moment he can evade the penalty,) with scorn and laughter,
‘Like Samson his green wythes.’[25]
So, in travelling, we often meet with great fatigue and inconvenience
from heat or cold, or rather accidents, and resolve never to go a
journey again; but we are ready to set off on a new excursion to-morrow.
We remember the landscape, the change of scene, the romantic
expectation, and think no more of the heat, the noise, and dust. The
body forgets its grievances, till they recur; but imagination, passion,
pride, have a longer memory and quicker apprehensions. To the first the
pleasure or the pain is nothing when once over; to the last it is only
then that they begin to exist. The line in Metastasio,
‘The worst of every evil is the fear,’
is true only when applied to this latter sort.—It is curious that, on
coming out of a sick room, where one has been pent some time, and grown
weak and nervous, and looking at Nature for the first time, the objects
that present themselves have a very questionable and spectral
appearance, the people in the street resemble flies crawling about, and
seem scarce half-alive. It is we who are just risen from a torpid and
unwholesome state, and who impart our imperfect feelings of existence,
health, and motion to others. Or it may be that the violence and
exertion of the pain we have gone through make common every-day objects
seem unreal and unsubstantial. It is not till we have established
ourselves in form in the sitting-room, wheeled round the arm-chair to
the fire (for this makes part of our re-introduction to the ordinary
modes of being in all seasons,) felt our appetite return, and taken up a
book, that we can be considered as at all restored to ourselves. And
even then our first sensations are rather empirical than positive; as
after sleep we stretch out our hands to know whether we are awake. This
is the time for reading. Books are then indeed ‘a world, both pure and
good,’ into which we enter with all our hearts, after our revival from
illness and respite from the tomb, as with the freshness and novelty of
youth. They are not merely acceptable as without too much exertion they
pass the time and relieve _ennui_; but from a certain suspension and
deadening of the passions, and abstraction from worldly pursuits, they
may be said to bring back and be friendly to the guileless and
enthusiastic tone of feeling with which we formerly read them. Sickness
has weaned us _pro tempore_ from contest and cabal; and we are fain to
be docile and children again. All strong changes in our present pursuits
throw us back upon the past. This is the shortest and most complete
emancipation from our late discomfiture. We wonder that any one who has
read _The History of a Foundling_ should labour under an indigestion;
nor do we comprehend how a perusal of the _Faery Queen_ should not
ensure the true believer an uninterrupted succession of halcyon days.
Present objects bear a retrospective meaning, and point to ‘a foregone
conclusion.’ Returning back to life with half-strung nerves and
shattered strength, we seem as when we first entered it with uncertain
purposes and faltering aims. The machine has received a shock, and it
moves on more tremulously than before, and not all at once in the beaten
track. Startled at the approach of death, we are willing to get as far
from it as we can by making a proxy of our former selves; and finding
the precarious tenure by which we hold existence, and its last sands
running out, we gather up and make the most of the fragments that memory
has stored up for us. Every thing is seen through a medium of reflection
and contrast. We hear the sound of merry voices in the street; and this
carries us back to the recollections of some country-town or
village-group—
‘We see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters roaring evermore.’
A cricket chirps on the hearth, and we are reminded of Christmas gambols
long ago. The very cries in the street seem to be of a former date; and
the dry toast eats very much as it did—twenty years ago. A rose smells
doubly sweet, after being stifled with tinctures and essences; and we
enjoy the idea of a journey and an inn the more for having been bed-rid.
But a book is the secret and sure charm to bring all these implied
associations to a focus. I should prefer an old one, Mr. Lamb’s
favourite, the _Journey to Lisbon_; or the _Decameron_, if I could get
it; but if a new one, let it be _Paul Clifford_. That book has the
singular advantage of being written by a gentleman, and not about his
own class. The characters he commemorates are every moment at fault
between life and death, hunger and a _forced loan_ on the public; and
therefore the interest they take in themselves, and which we take in
them, has no cant or affectation in it, but is ‘lively, audible, and
full of vent.’ A set of well-dressed gentlemen picking their teeth with
a graceful air after dinner, endeavouring to keep their cravats from the
slightest discomposure, and saying the most insipid things in the most
insipid manner, do not make a _scene_. Well, then, I have got the new
paraphrase on the _Beggar’s Opera_, am fairly embarked on it; and at the
end of the first volume, where I am galloping across the heath with the
three highwaymen, while the moon is shining full upon them, feel my
nerves so braced, and my spirits so exhilarated, that, to say truth, I
am scarce sorry for the occasion that has thrown me upon the work and
the author—have quite forgot my _Sick Room_, and am more than half ready
to recant the doctrine that a _Free Admission_ to the theatre is
—‘The true pathos and sublime
Of human life’:—
for I feel as I read that if the stage shows us the masks of men and the
pageant of the world, books let us into their souls and lay open to us
the secrets of our own. They are the first and last, the most home-felt,
the most heartfelt of all our enjoyments.
FOOTMEN
_The New Monthly Magazine._] [_September, 1830._
Footmen are no part of Christianity; but they are a very necessary
appendage to our happy Constitution in Church and State. What would the
bishop’s mitre be without these grave supporters to his dignity? Even
the plain presbyter does not dispense with his decent serving-man to
stand behind his chair and load his duly emptied plate with beef and
pudding, at which the genius of Ude turns pale. What would become of the
coronet-coach filled with elegant and languid forms, if it were not for
the triple row of powdered, laced, and liveried footmen, clustering,
fluttering, and lounging behind it? What an idea do we not conceive of
the fashionable _belle_ who is making the most of her time and tumbling
over silks and satins within at Sewell and Cross’s, or at the Bazaar in
Soho-square, from the tall lacquey in blue and silver with gold-headed
cane, cocked-hat, white thread stockings and large calves to his legs,
who stands as her representative without! The sleek shopman appears at
the door, at an understood signal the livery-servant starts from his
position, the coach-door flies open, the steps are let down, the young
lady enters the carriage as young ladies are taught to step into
carriages, the footman closes the door, mounts behind, and the glossy
vehicle rolls off, bearing its lovely burden and her gaudy attendant
from the gaze of the gaping crowd! Is there not a spell in beauty, a
charm in rank and fashion, that one would almost wish to be this
fellow—to obey its nod, to watch its looks, to breathe but by its
permission, and to live but for its use, its scorn, or pride?
Footmen are in general looked upon as a sort of supernumeraries in
society—they have no place assigned them in any Scotch Encyclopædia—they
do not come under any of the heads in Mr. Mill’s Elements, or Mr.
Maculloch’s Principles of Political Economy; and they nowhere have had
impartial justice done them, except in Lady Booby’s love for one of that
order. But if not ‘the Corinthian capitals of polished society,’ they
are ‘a graceful ornament to the civil order.’ Lords and ladies could not
do without them. Nothing exists in this world but by contrast. A foil is
necessary to make the plainest truths self-evident. It is the very
insignificance, the nonentity as it were of the gentlemen of the cloth,
that constitutes their importance, and makes them an indispensable
feature in the social system, by setting off the pretensions of their
superiors to the best advantage. What would be the good of having a will
of our own, if we had not others about us who are deprived of all will
of their own, and who wear a badge to say ‘I serve?’ How can we show
that we are the lords of the creation but by reducing others to the
condition of machines, who never move but at the beck of our caprices?
Is not the plain suit of the master wonderfully relieved by the borrowed
trappings and mock-finery of his servant? You see that man on horseback
who keeps at some distance behind another, who follows him as his
shadow, turns as he turns, and as he passes or speaks to him, lifts his
hand to his hat and observes the most profound attention—what is the
difference between these two men? The one is as well mounted, as well
fed, is younger and seemingly in better health than the other; but
between these two there are perhaps seven or eight classes of society,
each of whom is dependent on and trembles at the frown of the other—it
is a nobleman and his lacquey. Let any one take a stroll towards the
West-end of the town, South Audley or Upper Grosvenor-street; it is then
he will feel himself first entering into the _beau-ideal_ of civilized
life, a society composed entirely of lords and footmen! Deliver me from
the filth and cellars of St. Giles’s, from the shops of Holborn and the
Strand, from all that appertains to middle and to low life; and commend
me to the streets with the straw at the doors and hatchments overhead to
tell us of those who are just born or who are just dead, and with groups
of footmen lounging on the steps and insulting the passengers—it is then
I feel the true dignity and imaginary pretensions of human nature
realised! There is here none of the squalidness of poverty, none of the
hardships of daily labour, none of the anxiety and petty artifice of
trade; life’s business is changed into a romance, a summer’s dream, and
nothing painful, disgusting, or vulgar intrudes. All is on a liberal and
handsome scale. The true ends and benefits of society are here enjoyed
and bountifully lavished, and all the trouble and misery banished, and
not even allowed so much as to exist in thought. Those who would find
the real Utopia, should look for it somewhere about Park-lane or May
Fair. It is there only any feasible approach to equality is made—for it
is _like master like man_. Here, as I look down Curzon Street, or catch
a glimpse of the taper spire of South Audley Chapel, or the family-arms
on the gate of Chesterfield-House, the vista of years opens to me, and I
recall the period of the triumph of Mr. Burke’s ‘Reflections on the
French Revolution,’ and the overthrow of ‘The Rights of Man!’ You do not
indeed penetrate to the interior of the mansion where sits the stately
possessor, luxurious and refined; but you draw your inference from the
lazy, pampered, motley crew poured forth from his portals. This
mealy-coated, moth-like, butterfly-generation, seem to have no earthly
business but to enjoy themselves. Their green liveries accord with the
budding leaves and spreading branches of the trees in Hyde Park—they
seem ‘like brothers of the groves’—their red faces and powdered heads
harmonise with the blossoms of the neighbouring almond-trees, that shoot
their sprays over old-fashioned brick-walls. They come forth like
grasshoppers in June, as numerous and as noisy. They bask in the sun and
laugh in your face. Not only does the master enjoy an uninterrupted
leisure and tranquillity—those in his employment have nothing to do. He
wants drones, not drudges, about him, to share his superfluity, and give
a haughty pledge of his exemption from care. They grow sleek and wanton,
saucy and supple. From being independent of the world, they acquire the
look of _gentlemen’s gentlemen_. There is a cast of the aristocracy,
with a slight shade of distinction. The saying, ‘Tell me your company,
and I’ll tell you your manners,’ may be applied _cum grano salis_ to the
servants in great families. Mr. N—— knew an old butler who had lived
with a nobleman so long, and had learned to imitate his walk, look, and
way of speaking, so exactly that it was next to impossible to tell them
apart. See the porter in the great leather-chair in the hall—how big,
and burly, and self-important he looks; while my Lord’s gentleman (the
politician of the family) is reading the second edition of ‘The Courier’
(once more in request) at the side window, and the footman is romping,
or taking tea with the maids in the kitchen below. A match-girl
meanwhile plies her shrill trade at the railing; or a gipsey-woman
passes with her rustic wares through the street, avoiding the closer
haunts of the city. What a pleasant farce is that of ‘High Life Below
Stairs!’ What a careless life do the domestics of the Great lead! For,
not to speak of the reflected self-importance of their masters and
mistresses, and the contempt with which they look down on the herd of
mankind, they have only to eat and drink their fill, talk the scandal of
the neighbourhood, laugh at the follies, or assist the intrigues of
their betters, till they themselves fall in love, marry, set up a public
house, (the only thing they are fit for,) and without habits of
industry, resources in themselves, or self-respect, and drawing
fruitless comparisons with the past, are, of all people, the most
miserable! Service is no inheritance; and when it fails, there is not a
more helpless, or more worthless set of devils in the world. Mr. C——
used to say he should like to be a footman to some elderly lady of
quality, to carry her prayer-book to church, and place her cassock right
for her. There can be no doubt that this would have been better, and
quite as useful as the life he has led, dancing attendance on Prejudice,
but flirting with Paradox in such a way as to cut himself out of the old
lady’s will. For my part, if I had to choose, I should prefer the
service of a young mistress, and might share the fate of the footman
recorded in heroic verse by Lady Wortley Montagu. Certainly it can be no
hard duty, though a sort of _forlorn hope_, to have to follow three
sisters, or youthful friends, (resembling the three Graces,) at a slow
pace, and with grave demeanour, from Cumberland Gate to Kensington
Gardens—to be there shut out, a privation enhancing the privilege, and
making the sense of distant, respectful, idolatrous admiration more
intense—and then, after a brief interval lost in idle chat, or idler
reverie, to have to follow them back again, observing, not observed, to
keep within call, to watch every gesture, to see the breeze play with
the light tresses or lift the morning robe aside, to catch the
half-suppressed laugh, and hear the low murmur of indistinct words and
wishes, like the music of the spheres. An _amateur footman_ would seem a
more rational occupation than that of an amateur author, or an amateur
artist. An insurmountable barrier, if it excludes passion, does not
banish sentiment, but draws an atmosphere of superstitious, trembling
apprehension round the object of so much attention and respect; nothing
makes women seem so much like angels as always to see, never to converse
with them; and those whom we have to dangle a cane after must, to a
lacquey of any spirit, appear worthy to wield sceptres.
But of all situations of this kind, the most enviable is that of a
lady’s maid in a family travelling abroad. In the obtuseness of
foreigners to the nice gradations of English refinement and manners, the
maid has not seldom a chance of being taken for the mistress—a
circumstance never to be forgot! See our Abigail mounted in the _dicky_
with my Lord, or John, snug and comfortable—setting out on the grand
tour as fast as four horses can carry her, whirled over the
‘vine-covered hills and gay regions of France,’ crossing the Alps and
Apennines in breathless terror and wonder—frightened at a precipice,
laughing at her escape—coming to the inn, going into the kitchen to see
what is to be had—not speaking a word of the language, except what she
picks up, ‘as pigeons pick up peas:‘—the bill paid, the passport _visé_,
the horses put to, and _au route_ again—seeing every thing, and
understanding nothing, in a full tide of health, fresh air, and animal
spirits, and without one qualm of taste or sentiment, and arriving at
Florence, the city of palaces, with its amphitheatre of hills and
olives, without suspecting that such a person as Boccacio, Dante, or
Galileo, had ever lived there, while her young mistress is puzzled with
the varieties of the Tuscan dialect, is disappointed in the Arno, and
cannot tell what to make of the statue of David by Michael Angelo, in
the Great Square. The difference is, that the young lady, on her return,
has something to think of; but the maid absolutely forgets every thing,
and is only giddy and out of breath, as if she had been up in a balloon.
‘No more: where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise!’
English servants abroad, notwithstanding the comforts they enjoy, and
although travelling as it were _en famille_, must be struck with the
ease and familiar footing on which foreigners live with their domestics,
compared with the distance and reserve with which they are treated. The
housemaid (_la bonne_) sits down in the room, or walks abreast with you
in the street; and the valet who waits behind his master’s chair at
table, gives Monsieur his advice or opinion without being asked for it.
We need not wonder at this familiarity and freedom, when we consider
that those who allowed it could (formerly at least, when the custom
began) send those who transgressed but in the smallest degree to the
Bastille or the galleys at their pleasure. The licence was attended with
perfect impunity. With us the law leaves less to discretion; and by
interposing a real independence (and plea of right) between the servant
and master, does away with the appearance of it on the surface of
manners. The insolence and tyranny of the Aristocracy fell more on the
tradespeople and mechanics than on their domestics, who were attached to
them by a semblance of feudal ties. Thus an upstart lady of quality (an
imitator of the old school) would not deign to speak to a milliner while
fitting on her dress, but gave her orders to her waiting-women to tell
her what to do. Can we wonder at twenty _reigns of terror_ to efface
such a feeling?
I have alluded to the inclination in servants in great houses to ape the
manners of their superiors, and to their sometimes succeeding. What
facilitates the metamorphosis is, that the Great, in their character of
_courtiers_, are a sort of footmen in their turn. There is the same
crouching to interest and authority in either case, with the same
surrender or absence of personal dignity—the same submission to the
trammels of outward form, with the same suppression of inward
impulses—the same degrading finery, the same pretended deference in the
eye of the world, and the same lurking contempt from being admitted
behind the scenes, the same heartlessness, and the same eye-service—in a
word, they are alike puppets governed by motives not their own, machines
made of coarser or finer materials. It is not, therefore, surprising, if
the most finished courtier of the day cannot, by a vulgar eye, be
distinguished from a gentleman’s servant. M. de Bausset, in his amusing
and excellent _Memoirs_, makes it an argument of the legitimacy of
Napoleon’s authority, that from denying it, it would follow that his
lords of the bed-chamber were valets, and he himself (as prefect of the
palace) no better than head-cook. The inference is logical enough.
According to the author’s view, there was no other difference between
the retainers of the court and the kitchen than the rank of the master!
I remember hearing it said that ‘all men were equal but footmen.’ But of
all footmen the lowest class is _literary footmen_. These consist of
persons who, without a single grain of knowledge, taste, or feeling, put
on the livery of learning, mimic its phrases by rote, and are retained
in its service by dint of quackery and assurance alone. As they have
none of the essence, they have all the externals of men of gravity and
wisdom. They wear green spectacles, walk with a peculiar strut, thrust
themselves into the acquaintance of persons they hear talked of, get
introduced into the clubs, are seen reading books they do not understand
at the Museum and public libraries, dine (if they can) with lords or
officers of the Guards, abuse any party as _low_ to show what fine
gentlemen they are, and the next week join the same party to raise their
own credit and gain a little consequence, give themselves out as wits,
critics, and philosophers (and as they have never done any thing, no man
can contradict them), and have a great knack of turning editors, and not
paying their contributors. If you get five pounds from one of them, he
never forgives it. With the proceeds thus appropriated, the book-worm
graduates a dandy, hires expensive apartments, sports a tandem, and it
is inferred that he must be a great author who can support such an
appearance with his pen, and a great genius who can conduct so many
learned works while his time is devoted to the gay, the fair, and the
rich. This introduces him to new editorships, to new and more select
friendships, and to more frequent and importunate demands from debts and
duns. At length the bubble bursts and disappears, and you hear no more
of our classical adventurer, except from the invectives and
self-reproaches of those who took him for a great scholar from his
wearing green spectacles and Wellington-boots. Such a candidate for
literary honours bears the same relation to the man of letters, that the
valet with his second-hand finery and servile airs does to his master.
ON THE WANT OF MONEY
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_January, 1827._
It is hard to be without money. To get on without it is like travelling
in a foreign country without a passport—you are stopped, suspected, and
made ridiculous at every turn, besides being subjected to the most
serious inconveniences. The want of money I here allude to is not
altogether that which arises from absolute poverty—where there is a
downright absence of the common necessaries of life, this must be
remedied by incessant hard labour, and the least we can receive in
return is a supply of our daily wants—but that uncertain, casual,
precarious mode of existence, in which the temptation to spend remains
after the means are exhausted, the want of money joined with the hope
and possibility of getting it, the intermediate state of difficulty and
suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next that we may
have the good luck to encounter. This gap, this unwelcome interval
constantly recurring, however shabbily got over, is really full of many
anxieties, misgivings, mortifications, meannesses, and deplorable
embarrassments of every description. I may attempt (this essay is not a
fanciful speculation) to enlarge upon a few of them.
It is hard to go without one’s dinner through sheer distress, but harder
still to go without one’s breakfast. Upon the strength of that first and
aboriginal meal, one may muster courage to face the difficulties before
one, and to dare the worst: but to be roused out of one’s warm bed, and
perhaps a profound oblivion of care, with golden dreams (for poverty
does not prevent golden dreams), and told there is nothing for
breakfast, is cold comfort for which one’s half-strung nerves are not
prepared, and throws a damp upon the prospects of the day. It is a bad
beginning. A man without a breakfast is a poor creature, unfit to go in
search of one, to meet the frown of the world, or to borrow a shilling
of a friend. He may beg at the corner of a street—nothing is too mean
for the tone of his feelings—robbing on the highway is out of the
question, as requiring too much courage, and some opinion of a man’s
self. It is, indeed, as old Fuller, or some worthy of that age,
expresses it, ‘the heaviest stone which melancholy can throw at a man,’
to learn, the first thing after he rises in the morning, or even to be
dunned with it in bed, that there is no loaf, tea, or butter in the
house, and that the baker, the grocer, and butterman have refused to
give any farther credit. This is taking one sadly at a disadvantage. It
is striking at one’s spirit and resolution in their very source,—the
stomach—it is attacking one on the side of hunger and mortification at
once; it is casting one into the very mire of humility and Slough of
Despond. The worst is, to know what face to put upon the matter, what
excuse to make to the servants, what answer to send to the tradespeople;
whether to laugh it off, or be grave, or angry, or indifferent; in
short, to know how to parry off an evil which you cannot help. What a
luxury, what a God’s-send in such a dilemma, to find a half-crown which
had slipped through a hole in the lining of your waistcoat, a crumpled
bank-note in your breeches-pocket, or a guinea clinking in the bottom of
your trunk, which had been thoughtlessly left there out of a former
heap! Vain hope! Unfounded illusion! The experienced in such matters
know better, and laugh in their sleeves at so improbable a suggestion.
Not a corner, not a cranny, not a pocket, not a drawer has been left
unrummaged, or has not been subjected over and over again to more than
the strictness of a custom-house scrutiny. Not the slightest rustle of a
piece of bank-paper, not the gentlest pressure of a piece of hard metal,
but would have given notice of its hiding-place with electrical
rapidity, long before, in such circumstances. All the variety of
pecuniary resources which form a legal tender on the current coin of the
realm, are assuredly drained, exhausted to the last farthing before this
time. But is there nothing in the house that one can turn to account! Is
there not an old family-watch, or piece of plate, or a ring, or some
worthless trinket that one could part with? nothing belonging to
one’s-self or a friend, that one could raise the wind upon, till
something better turns up? At this moment an old clothes-man passes, and
his deep, harsh tones sound like an intended insult on one’s distress,
and banish the thought of applying for his assistance, as one’s eye
glanced furtively at an old hat or a great coat, hung up behind a
closet-door. Humiliating contemplations! Miserable uncertainty! One
hesitates, and the opportunity is gone by; for without one’s breakfast,
one has not the resolution to do any thing!—The late Mr. Sheridan was
often reduced to this unpleasant predicament. Possibly he had little
appetite for breakfast himself; but the servants complained bitterly on
this head, and said that Mrs. Sheridan was sometimes kept waiting for a
couple of hours, while they had to hunt through the neighbourhood, and
beat up for coffee, eggs, and French rolls. The same perplexity in this
instance appears to have extended to the providing for the dinner; for
so sharp-set were they, that to cut short a debate with a butcher’s
apprentice about leaving a leg of mutton without the money, the cook
clapped it into the pot: the butcher’s boy, probably used to such
encounters, with equal coolness took it out again, and marched off with
it in his tray in triumph. It required a man to be the author of THE
SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL, to run the gauntlet of such disagreeable occurrences
every hour of the day. There was one comfort, however, that poor
Sheridan had: he did not foresee that Mr. Moore would write his
Life![26]
The going without a dinner is another of the miseries of wanting money,
though one can bear up against this calamity better than the former,
which really ‘blights the tender blossom and promise of the day.’ With
one good meal, one may hold a parley with hunger and moralize upon
temperance. One has time to turn one’s-self and look about one—to ‘screw
one’s courage to the sticking-place,’ to graduate the scale of
disappointment, and stave off appetite till supper-time. You gain time,
and time in this weather-cock world is everything. You may dine at two,
or at six, or seven—as most convenient. You may in the meanwhile receive
an invitation to dinner, or some one (not knowing how you are
circumstanced) may send you a present of a haunch of venison or a brace
of pheasants from the country, or a distant relation may die and leave
you a legacy, or a patron may call and overwhelm you with his smiles and
bounty,
‘As kind as kings upon their coronation-day;’
or there is no saying what may happen. One may wait for dinner—breakfast
admits of no delay, of no interval interposed between that and our first
waking thoughts.[27] Besides, there are shifts and devices, shabby and
mortifying enough, but still available in case of need. How many
expedients are there in this great city (London), time out of mind and
times without number, resorted to by the dilapidated and thrifty
speculator, to get through this grand difficulty without utter failure!
One may dive into a cellar, and dine on boiled beef and carrots for
tenpence, with the knives and forks chained to the table, and jostled by
greasy elbows that seem to make such a precaution not unnecessary
(hunger is proof against indignity!)—or one may contrive to part with a
superfluous article of wearing apparel, and carry home a mutton-chop and
cook it in a garret; or one may drop in at a friend’s at the
dinner-hour, and be asked to stay or not; or one may walk out and take a
turn in the Park, about the time, and return home to tea, so as at least
to avoid the sting of the evil—the appearance of not having dined. You
then have the laugh on your side, having deceived the gossips, and can
submit to the want of a sumptuous repast without murmuring, having saved
your pride, and made a virtue of necessity. I say all this may be done
by a man without a family (for what business has a man without money
with one?—_See English Malthus and Scotch Macculloch_)—and it is only my
intention here to bring forward such instances of the want of money as
are tolerable both in theory and practice. I once lived on coffee (as an
experiment) for a fortnight together, while I was finishing the copy of
a half-length portrait of a Manchester manufacturer, who had died worth
a plum. I rather slurred over the coat, which was a reddish brown, ‘of
formal cut,’ to receive my five guineas, with which I went to market
myself, and dined on sausages and mashed potatoes, and while they were
getting ready, and I could hear them hissing in the pan, read a volume
of Gil Blas, containing the account of the fair Aurora. This was in the
days of my youth. Gentle reader, do not smile! Neither Monsieur de Very,
nor Louis XVIII., over an oyster-pâté, nor Apicius himself, ever
understood the meaning of the word _luxury_, better than I did at that
moment! If the want of money has its drawbacks and disadvantages, it is
not without its contrasts and counterbalancing effects, for which I fear
nothing else can make us amends. Amelia’s _hashed mutton_ is immortal;
and there is something amusing, though carried to excess and caricature
(which is very unusual with the author) in the contrivances of old
Caleb, in ‘The Bride of Lammermuir,’ for raising the wind at breakfast,
dinner, and supper-time. I recollect a ludicrous instance of a
disappointment in a dinner which happened to a person of my acquaintance
some years ago. He was not only poor but a very poor creature, as will
be imagined. His wife had laid by fourpence (their whole remaining
stock) to pay for the baking of a shoulder of mutton and potatoes, which
they had in the house, and on her return home from some errand, she
found he had expended it in purchasing a new string for a guitar. On
this occasion a witty friend quoted the lines from Milton:
‘And ever against _eating_ cares,
Wrap me in soft Lydian airs!’
Defoe, in his _Life of Colonel Jack_, gives a striking picture of his
young beggarly hero sitting with his companion for the first time in his
life at a three-penny ordinary, and the delight with which he relished
the hot smoking soup, and the airs with which he called about him—‘and
every time,’ he says, ‘we called for bread, or beer, or whatever it
might be, the waiter answered, “coming, gentlemen, coming;” and this
delighted me more than all the rest!’ It was about this time, as the
same pithy author expresses it, ‘the Colonel took upon him to wear a
shirt!’ Nothing can be finer than the whole of the feeling conveyed in
the commencement of this novel, about wealth and finery from the
immediate contrast of privation and poverty. One would think it a
labour, like the Tower of Babel, to build up a beau and a fine gentleman
about town. The little vagabond’s admiration of the old man at the
banking-house, who sits surrounded by heaps of gold as if it were a
dream or poetic vision, and his own eager anxious visits, day by day, to
the hoard he had deposited in the hollow tree, are in the very foremost
style of truth and nature. See the same intense feeling expressed in
Luke’s address to his riches in the _City Madam_, and in the
extraordinary raptures of the ‘Spanish Rogue’ in contemplating and
hugging his ingots of pure gold and Spanish pieces of eight: to which
Mr. Lamb has referred in excuse for the rhapsodies of some of our elder
poets on this subject, which to our present more refined and tamer
apprehensions sound like blasphemy.[28] In earlier times, before the
diffusion of luxury, of knowledge, and other sources of enjoyment had
become common, and acted as a diversion to the cravings of avarice, the
passionate admiration, the idolatry, the hunger and thirst of wealth and
all its precious symbols, was a kind of madness or hallucination, and
Mammon was truly worshipped as a god!
It is among the miseries of the want of money, not to be able to pay
your reckoning at an inn—or, if you have just enough to do that, to have
nothing left for the waiter;—to be stopped at a turnpike gate, and
forced to turn back;—not to venture to call a hackney-coach in a shower
of rain—(when you have only one shilling left yourself, it is a _bore_
to have it taken out of your pocket by a friend, who comes into your
house eating peaches in a hot summer’s day, and desiring you to pay for
the coach in which he visits you);—not to be able to purchase a
lottery-ticket, by which you might make your fortune, and get out of all
your difficulties;—or to find a letter lying for you at a country
post-office, and not to have money in your pocket to free it, and be
obliged to return for it the next day. The letter so unseasonably
withheld may be supposed to contain money, and in this case there is a
foretaste, a sort of actual possession taken through the thin folds of
the paper and the wax, which in some measure indemnifies us for the
delay: the bank-note, the post-bill seems to smile upon us, and shake
hands through its prison bars;—or it may be a love-letter, and then the
tantalization is at its height: to be deprived in this manner of the
only consolation that can make us amends for the want of money, by this
very want—to fancy you can see the name—to try to get a peep at the
hand-writing—to touch the seal, and yet not dare to break it open—is
provoking indeed—the climax of amorous and gentlemanly distress. Players
are sometimes reduced to great extremity, by the seizure of their scenes
and dresses, or (what is called) _the property of the theatre_, which
hinders them from acting; as authors are prevented from finishing a
work, for want of money to buy the books necessary to be consulted on
some material point or circumstance, in the progress of it. There is a
set of poor devils, who live upon a printed _prospectus_ of a work that
never will be written, for which they solicit your name and
half-a-crown. Decayed actresses take an annual benefit at one of the
theatres; there are patriots who live upon periodical subscriptions, and
critics who go about the country lecturing on poetry. I confess I envy
none of these; but there are persons who, provided they can live, care
not how they live—who are fond of display, even when it implies
exposure; who court notoriety under every shape, and embrace the public
with demonstrations of wantonness. There are genteel beggars, who send
up a well-penned epistle requesting the loan of a shilling. Your snug
bachelors and retired old maids pretend they can distinguish the knock
of one of these at their door. I scarce know which I dislike the
most—the patronage that affects to bring premature genius into notice,
or that extends its piecemeal, formal charity towards it in its decline.
I hate your Literary Funds, and Funds for Decayed Artists—they are
corporations for the encouragement of meanness, pretence, and insolence.
Of all people, I cannot tell how it is, but players appear to me the
best able to do without money. They are a privileged class. If not
exempt from the common calls of necessity and business, they are enabled
‘by their so potent art’ to soar above them. As they make imaginary ills
their own, real ones become imaginary, sit light upon them, and are
thrown off with comparatively little trouble. Their life is
theatrical—its various accidents are the shifting scenes of a play—rags
and finery, tears and laughter, a mock-dinner or a real one, a crown of
jewels or of straw, are to them nearly the same. I am sorry I cannot
carry on this reasoning to actors who are past their prime. The gilding
of their profession is then worn off, and shews the false metal beneath;
vanity and hope (the props of their existence) have had their day; their
former gaiety and carelessness serve as a foil to their present
discouragements; and want and infirmities press upon them at once. ‘We
know what we are,’ as Ophelia says, ‘but we know not what we shall be.’
A workhouse seems the last resort of poverty and distress—a
_parish-pauper_ is another name for all that is mean and to be
deprecated in human existence. But that name is but an abstraction, an
average term—‘within that lowest deep, a lower deep may open to receive
us.’ I heard not long ago of a poor man, who had been for many years a
respectable tradesman in London, and who was compelled to take shelter
in one of those receptacles of age and wretchedness, and who said he
could be contented with it—he had his regular meals, a nook in the
chimney, and a coat to his back—but he was forced to lie three in a bed,
and one of the three was out of his mind and crazy, and his great
delight was, when the others fell asleep, to tweak their noses, and
flourish his night-cap over their heads, so that they were obliged to
lie awake, and hold him down between them. One should be quite mad to
bear this. To what a point of insignificance may not human life dwindle!
To what fine, agonizing threads will it not cling! Yet this man had been
a lover in his youth, in a humble way, and still begins his letters to
an old maid (his former flame), who sometimes comforts him by listening
to his complaints, and treating him to a dish of weak tea, ‘MY DEAR MISS
NANCY!’
Another of the greatest miseries of a want of money, is the tap of a
dun at your door, or the previous silence when you expect it—the
uneasy sense of shame at the approach of your tormentor; the wish to
meet, and yet to shun the encounter; the disposition to bully; the
fear of irritating; the real and the sham excuses; the submission to
impertinence; the assurances of a speedy supply; the disingenuousness
you practise on him and on yourself; the degradation in the eyes of
others and your own. Oh! it is wretched to have to confront a just and
oft-repeated demand, and to be without the means to satisfy it; to
deceive the confidence that has been placed in you; to forfeit your
credit; to be placed at the power of another, to be indebted to his
lenity; to stand convicted of having played the knave or the fool; and
to have no way left to escape contempt, but by incurring pity. The
suddenly meeting a creditor on turning the corner of a street, whom
you have been trying to avoid for months, and had persuaded you were
several hundred miles off, discomposes the features and shatters the
nerves for some time. It is also a serious annoyance to be unable to
repay a loan to a friend, who is in want of it—nor is it very pleasant
to be so hard run, as to be induced to request the repayment. It is
difficult to decide the preference between debts of honour and legal
demands; both are bad enough, and almost a fair excuse for driving any
one into the hands of money-lenders—to whom an application, if
successful, is accompanied with a sense of being in the vulture’s
gripe—a reflection akin to that of those who formerly sold themselves
to the devil—or, if unsuccessful, is rendered doubly galling by the
smooth, civil leer of cool contempt with which you are dismissed, as
if they had escaped from your clutches—not you from their’s. If any
thing can be added to the mortification and distress arising from
straitened circumstances, it is when vanity comes in to barb the dart
of poverty—when you have a picture on which you had calculated,
rejected from an Exhibition, or a manuscript returned on your hands,
or a tragedy damned, at the very instant when your cash and credit are
at the lowest ebb. This forlorn and helpless feeling has reached its
_acme_ in the prison-scene in Hogarth’s RAKE’S PROGRESS, where his
unfortunate hero has just dropped the Manager’s letter from his hands,
with the laconic answer written in it:—‘Your play has been read, and
won’t do.’[29] To feel poverty is bad; but to feel it with the
additional sense of our incapacity to shake it off, and that we have
not merit enough to retrieve our circumstances—and, instead of being
held up to admiration, are exposed to persecution and insult—is the
last stage of human infirmity. My friend, Mr. Leigh Hunt (no one is
better qualified than he to judge) thinks, that the most pathetic
story in the world is that of Smollett’s fine gentleman and lady in
gaol, who have been roughly handled by the mob for some paltry attempt
at raising the wind, and she exclaims in extenuation of the pitiful
figure he cuts, ‘Ah! he was a fine fellow once!’
It is justly remarked by the poet, that poverty has no greater
inconvenience attached to it than that of making men ridiculous. It not
only has this disadvantage with respect to ourselves, but it often shews
us others in a very contemptible point of view. People are not soured by
misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it. When we do not
want assistance, every one is ready to obtrude it on us, as if it were
advice. If we do, they shun us instantly. They anticipate the increased
demand on their sympathy or bounty, and escape from it as from a falling
house. It is a mistake, however, that we court the society of the rich
and prosperous, merely with a view to what we can get from them. We do
so, because there is something in external rank and splendour that
gratifies and imposes on the imagination; just as we prefer the company
of those who are in good health and spirits to that of the sickly and
hypochondriacal, or as we would rather converse with a beautiful woman
than with an ugly one. I never knew but one man who would lend his money
freely and fearlessly in spite of circumstances (if you were likely to
pay him, he grew peevish, and would pick a quarrel with you). I can only
account for this from a certain sanguine buoyancy and magnificence of
spirit, not deterred by distant consequences, or damped by untoward
appearances. I have been told by those, who shared of the same bounty,
that it was not owing to generosity, but ostentation—if so, he kept his
ostentation a secret from me, for I never received a hint or a look from
which I could infer that I was not the lender, and he the person
obliged. Neither was I expected to keep in the back-ground or play an
under-part. On the contrary, I was encouraged to do my best; my dormant
faculties roused, the ease of my circumstances was on condition of the
freedom and independence of my mind, my lucky hits were applauded, and I
was paid to shine. I am not ashamed of such patronage as this, nor do I
regret any circumstance relating to it but its termination. People
endure existence even in Paris: the rows of chairs on the Boulevards are
gay with smiles and dress: the saloons, they say, are brilliant; at the
theatre there is Mademoiselle Mars—what is all this to me? After a
certain period, we live only in the past. Give me back one single
evening at Boxhill, after a stroll in the deep-empurpled woods, before
Buonaparte was yet beaten, ‘with wine of attic taste,’ when wit, beauty,
friendship presided at the board! Oh no! Neither the time nor friends
that are fled, can be recalled!—Poverty is the test of sincerity, the
touchstone of civility. Even abroad, they treat you scurvily if your
remittances do not arrive regularly, and though you have hitherto lived
like a _Milord Anglais_. The want of money loses us friends not worth
the keeping, mistresses who are naturally jilts or coquets; it cuts us
out of society, to which dress and equipage are the only introduction;
and deprives us of a number of luxuries and advantages of which the only
good is, that they can only belong to the possessors of a large fortune.
Many people are wretched because they have not money to buy a fine
horse, or to hire a fine house, or to keep a carriage, or to purchase a
diamond necklace, or to go to a race-ball, or to give their servants new
liveries. I cannot myself enter into all this. If I can _live to think,
and think to live_, I am satisfied. Some want to possess pictures,
others to collect libraries. All I wish is, sometimes, to see the one
and read the other. Gray was mortified because he had not a hundred
pounds to bid for a curious library; and the Duchess of —— has
immortalized herself by her liberality on that occasion, and by the
handsome compliment she addressed to the poet, that ‘if it afforded him
any satisfaction, she had been more than paid, by her pleasure in
reading the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_.’
Literally and truly, one cannot get on well in the world without money.
To be in want of money, is to pass through life with little credit or
pleasure; it is to live out of the world, or to be despised if you come
into it; it is not to be sent for to court, or asked out to dinner, or
noticed in the street; it is not to have your opinion consulted or else
rejected with contempt, to have your acquirements carped at and doubted,
your good things disparaged, and at last to lose the wit and the spirit
to say them; it is to be scrutinized by strangers, and neglected by
friends; it is to be a thrall to circumstances, an exile in a foreign
land; to forego leisure, freedom, ease of body and mind, to be dependent
on the good-will and caprice of others, or earn a precarious and irksome
livelihood by some laborious employment: it is to be compelled to stand
behind a counter, or to sit at a desk in some public office, or to marry
your landlady, or not the person you would wish; or to go out to the
East or West-Indies, or to get a situation as judge abroad, and return
home with a liver-complaint; or to be a law-stationer, or a scrivener or
scavenger, or newspaper reporter; or to read law and sit in court
without a brief, or be deprived of the use of your fingers by
transcribing Greek manuscripts, or to be a seal engraver and pore
yourself blind; or to go upon the stage, or try some of the Fine Arts;
with all your pains, anxiety, and hopes, most probably to fail, or, if
you succeed, after the exertions of years, and undergoing constant
distress of mind and fortune, to be assailed on every side with envy,
backbiting, and falsehood, or to be a favourite with the public for
awhile, and then thrown into the back-ground—or a jail, by the
fickleness of taste and some new favourite; to be full of enthusiasm and
extravagance in youth, of chagrin and disappointment in after-life; to
be jostled by the rabble because you do not ride in your coach, or
avoided by those who know your worth and shrink from it as a claim on
their respect or their purse; to be a burden to your relations, or
unable to do any thing for them; to be ashamed to venture into crowds;
to have cold comfort at home; to lose by degrees your confidence and any
talent you might possess; to grow crabbed, morose, and querulous,
dissatisfied with every one, but most so with yourself; and plagued out
of your life, to look about for a place to die in, and quit the world
without any one’s asking after your will. The _wiseacres_ will possibly,
however, crowd round your coffin, and raise a monument at a considerable
expense, and after a lapse of time, to commemorate your genius and your
misfortunes!
The only reason why I am disposed to envy the professions of the church
or army is, that men can afford to be poor in them without being
subjected to insult. A girl with a handsome fortune in a country town
may marry a poor lieutenant without degrading herself. An officer is
always a gentleman; a clergyman is something more. Echard’s book _On the
Contempt of the Clergy_ is unfounded. It is surely sufficient for any
set of individuals, raised above actual want, that their characters are
not merely respectable, but sacred. Poverty, when it is voluntary, is
never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect. What are the begging
friars? Have they not put their base feet upon the necks of princes?
Money as a luxury is valuable only as a passport to respect. It is one
instrument of power. Where there are other admitted and ostensible
claims to this, it becomes superfluous, and the neglect of it is even
admired and looked up to as a mark of superiority over it. Even a
strolling beggar is a popular character, who makes an open profession of
his craft and calling, and who is neither worth a doit nor in want of
one. The Scotch are proverbially poor and proud: we know they can remedy
their poverty when they set about it. No one is sorry for them. The
French emigrants were formerly peculiarly situated in England. The
priests were obnoxious to the common people on account of their
religion; both they and the nobles, for their politics. Their poverty
and dirt subjected them to many rebuffs; but their privations being
voluntarily incurred, and also borne with the characteristic patience
and good-humour of the nation, screened them from contempt. I little
thought, when I used to meet them walking out in the summer’s-evenings
at Somers’ Town, in their long great coats, their beards covered with
snuff, and their eyes gleaming with mingled hope and regret in the rays
of the setting sun, and regarded them with pity bordering on respect, as
the last filmy vestige of the ancient regime, as shadows of loyalty and
superstition still flitting about the earth and shortly to disappear
from it for ever, that they would one day return over the bleeding
corpse of their country, and sit like harpies, a polluted triumph, over
the tomb of human liberty! To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is perhaps
to some temperaments a consummation devoutly to be wished. There is all
the subdued splendour of external rank, the pride of self-opinion,
irritated and goaded on by petty privations and vulgar obloquy to a
degree of morbid acuteness. Private and public annoyances must
perpetually remind him of what he is, of what his ancestors were (a
circumstance which might otherwise be forgotten); must narrow the circle
of conscious dignity more and more, and the sense of personal worth and
pretension must be exalted by habit and contrast into a refined
abstraction—‘pure in the last recesses of the mind’—unmixed with, or
unalloyed by ‘baser matter!’—It was an hypothesis of the late Mr. Thomas
Wedgwood, that there is a principle of compensation in the human mind
which equalizes all situations, and by which the absence of any thing
only gives us a more intense and intimate perception of the reality;
that insult adds to pride, that pain looks forward to ease with delight,
that hunger already enjoys the unsavoury morsel that is to save it from
perishing; that want is surrounded with imaginary riches, like the poor
poet in Hogarth, who has a map of the mines of Peru hanging on his
garret walls; in short, that ‘we can hold a fire in our hand by thinking
on the frosty Caucasus’—but this hypothesis, though ingenious and to a
certain point true, is to be admitted only in a limited and qualified
sense.
There are two classes of people that I have observed who are not so
distinct as might be imagined—those who cannot keep their own money in
their hands, and those who cannot keep their hands from other people’s.
The first are always in want of money, though they do not know what they
do with it. They _muddle_ it away, without method or object, and without
having any thing to show for it. They have not, for instance, a fine
house, but they hire two houses at a time; they have not a hot-house in
their garden, but a shrubbery within doors; they do not gamble, but they
purchase a library, and dispose of it when they move house. A princely
benefactor provides them with lodgings, where, for a time, you are sure
to find them at home: and they furnish them in a handsome style for
those who are to come after them. With all this sieve-like economy, they
can only afford a leg of mutton and a bottle of wine, and are glad to
get a lift in a common stage; whereas with a little management and the
same disbursements, they might entertain a round of company and drive a
smart tilbury. But they set no value upon money, and throw it away on
any object or in any manner that first presents itself, merely to have
it off their hands, so that you wonder what has become of it. The second
class above spoken of not only make away with what belongs to
themselves, but you cannot keep any thing you have from their rapacious
grasp. If you refuse to lend them what you want, they insist that you
_must_: if you let them have any thing to take charge of for a time (a
print or a bust) they swear that you have given it them, and that they
have too great a regard for the donor ever to part with it. You express
surprise at their having run so largely in debt; but where is the
singularity while others continue to lend? And how is this to be helped,
when the manner of these sturdy beggars amounts to dragooning you out of
your money, and they will not go away without your purse, any more than
if they came with a pistol in their hand? If a person has no delicacy,
he has you in his power, for you necessarily feel some towards him; and
since he will take no denial, you must comply with his peremptory
demands, or send for a constable, which out of respect for his character
you will not do. These persons are also poor—_light come, light go_—and
the bubble bursts at last. Yet if they had employed the same time and
pains in any laudable art or study that they have in raising a
surreptitious livelihood, they would have been respectable, if not rich.
It is their facility in borrowing money that has ruined them. No one
will set heartily to work, who has the face to enter a strange house,
ask the master of it for a considerable loan, on some plausible and
pompous pretext, and walk off with it in his pocket. You might as well
suspect a highwayman of addicting himself to hard study in the intervals
of his profession.
There is only one other class of persons I can think of, in connexion
with the subject of this Essay—those who are always in want of money
from the want of spirit to make use of it. Such persons are perhaps more
to be pitied than all the rest. They live in want, in the midst of
plenty—dare not touch what belongs to them, are afraid to say that their
soul is their own, have their wealth locked up from them by fear and
meanness as effectually as by bolts and bars, scarcely allow themselves
a coat to their backs or a morsel to eat, are in dread of coming to the
parish all their lives, and are not sorry when they die, to think that
they shall no longer be an expense to themselves—according to the old
epigram:
‘Here lies Father Clarges,
Who died to save charges!’
ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_March, 1827._
‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.’
—SIR THOMAS BROWN.
No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my
brother’s, and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth,
which makes us amends for every thing. To be young is to be as one of
the Immortal Gods. One half of time indeed is flown—the other half
remains in store for us with all its countless treasures; for there is
no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. We make the
coming age our own.——
‘The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us.’
Death, old age, are words without a meaning, that pass by us like the
idle air which we regard not. Others may have undergone, or may still be
liable to them—we ‘bear a charmed life,’ which laughs to scorn all such
sickly fancies. As in setting out on a delightful journey, we strain our
eager gaze forward——
‘Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail,’—
and see no end to the landscape, new objects presenting themselves as we
advance; so, in the commencement of life, we set no bounds to our
inclinations, nor to the unrestricted opportunities of gratifying them.
We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag; and it seems
that we can go on so for ever. We look round in a new world, full of
life, and motion, and ceaseless progress; and feel in ourselves all the
vigour and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from any
present symptoms how we shall be left behind in the natural course of
things, decline into old age, and drop into the grave. It is the
simplicity, and as it were _abstractedness_ of our feelings in youth,
that (so to speak) identifies us with nature, and (our experience being
slight and our passions strong) deludes us into a belief of being
immortal like it. Our short-lived connection with existence, we fondly
flatter ourselves, is an indissoluble and lasting union—a honey-moon
that knows neither coldness, jar, nor separation. As infants smile and
sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our wayward fancies, and lulled
into security by the roar of the universe around us—we quaff the cup of
life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only
overflows the more—objects press around us, filling the mind with their
magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we
have no room for the thoughts of death. From that plenitude of our
being, we cannot change all at once to dust and ashes, we cannot imagine
‘this sensible, warm motion, to become a kneaded clod’—we are too much
dazzled by the brightness of the waking dream around us to look into the
darkness of the tomb. We no more see our end than our beginning: the one
is lost in oblivion and vacancy, as the other is hid from us by the
crowd and hurry of approaching events. Or the grim shadow is seen
lingering in the horizon, which we are doomed never to overtake, or
whose last, faint, glimmering outline touches upon Heaven and translates
us to the skies! Nor would the hold that life has taken of us permit us
to detach our thoughts from present objects and pursuits, even if we
would. What is there more opposed to health, than sickness; to strength
and beauty, than decay and dissolution; to the active search of
knowledge than mere oblivion? Or is there none of the usual advantage to
bar the approach of Death, and mock his idle threats; Hope supplies
their place, and draws a veil over the abrupt termination of all our
cherished schemes. While the spirit of youth remains unimpaired, ere the
‘wine of life is drank up,’ we are like people intoxicated or in a
fever, who are hurried away by the violence of their own sensations: it
is only as present objects begin to pall upon the sense, as we have been
disappointed in our favourite pursuits, cut off from our closest ties,
that passion loosens its hold upon the breast, that we by degrees become
weaned from the world, and allow ourselves to contemplate, ‘as in a
glass, darkly,’ the possibility of parting with it for good. The example
of others, the voice of experience, has no effect upon us whatever.
Casualties we must avoid: the slow and deliberate advances of age we can
play at _hide-and-seek_ with. We think ourselves too lusty and too
nimble for that blear-eyed decrepid old gentleman to catch us. Like the
foolish fat scullion, in Sterne, when she hears that Master Bobby is
dead, our only reflection is—‘So am not I!’ The idea of death, instead
of staggering our confidence, rather seems to strengthen and enhance our
possession and our enjoyment of life. Others may fall around us like
leaves, or be mowed down like flowers by the scythe of Time: these are
but tropes and figures to the unreflecting ears and overweening
presumption of youth. It is not till we see the flowers of Love, Hope,
and Joy, withering around us, and our own pleasures cut up by the roots,
that we bring the moral home to ourselves, that we abate something of
the wanton extravagance of our pretensions, or that the emptiness and
dreariness of the prospect before us reconciles us to the stillness of
the grave!
‘Life! thou strange thing, that hast a power to feel
Thou art, and to perceive that others are.’[30]
Well might the poet begin his indignant invective against an art, whose
professed object is its destruction, with this animated apostrophe to
life. Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges are most
miraculous. Nor is it singular that when the splendid boon is first
granted us, our gratitude, our admiration, and our delight should
prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness, or from thinking it
will ever be recalled. Our first and strongest impressions are taken
from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we very innocently
transfer its durability as well as magnificence to ourselves. So newly
found, we cannot make up our minds to parting with it yet and at least
put off that consideration to an indefinite term. Like a clown at a
fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thoughts of
going home, or that it will soon be night. We know our existence only
from external objects, and we measure it by them. We can never be
satisfied with gazing; and nature will still want us to look on and
applaud. Otherwise, the sumptuous entertainment, ‘the feast of reason
and the flow of soul,’ to which they were invited, seems little better
than a mockery and a cruel insult. We do not go from a play till the
scene is ended, and the lights are ready to be extinguished. But the
fair face of things still shines on; shall we be called away, before the
curtain falls, or ere we have scarce had a glimpse of what is going on?
Like children, our step-mother Nature holds us up to see the raree-show
of the universe; and then, as if life were a burthen to support, lets us
instantly down again. Yet in that short interval, what ‘brave sublunary
things’ does not the spectacle unfold; like a bubble, at one minute
reflecting the universe, and the next, shook to air!—To see the golden
sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green
earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures, to look down giddy
precipices or over distant flowery vales, to see the world spread out
under one’s finger in a map, to bring the stars near, to view the
smallest insects in a microscope, to read history, and witness the
revolutions of empires and the succession of generations, to hear of the
glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant, and
to say all these were, and are now nothing, to think that we exist in
such a point of time, and in such a corner of space, to be at once
spectators and a part of the moving scene, to watch the return of the
seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear
——‘The stockdove plain amid the forest deep,
That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale’——
to traverse desert wildernesses, to listen to the midnight choir, to
visit lighted halls, or plunge into the dungeon’s gloom, or sit in
crowded theatres and see life itself mocked, to feel heat and cold,
pleasure and pain, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, to study the
works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame
and to dream of immortality, to have read Shakspeare and belong to the
same species as Sir Isaac Newton;[31] to be and to do all this, and then
in a moment to be nothing, to have it all snatched from one like a
juggler’s ball or a phantasmagoria; there is something revolting and
incredible to sense in the transition, and no wonder that, aided by
youth and warm blood, and the flush of enthusiasm, the mind contrives
for a long time to reject it with disdain and loathing as a monstrous
and improbable fiction, like a monkey on a house-top, that is loath,
amidst its fine discoveries and specious antics, to be tumbled headlong
into the street, and crushed to atoms, the sport and laughter of the
multitude!
The change, from the commencement to the close of life, appears like a
fable, after it has taken place; how should we treat it otherwise than
as a chimera before it has come to pass? There are some things that
happened so long ago, places or persons we have formerly seen, of which
such dim traces remain, we hardly know whether it was sleeping or waking
they occurred; they are like dreams within the dream of life, a mist, a
film before the eye of memory, which, as we try to recall them more
distinctly, elude our notice altogether. It is but natural that the lone
interval that we thus look back upon, should have appeared long and
endless in prospect. There are others so distinct and fresh, they seem
but of yesterday—their very vividness might be deemed a pledge of their
permanence. Then, however far back our impressions may go, we find
others still older (for our years are multiplied in youth); descriptions
of scenes that we had read, and people before our time, Priam and the
Trojan war; and even then, Nestor was old and dwelt delighted on his
youth, and spoke of the race, of heroes that were no more;—what wonder
that, seeing this long line of being pictured in our minds, and reviving
as it were in us, we should give ourselves involuntary credit for an
indeterminate period of existence? In the Cathedral at Peterborough
there is a monument to Mary, Queen of Scots, at which I used to gaze
when a boy, while the events of the period, all that had happened since,
passed in review before me. If all this mass of feeling and imagination
could be crowded into a moment’s compass, what might not the whole of
life be supposed to contain? We are heirs of the past; we count upon the
future as our natural reversion. Besides, there are some of our early
impressions so exquisitely tempered, it appears that they must always
last—nothing can add to or take away from their sweetness and purity—the
first breath of spring, the hyacinth dipped in the dew, the mild lustre
of the evening-star, the rainbow after a storm—while we have the full
enjoyment of these, we must be young; and what can ever alter us in this
respect? Truth, friendship, love, books, are also proof against the
canker of time; and while we live, but for them, we can never grow old.
We take out a new lease of existence from the objects on which we set
our affections, and become abstracted, impassive, immortal in them. We
cannot conceive how certain sentiments should ever decay or grow cold in
our breasts; and, consequently, to maintain them in their first youthful
glow and vigour, the flame of life must continue to burn as bright as
ever, or rather, they are the fuel that feed the sacred lamp, that
kindle ‘the purple light of love,’ and spread a golden cloud around our
heads! Again, we not only flourish and survive in our affections (in
which we will not listen to the possibility of a change, any more than
we foresee the wrinkles on the brow of a mistress), but we have a
farther guarantee against the thoughts of death in our favourite studies
and pursuits, and in their continual advance. Art we know is long; life,
we feel, should be so too. We see no end of the difficulties we have to
encounter: perfection is slow of attainment, and we must have time to
accomplish it in. Rubens complained that when he had just learnt his
art, he was snatched away from it: we trust we shall be more fortunate!
A wrinkle in an old head takes whole days to finish it properly: but to
catch ‘the Raphael grace, the Guido air,’ no limit should be put to our
endeavours. What a prospect for the future! What a task we have entered
upon! and shall we be arrested in the middle of it? We do not reckon our
time thus employed lost, or our pains thrown away, or our progress
slow—we do not droop or grow tired, but ‘gain new vigour at our endless
task;‘—and shall Time grudge us the opportunity to finish what we have
auspiciously begun, and have formed a sort of compact with nature to
achieve? The fame of the great names we look up to is also imperishable;
and shall not we, who contemplate it with such intense yearnings, imbibe
a portion of ethereal fire, the _divinæ particula auræ_, which nothing
can extinguish? I remember to have looked at a print of Rembrandt for
hours together, without being conscious of the flight of time, trying to
resolve it into its component parts, to connect its strong and sharp
gradations, to learn the secret of its reflected lights, and found
neither satiety nor pause in the prosecution of my studies. The print
over which I was poring would last long enough; why should the idea in
my mind, which was finer, more impalpable, perish before it? At this, I
redoubled the ardour of my pursuit, and by the very subtlety and
refinement of my inquiries, seemed to bespeak for them an exemption from
corruption and the rude grasp of Death.[32]
Objects, on our first acquaintance with them, have that singleness and
integrity of impression that it seems as if nothing could destroy or
obliterate them, so firmly are they stamped and rivetted on the brain.
We repose on them with a sort of voluptuous indolence, in full faith and
boundless confidence. We are absorbed in the present moment, or return
to the same point—idling away a great deal of time in youth, thinking we
have enough and to spare. There is often a local feeling in the air,
which is as fixed as if it were of marble; we loiter in dim cloisters,
losing ourselves in thought and in their glimmering arches; a winding
road before us seems as long as the journey of life, and as full of
events. Time and experience dissipate this illusion; and by reducing
them to detail, circumscribe the limits of our expectations. It is only
as the pageant of life passes by and the masques turn their backs upon
us, that we see through the deception, or believe that the train will
have an end. In many cases, the slow progress and monotonous texture of
our lives, before we mingle with the world and are embroiled in its
affairs, has a tendency to aid the same feeling. We have a difficulty,
when left to ourselves, and without the resource of books or some more
lively pursuit, to ‘beguile the slow and creeping hours of time,’ and
argue that if it moves on always at this tedious snail’s-pace, it can
never come to an end. We are willing to skip over certain portions of it
that separate us from favourite objects, that irritate ourselves at the
unnecessary delay. The young are prodigal of life from a superabundance
of it; the old are tenacious on the same score, because they have little
left, and cannot enjoy even what remains of it.
For my part, I set out in life with the French Revolution, and that
event had considerable influence on my early feelings, as on those of
others. Youth was then doubly such. It was the dawn of a new era, a new
impulse had been given to men’s minds, and the sun of Liberty rose upon
the sun of Life in the same day, and both were proud to run their race
together. Little did I dream, while my first hopes and wishes went hand
in hand with those of the human race, that long before my eyes should
close, that dawn would be overcast, and set once more in the night of
despotism—‘total eclipse!’ Happy that I did not. I felt for years, and
during the best part of my existence, _heart-whole_ in that cause, and
triumphed in the triumphs over the enemies of man! At that time, while
the fairest aspirations of the human mind seemed about to be realized,
ere the image of man was defaced and his breast mangled in scorn,
philosophy took a higher, poetry could afford a deeper range. At that
time, to read the ‘ROBBERS,’ was indeed delicious, and to hear
‘From the dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice, a famish’d father’s cry,’
could be borne only amidst the fulness of hope, the crash of the fall of
the strong holds of power, and the exulting sounds of the march of human
freedom. What feelings the death-scene in Don Carlos sent into the soul!
In that headlong career of lofty enthusiasm, and the joyous opening of
the prospects of the world and our own, the thought of death crossing
it, smote doubly cold upon the mind; there was a stifling sense of
oppression and confinement, an impatience of our present knowledge, a
desire to grasp the whole of our existence in one strong embrace, to
sound the mystery of life and death, and in order to put an end to the
agony of doubt and dread, to burst through our prison-house, and
confront the King of Terrors in his grisly palace!... As I was writing
out this passage, my miniature-picture when a child lay on the
mantle-piece, and I took it out of the case to look at it. I could
perceive few traces of myself in it; but there was the same placid brow,
the dimpled mouth, the same timid, inquisitive glance as ever. But its
careless smile did not seem to reproach me with having become a recreant
to the sentiments that were then sown in my mind, or with having written
a sentence that could call up a blush in this image of ingenuous youth!
‘That time is past with all its giddy raptures.’ Since the future was
barred to my progress, I have turned for consolation to the past,
gathering up the fragments of my early recollections, and putting them
into a form that might live. It is thus, that when we find our personal
and substantial identity vanishing from us, we strive to gain a
reflected and substituted one in our thoughts: we do not like to perish
wholly, and wish to bequeath our names at least to posterity. As long as
we can keep alive our cherished thoughts and nearest interests in the
minds of others, we do not appear to have retired altogether from the
stage, we still occupy a place in the estimation of mankind, exercise a
powerful influence over them, and it is only our bodies that are
trampled into dust or dispersed to air. Our darling speculations still
find favour and encouragement, and we make as good a figure in the eyes
of our descendants, nay, perhaps, a better than we did in our lifetime.
This is one point gained; the demands of our self-love are so far
satisfied. Besides, if by the proofs of intellectual superiority we
survive ourselves in this world, by exemplary virtue or unblemished
faith, we are taught to ensure an interest in another and a higher state
of being, and to anticipate at the same time the applauses of men and
angels.
‘Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries;
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.’
As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time.
Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in
this respect. We try to arrest its few last tottering steps, and to make
it linger on the brink of the grave. We can never leave off wondering
how that which has ever been should cease to be, and would still live
on, that we may wonder at our own shadow, and when ‘all the life of life
is flown,’ dwell on the retrospect of the past. This is accompanied by a
mechanical tenaciousness of whatever we possess, by a distrust and a
sense of fallacious hollowness in all we see. Instead of the full, pulpy
feeling of youth, every thing is flat and insipid. The world is a
painted witch, that puts us off with false shews and tempting
appearances. The ease, the jocund gaiety, the unsuspecting security of
youth are fled: nor can we, without flying in the face of common sense,
‘From the last dregs of life, hope to receive
What its first sprightly runnings could not give.’
If we can slip out of the world without notice or mischance, can tamper
with bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the becoming composure of
_still-life_, before we sink into total insensibility, it is as much as
we ought to expect. We do not in the regular course of nature die all at
once: we have mouldered away gradually long before; faculty after
faculty, attachment after attachment, we are torn from ourselves
piecemeal while living; year after year takes something from us; and
death only consigns the last remnant of what we were to the grave. The
revulsion is not so great, and a quiet _euthanasia_ is a winding-up of
the plot, that is not out of reason or nature.
That we should thus in a manner outlive ourselves, and dwindle
imperceptibly into nothing, is not surprising, when even in our prime
the strongest impressions leave so little traces of themselves behind,
and the last object is driven out by the succeeding one. How little
effect is produced on us at any time by the books we have read, the
scenes we have witnessed, the sufferings we have gone through! Think
only of the variety of feelings we experience in reading an interesting
romance, or being present at a fine play—what beauty, what sublimity,
what soothing, what heart-rending emotions! You would suppose these
would last for ever, or at least subdue the mind to a correspondent tone
and harmony—while we turn over the page, while the scene is passing
before us, it seems as if nothing could ever after shake our resolution,
that ‘treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing could touch us farther!’
The first splash of mud we get, on entering the street, the first
pettifogging shop-keeper that cheats us out of twopence, and the whole
vanishes clean out of our remembrance, and we become the idle prey of
the most petty and annoying circumstances. The mind soars by an effort
to the grand and lofty: it is at home, in the grovelling, the
disagreeable, and the little. This happens in the height and hey-day of
our existence, when novelty gives a stronger impulse to the blood and
takes a faster hold of the brain, (I have known the impression on coming
out of a gallery of pictures then last half a day)—as we grow old, we
become more feeble and querulous, every object ‘reverbs its own
hollowness,’ and both worlds are not enough to satisfy the peevish
importunity and extravagant presumption of our desires! There are a few
superior, happy beings, who are born with a temper exempt from every
trifling annoyance. This spirit sits serene and smiling as in its native
skies, and a divine harmony (whether heard or not) plays around them.
This is to be at peace. Without this, it is in vain to fly into deserts,
or to build a hermitage on the top of rocks, if regret and ill-humour
follow us there: and with this, it is needless to make the experiment.
The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is
the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference
whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with
graceful resignation.
ON READING NEW BOOKS
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_July, 1827._
‘And what of this new book, that the whole world make such a rout
about?’—STERNE.
I cannot understand the rage manifested by the greater part of the world
for reading New Books. If the public had read all those that have gone
before, I can conceive how they should not wish to read the same work
twice over; but when I consider the countless volumes that lie unopened,
unregarded, unread, and unthought-of, I cannot enter into the pathetic
complaints that I hear made, that Sir Walter writes no more—that the
press is idle—that Lord Byron is dead. If I have not read a book before,
it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed
yesterday or three hundred years ago. If it be urged that it has no
modern, passing incidents, and is out of date and old-fashioned, then it
is so much the newer; it is farther removed from other works that I have
lately read, from the familiar routine of ordinary life, and makes so
much more addition to my knowledge. But many people would as soon think
of putting on old armour, as of taking up a book not published within
the last month, or year at the utmost. There is a fashion in reading as
well as in dress, which lasts only for the season. One would imagine
that books were, like women, the worse for being old;[33] that they have
a pleasure in being read for the first time; that they open their leaves
more cordially; that the spirit of enjoyment wears out with the spirit
of novelty; and that, after a certain age, it is high time to put them
on the shelf. This conceit seems to be followed up in practice. What is
it to me that another—that hundreds or thousands have in all ages read a
work? Is it on this account the less likely to give me pleasure, because
it has delighted so many others? Or can I taste this pleasure by proxy?
Or am I in any degree the wiser for their knowledge? Yet this might
appear to be the inference. _Their_ having read the work may be said to
act upon us by sympathy, and the knowledge which so many other persons
have of its contents deadens our curiosity and interest altogether. We
set aside the subject as one on which others have made up their minds
for us (as if we really could have ideas in their heads), and are quite
on the alert for the next new work, teeming hot from the press, which we
shall be the first to read, criticise, and pass an opinion on. Oh,
delightful! To cut open the leaves, to inhale the fragrance of the
scarcely dry paper, to examine the type, to see who is the printer
(which is some clue to the value that is set upon the work), to launch
out into regions of thought and invention never trod till now, and to
explore characters that never met a human eye before—this is a luxury
worth sacrificing a dinner-party, or a few hours of a spare morning to.
Who, indeed, when the work is critical and full of expectation, would
venture to dine out, or to face a coterie of bluestockings in the
evening, without having gone through this ordeal, or at least without
hastily turning over a few of the first pages, while dressing, to be
able to say that the beginning does not promise much, or to tell the
name of the heroine?
A new work is something in our power: we mount the bench, and sit in
judgment on it: we can damn or recommend it to others at pleasure, can
decry or extol it to the skies, and can give an answer to those who have
not yet read it and expect an account of it; and thus shew our
shrewdness and the independence of our taste before the world have had
time to form an opinion. If we cannot write ourselves, we become, by
busying ourselves about it, a kind of _accessaries after the fact_.
Though not the parent of the bantling that ‘has just come into this
breathing world, scarce half made up,’ without the aid of criticism and
puffing, yet we are the gossips and foster-nurses on the occasion, with
all the mysterious significance and self-importance of the tribe. If we
wait, we must take our report from others; if we make haste, we may
dictate our’s to them. It is not a race, then, for priority of
information, but for precedence in tattling and dogmatising. The work
last out is the first that people talk and inquire about. It is the
subject on the _tapis_—the cause that is pending. It is the last
candidate for success (other claims have been disposed of), and appeals
for this success to us, and us alone. Our predecessors can have nothing
to say to this question, however they may have anticipated us on others;
future ages, in all probability, will not trouble their heads about it;
we are the panel. How hard, then, not to avail ourselves of our
immediate privilege to give sentence of life or death—to seem in
ignorance of what every one else is full of—to be behind-hand with the
polite, the knowing, and fashionable part of mankind—to be at a loss and
dumb-founded, when all around us are in their glory, and figuring away,
on no other ground than that of having read a work that we have not!
Books that are to be written hereafter cannot be criticised by us; those
that were written formerly have been criticised long ago: but a new book
is the property, the prey of ephemeral criticism, which it darts
triumphantly upon; there is a raw thin air of ignorance and uncertainty
about it, not filled up by any recorded opinion; and curiosity,
impertinence, and vanity rush eagerly into the vacuum. A new book is the
fair field for petulance and coxcombry to gather laurels in—the butt set
up for roving opinion to aim at. Can we wonder, then, that the
circulating libraries are besieged by literary dowagers and their
granddaughters, when a new novel is announced? That Mail-Coach copies of
the Edinburgh Review are or were coveted? That the Manuscript of the
Waverley romances is sent abroad in time for the French, German, or even
Italian translation to appear on the same day as the original work, so
that the longing Continental public may not be kept waiting an instant
longer than their fellow-readers in the English metropolis, which would
be as tantalising and insupportable as a little girl being kept without
her new frock, when her sister’s is just come home and is the talk and
admiration of every one in the house? To be sure, there is something in
the taste of the times; a modern work is expressly adapted to modern
readers. It appeals to our direct experience, and to well-known
subjects; it is part and parcel of the world around us, and is drawn
from the same sources as our daily thoughts. There is, therefore, so
far, a natural or habitual sympathy between us and the literature of the
day, though this is a different consideration from the mere circumstance
of novelty. An author now alive has a right to calculate upon the living
public: he cannot count upon the dead, nor look forward with much
confidence to those that are unborn. Neither, however, is it true that
we are eager to read all new books alike: we turn from them with a
certain feeling of distaste and distrust, unless they are recommended to
us by some peculiar feature or obvious distinction. Only young ladies
from the boarding-school, or milliners’ girls, read all the new novels
that come out. It must be spoken of or against; the writer’s name must
be well known or a great secret; it must be a topic of discourse and a
mark for criticism—that is, it must be likely to bring us into notice in
some way—or we take no notice of it. There is a mutual and tacit
understanding on this head. We can no more read all the new books that
appear, than we can read all the old ones that have disappeared from
time to time. A question may be started here, and pursued as far as
needful, whether, if an old and worm-eaten Manuscript were discovered at
the present moment, it would be sought after with the same avidity as a
new and hot-pressed poem, or other popular work? Not generally,
certainly, though by a few with perhaps greater zeal. For it would not
affect present interests, or amuse present fancies, or touch on present
manners, or fall in with the public _egotism_ in any way: it would be
the work either of some obscure author—in which case it would want the
principle of excitement; or of some illustrious name, whose style and
manner would be already familiar to those most versed in the subject,
and his fame established—so that, as a matter of comment and
controversy, it would only go to account on the old score: there would
be no room for learned feuds and heart-burnings. Was there not a
Manuscript of Cicero’s talked of as having been discovered about a year
ago? But we have heard no more of it. There have been several other
cases, more or less in point, in our time or near it. A Noble Lord
(which may serve to shew at least the interest taken in books _not for
being new_) some time ago gave 2000_l._ for a copy of the first edition
of the Decameron: but did he read it? It has been a fashion also of late
for noble and wealthy persons to go to a considerable expense in
ordering reprints of the old Chronicles and black-letter works. Does not
this rather prove that the books did not circulate very rapidly or
extensively, or such extraordinary patronage and liberality would not
have been necessary? Mr. Thomas Taylor, at the instance, I believe, of
the old Duke of Norfolk, printed fifty copies in quarto of a translation
of the works of Plato and Aristotle. He did not choose that a larger
impression should be struck off, lest these authors should get into the
hands of the vulgar. There was no danger of a run in that way. I tried
to read some of the Dialogues in the translation of Plato, but, I
confess, could make nothing of it: ‘the logic was so different from
ours!’[34] A startling experiment was made on this sort of retrospective
curiosity, in the case of Ireland’s celebrated Shakspeare forgery. The
public there certainly manifested no backwardness nor lukewarmness: the
enthusiasm was equal to the folly. But then the spirit exhibited on this
occasion was partly critical and polemical, and it is a problem whether
an actual and undoubted play of Shakspeare’s would have excited the same
ferment; and, on the other hand, Shakspeare is an essential modern.
People read and go to see his real plays, as well as his pretended ones.
The _fuss_ made about Ossian is another test to refer to. It was its
being the supposed revival of an old work (known only by scattered
fragments or lingering tradition) which gave it its chief interest,
though there was also a good deal of mystery and quackery concerned
along with the din and stir of national jealousy and pretension. Who
reads Ossian now? It is one of the reproaches brought against Buonaparte
that he was fond of it when young. I cannot for myself see the
objection. There is no doubt an antiquarian spirit always at work, and
opposed to the spirit of novelty-hunting; but, though opposed, it is
scarcely a match for it in a general and popular point of view. It is
not long ago that I happened to be suggesting a new translation of Don
Quixote to an enterprising bookseller; and his answer was,—‘We want new
Don Quixotes.’ I believe I deprived the same active-minded person of a
night’s rest, by telling him there was the beginning of another novel by
Goldsmith in existence. This, if it could be procured, would satisfy
both tastes for the new and the old at once. I fear it is but a
fragment, and that we must wait till a new Goldsmith appears. We may
observe of late a strong craving after _Memoirs_ and _Lives of the
Dead_. But these, it may be remarked, savour so much of the real and
familiar, that the persons described differ from us only in being dead,
which is a reflection to our advantage: or, if remote and romantic in
their interest and adventures, they require to be bolstered up in some
measure by the embellishments of modern style and criticism. The
accounts of Petrarch and Laura, of Abelard and Eloise, have a
lusciousness and warmth in the subject which contrast quaintly and
pointedly with the coldness of the grave; and, after all, we prefer
Pope’s Eloise and Abelard with the modern dress and flourishes, to the
sublime and affecting simplicity of the original Letters.
In some very just and agreeable reflections on the story of Abelard and
Eloise, in a late number of a contemporary publication, there is a
quotation of some lines from Lucan, which Eloise is said to have
repeated in broken accents as she was advancing to the altar to receive
the veil:
‘O maxime conjux!
O thalamis indigne meis! Hoc juris habebat
In tantum fortuna caput? Cur impia nupsi,
Si miserum factura fui? Nunc accipe pœnas,
Sed quas sponte luam.’ _Pharsalia_, lib. 8.
This speech, quoted by another person, on such an occasion, might seem
cold and pedantic; but from the mouth of the passionate and unaffected
Eloise it cannot bear that interpretation. What sounding lines! What a
pomp, and yet what a familiar boldness in their application—‘proud as
when blue Iris bends!’ The reading this account brought forcibly to mind
what has struck me often before—the unreasonableness of the complaint we
constantly hear of the ignorance and barbarism of former ages, and the
folly of restricting all refinement and literary elegance to our own. We
are indeed, indebted to the ages that have gone before us, and could not
well do without them. But in all ages there will be found still others
that have gone before with nearly equal lustre and advantage, though by
distance and the intervention of multiplied excellence, this lustre may
be dimmed or forgotten. Had it then no existence? We might, with the
same reason, suppose that the horizon is the last boundary and verge of
the round earth. Still, as we advance, it recedes from us; and so time
from its store-house pours out an endless succession of the productions
of art and genius; and the farther we explore the obscurity, other
trophies and other landmarks rise up. It is only our ignorance that
fixes a limit—as the mist gathered round the mountain’s brow makes us
fancy we are treading the edge of the universe! Here was Heloise living
at a period when monkish indolence and superstition were at their
height—in one of those that are emphatically called the _dark ages_; and
yet, as she is led to the altar to make her last fatal vow, expressing
her feelings in language quite natural to her, but from which the most
accomplished and heroic of our modern females would shrink back with
pretty and affected wonder and affright. The glowing and impetuous lines
which she murmured, as she passed on, with spontaneous and rising
enthusiasm, were engraven on her heart, familiar to her as her daily
thoughts; her mind must have been full of them to overflowing, and at
the same time enriched with other stores and sources of knowledge
equally elegant and impressive; and we persist, notwithstanding this and
a thousand similar circumstances, in indulging our surprise how people
could exist, and see, and feel, in those days, without having access to
our opportunities and acquirements, and how Shakspeare wrote long after,
_in a barbarous age_! The mystery in this case is of our own making. We
are struck with astonishment at finding a fine moral sentiment or a
noble image nervously expressed in an author of the age of Queen
Elizabeth; not considering that, independently of nature and feeling,
which are the same in all periods, the writers of that day, who were
generally men of education and learning, had such models before them as
the one that has been just referred to—were thoroughly acquainted with
those masters of classic thought and language, compared with whom, in
all that relates to the artificial graces of composition, the most
studied of the moderns are little better than Goths and Vandals. It is
true, we have lost sight of, and neglected the former, because the
latter have, in a great degree, superseded them, as the elevations
nearest to us intercept those farthest off; but our not availing
ourselves of this vantage-ground is no reason why our forefathers should
not (who had not our superfluity of choice), and most assuredly they did
study and cherish the precious fragments of antiquity, collected
together in their time, ‘like sunken wreck and sumless treasuries;’ and
while they did this, we need be at no loss to account for any examples
of grace, of force, or dignity in their writings, if these must always
be traced back to a previous source. One age cannot understand how
another could subsist without its lights, as one country thinks every
other must be poor for want of its physical productions. This is a
narrow and superficial view of the subject: we should by all means rise
above it. I am not for devoting the whole of our time to the study of
the classics, or of any other set of writers, to the exclusion and
neglect of nature; but I think we should turn our thoughts enough that
way to convince us of the existence of genius and learning before our
time, and to cure us of an overweening conceit of ourselves, and of a
contemptuous opinion of the world at large. Every civilised age and
country (and of these there is not one, but a hundred) has its
literature, its arts, its comforts, large and ample, though we may know
nothing of them; nor is it (except for our own sakes) important that we
should.
Books have been so multiplied in our days (like the Vanity Fair of
knowledge), and we have made such progress beyond ourselves in some
points, that it seems at first glance as if we had monopolised every
possible advantage, and the rest of the world must be left destitute and
in darkness. This is the _cockneyism_ (with leave be it spoken) of the
nineteenth century. There is a tone of smartness and piquancy in modern
writing, to which former examples may, in one sense, appear flat and
pedantic. Our allusions are more pointed and personal: the ancients are,
in this respect, formal and prosaic personages. Some one, not long ago,
in this vulgar, shallow spirit of criticism (which sees every thing from
its own point of view), said that the tragedies of Sophocles and
Æschylus were about as good as the pieces brought out at Sadler’s Wells
or the Adelphi Theatre. An oration of Demosthenes is thought dry and
meagre, because it is not ‘full of wise saws and modern instances:’ one
of Cicero’s is objected to as flimsy and extravagant, for the same
reason. There is a style in one age which does not fall in with the
taste of the public in another, as it requires greater effeminacy and
softness, greater severity or simplicity, greater force or refinement.
Guido was more admired than Raphael in his day, because the manners were
grown softer without the strength: Sir Peter Lely was thought in his to
have eclipsed Vandyke—an opinion that no one holds at present: Holbein’s
faces must be allowed to be very different from Sir Thomas
Lawrence’s—yet the one was the favourite painter of Henry VIII., as the
other is of George IV. What should we say in our time to the _euphuism_
of the age of Elizabeth, when style was made a riddle, and the court
talked in conundrums? This, as a novelty and a trial of the wits, might
take for a while: afterwards, it could only seem absurd. We must always
make some allowance for a change of style, which those who are
accustomed to read none but works written within the last twenty years
neither can nor will make. When a whole generation read, they will read
none but contemporary productions. The taste for literature becomes
superficial, as it becomes universal and is spread over a larger space.
When ten thousand boarding-school girls, who have learnt to play on the
harpsichord, are brought out in the same season, Rossini will be
preferred to Mozart, as the last new composer. I remember a very genteel
young couple in the boxes at Drury Lane being very much scandalised some
years ago at the phrase in _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_—‘an insolent
piece of paper’—applied to the contents of a letter—it wanted the modern
lightness and indifference. Let an old book be ever so good, it treats
(generally speaking) of topics that are stale in a style that has grown
‘somewhat musty;’ of manners that are exploded, probably by the very
ridicule thus cast upon them; of persons that no longer figure on the
stage; and of interests that have long since given place to others in
the infinite fluctuations of human affairs. Longinus complains of the
want of interest in the Odyssey, because it does not, like the Iliad,
treat of war. The very complaint we make against the latter is that it
treats of nothing else; or that, as Fuseli expresses it, every thing is
seen ‘through the blaze of war.’ Books of devotion are no longer read
(if we read Irving’s _Orations_, it is merely that we may go as a
_lounge_ to see the man): even attacks on religion are out of date and
insipid. Voltaire’s jests, and the _Jew’s Letters_ in answer (equal in
wit, and more than equal in learning), repose quietly on the shelf
together. We want something in England about Rent and the Poor Laws, and
something in France about the Charter—or Lord Byron. With the attempts,
however, to revive superstition and intolerance, a spirit of opposition
has been excited, and Pascall’s _Provincial Letters_ have been once more
enlisted into the service. In France you meet with no one who has read
the _New Heloise_: the _Princess of Cleves_ is not even mentioned in
these degenerate days. Is it not provoking with us to see the _Beggar’s
Opera_ cut down to two acts, because some of the allusions are too
broad, and others not understood? And in America—that Van Diemen’s Land
of letters—this sterling satire is hooted off the stage, because
fortunately they have no such state of manners as it describes before
their eyes; and because, unfortunately, they have no conception of any
thing but what they see. America is singularly and awkwardly situated in
this respect. It is a new country with an old language; and while every
thing about them is of a day’s growth, they are constantly applying to
us to know what to think of it, and taking their opinions from our books
and newspapers with a strange mixture of servility and of the spirit of
contradiction. They are an independent state in politics: in literature
they are still a colony from us—not out of their leading strings, and
strangely puzzled how to determine between the Edinburgh and Quarterly
Reviews. We have naturalised some of their writers, who had formed
themselves upon us. This is at once a compliment to them and to
ourselves. Amidst the scramble and lottery for fame in the present day,
besides puffing, which may be regarded as the hotbed of reputation,
another mode has been attempted by _transplanting_ it; and writers who
are set down as drivellers at home, shoot up great authors on the other
side of the water; pack up their all—a title-page and sufficient
impudence; and a work, of which the _flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication_,
in Shenstone’s phrase, is well known to every competent judge, is
_placarded_ into eminence, and ‘flames in the forehead of the morning
sky’ on the walls of Paris or St. Petersburgh. I dare not mention the
instances, but so it is. Some reputations last only while the possessors
live, from which one might suppose that they gave themselves a character
for genius: others are cried up by their gossiping acquaintances, as
long as they give dinners, and make their houses places of polite
resort; and, in general, in our time, a book may be considered to have
passed the ordeal that is mentioned at all three months after it is
printed. Immortality is not even a dream—a boy’s conceit; and posthumous
fame is no more regarded by the author than by his bookseller.[35]
This idle, dissipated turn seems to be a set-off to, or the obvious
reaction of, the exclusive admiration of the ancients, which was
formerly the fashion: as if the sun of human intellect rose and set at
Rome and Athens, and the mind of man had never exerted itself to any
purpose since. The ignorant, as well as the adept, were charmed only
with what was obsolete and far-fetched, wrapped up in technical terms
and in a learned tongue. Those who spoke and wrote a language which
hardly any one at present even understood, must of course be wiser than
we. Time, that brings so many reputations to decay, had embalmed others
and rendered them sacred. From an implicit faith and overstrained homage
paid to antiquity, we of the modern school have taken too strong a bias
to what is new; and divide all wisdom and worth between ourselves and
posterity,—not a very formidable rival to our self-love, as we attribute
all its advantages to ourselves, though we pretend to owe little or
nothing to our predecessors. About the time of the French Revolution, it
was agreed that the world had hitherto been in its dotage or its
infancy; and that Mr. Godwin, Condorcet, and others were to begin a new
race of men—a new epoch in society. Every thing up to that period was to
be set aside as puerile or barbarous; or, if there were any traces of
thought and manliness now and then discoverable, they were to be
regarded with wonder as prodigies—as irregular and fitful starts in that
long sleep of reason and night of philosophy. In this liberal spirit Mr.
Godwin composed an Essay, to prove that, till the publication of _The
Enquiry concerning Political Justice_, no one knew how to write a word
of common grammar, or a style that was not utterly uncouth, incongruous,
and feeble. Addison, Swift, and Junius were included in this censure.
The English language itself might be supposed to owe its stability and
consistency, its roundness and polish, to the whirling motion of the
French Revolution. Those who had gone before us were, like our
grandfathers and grandmothers, decrepit, superannuated people, blind and
dull; poor creatures, like flies in winter, without pith or marrow in
them. The past was barren of interest—had neither thought nor object
worthy to arrest our attention; and the future would be equally a
senseless void, except as we projected ourselves and our theories into
it. There is nothing I hate more than I do this exclusive, upstart
spirit.
‘By Heavens, I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on some pleasant lea,
Catch glimpses that might make me less forlorn,
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.’
WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS.
Neither do I see the good of it even in a personal and interested point
of view. By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to
despise ourselves. Where there is no established scale nor rooted faith
in excellence, all superiority—our own as well as that of others—soon
comes to the ground. By applying the wrong end of the magnifying glass
to all objects indiscriminately, the most respectable dwindle into
insignificance, and the best are confounded with the worst. Learning, no
longer supported by opinion, or genius by fame, is cast into the mire,
and ‘trampled under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ I would rather
endure the most blind and bigotted respect for great and illustrious
names, than that pitiful, grovelling humour which has no pride in
intellectual excellence, and no pleasure but in decrying those who have
given proofs of it, and reducing them to its own level. If, with the
diffusion of knowledge, we do not gain an enlargement and elevation of
views, where is the benefit? If, by tearing asunder names from things,
we do not leave even the name or shadow of excellence, it is better to
let them remain as they were; for it is better to have something to
admire than nothing—names, if not things—the shadow, if not the
substance—the tinsel, if not the gold. All can now read and write
equally; and, it is therefore presumed, equally well. Any thing short of
this sweeping conclusion is an invidious distinction; and those who
claim it for themselves or others are _exclusionists_ in letters. Every
one at least can call names—can invent a falsehood, or repeat a story
against those who have galled their pragmatical pretensions by really
adding to the stock of general amusement or instruction. Every one in a
crowd has the power to throw dirt: nine out of ten have the inclination.
It is curious that, in an age when the most universally-admitted claim
to public distinction is literary merit, the attaining of this
distinction is almost a sure title to public contempt and obloquy.[36]
They cry you up, because you are unknown, and do not excite their
jealousy; and run you down, when they have thus distinguished you, out
of envy and spleen at the very idol they have set up. A public favourite
is ‘kept like an apple in the jaw of an ape—first mouthed, to be
afterwards swallowed. When they need what you have gleaned, it is but
squeezing you, and spunge, you shall be dry again.’ At first they think
only of the pleasure or advantage they receive; but, on reflection, they
are mortified at the superiority implied in this involuntary concession,
and are determined to be even with you the very first opportunity. What
is the prevailing spirit of modern literature? To defame men of letters.
What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the
public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up
to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves, or a set of
vagabonds or miscreants that should be hunted out of society.[37] Hence
men of letters, losing their self-respect, become government-tools, and
prostitute their talents to the most infamous purposes, or turn _dandy
scribblers_, and set up for gentlemen authors in their own defence. I
like the Order of the Jesuits better than this: they made themselves
respected by the laity, kept their own secret, and did not prey on one
another. Resume then, oh! Learning, thy robe pontifical; clothe thyself
in pride and purple; join the sacred to the profane; wield both worlds;
instead of twopenny trash and mechanics’ magazines, issue bulls and
decretals; say not, let there be light, but darkness visible; draw a
bandage over the eyes of the ignorant and unlettered; hang the terrors
of superstition and despotism over them;—and for thy pains they will
bless thee: children will pull off their caps as thou dost pass; women
will courtesy; the old will wipe their beards; and thou wilt rule once
more over the base serving people, clowns, and nobles, with a rod of
iron!
ON DISAGREEABLE PEOPLE
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_August, 1827._
Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to
others. I do not here mean to speak of persons who offend intentionally,
or are obnoxious to dislike from some palpable defect of mind or body,
ugliness, pride, ill-humour, &c.,—but of those who are disagreeable in
spite of themselves, and, as it might appear, with almost every
qualification to recommend them to others. This want of success is owing
chiefly to something in what is called their _manner_; and this again
has its foundation in a certain cross-grained and unsociable state of
feeling on their part, which influences us, perhaps, without our
distinctly adverting to it. The mind is a finer instrument than we
sometimes suppose it, and is not only swayed by overt acts and tangible
proofs, but has an instinctive feeling of the air of truth. We find many
individuals in whose company we pass our time, and have no particular
fault to find with their understandings or character, and yet we are
never thoroughly satisfied with them: the reason will turn out to be,
upon examination, that they are never thoroughly satisfied with
themselves, but uneasy and out of sorts all the time; and this makes us
uneasy with them, without our reflecting on, or being able to discover
the cause.
Thus, for instance, we meet with persons who do us a number of
kindnesses, who shew us every mark of respect and good-will, who are
friendly and serviceable,—and yet we do not feel grateful to them, after
all. We reproach ourselves with this as caprice or insensibility, and
try to get the better of it; but there is something in their way of
doing things that prevents us from feeling cordial or sincerely obliged
to them. We think them very worthy people, and would be glad of an
opportunity to do them a good turn if it were in our power; but we
cannot get beyond this: the utmost we can do is to save appearances, and
not come to an open rupture with them. The truth is, in all such cases,
we do not sympathise (as we ought) with them, because they do not
sympathise (as they ought) with us. They have done what they did from a
sense of duty in a cold dry manner, or from a meddlesome busybody
humour; or to shew their superiority over us, or to patronise our
infirmity; or they have dropped some hint by the way, or blundered upon
some topic they should not, and have shewn, by one means or other, that
they were occupied with any thing but the pleasure they were affording
us, or a delicate attention to our feelings. Such persons may be styled
_friendly grievances_. They are commonly people of low spirits and
disappointed views, who see the discouraging side of human life, and,
with the best intentions in the world, contrive to make every thing they
have to do with uncomfortable. They are alive to your distress, and take
pains to remove it; but they have no satisfaction in the gaiety and ease
they have communicated, and are on the _look-out_ for some new occasion
of signalizing their zeal; nor are they backward to insinuate that you
will soon have need of their assistance, to guard you against running
into fresh difficulties, or to extricate you from them. From large
benevolence of soul and ‘discourse of reason, looking before and after,’
they are continually reminding you of something that has gone wrong in
time past, or that may do so in that which is to come, and are surprised
that their awkward hints, sly inuendos, blunt questions, and solemn
features do not excite all the complacency and mutual good understanding
in you which it is intended that they should. When they make themselves
miserable on your account, it is hard that you will not lend them your
countenance and support. This deplorable humour of theirs does not hit
any one else. They are useful, but not agreeable people; they may assist
you in your affairs, but they depress and tyrannise over your feelings.
When they have made you happy, they will not let you be so—have no
enjoyment of the good they have done—will on no account part with their
melancholy and desponding tone—and, by their mawkish insensibility and
doleful grimaces, throw a damp over the triumph they are called upon to
celebrate. They would keep you in hot water, that they may help you out
of it. They will nurse you in a fit of sickness (congenial
sufferers!)—arbitrate a law-suit for you, and embroil you deeper—procure
you a loan of money;—but all the while they are only delighted with
rubbing the sore place, and casting the colour of your mental or other
disorders. ‘The whole need not a physician;’ and, being once placed at
ease and comfort, they have no farther use for you as subjects for their
singular beneficence, and you are not sorry to be quit of their tiresome
interference. The old proverb, _A friend in need is a friend indeed_, is
not verified in them. The class of persons here spoken of are the very
reverse of _summer-friends_, who court you in prosperity, flatter your
vanity, are the humble servants of your follies, never see or allude to
any thing wrong, minister to your gaiety, smooth over every difficulty,
and, with the slightest approach of misfortune or of any thing
unpleasant, take French leave:—
‘As when, in prime of June, a burnished fly,
Sprung from the meads, o’er which he sweeps along,
Cheered by the breathing bloom and vital sky,
Tunes up amid these airy halls his song,
Soothing at first the gay reposing throng;
And oft he sips their bowl, or nearly drowned,
He thence recovering drives their beds among,
And scares their tender sleep with trump profound;
Then out again he flies to wing his mazy round.’
THOMSON’S CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.
However we may despise such triflers, yet we regret them more than those
well-meaning friends on whom a dull melancholy vapour hangs, that drags
them and every one about them to the ground.
Again, there are those who might be very agreeable people, if they had
but spirit to be so; but there is a narrow, unaspiring, under-bred tone
in all they say or do. They have great sense and information—abound in a
knowledge of character—have a fund of anecdote—are unexceptionable in
manners and appearance—and yet we cannot make up our minds to like them:
we are not glad to see them, nor sorry when they go away. Our
familiarity with them, however great, wants the principle of cement,
which is a certain appearance of frank cordiality and social enjoyment.
They have no pleasure in the subjects of their own thoughts, and
therefore can communicate none to others. There is a dry, husky, grating
manner—a pettiness of detail—a tenaciousness of particulars, however
trifling or unpleasant—a disposition to cavil—an aversion to enlarged
and liberal views of things—in short, a hard, painful, unbending
_matter-of-factness_, from which the spirit and effect are banished, and
the letter only is attended to, which makes it impossible to sympathise
with their discourse. To make conversation interesting or agreeable,
there is required either the habitual tone of good company, which gives
a favourable colouring to every thing—or the warmth and enthusiasm of
genius, which, though it may occasionally offend or be thrown off its
guard, makes amends by its rapturous flights, and flings a glancing
light upon all things. The literal and _dogged_ style of conversation
resembles that of a French picture, or its mechanical fidelity is like
evidence given in a court of justice, or a police report.
From the literal to the plain-spoken, the transition is easy. The most
efficient weapon of offence is truth. Those who deal in dry and
repulsive matters-of-fact, tire out their friends; those who blurt out
hard and home truths, make themselves mortal enemies wherever they come.
There are your blunt, honest creatures, who omit no opportunity of
letting you know their minds, and are sure to tell you all the ill, and
conceal all the good they hear of you. They would not flatter you for
the world, and to caution you against the malice of others, they think
the province of a friend. This is not candour, but impudence; and yet
they think it odd you are not charmed with their unreserved
communicativeness of disposition. Gossips and tale-bearers, on the
contrary, who supply the _tittle-tattle_ of the neighbourhood, flatter
you to your face, and laugh at you behind your back, are welcome and
agreeable guests in all companies. Though you know it will be your turn
next, yet for the sake of the immediate gratification, you are contented
to pay your share of the public tax upon character, and are better
pleased with the falsehoods that never reach your ears, than with the
truths that others (less complaisant and more sincere) utter to your
face—so short-sighted and willing to be imposed upon is our self-love!
There is a man, who has the air of not being convinced without an
argument: you avoid him as if he were a lion in your path. There is
another, who asks you fifty questions as to the commonest things you
advance: you would sooner pardon a fellow who held a pistol to your
breast and demanded your money. No one regards a turnpike-keeper, or a
custom-house officer, with a friendly eye: he who stops you in an
excursion of fancy, or ransacks the articles of your belief obstinately
and churlishly, to distinguish the spurious from the genuine, is still
more your foe. These inquisitors and cross-examiners upon system make
ten enemies for every controversy in which they engage. The world dread
nothing so much as being convinced of their errors. In doing them this
piece of service, you make war equally on their prejudices, their
interests, their pride, and indolence. You not only set up for a
superiority of understanding over them, which they hate, but you deprive
them of their ordinary grounds of action, their topics of discourse, of
their confidence in themselves, and those to whom they have been
accustomed to look up for instruction and advice. It is making children
of them. You unhinge all their established opinions and trains of
thought; and after leaving them in this listless, vacant, unsettled
state—dissatisfied with their own notions and shocked at yours—you
expect them to court and be delighted with your company, because,
forsooth, you have only expressed your sincere and conscientious
convictions. Mankind are not deceived by professions, unless they
choose. They think that this pill of true doctrine, however it may be
gilded over, is full of gall and bitterness to them; and, again, it is a
maxim of which the vulgar are firmly persuaded, that plain-speaking (as
it is called) is, nine parts in ten, spleen and self-opinion; and the
other part, perhaps, honesty. Those who will not abate an inch in
argument, and are always seeking to recover the wind of you, are, in the
eye of the world, disagreeable, unconscionable people, who ought to be
_sent to Coventry_, or left to wrangle by themselves. No persons,
however, are more averse to contradiction than these same dogmatists.
What shews our susceptibility on this point is, there is no flattery so
adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent. Any one, however mean
his capacity or ill-qualified to judge, who gives way to all our
sentiments, and never seems to think but as we do, is indeed an _alter
idem_—another self; and we admit him without scruple into our entire
confidence, ‘yea, into our heart of hearts.’
It is the same in books. Those which, under the disguise of
plain-speaking, vent paradoxes, and set their faces against the common
sense of mankind, are neither ‘the volumes
——‘That enrich the shops,
That pass with approbation through the land;’
nor, I fear, can it be added—
‘That bring their authors an immortal fame.’
They excite a clamour and opposition at first, and are in general soon
consigned to oblivion. Even if the opinions are in the end adopted, the
authors gain little by it, and their names remain in their original
obloquy; for the public will own no obligations to such ungracious
benefactors. In like manner, there are many books written in a very
delightful vein, though with little in them, and that are accordingly
popular. Their principle is to please, and not to offend; and they
succeed in both objects. We are contented with the deference shown to
our feelings for the time, and grant a truce both to wit and wisdom. The
‘courteous reader’ and the good-natured author are well matched in this
instance, and find their account in mutual tenderness and forbearance to
each other’s infirmities. I am not sure that Walton’s Angler is not a
book of this last description—
‘That dallies with the innocence of thought,
Like the old age.’
Hobbes and Mandeville are in the opposite extreme, and have met with a
correspondent fate. The Tatler and the Spectator are in the golden mean,
carry instruction as far as it can go without shocking, and give the
most exquisite pleasure without one particle of pain. ‘_Desire to
please, and you will infallibly please_,’ is a maxim equally applicable
to the study or the drawing-room. Thus also we see actors of very small
pretensions, and who have scarce any other merit than that of being on
good terms with themselves, and in high good humour with their parts
(though they hardly understand a word of them), who are universal
favourites with the audience. Others, who are masters of their art, and
in whom no slip or flaw can be detected, you have no pleasure in seeing,
from something dry, repulsive, and unconciliating in their manner; and
you almost hate the very mention of their names, as an unavailing appeal
to your candid decision in their favour, and as taxing you with
injustice for refusing it.
We may observe persons who seem to take a peculiar delight in the
_disagreeable_. They catch all sorts of uncouth tones and gestures, the
manners and dialect of clowns and hoydens, and aim at vulgarity as
desperately as others ape gentility. [This is what is often understood
by a _love of low life_.] They say the most unwarrantable things,
without meaning or feeling what they say. What startles or shocks other
people, is to them a sport—an amusing excitement—a fillip to their
constitutions; and from the bluntness of their perceptions, and a
certain wilfulness of spirit, not being able to enter into the refined
and agreeable, they make a merit of despising every thing of the kind.
Masculine women, for example, are those who, not being distinguished by
the charms and delicacy of the sex, affect a superiority over it by
throwing aside all decorum. We also find another class, who continually
do and say what they ought not, and what they do not intend, and who are
governed almost entirely by an instinct of absurdity. Owing to a
perversity of imagination or irritability of nerve, the idea that a
thing is improper acts as a provocation to it: the fear of committing a
blunder is so strong, that in their agitation they _bolt_ out whatever
is uppermost in their minds, before they are aware of the consequence.
The dread of something wrong haunts and rivets their attention to it;
and an uneasy, morbid apprehensiveness of temper takes away their
self-possession, and hurries them into the very mistakes they are most
anxious to avoid.
If we look about us, and ask who are the agreeable and disagreeable
people in the world, we shall see that it does not depend on their
virtues or vices—their understanding or stupidity—but as much on the
degree of pleasure or pain they seem to feel in ordinary social
intercourse. What signify all the good qualities any one possesses, if
he is none the better for them himself? If the cause is so delightful,
the effect ought to be so too. We enjoy a friend’s society only in
proportion as he is satisfied with ours. Even wit, however it may
startle, is only agreeable as it is sheathed in good-humour. There are a
kind of _intellectual stammerers_, who are delivered of their good
things with pain and effort; and consequently what costs them such
evident uneasiness does not impart unmixed delight to the bystanders.
There are those, on the contrary, whose sallies cost them nothing—who
abound in a flow of pleasantry and good-humour; and who float down the
stream with them carelessly and triumphantly,—
‘Wit at the helm, and Pleasure at the prow.’
Perhaps it may be said of English wit in general, that it too much
resembles pointed lead: after all, there is something heavy and dull in
it! The race of small wits are not the least agreeable people in the
world. They have their little joke to themselves, enjoy it, and do not
set up any preposterous pretensions to thwart the current of our
self-love. Toad-eating is accounted a thriving profession; and a _butt_,
according to the Spectator, is a highly useful member of society—as one
who takes whatever is said of him in good part, and as necessary to
conduct off the spleen and superfluous petulance of the company. Opposed
to these are the swaggering bullies—the licensed wits—the
free-thinkers—the loud talkers, who, in the jockey phrase, have _lost
their mouths_, and cannot be reined in by any regard to decency or
common sense. The more obnoxious the subject, the more are they charmed
with it, converting their want of feeling into a proof of superiority to
vulgar prejudice and squeamish affectation. But there is an unseemly
exposure of the mind, as well as of the body. There are some objects
that shock the sense, and cannot with propriety be mentioned: there are
naked truths that offend the mind, and ought to be kept out of sight as
much as possible. For human nature cannot bear to be too hardly pressed
upon. One of these cynical truisms, when brought forward to the world,
may be forgiven as a slip of the pen: a succession of them, denoting a
deliberate purpose and _malice prepense_, must ruin any writer. Lord
Byron had got into an irregular course of these a little before his
death—seemed desirous, in imitation of Mr. Shelley, to run the gauntlet
of public obloquy—and, at the same time, wishing to screen himself from
the censure he defied, dedicated his Cain to Sir Walter Scott—a pretty
godfather to such a bantling!
Some persons are of so teazing and fidgetty a turn of mind, that they do
not give you a moment’s rest. Every thing goes wrong with them. They
complain of a headache or the weather. They take up a book, and lay it
down again—venture an opinion, and retract it before they have half
done—offer to serve you, and prevent some one else from doing it. If you
dine with them at a tavern, in order to be more at your ease, the fish
is too little done—the sauce is not the right one; they ask for a sort
of wine which they think is not to be had, or if it is, after some
trouble, procured, do not touch it; they give the waiter fifty
contradictory orders, and are restless and sit on thorns the whole of
dinner-time. All this is owing to a want of robust health, and of a
strong spirit of enjoyment; it is a fastidious habit of mind, produced
by a valetudinary habit of body: they are out of sorts with every thing,
and of course their ill-humour and captiousness communicates itself to
you, who are as little delighted with them as they are with other
things. Another sort of people, equally objectionable with this helpless
class, who are disconcerted by a shower of rain or stopped by an
insect’s wing, are those who, in the opposite spirit, will have every
thing their own way, and carry all before them—who cannot brook the
slightest shadow of opposition—who are always in the heat of an
argument—who knit their brows and clench their teeth in some speculative
discussion, as if they were engaged in a personal quarrel—and who,
though successful over almost every competitor, seem still to resent the
very offer of resistance to their supposed authority, and are as angry
as if they had sustained some premeditated injury. There is an
impatience of temper and an intolerance of opinion in this that
conciliates neither our affection nor esteem. To such persons nothing
appears of any moment but the indulgence of a domineering intellectual
superiority to the disregard and discomfiture of their own and every
body else’s comfort. Mounted on an abstract proposition, they trample on
every courtesy and decency of behaviour; and though, perhaps, they do
not intend the gross personalities they are guilty of, yet they cannot
be acquitted of a want of due consideration for others, and of an
intolerable egotism in the support of truth and justice. You may hear
one of these Quixotic declaimers pleading the cause of humanity in a
voice of thunder, or expatiating on the beauty of a Guido with features
distorted with rage and scorn. This is not a very amiable or edifying
spectacle.
There are persons who cannot make friends. Who are they? Those who
cannot be friends. It is not the want of understanding or good-nature,
of entertaining or useful qualities, that you complain of: on the
contrary, they have probably many points of attraction; but they have
one that neutralises all these—they care nothing about you, and are
neither the better nor worse for what you think of them. They manifest
no joy at your approach; and when you leave them, it is with a feeling
that they can do just as well without you. This is not sullenness, nor
indifference, nor absence of mind; but they are intent solely on their
own thoughts, and you are merely one of the subjects they exercise them
upon. They live in society as in a solitude; and, however their brain
works, their pulse beats neither faster nor slower for the common
accidents of life. There is, therefore, something cold and repulsive in
the air that is about them—like that of marble. In a word, they are
_modern philosophers_; and the modern philosopher is what the pedant was
of old—a being who lives in a world of his own, and has no
correspondence with this. It is not that such persons have not done you
services—you acknowledge it; it is not that they have said severe things
of you—you submit to it as a necessary evil: but it is the cool manner
in which the whole is done that annoys you—the speculating upon you, as
if you were nobody—the regarding you, with a view to experiment _in
corpore vili_—the principle of dissection—the determination to spare no
blemishes—to cut you down to your real standard;—in short, the utter
absence of the partiality of friendship, the blind enthusiasm of
affection, or the delicacy of common decency, that whether they ‘hew you
as a carcase fit for hounds, or carve you as a dish fit for the gods,’
the operation on your feelings and your sense of obligation is just the
same; and, whether they are demons or angels in themselves, you wish
them equally _at the devil_!
Other persons of worth and sense give way to mere violence of
temperament (with which the understanding has nothing to do)—are burnt
up with a perpetual fury—repel and throw you to a distance by their
restless, whirling motion—so that you dare not go near them, or feel as
uneasy in their company as if you stood on the edge of a volcano. They
have their _tempora mollia fandi_; but then what a stir may you not
expect the next moment! Nothing is less inviting or less comfortable
than this state of uncertainty and apprehension. Then there are those
who never approach you without the most alarming advice or information,
telling you that you are in a dying way, or that your affairs are on the
point of ruin, by way of disburthening their consciences; and others,
who give you to understand much the same thing as a good joke, out of
sheer impertinence, constitutional vivacity, and want of something to
say. All these, it must be confessed, are disagreeable people; and you
repay their overanxiety or total forgetfulness of you, by a
determination to cut them as speedily as possible. We meet with
instances of persons who overpower you by a sort of boisterous mirth and
rude animal spirits, with whose ordinary state of excitement it is as
impossible to keep up as with that of any one really intoxicated; and
with others who seem scarce alive—who take no pleasure or interest in
any thing—who are born to exemplify the maxim,
‘Not to admire is all the art I know
To make men happy, or to keep them so,—
and whose mawkish insensibility or sullen scorn are equally annoying. In
general, all people brought up in remote country places, where life is
crude and harsh—all sectaries—all partisans of a losing cause, are
discontented and disagreeable. Commend me above all to the Westminster
School of Reform, whose blood runs as cold in their veins as the
torpedo’s, and whose touch jars like it. Catholics are, upon the whole,
more amiable than Protestants—foreigners than English people. Among
ourselves, the Scotch, as a nation, are particularly disagreeable. They
hate every appearance of comfort themselves, and refuse it to others.
Their climate, their religion, and their habits are equally averse to
pleasure. Their manners are either distinguished by a fawning sycophancy
(to gain their own ends, and conceal their natural defects), that makes
one sick; or by a morose unbending callousness, that makes one shudder.
I had forgot to mention two other descriptions of persons who fall under
the scope of this essay:—those who take up a subject, and run on with it
interminably, without knowing whether their hearers care one word about
it, or in the least minding what reception their oratory meets
with—these are pretty generally voted _bores_ (mostly German ones);—and
others, who may be designated as practical paradox-mongers—who discard
the ‘milk of human kindness,’ and an attention to common observances,
from all their actions, as effeminate and puling—who wear a white hat as
a mark of superior understanding, and carry home a handkerchief-full of
mushrooms in the top of it as an original discovery—who give you
craw-fish for supper instead of lobsters; seek their company in a
garret, and over a gin-bottle, to avoid the imputation of affecting
genteel society; and discard them after a term of years, and warn others
against them, as being _honest fellows_, which is thought a vulgar
prejudice. This is carrying the harsh and repulsive even beyond the
disagreeable—to the hateful. Such persons are generally people of
common-place understandings, obtuse feelings, and inordinate vanity.
They are formidable if they get you in their power—otherwise, they are
only to be laughed at.
There are a vast number who are disagreeable from meanness of spirit,
from downright insolence, from slovenliness of dress or disgusting
tricks, from folly or ignorance: but these causes are positive moral or
physical defects, and I only meant to speak of that repulsiveness of
manners which arises from want of tact and sympathy with others. So far
of friendship: a word, if I durst, of love. Gallantry to women (the sure
road to their favour) is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion
to all their wants and wishes—a delight in their satisfaction, and a
confidence in yourself, as being able to contribute towards it. The
slightest indifference with regard to them, or distrust of yourself, are
equally fatal. The amiable is the voluptuous in looks, manner, or words.
No face that exhibits this kind of expression—whether lively or serious,
obvious or suppressed, will be thought ugly—no address, awkward—no lover
who approaches every woman he meets as his mistress, will be
unsuccessful. Diffidence and awkwardness are the two antidotes to love.
To please universally, we must be pleased with ourselves and others.
There should be a tinge of the coxcomb, an oil of self-complacency, an
anticipation of success—there should be no gloom, no moroseness no
shyness—in short, there should be very little of an Englishman, and a
good deal of a Frenchman. But though, I believe, this is the receipt, we
are none the nearer making use of it. It is impossible for those who are
naturally disagreeable ever to become otherwise. This is some
consolation, as it may save a world of useless pains and anxiety.
‘_Desire to please, and you will infallibly please_,’ is a true maxim;
but it does not follow that it is in the power of all to practise it. A
vain man, who thinks he is endeavouring to please, is only endeavouring
to shine, and is still farther from the mark. An irritable man, who puts
a check upon himself, only grows dull, and loses spirit to be any thing.
Good temper and a happy spirit (which are the indispensable requisites)
can no more be commanded than good health or good looks; and though the
plain and sickly need not distort their features, and may abstain from
success, this is all they can do. The utmost a disagreeable person can
do is to hope to be less disagreeable than with care and study he might
become, and to pass unnoticed in society. With this negative character
he should be contented, and may build his fame and happiness on other
things.
I will conclude with a character of men who neither please nor aspire to
please anybody, and who can come in nowhere so properly as at the
fag-end of an essay:—I mean that class of discontented but amusing
persons, who are infatuated with their own ill success, and reduced to
despair by a lucky turn in their favour. While all goes well, they are
_like fish out of water_. They have no reliance on or sympathy with
their good fortune, and look upon it as a momentary delusion. Let a
doubt be thrown on the question, and they begin to be full of lively
apprehensions again: let all their hopes vanish, and they feel
themselves on firm ground once more. From want of spirit or of habit,
their imaginations cannot rise above the low ground of humility—cannot
reflect the gay, flaunting tints of the fancy—flag and droop into
despondency—and can neither indulge the expectation, nor employ the
means of success. Even when it is within their reach, they dare not lay
hands upon it; and shrink from unlooked-for bursts of prosperity, as
something of which they are both ashamed and unworthy. The class of
_croakers_ here spoken of are less delighted at other people’s
misfortunes than their own. Their neighbours may have some
pretensions—they have none. Querulous complaints and anticipations of
discomfort are the food on which they live; and they at last acquire a
passion for that which is the favourite theme of their thoughts, and can
no more do without it than without the pinch of snuff with which they
season their conversation, and enliven the pauses of their daily
prognostics.
ON MEANS AND ENDS
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_September, 1827._
‘We work by wit, and not by witchcraft.’—IAGO.
It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This seems a
truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that we shall find
things done, merely by wishing it? _To put the will for the deed_ is as
usual in practice as it is contrary to common sense. There is, in fact,
no absurdity, no contradiction, of which the mind is not capable. This
weakness is, I think, more remarkable in the English than in any other
people, in whom (to judge by what I discover in myself) the will bears
great and disproportioned sway. We desire a thing: we contemplate the
end intently, and think it done, neglecting the necessary means to
accomplish it. The strong tendency of the mind towards it, the internal
effort it makes to give birth to the object of its idolatry, seems an
adequate cause to produce the wished-for effect, and is in a manner
identified with it. This is more particularly the case in what relates
to the _Fine Arts_, and will account for some phenomena in the national
character.
The English style is distinguished by what are called
_ébauches_[38]—rude sketches, or violent attempts at effect, with a
total inattention to the details or delicacy of finishing. Now this, I
apprehend, proceeds not exactly from grossness of perception, but from
the wilfulness of our characters, our determination to have every thing
our own way without any trouble, or delay, or distraction of mind. An
object strikes us: we see and feel the whole effect at once. We wish to
produce a likeness of it; but we wish to transfer the impression to the
canvas as it is conveyed to us, simultaneously and intuitively—that is,
to stamp it there at a blow—or, otherwise, we turn away with impatience
and disgust, as if the means were an obstacle to the end, and every
attention to the mechanical process were a deviation from our original
purpose. We thus degenerate, by repeated failures, into a slovenly style
of art; and that which was at first an undisciplined and irregular
impulse, becomes a habit, and then a theory. It seems a little strange
that the zealous devotion to the end should produce aversion to the
means; but so it is: neither is it, however irrational, altogether
unnatural. That which we are struck with, which we are enamoured of, is
the general appearance or result; and it would certainly be most
desirable to produce the effect we aim at by a word or wish, if it were
possible, without being taken up with the mechanical drudgery or
pettiness of detail, or dexterity of execution, which, though they are
essential and component parts of the work, do not enter into our
thoughts, or form any part of our contemplation. In a word, the hand
does not keep pace with the eye; and it is the desire that it should,
that causes all the contradiction and confusion. We would have a face to
start out from the canvas at once—not feature by feature, or touch by
touch; we would be glad to convey an attitude or a divine expression to
the spectator by a stroke of the pencil, as it is conveyed by a glance
of the eye, or by the magic of feeling, independently of measurements,
and distances, and foreshortening, and numberless minute particulars,
and all the instrumentality of the art. We may find it necessary, on a
cool calculation, to go through and make ourselves masters of these;
but, in so doing, we submit only to necessity, and they are still a
diversion to, and a suspension of, our favourite purpose for the time—at
least unless practice has given that facility which almost identifies
the two together, and makes the process an unconscious one. The end thus
devours up the means; or our eagerness for the one, where it is strong
and unchecked, renders us in proportion impatient of the other. So we
view an object at a distance, which excites in us an inclination to
visit it: this, after many tedious steps and intricate windings, we do;
but, if we could fly, we should never consent to go on foot. The mind,
however, has wings, though the body has not; and, wherever the
imagination can come into play, our desires outrun their accomplishment.
Persons of this extravagant humour should addict themselves to eloquence
or poetry, where the thought ‘leaps at once to its effect,’ and is
wafted, in a metaphor or an apostrophe, ‘from Indus to the Pole;’ though
even there we should find enough, in the preparatory and mechanical
parts of those arts, to try our patience and mortify our vanity! The
first and strongest impulse of the mind is to achieve any object, on
which it is set, at once, and by the shortest and most decisive means;
but, as this cannot always be done, we ought not to neglect other more
indirect and subordinate aids; nor should we be tempted to do so, but
that the delusions of the will interfere with the convictions of the
understanding, and what we ardently wish, we fancy to be both possible
and true. Let us take the instance of copying a fine picture. We are
full of the effect we intend to produce; and so powerfully does this
prepossession affect us, that we imagine we have produced it, in spite
of the evidence of our senses and the suggestions of friends. In truth,
after a number of violent and anxious efforts to strike off a
resemblance which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not to
have succeeded; it is too late to retrace our steps, and begin over
again in a different method; we prefer even failure to arriving at our
end by petty, mechanical tricks and rules; we have copied Titian or
Rubens in the spirit in which they ought to be copied; though the
likeness may not be perfect, there is a look, a tone, a _something_,
which we chiefly aimed at, and which we persuade ourselves, seeing the
copy only through the dazzled, hectic flush of feverish imagination, we
have really given; and thus we persist, and make fifty excuses, sooner
than own our error, which would imply its abandonment; or, if the light
breaks in upon us, through all the disguises of sophistry and self-love,
it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it. The more evident our
failure, the more desperate the struggles we make to conceal it from
ourselves, to stick to our original determination, and end where we
began.
What makes me think that this is the real stumbling-block in our way,
and not mere rusticity or want of discrimination, is that you will see
an English artist admiring and thrown into downright raptures by the
tucker of Titian’s _Mistress_, made up of an infinite number of little
delicate folds; and, if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds deliberately
to omit all these details, and dash it off by a single smear of his
brush. This is not ignorance, or even laziness, I conceive, so much as
what is called _jumping at a conclusion_. It is, in a word, an
overweening presumption. ‘A wilful man must have his way.’ He sees the
details, the varieties, and their effect: he sees and is charmed with
all this; but he would reproduce it with the same rapidity and
unembarrassed freedom that he sees it—or not at all. He scorns the slow
but sure method, to which others conform, as tedious and inanimate. The
mixing his colours, the laying in the ground, the giving all his
attention to a minute break or nice gradation in the several lights and
shades, is a mechanical and endless operation, very different from the
delight he feels in studying the effect of all these, when properly and
ably executed. _Quam nihil ad tuum, Papiniane, ingenium!_ Such fooleries
are foreign to his refined taste and lofty enthusiasm; and a doubt
crosses his mind, in the midst of his warmest raptures, how Titian could
resolve upon the drudgery of going through them, or whether it was not
rather owing to extreme facility of hand, and a sort of trick in laying
on the colours, abridging the mechanical labour! No one wrote or talked
more eloquently about Titian’s harmony and clearness of colouring than
the late Mr. Barry—discoursing of his greens, his blues, his yellows,
‘the little red and white of which he composed his flesh-colour,’ _con
amore_; yet his own colouring was dead and dingy, and, if he had copied
a Titian, he would have made it a mere daub, leaving out all that caused
his wonder or admiration, or that induced him to copy it after the
English or Irish fashion. We not only grudge the labour of beginning,
but we stop short, for the same reason, when we are near touching the
goal of success, and, to save a few last touches, leave a work
unfinished and an object unattained. The immediate steps, the daily
gradual improvement, the successive completion of parts, give us no
pleasure; we strain at the final result; we wish to have the whole done,
and, in our anxiety to get it off our hands, say _it will do_, and lose
the benefit of all our pains by stinting a little more, and being unable
to command a little patience. In a day or two, we will suppose, a copy
of a fine Titian would be as like as we could make it: the prospect of
this so enchants us, that we skip the intervening space, see no great
use in going on with it, fancy that we may spoil it, and, in order to
put an end to the question, take it home with us, where we immediately
see our error, and spend the rest of our lives in regretting that we did
not finish it properly when we were about it. We can execute only a
part; we see the whole of nature or of a picture at once. _Hinc illæ
lachrymæ._ The English grasp at this whole—nothing less interests or
contents them; and, in aiming at too much, they miss their object
altogether.
A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious
feeling—of this desire to master the whole of his subject, and
anticipate his good fortune at a blow—of this _massing_ and
concentrating principle. He takes the thing more easy and rationally. He
has none of the mental qualms, the nervous agitation, the wild,
desperate plunges and convulsive throes of the English artist. He does
not set off headlong without knowing where he is going, and find himself
up to the neck in all sorts of difficulties and absurdities, from
impatience to begin and have the matter off his mind (as if it were an
evil conscience); but takes time to consider, arranges his plans, gets
in his outline and his distances, and lays a foundation before he
attempts a superstructure which he may have to pull in pieces again, or
let it remain—a monument of his folly. _He looks before he leaps_, which
is contrary to the true blindfold English rule; and I should think that
we had invented this proverb from seeing so many fatal examples of the
violation of it. Suppose he undertakes to make a copy of a picture: he
first looks at it, and sees what it is. He does not make his sketch all
black or all white, because one part of it is so, and because he cannot
alter an idea he has once got into his head and must always run into
extremes, but varies his tints (strange as it may seem) from green to
red, from orange-tawny to yellow, from grey to brown, according as they
vary in the original. He sees no inconsistency, no forfeiture of a
principle, in this (any more than Mr. Southey in the change of the
colours of his coat), but a great deal of right reason, and indeed an
absolute necessity for it, if he wishes to succeed in what he is about.
This is the last thing in an Englishman’s thoughts: he only wishes to
have his own way, though it ends in defeat and ruin—strives hard to do
what he is sensible he cannot—or, if he finds he can, gives over and
leaves the matter short of a triumphant conclusion, which is too
flattering an idea for him to indulge in. The French artist proceeds
with due deliberation, and bit by bit. He takes some one part—a hand, an
eye, a piece of drapery, an object in the back-ground—and finishes it
carefully; then another, and so on to the end. When he has gone through
every part, his picture is done: there is nothing more that he can add
to it; it is a numerical calculation, and there are only so many items
in the account. An Englishman may go on _slobbering_ his over for the
hundredth time, and be no nearer than when he began. As he tries to
finish the whole at once, and as this is not possible, he always leaves
his work in an imperfect state, or as if he had begun on a new
canvas—like a man who is determined to leap to the top of a tower,
instead of scaling it step by step, and who is necessarily thrown on his
back every time he repeats the experiment. Again, the French student
does not, from a childish impatience, when he is near the end, destroy
the effect of the whole, by leaving some one part eminently deficient,
an eye-sore to the rest; nor does he fly from what he is about, to any
thing else that happens to catch his eye, neglecting the one and
spoiling the other. He is, in our old poet’s phrase, ‘constrained by
mastery,’ by the mastery of common sense and pleasurable feeling. He is
in no hurry to get to the end; for he has a satisfaction in the work,
and touches and retouches perhaps a single head, day after day and week
after week, without repining, uneasiness, or apparent progress. The very
lightness and buoyancy of his feeling renders him (where the necessity
of this is pointed out) patient and laborious. An Englishman, whatever
he undertakes, is as if he was carrying a heavy load that oppresses both
his body and mind, and that he is anxious to throw down as soon as
possible. The Frenchman’s hopes and fears are not excited to a pitch of
intolerable agony, so that he is compelled, in mere compassion to
himself, to bring the question to a speedy issue, even to the loss of
his object. He is calm, easy, collected, and takes his time and improves
his advantages as they occur, with vigilance and alacrity. Pleased with
himself, he is pleased with whatever occupies his attention nearly
alike. He is never taken at a disadvantage. Whether he paints an angel
or a joint-stool, it is much the same to him: whether it is landscape or
history, still it is he who paints it. Nothing puts him out of his way,
for nothing puts him out of conceit with himself. This self-complacency
forms an admirable ground-work for moderation and docility in certain
particulars, though not in others.
I remember an absurd instance enough of this deliberate mode of setting
to work in a young French artist, who was copying the Titian’s
_Mistress_ in the Louvre, some twenty years ago. After getting in his
chalk-outline, one would think he might have been attracted to the
face—that heaven of beauty (as it appears to some), clear, transparent,
open, breathing freshness, that ‘makes a sunshine in the shady place’;
or to the lustre of the golden hair; or some part of the poetry of the
picture (for, with all its materiality, this picture has a poetry about
it); instead of which he began to finish a square he had marked out in
the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of board and a
bottle of some kind of ointment. He set to work like a cabinet-maker or
an engraver, and appeared to have no sympathy with the soul of the
picture. On a Frenchman (generally speaking), the distinction between
the great and the little, the exquisite and the indifferent, is in a
great measure lost: his self-satisfied egotism supplies whatever is
wanting up to a certain point, and neutralizes whatever goes beyond it.
Another young man, at the time I speak of, was for eleven weeks daily
employed in making a black-lead pencil drawing of a small Leonardo: he
sat with his legs balanced across a rail to do it, kept his hat on,
every now and then consulted with his friends about his progress, rose
up, went to the fire to warm himself, talked of the styles of the
different masters—praising Titian _pour les coloris_, Raphael _pour
l’expression_, Poussin _pour la composition_—all being alike to him,
provided they had each something to help him on in his harangue (for
that was all he thought about),—and then returned to _perfectionate_ (as
he called it) his copy. This would drive an Englishman out of his
senses, supposing him to be ever so stupid. The perseverance and the
interruptions, the labour without impulse, the attention to the parts in
succession, and disregard of the whole together, are to him utterly
incomprehensible. He wants to do something striking, and bends all his
thoughts and energies to one mighty effort. A Frenchman has no notion of
this summary proceeding, exists mostly in his present sensations, and,
if he is left at liberty to enjoy or trifle with these, cares about
nothing farther, looking neither backwards nor forwards. They forgot the
reign of terror under Robespierre in a month; they forgot that they had
ever been called the _great nation_ under Buonaparte in a week. They sat
in chairs on the Boulevards (just as they do at other times), when the
shots were firing into the next street, and were only persuaded to quit
them when their own soldiers were seen pouring down all the avenues from
the heights of Montmartre, crying ‘_Sauve qui peut!_’ They then went
home and dressed themselves to see the _Allies_ enter Paris, as a fine
sight, just as they would witness a procession at a theatre. This is
carrying the instinct of levity as far as it will go. With all their
affectation and want of sincerity, there is, on the principle here
stated, a kind of simplicity and nature about them after all. They lend
themselves to the impression of the moment with good humour and good
will, making it not much better nor worse than it is: the English
constantly over-do or under-do every thing, and are either mad with
enthusiasm or in despair. The extreme slowness and regularity of the
French school have then arisen, as a natural consequence, out of their
very fickleness and frivolity (their severally supposed national
characteristics); for, owing to the last, their studious exactness costs
them nothing; and, again, they have no headstrong impulses or ardent
longings that urge them on to the violation of rules, or hurry them away
with a subject or with the interest belonging to it. All is foreseen and
settled beforehand, so as to assist the fluttering and feeble hold they
have of things. When they venture beyond the literal and formal, and
(mistaking pedantry and bombast for genius) attempt the grand and the
impressive style, as in David’s and Girodet’s pictures, the Lord deliver
us from sublimity engrafted on insipidity and _petit maître-ism_! You
see a solitary French artist in the Louvre copying a Raphael or a
Rubens, standing on one leg, not quite sure of what he is about: you see
them collected in groupes about David’s, elbowing each other, thinking
them even finer than Raphael, more truly themselves, a more perfect
combination of all that can be taught by the Greek sculptor and the
French posture-master! Is this patriotism, or want of taste? If the
former, it is excusable, and why not, if the latter?
Even should a French artist fail, he is not disconcerted—there is
something else he excels in: ‘for one unkind and cruel fair, another
still consoles him.’ He studies in a more graceful posture, or pays
greater attention to his dress; or he has a friend, who has _beaucoup du
talent_, and conceit enough for them both. His self-love has always a
salvo, and comes upon its legs again, like a cat or a monkey. Not so
with Bruin the Bear. If an Englishman (God help the mark!) fails in one
thing, it is all over with him; he is enraged at the mention of any
thing else he can do, and at every consolation offered him on that
score; he banishes all other thoughts, but of his disappointment and
discomfiture, from his breast—neither eats nor sleeps (it is well if he
does not swallow down double ‘potations, pottle-deep,’ to drown
remembrance)—will not own, even to himself, any other thing in which he
takes an interest or feels a pride; and is in the horrors till he
recovers his good opinion of himself in the only point on which he now
sets a value, and for which his anxiety and disorder of mind
incapacitate him as effectually as if he were drunk with strong liquor
instead of spleen and passion. I have here drawn the character of an
Englishman, I am sure; for it is a portrait of myself, and, I am sorry
to add, an unexaggerated one. I intend these Essays as studies of human
nature; and as, in the prosecution of this design, I do not spare
others, I see no reason why I should spare myself. I lately tried to
make a copy of a portrait by Titian (after several years’ want of
practice), with a view to give a friend in England some notion of the
picture, which is equally remarkable and fine. I failed, and floundered
on for some days, as might be expected. I must say the effect on me was
painful and excessive. My sky was suddenly overcast. Every thing seemed
of the colour of the paints I used. Nature in my eyes became dark and
gloomy. I had no sense or feeling left, but of the unforeseen want of
power, and of the tormenting struggle to do what I could not. I was
ashamed ever to have written or spoken on art: it seemed a piece of
vanity and affectation in me to do so—all whose reasonings and
refinements on the subject ended in an execrable daub. Why did I think
of attempting such a thing without weighing the consequences of exposing
my presumption and incapacity so unnecessarily? It was blotting from my
mind, covering with a thick veil all that I remembered of these pictures
formerly—my hopes when young, my regrets since, one of the few
consolations of my life and of my declining years. I was even afraid to
walk out of an evening by the barrier of Neuilly, or to recall the
yearnings and associations that once hung upon the beatings of my heart.
All was turned to bitterness and gall. To feel any thing but the
consciousness of my own helplessness and folly, appeared a want of
sincerity, a mockery, and an insult to my mortified pride! The only
relief I had was in the excess of pain I felt: this was at least some
distinction. I was not insensible on that side. No French artist, I
thought, would regret _not_ copying a Titian so much as I did, nor so
far shew the same value for it, however he might have the advantage of
me in drawing or mechanical dexterity. Besides, I had copied this very
picture very well formerly. If ever I got out of my present scrape, I
had at any rate received a lesson not to run the same risk of vexation,
or commit myself gratuitously again upon any occasion whatever. Oh!
happy ought they to be, I said, who can do any thing, when I feel the
misery, the agony, the dull, gnawing pain of being unable to do what I
wish in this single instance! When I copied this picture before, I had
no other resource, no other language. My tongue then stuck to the roof
of my mouth: now it is unlocked, and I have done what I then despaired
of doing in another way. Ought I not to be grateful and contented? Oh,
yes!—and think how many there are who have nothing to which they can
turn themselves, and fail in every object they undertake. Well, then,
_Let bygones be bygones_ (as the Scotch proverb has it); give up the
attempt, and think no more of Titian, or of the portrait of a Man in
black in the Louvre. This would be very well for any one else; but for
me, who had nearly exhausted the subject on paper, that I should take it
into my head to paint a libel of what I had composed so many and such
fine panegyrics upon—it was a fatality, a judgment upon me for my
vapouring and conceit. I must be as shy of the subject for the future as
a damned author is of the title of his play or the name of his hero ever
after. Yet the picture would look the same as ever. I could hardly bear
to think so: it would be hid or defaced to me as ‘in a phantasma or a
hideous dream.’ I must turn my thoughts from it, or they would lead to
madness! The copy went on better afterwards, and the affair ended less
tragically than I apprehended. I did not cut a hole in the canvas, or
commit any other extravagance: it is now hanging up very quietly facing
me; and I have considerable satisfaction in occasionally looking at it,
as I write this paragraph.
Such are the agonies into which we throw ourselves about trifles—our
rage and disappointment at want of success in any favourite pursuit,
and, our neglect of the means to ensure it. A Frenchman, under the
penalty of half the chagrin at failure, would take just twice the pains
and consideration to avoid it: but our morbid eagerness and blundering
impetuosity, together with a certain _concreteness_ of imagination which
prevents our dividing any operation into steps and stages, defeat the
very end we have in view. The worst of these wilful mischiefs of our own
making is, that they admit of no relief or intermission. Natural
calamities or great griefs, as we do not bring them upon ourselves, so
they find a seasonable respite in tears or resignation, or in some
alleviating contrast or reflection: but pride scorns all alliance with
natural frailty or indulgence; our wilful purposes regard every
relaxation or moment’s ease as a compromise of their very essence, which
consists in violence and effort: they turn away from whatever might
afford diversion or solace, and goad us on to exertions as painful as
they are unavailable, and with no other companion than remorse,—the most
intolerable of all inmates of the breast; for it is constantly urging us
to retrieve our peace of mind by an impossibility—the undoing of what is
past. One of the chief traits of sublimity in Milton’s character of
Satan is this dreadful display of unrelenting pride and self-will—the
sense of suffering joined with the sense of power and ‘courage never to
submit or yield’—and the aggravation of the original purpose of lofty
ambition and opposition to the Almighty, with the total overthrow and
signal punishment,—which ought to be reasons for its relinquishment.
‘His thoughts burn like a hell within him!’ but he gives them ‘neither
truce nor rest,’ and will not even sue for mercy. This kind of sublimity
must be thrown away upon the French critic, who would only think Satan a
very ridiculous old gentleman for adhering so obstinately to his
original pretensions, and not making the most of circumstances, and
giving in his resignation to the ruling party! When Buonaparte fell, an
English editor (of virulent memory) exhausted a great number of the
finest passages in _Paradise Lost_, in applying them to his ill-fated
ambition. This was an equal compliment to the poet and the conqueror: to
the last, for having realized a conception of himself in the mind of his
enemies on a par with the most stupendous creations of imagination; to
the first, for having embodied in fiction what bore so strong a
resemblance to, and was constantly brought to mind by, the fearful and
imposing reality! But to return to our subject.
It is the same with us in love and literature. An Englishman makes love
without thinking of the chances of success, his own disadvantages, or
the character of his mistress—that is, without the adaptation of means
to ends, consulting only his own humour or fancy;[39] and he writes a
book of history or travels, without acquainting himself with geography,
or appealing to documents or dates; substituting his own will or opinion
in the room of these technical helps or hindrances, as he considers
them. It is not right. In business it is not by any means the same;
which looks as if, where interest was the moving principle, and acted as
a counterpoise to caprice and will, our headstrong propensity gave way,
though it sometimes leads us into extravagant and ruinous speculations.
Nor is it a disadvantage to us in war; for there the spirit of
contradiction does every thing, and an Englishman will go to the devil
sooner than yield to any odds. Courage is nothing but will, defying
consequences; and this the English have in perfection. Burns somewhere
calls out lustily, inspired by rhyme and _usquebaugh_,—
‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill;
Say such is royal George’s will,
And there’s the foe:-
His only thought is how to kill
Twa at a blow.’
I apprehend, with his own countrymen or ours, all the love and loyalty
would come to little, but for their hatred of the army opposed to them.
It is the resistance, ‘the two to kill at a blow,’ that is the charm,
and makes our fingers’-ends tingle. The Greek cause makes no progress
with us for this reason: it is one of pure sympathy, but our sympathies
must arise out of our antipathies; they were devoted to the Queen to
spite the King. We had a wonderful affection for the Spaniards—the
secret of which was that we detested the French. Our love must begin
with hate. It is so far well that the French are opposed to us in almost
every way; for the spirit of contradiction alone to foreign fopperies
and absurdities keeps us within some bounds of decency and order. When
an English lady of quality introduces a favourite by saying, ‘This is
his lordship’s physician, and my atheist,’ the humour might become
epidemic; but we can stop it at once by saying, ‘That is so like a
Frenchwoman!’—The English excel in the practical and mechanic arts,
where mere plodding and industry are expected and required; but they do
not combine business and pleasure well together. Thus, in the Fine Arts,
which unite the mechanical with the sentimental, they will probably
never succeed; for the one spoils and diverts them from the other. An
Englishman can attend but to one thing at a time. He hates music at
dinner. He can go through any labour or pain with prodigious fortitude;
but he cannot make a pleasure of it, or persuade himself he is doing a
_fine thing_, when he is not. Again, they are great in original
discoveries, which come upon them by surprise, and which they leave to
others to perfect. It is a question whether, if they foresaw they were
about to make the discovery, at the very point of projection as it were,
they would not turn their backs upon it, and leave it to shift for
itself; or obstinately refuse to take the last step, or give up the
pursuit, in mere dread and nervous apprehension lest they should not
succeed. Poetry is also their undeniable element; for the essence of
poetry is will and passion, ‘and it alone is highly fantastical.’ French
poetry is _verbiage_ or dry detail.
I have thus endeavoured to shew why it is the English fail as a people
in the Fine Arts, because the idea of the end absorbs that of the means.
Hogarth was an exception to this rule; but then every stroke of his
pencil was instinct with genius. As it has been well said, that ‘we
_read_ his works,’ so it might be said he _wrote_ them. Barry is an
instance more to my purpose. No one could argue better about _gusto_ in
painting, and yet no one ever painted with less. His pictures were dry,
coarse, and wanted all that his descriptions of those of others
indicate. For example, he speaks of ‘the dull, dead, watery look’ of the
Medusa’s head of Leonardo, in a manner that conveys an absolute idea of
the character: had he copied it, you would never have suspected any
thing of the kind. His pen grows almost wanton in praise of Titian’s
nymph-like figures. What _drabs_ he has made of his own sea-nymphs,
floating in the Thames, with Dr. Burney at their head, with his wig on!
He is like a person admiring the grace of an accomplished rope-dancer;
place him on the rope himself, and his head turns;—or he is like
Luther’s comparison of Reason to a drunken man on horseback—‘set him up
on one side, and he tumbles over on the other.’ Why is this? His mind
was essentially ardent and discursive, not sensitive or observant; and
though the immediate object acted as a stimulus to his imagination, it
was only as it does to the poet’s—that is, as a link in the chain of
association, as implying other strong feelings and ideas, and not for
its intrinsic beauty or individual details. He had not the painter’s
eye, though he had the painter’s general knowledge. There is as great a
difference in this respect between our views of things as between the
telescope and microscope. People in general see objects only to
distinguish them in practice and by name—to know that a hat is black,
that a chair is not a table, that John is not James; and there are
painters, particularly of history in England, who look very little
farther. They cannot finish any thing, or go over a head twice: the
first _coup-d’œil_ is all they ever arrive at, nor can they refine on
their impressions, soften them down, or reduce them to their component
parts, without losing their spirit. The inevitable result of this is
grossness, and also want of force and solidity; for, in reality, the
parts cannot be separated without injury from the whole. Such people
have no pleasure in the art as such: it is merely to astonish or to
thrive that they follow it; or, if thrown out of it by accident, they
regret it only as a bankrupt tradesman does a business which was a
handsome subsistence to him. Barry did not live, like Titian, on the
taste of colours (there was here, perhaps—and I will not disguise it—in
English painters in general, a defect of organic susceptibility); they
were not a _pabulum_ to his senses; he did not hold green, blue, red,
and yellow for ‘the darlings of his precious eye.’ They did not,
therefore, sink into his mind with all their hidden harmonies, nor
nourish and enrich it with material beauty, though he knew enough of
them to furnish hints for other ideas and to suggest topics of
discourse. If he had had the most enchanting object in nature before him
in his painting-room at the Adelphi, he would have turned from it, after
a moment’s burst of admiration, to talk of the subject of his next
composition, and to scrawl in some new and vast design, illustrating a
series of great events in history, or some vague moral theory. The art
itself was nothing to him, though he made it the stalking-horse to his
ambition and display of intellectual power in general; and, therefore,
he neglected its essential qualities to daub in huge allegories, or
carry on cabals with the Academy, in which the violence of his will and
the extent of his views found proper food and scope. As a painter, he
was tolerable merely as a draftsman, or in that part of the art which
may be best reduced to rules and precepts, or to positive measurements.
There is neither colouring, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor striking
effect in his pictures at the Adelphi. The group of youths and horses,
in the representation of the Olympic Games, is the best part of them,
and has more of the grace and spirit of a Greek bas-relief than any
thing of the same kind in the French school of painting. Barry was, all
his life, a thorn in the side of Sir Joshua, who was irritated by the
temper and disconcerted by the powers of the man; and who, conscious of
his own superiority in the exercise of his profession, yet looked
askance at Barry’s loftier pretensions and more gigantic scale of art.
But he had no more occasion to be really jealous of him than of an Irish
porter or orator. It was like Imogen’s mistaking the dead body of Cloten
for her lord’s—‘the jovial thigh, the brawns of Hercules’: the head,
which would have detected the cheat, was missing!
I might have gone more into the subject of our apparent indifference to
the pleasure of mere imitation, if I had had to run a parallel between
English and Italian or even Flemish art; but really, though I find a
great deal of what is finical, I find nothing of the pleasurable in the
details of French more than of English art. The English artist, it is an
old and just complaint, can with difficulty be prevailed upon to finish
any part of a picture but the face, even if he does that any tolerable
justice: the French artist bestows equal and elaborate pains on every
part of his picture—the dress, the carpet, &c.; and it has been objected
to the latter method, that it has the effect of making the face look
unfinished; for as this is variable and in motion, it can never admit of
the same minuteness of imitation as objects of _still-life_, and must
suffer in the comparison, if these have the utmost possible degree of
attention bestowed on them, and do not fall into their relative place in
the composition from their natural insignificance. But does not this
distinction shew generally that the English have no pleasure in art,
unless there is an additional interest beyond what is borrowed from the
eye, and that the French have the same pleasure in it, provided the
mechanical operation is the same—like the fly that settles equally on
the face or dress, and runs over the whole surface with the same
lightness and indifference? The collar of a coat is out of drawing: this
may be and is wrong. But I cannot say that it gives me the same
disturbance as if the nose was awry. A Frenchman thinks that both are
equally out of drawing, and sets about correcting them both with equal
gravity and perseverance. A part of the back-ground of a picture is left
in an unfinished state: this is a sad eye-sore to the French artist or
connoisseur. We English care little about it: if the head and character
are well given, we pass it over as of small consequence; and if they are
failures, it is of even less. A French painter, after having made you
look like a baboon, would go on finishing the cravat or the buttons of
your coat with all the nicety of a man milliner or button-maker, and the
most perfect satisfaction with himself and his art. This with us would
be quite impossible. ‘They are careful after many things: with us, there
is one thing needful’—which is effect. We certainly throw our
impressions more into masses (they are not taken off by pattern, every
part alike): there may be a slowness and repugnance at first; but,
afterwards, there is an impulse, a _momentum_ acquired—one interest
absorbing and being strengthened by several others; and if we gain our
principal object, we can overlook the rest, or at least cannot find time
to attend to them till we have secured this. We have nothing of the
_petit maître_, of the _martinet_ style about us: we run into the
opposite fault. If we had time, if we had power, there could be no
objection to giving every part with the utmost perfection, as it is
given in a looking-glass. But if we have only a month to do a portrait
in, is it not better to give three weeks to the face and one to the
dress, than one week to the face and three to the dress. How often do we
look at the face compared to the dress? ‘On a good foundation,’ says
Sancho Panza, ‘a good house may be built’; so a good picture should have
a good back-ground, and be finished in every part. It is entitled to
this mark of respect, which is like providing a frame for it, and
hanging it in a good light. I can easily understand how Rubens or
Vandyke finished the back grounds and drapery of their pictures:—they
were worth the trouble; and, besides, it cost them nothing. It was to
them no more than blowing a bubble in the air. One would no doubt have
every thing right—a feather in a cap, or a plant in the foreground—if a
thought or a touch would do it. But to labour on for ever, and labour to
no purpose, is beyond mortal or English patience. Our clumsiness is one
cause of our negligence. Depend upon it, people do with readiness what
they can do well. I rather wonder, therefore, that Raphael took such
pains in finishing his draperies and back grounds, which he did so
indifferently. The expression is like an emanation of the soul, or like
a lamp shining within and illuminating the whole face and body; and
every part, charged with so sacred a trust as the conveying of this
expression (even to the hands and feet), would be wrought up to the
highest perfection. But his inanimate objects must have cost him some
trouble; and yet he laboured them too. In what he could not do well, he
was still determined to do his best; and that nothing should be wanting
in decorum and respect to an art that he had consecrated to virtue, and
to that genius that burnt like a flame upon its altars! We have nothing
that for myself I can compare with this high and heroic pursuit of art
for its own sake. The French fancy their own pedantic abortions equal to
it, thrust them into the Louvre, ‘and with their darkness dare affront
that light!’—thus proving themselves without the germ or the possibility
of excellence—the feeling of it in others. We at least claim some
interest in art, by looking up to its loftiest monuments—retire to a
distance, and reverence the sanctuary, if we cannot enter it.
‘They also serve who only stare and wait.’[40]
ON PERSONAL IDENTITY
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_January, 1828._
‘Ha! here be three of us sophisticated.’—LEAR.
‘If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes!’ said the Macedonian
hero; and the cynic might have retorted the compliment upon the prince
by saying, that, ‘were he not Diogenes, he would be Alexander!’ This is
the universal exception, the invariable reservation that our self-love
makes, the utmost point at which our admiration or envy ever arrives—to
wish, if we were not ourselves, to be some other individual. No one ever
wishes to be another, _instead_ of himself. We may feel a desire to
change places with others—to have one man’s fortune—another’s health or
strength—his wit or learning, or accomplishments of various kinds—
‘Wishing to be like one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope:’
but we would still be our selves, to possess and enjoy all these, or we
would not give a doit for them. But, on this supposition, what in truth
should we be the better for them? It is not we, but another, that would
reap the benefit; and what do we care about that other? In that case,
the present owner might as well continue to enjoy them. _We_ should not
be gainers by the change. If the meanest beggar who crouches at a
palace-gate, and looks up with awe and suppliant fear to the proud
inmate as he passes, could be put in possession of all the finery, the
pomp, the luxury, and wealth that he sees and envies on the sole
condition of getting rid, together with his rags and misery, of all
recollection that there ever was such a wretch as himself, he would
reject the proffered boon with scorn. He might be glad to change
situations; but he would insist on keeping his own thoughts, to _compare
notes_, and point the transition by the force of contrast. He would not,
on any account, forego his self-congratulation on the unexpected
accession of good fortune, and his escape from past suffering. All that
excites his cupidity, his envy, his repining or despair, is the
alternative of some great good to himself; and if, in order to attain
that object, he is to part with his own existence to take that of
another, he can feel no farther interest in it. This is the language
both of passion and reason.
Here lies ‘the rub that makes calamity of so long life:’ for it is not
barely the apprehension of the ills that ‘in that sleep of death may
come,’ but also our ignorance and indifference to the promised good,
that produces our repugnance and backwardness to quit the present scene.
No man, if he had his choice, would be the angel Gabriel to-morrow! What
is the angel Gabriel to him but a splendid vision? He might as well have
an ambition to be turned into a bright cloud, or a particular star. The
interpretation of which is, he can have no sympathy with the angel
Gabriel. Before he can be transformed into so bright and ethereal an
essence, he must necessarily ‘put off this mortal coil’—be divested of
all his old habits, passions, thoughts, and feelings—to be endowed with
other lofty and beatific attributes, of which he has no notion; and,
therefore, he would rather remain a little longer in this mansion of
clay, which, with all its flaws, inconveniences, and perplexities,
contains all that he has any real knowledge of, or any affection for.
When, indeed, he is about to quit it in spite of himself, and has no
other chance left to escape the darkness of the tomb, he may then have
no objection (making a virtue of necessity) to put on angels’ wings, to
have radiant locks, to wear a wreath of amaranth, and thus to masquerade
it in the skies.
It is an instance of the truth and beauty of the ancient mythology, that
the various transmutations it recounts are never voluntary, or of
favourable omen, but are interposed as a timely release to those who,
driven on by fate, and urged to the last extremity of fear or anguish,
are turned into a flower, a plant, an animal, a star, a precious stone,
or into some object that may inspire pity or mitigate our regret for
their misfortunes. Narcissus was transformed into a flower; Daphne into
a laurel; Arethusa into a fountain (by the favour of the gods)—but not
till no other remedy was left for their despair. It is a sort of smiling
cheat upon death, and graceful compromise with annihilation. It is
better to exist by proxy, in some softened type and soothing allegory,
than not at all—to breathe in a flower or shine in a constellation, than
to be utterly forgot; but no one would change his natural condition (if
he could help it) for that of a bird, an insect, a beast, or a fish,
however delightful their mode of existence, or however enviable he might
deem their lot compared to his own. Their thoughts are not our
thoughts—their happiness is not our happiness; nor can we enter into it
except with a passing smile of approbation, or as a refinement of fancy.
As the poet sings:—
‘What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty,
And to be lord of all the works of nature?
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky;
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature;
To taste whatever thing doth please the eye?—
Who rests not pleased with such happiness,
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness!’
This is gorgeous description and fine declamation: yet who would be
found to act upon it, even in the forming of a wish; or would not rather
be the thrall of wretchedness, than launch out (by the aid of some magic
spell) into all the delights of such a butterfly state of existence? The
French (if any people can) may be said to enjoy this airy, heedless
gaiety and unalloyed exuberance of satisfaction: yet what Englishman
would deliberately change with them? We would sooner be miserable after
our own fashion than happy after their’s. It is not happiness, then, in
the abstract, which we seek, that can be addressed as
‘That something still that prompts th’ eternal sigh,
For which we wish to live or dare to die,—’
but a happiness suited to our taste and faculties—that has become a part
of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment—that is endeared to us by a
thousand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then, would
willingly change his country or his kind for the most plausible
pretences held out to him. The most humiliating punishment inflicted in
ancient fable is the change of sex: not that it was any degradation in
itself—but that it must occasion a total derangement of the moral
economy and confusion of the sense of personal propriety. The thing is
said to have happened, _au sens contraire_, in our time. The story is to
be met with in ‘very choice Italian’; and Lord D—— tells it in very
plain English!
We may often find ourselves envying the possessions of others, and
sometimes inadvertently indulging a wish to change places with them
altogether; but our self-love soon discovers some excuse to be off the
bargain we were ready to strike, and retracts ‘vows made in haste, as
violent and void.’ We might make up our minds to the alteration in every
other particular; but, when it comes to the point, there is sure to be
some trait or feature of character in the object of our admiration to
which we cannot reconcile ourselves—some favourite quality or darling
foible of our own, with which we can by no means resolve to part. The
more enviable the situation of another, the more entirely to our taste,
the more reluctant we are to leave any part of ourselves behind that
would be so fully capable of appreciating all the exquisiteness of its
new situation, or not to enter into the possession of such an imaginary
reversion of good fortune with all our previous inclinations and
sentiments. The outward circumstances were fine: they only wanted a
_soul_ to enjoy them, and that soul is our’s (as the costly ring wants
the peerless jewel to perfect and set it off). The humble prayer and
petition to sneak into visionary felicity by personal adoption, or the
surrender of our own personal pretensions, always ends in a daring
project of usurpation, and a determination to expel the actual
proprietor, and supply his place so much more worthily with our own
identity—not bating a single jot of it. Thus, in passing through a fine
collection of pictures, who has not envied the privilege of visiting it
every day, and wished to be the owner? But the rising sigh is soon
checked, and ‘the native hue of emulation is sicklied o’er with the pale
cast of thought,’ when we come to ask ourselves not merely whether the
owner has any taste at all for these splendid works, and does not look
upon them as so much expensive furniture, like his chairs and tables—but
whether he has the same precise (and only true) taste that we
have—whether he has the very same favourites that we have—whether he may
not be so blind as to prefer a Vandyke to a Titian, a Ruysdael to a
Claude;—nay, whether he may not have other pursuits and avocations that
draw off his attention from the sole objects of our idolatry, and which
seem to us mere impertinences and waste of time? In that case, we at
once lose all patience, and exclaim indignantly, ‘Give us back our taste
and keep your pictures!’ It is not we who should envy them the
possession of the treasure, but they who should envy us the true and
exclusive enjoyment of it. A similar train of feeling seems to have
dictated Warton’s spirited Sonnet on visiting Wilton-House:—
‘From Pembroke’s princely dome, where mimic art
Decks with a magic hand the dazzling bowers,
Its living hues where the warm pencil pours,
And breathing forms from the rude marble start,
How to life’s humbler scene can I depart?
My breast all glowing from those gorgeous towers,
In my low cell how cheat the sullen hours?
Vain the complaint! For Fancy can impart
(To fate superior and to fortune’s power)
Whate’er adorns the stately storied-hall:
She, mid the dungeon’s solitary gloom,
Can dress the Graces in their attic pall;
Bid the green landskip’s vernal beauty bloom;
And in bright trophies clothe the twilight wall.’
One sometimes passes by a gentleman’s park, an old family-seat, with its
moss-grown ruinous paling, its ‘glades mild-opening to the genial day,’
or embrowned with forest-trees. Here one would be glad to spend one’s
life, ‘shut up in measureless content,’ and to grow old beneath
ancestral oaks, instead of gaining a precarious, irksome, and despised
livelihood, by indulging romantic sentiments, and writing disjointed
descriptions of them. The thought has scarcely risen to the lips, when
we learn that the owner of so blissful a seclusion is a thorough-bred
fox-hunter, a preserver of the game, a brawling electioneerer, a Tory
member of parliament, a ‘no-Popery’ man!—‘I’d sooner be a dog, and bay
the moon!’ Who would be Sir Thomas Lethbridge for his title and estate?
asks one man. But would not almost any one wish to be Sir Francis
Burdett, the man of the people, the idol of the electors of Westminster?
says another. I can only answer for myself. Respectable and honest as he
is, there is something in his white boots, and white breeches, and white
coat, and white hair, and red face, and white hat, that I cannot, by any
effort of candour, confound my personal identity with! If Mr. Hobhouse
can prevail on Sir Francis to exchange, let him do so by all means.
Perhaps they might contrive to _club_ a soul between them! Could I have
had my will, I should have been born a lord: but one would not be a
booby lord neither. I am haunted by an odd fancy of driving down the
Great North Road in a chaise and four, about fifty years ago, and coming
to the inn at Ferry-bridge, with out-riders, white favours, and a
coronet on the panels; and then I choose my companion in the coach.
Really there is a witchcraft in all this that makes it necessary to turn
away from it, lest, in the conflict between imagination and
impossibility, I should grow feverish and light-headed! But, on the
other hand, if one was born a lord, should one have the same idea (that
every one else has) of _a peeress in her own right_? Is not distance,
giddy elevation, mysterious awe, an impassable gulf, necessary to form
this idea in the mind, that fine ligament of ‘ethereal braid,
sky-woven,’ that lets down heaven upon earth, fair as enchantment, soft
as Berenice’s hair, bright and garlanded like Ariadne’s crown; and is it
not better to have had this idea all through life—to have caught but
glimpses of it, to have known it but in a dream—than to have been born a
lord ten times over, with twenty pampered menials at one’s back, and
twenty descents to boast of? It is the envy of certain privileges, the
sharp privations we have undergone, the cutting neglect we have met with
from the want of birth or title, that gives its zest to the distinction:
the thing itself may be indifferent or contemptible enough. It is the
_becoming_ a lord that is to be desired; but he who becomes a lord in
reality is an upstart—a mere pretender, without the sterling essence; so
that, all that is of any worth in this supposed transition is purely
imaginary and impossible. Had I been a lord, I should have married Miss
——, and my life would not have been one long-drawn sigh, made up of
sweet and bitter regret![41] Had I been a lord, I would have been a
Popish lord, and then I might also have been an honest man:—poor, and
then I might have been proud and not vulgar! Kings are so accustomed to
look down on all the rest of the world, that they consider the condition
of mortality as vile and intolerable, if stripped of royal state, and
cry out in the bitterness of their despair, ‘Give me a crown, or a
tomb!’ It should seem from this as if all mankind would change with the
first crowned head that could propose the alternative, or that it would
be only the presumption of the supposition, or a sense of their own
unworthiness, that would deter them. Perhaps there is not a single
throne that, if it was to be filled by this sort of voluntary
metempsychosis, would not remain empty. Many would, no doubt, be glad to
‘monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks’ in their own persons and
after their own fashion: but who would be the _double_ of ——, or of
those shadows of a shade—those ‘tenth transmitters of a foolish
face’—Charles X. and Ferdinand VII.? If monarchs have little sympathy
with mankind, mankind have even less with monarchs. They are merely to
us a sort of state-puppets or royal wax-work, which we may gaze at with
superstitious wonder, but have no wish to become; and he who should
meditate such a change must not only feel by anticipation an utter
contempt for the _slough_ of humanity which he is prepared to cast, but
must feel an absolute void and want of attraction in those lofty and
incomprehensible sentiments which are to supply its place. With respect
to actual royalty, the spell is in a great measure broken. But, among
ancient monarchs, there is no one, I think, who envies Darius or Xerxes.
One has a different feeling with respect to Alexander or Pyrrhus; but
this is because they were great men as well as great kings, and the soul
is up in arms at the mention of their names as at the sound of a
trumpet. But as to all the rest—those ‘in the catalogue who go for
kings’—the praying, eating, drinking, dressing monarchs of the earth, in
time past or present—one would as soon think of wishing to personate the
Golden Calf, or to turn out with Nebuchadnezzar to graze, as to be
transformed into one of that ‘swinish multitude.’ There is no point of
affinity. The extrinsic circumstances are imposing: but, within, there
is nothing but morbid humours and proud flesh! Some persons might vote
for Charlemagne; and there are others who would have no objection to be
the modern Charlemagne, with all he inflicted and suffered, even after
the necromantic field of Waterloo, and the bloody wreath on the vacant
brow of his conqueror, and that fell jailer set over him by a craven
foe, that ‘glared round his soul, and mocked his closing eyelids!’
It has been remarked, that could we at pleasure change our situation in
life, more persons would be found anxious to descend than to ascend in
the scale of society. One reason may be, that we have it more in our
power to do so; and this encourages the thought, and makes it familiar
to us. A second is, that we naturally wish to throw off the cares of
state, of fortune or business, that oppress us, and to seek repose
before we find it in the grave. A third reason is, that, as we descend
to common life, the pleasures are simple, natural, such as all can enter
into, and therefore excite a general interest, and combine all
suffrages. Of the different occupations of life, none is beheld with a
more pleasing emotion, or less aversion to a change of our own, than
that of a shepherd tending his flock: the pastoral ages have been the
envy and the theme of all succeeding ones; and a beggar with his crutch
is more closely allied than the monarch and his crown to the
associations of mirth and heart’s ease. On the other hand, it must be
admitted that our pride is too apt to prefer grandeur to happiness; and
that our passions make us envy great vices oftener than great virtues.
The world shew their sense in nothing more than in a distrust and
aversion to those changes of situation which only tend to make the
successful candidates ridiculous, and which do not carry along with them
a mind adequate to the circumstances. The common people, in this
respect, are more shrewd and judicious than their superiors, from
feeling their own awkwardness and incapacity, and often decline, with an
instinctive modesty, the troublesome honours intended for them. They do
not overlook their original defects so readily as others overlook their
acquired advantages. It is wonderful, therefore, that opera-singers and
dancers refuse, or only _condescend_ as it were, to accept lords, though
the latter are so often fascinated by them. The fair performer knows
(better than her unsuspecting admirer) how little connection there is
between the dazzling figure she makes on the stage and that which she
may make in private life, and is in no hurry to convert ‘the
drawing-room into a Green-room.’ The nobleman (supposing him not to be
very wise) is astonished at the miraculous powers of art in
‘The fair, the chaste, the inexpressive _she_;’
and thinks such a paragon must easily conform to the routine of manners
and society which every trifling woman of quality of his acquaintance,
from sixteen to sixty, goes through without effort. This is a hasty or a
wilful conclusion. Things of habit only come by habit, and inspiration
here avails nothing. A man of fortune who marries an actress for her
fine performance of tragedy, has been well compared to the person who
bought Punch. The lady is not unfrequently aware of the
inconsequentiality, and unwilling to be put on the shelf, and hid in the
nursery of some musty country-mansion. Servant girls, of any sense and
spirit, treat their masters (who make serious love to them) with
suitable contempt. What is it but a proposal to drag an unmeaning
trollop at his heels through life, to her own annoyance and the ridicule
of all his friends? No woman, I suspect, ever forgave a man who raised
her from a low condition in life (it is a perpetual obligation and
reproach); though, I believe, men often feel the most disinterested
regard for women under such circumstances. Sancho Panza discovered no
less folly in his eagerness to enter upon his new government, than
wisdom in quitting it as fast as possible. Why will Mr. Cobbett persist
in getting into Parliament? He would find himself no longer the same
man. What member of Parliament, I should like to know, could write his
Register? As a popular partisan, he may (for aught I can say) be a match
for the whole Honourable House; but, by obtaining a seat in St.
Stephen’s Chapel, he would only be equal to a 576th part of it. It was
surely a puerile ambition in Mr. Addington to succeed Mr. Pitt as
prime-minister. The situation was only a foil to his imbecility. Gipsies
have a fine faculty of evasion: catch them who can in the same place or
story twice! Take them; teach them the comforts of civilization; confine
them in warm rooms, with thick carpets and down beds; and they will fly
out of the window-like the bird, described by Chaucer, out of its golden
cage. I maintain that there is no common language or medium of
understanding between people of education and without it—between those
who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so
far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from
what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a
perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power. This is what foiled
Buonaparte in Spain and Russia. The people can only be gained over by
informing them, though they may be enslaved by fraud or force. You say
there is a common language in nature. They see nature through their
wants, while you look at it for your pleasure. Ask a country lad if he
does not like to hear the birds sing in the spring? And he will laugh in
your face. ‘What is it, then, he does like?’—‘Good victuals and drink!’
As if you had not these too; but because he has them not, he thinks of
nothing else, and laughs at you and your refinements, supposing you to
live upon air. To those who are deprived of every other advantage, even
nature is a _book sealed_. I have made this capital mistake all my life,
in imagining that those objects which lay open to all, and excited an
interest merely from the _idea_ of them, spoke a common language to all;
and that nature was a kind of universal home, where all ages, sexes,
classes met. Not so. The vital air, the sky, the woods, the streams—all
these go for nothing, except with a favoured few. The poor are taken up
with their bodily wants—the rich, with external acquisitions: the one,
with the sense of property—the other, of its privation. Both have the
same distaste for _sentiment_. The _genteel_ are the slaves of
appearances—the vulgar, of necessity; and neither has the smallest
regard to true worth, refinement, generosity. All savages are
irreclaimable. I can understand the Irish character better than the
Scotch. I hate the formal crust of circumstances and the mechanism of
society. I have been recommended, indeed, to settle down into some
respectable profession for life:—
‘Ah! why so soon the blossom tear?’
I am ‘in no haste to be venerable!’
In thinking of those one might wish to have been, many people will
exclaim, ‘Surely, you would like to have been Shakspeare?’ Would Garrick
have consented to the change? No, nor should he; for the applause which
he received, and on which he lived, was more adapted to his genius and
taste. If Garrick had agreed to be Shakspeare, he would have made it a
previous condition that he was to be a better player. He would have
insisted on taking some higher part than _Polonius_ or the
_Grave-digger_. Ben Jonson and his companions at the Mermaid would not
have known their old friend Will in his new disguise. The modern Roscius
would have scouted the halting player. He would have shrunk from the
parts of the inspired poet. If others were unlike us, we feel it as a
presumption and an impertinence to usurp their place; if they were like
us, it seems a work of supererogation. We are not to be cozened out of
our existence for nothing. It has been ingeniously urged, as an
objection to having been Milton, that ‘then we should not have had the
pleasure of reading Paradise Lost.’ Perhaps I should incline to draw
lots with Pope, but that he was deformed, and did not sufficiently
relish Milton and Shakspeare. As it is, we can enjoy his verses and
their’s too. Why, having these, need we ever be dissatisfied with
ourselves? Goldsmith is a person whom I considerably affect,
notwithstanding his blunders and his misfortunes. The author of the
_Vicar of Wakefield_, and of _Retaliation_, is one whose temper must
have had something eminently amiable, delightful, gay, and happy in it.
‘A certain tender bloom his fame o’erspreads.’
But then I could never make up my mind to his preferring Rowe and Dryden
to the worthies of the Elizabethan age; nor could I, in like manner,
forgive Sir Joshua—whom I number among those whose existence was marked
with a _white stone_, and on whose tomb might be inscribed ‘Thrice
Fortunate!’—his treating Nicholas Poussin with contempt. Differences in
matters of taste and opinion are points of honour—‘stuff o’ the
conscience’—stumbling-blocks not to be got over. Others, we easily
grant, may have more wit, learning, imagination, riches, strength,
beauty, which we should be glad to borrow of them; but that they have
sounder or better views of things, or that we should act wisely in
changing in this respect, is what we can by no means persuade ourselves.
We may not be the lucky possessors of what is best or most desirable;
but our notion of what is best and most desirable we will give up to no
man by choice or compulsion; and unless others (the greatest wits or
brightest geniuses) can come into our way of thinking, we must humbly
beg leave to remain as we are. A Calvinistic preacher would not
relinquish a single point of faith to be the Pope of Rome; nor would a
strict Unitarian acknowledge the mystery of the Holy Trinity to have
painted Raphael’s _Assembly of the Just_. In the range of _ideal_
excellence, we are distracted by variety and repelled by differences:
the imagination is fickle and fastidious, and requires a combination of
all possible qualifications, which never met. Habit alone is blind and
tenacious of the most homely advantages; and after running the tempting
round of nature, fame, and fortune, we wrap ourselves up in our familiar
recollections and humble pretensions—as the lark, after long fluttering
on sunny wing, sinks into its lowly bed!
We can have no very importunate craving, nor very great confidence, in
wishing to change characters, except with those with whom we are
intimately acquainted by their works; and having these by us (which is
all we know or covet in them), what would we have more? We can have _no
more of a cat than her skin_; nor of an author than his brains. By
becoming Shakspeare in reality, we cut ourselves out of reading Milton,
Pope, Dryden, and a thousand more—all of whom we have in our possession,
enjoy, and _are_, by turns, in the best part of them, their thoughts,
without any metamorphosis or miracle at all. What a microcosm is our’s!
What a Proteus is the human mind! All that we know, think of, or can
admire, in a manner becomes ourselves. We are not (the meanest of us) a
volume, but a whole library! In this calculation of problematical
contingencies, the lapse of time makes no difference. One would as soon
have been Raphael as any modern artist. Twenty, thirty, or forty years
of elegant enjoyment and lofty feeling were as great a luxury in the
fifteenth as in the nineteenth century. But Raphael did not live to see
Claude, nor Titian Rembrandt. Those who found arts and sciences are not
witnesses of their accumulated results and benefits; nor in general do
they reap the meed of praise which is their due. We who come after in
some ‘laggard age,’ have more enjoyment of their fame than they had. Who
would have missed the sight of the Louvre in all its glory to have been
one of those whose works enriched it? Would it not have been giving a
certain good for an uncertain advantage? No: I am as sure (if it is not
presumption to say so) of what passed through Raphael’s mind as of what
passes through my own; and I know the difference between seeing (though
even that is a rare privilege) and producing such perfection. At one
time I was so devoted to Rembrandt, that I think, if the Prince of
Darkness had made me the offer in some rash mood, I should have been
tempted to close with it, and should have become (in happy hour, and in
downright earnest) the great master of light and shade!
I have run myself out of my materials for this Essay, and want a
well-turned sentence or two to conclude with; like Benvenuto Cellini,
who complains that, with all the brass, tin, iron, and lead he could
muster in the house, his statue of Perseus was left imperfect, with a
dent in the heel of it. Once more then—I believe there is one character
that all the world would be glad to change with—which is that of a
favoured rival. Even hatred gives way to envy. We would be any thing—a
toad in a dungeon—to live upon her smile, which is our all of earthly
hope and happiness; nor can we, in our infatuation, conceive that there
is any difference of feeling on the subject, or that the pressure of her
hand is not in itself divine, making those to whom such bliss is deigned
like the Immortal Gods!
APHORISMS ON MAN
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_October, 1830–June, 1831._
I
Servility is a sort of bastard envy. We heap our whole stock of
involuntary adulation on a single prominent figure, to have an excuse
for withdrawing our notice from all other claims (perhaps juster and
more galling ones), and in the hope of sharing a part of the applause as
train-bearers.
II
Admiration is catching by a certain sympathy. The vain admire the vain;
the morose are pleased with the morose; nay, the selfish and cunning are
charmed with the tricks and meanness of which they are witnesses, and
may be in turn the dupes.
III
Vanity is no proof of conceit. A vain man often accepts of praise as a
cheap substitute for his own good opinion. He may think more highly of
another, though he would be wounded to the quick if his own circle
thought so. He knows the worthlessness and hollowness of the flattery to
which he is accustomed, but his ear is tickled with the sound; and the
effeminate in this way can no more live without the incense of applause,
than the effeminate in another can live without perfumes or any other
customary indulgence of the senses. Such people would rather have the
applause of fools than the approbation of the wise. It is a low and
shallow ambition.
IV
It was said of some one who had contrived to make himself popular abroad
by getting into _hot water_, but who proved very troublesome and
ungrateful when he came home—‘We thought him a very persecuted man in
India’—the proper answer to which is, that there are some people who are
good for nothing else but to be persecuted. They want some check to keep
them in order.
V
It is a sort of gratuitous error in high life, that the poor are
naturally thieves and beggars, just as the latter conceive that the rich
are naturally proud and hard-hearted. Give a man who is starving a
thousand a-year, and he will be no longer under a temptation to get
himself hanged by stealing a leg of mutton for his dinner; he may still
spend it in gaming, drinking, and the other vices of a gentleman, and
not in _charity_, about which he before made such an outcry.
VI
Do not confer benefits in the expectation of meeting with gratitude; and
do not cease to confer them because you find those whom you have served
ungrateful. Do what you think fit and right to please yourself; the
generosity is not the less real, because it does not meet with a
correspondent return. A man should study to get through the world as he
gets through St. Giles’s—with as little annoyance and interruption as
possible from the shabbiness around him.
VII
_Common-place_ advisers and men of the world, are always pestering you
to conform to their maxims and modes, just like the _barkers_ in
Monmouth-street, who stop the passengers by entreating them to turn in
and _refit_ at their second-hand repositories.
VIII
The word _gentility_ is constantly in the mouths of vulgar people; as
quacks and pretenders are always talking of _genius_. Those who possess
any real excellence think and say the least about it.
IX
Taste is often envy in disguise: it turns into the art of reducing
excellence within the smallest possible compass, or of finding out the
_minimum_ of pleasure. Some people admire only what is new and
fashionable—the work of the day, of some popular author—the last and
frothiest bubble that glitters on the surface of fashion. All the rest
is gone by, ‘in the deep bosom of the ocean buried;’ to allude to it is
Gothic, to insist upon it odious. We have only to wait a week to be
relieved of the hot-pressed page, of the vignette-title; and in the
interim can look with sovereign contempt on the wide range of science,
learning, art, and on those musty old writers who lived before the
present age of novels. Peace be with their _manes_! There are others, on
the contrary, to whom all the modern publications are anathema, a
by-word—they get rid of this idle literature ‘at one fell
swoop’—disqualify the present race from all pretensions whatever, get
into a corner with an obscure writer, and devour the cobwebs and the
page together, and pick out in the quaintest production, the quaintest
passages, the merest _choke-pear_, which they think nobody can swallow
but themselves.
X
The source of the love of nature or of the country has never been
explained so well as it might. The truth is this. Natural or inanimate
objects please merely as objects of sense or contemplation, and we ask
no return of the passion or admiration from them, so that we cannot be
disappointed or distracted in our choice. If we are delighted with a
flower or a tree, we are pleased with it _for its own sake_; nothing
more is required to make our satisfaction complete; we do not ask the
flower or tree whether it likes us again; and, therefore, wherever we
can meet with the same or a similar object, we may reckon upon a
recurrence of the same soothing emotion. Nature is the only mistress
that smiles on us still the same; and does not repay admiration with
scorn, love with hatred. She is faithful to us, as long as we are
faithful to ourselves. Whereas, in regard to the human species, we have
not so much to consider our own dispositions towards others, as theirs
towards us; a thousand caprices, interests, and opinions, may intervene
before the good understanding can be mutual; we not only cannot infer of
one individual from another, but the same individual may change
to-morrow: so that in our intercourse with the world, there is nothing
but littleness, uncertainty, suspicion, and mortification, instead of
the grandeur and repose of nature.
XI
It has been objected to the soothing power of Nature, that it cannot
take away the sharp pang of vehement distress, but rather barbs the
dart, and seems to smile in mockery of our anguish. But the same might
be said of music, poetry, and friendship, which only tantalize and
torment us by offering to divert our grief in its keenest paroxysms; but
yet cannot be denied to be enviable resources and consolations of the
human mind, when the bitterness of the moment has passed over.
XII
Every one is a hero, the circumstances being given. All that is
necessary is, that the outward impression should be so strong as to make
a man forget himself. A woman rushes into the flames to save her child,
not from duty or reason—but because the distracting terror for another
banishes all recollection of, and fear for, herself. For the same
reason, a person throws himself from a precipice, because the
apprehension of danger gets the better of and confounds the sense of
self-preservation. The doctrine of self-love, as an infallible
metaphysical principle of action, is nonsense.
XIII
The heroical ages were those in which there was a constant question
between life and death, and men ate their scanty meal with their swords
in their hands.
XIV
The hero acts from outward impulse; the martyr from internal faith, and
so far is the greater character of the two. And yet it may be doubted
whether the latter is properly a voluntary agent, or whether, if he
could do it unperceived, he would not abstract himself from the scene,
instead of becoming a sacrifice and a witness to the truth.
XV
What shews that persecution and danger act as incentives rather than
impediments to the will, is that zeal generally goes out with the fires
that kindle it; and we become indifferent to a cause, when life,
property, and limb are no longer endangered. He is the real philosopher
who loves truth for its own sake, not in the spirit of contradiction: he
the genuine friend of freedom and justice, who hates oppression and
wrong after they have ceased, and as long as the very name of them
remains, as well as while it is a bone of contention between infuriated
sects and parties.
XVI
If reform were to gain the day, reform would become as vulgar as cant of
any other kind. We only shew a spirit of independence and resistance to
power, as long as power is against us. As soon as the cause of
opposition prevails, its essence and character are gone out of it; and
the most flagrant _radicalism_ degenerates into the tamest servility. We
then say as others say; sail with the stream; no longer sacrifice
interest to principle, but are in a pitiful majority. Had events taken a
different turn in 1794, who can predict what the popular cry would have
been? This may point out how little chance there is of any great
improvement in the affairs of the world. Virtue ceases with difficulty;
honesty is _militant_. The mass of mankind, who are governed by
indolence and habit, fall in with existing events and interests; the
imaginative and reasoning part fall out with facts and reality; but
could they have their way, and model the world at their pleasure, their
occupation would be gone; or if all governments were wise and good, the
character of the patriot would become obsolete, and a sinecure. At
present there is a very convenient division of labour; and each class
fulfils its vocation. It is essential to the triumph of reform that it
should never succeed.
XVII
We talk about the cant of politics or religion, as if there were no cant
but that which is common to the multitude. But whenever any two
individuals agree about any one thing, they begin to cant about it, and
take the echo of one another’s voices for the verdict of truth.
Half-a-dozen persons will always make a _quorum_ of credulity and
vulgarity.
XVIII
When people have done quarrelling about one set of questions they start
another. Motion is necessary to mind as much as to matter; and for ‘an
ultimate end,’ Hobbes denies that there is any such thing. Hence the
tendency to all Ultra opinions and measures! Man is seldom contented to
go as far as others, unless he can go beyond them, and make a caricature
and a paradox even of the most vulgar prejudice. It is necessary to aim
at some kind of distinction—to create some difficulty, were it only for
the sake of overcoming it. Thus we find that O’Connell, having carried
his cause, would not let the ‘agitation’ subside without turning it into
a personal quarrel: the way was opened to him into the House, and he
wanted to force his way there by an _ex post facto_ inference; the banns
of marriage were published between him and parliament, and he would
fain, with the petulance of opposition, _seize_ a seat there.
XIX
Truth itself becomes but a fashion. When all the world acknowledge it,
it seems trite and stale. It is tinged by the coarse medium through
which it passes.
XX
Erasmus, in his ‘Remains,’ tells a story of two thieves, who were
recommended by their mother to rob every one they met with; but warned,
on peril of their lives, to avoid one _Black-breeches_ (Hercules).
Meeting him, however, without knowing him, they set upon him, and were
slung across his shoulder,—where Hercules heard them muttering behind
his back, _a long way off_, ‘This must surely be he that our mother
warned us of.’ In contempt and pity he let them escape. What modern wit
can come up to the grotesque grandeur of this invention?
XXI
People addicted to secresy are so without knowing why; they are so not
‘for cause,’ but for secresy’s sake. It is a mixture of cowardice and
conceit. They think, if they tell you any thing, you may understand it
better than they do, or turn it in some way against them; but that while
they shut up their mouths they are wiser than you, just as liars think
by telling you a falsehood they have an advantage over you. There are
others who deal in significant nods, smiles, and half-sentences, so that
you never can get at their meaning, and indeed they have none, but leave
it to you to put what interpretation you please on their embryo hints
and conceptions. They are glad to find a _proxy_ for their want of
understanding.
XXII
It is the force and violence of the English mind that has put it into
the safe custody of the law, and it is every man’s disposition to act
upon his own judgment and presumption, without regard to others, that
has made it absolutely necessary to establish equal claims to curb them.
We are too much in a state of nature to submit to what Burke calls ‘the
soft collar of social esteem,’ and require ‘the iron rod, the torturing
hour,’ to tame us. But though the foundations of liberty, life, and
property, are formally secured in this way from the ebullitions of
national character, yet the spirit breaks out upon the surface of
manners, and is often spurted in our face. Lord Castlereagh was wrong in
saying that ‘liberty was merely a custom of England;’ it is the
indigenous growth of our temper and our clime; and woe to him who
deprives us of the only amends for so many disadvantages and failings!
The wild beast roaming his native forests is respectable though
formidable—shut up in Exeter ‘Change, he is equally odious and wretched.
XXIII
It was a long time made an argument for not throwing open the galleries
of noblemen and others to the public, that if permission were given they
would be filled with the lowest of the rabble, and with squalid
wretches, who would run up against well-dressed people, and damage the
works of art. Nothing could be more false than this theory, as
experience has shown. It was in vain to quote the example of foreign
countries, as it was said the common people there were kept more in
subjection; but if they are tamer, ours are prouder for that very
reason. The National Gallery in Pall-Mall is now open to all the world;
and, except a shabby artist or two, who ever saw a soul there who was
not, if not well-dressed, yet dressed in his best, and behaving with
decency, instead of trying to turn the place into a bear-garden, as had
been predicted.[42] People will not go out of their way to see pictures
unless they have an interest in them, which gives the title, and is a
security against ill consequences; much less will any class of people
obtrude themselves where they are pointed at as inferior to the rest of
the company, or subject themselves to looks of scorn and disgust, to see
any sights in the world. There is no man so poor or low but he loves
himself better than pictures or statues; and if he must get snubbed and
treated with contempt to indulge his admiration of celebrated works, he
will forego the latter. _Comparisons are odious_; and we avoid them. The
first object of every human being (high or low, great or small) is to
stand well with himself, and to appear to the best advantage to others.
A man is not very fond of passing along the streets in a thread-bare
coat, and shoes with holes in them. Will he go in this trim into a group
of well-dressed people to make himself ridiculous? The mind, so far from
being dull or callous on this point, is but too sensitive; our jealousy
of public opinion is the ruling passion, a morbid disease. Does not the
consciousness of any singularity or impropriety of appearance
immediately take off from our pleasure at a play? How seldom we observe
an interloper in the dress circle; and how sure he is to pay for it! If
a man has any defect or inferiority, this is certain, he will keep it in
the back-ground. If a chimney-sweeper or scavenger had a ticket to a
ball, would he go? Oh! no; it is enough to bear the sense of our own
infirmity and disgrace in silence, and unnoticed, without having it
wrought to agony by the glare of contrast and ostentation of insult!
What linendraper or grocer’s son would dine with a prince every day
though he might, to be crushed into insignificance, and stifled with
ironical civility? Do we not observe the difficulty there is in making
servants and mechanics sit down, or keep on their hats in speaking to
their _betters_, for fear of being thought to encroach, and made liable
to a rebuff in consequence? Assuredly, then, the great may throw open
their palace-doors and galleries of art without having to dread the
inroad or outrages of the mob, or fancying that any one will go who is
not qualified to appear, or will not come away with his mind and manners
improved. The wooden shoes and mob caps in the Louvre or the Vatican do
no harm to the pictures on the walls: but add a new interest to them,
and throw a pleasing light on human nature. If we are behind other
nations in politeness and civilization, the best way to overtake them is
to tread in their steps.
XXIV
It is at the same time true that _familiarity breeds contempt_; or that
the vulgar, if admitted to an intimacy and footing of equality, try to
make you feel all your defects, and to pay for the superiority you have
so long usurped over them. The same pride that before kept them at a
distance makes them ready to throw down any barrier of deference or
distinction the moment they can do so with impunity. No one willingly
admits a superiority in another; or does not secretly prefer himself to
the whole universe beside. The slave would kill the tyrant, whose feet
he kisses; and there is no Turk so loyal that he would not cut off the
head of the best of Sultans, if he was sure of putting the diadem upon
his own.
XXV
The strongest minds are governed more by appearances than by a regard to
consequences. Those who pretend to be the greatest calculators of their
own interest, or the _main-chance_, are the very slaves of opinion, and
dupes of shallow pretension. They are often so mad in this respect, that
they think neither better nor worse of the oldest friend they have in
the world than the first person they happen to be in company with does,
or the last rumour they heard gives him out. Their _circumspection_
amounts to looking three ways at once, and missing the right point of
view at last. They would rather speak to a well-dressed fool in the
street than to the wisest man in a thread-bare suit. I know an author
who succeeds with a set of second-hand thoughts by having a coat of the
newest cut; and an editor, who flourishes about the town in virtue of a
pair of green spectacles. Lay out all you are worth in decking out the
person of a vulgar woman, and she will _cut_ you in the very finery you
have given her; lay it out on your own back, and she will be ambitious
of your least notice. People judge of you not from what _they_ know, but
from the impression you make on others, which depends chiefly on
professions, and on outward bearing and bravery. _De non apparentibus et
non existentibus eadem est ratio._ If a man has no opinion of himself,
how the deuce should any one else? It is like electing a person member
of parliament who refuses to come forward as a candidate. On the other
hand, let a man have impudence in lieu of all other qualifications, and
he needs not despair. The part of quack or coxcomb is a favourite one
with the town. The only character that is likely to get on by passing
for a _poor creature_ is the legacy-hunter. Nothing can be too low or
insignificant for that. A man is only grateful to you in the other world
for having been a foil to him in this. A miser (if he could) would leave
his fortune to his dog, that no human being might be the better for it,
or no one that he could envy in the possession of it, or think raised to
an equality with himself.
XXVI
We complain of old friends who have made their fortunes in the world and
slighted us in their prosperity, without considering those who have been
unsuccessful, and whom we have neglected in our turn. When our friends
betray or desert us, we cling the closer to those that remain. Our
confidence is strengthened by being circumscribed; we do not wish to
give up a forlorn hope. With the crumbling and decayed fragments of
friendship around us, we maintain our point to the last; like the
cobbler, who kept his stall and cooked his beef-steak in the ruins of
Drury Lane. Bonaparte used to speak of old generals and favourites who
would not have abandoned him in his misfortunes if they had lived; it
was perhaps well for them that they were dead. The list of traitors and
the ungrateful is too much swelled without any probable additions to it.
XXVII
When we hear of any base or shocking action or character, we think the
better of ourselves; instead of which, we ought to think the worse. It
strikes at the grounds of our faith in human nature. The reflection of
the old divine was wiser on seeing a reprobate—‘There goes my wicked
self!’
XXVIII
Over-civility generally ends in impertinence; for as it proceeds from
design, and not from any kindness or respect, it ceases with its object.
XXIX
I am acquainted with but one person, of whom I feel quite sure that if
he were to meet an old and tried friend in the street, he would go up
and speak to him in the same manner, whether in the interim he had
become a lord or a beggar. Upon reflection, I may add a second to the
list. Such is my estimate of the permanence and sincerity of our most
boasted virtues. ‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man
picked out of ten thousand.’
XXX
It has been said that family attachments are the only ones that stand
the test of adversity, because the disgrace or misfortune is there in
some measure reflected upon ourselves. A friend is no longer a friend,
provided we choose to pick a quarrel with him; but we cannot so easily
cut the link of relationship asunder. We therefore relieve the
distresses of our near relations, or get them out of the way, lest they
should shame us. But the sentiment is unnatural, and therefore must be
untrue.
XXXI
L—— said of some monkeys at a fair, that we were ashamed of their
resemblance to ourselves on the same principle that we avoided _poor
relations_.
XXXII
Servants and others who consult only their ease and convenience, give a
great deal of trouble by their carelessness and profligacy; those who
take a pride in their work often carry it to excess, and plague you with
constant advice and interference. Their duty gets so much a-head in
their imagination, that it becomes their master, and your’s too.
XXXIII
There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books
or papers in order, that is, according to their notions of the matter;
and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor
any body else can find them. This is a sort of _magpie faculty_. If any
thing is left where you want it, it is called making a _litter_. There
is a pedantry in housewifery as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker
complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he
could not set comfortably to work again for several days.
XXXIV
True misanthropy consists not in pointing out the faults and follies of
men, but in encouraging them in the pursuit. They who wish well to their
fellow-creatures are angry at their vices and sore at their mishaps; he
who flatters their errors and smiles at their ruin is their worst enemy.
But men like the sycophant better than the plain-dealer, because they
prefer their passions to their reason, and even to their interest.
XXXV
I am not very patriotic in my notions, nor prejudiced in favour of my
own countrymen; and one reason is, I wish to have as good an opinion as
I can of human nature in general. If we are the paragons that some
people would make us out, what must the rest of the world be? If we
monopolize all the sense and virtue on the face of the globe, we ‘leave
others poor indeed,’ without having a very great superabundance falling
to our own share. Let them have a few advantages that we have not—grapes
and the sun!
XXXVI
When the Persian ambassador was at Edinburgh, an old Presbyterian lady,
more full of zeal than discretion, fell upon him for his idolatrous
belief, and said ‘I hear you worship the sun!’—‘In faith, Madam,’ he
replied, ‘and so would you too if you had ever seen him!’
XXXVII
‘To be _direct_ and honest is not safe,’ says Iago. Shakspeare has here
defined the nature of honesty, which seems to consist in the absence of
any _indirect_ or sinister bias. The honest man looks at and decides
upon an object as it is in itself, without a view to consequences, and
as if he himself were entirely out of the question; the prudent man
considers only what others will think of it; the knave, how he can turn
it to his own advantage or another’s detriment, which he likes better.
His straightforward simplicity of character is the reverse of what is
understood by the phrase, _a man of the world_: an honest man is
independent of and abstracted from material ties. This character is
owing chiefly to strong natural feeling and a love of right, partly to
pride and obstinacy, and a want of discursiveness of imagination. It is
not well to be too witty or too wise. In many circles (not including the
night-cellar or a mess-table) a clever fellow means a rogue. According
to the French proverb, ‘_Tout homme reflechi est méchant_.’ Your honest
man often is, and is always set down as no better than an ass.
XXXVIII
A person who does not tell lies will not believe that others tell them.
From old habit, he cannot break the connection between words and things.
This is to labour under a great disadvantage in his transactions with
_men of the world_: it is playing against sharpers with loaded dice. The
secret of plausibility and success is _point-blanc lying_. The advantage
which men of business have over the dreamers and sleep-walkers is not in
knowing the exact state of a case, but in telling you with a grave face
what it is not, to suit their own purposes. This is one obvious reason
why students and book-worms are so often reduced to their last legs.
Education (which is a study and discipline of abstract truth) is a
diversion to the instinct of lying and a bar to fortune.
XXXIX
Those who get their money as wits, spend it like fools.
XL
It is not true that authors, artists, &c., are uniformly ill-paid; they
are often improvident, and look upon an income as an estate. A literary
man who has made even five or six hundred a-year for a length of time
has only himself to blame if he has none of it left (a tradesman with
the same annual profits would have been rich or independent); an artist
who breaks for ten thousand pounds cannot surely lament the want of
patronage. A sieve might as well petition against a dry season. Persons
of talent and reputation do not make money, because they do not keep it;
and they do not keep it, because they do not care about it till they
feel the want of it—and then _the public stop payment_. The prudent and
careful, even among players, lay by fortunes.
XLI
In general, however, it is not to be expected that those should grow
rich by a special Providence, whose first and last object is by every
means and at every sacrifice to grow famous. Vanity and avarice have
different goals and travel different roads. The man of genius produces
that which others admire: the man of business that which they will buy.
If the poet is delighted with the ideas of certain things, the reader is
equally satisfied with the idea of them too. The man of genius does that
which no one else but himself can do: the man of business gets his
wealth from the joint mechanical drudgery of all whom he has the means
to employ. Trade is the Briareus that works with a hundred hands. A
popular author grew rich, because he seemed to have a hundred hands to
write with: but he wanted another hand to say to his well-got gains,
‘Come, let me clutch thee.’ Nollekens made a fortune (how he saved it we
know) by having blocks of marble to turn into sharp-looking busts (which
required a capital), and by hiring a number of people to hack and hew
them into shape. Sir Joshua made more money than West or Barry, partly
because he was a better painter, partly because gentlemen like their own
portraits better than those of prophet or apostle, saint or hero. What
the individual wants, he will pay the highest price for: what is done
for the public the State must pay for. How if they will not? The
historical painter cannot make them; and if he persists in the attempt,
must be contented to fall a martyr to it. It is some glory to fail in
great designs; and some punishment is due to having rashly or
presumptuously embarked in them.
XLII
It is some comfort to starve on a name: it is something to be a poor
_gentleman_; and your man of letters ‘writes himself _armigero_, in any
bond, warrant, or quittance.’ In fixing on a profession for a child, it
is a consideration not to place him in one in which he may not be
thought good enough to sit down in any company. Miserable mortals that
we are! If you make a lawyer of him, he may become Lord Chancellor; and
then all his posterity are lords. How cheap and yet acceptable a thing
is nobility in this country! It does not date from Adam or the conquest.
We need not laugh at Buonaparte’s mushroom peers, who were something
like Charlemagne’s or the knights of King Arthur’s round table.
XLIII
We talk of the march of intellect, as if it only unfolded the knowledge
of good: _the knowledge of evil_, which communicates with twenty times
the rapidity, is never once hinted at. Eve’s apple, the torch of
Prometheus, and Pandora’s box, are discarded as childish fables by our
wise moderns.
XLIV
As I write this, I hear out of the window a man beating his wife and
calling her names. Is this what is meant by good-nature and domestic
comfort? Or is it that we have so little of these, ordinarily speaking,
that we are astonished at the smallest instances of them; and have never
done _lauding_ ourselves for the exclusive possession of them?
XLV
A man should never marry beneath his own rank in life—_for love_. It
shews goodness of heart, but want of consideration; and the very
generosity of purpose will defeat itself. She may please him and be
every way qualified to make him happy: but what will others think? Can
he with equal certainty of the issue introduce her to his friends and
family? If not, nothing is done; for marriage is an artificial
institution, and a wife a part of the machinery of society. We are not
in a state of nature, to be quite free and unshackled to follow our
spontaneous impulses. Nothing can reconcile the difficulty but a woman’s
being a paragon of wit or beauty; but every man fancies his Dulcinea a
paragon of wit or beauty. Without this, he will only (with the best
intentions in the world) have entailed chagrin and mortification both on
himself and her; and she will be as much excluded from society as if he
had made her his mistress instead of his wife. She must either mope at
home, or tie him to her apron-string; and he will drag a clog and a load
through life, if he be not saddled with a scold and a tyrant to boot.
XLVI
I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and practical malignity of
man.
XLVII
We pity those who lived three hundred years ago, as if the world was
hardly then awake, and they were condemned to feel their way and drag
out an inanimate existence in the obscure dawn of manners and
civilization: _we_ forsooth are at the meridian, and the ages that are
to follow are dark night. But if there were any truth in our theory, we
should be as much behind-hand and objects of scorn to those who are to
come after us, as we have a fancied advantage over those that have
preceded us. Supposing it to be a misfortune to have lived in the age of
Raphael or Virgil, it would be desirable (if it were possible) still to
postpone the period of our existence _sine die_: for the value of time
must mount up, as it proceeds, through the positive, comparative, and
superlative degrees. Common sense with a little reflection will teach
us, that one age is as good as another; that in familiar phrase _we
cannot have our cake and eat it_; and that there is no time like the
time present, whether in the first, the tenth or the twentieth century.
XLVIII
The world does not start fair in the race of time: one country has run
its course before another has set out or even been heard of. Riches,
luxury, and the arts, reach their utmost height in one place, while the
rest of the globe is in a crude and barbarous state; decline
thenceforward, and can no more be resuscitated than the dead. The twelve
old Etruscan cities are stone-walls, surrounded with heaps of cinders:
Rome is but the tomb of its ancient greatness. Venice, Genoa, are
extinct; and there are those who think that England has had her day. She
may exclaim in the words of Gray’s _Bard_—‘To triumph and to die are
mine.’ America is just setting out in the path of history, on the model
of England, without a language of its own, and with a continent instead
of an island to run its career in—like a novice in the art, who gets a
larger canvass than his master ever had to cover with his second-hand
designs.
XLIX
It was shrewdly observed that the ruin of states commences with the
accumulation of people in great cities, which conceal and foster vice
and profligacy.
L
The world, said a sensible man, does not on the whole grow much worse,
nor abandon itself to absolute licentiousness, because as people have
children growing up, they do not wish them to be reprobates; but give
them good advice and conceal their failings from them. This in each
successive generation brings morality on its legs again, however
sceptical in virtue or hardened in vice the old may become through habit
or bad example.
LI
As children puzzle you by asking explanations of what they do not
understand, many grown people shine in company and triumph over their
antagonists by dint of ignorance and conceit.
LII
A certain bookseller wanted Northcote to write a history of art in all
ages and countries, and in all its ramifications and collateral
bearings. It would have taken a life to execute it; but the projector
thought it was as easy to make the book as to draw up the title-page.
Some minds are as sanguine from a want of imagination, as others are
from an excess of it; they see no difficulty or objection in the way of
what they undertake, and are blind to every thing but their own interest
and wishes.
LIII
An outcry is raised against the distresses of literature as a tax upon
the public, and against the sums of money and unrepaid loans which
authors borrow of strangers or friends. It is not considered that but
for authors we should still have been in the hands of tyrants, who
rioted in the spoil of widows and orphans, and swept the fortunes of
individuals and the wealth of provinces into their pouch. It will be
time enough to be alarmed when the _Literary Fund_ has laid its iron
grasp on fat abbey lands and portly monasteries for the poor brethren of
the Muses, has establishments like those of the Franciscan and Dominican
Friars for its hoary veterans or tender novices, and has laid half the
property of the country under contribution. Authors are the _ideal_
class of the present day, who supply the brains of the community with
‘fancies and good-nights,’ as the priests did of old; and who
cultivating no goodly vineyard of their own to satisfy the wants of the
body, are sometimes entitled, besides their pittance, to ask the
protection of taste or liberality. After all, the fees of Parnassus are
trifling in comparison with the toll of Purgatory.
LIV
There are but few authors who should marry: they are already wedded to
their studies and speculations. Those who are accustomed to the airy
regions of poetry and romance, have a fanciful and peculiar standard of
perfection of their own, to which realities can seldom come up; and
disappointment, indifference, or disgust, is too often the result.
Besides, their ideas and their intercourse with society make them fit
for the highest matches. If an author, baulked of the goddess of his
idolatry, marries an ignorant and narrow-minded person, they have no
language in common: if she is a _bluestocking_, they do nothing but
wrangle. Neither have most writers the means to maintain a wife and
family without difficulty. They have chosen their part, the pursuit of
the intellectual and abstracted; and should not attempt to force the
world of reality into a union with it, like mixing gold with clay. In
this respect, the Romish priests were perhaps wiser. ‘From every work
they challenged _essoin_ for contemplation’s sake.’ Yet their celibacy
was but a compromise with their sloth and supposed sanctity. We must not
contradict the course of nature, after all.
LV
There is sometimes seen more natural ease and grace in a common
gipsy-girl than in an English court-circle. To demand a reason why, is
to ask why the strolling fortune-teller’s hair and eyes are black, or
her face oval.
LVI
The greatest proof of pride is its being able to extinguish envy and
jealousy. Vanity produces the latter effect on the continent.
LVII
When you speak of the popular effect and enthusiasm produced by the
ceremonies of the Catholic church, it is presently objected that all
this faith and zeal is excited by mummery and superstition. I am ready
to allow that; and when I find that truth and reason have the same
homage and reverence paid to them as absurdity and falsehood, I shall
think all the advantages are clearly on the side of the former. The
processes of reason do not commonly afford the elements of passion as
their result; and the object of strong and even lofty feeling seems to
appeal rather to the grossness and incongruity of the senses and
imagination, than to the clear and dry deductions of the understanding.
Man has been truly defined a _religious animal_; but his faith and
heavenward aspirations cease if you reduce him to a mere mathematical
machine. The glory and the power of the true religion are in its
enlisting the affections of man along with the understanding.
LVIII
We are imposed upon by the affectation of grace and gentility only till
we see the reality; and then we laugh at the counterfeit, and are
surprised that we did not see through it before.
LIX
English women, even of the highest rank, look like _dowdies_ in Paris;
or exactly as countrywomen do in London. It is a _rule-of-three_
proportion. A French milliner or servant maid laughs (not without
reason) at an English Duchess. The more our fair country women dress _à
la Française_, the more unlucky they seem; and the more foreign graces
they give themselves, the more awkward they grow. They want the
_tournure_ Françoise. Oh! how we have ‘melted, thawed, and dissolved
into a dew,’ to see a bustling, red-faced, bare-necked English Duchess,
or banker’s wife, come into a box at the French theatre, bedizened and
bedaubed! My Lady-mayoress or the Right Honourable the Countess Dowager
of ——, before she ventures on the word _vulgar_, or scorns her untitled
and untutored neighbours as beneath her notice, should go to see _les
Angloises pour rire_! _That_ is the looking-glass for upstart wealth and
inflated aristocracy.
LX
The advantage of our nobility over the plebeian classes is said to be in
the blood and in the breed—the Norman breed, we suppose—the high noses
and arched eyebrows date from the Conquest. We plead guilty to the
insinuation conveyed in the expression—‘the coronet face’—and bow with
some sort of pride to the pride of birth. But this hypothesis is hardly
compatible with the evident improvement in the present generation of
noblemen and gentlemen by the intermarriages with rich heiresses, or the
beautiful Pamelas of an humbler stock. _Crossing the breed_ has done
much good; for the actual race of Bond-street loungers would make a very
respectable regiment of grenadiers; and the satire on Beau Didapper, in
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, has lost its force.
LXI
The tone of society in Paris is very far from John Bullish. They do not
ask what a man is worth, or whether his father is owner of a tin-mine or
a borough—but what he has to say, whether he is amiable and _spirituel_.
In the case (unless a marriage is on the _tapis_) no one inquires
whether his account at his banker’s is high or low; or whether he has
come in his carriage or on foot. An English soldier of fortune, or a
great traveller, is listened to with some attention as a _marked
character_; while a booby lord is no more regarded than his own footman
in livery. The blank after a man’s name is expected to be filled up with
talent or adventures, or he passes for what he really is, a cypher.
LXII
Our young Englishmen in Paris do not make much figure in the society of
Frenchmen of education and spirit. They stumble at the threshold in
point of manners, dress, and conversation. They have not only to learn
the language, but to _unlearn_ almost every thing else. Both words and
things are different in France; our raw recruits have to get rid of a
host of prejudices, and they do it awkwardly and reluctantly, and if
they attempt to make a regular stand, are presently out-voted. The terms
_gothic_ and _barbarous_ are talisman to strike them dumb. There is,
moreover, a clumsiness in both their wit and advances to familiarity,
that the spiteful _brunettes_ on the other side of the water do not
comprehend, and that subjects them to constant sneers; and every false
step adds to their confusion and want of confidence. But their lively
antagonists are so flushed with victory and victims to their loquacity
and charms, that they are not contented to lecture them on morals,
metaphysics, sauces, and _virtù_, but proceed to teach them the true
pronunciation and idiom of the English tongue. Thus a smart French widow
having blundered by saying, ‘I have never _made_ a child;’ and
perceiving that it excited a smile, maintained, for three whole days,
against a large company, that it was better than saying, ‘I never _had_
a child.’
LXIII
The Parisian _trip_ (say what they will) is not grace. It is the motion
of a puppet, and may be mimicked, which grace _cannot_. It may be
different from the high, heavy-heeled walk of the Englishwoman. Is it
not equally remote from the step (if step it may be called) of an
Andalusian girl?
LXIV
It has been often made a subject of dispute, What is the distinguishing
characteristic of man? And the answer may, perhaps, be given that _he is
the only animal that dresses_. He is the only being who is coxcomb
enough not to go out of the world naked as he came into it; that is
ashamed of what he really is, and proud of what he is not; and that
tries to pass off an artificial disguise as himself. We may safely
extend the old maxim, and say that it is the tailor that makes both the
gentleman and the man. _Fine feathers make fine birds_—this lie is the
motto of the human mind. Dress a fellow in sheepskin, and he is a
clown—dress him in scarlet, and he is a gentleman. It is then the
clothes that makes all the difference; and the moral agent is simply the
lay-figure to hang them on. Man, in short, is the only creature in the
known world, with whom appearances pass for realities, words for things;
or that has the wit to find out his own defects, and the impudence and
hypocrisy, by merely concealing them, to persuade himself and others
that he has them not. Teniers’s monkeys, habited like monks, may be
thought a satire on human nature—alas! it is a piece of natural history.
The monks are the larger and more solemn species, to be sure. Swift has
taken a good bird’s eye view of man’s nature, by abstracting the
habitual notions of size, and looking at it in _great_ or in _little_:
would that some one had the boldness and the art to do a similar
service, by stripping off the coat from his back, the vizor from his
thoughts, or by dressing up some other creature in similar mummery! It
is not his body alone that he tampers with, and metamorphoses so
successfully; he tricks out his mind and soul in borrowed finery, and in
the admired costume of gravity and imposture. If he has a desire to
commit a base or cruel action without remorse and with the applause of
the spectators, he has only to throw the cloak of religion over it, and
invoke Heaven to set its seal on a massacre or a robbery. At one time
dirt, at another indecency, at another rapine, at a fourth rancorous
malignity, is decked out and accredited in the garb of sanctity. The
instant there is a flaw, a ‘damned spot’ to be concealed, it is glossed
over with a doubtful name. Again, we dress up our enemies in nicknames,
and they march to the stake as assuredly as in _san Benitos_. The words
Heretic or Papist, Jew or Infidel, labelled on those who differ from us,
stand us in lieu of sense or decency. If a man be mean, he sets up for
economy; if selfish, he pretends to be prudent; if harsh, firm; and so
on. What enormities, what follies are not undertaken for the love of
glory?—and the worst of all, are said to be for the glory of God!
Strange, that a reptile should wish to be thought an angel; or that he
should not be content to writhe and grovel in his native earth, without
aspiring to the skies! It is from the love of dress and finery. He is
the Chimney-sweeper on May-day all the year round: the soot peeps
through the rags and tinsel, and all the flowers of sentiment!
LXV
The meaning of all which is, that man is the only hypocrite in the
creation; or that he is composed of two natures, the _ideal_ and the
_physical_, the one of which he is always trying to keep a secret from
the other. He is the _Centaur not fabulous_.
LXVI
A person who is full of secrets is a knave or a fool, or both.
LXVII
The error of Mandeville, as well as of those opposed to him, is in
concluding that man is a simple and not a compound being. The schoolmen
and divines endeavour to prove that the gross and material part of his
nature is a foreign admixture, distinct from and unworthy of the man
himself. The misanthropes and sceptics, on the other hand, maintain the
_falsity of all human virtues_, and that all that is not sensual and
selfish is a mere theatrical deception. But in order that man should be
a wholly and incorrigibly selfish being, he should be shut up like an
oyster in its shell, without any possible conception of what passes
beyond the wall of his senses; and the _feelers_ of his mind should not
extend their ramifications under any circumstance or in any manner, to
the thoughts and sentiments of others. Shakspeare has expressed the
matter better than the pedants on either side, who wish unreasonably to
exalt or degrade human nature.—‘The web of our lives is as of a mingled
yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults
whipped them not, and our vices would despair, if they were not
cherished by our virtues.’
LXVIII
People cry out against the preposterous absurdity of such
representations as the German inventions of the _Devil’s Elixir_ and the
_Bottle Imp_. Is it then a fiction that we see? Or is it not rather a
palpable reality that takes place every day and hour? Who is there that
is not haunted by some heated phantom of his brain, some wizard spell,
that clings to him in spite of his will, and hurries him on to absurdity
or ruin? There is no machinery or phantasmagoria of a melo-drame, more
extravagant than the workings of the passions. Mr. Farley may do his
worst with scaly forms, with flames, and dragon’s wings: but after all,
the true demon is within us. How many, whose senses are shocked at the
outward spectacle, and who turn away startled or disgusted might say,
pointing to their bosoms, ‘_The moral is here!_’
LXIX
Mr. L—— asked Sir Thomas —— who had been intimate with the Prince, if it
was true that he was so fine a gentleman as he was generally
represented? Sir Thomas —— made answer, that it was certainly true that
the Prince was a very fine gentleman indeed: ‘but,’ added he, ‘if I am
to speak my mind, the finest gentleman I ever saw, was Sadi Baba, the
ambassador to Constantinople, from the Usbek Tartars.’
LXX
‘Man is in no haste to be venerable.’ At present, it seems as if there
were no occasion to become so. People die as usual; but it is not the
fashion to grow old. Formerly, men subsided and settled down into a
respectable old age at forty, as they did into a bob-wig, and a brown
coat and waistcoat of a certain cut. The father of a family no longer
pretended to pass for a gay young fellow, after he had children grown
up; and women dwindled, by regular and willing gradations, into mothers
and grandmothers, transferring their charms and pretensions to a
blooming posterity; but these things are never thought of now-a-days. A
matron of sixty flaunts it in ‘La Belle Assemblée’s dresses for May:’
and certainly M. Stultz never inquires into the grand climacteric of his
customers. Dress levels all ages as well as all ranks.
A CHAPTER ON EDITORS
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_November, 1830._
‘Our withers are unwrung.’
Editors are (to use an approved Scotch phrase—for what that is Scotch is
not approved?) a ‘sort of _tittle-tattle_‘—difficult to deal with,
dangerous to discuss. ‘A capital subject for an article, great scope,
complete novelty, and ground never touched upon!’ Very true; for what
Editor would insert an article against himself? Certainly none that did
not feel himself free from and superior to the common foibles of his
tribe. What might, therefore, be taken for a satire in manuscript, turns
to a compliment in print—the exception in this, as in other cases,
proves the rule—an inference we have endeavoured to express in our
motto.
With one exception, then, Editors in general partake of the usual
infirmity of human nature, and of persons placed in high and honorary
situations. Like other individuals raised to authority, they are chosen
to fill a certain post for qualities useful or ornamental to the
_reading public_; but they soon fancy that the situation has been
invented for their own honour and profit, and sink the use in the abuse.
Kings are not the only servants of the public who imagine that they are
the _state_. Editors are but men, and easily ‘lay the flattering unction
to their souls’ that they _are_ the Magazine, the Newspaper, or the
Review they conduct. They have got a little power in their hands, and
they wish to employ that power (as all power is employed) to increase
the sense of self-importance; they borrow a certain dignity from their
situation as arbiters and judges of taste and elegance, and they are
determined to keep it to the detriment of their employers and of every
one else. They are dreadfully afraid there should be any thing behind
the Editor’s chair, greater than the Editor’s chair. That is a scandal
to be prevented at all risks. The publication they are entrusted with
for the amusement and edification of the town, they convert, in theory
and practice, into a stalking-horse of their own vanity, whims, and
prejudices. They cannot write a whole work themselves, but they take
care that the whole is such as they might have written: it is to have
the Editor’s mark, like the broad R, on every page, or the N. N. at the
Tuileries; it is to bear the same image and superscription—every line is
to be upon oath: nothing is to be differently conceived or better
expressed than the Editor could have done it. The whole begins in
vanity, and ends too often in dulness and insipidity.
It is utterly impossible to persuade an Editor that he is nobody. As Mr.
Horne Tooke said, on his trial for a libel before Lord Kenyon, ‘There
are two parties in this cause—myself and the jury; the judge and the
crier of the court attend in their respective places:’ so in every
periodical miscellany, there are two essential parties—the writers and
the public; the Editor and the printer’s-devil are merely the mechanical
instruments to bring them together. There is a secret consciousness of
this on the part of the Conductor of the Literary Diligence, that his
place is one for shew and form rather than use; and as he cannot
maintain his pretended superiority by what he does himself, he thinks to
arrive at the same end by hindering others from doing their best. The
‘dog-in-the-manger’ principle comes into full play. If an article has
nothing to recommend it, is one of no mark or likelihood, it goes in;
there is no offence in it. If it is likely to strike, to draw attention,
to make a noise, then every syllable is scanned, every objection is
weighed: if grave, it is too grave; if witty, it is too witty. One way
or other, it might be better; and while this nice point is pending, it
gives place, as a matter of course, to something that there is no
question about.
The responsibility, the delicacy, the nervous apprehension of the
Editor, naturally increase with the probable effect and popularity of
the contributions on which he has to pass judgment; and the nearer an
effusion approaches to perfection, the more fatal is a single flaw, or
its falling short of that superhuman standard by a hair’s-breadth
difference, to its final reception. If people are likely to ask, ‘Who
wrote a certain paper in the last number of ——?’ the Editor is bound, as
a point of honour, to baulk that impertinent curiosity on the part of
the public. He would have it understood that all the articles are
equally good, and may be equally his own. If he inserts a paper of more
than the allowed average merit, his next care is to spoil by revising
it. The sting, with the honey, is sure to be left out. If there is any
thing that pleased you in the writing, you look in vain for it in the
proof. What might electrify the reader, startles the Editor. With a
paternal regard for the interests of the public, he takes care that
their tastes should not be pampered, and their expectations raised too
high, by a succession of fine passages, of which it is impossible to
continue a supply. He interposes between the town and their vicious
appetite for the piquant and high-seasoned, as we forbid children to
indulge in sweetmeats. The trite and superficial are always to be had
_to order_, and present a beautiful uniformity of appearance. There is
no unexpected relief, no unwelcome inequality of style, to disorder the
nerves or perplex the understanding: the reader may read, and smile, and
sleep, without meeting a single idea to break his repose!
Some Editors, moreover, have a way of altering the first paragraph: they
have then exercised their privileges, and let you alone for the rest of
the chapter. This is like paying ‘a pepper-corn rent,’ or making one’s
bow on entering a room: it is being let off cheap. Others add a
pointless conclusion of their own: it is like signing their names to the
article. Some have a passion for sticking in the word _however_ at every
opportunity, in order to impede the march of the style; and others are
contented and take great pains (with Lindley Murray’s Grammar lying open
before them) to alter ‘if it _is_’ into ‘if it _be_.’ An Editor abhors
an ellipsis. If you fling your thoughts into continued passages, they
set to work to cut them up into short paragraphs: if you make frequent
breaks, they turn the tables on you that way, and throw the whole
composition into masses. Any thing to preserve the form and appearance
of power, to make the work their own by mental stratagem, to stamp it by
some fiction of criticism with their personal identity, to enable them
to run away with the credit, and look upon themselves as the
master-spirits of the work and of the age! If there is any point they do
not understand, they are sure to meddle with it, and mar the sense; for
it piques their self-love, and they think they are bound _ex-officio_ to
know better than the writer. Thus they substitute (at a venture, and
merely for the sake of altering) one epithet for another, when perhaps
the same word has occurred just before, and produces a cruel tautology,
never considering the trouble you have taken to compare the context and
vary the phraseology.
Editors have no misplaced confidence in the powers of their
contributors: they think by the supposition they must be in the right
from a single supercilious glance,—and you in the wrong, after poring
over a subject for a month. There are Editors who, if you insert the
name of a popular actor or artist, strike it out, and, in virtue of
their authority, insert a favourite of their own,—as a dexterous
attorney substitutes the name of a friend in a will. Some Editors will
let you praise nobody; others will let you blame nobody. The first
excites their jealousy of contemporary merit; the last excites their
fears, and they do not like to make enemies. Some insist upon giving no
opinion at all, and observe an _unarmed neutrality_ as to all parties
and persons;—it is no wonder the world think very little of them in
return. Some Editors stand upon their characters for this; others for
that. Some pique themselves upon being genteel and well-dressed; others
on being moral and immaculate, and do not perceive that the public never
trouble their heads about the matter. We only know one Editor who openly
discards all regard to character and decency, and who thrives by the
dissolution of partnership, if indeed the articles were ever drawn up.
We shall not mention names, as we would not advertise a work that ‘ought
to lie on no gentleman’s table.’ Some Editors drink tea with a set of
_blue stockings_ and literary ladies: not a whisper, not a breath that
might blow away those fine cobwebs of the brain—
‘More subtle web Arachne cannot spin;
Nor those fine threads which oft we woven see
Of scorched dew, do not in the air more lightly flee!’
Others dine with Lords and Academicians—for God’s sake, take care what
you say! Would you strip the Editor’s mantel-piece of the cards of
invitation that adorn it to select parties for the next six months? An
Editor takes a turn in St. James’s-street, and is congratulated by the
successive literary or political groups on all he does _not_ write; and
when the mistake is found out, the true Simon Pure is dismissed. We have
heard that it was well said by the proprietor of a leading journal, that
he would take good care never to write a line in his own paper, as he
had conflicting interests enough to manage, without adding literary
jealousies to the number. On the other hand, a very good-natured and
warm-hearted individual declared, ‘he would never have another man of
talents for an Editor’ (the Editor, in this case, is to the proprietor
as the author to the Editor), ‘for he was tired of having their good
things thrust in his teeth.’ Some Editors are scrubs, mere drudges,
newspaper-puffs: others are bullies or quacks: others are nothing at
all—they have the name, and receive a salary for it! A literary sinecure
is at once lucrative and highly respectable. At Lord’s-Ground there are
some old hands that are famous for ‘_blocking out and staying in_:’ it
would seem that some of our literary veterans had taken a lesson from
their youthful exercises at Harrow or Eton.
All this is bad enough; but the worst is, that Editors, besides their
own failings, have _friends_ who aggravate and take advantage of them.
These self-styled friends are the night-shade and hemlock clinging to
the work, preventing its growth and circulation, and dropping a
slumberous poison from its jaundiced leaves. They form a _cordon_, an
opake mass round the Editor, and persuade him that they are the support,
the prop, and pillar of his reputation. They get between him and the
public, and shut out the light, and set aside common sense. They pretend
anxiety for the interest of some established organ of opinion, while all
they want is to make it the organ of their dogmas, prejudices, or party.
They want to be the Magazine or the Review—to wield that power covertly,
to warp that influence to their own purposes. If they cannot do this,
they care not if it sinks or swims. They prejudge every
question—fly-blow every writer who is not of their own set. A friend of
theirs has three articles in the last number of ——; they strain every
nerve and make pressing instances to throw a slur on a popular
contribution by another hand, in order that he may write a fourth in the
next number. The short articles which are read by the vulgar, are cut
down to make room for the long ones, which are read by nobody but the
writers and their friends. If an opinion is expressed contrary to the
shibboleth of the party, it is represented as an outrage on decency and
public opinion, when in truth the public are delighted with the candour
and boldness displayed. They would convert the most valuable and
spirited journal into a dull pamphleteer, stuffed with their own
lucubrations on certain heavy topics. The self-importance of these
people is in proportion to their insignificance; and what they cannot do
by an appeal to argument or sound policy, they effect by importunity and
insinuation. They keep the Editor in continual alarm as to what will be
said of him by the public, when in fact the public will think (in nine
cases out of ten) just what he tells them.
These people create much of the mischief. An Editor should have no
friends—his only prompter should be the number of copies of the work
that sell. It is superfluous to strike off a large impression of a work
for those few squeamish persons who prefer lead to tinsel. Principle and
good manners are barriers that are, in our estimate, inviolable: the
rest is open to popular suffrage, and is not to be prejudged by a
_coterie_ with closed doors. Another difficulty lies here. An Editor
should, in one sense, be a respectable man—a distinguished character;
otherwise, he cannot lend his name and sanction to the work. The
conductor of a periodical publication which is to circulate widely and
give the tone to taste and opinion, ought to be of high standing, should
have connections with society, should belong to some literary
institution, should be courted by the great, be run after by the
obscure. But ‘here’s the rub’—that one so graced and gifted can neither
have his time nor his thoughts to himself. Our obligations are mutual;
and those who owe much to others, become the slaves of their good
opinion and good word. He who dines out loses his free agency. He may
improve in politeness; he falls off in the pith and pungency of his
style. A poem is dedicated to the son of the Muses:—can the critic do
otherwise than praise it? A tragedy is brought out by a noble friend and
patron:—the severe rules of the drama must yield in some measure to the
amenities of private life. On the contrary, Mr. —— is a garretteer—a
person that nobody knows; his work has nothing but the _contents_ to
recommend it; it sinks into obscurity, or addresses itself to the
_canaille_. An Editor, then, should be an abstraction—a being in the
clouds—a mind without a body—reason without passion.——But where find
such a one?
THE LETTER-BELL
_The Monthly Magazine._] [_March, 1831._
Complaints are frequently made of the vanity and shortness of human
life, when, if we examine its smallest details, they present a world by
themselves. The most trifling objects, retraced with the eye of memory,
assume the vividness, the delicacy, and importance of insects seen
through a magnifying glass. There is no end of the brilliancy or the
variety. The habitual feeling of the love of life may be compared to
‘one entire and perfect chrysolite,’ which, if analysed, breaks into a
thousand shining fragments. Ask the sum-total of the value of human
life, and we are puzzled with the length of the account, and the
multiplicity of items in it: take any one of them apart, and it is
wonderful what matter for reflection will be found in it! As I write
this, the _Letter-Bell_ passes: it has a lively, pleasant sound with it,
and not only fills the street with its importunate clamour, but rings
clear through the length of many half-forgotten years. It strikes upon
the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes me from the dream of time,
it flings me back upon my first entrance into life, the period of my
first coming up to town, when all around was strange, uncertain,
adverse—a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos of shifting objects—and
when this sound alone, startling me with the recollection of a letter I
had to send to the friends I had lately left, brought me as it were to
myself, made me feel that I had links still connecting me with the
universe, and gave me hope and patience to persevere. At that
loud-tinkling, interrupted sound (now and then), the long line of blue
hills near the place where I was brought up waves in the horizon, a
golden sunset hovers over them, the dwarf-oaks rustle their red leaves
in the eveningbreeze, and the road from —— to ——, by which I first set
out on my journey through life, stares me in the face as plain, but from
time and change not less visionary and mysterious, than the pictures in
the _Pilgrim’s Progress_. I should notice, that at this time the light
of the French Revolution circled my head like a glory, though dabbled
with drops of crimson gore: I walked comfortable and cheerful by its
side—
‘And by the vision splendid
Was on my way attended.’
It rose then in the east: it has again risen in the west. Two suns in
one day, two triumphs of liberty in one age, is a miracle which I hope
the Laureate will hail in appropriate verse. Or may not Mr. Wordsworth
give a different turn to the fine passage, beginning—
‘What, though the radiance which was once so bright,
Be now for ever vanished from my sight;
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower?’
For is it not brought back, ‘like morn risen on mid-_night_‘; and may he
not yet greet the yellow light shining on the evening bank with eyes of
youth, of genius, and freedom, as of yore? No, never! But what would not
these persons give for the unbroken integrity of their early
opinions—for one unshackled, uncontaminated strain—one _Io pæan_ to
Liberty—one burst of indignation against tyrants and sycophants, who
subject other countries to slavery by force, and prepare their own for
it by servile sophistry, as we see the huge serpent lick over its
trembling, helpless victim with its slime and poison, before it devours
it! On every stanza so penned should be written the word RECREANT! Every
taunt, every reproach, every note of exultation at restored light and
freedom, would recal to them how their hearts failed them in the Valley
of the Shadow of Death. And what shall we say to _him_—the sleep-walker,
the dreamer, the sophist, the word-hunter, the craver after sympathy,
but still vulnerable to truth, accessible to opinion, because not sordid
or mechanical? The Bourbons being no longer tied about his neck, he may
perhaps recover his original liberty of speculating; so that we may
apply to him the lines about his own _Ancient Mariner_—
‘And from his neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.’
This is the reason I can write an article on the _Letter-Bell_, and
other such subjects; I have never given the lie to my own soul. If I
have felt any impression once, I feel it more strongly a second time;
and I have no wish to revile or discard my best thoughts. There is at
least a thorough _keeping_ in what I write—not a line that betrays a
principle or disguises a feeling. If my wealth is small, it all goes to
enrich the same heap; and trifles in this way accumulate to a tolerable
sum. Or if the Letter-Bell does not lead me a dance into the country, it
fixes me in the thick of my town recollections, I know not how long ago.
It was a kind of alarm to break off from my work when there happened to
be company to dinner or when I was going to the play. _That_ was going
to the play, indeed, when I went twice a year, and had not been more
than half a dozen times in my life. Even the idea that any one else in
the house was going, was a sort of reflected enjoyment, and conjured up
a lively anticipation of the scene. I remember a Miss D——, a maiden lady
from Wales (who in her youth was to have been married to an earl),
tantalised me greatly in this way, by talking all day of going to see
Mrs. Siddons’ ‘airs and graces’ at night in some favourite part; and
when the Letter-Bell announced that the time was approaching, and its
last receding sound lingered on the ear, or was lost in silence, how
anxious and uneasy I became, lest she and her companion should not be in
time to get good places—lest the curtain should draw up before they
arrived—and lest I should lose one line or look in the intelligent
report which I should hear the next morning! The punctuating of time at
that early period—every thing that gives it an articulate voice—seems of
the utmost consequence; for we do not know what scenes in the _ideal_
world may run out of them: a world of interest may hang upon every
instant, and we can hardly sustain the weight of future years which are
contained in embryo in the most minute and inconsiderable passing
events. How often have I put off writing a letter till it was too late!
How often had to run after the postman with it—now missing, now
recovering the sound of his bell—breathless, angry with myself—then
hearing the welcome sound come full round a corner—and seeing the
scarlet costume which set all my fears and self-reproaches at rest! I do
not recollect having ever repented giving a letter to the postman, or
wishing to retrieve it after he had once deposited it in his bag. What I
have once set my hand to, I take the consequences of, and have been
always pretty much of the same humour in this respect. I am not like the
person who, having sent off a letter to his mistress, who resided a
hundred and twenty miles in the country, and disapproving, on second
thoughts, of some expressions contained in it, took a post-chaise and
four to follow and intercept it the next morning. At other times, I have
sat and watched the decaying embers in a little _back_ painting-room
(just as the wintry day declined), and brooded over the half-finished
copy of a Rembrandt, or a landscape by Vangoyen, placing it where it
might catch a dim gleam of light from the fire; while the Letter-Bell
was the only sound that drew my thoughts to the world without, and
reminded me that I had a task to perform in it. As to that landscape,
methinks I see it now—
‘The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale,
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail.’
There was a windmill, too, with a poor low clay-built cottage beside
it:—how delighted I was when I had made the tremulous, undulating
reflection in the water, and saw the dull canvas become a lucid mirror
of the commonest features of nature! Certainly, painting gives one a
strong interest in nature and humanity (it is not the _dandy-school_ of
morals or sentiment)—
‘While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.’
Perhaps there is no part of a painter’s life (if we must tell ‘the
secrets of the prison-house’) in which he has more enjoyment of himself
and his art, than that in which after his work is over, and with
furtive, sidelong glances at what he has done, he is employed in washing
his brushes and cleaning his pallet for the day. Afterwards, when he
gets a servant in livery to do this for him, he may have other and more
ostensible sources of satisfaction—greater splendour, wealth, or fame;
but he will not be so wholly in his art, nor will his art have such a
hold on him as when he was too poor to transfer its meanest drudgery to
others—too humble to despise aught that had to do with the object of his
glory and his pride, with that on which all his projects of ambition or
pleasure were founded. ‘Entire affection scorneth nicer hands.’ When the
professor is above this mechanical part of his business, it may have
become a _stalking-horse_ to other worldly schemes, but is no longer his
_hobby-horse_ and the delight of his inmost thoughts—
‘His shame in crowds, his solitary pride!’
I used sometimes to hurry through this part of my occupation, while the
Letter-Bell (which was my dinner-bell) summoned me to the fraternal
board, where youth and hope
‘Made good digestion wait on appetite
And health on both—’
or oftener I put it off till after dinner, that I might loiter longer
and with more luxurious indolence over it, and connect it with the
thoughts of my next day’s labours.
The dustman’s bell, with its heavy, monotonous noise, and the brisk,
lively tinkle of the muffin-bell, have something in them, but not much.
They will bear dilating upon with the utmost licence of inventive prose.
All things are not alike _conductors_ to the imagination. A learned
Scotch professor found fault with an ingenious friend and arch-critic
for cultivating a rookery on his grounds: the professor declared ‘he
would as soon think of encouraging a _froggery_.’ This was barbarous as
it was senseless. Strange, that a country that has produced the Scotch
novels and Gertrude of Wyoming should want sentiment!
The postman’s double knock at the door the next morning is ‘more germain
to the matter.’ How that knock often goes to the heart! We distinguish
to a nicety the arrival of the Two-penny or the General Post. The
summons of the latter is louder and heavier, as bringing news from a
greater distance, and as, the longer it has been delayed, fraught with a
deeper interest. We catch the sound of what is to be paid—eight-pence,
nine-pence, a shilling—and our hopes generally rise with the postage.
How we are provoked at the delay in getting change—at the servant who
does not hear the door! Then if the postman passes, and we do not hear
the expected knock, what a pang is there! It is like the silence of
death—of hope! We think he does it on purpose, and enjoys all the misery
of our suspense. I have sometimes walked out to see the Mail-Coach pass,
by which I had sent a letter, or to meet it when I expected one. I never
see a Mail-Coach, for this reason, but I look at it as the bearer of
glad tidings—the messenger of fate. I have reason to say so. The finest
sight in the metropolis is that of the Mail-Coaches setting off from
Piccadilly. The horses paw the ground, and are impatient to be gone, as
if conscious of the precious burden they convey. There is a peculiar
secresy and despatch, significant and full of meaning, in all the
proceedings concerning them. Even the outside passengers have an erect
and supercilious air, as if proof against the accidents of the journey.
In fact, it seems indifferent whether they are to encounter the summer’s
heat or winter’s cold, since they are borne on through the air in a
winged chariot. The Mail-Carts drive up; the transfer of packages is
made; and, at a signal given, they start off, bearing the irrevocable
scrolls that give wings to thought, and that bind or sever hearts for
ever. How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages that draw up in a line
after they are gone! Some persons think the sublimest object in nature
is a ship launched on the bosom of the ocean: but give me, for my
private satisfaction, the Mail-Coaches that pour down Piccadilly of an
evening, tear up the pavement, and devour the way before them to the
Land’s-End!
In Cowper’s time, Mail-Coaches were hardly set up; but he has
beautifully described the coming in of the Post-Boy:—
‘Hark! ’tis the twanging horn o’er yonder bridge,
That with its wearisome but needful length
Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon
Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright:—
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks;
News from all nations lumbering at his back.
True to his charge, the close-packed load behind.
Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
Is to conduct it to the destined inn;
And having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch!
Cold and yet cheerful; messenger of grief
Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
To him indifferent whether grief or joy.
Houses in ashes and the fall of stocks,
Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
With tears that trickled down the writer’s cheeks
Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains
Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
His horse and him, unconscious of them all.’
And yet, notwithstanding this, and so many other passages that seem like
the very marrow of our being, Lord Byron denies that Cowper was a
poet!—The Mail-Coach is an improvement on the Post-Boy; but I fear it
will hardly bear so poetical a description. The picturesque and dramatic
do not keep pace with the useful and mechanical. The telegraphs that
lately communicated the intelligence of the new revolution to all France
within a few hours, are a wonderful contrivance; but they are less
striking and appalling than the beacon-fires (mentioned by Æschylus),
which, lighted from hill-top to hill-top, announced the taking of Troy,
and the return of Agamemnon.
ON THE SPIRIT OF MONARCHY
_The Liberal._] [1822.
‘Strip it of its externals, and what is it but a _jest_?’
_Charade on the word_ MAJESTY.
‘As for politics, I think poets are _Tories_ by nature, supposing them
to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family,
that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly
adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians,
abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to
the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of
virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally _Whigs_. It happens
agreeably enough to this maxim, that the Whigs are friends to that
wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.’—_Skenstone’s Letters_,
1746.
The Spirit of Monarchy then is nothing but the craving in the human mind
after the Sensible and the One. It is not so much a matter of
state-necessity or policy, as a natural infirmity, a disease, a false
appetite in the popular feeling, which must be gratified. Man is an
individual animal with narrow faculties, but infinite desires, which he
is anxious to concentrate in some one object within the grasp of his
imagination, and where, if he cannot be all that he wishes himself, he
may at least contemplate his own pride, vanity, and passions, displayed
in their most extravagant dimensions in a being no bigger and no better
than himself. Each individual would (were it in his power) be a king, a
God: but as he cannot, the next best thing is to see this reflex image
of his self-love, the darling passion of his breast, realized, embodied
out of himself in the first object he can lay his hands on for the
purpose. The slave admires the tyrant, because the last is, what the
first _would be_. He surveys himself all over in the glass of royalty.
The swelling, bloated self-importance of the one is the very counterpart
and ultimate goal of the abject servility of the other. But both hate
mankind for the same reason, because a respect for humanity is a
diversion to their inordinate self-love, and the idea of the general
good is a check to the gross intemperance of passion. The worthlessness
of the object does not diminish but irritate the propensity to admire.
It serves to pamper our imagination equally, and does not provoke our
envy. All we want is to aggrandize our own vain-glory at second-hand;
and the less of real superiority or excellence there is in the person we
fix upon as our proxy in this dramatic exhibition, the more easily can
we change places with him, and fancy ourselves as good as he. Nay, the
descent favours the rise; and we heap our tribute of applause the
higher, in proportion as it is a free gift. An idol is not the worse for
being of coarse materials: a king should be a common-place man.
Otherwise, he is superior in his own nature, and not dependent on our
bounty or caprice. Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction. We
like to have scope for the exercise of our mere will. We make kings of
men, and Gods of stocks and stones: we are not jealous of the creatures
of our own hands. We only want a peg or loop to hang our idle fancies
on, a puppet to dress up, a lay-figure to paint from. It is ‘THING
Ferdinand, and not KING Ferdinand,’ as it was wisely and wittily
observed. We ask only for the stage effect; we do not go behind the
scenes, or it would go hard with many of our prejudices! We see the
symbols of majesty, we enjoy the pomp, we crouch before the power, we
walk in the procession, and make part of the pageant, and we say in our
secret hearts, there is nothing but accident that prevents us from being
at the head of it. There is something in the mock-sublimity of thrones,
wonderfully congenial to the human mind. Every man feels that he could
sit there; every man feels that he could look big there; every man feels
that he could bow there; every man feels that he could play the monarch
there. The transition is so easy, and so delightful! The imagination
keeps pace with royal state,
‘And by the vision splendid
Is on its way attended.’
The Madman in Hogarth who fancies himself a king, is not a solitary
instance of this species of hallucination. Almost every true and loyal
subject holds such a barren sceptre in his hand; and the meanest of the
rabble, as he runs by the monarch’s side, has wit enough to think—‘There
goes my _royal_ self!’ From the most absolute despot to the lowest slave
there is but one step (no, not one) in point of real merit. As far as
truth or reason is concerned, they might change situations
to-morrow—nay, they constantly do so without the smallest loss or
benefit to mankind! Tyranny, in a word, is a farce got up for the
entertainment of poor human nature; and it might pass very well, if it
did not so often turn into a tragedy.
We once heard a celebrated and elegant historian and a hearty Whig
declare, he liked a king like George III. better than such a one as
Buonaparte; because, in the former case, there was nothing to overawe
the imagination but birth and situation; whereas he could not so easily
brook the double superiority of the other, mental as well as
adventitious. So does the spirit of independence and the levelling pride
of intellect join in with the servile rage of the vulgar! This is the
advantage which an hereditary has over an elective monarchy: for there
is no end of the dispute about precedence while merit is supposed to
determine it, each man laying claim to this in his own person; so that
there is no other way to set aside all controversy and heart-burnings,
but by precluding moral and intellectual qualifications altogether, and
referring the choice to accident, and giving the preference to a
nonentity. ‘A good king,’ says Swift, ‘should be, in all other respects,
a mere cypher.’
It has been remarked, as a peculiarity in modern criticism, that the
courtly and loyal make a point of crying up Mr. Young, as an actor, and
equally running down Mr. Kean; and it has been conjectured in
consequence that Mr. Kean was a _radical_. Truly, he is not a radical
politician; but what is as bad, he is a radical actor. He savours too
much of the reality. He is not a mock-tragedian, an automaton player—he
is something besides his paraphernalia. He has ‘that within which passes
shew.’ There is not a particle of affinity between him and the patrons
of the court-writers. Mr. Young, on the contrary, is the very thing—all
assumption and strut and measured pomp, full of self-importance, void of
truth and nature, the mask of the characters he takes, a pasteboard
figure, a stiff piece of wax-work. He fills the throne of tragedy, not
like an upstart or usurper, but as a matter of course, decked out in his
plumes of feathers, and robes of state, stuck into a posture, and
repeating certain words by rote. Mr. Kean has a heart in his bosom,
beating with human passion (a thing for the great ‘to fear, not to
delight in!’) he is a living man, and not an artificial one. How should
those, who look to the surface, and never probe deeper, endure him? He
is the antithesis of a court-actor. It is the object there to suppress
and varnish over the feelings, not to give way to them. His _overt_
manner must shock them, and be thought a breach of all decorum. They are
in dread of his fiery humours, of coming near his Voltaic Battery—they
chuse rather to be roused gently from their self-complacent apathy by
the application of Metallic Tractors. They dare not trust their delicate
nerves within the estuary of the passions, but would slumber out their
torpid existence in a calm, a Dead Sea—the air of which extinguishes
life and motion!
Would it not be hard upon a little girl, who is busy in dressing up a
favourite doll, to pull it in pieces before her face in order to shew
her the bits of wood, the wool, and rags it is composed of? So it would
be hard upon that great baby, the world, to take any of its idols to
pieces, and shew that they are nothing but painted wood. Neither of them
would thank you, but would consider the offer as an insult. The little
girl knows as well as you do that her doll is a cheat; but she shut her
eyes to it, for she finds her account in keeping up the deception. Her
doll is her pretty little self. In its glazed eyes, its cherry cheeks,
its flaxen locks, its finery and its baby-house, she has a fairy vision
of her own future charms, her future triumphs, a thousand hearts led
captive, and an establishment for life. Harmless illusion! that can
create something out of nothing, can make that which is good for nothing
in itself so fine in appearance, and clothe a shapeless piece of
deal-board with the attributes of a divinity! But the great world has
been doing little else but playing at _make-believe_ all its lifetime.
For several thousand years its chief rage was to paint larger pieces of
wood and smear them with gore and call them Gods and offer victims to
them—slaughtered hecatombs, the fat of goats and oxen, or human
sacrifices—shewing in this its love of shew, of cruelty, and imposture;
and woe to him who should ‘peep through the blanket of the dark to cry,
_Hold, hold_.’—_Great is Diana of the Ephesians_, was the answer in all
ages. It was in vain to represent to them, ‘Your Gods have eyes but they
see not, ears but they hear not, neither do they understand’—the more
stupid, brutish, helpless, and contemptible they were, the more furious,
bigotted, and implacable were their votaries in their behalf.[43] The
more absurd the fiction, the louder was the noise made to hide it—the
more mischievous its tendency, the more did it excite all the phrenzy of
the passions. Superstition nursed, with peculiar zeal, her ricketty,
deformed, and preposterous offspring. She passed by the nobler races of
animals even, to pay divine honours to the odious and unclean—she took
toads and serpents, cats, rats, dogs, crocodiles, goats and monkeys, and
hugged them to her bosom, and dandled them into deities, and set up
altars to them, and drenched the earth with tears and blood in their
defence; and those who did not believe in them were cursed, and were
forbidden the use of bread, of fire, and water, and to worship them was
piety, and their images were held sacred, and their race became Gods in
perpetuity and by divine right. To touch them, was sacrilege: to kill
them, death, even in your own defence. If they stung you, you must die:
if they infested the land with their numbers and their pollutions, there
was no remedy. The nuisance was intolerable, impassive, immortal. Fear,
religious horror, disgust, hatred, heightened the flame of bigotry and
intolerance. There was nothing so odious or contemptible but it found a
sanctuary in the more odious and contemptible perversity of human
nature. The barbarous Gods of antiquity reigned _in contempt of their
worshippers_!
This game was carried on through all the first ages of the world, and is
still kept up in many parts of it; and it is impossible to describe the
wars, massacres, horrors, miseries and crimes, to which it gave colour,
sanctity, and sway. The idea of a God, beneficent and just, the
invisible maker of all things, was abhorrent to their gross, material
notions. No, they must have Gods of their own making, that they could
see and handle, that they knew to be nothing in themselves but senseless
images, and these they daubed over with the gaudy emblems of their own
pride and passions, and these they lauded to the skies, and grew fierce,
obscene, frantic before them, as the representatives of their sordid
ignorance and barbaric vices. TRUTH, GOOD, were idle names to them,
without a meaning. They must have a lie, a palpable, pernicious lie, to
pamper their crude, unhallowed conceptions with, and to exercise the
untameable fierceness of their wills. The Jews were the only people of
antiquity who were withheld from running headlong into this abomination;
yet so strong was the propensity in them (from inherent frailty as well
as neighbouring example) that it could only be curbed and kept back by
the hands of Omnipotence.[44] At length, reason prevailed over
imagination so far, that these brute idols and their altars were
overturned; it was thought too much to set up stocks and stones, Golden
Calves and Brazen Serpents, as _bonâ-fide_ Gods and Goddesses, which men
were to fall down and worship at their peril—and Pope long after summed
up the merits of the whole mythologic tribe in a handsome distich—
‘Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.’
It was thought a bold stride to divert the course of our imaginations,
the overflowings of our enthusiasm, our love of the mighty and the
marvellous, from the dead to the living _subject_, and there we stick.
We have got living idols, instead of dead ones; and we fancy that they
are real, and put faith in them accordingly. Oh, Reason! when will thy
long minority expire? It is not now the fashion to make Gods of wood and
stone and brass, but we make kings of common men, and are proud of our
own handy-work. We take a child from his birth, and we agree, when he
grows up to be a man, to heap the highest honours of the state upon him,
and to pay the most devoted homage to his will. Is there any thing in
the person, ‘any mark, any likelihood,’ to warrant this sovereign awe
and dread? No: he may be little better than an ideot, little short of a
madman, and yet he is no less qualified for king.[45] If he can contrive
to pass the College of Physicians, the Herald’s College dub him divine.
Can we make any given individual taller or stronger or wiser than other
men, or different in any respect from what nature intended him to be?
No; but we can make a king of him. We cannot add a cubit to the stature,
or instil a virtue into the minds of monarchs—but we can put a sceptre
into their hands, a crown upon their heads, we can set them on an
eminence, we can surround them with circumstance, we can aggrandise them
with power, we can pamper their appetites, we can pander to their wills.
We can do every thing to exalt them in external rank and station—nothing
to lift them one step higher in the scale of moral or intellectual
excellence. Education does not give capacity or temper; and the
education of kings is not especially directed to useful knowledge or
liberal sentiment. What then is the state of the case? The highest
respect of the community and of every individual in it is paid and is
due of right there, where perhaps not an idea can take root, or a single
virtue be engrafted. Is not this to erect a standard of esteem directly
opposite to that of mind and morals? The lawful monarch may be the best
or the worst man in his dominions, he may be the wisest or the weakest,
the wittiest or the stupidest: still he is equally entitled to our
homage as king, for it is the place and power we bow to, and not the
man. He may be a sublimation of all the vices and diseases of the human
heart; yet we are not to say so, we dare not even think so. ‘Fear God,
and honour the King,’ is equally a maxim at all times and seasons. The
personal character of the king has nothing to do with the question. Thus
the extrinsic is set up over the intrinsic by authority: wealth and
interest lend their countenance to gilded vice and infamy on principle,
and outward shew and advantages become the symbols and the standard of
respect in despite of useful qualities or well-directed efforts through
all ranks and gradations of society. ‘From the crown of the head to the
sole of the foot there is no soundness left.’ The whole style of moral
thinking, feeling, acting, is in a false tone—is hollow, spurious,
meretricious. Virtue, says Montesquieu, is the principle of republics;
honour, of a monarchy. But it is ‘honour dishonourable, sin-bred’—it is
the honour of trucking a principle for a place, of exchanging our honest
convictions for a ribbon or a garter. The business of life is a scramble
for unmerited precedence. Is not the highest respect entailed, the
highest station filled without any possible proofs or pretensions to
public spirit or public principle? Shall not the next places to it be
secured by the sacrifice of them? It is the order of the day, the
understood etiquette of courts and kingdoms. For the servants of the
crown to presume on merit, when the crown itself is held as an heir-loom
by prescription, is a kind of _lèse majesté_, an indirect attainder of
the title to the succession. Are not all eyes turned to the sun of
court-favour? Who would not then reflect its smile by the performance of
any acts which can avail in the eye of the great, and by the surrender
of any virtue, which attracts neither notice nor applause? The stream of
corruption begins at the fountainhead of court influence. The sympathy
of mankind is that on which all strong feeling and opinion floats; and
this sets in full in every absolute monarchy to the side of tinsel shew
and iron-handed power, in contempt and defiance of right and wrong. The
right and the wrong are of little consequence, compared to the _in_ and
the _out_. The distinction between Whig and Tory is merely nominal:
neither have their country one bit at heart. Phaw! we had forgot—Our
British monarchy is a mixed, and the only perfect form of government;
and therefore what is here said cannot properly apply to it. But MIGHT
BEFORE RIGHT is the motto blazoned on the front of unimpaired and
undivided Sovereignty!—
A court is the centre of fashion; and no less so, for being the sink of
luxury and vice—
——‘Of outward shew
Elaborate, of inward less exact.’
The goods of fortune, the baits of power, the indulgences of vanity, may
be accumulated without end, and the taste for them increases as it is
gratified: the love of virtue, the pursuit of truth, grow stale and dull
in the dissipation of a court. Virtue is thought crabbed and morose,
knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly
tolerated. Every thing tends naturally to personal aggrandisement and
unrestrained self-will. It is easier for monarchs as well as other men
‘to tread the primrose path of dalliance’ than ‘to scale the steep and
thorny road to heaven.’ The vices, when they have leave from power and
authority, go greater lengths than the virtues; example justifies almost
every excess, and ‘nice customs curtsey to great kings.’ What chance is
there that monarchs should not yield to the temptations of gallantry
there, where youth and beauty are as wax? What female heart can indeed
withstand the attractions of a throne—the smile that melts all hearts,
the air that awes rebellion, the frown that kings dread, the hand that
scatters fairy wealth, that bestows titles, places, honour, power, the
breast on which the star glitters, the head circled with a diadem, whose
dress dazzles with its richness and its taste, who has nations at his
command, senates at his controul, ‘in form and motion so express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a God;
the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!’ The power of
resistance is so much the less, where fashion extends impunity to the
frail offender, and screens the loss of character.
‘Vice is undone, if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth;
But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore:
Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.
Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess,
Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless.
In golden chains the willing world she draws,
And hers the Gospel is, and hers the laws.’[46]
The air of a court is not assuredly that which is most favourable to the
practice of self-denial and strict morality. We increase the temptations
of wealth, of power, and pleasure a thousand-fold, while we can give no
additional force to the antagonist principles of reason, disinterested
integrity and goodness of heart. Is it to be wondered at that courts and
palaces have produced so many monsters of avarice, cruelty, and lust?
The adept in voluptuousness is not likely to be a proportionable
proficient in humanity. To feed on plate or be clothed in purple, is not
to feel for the hungry and the naked. He who has the greatest power put
into his hands, will only become more impatient of any restraint in the
use of it. To have the welfare and the lives of millions placed at our
disposal, is a sort of warrant, a challenge to squander them without
mercy. An arbitrary monarch set over the heads of his fellows does not
identify himself with them, or learn to comprehend their rights or
sympathise with their interests, but looks down upon them as of a
different species from himself, as insects crawling on the face of the
earth, that he may trample on at his pleasure, or if he spares them, it
is an act of royal grace—he is besotted with power, blinded with
prerogative, an alien to his nature, a traitor to his trust, and instead
of being the organ of public feeling and public opinion, is an
excrescence and an anomaly in the state, a bloated mass of morbid
humours and proud flesh! A constitutional king, on the other hand, is a
servant of the public, a representative of the people’s wants and
wishes, dispensing justice and mercy according to law. Such a monarch is
the King of England! Such was his late, and such is his present Majesty
George the IVth!—
Let us take the Spirit of Monarchy in its highest state of exaltation,
in the moment of its proudest triumph—a Coronation-day. We now see it in
our mind’s eye; the preparation of weeks—the expectation of months—the
seats, the privileged places, are occupied in the obscurity of night,
and in silence—the day dawns slowly, big with the hope of Cæsar and of
Rome—the golden censers are set in order, the tables groan with
splendour and with luxury—within the inner space the rows of peeresses
are set, and revealed to the eye decked out in ostrich feathers and
pearls, like beds of lilies sparkling with a thousand dew-drops—the
marshals and the heralds are in motion—the full organ, majestic, peals
forth the Coronation Anthem—every thing is ready—and all at once the
Majesty of kingdoms bursts upon the astonished sight—his person is
swelled out with all the gorgeousness of dress, and swathed in bales of
silk and golden tissues—the bow with which he greets the assembled
multitude, and the representatives of foreign kings, is the climax of
conscious dignity, bending gracefully on its own bosom, and instantly
thrown back into the sightless air, as if asking no recognition in
return—the oath of mutual fealty between him and his people is taken—the
fairest flowers of female beauty precede the Sovereign, scattering
roses; the sons of princes page his heels, holding up the robes of
crimson and ermine—he staggers and reels under the weight of royal pomp,
and of a nation’s eyes; and thus the pageant is launched into the open
day, dazzling the sun, whose beams seem beaten back by the sun of
royalty—there were the warrior, the statesman, and the mitred head—there
was Prince Leopold, like a panther in its dark glossy pride, and
Castlereagh, clad in triumphant smiles and snowy satin, unstained with
his own blood—the loud trumpet brays, the cannon roars, the spires are
mad with music, the stones in the street are startled at the presence of
a king:—the crowd press on, the metropolis heaves like a sea in restless
motion, the air is thick with loyalty’s quick pants in its monarch’s
arms—all eyes drink up the sight, all tongues reverberate the sound—
‘A present deity they shout around,
A present deity the vaulted roofs rebound!’
What does it all amount to? A shew—a theatrical spectacle! What does it
prove? That a king is crowned, that a king is dead! What is the moral to
be drawn from it, that is likely to sink into the heart of a nation?
That greatness consists in finery, and that supreme merit is the dower
of birth and fortune! It is a form, a ceremony to which each successor
to the throne is entitled in his turn as a matter of right. Does it
depend on the inheritance of virtue, on the acquisition of knowledge in
the new monarch, whether he shall be thus exalted in the eyes of the
people? No;—to say so is not only an offence in manners, but a violation
of the laws. The king reigns in contempt of any such pragmatical
distinctions. They are set aside, proscribed, treasonable, as it relates
to the august person of the monarch; what is likely to become of them in
the minds of the people? A Coronation overlays and drowns all such
considerations for a generation to come, and so far it serves its
purpose well. It debauches the understandings of the people, and makes
them the slaves of sense and show. It laughs to scorn and tramples upon
every other claim to distinction or respect. Is the chief person in the
pageant a tyrant? It does not lessen, but aggrandise him to the
imagination. Is he the king of a free people? We make up in love and
loyalty what we want in fear. Is he young? He borrows understanding and
experience from the learning and tried wisdom of councils and
parliaments. Is he old? He leans upon the youth and beauty that attend
his triumph. Is he weak? Armies support him with their myriads. Is he
diseased? What is health to a staff of physicians? Does he die? The
truth is out, and he is then—nothing!
There is a cant among court-sycophants of calling all those who are
opposed to them, ‘the _rabble_,’ ‘_fellows_,’ ‘_miscreants_,’ &c. This
shews the grossness of their ideas of all true merit, and the false
standard of rank and power by which they measure every thing; like
footmen, who suppose their masters must be gentlemen, and that the rest
of the world are low people. Whatever is opposed to power, they think
despicable; whatever suffers oppression, they think deserves it. They
are ever ready to side with the strong, to insult and trample on the
weak. This is with us a pitiful fashion of thinking. They are not of the
mind of Pope, who was so full of the opposite conviction, that he has
even written a bad couplet to express it:—
‘Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow:
The rest is all but leather and prunella.’
Those lines in Cowper also must sound very puerile or old-fashioned to
courtly ears:—
‘The only amaranthine flower on earth
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.’
To this sentiment, however, we subscribe our hearts and hands. There is
nothing truly liberal but that which postpones its own claims to those
of propriety—or great, but that which looks out of itself to others. All
power is but an unabated nuisance, a barbarous assumption, an aggravated
injustice, that is not directed to the common good: all grandeur that
has not something corresponding to it in personal merit and heroic acts,
is a deliberate burlesque, and an insult on common sense and human
nature. That which is true, the understanding ratifies: that which is
good, the heart owns: all other claims are spurious, vitiated,
mischevious, false—fit only for those who are sunk below contempt, or
raised above opinion. We hold in scorn all _right-lined_ pretensions but
those of rectitude. If there is offence in this, we are ready to abide
by it. If there is shame, we take it to ourselves: and we hope and hold
that the time will come, when all other idols but those which represent
pure truth and real good, will be looked upon with the same feelings of
pity and wonder that we now look back to the images of Thor and Woden!
Really, that men born to a throne (limited or unlimited) should employ
the brief span of their existence here in doing all the mischief in
their power, in levying cruel wars and undermining the liberties of the
world, to prove to themselves and others that their pride and passions
are of more consequence than the welfare of mankind at large, would seem
a little astonishing, but that the fact is so. It is not our business to
preach lectures to monarchs, but if we were at all disposed to attempt
the ungracious task, we should do it in the words of an author who often
addressed the ear of monarchs.
‘A man may read a sermon,’ says Jeremy Taylor, ‘the best and most
passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the
sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live
in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed
a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall
be no more: and where _our_ kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie
interred, and they must walk over their grandsire’s head to take his
crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest
change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from
living like Gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of
lust, to abate the height of pride, to appease the itch of covetous
desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful,
artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful,
the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes
mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all
the world, that when we die our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our
accounts shall be easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less. To
my apprehension, it is a sad record which is left by Athenæus concerning
Ninus, the great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in
these words: “Ninus, the Assyrian, had an ocean of gold, and other
riches more than the sand in the Caspian sea; he never saw the stars,
and perhaps he never desired it; he never stirred up the holy fire among
the Magi; nor touched his God with the sacred rod, according to the
laws; he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the Deity, nor
administered justice, nor spake to the people, nor numbered them; but he
was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his wines, he
threw the rest upon the stones. This man is dead: behold his sepulchre,
and now hear where Ninus is. _Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath
of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I
did eat, and what I served to myself in lust is all my portion: the
wealth with which I was blest, my enemies meeting together shall carry
away, as the mad Thyades carry a raw goat. I am gone to Hell; and when I
went thither, I carried neither gold nor horse, nor a silver chariot. I
that wore a mitre, am now a little heap of dust!_”‘—Taylor’s Holy Living
and Dying.
ON THE SCOTCH CHARACTER
(_A Fragment._)
_The Liberal._] [1822.
The Scotch nation are a body-corporate. They hang together like a swarm
of bees. I do not know how it may be among themselves, but with us they
are all united as one man. They are not straggling individuals, but
embodied, formidable abstractions—determined personifications of the
land they come from. A Scotchman gets on in the world, because he is not
one, but many. He moves in himself a host, drawn up in battle-array, and
armed at all points against all impugners. He is a double existence—he
stands for himself and his country. Every Scotchman is bond and surety
for every other Scotchman—he thinks nothing Scotch foreign to him. If
you see a Scotchman in the street, you may be almost sure it is another
Scotchman he is arm in arm with; and what is more, you may be sure they
are talking of Scotchmen. Begin at the Arctic Circle, and they take
Scotland in their way back. Plant the foot of the compasses in the
meridian, and they turn it by degrees to ‘Edina’s darling seat’—true as
the needle to the Pole. If you happen to say it is a high wind, they say
there are high winds in Edinburgh. Should you mention Hampstead or
Highgate, they smile at this as a local prejudice, and remind you of the
Calton Hill. The conversation wanders and is impertinent, unless it
hangs by this loop. It ‘runs the great mile, and is still at home.’ You
would think there was no other place in the world but Scotland, but that
they strive to convince you at every turn of its superiority to all
other places. Nothing goes down but Scotch Magazines and Reviews, Scotch
airs, Scotch bravery, Scotch hospitality, Scotch novels, and Scotch
logic. Some one the other day at a literary dinner in Scotland
apologised for alluding to the name of Shakespear so often, because he
was not a Scotchman. What a blessing that the Duke of Wellington was not
a Scotchman, or we should never have heard the last of him! Even Sir
Walter Scott, I understand, talks of the Scotch novels in all companies;
and by waving the title of the author, is at liberty to repeat the
subject _ad infinitum_.
Lismahago in Smollett is a striking and laughable picture of this
national propensity. He maintained with good discretion and method that
oat-cakes were better than wheaten bread, and that the air of the old
town of Edinburgh was sweet and salubrious. He was a favourable specimen
of the class—acute though pertinacious, pleasant but wrong.[47] In
general, his countrymen only plod on with the national character
fastened behind them, looking round with wary eye and warning voice to
those who would pick out a single article of their precious charge; and
are as drawling and troublesome as if they were hired by the hour to
disclaim and exemplify all the vices of which they stand accused. Is
this repulsive egotism peculiar to them merely in their travelling
capacity, when they have to make their way amongst strangers, and are
jealous of the honour of the parent-country, on which they have
ungraciously turned their backs? So Lord Erskine, after an absence of
fifty years, made an appropriate eulogy on the place of his birth, and
having traced the feeling of patriotism in himself to its source in that
habitual attachment which all wandering tribes have to their places of
fixed residence, turned his horses’ heads towards England—and farewell
sentiment!
The Irish and others, who come and stay among us, however full they may
be of the same prejudice, keep it in a great measure to themselves, and
do not vent it in all companies and on all occasions, proper or
improper. The natives of the sister-kingdom in particular rather cut
their country like a poor relation, are shy of being seen in one
another’s company, and try to soften down the _brogue_ into a natural
gentility of expression. A Scotchman, on the contrary, is never easy but
when his favourite subject is started, treats it with unqualified
breadth of accent, and seems assured that every one else must be as fond
of talking of Scotland and Scotchmen as he is.
Is it a relic of the ancient system of _clanship_? And are the Scotch
pitted against all the rest of the world, on the same principle that
they formerly herded and banded together under some chosen leader, and
_harried_ the neighbouring district? This seems to be the most likely
solution. A feeling of antipathy and partisanship, of offensive and
defensive warfare, may be considered as necessary to the mind of a
Scotchman. He is nothing in himself but as he is opposed to or in league
with others. He must be for or against somebody. He must have a cause to
fight for; a point to carry in argument. He is not an unit but an
aggregate; he is not a link, but a chain. He belongs to the regiment. I
should hardly call a Scotchman _conceited_, though there is often
something that borders strongly on the appearance of it. He has
(speaking in the lump) no personal or individual pretensions. He is not
proud of himself, but of being a Scotchman. He has no existence or
excellence except what he derives from some external accident, or shares
with some body of men. He is a Brunonian, a Cameronian, a Jacobite, a
Covenanter; he is of some party, he espouses some creed, he is great in
some controversy, he was bred in some University, has attended a certain
course of lectures, understands Gaelic, and upon occasion wears the
Highland dress. An Englishman is satisfied with the character of his
country, and proceeds to set up for himself; an Irishman despairs of
that of his, and leaves it to shift for itself; a Scotchman pretends to
respectability as such, and owes it to his country to make you hate the
very name by his ceaseless importunity and intolerance in its behalf. An
Irishman is mostly vain of his person, an Englishman of his
understanding, a Frenchman of his politeness—a Scotchman thanks God for
the place of his birth. The face of a Scotchman is to him accordingly
the face of a friend. It is enough for him to let you know that he
speaks the dialect that Wilkie speaks, that he has sat in company with
the Author of Waverley. He does not endeavour to put forward his own
notions so much as to inform you of the school in politics, in morals,
in physic, in which he is an adept; nor does he attempt to overpower you
by wit, by reason, by eloquence, but to tire you out by dint of verbal
logic; and in common-places it must be confessed that he is invincible.
There he is _teres et rotundus_. He fortifies himself in these,
circumvallation within circumvallation, till his strong-hold is
impregnable by art and nature. I never knew a Scotchman give up an
argument but once. It was a very learned man, the Editor of an
Encyclopedia,—not my friend, Mr. Macvey Napier. On some one’s proposing
the question why Greek should not be printed in the Roman type, this
gentleman answered, that in that case it would be impossible to
distinguish the two languages. Every one stared, and it was asked how at
this rate we distinguished French from English? It was the forlorn hope.
Any one else would have laughed, and confessed the blunder. But the
Editor was a grave man—made an obstinate defence (the best his situation
allowed of) and yielded in the forms and with the honours of war.
A Scotchman is generally a dealer in staple-propositions, and not in
rarities and curiosities of the understanding. He does not like an idea
the worse for its coming to him from a reputable, well-authenticated
source, as I conceive he might feel more respect for a son of Burns than
for Burns himself, on the same hereditary or genealogical principle. He
swears (of course) by the Edinburgh Review, and thinks Blackwood not
easily put down. He takes the word of a Professor in the
University-chair in a point of philosophy as he formerly took the
Laird’s word in a matter of life and death; and has the names of the
Says, the Benthams, the Mills, the Malthuses, in his mouth, instead of
the Montroses, the Gordons, and the Macullamores. He follows in a train;
he enlists under some standard; he comes under some collateral
description. He is of the tribe of Issachar, and not of Judah. He
stickles for no higher distinction than that of his clan, or
vicinage.[48] In a word, the Scotch are the creatures of inveterate
habit. They pin their faith on example and authority. All their ideas
are cast in a previous mould, and rivetted to those of others. It is not
a single blow, but a repetition of blows, that leaves an impression on
them. They are strong only in the strength of prejudice and numbers. The
genius of their greatest living writer is the genius of national
tradition. He has ‘damnable iteration in him’; but hardly one grain of
sheer invention. His mind is turned instinctively backward on the
past—he cannot project it forward to the future. He has not the faculty
of imagining any thing, either in individual or general truth, different
from what has been handed down to him for such. Give him _costume_,
dialect, manners, popular superstitions, grotesque characters,
supernatural events, and local scenery, and he is a prodigy, a
man-monster among writers—take these actually embodied and endless
materials from him, and he is a common man, with as little original
power of mind as he has (unfortunately) independence or boldness of
spirit!
The Scotch, with all their mechanical, wholesale attachment to names
and parties, are venal in politics,[49] and cowardly in friendship.
They crouch to power; and would be more disposed to fall upon and
crush, than come forward to the support of, a sinking individual. They
are not like La Fleur in the Sentimental Journey, who advanced three
steps forward to his master when the _Gens-d’ Armes_ arrested him:
they are like the _Maitre d’ Hotel_, who retired three paces backwards
on the same occasion. They will support a generic denomination, where
they have numbers to support them again: they make a great gulp, and
swallow down a feudal lord with all the retinue he can muster—_the
more, the merrier_—but of a single unprotected straggler they are shy,
jealous, scrupulous in the extreme as to character, inquisitive as to
connections, curious in all the particulars of birth, parentage and
education. Setting his prejudices of country, religion, or party
aside, you have no hold of a Scotchman but by his self-interest. If it
is for his credit or advantage to stand by you, he will do it:
otherwise, it will go very much against both his stomach and his
conscience to do so, and you must e’en shift for yourself. You may
trust something to the generosity and magnanimity of an Englishman or
an Irishman; they act from an impulse of the blood or from a sense of
justice: A Scotchman (the exceptions are splendid indeed) uniformly
calculates the consequences to himself. He is naturally faithful to a
leader, as I said before, that is, to a powerful head; but his
fidelity amounts to little more than servility. He is a bigot to the
shadow of power and authority, a slave to prejudice and custom, and a
coward in every thing else. He has not a particle of mental courage.
Cæsar’s wife was not to be suspected; and it is the same with a
Scotchman’s friend. If a word is said against your moral character,
they shun you like a plague-spot. They are not only afraid of a charge
being proved against you, but they dare not disprove it, lest by
clearing you of it they should be supposed a party to what had no
existence or foundation. They thus imbibe a bad opinion of you from
hearsay, and conceal the good they know of you both from themselves
and the world. If your political orthodoxy is called in question, they
take the alarm as much as if they were apprehensive of being involved
in a charge of high treason. One would think that the whole country
laboured, as they did SIXTY YEARS SINCE, under an imputation of
disaffection, and were exposed to the utmost vigilance of the police,
so that each person had too little character for loyalty himself to
run any additional risk by his neighbour’s bad name. This is not the
case at present: but they carry their precautions and circumspection
in this respect to such an idle and stupid excess, as can only be
accounted for from local circumstances and history—that is to say,
from the effects of that long system of suspicion, persecution and
_surveillance_, to which they were exposed during a century of
ridiculous (at least of unsuccessful) wars and rebellions, in favour
of the House of Stuart. They suffered much for King James and the
_Good Cause_; but since that time their self-love must be excused to
look at home. On my once complaining to a Scotchman of what I thought
a dereliction of his client’s cause by the counsel for the defendant
in a prosecution for libel, I received for answer—That ‘Mr. —— had
defended the accused as far as he could, _consistently with his
character_,’—though the only character the Learned Gentleman could
boast, had been acquired by his skill, if not his courage, in
resisting prosecutions of this kind.
The delicate sensibility (not to say soreness) of the Scotch in matters
of moral reputation, may in like manner be accounted for (indirectly)
from their domiciliary system of church-government, of Kirk-assemblies,
and Ruling Elders: and in the unprincipled assurance with which
aspersions of this sort are thrown out, and the panic-terror which they
strike into the timid or hypocritical, one may see the remaining effects
of Penance-Sheets and Cutty-Stools! Poor Burns! he called up the ghost
of Dr. Hornbook, but did not lay the spirit of cant and lying in the
Cunning North!
Something however, it must be confessed, has been done; a change has
been effected. Extremes meet; and the Saint has been (in some instances)
merged in the Sinner. The essential character of the Scotch is
determined self-will, the driving at a purpose; so that whatever they
undertake, they make thorough-stitch work, and carry as far as it will
go. This is the case in the pretensions some of their writers have
lately set up to a contempt for Cutty-Stools, and to all the freedom of
wit and humour. They have been so long under interdict that they break
out with double violence, and stop at nothing. Of all _blackguards_ (I
use the term for want of any other) a Scotch blackguard is for this
reason the worst. First, the character sits ill upon him for want of
use, and is sure to be most outrageously caricatured. He is only just
broke loose from the shackles of regularity and restraint, and is forced
to play strange antics to be convinced that they are not still clinging
to his heels. Secondly, formality, hypocrisy, and a deference to
opinion, are the ‘sins that most easily beset him.’ When therefore he
has once made up his mind to disregard appearances, he becomes totally
reckless of character, and ‘at one bound high overleaps all bound’ of
decency and common sense. Again, there is perhaps a natural hardness and
want of nervous sensibility about the Scotch, which renders them (rules
and the consideration of consequences apart) not very nice or scrupulous
in their proceedings. If they are not withheld by conscience or
prudence, they have no _mauvaise honte_, no involuntary qualms or
tremors, to qualify their effrontery and disregard of principle. Their
impudence is extreme, their malice is cold-blooded, covert, crawling,
deliberate, without the frailty or excuse of passion. They club their
vices and their venality together, and by the help of both together are
invincible. The choice spirits who have lately figured in a
much-talked-of publication, with ‘old Sylvanus at their head,’—
‘Leaning on cypress stadle stout,’—
in their ‘pious orgies’ resemble a troop of Yahoos, or a herd of Satyrs—
‘And with their horned feet they beat the ground!’—
that is to say, the floor of Mr. Blackwood’s shop! There is one other
publication, a match for this in flagrant impudence and dauntless
dulness, which is the John Bull. The Editor is supposed, for the honour
of Scotland, to be an Irishman. What the _Beacon_ might have proved,
there is no saying; but it would have been curious to have seen some
articles of Sir Walter’s undoubted hand proceeding from this quarter, as
it has been always contended that Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was too
low and scurrilous a publication for him to have any share in it. The
adventure of the _Beacon_ has perhaps discovered to Sir Walter’s
admirers and the friends of humanity in general, that
‘Entire affection scorneth nicer hands!’
Old Dr. Burney, about the middle of the last century, called one morning
on Thomson, the Author of The Seasons, at a late hour, and on expressing
his surprise at the poet’s not having risen sooner, received for
answer,—‘I had no motive, young man!’ A Scotchman acts always from a
motive, and on due consideration; and if he does not act right or with a
view to honest ends, is more dangerous than any one else. Others may
plead the vices of their blood in extenuation of their errors; but a
Scotchman is a machine, and should be constructed on sound moral, and
philosophical principles, or should be put a stop to altogether.
MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS
_The Liberal._] [1823.
My father was a Dissenting Minister at W——m in Shropshire; and in the
year 1798 (the figures that compose that date are to me like the
‘dreaded name of Demogorgon’) Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to
succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian Congregation
there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was
to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach in a state
of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor,
could find no one at all answering the description but a round-faced man
in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket) which hardly seemed to
have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate to
his fellow-passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account
of his disappointment, when the round-faced man in black entered, and
dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. He did not
cease while he staid; nor has he since, that I know of. He held the good
town of Shrewsbury in delightful suspense for three weeks that he
remained there, ‘fluttering the _proud Salopians_ like an eagle in a
dove-cote; ‘and the Welch mountains that skirt the horizon with their
tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since
the days of
‘High-born Hoel’s harp or soft Llewellyn’s lay!’
As we passed along between W——m and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue
tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of the
sturdy oak-trees by the road-side, a sound was in my ears as of a
Siren’s song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; but I
had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration
to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his
genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles
of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a
worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting
from the deadly bands that ‘bound them,
‘With Styx nine times round them,’
my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch
the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its
original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied;
my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never
found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my
understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a
language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. But this is not to my
purpose.
My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of
exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch
(nine miles farther on) according to the custom of Dissenting Ministers
in each other’s neighbourhood. A line of communication is thus
established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept
alive, and nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like the fires
in the Agamemnon of Æschylus, placed at different stations, that waited
for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the
destruction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over to see my father,
according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe’s probable
successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday
after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian
pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these degenerate days, a
sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not
to be resisted.
It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to
walk ten miles in the mud, and went to hear this celebrated person
preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another
walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798.
_Il y a des impressions que ni le tems ni les circonstances peuvent
effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse
ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s’effacer jamais dans ma mémoire._ When I
got there, the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and, when it was done,
Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, ‘And he went up into the
mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.’ As he gave out this text, his voice
‘rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,’ and when he came to the
two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed
to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom
of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn
silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into mind, ‘of
one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose
food was locusts and wild honey.’ The preacher then launched into his
subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace
and war; upon church and state—not their alliance, but their
separation—on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity,
not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who
had ‘inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.’
He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,—and to shew the fatal effects
of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd-boy,
driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his
flock, ‘as though he should never be old,’ and the same poor country
lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse,
turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with
powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the
loathsome finery of the profession of blood.
‘Such were the notes our once-lov’d poet sung.’
And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the
music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and
Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion.
This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun
that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick
mists, seemed an emblem of the _good cause_; and the cold dank drops of
dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something
genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth
in all nature, that turned every thing into good. The face of nature had
not then the brand of JUS DIVINUM on it:
‘Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.’
On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called
down into the room where he was, and went half-hoping, half-afraid. He
received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without
uttering a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. ‘For
those two hours,’ he afterwards was pleased to say, ‘he was conversing
with W. H.’s forehead! ‘His appearance was different from what I had
anticipated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light
of the chapel, there was to me a strange wildness in his aspect, a dusky
obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the small-pox. His complexion
was at that time clear, and even bright—
‘As are the children of yon azure sheen.’
His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large
projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with
darkened lustre. ‘A certain tender bloom his face o’erspread,’ a purple
tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish
portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross,
voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humoured and round; but his
nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble,
nothing—like what he has done. It might seem that the genius of his face
as from a height surveyed and projected him (with sufficient capacity
and huge aspiration) into the world unknown of thought and imagination,
with nothing to support or guide his veering purpose, as if Columbus had
launched his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without
oars or compass. So at least I comment on it after the event. Coleridge
in his person was rather above the common size, inclining to the
corpulent, or like Lord Hamlet, ‘somewhat fat and pursy.’ His hair (now,
alas! grey) was then black and glossy as the raven’s, and fell in smooth
masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to
enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward; and is traditionally
inseparable (though of a different colour) from the pictures of Christ.
It ought to belong, as a character, to all who preach _Christ
crucified_, and Coleridge was at that time one of those!
It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who
was a veteran in the cause, and then declining into the vale of years.
He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and
sent to the University of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith) to
prepare him for his future destination. It was his mother’s proudest
wish to see her son a Dissenting Minister. So if we look back to past
generations (as far as eye can reach) we see the same hopes, fears,
wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human
heart; and so we may see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever,
and disappearing, like vapourish bubbles, in the human breast! After
being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the heats of the
Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the American war, he had been
relegated to an obscure village, where he was to spend the last thirty
years of his life, far from the only converse that he loved, the talk
about disputed texts of Scripture and the cause of civil and religious
liberty. Here he passed his days, repining but resigned, in the study of
the Bible, and the perusal of the Commentators,—huge folios, not easily
got through, one of which would outlast a winter! Why did he pore on
these from morn to night (with the exception of a walk in the fields or
a turn in the garden to gather broccoli-plants or kidney-beans of his
own rearing, with no small degree of pride and pleasure)?—Here were ‘no
figures nor no fantasies,’—neither poetry nor philosophy—nothing to
dazzle, nothing to excite modern curiosity; but to his lack-lustre eyes
there appeared, within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected
tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by
the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the
understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the
patriarchal wanderings, with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and
processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there was
Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes, types,
shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets; there were discussions
(dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty speculation! there were
outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah’s Ark and of the riches of
Solomon’s Temple; questions as to the date of the creation, predictions
of the end of all things; the great lapses of time, the strange
mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it
turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil
of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was in a slumber
ill-exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or
reason. My father’s life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream
of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgment to
come!
No two individuals were ever more unlike than were the host and his
guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever added
grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly have
been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings. Indeed,
his thoughts had wings; and as the silken sounds rustled round our
little wainscoted parlour, my father threw back his spectacles over his
forehead, his white hairs mixing with its sanguine hue; and a smile of
delight beamed across his rugged cordial face, to think that Truth had
found a new ally in Fancy![50] Besides, Coleridge seemed to take
considerable notice of me, and that of itself was enough. He talked very
familiarly, but agreeably, and glanced over a variety of subjects. At
dinner-time he grew more animated, and dilated in a very edifying manner
on Mary Wolstonecraft and Mackintosh. The last, he said, he considered
(on my father’s speaking of his _Vindiciæ Gallicæ_ as a capital
performance) as a clever scholastic man—a master of the topics,—or as
the ready warehouseman of letters, who knew exactly where to lay his
hand on what he wanted, though the goods were not his own. He thought
him no match for Burke, either in style or matter. Burke was a
metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician. Burke was an orator (almost a
poet) who reasoned in figures, because he had an eye for nature:
Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a rhetorician, who had only an eye to
common-places. On this I ventured to say that I had always entertained a
great opinion of Burke, and that (as far as I could find) the speaking
of him with contempt might be made the test of a vulgar democratical
mind. This was the first observation I ever made to Coleridge, and he
said it was a very just and striking one. I remember the leg of Welsh
mutton and the turnips on the table that day had the finest flavour
imaginable. Coleridge added that Mackintosh and Tom Wedgwood (of whom,
however, he spoke highly) had expressed a very indifferent opinion of
his friend Mr. Wordsworth, on which he remarked to them—‘He strides on
so far before you, that he dwindles in the distance!’ Godwin had once
boasted to him of having carried on an argument with Mackintosh for
three hours with dubious success; Coleridge told him—‘If there had been
a man of genius in the room, he would have settled the question in five
minutes.’ He asked me if I had ever seen Mary Wolstonecraft, and I said,
I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to me to turn off
Godwin’s objections to something she advanced with quite a playful, easy
air. He replied, that ‘this was only one instance of the ascendancy
which people of imagination exercised over those of mere intellect.’ He
did not rate Godwin very high[51] (this was caprice or prejudice, real
or affected) but he had a great idea of Mrs. Wolstonecraft’s powers of
conversation, none at all of her talent for book-making. We talked a
little about Holcroft. He had been asked if he was not much struck
_with_ him, and he said, he thought himself in more danger of being
struck _by_ him. I complained that he would not let me get on at all,
for he required a definition of every the commonest word, exclaiming,
‘What do you mean by a _sensation_, Sir? What do you mean by an _idea_?’
This, Coleridge said, was barricadoing the road to truth:—it was setting
up a turnpike gate at every step we took. I forget a great number of
things, many more than I remember; but the day passed off pleasantly,
and the next morning Mr. Coleridge was to return to Shrewsbury. When I
came down to breakfast, I found that he had just received a letter from
his friend T. Wedgwood, making him an offer of 150_l._ a-year if he
chose to wave his present pursuit, and devote himself entirely to the
study of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge seemed to make up his mind to
close with this proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes. It
threw an additional damp on his departure. It took the wayward
enthusiast quite from us to cast him into Deva’s winding vales, or by
the shores of old romance. Instead of living at ten miles distance, of
being the pastor of a Dissenting congregation at Shrewsbury, he was
henceforth to inhabit the Hill of Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the
Delectable Mountains. Alas! I knew not the way thither, and felt very
little gratitude for Mr. Wedgwood’s bounty. I was presently relieved
from this dilemma; for Mr. Coleridge, asking for a pen and ink, and
going to a table to write something on a bit of card, advanced towards
me with undulating step, and giving me the precious document, said that
that was his address, _Mr. Coleridge, Nether Stowey, Somersetshire_; and
that he should be glad to see me there in a few weeks’ time, and, if I
chose, would come half-way to meet me. I was not less surprised than the
shepherd-boy (this simile is to be found in Cassandra) when he sees a
thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered out my acknowledgments
and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr. Wedgwood’s annuity a trifle
to it) as well as I could; and this mighty business being settled, the
poet-preacher took leave, and I accompanied him six miles on the road.
It was a fine morning in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole
way. The scholar in Chaucer is described as going
——‘Sounding on his way.’
So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from
subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice.
He told me in confidence (going along) that he should have preached two
sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury, one on Infant
Baptism, the other on the Lord’s Supper, shewing that he could not
administer either, which would have effectually disqualified him for the
object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by
shifting from one side of the foot-path to the other. This struck me as
an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any
instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle, as I have
done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a strait line. He spoke
slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was stolen from an
objection started in one of South’s sermons—_Credat Judæus Apella!_) I
was not very much pleased at this account of Hume, for I had just been
reading, with infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical
_choke-pears_, his _Treatise on Human Nature_, to which the _Essays_, in
point of scholastic subtlety and close reasoning, are mere elegant
trifling, light summer-reading. Coleridge even denied the excellence of
Hume’s general style, which I think betrayed a want of taste or candour.
He however made me amends by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley.
He dwelt particularly on his _Essay on Vision_ as a masterpiece of
analytical reasoning. So it undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry
with Dr. Johnson for striking the stone with his foot, in allusion to
this author’s Theory of Matter and Spirit, and saying, ‘Thus I confute
him, Sir.’ Coleridge drew a parallel (I don’t know how he brought about
the connection) between Bishop Berkeley and Tom Paine. He said the one
was an instance of a subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no
two things could be more distinct. The one was a shop-boy’s quality, the
other the characteristic of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler
as a true philosopher, a profound and conscientious thinker, a genuine
reader of nature and of his own mind. He did not speak of his _Analogy_,
but of his _Sermons at the Rolls’ Chapel_, of which I had never heard.
Coleridge somehow always contrived to prefer the _unknown_ to the
_known_. In this instance he was right. The _Analogy_ is a tissue of
sophistry, of wire-drawn, theological special-pleading; the _Sermons_
(with the Preface to them) are in a fine vein of deep, matured
reflection, a candid appeal to our observation of human nature, without
pedantry and without bias. I told Coleridge I had written a few remarks,
and was sometimes foolish enough to believe that I had made a discovery
on the same subject (the _Natural Disinterestedness of the Human
Mind_)—and I tried to explain my view of it to Coleridge, who listened
with great willingness, but I did not succeed in making myself
understood. I sat down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth
time, got new pens and paper, determined to make clear work of it, wrote
a few meagre sentences in the skeleton-style of a mathematical
demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page; and, after trying
in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or
observations, from that gulph of abstraction in which I had plunged
myself for four or five years preceding, gave up the attempt as labour
in vain, and shed tears of helpless despondency on the blank unfinished
paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I was then? Oh no!
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express
it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world. Would
that I could go back to what I then was! Why can we not revive past
times as we can revisit old places? If I had the quaint Muse of Sir
Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a _Sonnet to the Road between
W——m and Shrewsbury_, and immortalise every step of it by some fond
enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very milestones had ears,
and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as
he passed! I remember but one other topic of discourse in this walk. He
mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness and clearness of his style, but
condemned his sentiments, thought him a mere time-serving casuist, and
said that ‘the fact of his work on Moral and Political Philosophy being
made a text-book in our Universities was a disgrace to the national
character.’ We parted at the six-mile stone; and I returned homeward
pensive but much pleased. I had met with unexpected notice from a
person, whom I believed to have been prejudiced against me. ‘Kind and
affable to me had been his condescension, and should be honoured ever
with suitable regard.’ He was the first poet I had known, and he
certainly answered to that inspired name. I had heard a great deal of
his powers of conversation, and was not disappointed. In fact, I never
met with any thing at all like them, either before or since. I could
easily credit the accounts which were circulated of his holding forth to
a large party of ladies and gentlemen, an evening or two before, on the
Berkeleian Theory, when he made the whole material universe look like a
transparency of fine words; and another story (which I believe he has
somewhere told himself) of his being asked to a party at Birmingham, of
his smoking tobacco and going to sleep after dinner on a sofa, where the
company found him to their no small surprise, which was increased to
wonder when he started up of a sudden, and rubbing his eyes, looked
about him, and launched into a three-hours’ description of the third
heaven, of which he had had a dream, very different from Mr. Southey’s
Vision of Judgment, and also from that other Vision of Judgment, which
Mr. Murray, the Secretary of the Bridge-street Junto, has taken into his
especial keeping!
On my way back, I had a sound in my ears, it was the voice of Fancy: I
had a light before me, it was the face of Poetry. The one still lingers
there, the other has not quitted my side! Coleridge in truth met me
half-way on the ground of philosophy, or I should not have been won over
to his imaginative creed. I had an uneasy, pleasurable sensation all the
time, till I was to visit him. During those months the chill breath of
winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air was balm and inspiration to
me. The golden sunsets, the silver star of evening, lighted me on my way
to new hopes and prospects. _I was to visit Coleridge in the spring._
This circumstance was never absent from my thoughts, and mingled with
all my feelings. I wrote to him at the time proposed, and received an
answer postponing my intended visit for a week or two, but very
cordially urging me to complete my promise then. This delay did not
damp, but rather increased my ardour. In the meantime, I went to
Llangollen Vale, by way of initiating myself in the mysteries of natural
scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it. I had been reading
Coleridge’s description of England in his fine _Ode on the Departing
Year_, and I applied it, _con amore_, to the objects before me. That
valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a new existence: in the
river that winds through it, my spirit was baptised in the waters of
Helicon!
I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn heart
and untired feet. My way lay through Worcester and Gloucester, and by
Upton, where I thought of Tom Jones and the adventure of the muff. I
remember getting completely wet through one day, and stopping at an inn
(I think it was at Tewkesbury) where I sat up all night to read Paul and
Virginia. Sweet were the showers in early youth that drenched my body,
and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books I read! I recollect
a remark of Coleridge’s upon this very book, that nothing could shew the
gross indelicacy of French manners and the entire corruption of their
imagination more strongly than the behaviour of the heroine in the last
fatal scene, who turns away from a person on board the sinking vessel,
that offers to save her life, because he has thrown off his clothes to
assist him in swimming. Was this a time to think of such a circumstance?
I once hinted to Wordsworth, as we were sailing in his boat on Grasmere
lake, that I thought he had borrowed the idea of his _Poems on the
Naming of Places_ from the local inscriptions of the same kind in Paul
and Virginia. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction
without a difference, in defence of his claim to originality. Any the
slightest variation would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind;
for whatever _he_ added or omitted would inevitably be worth all that
any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment. I was
still two days before the time fixed for my arrival, for I had taken
care to set out early enough. I stopped these two days at Bridgewater,
and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river,
returned to the inn, and read Camilla. So have I loitered my life away,
reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking,
writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me
happy; but wanting that, have wanted everything!
I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is
beautiful, green and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the
other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near Taunton.
How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map of the
country lay at my feet! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me over to
All-Foxden, a romantic old family-mansion of the St. Aubins, where
Wordsworth lived. It was then in the possession of a friend of the
poet’s, who gave him the free use of it. Somehow that period (the time
just after the French Revolution) was not a time when _nothing was given
for nothing_. The mind opened, and a softness might be perceived coming
over the heart of individuals, beneath ‘the scales that fence’ our
self-interest. Wordsworth himself was from home, but his sister kept
house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had free access to her
brother’s poems, the _Lyrical Ballads_, which were still in manuscript,
or in the form of _Sybilline Leaves_. I dipped into a few of these with
great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice. I slept that night
in an old room with blue hangings, and covered with the round-faced
family-portraits of the age of George I. and II. and from the wooded
declivity of the adjoining park that overlooked my window, at the dawn
of day, could
‘——hear the loud stag speak.’
In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our
imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and
waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and
there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our
dreams the fulness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage
of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered
with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the
weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we
repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we
exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in
_lamb’s-wool_, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life,
their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and nothing is left but the
phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what _has been_!
That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the
park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that
stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and
musical voice, the ballad of _Betty Foy_. I was not critically or
sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the
rest for granted. But in the _Thorn_, the _Mad Mother_, and the
_Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman_, I felt that deeper power and pathos
which have been since acknowledged,
‘In spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,’
as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style and
a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of the
effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the
first welcome breath of Spring,
‘While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.’
Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that evening, and his voice
sounded high
‘Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fix’d fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,’
as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall,
gleaming in the summer moonlight! He lamented that Wordsworth was not
prone enough to believe in the traditional superstitions of the place,
and that there was a something corporeal, a _matter-of-fact-ness_, a
clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in
consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through
the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself
from a green spray, on which the gold-finch sang. He said, however (if I
remember right) that this objection must be confined to his descriptive
pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and comprehensive spirit
in it, so that his soul seemed to inhabit the universe like a palace,
and to discover truth by intuition, rather than by deduction. The next
day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage. I think I
see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of
him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed
(according to the _costume_ of that unconstrained period) in a brown
fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a
lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe,
worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he
saw something in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense
high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose
and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a
good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of
his face. Chantry’s bust wants the marking traits; but he was teazed
into making it regular and heavy: Haydon’s head of him, introduced into
the _Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem_, is the most like his drooping
weight of thought and expression. He sat down and talked very naturally
and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep
guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern _burr_, like
the crust on wine. He instantly began to make havoc of the half of a
Cheshire cheese on the table, and said triumphantly that ‘his marriage
with experience had not been so unproductive as Mr. Southey’s in
teaching him a knowledge of the good things of this life.’ He had been
to see the _Castle Spectre_ by Monk Lewis, while at Bristol, and
described it very well. He said ‘it fitted the taste of the audience
like a glove.’ This _ad captandum_ merit was however by no means a
recommendation of it, according to the severe principles of the new
school, which reject rather than court popular effect. Wordsworth,
looking out of the low, latticed window, said, ‘How beautifully the sun
sets on that yellow bank!’ I thought within myself, ‘With what eyes
these poets see nature!’ and ever after, when I saw the sunset stream
upon the objects facing it, conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked
Mr. Wordsworth for having made one for me! We went over to All-Foxden
again the day following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell
in the open air; and the comment made upon it by his face and voice was
very different from that of some later critics! Whatever might be
thought of the poem, ‘his face was as a book where men might read
strange matters,’ and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic
tones. There is a _chaunt_ in the recitation both of Coleridge and
Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the
judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use
of this ambiguous accompaniment. Coleridge’s manner is more full,
animated, and varied; Wordsworth’s more equable, sustained, and
internal. The one might be termed more _dramatic_, the other more
_lyrical_. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in
walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches
of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking
up and down a straight gravel-walk, or in some spot where the continuity
of his verse met with no collateral interruption. Returning that same
evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with Wordsworth, while
Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the nightingale to his
sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in making ourselves
perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus I passed three weeks at Nether
Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting the afternoons to a
delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the poet’s friend Tom
Poole, sitting under two fine elm-trees, and listening to the bees
humming round us, while we quaffed our _flip_. It was agreed, among
other things, that we should make a jaunt down the Bristol-Channel, as
far as Linton. We set off together on foot, Coleridge, John Chester, and
I. This Chester was a native of Nether Stowey, one of those who were
attracted to Coleridge’s discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in
swarming-time to the sound of a brass pan. He ‘followed in the chase,
like a dog who hunts, not like one that made up the cry.’ He had on a
brown cloth coat, boots, and corduroy breeches, was low in stature,
bow-legged, had a drag in his walk like a drover, which he assisted by a
hazel switch, and kept on a sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like
a running footman by a state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or
sound that fell from Coleridge’s lips. He told me his private opinion,
that Coleridge was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much
less offered an opinion the whole way: yet of the three, had I to chuse
during that journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed
Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how
to bring him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table
with his idol, John’s felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott’s, or Mr.
Blackwood’s, when they sat down at the same table with the King, was not
more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the brow
of a hill and the sea. I remember eying it wistfully as it lay below us:
contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear, as pure, as
_embrowned_ and ideal as any landscape I have seen since, of Gaspar
Poussin’s or Domenichino’s. We had a long day’s march—(our feet kept
time to the echoes of Coleridge’s tongue)—through Minehead and by the
Blue Anchor, and on to Linton, which we did not reach till near
midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgment. We
however knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were repaid
for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of fried
bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We walked
for miles and miles on dark brown heaths overlooking the Channel, with
the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into little sheltered
valleys close by the seaside, with a smuggler’s face scowling by us, and
then had to ascend conical hills with a path winding up through a
coppice to a barren top, like a monk’s shaven crown, from one of which I
pointed out to Coleridge’s notice the bare masts of a vessel on the very
edge of the horizon and within the red-orbed disk of the setting sun,
like his own spectre-ship in the _Ancient Mariner_. At Linton the
character of the sea-coast becomes more marked and rugged. There is a
place called the _Valley of Rocks_ (I suspect this was only the poetical
name for it) bedded among precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky
caverns beneath, into which the waves dash, and where the sea-gull for
ever wheels its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones
thrown transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind
these is a fretwork of perpendicular rocks, something like the _Giant’s
Causeway_. A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and
Coleridge was running out bare-headed to enjoy the commotion of the
elements in the _Valley of Rocks_, but as if in spite, the clouds only
muttered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops.
Coleridge told me that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place
the scene of a prose-tale, which was to have been in the manner of, but
far superior to, the _Death of Abel_, but they had relinquished the
design. In the morning of the second day, we breakfasted luxuriously in
an old-fashioned parlour, on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very
sight of the bee-hives from which it had been taken, and a garden full
of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion
Coleridge spoke of Virgil’s Georgics, but not well. I do not think he
had much feeling for the classical or elegant. It was in this room that
we found a little worn-out copy of the _Seasons_, lying in a
window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, ‘_That_ is true fame!’ He
said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was as
meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as the
best modern poet. He said the _Lyrical Ballads_ were an experiment about
to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would
endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had
hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of poetical
diction, and making use only of such words as had probably been common
in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II. Some
comparison was introduced between Shakespear and Milton. He said ‘he
hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespear appeared to him a mere stripling
in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity
than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man’s estate; or if
he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster.’ He spoke with
contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not like the
versification of the latter. He observed that ‘the ears of these
couplet-writers might be charged with having short memories, that could
not retain the harmony of whole passages.’ He thought little of Junius
as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a much higher opinion
of Burke as an orator and politician, than of Fox or Pitt. He however
thought him very inferior in richness of style and imagery to some of
our elder prose-writers, particularly Jeremy Taylor. He liked
Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to enter into the
merits of _Caleb Williams_.[52] In short, he was profound and
discriminating with respect to those authors whom he liked, and where he
gave his judgment fair play; capricious, perverse, and prejudiced in his
antipathies and distastes. We loitered on the ‘ribbed sea-sands,’ in
such talk as this, a whole morning, and I recollect met with a curious
sea-weed, of which John Chester told us the country name! A fisherman
gave Coleridge an account of a boy that had been drowned the day before,
and that they had tried to save him at the risk of their own lives. He
said ‘he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a
_nature_ towards one another.’ This expression, Coleridge remarked to
me, was a fine illustration of that theory of disinterestedness which I
(in common with Butler) had adopted. I broached to him an argument of
mine to prove that _likeness_ was not mere association of ideas. I said
that the mark in the sand put one in mind of a man’s foot, not because
it was part of a former impression of a man’s foot (for it was quite
new) but because it was like the shape of a man’s foot. He assented to
the justness of this distinction (which I have explained at length
elsewhere, for the benefit of the curious) and John Chester listened;
not from any interest in the subject, but because he was astonished that
I should be able to suggest any thing to Coleridge that he did not
already know. We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked
the silent cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings
before, we had seen the lights gleaming through the dark.
In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we set out, I on my return
home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to preach
that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had prepared
anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of the text,
but should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear him,—this was a
fault,—but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The next day we had a
long day’s walk to Bristol, and sat down, I recollect, by a well-side on
the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy our thirst, when Coleridge
repeated to me some descriptive lines from his tragedy of Remorse; which
I must say became his mouth and that occasion better than they, some
years after, did Mr. Elliston’s and the Drury Lane boards,—
‘Oh memory! shield me from the world’s poor strife,
And give those scenes thine everlasting life.’
I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had been
wandering in the Hartz Forest in Germany; and his return was cometary,
meteorous, unlike his setting out. It was not till some time after that
I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always appears to me (as I
first saw him) with a common-place book under his arm, and the first
with a _bon-mot_ in his mouth. It was at Godwin’s that I met him with
Holcroft and Coleridge, where they were disputing fiercely which was the
best—_Man as he was, or man as he is to be_. ‘Give me,’ says Lamb, ‘man
as he is _not_ to be.’ This saying was the beginning of a friendship
between us, which I believe still continues.—Enough of this for the
present.
‘But there is matter for another rhyme,
And I to this may add a second tale.’
PULPIT ORATORY—DR. CHALMERS AND MR. IRVING
_The Liberal._] [_1823._
The Scotch at present seem to bear the bell, and to have ‘got the start
of the majestic world.’ They boast of the greatest novelists, the
greatest preachers, the greatest philanthropists, and the greatest
blackguards in the world. Sir Walter Scott stands at the head of these
for Scotch humour, Dr. Chalmers for Scotch logic, Mr. Owen for Scotch
Utopianism, and Mr. Blackwood for Scotch impudence. Unrivalled four!
Nay, here is Mr. Irving, who threatens to make a fifth, and _stultify_
all our London orators, from ‘kingly Kensington’ to Blackwall! Who has
not heard of him? Who does not go to hear him? You can scarcely move
along for the coronet-coaches that besiege the entrance to the
Caledonian chapel in Hatton-garden; and when, after a prodigious
squeeze, you get in so as to have standing-room, you see in the same
undistinguished crowd Brougham and Mackintosh, Mr. Peel and Lord
Liverpool, Lord Landsdown and Mr. Coleridge. Mr. Canning and Mr. Hone
are pew fellows. Mr. Waithman frowns stern applause, and Mr. Alderman
Wood does the honours of the Meeting! The lamb lies down with the lion,
and the Millennium seems to be anticipated in the Caledonian chapel,
under the new Scotch preacher. Lords, ladies, sceptics, fanatics, join
in approbation,—some admire the doctrine, others the sound, some the
picturesque appearance of the orator, others the grace of action, some
the ingenuity of the argument, others the beauty of the style or the
bursts of passion, some even go so far as to patronize a certain
_brackish_ infusion of the Scottish dialect, and a slight defect of
vision. Lady Bluemount declares it to be only inferior to the EXCURSION
in imagination, and Mr. Botherby cries—‘Good, good!’ The ‘Talking
Potato’[53] and Mr. Theodore Flash have not yet been.
Mr. Irving appears to us the most accomplished barbarian, and the least
offensive and most dashing clerical holder-forth we remember to have
seen. He puts us in mind of the first man, Adam, if Adam had but been a
Scotchman, and had had coal black hair. He seems to stand up in the
integrity of his composition, to begin a new race of practising
believers, to give a new impulse to the Christian religion, to
regenerate the fallen and degenerate race of man. You would say he had
been turned out of the hands of Nature and the Schools a perfect piece
of workmanship. See him in the street, he has the air, the free swing,
the _bolt upright_ figure of an Indian savage, or a northern borderer
dressed in canonicals: set him in the pulpit, and he is armed with all
the topics, a master of fence, the pupil of Dr. Chalmers! In action he
has been compared to Kean; in the union of external and intellectual
advantages, we might start a parallel for him in the admirable Crichton.
He stands before Haydon’s picture of Lazarus, and says, ‘Look at me! ’
He crosses Piccadilly, and clears Bond-street of its beaux! Rob Roy,
Macbriar is come again. We saw him stretched on a bench at the Black
Bull in Edinburgh,—we met him again at a thirteen-penny ordinary in
London, in the same attitude, and said, without knowing his calling, or
his ghostly parts, ‘That is the man for a fair saint.’ We swear it by
‘His foot mercurial; his martial thigh;
The brawns of Hercules, but his jovial face!’
Aye, there we stop like Imogen—there is a want of expression in it. ‘The
iron has not entered his soul.’ He has not dared to feel but in trammels
and in dread. He has read Werter but to criticise him; Rousseau, but to
steel himself against him; Shakespear, but to quote him; Milton, but to
round his periods. Pleasure, fancy, humanity, are syrens that he repels
and keeps at arms-length; and hence his features are hardened, and have
a barbaric crust upon them. They are not steeped in the expression of
Titian or Raphael; but they would do for Spagnoletti to paint, and his
dark profile and matted locks have something of the grave commanding
appearance of Leonardo da Vinci’s massive portraits.
Dr. Chalmers is not so good-looking a man as Mr. Irving; he wants the
same vigour and spirit. His face is dead and clammy, cold, pale,
bloodless, passionless, and there is a glazed look of insincerity about
the eyes, uninformed, uninspired from within. His voice is broken,
harsh, and creaking, while Mr. Irving’s is flowing and silvery: his
Scotch accent and pronunciation are a terrible infliction on the
_uncultivated_ ear. His ‘Whech observation I _oo_rge upon you my frinds
and br_ee_thren’ desolates and lays waste all the humanities. He grinds
out his sentences between his teeth, and catches at truth with his
fists, as a monkey catches an apple or a stick thrown at him with his
paws. He seems by his action and his utterance to say to difficulties,
‘Come, let me clutch thee,’ and having got them in his grasp, tears and
rends them in pieces as a dog tears an old rag to tatters or mumbles a
stone that is flung in his way. Dr. Chalmers engages attention and
secures sympathy solely by the intensity of his own purpose: there is
neither eloquence nor wisdom, neither imagination nor feeling, neither
the pomp of sound nor grace nor solemnity of manner about him, but he is
in earnest, and eager in pursuit of his argument, and arrests the eye
and ear of his congregation by this alone. He dashes head foremost into
the briars and thorns of controversy, and drags you along with him
whether you will or no, and your only chance is to push on and get out
of them as well as you can, though dreadfully scratched and almost
blinded. He involves you in a labyrinth, and you are anxious to escape
from it: you have to pass through many a dark, subterranean cavern with
him in his theological ferry-boat, and are glad enough to get out on the
other side, with the help of Scotch logic for oars, and Scotch rhetoric
for sails! You hear no _home_ truths, nothing that touches the heart, or
swells or expands the soul; there is no tide of eloquence lifting you up
to Heaven, or wafting you from Indus to the Pole.—No, you are detained
in a canal, with a great number of _locks_ in it.—You make way by virtue
of standing still, your will is irritated, and impelled forward by
stoppages—you are puzzled into sympathy, pulled into admiration, tired
into patience! The preacher starts a difficulty, of which you had no
notion before, and you stare to see how he will answer it. He first
makes you uneasy, sceptical, sensible of your helplessness and
dependence upon his superior sagacity and recondite learning, and
proportionably thankful for the relief he affords you in the unpleasant
dilemma to which you have been reduced. It is like proposing a riddle,
and then, after playing with the curiosity and impatience of the company
for some time, giving the solution, which nobody else has the wit to
find out. We never saw fuller attendances or more profound attention
than at the Tron Church in Glasgow—it was like a sea of eyes, a swarm of
heads, gaping for mysteries, and staring for elucidations—it was not the
sublime or beautiful; the secret was that which has been here explained,
a desire to get rid of the difficult, the disagreeable, the dry, and the
discordant matter that had been conjured up in the imagination. Dr.
Chalmers, then, succeeds by the force of sophistry and casuistry, in our
humble judgment. Riddles (of which we spoke just now) are generally
traditional: those that Dr. Chalmers unfolds from the pulpit, are of his
own invention, or at least promulgation. He started an objection to the
Christian religion (founded on its supposed inconsistency with the
Newtonian philosophy) which objection had never been noticed in books,
on purpose that he might answer it. ‘Well,’ said a Scotchman, ‘and if
the answer was a good one, was he not right?’ ‘No, assuredly,’ we should
answer, ‘for there is no faith so firm as that which has never been
called in question.’ The answer could only satisfy those who had been
unsettled by the question; and there would be many who would not be
convinced by the Doctor’s reasoning, however he might plume himself on
his success. We suspect that this is looking after a reputation for
literary ingenuity and philosophical depth, rather than the peace of
consciences or the salvation of souls; which, in a Christian minister,
is unbecoming, and savours of the Mammon of unrighteousness. We
ourselves were staggered by the blow (either then or long before) and
still gasp for a reply, notwithstanding Dr. Chalmers’s nostrum. Let the
reader briefly judge:—The Doctor tells us, it may be said, that the
Christian Dispensation supposes that the counsels of God turn upon this
world as its center; that there is a heaven above and an earth beneath;
and that man is the lord of the universe, the only creature made in the
divine likeness, and over whom Providence watches, and to whom
revelations are given, and an inheritance everlasting. This agrees with
the cosmogony of Moses, which makes the earth the center of all things,
and the sun, moon, and stars, little shining spots like silver sixpences
moving round it. But it does not so well agree with Newton’s _Principia_
(we state Dr. Chalmers’s objection) which supposes the globe we inhabit
to be but a point in the immensity of the universe; that ours is but
one, and that the most insignificant (perhaps) among innumerable worlds,
filled, probably, with created intelligences, rational and fallen souls,
that share the eye of God with us, and who require to know that their
Redeemer liveth. We alone (it would appear) cannot pretend to monopolize
heaven or hell: there are other contingent candidates besides us.
Jacob’s dream was poetical and natural, while the earth was supposed to
be a flat surface and the blue sky hung over it, to which angels might
ascend by a ladder, and the face of God be seen at the top, as his lofty
and unchangeable abode; but this beautiful episode hardly accords with
the Antipodes. Sir Isaac turned the world upon its back, and divided
heaven from itself, and removed it far from every one of us. As we
thought the universe turned round the earth as its pivot, so religion
turned round man as its center, as the sole, important, moral and
accountable agent in existence. But there are other worlds revolving in
infinite space, to which this is a speck. Are they all desert,
worthless? Were they made for us? Have they no especial dispensations of
life and light? Have we alone a God, a Saviour, revealed to us? Is
religion triumphant only here, or is it itinerant through each? It can
hardly seem that we alone have occupied the thoughts or been the sole
objects of the plans of infinite wisdom from eternity—that our life,
resurrection, and judgment to come, are the whole history of a
wide-seeing Providence, or the loftiest events in the grand drama of the
universe, which was got up as a theatre only for us to perform our petty
parts in, and then to be cast, most of us, into hell fire? Dr.
Chalmers’s Astronomical Discourses indeed may be said to dwarf his
mighty subject, and make mankind a very Lilliputian race of beings,
which this Gulliver in vain dandles in the hard, broad, brawny hand of
school divinity, and tries to lift into their bigotted self-sufficiency
and exclusive importance again. How does he answer his own objection,
and turn the tables on himself—how reverse this pitiful, diminished
perspective, and aggrandise us in our own estimation once more as
undoubted heirs of heaven or of hell—the sole favoured or reprobated
sons of God? Why, his answer is this—that the microscope has done as
much to lift man in the scale of being, and to enlarge the bounds of
this atom the earth, as the telescope has done to circumscribe and
lessen it; that there are infinite gradations BELOW man, worlds within
worlds, as there are degrees of being above, and stars and suns blazing
round each other; that, for what we know, a speck, a lucid drop
circulating in a flea’s back, may be another habitable globe like
this!—And has that, too, a revelation of its own, an avenging God, and a
Christ crucified? Does every particle in a flea’s back contain a Mosaic
dispensation, a Popish and a Protestant religion? Has it its Tron Church
and its Caledonian Chapel, and Dr. Chalmers’s Discourses and Mr.
Irving’s Orations in little? This does not seem to obviate the
difficulty, but to increase it a million-fold. It is his objection and
his answer to it, not ours: if blasphemy, it is his; and, if orthodoxy,
he is entitled to all the credit of it. But his whole scheme shows how
impossible it is to reconcile the faith delivered to the saints with the
subtleties and intricacies of metaphysics. It displays more pride of
intellect than simplicity of heart, is an insult equally on the
understandings or prejudices of men, and could only have been hit upon
by that personification and abstraction of cross-purposes, a Scotch
metaphysical divine. In his general preaching, Dr. Chalmers is a great
casuist, and a very indifferent moralist. He states the _pros_ and
_cons_ of every question with extreme pertinacity, and often ‘spins the
thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.’ He
assigns possible reasons, not practical motives, for conduct; and
vindicates the ways of God, and his own interpretation of the
Scriptures, to the head, not to the heart. The old school-divines set
this practice afoot; for being accustomed to hear the secrets of
confession, and to salve the tender consciences of the great and
powerful, they had to bandy all sorts of questions about; and if they
could find out ‘a loop or peg to hang a doubt on,’ were well rewarded
for their trouble; they were constantly reduced to their shifts, and
forced to go on the forlorn hope of morality by the ticklish cases
referred to them for arbitration; and when they had exhausted the
resources of humanity and natural sentiment, endeavoured to find new
topics within the range of abstract reason and possibility. Dr.
Chalmers’s reasoning is as unlike as possible to a chapter in the
Gospels: but he may do very well to comment on the Apocalypse or an
Epistle of St. Paul’s. We do not approve of this method of carving out
excuses or defences of doctrinal points from the dry parchment of the
understanding or the cobwebs of the brain. Whatever sets or leaves the
dogmas of religion at variance with the dictates of the heart, hardens
the last, and lends no advantage to the first.
Mr. Irving is a more amiable moralist, and a more practical reasoner. He
throws a glancing, pleasing light over the gloomy ground of Calvinism.
There is something humane in his appeals, striking in his apostrophes,
graceful in his action, soothing in the tones of his voice. He is not
affected and theatrical; neither is he deeply impassioned or
overpowering from the simple majesty of his subject. He is above
common-place both in fancy and argument; yet he can hardly rank as a
poet or philosopher. He is a modernised covenanter, a sceptical fanatic.
We do not feel exactly on sure ground with him—we scarcely know whether
he preaches Christ crucified, or himself. His pulpit style has a
resemblance to the _florid gothic_. We are a little _mystified_ when a
man with one hand brings us all the nice distinctions and air-drawn
speculations of modern unbelievers, and arms the other with ‘fire hot
from Hell,’—when St. Paul and Jeremy Bentham, the Evangelists and the
Sorrows of Werter, Seneca, Shakespear, the author of Caleb Williams and
the Political Justice, are mingled together in the same passage, and
quoted in the same breath, however eloquent that breath may be. We see
Mr. Irving smile with decent scorn at this remark, and launch one more
thunderbolt at the critics. He is quite welcome, and we should be proud
of his notice. In the discourses he has lately delivered, and which have
drawn crowds to admire them, he has laboured to describe the Sensual
Man, the Intellectual Man, the Moral Man, and the Spiritual Man; and has
sacrificed the three first at the shrine of the last. He gave certainly
a terrific picture of the death-bed of the Sensual Man—a scene where few
shine—but it is a good subject for oratory, and he made the most of it.
He described the Poet well, walking by the mountain side, in the eye of
nature—yet oppressed, panting rather than satisfied, with beauty and
sublimity. Neither Fame nor Genius, it is most true, are all-sufficient
to the mind of man! He made a fair hit at the Philosophers; first, at
the Political Economist, who draws a circle round man, gives him so many
feet of earth to stand upon, and there leaves him to starve in all his
nobler parts and faculties: next, at the great Jurisconsult, who carves
out a mosaic work of motives for him, cold, hard, and dry, and expects
him to move mechanically in right lines, squares, and parallelograms,
drills him into perfection, and screws him into utility. He then fell
foul of the Moralist and Sentimentalist, weighed him in the balance and
found him wanting—deficient in clearness of sight to discern good, in
strength of hand and purpose to seize upon it when discerned. But
Religion comes at last to the aid of the Spiritual Man, couches the
blind sight, and braces the paralytic limb; the Lord of Hosts is in the
field, and the battle is won, his countenance pours light into our
souls, and his hand stretched out imparts strength to us, by which we
tower to our native skies! In treating of this subject, Mr. Irving
introduced several powerful images and reflections, to show how feeble
moral and intellectual motives are to contend with the allurements of
sense and the example of the world. Reason alone, he said, was no more
able to stem the tide of prejudice and fashion, than the swimmer with
his single arm (here he used an appropriate and spirited gesture, which
reminded us of the description of the heroic action of the swimmer in
Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia) is able to oppose the raging torrent, as
the voice of conscience was only heard in the tumultuous scenes of life
like the faint cry of the sea-bird in the wide world of waters. He drew
an animated but mortifying sketch of the progress of the Patriot and
Politician, weaned by degrees from his attachment to young Liberty to
hug old Corruption; and showed (strikingly enough) that this change from
youthful ardour to a hoary, heartless old age of selfishness and
ridicule (there were several Members of the Honourable House present)
was not owing to increased wisdom or strength of sight, but to faltering
resolution and weakness of hand, that could no longer hold out against
the bribes, the snares, and gilded chains prepared for it. The romantic
Tyro was right and free, the callous Courtier was a slave and
self-conceited. All this was true; it was honest, downright, and well
put. There was no cant in it, as far as regards the unequal odds and the
hard battle that reason has to fight with pleasure, or ambition, or
interest, or other antagonist motives. But does the objection apply to
morality solely, or has not religion its share in it? Man is not what he
ought to be—Granted; but is he not different from this ideal standard,
in spite of religion as well as of morality? Is not the religious man
often a slave to power, the victim of pleasure, the thrall of avarice,
hard of heart, a sensual hypocrite, cunning, mercenary, miserable? If it
be said that the really religious man is none of these, neither is the
truly moral man. Real morality, as well as vital Christianity, implies
right conduct and consistent principle. But the question simply at issue
is, whether the profession or the belief of sound moral opinion implies
these; and it certainly does it no more than the profession or belief of
orthodox religious opinions does. The conviction of the good or ill
consequences of our actions in this life does not absolutely conform the
will or the desires to good; neither does the apprehension of future
rewards or punishments produce this effect completely or necessarily.
The candidate for Heaven is a backslider; the dread of eternal torments
makes but a temporary impression on the mind. This is not a reason, in
our judgment, for neglecting or giving up in despair the motives of
religion or morality, but for strengthening and cultivating both. With
Mr. Irving, it is a triumphant and unanswerable ground for discarding
and denouncing morality, and for exalting religion, as the sovereign
cure for all wounds, as the _thaumaturgos_, or wonder-worker, in the
reform of mankind! We are at a loss to understand how this exclusive and
somewhat intolerant view of the subject is reconcileable with sound
reason or with history. Religion is no new experiment now first making
on mankind; we live in the nineteenth century of the Christian æra; it
is not as if we lived in the age of apostles, when we might (from
novelty and inexperience of the intended dispensations of Providence)
expect the earth to wear a new face, and darkness suddenly to flee away
before the light of the gospel: nor do we apprehend that Mr. Irving is
one of those who believe with Mr. Croly, that the millennium actually
commenced with the battle of Waterloo; that event seems as far off, to
all outward appearance, as it was two thousand years ago. What does this
make against the doctrines of Christianity? Nothing; if, as far as they
are implanted and take root, they bear fruit accordingly,
notwithstanding the repugnance and thanklessness of the soil. Why then
is Mr. Irving so hard upon the labours of philosophers, moralists, and
men of letters, because they do not do all their work at once? Bishop
Butler indeed wrote a most able and learned quarto volume, to prove that
the slow growth and imperfect influence of Christianity was a proof of
its divine origin, and that in this respect we had a right to look for a
direct _analogy_ between the operations of the world of grace and
nature, both proceeding as they did from the same Almighty hands! Our
deservedly popular preacher has, however, an answer to what we have here
stated: he says, ‘the time MUST and WILL shortly come!’ We never
contradict prophecies; we only speak to facts. In addressing himself to
this point, Mr. Irving made a spirited digression to the Missionary
Societies, and the impending propagation of the Gospel at home and
abroad—all obstacles to it would speedily be surmounted:—‘The Negro
slave was not so enchained but that the Gospel would set him free; the
Hottentot was not so benighted but that its light would penetrate to
him; the South Sea Islander was not so indolent and voluptuous but that
he would rouse himself at its call; neither the cunning of the Italian,
nor the superstition of the Spaniard, nor the tameness of the German,
nor the levity of the French, nor the buoyancy of the Irish, nor the
indomitable pride of the English, nor the _fiery manhood_ of the Scotch,
would be long able to withstand its all-pervading influence!’ We
confess, when our Caledonian pastor launched his canoe from the South
Sea Isles and landed on European _terra firma_, taking measure of the
vices of each nation that were opposed to the spirit of Christianity, we
did _prick up_ our ears to know what fault he would, in due course of
argument, find with his native country—it would go against the grain, no
doubt, but still he had undertaken it, and he must speak out—When lo!
for some sneaking vice or sordid pettifogging disposition, we have our
own ‘best virtue’ palmed upon us as the only failing of the most
magnanimous natives of the North—_fiery manhood_, quotha! The cold sweat
of rankling malice, hypocrisy, and servility, would be nearer the
mark—Eh! Sir Walter? Nay, good Mr. Blackwood, we meant no offence to
you! ‘Fiery manhood’ is the Anti-Christian vice or virtue of the Scotch
that meets true religion on the borders, and beats her back with
suffocating breath! Is Christianity still then to be planted like oak
timber in Scotland? What will Dr. Chalmers and the other labourers in
the vineyard say to this?—‘We pause for a reply!’ The best and most
impressive part of Mr. Irving’s discourse (Sunday, the 22nd June) was
that, in which he gave a very beautiful account of what Christianity had
done, or rather might do, in aid of morality and the regeneration of the
spirit of man. It had made ‘corruption blossom,’ ‘annihilated time in
the prospect of eternity,’ and ‘changed all nature, from a veil hiding
the face of God, into a mirror reflecting his power and beneficence.’ We
do not, however, see why in the fervour of his enthusiasm he should
affirm ‘that Jesus Christ had destroyed melody,’ nor why, by any allowed
licence of speech, he should talk of ‘the mouth of God being muzzled by
man.’ We might not perhaps have noticed this last expression,
considering it as a slip of the tongue; but Mr. Irving preaches from
written notes, and his style is, on the whole, polished and ambitious.
We can conceive of a deeper strain of argument, of a more powerful and
overwhelming flood of eloquence; but altogether we deem him an able and
attractive expounder of Holy Writ; and farther, we believe him to be an
honest man. We suspect there is a radical ‘taint in him,’ and that Mr.
Canning will be advised to withdraw himself from the congregation. His
strokes aimed at iniquity in high places are bold, unsparing, and
repeated. We would however suggest to him the propriety of containing
his indignation at the advancement of the secular priesthood by ‘the
powers that be;’ it is a thing of course, and his impatience of their
elevation may be invidiously construed into a jealousy of the spoil.
When we compare Mr. Irving with some other preachers that we have heard,
and particularly with that crawling sycophant Daniel Wilson (who
tendered his gratuitous submission to Nero the other day in the excess
of his loyalty to George IV.) we are sorry that we have not been able to
make our tribute of approbation unqualified as it is cordial, and to
stifle _their_ venal breath with the applauses bestowed upon _him_. ‘Oh!
for an _eulogy_ to kill’ all such with!
ARGUING IN A CIRCLE
_The Liberal._] [1823.
There was an account in the newspapers the other day of a fracas in the
street, in which a Lord and one or two Members of Parliament were
concerned. It availed them nought to plead the privilege of Peerage, or
to have made speeches in the House—they were held to bail, like the
vilest of the rabble, and the circumstance was not considered one to
come before the public. Ah! it is that public that is the sad thing. It
is the most tremendous ring that ever was formed to see fair play
between man and man; it puts people on their good behaviour immediately;
and wherever it exists, there is an end of the airs and graces which
individuals, high in rank, and low in understanding and morals, may
chuse to give themselves. While the affair is private and can be kept in
a corner, personal fear and favour are the ruling principles, _might_
prevails over _right_: but bring it before the world, and truth and
justice stand some chance. The public is too large a body to be bribed
or browbeat. Its voice, deep and loud, quails the hearts of princes: its
breath would make the feather in a lord’s cap bend and cower before it,
if its glance, measuring the real magnitude of such persons with their
lofty, tiptoe, flaunting pretensions, had not long since taken the
feathers out of their caps. A lord is now dressed (oh! degenerate world)
like any other man; and a watchman will no sooner let go his grasp of
his plain collar than he will that of a Commoner or any other man, who
has his ‘fancies and good-nights.’ What a falling off is here from the
time when if a ‘base cullionly fellow’ had dared to lay hands on a
nobleman, on ‘one of quality,’ he would have whipped his sword out of
its scabbard and run him through the body; the ‘beggarly, unmannered
corse’ would have been thrown into the Thames or the next ditch; and woe
to any person that should have attempted to make a stir in the matter!
‘The age of chivalry is gone, that of constables, legislators, and
Grub-street writers, has succeeded, and the glory of heraldry is
extinguished for ever.’
‘The melancholy Jacques grieves at that.’
Poor Sir Walter! the times are changed indeed, since a Duke of
Buckingham could send a couple of bullies, equipped in his livery, with
swords and ribbons, to carry off a young lady from a Peveril of the
Peak, by main force, in the face of day, and yet the bye-standers not
dare to interfere, from a dread of the Duke’s livery and the High Court
of Star Chamber! It is no wonder that the present Duke of Buckingham
(the old title new revived) makes speeches in the Upper House to prove
that legitimate monarchs have a right, whenever they please, to run
their swords through the heart of a nation and _pink_ the liberties of
mankind, thinking if this doctrine were once fully restored, the old
times of his predecessor might come again,—
‘New manners and the pomp of elder days!’
It is in tracing the history of private manners that we see (more than
any thing else) the progress that has been made in public opinion and
political liberty, and that may be still farther made. No one individual
now sets up his will as higher than the law: no noble Duke or Baron bold
acts the professed bully or glories in the character of a lawless
ruffian, as a part of the etiquette and privileges of high rank: no gay,
gaudy minion of the court takes the wall of the passengers, sword in
hand, cuts a throat, washes his white, crimson-spotted hands, and then
to dinner with the king and the ladies.—_That_ is over with us at
present; and while that is the case, Hampden will not have bled in the
field, nor Sydney on the scaffold, in vain! Even the monarch in this
country, though he is above the law, is subject to opinion; ‘submits,’
as Mr. Burke has it, both from choice and necessity, ‘to the soft collar
of social esteem, and gives a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be
subdued by manners!’
It is this which drives the Despots of the Continent mad, and makes
their nobles and chief vassals league together, like a herd of tygers,
to destroy the example of liberty which we (the people of England) have
set to the rest of the world. They are afraid that if this example
should spread and things go on much farther in the road they have taken,
they will no longer be able to give their subjects and dependants the
_knout_, to send them to the galleys or a dungeon without any warrant
but their own unbridled will, and that a lord or a king will be no more
above the law than any other man. Mankind, in short, till lately and
except in this country, were considered as a herd of deer which the
privileged classes were to use for their pleasure, or which they were to
hunt down for spite or sport, as liked them best. That they should
combine together with a knot of obscure philosophers and hair-brained
philanthropists, to set up a plea not to be used at any man’s pleasure,
or hunted down like vermin for any man’s sport, was an insult to be
avenged with seas of blood, an attack upon the foundations of social
order, and the very existence of all law, religion, and morality. In all
the legitimate governments of Europe, there existed, and there still
exist, a number of individuals who were exempted (by birth and title)
from the law, who could offer every affront to religion, and commit
every outrage upon morality with impunity, with insolence and loud
laughter, and who pretended that in asserting this monstrous privilege
of theirs to the very letter, the essence of all law, religion, and
morality consisted. This was the case in France till the year 1789. The
only law was the will of the rich to insult and harass the poor, the
only religion a superstitious mummery, the only morality subserviency to
the pleasures of the great. In the mild reign of Louis XV. only, there
were fifteen thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued for a number of
private, nameless offences, such as the withholding a wife or daughter
from the embraces of some man of rank, for having formerly received
favours from a king’s mistress, or writing an epigram on a Minister of
State. It was on the ruins of this flagitious system (no less despicable
than detestable) that the French Revolution rose; and the towers of the
Bastille, as they fell, announced the proud truth in welcome thunder to
the human race—to all but those who thought they were born, and who only
wished to live, to exercise their sweeping, wholesale, ruthless tyranny,
or to vent the workings of their petty, rankling spleen, pride, bigotry,
and malice, in endless, tormenting details on their fellow-creatures.
It will, I conceive, hereafter be considered as the greatest enormity in
history, the stupidest and the most barefaced insult that ever was
practised on the understandings or the rights of men, that we should
interfere in this quarrel between liberty and slavery, take the wrong
side, and endeavour to suppress the natural consequences of that very
example of freedom we had set. That we should do this, we who had ‘long
insulted the slavery of Europe by the loudness of our boasts of
freedom,’ who had laughed at the _Grand Monarque_ for the last hundred
and fifty years, and treated his subjects with every indignity, as
belonging to an inferior species to ourselves, for submitting to his
cruel and enervated sway; that the instant they took us at our word and
were willing to break the chains of Popery and Slavery that we never
ceased to taunt them with, we should turn against them, stand passive by
‘with jealous leer malign,’ witnessing the machinations of despots to
extinguish the rising liberties of the world, and with the first
plausible protest, the first watch-word given (the blow aimed at the
head of a king confederate with the enemies of his country against its
freedom) should join the warwhoop, and continue it loudest and longest,
and never rest, under one hollow, dastard, loathsome pretence or other,
till we had put down ‘the last example of democratic rebellion’ (we, who
are nothing but rebellion all over, from the crown of the head to the
sole of the foot!) and had restored the doctrine of Divine Right, that
had fallen headless from its throne of Ignorance and Superstition with
the First Charles, long before it was condemned to the same fate in the
person of the French king; that we should do this, and be led, urged on
to the unhallowed task by a descendant of the House of Brunswick, who
held his crown in contempt of the Stuarts, and grew old, blind, and
crazed in the unsated, undiverted, sacred thirst of Legitimacy, is a
thing that posterity will wonder at. We pretend to have interfered to
put down the horrors of the French Revolution, when it was our
interference (with that of others) that produced those horrors, of which
we were glad as an excuse to justify our crooked policy and to screen
the insidious, deadly, fatal blow aimed at liberty. No; the ‘cause was
hearted’ in the breasts of those who reign, or who would reign, in
contempt of the people, and with whom it rests to make peace or war. Is
not the same principle at work still? What horrors have the _Holy_
ALLIANCE to plead in vindication of their interference with Spain? They
have not a rag, a thread of all their hideous tissue of sophistry and
lies to cover ‘the open and apparent shame’ of this sequel and
consistent comment on their former conduct. It is a naked, barefaced,
undisguised attack upon the rights and liberties of the world: it is
putting the thing upon its true and proper footing—the claim of Kings to
hold mankind as a property in perpetuity. There are no horrors, real or
pretended, to warrant this new outrage on common sense and human nature.
It stands on its own proud basis of injustice—it towers and mocks the
skies in all the majesty of regal wrong. ‘The shame, the blood be upon
their heads.’ If there are no horrors ready-made to their hands, they
stand upon their privilege to commit wanton outrage and unqualified
aggression; and if by these means they can provoke horrors, then the
last are put first as the most plausible plea, as a handsome mask and
soft lining to the hard gripe and features of Legitimacy—Religion
consecrates, and Loyalty sanctions the fraud! But, should the scheme
fail in spite of every art and effort, and the wrong they have meditated
be retorted on their own heads, then we shall have, as before, an appeal
made to Liberty and Humanity—the motto of despots will once more be
_peace on earth and good will to men_—and we too shall join in the yell
of blood and the whine of humanity. We are only waiting for an excuse
now—till the threats and insults and cruelties of insolent invaders call
forth reprisals, and lead to some act of popular fury or national
justice that shall serve as a signal to rouse the torpid spirit of trade
in the city, or to inflame the loyalty of country gentlemen deaf for the
present to all other sounds but that appalling one of RENT! We must
remain neuter while a grievous wrong is acting, unless we can get
something by the change, or pick a quarrel with the right. We are
peaceable, politic, when a nation’s liberty only is at stake, but were
it a monarch’s crown that hung tottering in the air, oh! how soon would
a patriot senate and people start out to avenge the idle cause: a single
speech from the throne would metamorphose us into martyrs of
self-interest, saviours of the world, deliverers of Europe from lawless
violence and unexampled wrong. But here we have no heart to stir,
because the name of liberty alone (without the cant of loyalty) has lost
its magic charm on the ears of Englishmen—impotent to save, powerful
only to betray and destroy themselves and others!
We want a Burke to give the thing a legitimate turn at present. I am
afraid the Editor of the _New Times_ can hardly supply his place. They
could hardly have done before, without that eloquent apostate, that
brilliant sophist, to throw his pen into the scale against truth and
liberty. He varnished over a bad cause with smooth words, and had power
to ‘make the worse appear the better reason’—the devil’s boast! The
madness of genius was necessary to second the madness of a court; his
flaming imagination was the torch that kindled the smouldering fire in
the inmost sanctuary of pride and power, and spread havoc, dismay, and
desolation through the world. The light of his imagination, sportive,
dazzling, beauteous as it seemed, was followed by the stroke of death.
It so happens that I myself have played all my life with his forked
shafts unhurt, because I had a metaphysical clue to carry off the
noxious particles, and let them sink into the earth, like drops of
water. But the English nation are not a nation of metaphysicians, or
they would have detected, and smiled or wept over the glittering
fallacies of this half-bred reasoner, but, at the same time, most
accomplished rhetorician that the world ever saw. But they are perplexed
by sophistry, stupified by prejudice, staggered by authority. In the way
of common sense and practical inquiry, they do well enough; but start a
paradox, and they know not what to make of it. They either turn from it
altogether, or, if interest or fear give them motives to attend to it,
are fascinated by it. They cannot analyze or separate the true from the
_seeming_ good. Mr. Pitt, with his deep-mouthed _common-places_, was
able to follow in the same track, and fill up the cry; but he could not
have given the tone to political feeling, or led on the chase with ‘so
musical a discord, such sweet; thunder.’ Burke strewed the flowers of
his style over the rotten carcase of corruption, and embalmed it in
immortal prose: he contrived, by the force of artful invective and
misapplied epithets, to persuade the people of England that Liberty was
an illiberal, hollow sound; that humanity was a barbarous modern
invention, that prejudices were the test of truth; that reason was a
strumpet, and right a fiction. Every other view of the subject but his
(‘so well the tempter glozed’) seemed to be without attraction,
elegance, or refinement. Politics became poetry in his hands, his
sayings passed like proverbs from mouth to mouth, and his descriptions
and similes were admired and repeated by the fashionable and the fair.
Liberty from thenceforward became a low thing: philosophy was a
spring-nailed, velvet-pawed tyger-cat, with green eyes, watching its
opportunity to dart upon its prey: humanity was a lurking assassin. The
emblems of our cardinal and favourite virtues were overturned: the whole
vocabulary of national watch-words was inverted or displaced. This was a
change indeed in our style of thinking, more alarming than that in our
calendar formerly: and this change was brought about by Mr. Burke, who
softened down hard reasons in the crucible of his fancy, and who gave to
his epithets the force of nicknames. Half the business was done by his
description of the Queen of France. It was an appeal to all women of
quality; to all who were, or would be thought, cavaliers or men of
honour; to all who were admirers of beauty, or rank, or sex. Yet what it
had to do with the question, it would be difficult to say. If a woman is
handsome, it is well: but it is no reason why she should poison her
husband, or betray a country. If, instead of being young, beautiful, and
free of manners, Marie Antoinette had been old, ugly, and chaste, all
this mischief had been prevented. The author of the Reflections had seen
or dreamt he saw a most delightful vision sixteen years before, which
had thrown his brain into a ferment; and he was determined to throw his
readers and the world into one too. It was a theme for a copy of verses,
or a romance; not for a work in which the destinies of mankind were to
be weighed. Yet she was the Helen that opened another Iliad of woes; and
the world has paid for that accursed glance at youthful beauty with
rivers of blood. If there was any one of sufficient genius now to deck
out some Castilian maid, or village girl in the Army of the Faith, in
all the colours of fancy, to reflect her image in a thousand ages and
hearts, making a saint and a martyr of her; turning loyalty into
religion, and the rights and liberties of the Spanish nation, and of all
other nations, into a mockery, a bye-word, and a bugbear, how soon would
an end be put to Mr. Canning’s present _bizarre_ (almost afraid to know
itself) situation! How gladly he would turn round on the pivot of his
forced neutrality, and put all his drooping tropes and figures on their
splendid war-establishment again!
Mr. Burke was much of a theatrical man. I do not mean that his
high-wrought enthusiasm or vehemence was not natural to him; but the
direction that he gave to it, was exceedingly capricious and arbitrary.
It was for some time a doubtful question which way he should turn with
respect to the French Revolution, whether for or against it. His pride
took the alarm, that so much had been done with which he had nothing to
do, and that a great empire had been overturned with his favourite
engines, wit and eloquence, while he had been reforming the ‘turn-spit
of the king’s kitchen,’ in set speeches far superior to the occasion.
Rousseau and the Encyclopædists had lamentably got the start of him; and
he was resolved to drag them back somehow by the heels, and bring what
they had effected to an untimely end,—
‘Undoing all, as all had never been.’
The ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ was a spiteful and dastard
but too successful attempt to _put a spoke in the wheels_ of knowledge
and progressive civilization, and throw them back for a century and a
half at least. In viewing the change, in the prospects of society, in
producing which he had only a slight and indirect hand by his efforts in
the cause of American freedom, he seemed to say, with Iago in the play,—
‘Though that their joy be joy,
Yet will I contrive
To throw such changes of vexations on it;
As it may lose some colour.’
He went beyond his own most sanguine hopes, but did not live to witness
their final accomplishment, by seeing France literally ‘blotted out of
the map of Europe.’ He died in the most brilliant part of Buonaparte’s
victorious and captain-like campaigns in Italy. If it could have been
foreseen what an ‘ugly customer’ he was likely to prove, the way would
have been to have bribed his vanity (a great deal stronger than his
interest) over to the other side, by asking his opinion; and, indeed, he
has thrown out pretty broad hints in the early stage of his hostility,
and before the unexpected success of the French arms, and the whizzing
arrows flung at him by his old friends and new antagonists had stung him
to madness, that the great error of the National Assembly was in not
having consulted able and experienced heads on this side the water, as
to demolishing the old, and constructing the new edifice. If he had been
employed to lay the first stone, or to assist, by an inaugural
dissertation, at the baptism of the new French Constitution, the fabric
of the Revolution would thenceforth have risen,—
‘Like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumery,’
without let or molestation from his tongue or pen. But he was
overlooked. He was not called from his closet, or from his place in the
House (where, it must be confessed, he was out of his place) to ‘ride in
the whirlwind and direct the storm’; and therefore he tried, like some
malicious hag, to urge the veering gale into a hurricane; to dash the
labouring vessel of the state in pieces, and make shipwreck of the
eternal jewel of man’s happiness, which it had on board—Liberty. The
stores of practical and speculative knowledge which he had been for
years collecting and digesting, and for which he had no use at home,
were not called into play abroad. His genius had hitherto been always
too mighty for the occasion; but here his utmost grasp of intellect
would hardly have been sufficient to grapple with it. What an
opportunity was lost! Something, therefore, was to be done, to relieve
the galling sense of disappointed ambition and mortified
self-consequence. Our political _Busy body_ turned _Marplot_; and
maliciously, and like a felon, strangled the babe that he was not
professionally called in to swaddle, and dandle, and bring to maturity.
He had his revenge: but so must others have their’s on his memory.
Burke was not an honest man. There was always a _dash_ of insincerity, a
sinister bias in his disposition. We see, from the letters that passed
between him and his two brothers, and Barry the painter, that there was
constantly a balancing of self-interest and principle in his mind; a
thanking of God that he was in no danger of yielding to temptation, yet
as if it were a doubtful or ticklish point; and a patient, pensive
expectation of place and emolument, till he could reconcile it with
integrity and fidelity to his party; which might easily be construed
into a querulous hankering after it, and an opinion that this temporary
self-denial implied a considerable sacrifice on his part, or that he
displayed no small share of virtue in not immediately turning knave. All
this, if narrowly looked into, has a very suspicious appearance. Burke,
with all his capricious wildness and flighty impulses, was a self-seeker
and more constant in his enmities than in his friendships. He bore
malice, and did not forgive to the last. His cold, sullen behaviour to
Fox, who shed tears when they had a quarrel in the House, and his
refusal to see him afterwards, when the latter came to visit him on his
death-bed, will for ever remain a stigma on his memory. He was, however,
punished for his fault. In his latter writings, he complains bitterly of
the solitariness of his old age, and of the absence of the friends of
his youth—whom he had deserted. This is natural justice, and the tribute
due to apostacy. A man may carry over his own conscience to the side of
his vanity or interest, but he cannot expect, at the same time, to carry
over along with him all those with whom he has been connected in thought
and action, and whose society he will miss, sooner or later. Mr. Burke
could hardly hope to find, in his casual, awkward, unaccountable
intercourse with such men as Pitt or Dundas, amends for the loss of his
old friends, Fox and Sheridan, to whom he was knit not only by political
ties, but by old habitudes, lengthened recollections, and a variety of
common studies and pursuits. Pitt was a mere politician; Dundas, a mere
worldling. What would they care about him, and his ‘winged words’? _No
more of talk_ about the meetings at Sir Joshua’s—the _Noctes cœnæque
Deûm_; about the fine portraits of that great colourist; about Johnson
or Goldsmith, or Dunning or Barrè; or their early speeches; or the
trying times in the beginning of the American war; or the classic taste
and freeborn spirit of Greece and Rome;—
‘The beautiful was vanish’d, and return’d not.’
Perhaps, indeed, he would wish to forget most of these, as ungrateful
topics; but when a man seeks for repose in oblivion of himself, he had
better seek it, where he will soonest find it,—in the grave! Whatever
the talents, or the momentary coincidence of opinion of his new allies,
there would be a want of previous sympathy between them. Their notions
would not amalgamate, or they would not be sure that they did. Every
thing would require to be explained, to be reconciled. There would be
none of the freedom of habitual intimacy. Friendships, like the clothes
we wear, become the easier from custom. New friendships do not sit well
on old or middle age. Affection is a science, to which it is too late to
serve an apprenticeship after a certain period of life. This is the case
with all patched-up, conventional intimacies; but it is worse when they
are built on inveterate hostility and desertion from an opposite party,
where their naturally crude taste is embittered by jealousy and rankling
wounds. We think to exchange old friends and connections for new ones,
and to be received with an additional welcome for the sacrifice we have
made; but we gain nothing by it but the contempt of those whom we have
left, and the suspicions of those whom we have joined. By betraying a
cause, and turning our backs on a principle, we forfeit the esteem of
the honest, and do not inspire one particle of confidence or respect in
those who may profit by and pay us for our treachery.
Deserters are never implicitly trusted. There is, besides the sentiment
or general principle of the thing, a practical reason for this. Their
zeal, their eagerness to distinguish themselves in their new career,
makes them rash and extravagant; and not only so, but there is always a
leaven of their old principles remaining behind, which breaks out in
spite of themselves, and which it is difficult for their encouragers and
patrons to guard against. This was remarkably the case with the late Mr.
Windham. He was constantly _running a-muck_ at some question or other,
and committing the Ministers. His old, free-thinking, opposition habits
returned upon him before he was aware of it; and he was sure to hazard
some paradox, or stickle for some objectionable point, contrary to the
forms of office. The cabinet had contemplated no such thing. He was
accordingly kept in check, and alarmed the treasury-bench whenever he
rose. He was like a dog that gives mouth before the time, or is
continually running on a stray scent: he was chid and fed! The same
thing is observable in the present Poet-Laureat, whose jacobinical
principles have taken such deep root in him (_intus et in cute_) that
they break out even in his Court poems, like ‘a thick scurf’ on loyalty;
and he presents them unconsciously, (as an offering of ‘sweet smelling
gums,’) at the very foot of the throne. He at present retains his place
apparently on condition of holding his tongue. He writes such Odes on
kings, that it is next to impossible not to travestie them into
lampoons!
The remarks I have made above apply strongly to him and some of his
associates of the _Lake School_. I fancy he has felt, as much as anyone,
the inconvenience of drawing off from a cause, and that by so doing we
leave our oldest and our best friends behind. There are those among the
favourers and admirers of his youth, whom his dim eyes discover not, and
who do not count his grey hairs. Not one or two, but more;—men of
character and understanding, who have pledged mutual faith, and drank
the cup of freedom with him, warm from the wine-press, as well as the
‘dews of Castalie.’ He gave up a principle, and one left him;—he
insulted a feeling, and another fled; he accepted a place, and received
the congratulations of no one but Mr. Croker. He looks round for them in
vain, with throbbing heart, (the heart of a poet can never lie still; he
should take the more care what it is that agitates it!)—sees only the
shadows or the carcases of old friendships; or stretches out his hand to
grasp some new patron, and finds that also cold. If our friends are
sometimes accused of short memories, our enemies make it up by having
long ones. We had better adhere to the first; for we must despair of
making cordial converts of the last. This double desolation is
cheerless, and makes a man bethink himself. We may make a shift (a
shabby one) without our self-respect; but it will never do to have it
followed by the loss of the respect of those whose opinion we once
valued most. We may tamper with our own consciences; but we feel at a
loss without the testimony of others in our favour, which is seldom
paid, except to integrity of purpose and principle. Perhaps, however,
Mr. Southey consoles himself for a certain void without and within, by
receiving the compliments of some Undergraduate of either of our
Universities, on his last article in defence of Rotten Boroughs, in the
Quarterly Review; or of a Dignitary of the Church, on his share in the
Six Acts, and for suggesting to Lord Sidmouth the propriety of punishing
the second conviction for libel with banishment. We do not know how this
may be: but with us, it would barb the dart.
It would not matter, if these turn-coats were not in such violent
extremes. Between the two, they must be strangely perplexed in their own
minds, and scarcely know what to make of themselves. They must have
singular qualms come over them at times—the apparitions of former
acquaintance and opinions. If they were contented to correct, to qualify
their youthful extravagancies, and to be taught by experience to steer a
middle course, and pay some deference to the conclusions of others, it
would be mighty well; but this is not their humour. They must be
conspicuous, dogmatical, exclusive, intolerant, on whichever side they
are: the mode may be different, the principle is the same. A man’s
nature does not change, though he may profess different sentiments. A
Socinian may become a Calvinist, or a Whig a Tory: but a bigot is always
a bigot; an egotist never becomes humble. Besides, what excuse has a
man, after thirty, to change about all of a sudden to the very opposite
side? If he is an uneducated man, he may indeed plead ignorance
yesterday of what he has learnt to-day: but a man of study and reading
can’t pretend that a whole host of arguments has suddenly burst upon
him, of which he never heard before, and that they have upset all his
earlier notions: he must have known them long before, and if they made
no impression on him then to modify his violent zeal (supposing them to
be right now) it is a sign either of a disinclination, or of an
incapacity, on his part, to give truth a fair hearing—a bad ground to
build his present dogmatical and infallible tone upon! It is certain,
that the common sense of the world condemns these violent changes of
opinion; and if they do not prove that a man prefers his convenience to
his virtue, they at least show that he prefers it to his reputation; for
he loses his character by them. An apostate is a name that all men
abhor, that no man ever willingly acknowledges; and the tergiversation
which it denotes is not likely to come into much greater request, till
it is no longer observed that a man seldom changes his principles except
for his interest! Those who go over from the winning to the losing side,
do not incur this appellation; and however we may count them fools, they
can’t be called knaves into the bargain.
QUERIES AND ANSWERS; OR THE RULE OF CONTRARY
_The London Weekly Review._] [_November 17, 1827._
1. Why is the word _comfort_ so continually in the mouths of the
English?—Because the English are the most uncomfortable of all people:
for being so liable to receive pain from outward objects, and being made
uneasy by everything that is not as they wish it, they are obliged to
remove, if possible, every source of annoyance, and have _all their
comforts about them_.
2. Why are the English so fond of clubs, corporate bodies, joint-stock
companies, and large associations of all kinds?—Because they are the
most unsociable set of people in the world: for being mostly at variance
with each other, they are glad to get any one else to join and be on
their side; having no spontaneous attraction, they are forced to fasten
themselves into the machine of society; and each holds out in his
individual shyness and reserve, till he is carried away by the crowd,
and borne with a violent, but welcome shock against some other mass of
aggregate prejudice or self-interest. The English join together to get
rid of their sharp points and sense of uncomfortable peculiarity. Hence,
their clubs, their mobs, their sects, their parties, their spirit of
co-operation, and previous understanding in every thing. An English mob
is a collection of violent and headstrong humours, acting with double
force from each man’s natural self-will, and the sense of opposition to
others; and the same may be said of the nation at large. The French
unite and separate more easily; and therefore do not collect into such
formidable masses, and act with such unity and tenacity of purpose. It
is the same with their ideas, which easily join together, and easily
part company; but do not form large or striking masses: and hence, the
French are full of wit and fancy, but without imagination and principle.
The French are governed by fashion, the English by cabal.
3. Why are the English a credulous nation, and the eager dupes of all
sorts of quacks and impostors?—Because they are a dry, plodding,
_matter-of-fact_ people, and having, in general, no idea of the
possibility of telling lies, think all they hear or read must be true,
and are left at the mercy of every empiric or knavish pretender, who
will take the trouble to impose on them. From their very gravity and
seriousness, they are the dupes of superficial professions and
appearances, which they think, (judging from themselves,) must imply all
they pretend. Their folly and love of the marvellous takes a practical
and mischievous turn; they despise the fictitious, and require to be
amused by something that they think solid and useful. Hence, they
swallow Dr. Brodum’s pills, Joanna Southcote’s prophecies, the Literary
Gazette, and Blackwood’s Magazine, taking them all for gospel. They
constantly have a succession of idols or bugbears. There is always some
one to be hunted down at the time for their amusement, like a strange
dog in a village; and some name, some work that is cried up for
half-a-dozen years, as containing all wisdom, and then you hear no more
of it. No people judge so much as the English at second-hand, except in
mere matters of pounds, shillings, and pence; and even then they may be
gulled by impudence and quackery. Every thing is either in collusion or
collision. _Thimble_ was a great man in the O. P. Row, and now regulates
the debates in Parliament. If a man has a monstrous good opinion of
himself, and nothing will drive him out of it, the English will come
into his way of thinking, sooner than be left in a _minority_, or not
appear to be in the secret! Lest they should seem stupid, they try to be
_knowing_, as they become forward in aiming to be witty, and vulgar in
affecting to be genteel.
ON KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD
_The London Weekly Review._] [_December 1, 1827._
‘Who shall go about to cozen fortune, or wear the badge of honour
without the stamp of merit?’
A knowledge of the world is generally supposed to be the fruit of
experience and observation, or of a various, practical acquaintance with
men and things. On the contrary, it appears to me to be a kind of
instinct, arising out of a peculiar construction and turn of mind. Some
persons display this knowledge at their first outset in life: others,
with all their opportunities and dear-bought lessons, never acquire it
to the end of their career. In fact, a knowledge of the world only means
a knowledge of our own interest; it is nothing but a species of
selfishness or ramification of the law of self-preservation. There may
be said to be two classes of people in the world, which remain for ever
distinct: those who consider things in the abstract, or with a reference
to the truth, and those who consider them only with a reference to
themselves, or to the _main-chance_. The first, whatever may be their
acquirements or discoveries, wander through life in a sort of absence of
mind, or comparative state of sleep-walking: the last, though their
attention is riveted to a single point of view, are always on the alert,
know perfectly well what they are about, and calculate with the greatest
nicety the effect which their words or actions will have on others. They
do not trouble themselves about the arguments on any subject: they know
the opinion entertained on it, and that is enough for them to regulate
themselves by; the rest they regard as quite Utopian, and foreign to the
purpose. ‘Subtle as the fox for prey, like warlike as the wolf for what
they eat,’ they leave mere speculative points to those who, from some
unaccountable bias or caprice take an interest in what does not
personally concern them, and make good the old saying, that ‘the
children of the world are wiser in their generation than the children of
the light!’
The man of the world is to the man of science very much what the
chamelion is to the armadillo: the one takes its hue from every
surrounding object, and is undistinguishable from them; the other is
shut up in a formal crust of knowledge, and clad in an armour of proof,
from which the shaft of ridicule or the edge of disappointment falls
equally pointless. It is no uncommon case to see a person come into a
room, which he enters awkwardly enough, and has nothing in his dress or
appearance to recommend him, but after the first embarrassments are
over, sits down, takes his share in the conversation, in which he
acquits himself creditably, shews sense, reading, and shrewdness,
expresses himself with point, articulates distinctly, when he blunders
on some topic which he might see is disagreeable, but persists in it the
more as he finds others shrink from it; mentions a book of which you
have not heard, and perhaps do not wish to hear, and he therefore thinks
himself bound to favour you with the contents; gets into an argument
with one, proses on with another on a subject in which his hearer has no
interest; and when he goes away, people remark, ‘What a pity that Mr. ——
has not more knowledge of the world, and has so little skill in adapting
himself to the tone and manners of society!’ But will time and habit
cure him of this defect? Never. He wants a certain _tact_, he has not a
voluntary power over his ideas, but is like a person reading out of a
book, or who can only pour out the budget of knowledge with which his
brain is crammed in all places and companies alike. If you attempt to
divert his attention from the general subject to the persons he is
addressing, you puzzle and stop him quite. He is a mere conversing
automaton. He has not the _sense of personality_—the faculty of
perceiving the effect (as well as the grounds) of his opinions; and how
then should failure or mortification give it him? It must be a painful
reflection, and he must be glad to turn from it; or after a few
reluctant and unsuccessful efforts to correct his errors, he will try to
forget or harden himself in them. Finding that he makes so slow and
imperceptible a progress in amending his faults, he will take his swing
in the opposite direction, will triumph and revel in his supposed
excellences, will launch out into the wide, untrammelled field of
abstract speculation, and silence envious sneers and petty cavils by
force of argument and dint of importunity. You will find him the same
character at sixty that he was at thirty; or should time soften down
some of his asperities, and tire him of his absurdities as he has tired
others, nothing will transform him into a man of the world, and he will
die in a garret, or a paltry second-floor, from not having been able to
acquire the art ‘to see ourselves as others see us,’ or to dress his
opinions, looks, and actions in the smiles and approbation of the world.
On the other hand, take a youth from the same town (perhaps a
school-fellow, and the dunce of the neighbourhood); he has ‘no figures,
nor no fantasies which busy thought draws in the brains of men,’ no
preconceived notions by which he must square his conduct or his
conversation, no dogma to maintain in the teeth of opposition, no
Shibboleth to which he must force others to subscribe; the progress of
science or the good of his fellow-creatures are things about which he
has not the remotest conception, or the smallest particle of anxiety—
‘His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;’
all that he sees or attends to is the immediate path before him, or what
can encourage or lend him a helping hand through it; his mind is a
complete blank, on which the world may write its maxims and customs in
what characters it pleases; he has only to study its humours, flatter
its prejudices, and take advantage of its foibles; while walking the
streets he is not taken up with solving an abstruse problem, but with
considering his own and the appearance of others; instead of
contradicting a patron, assents to all he hears; and in every
proposition that comes before him asks himself only what he can get by
it, and whether it will make him friends or enemies: such a one is said
to possess great penetration and knowledge of the world, understands his
place in society, gets on in it, rises from the counter to the
counting-house, from the dependant to be a partner, amasses a fortune,
gains in size and respectability as his affairs prosper, has his town
and country house, and ends with buying up half the estates in his
native county!
The great secret of a knowledge of the world, then, consists in a
subserviency to the will of others, and the primary motive to this
attention is a mechanical and watchful perception of our own interest.
It is not an art that requires a long course of study, the difficulty is
in putting one’s self apprentice to it. It does not surely imply any
very laborious or profound inquiry into the distinctions of truth or
falsehood, to be able to assent to whatever one hears; nor any great
refinement of moral feeling, to approve of whatever has custom, power,
or interest on its side. The only question is, ‘Who is willing to do
so?’—and the answer is, those who have no other faculties or
pretensions, either to stand in the way of or to assist their progress
through life. Those are slow to wear the livery of the world who have
any independent resources of their own. It is not that the philosopher
or the man of genius does not see and know all this, that he is not
constantly and forcibly reminded of it by his own failure or the success
of others, but he cannot stoop to practice it. He has a different scale
of excellence and mould of ambition, which has nothing in common with
current maxims and time-serving calculations. He is a moral and
intellectual egotist, not a mere worldly-minded one. In youth, he has
sanguine hopes and brilliant dreams, which he cannot sacrifice for
sordid realities—as he advances farther in life, habit and pride forbid
his turning back. He cannot bring himself to give up his best-grounded
convictions to a blockhead, or his conscientious principles to a knave,
though he might make his fortune by so doing. The rule holds good here
as well as in another sense—‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the
whole world and lose his own soul?’ If his convictions and principles
had been less strong, they would have yielded long ago to the
suggestions of his interest, and he would have relapsed into the man of
the world, or rather he would never have had the temptation or capacity
to be any thing else. One thing that keeps men honest, as well as that
confirms them knaves, is their incapacity to do any better for
themselves than nature has done for them. One person can with difficulty
speak the truth, as another lies with a very ill grace. After repeated
awkward attempts to change characters, they each very properly fall back
into their old _jog-trot_ path, as best suited to their genius and
habits.
There are individuals who make themselves and every one else
uncomfortable by trying to be agreeable, and who are only to be endured
in their natural characters of blunt, plain-spoken people. Many a man
would have turned rogue if he had known how. _Non ex quovis ligno fit
Mercurius._ The modest man cannot be impudent if he would. The man of
sense cannot play the fool to advantage. It is not the mere resolution
to act a part that will enable us to do it, without a natural genius and
fitness for it. Some men are born to be valets, as others are to be
courtiers. There is the climbing _genus_ in man as well as in plants. It
is sometimes made a wonder how men of ‘no mark or likelihood’ frequently
rise to court-preferment, and make their way against all competition.
That is the very reason. They present no tangible point; they offend no
feeling of self-importance. They are a perfect unresisting medium of
patronage and favour. They aspire through servility; they repose in
insignificance. A man of talent or pretension in the same circumstances
would be kicked out in a week. A look that implied a doubt, a hint that
suggested a difference of opinion, would be fatal. It is of no use, in
parleying with absolute power, to dissemble, to suppress: there must be
no feelings or opinions to dissemble or suppress. The artifice of the
dependant is not a match for the jealousy of the patron: ‘The soul must
be subdued to the very quality of its lord.’ Where all is annihilated in
the presence of the sovereign, is it astonishing that _nothings_ should
succeed? Ciphers are as necessary in courts as eunuchs in seraglios.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The London Weekly Review._] [_December 8, 1827_,
I do not think Mr. Cobbett would succeed in an interview with the
Prince. Bub Doddington said, ‘he would not justify before his
Sovereign,’ even where his own character was at stake. I am afraid we
could hardly reckon upon the same forbearance in Mr. Cobbett where his
country’s welfare was at stake, and where he had an opportunity of
vindicating it. He might have a great deal of reason on his side; but he
might forget, or seem to forget, that as the king is above the law, he
is also above reason. Reason is but a suppliant at the foot of thrones,
and waits for their approval or rebuke. _Salus populi suprema lex_—may
be a truism anywhere else. If reason dares to approach them at all, it
must be in the shape of deference and humility, not of headstrong
importunity and self-will. Instead of breathless awe, of mild entreaty,
of humble remonstrance, it is Mr. Cobbett, who, upon very slight
encouragement, would give the law, and the monarch who must kiss the
rod. The upstart, the bully, and the dogmatist, would break out, and the
King would assert himself. The reformer would be too full of his own
opinion to allow an option even to Majesty, and the affair would have
the same ending as that of the old ballad—
‘Then the Queen overhearing what Betty did say,
Would send Mr. Roper to take her away.’
As I have brought Mr. Cobbett in here by the neck and shoulders, I may
add that I do not think he belongs properly to the class, either of
philosophical speculators, or men of the world. He is a political
humourist. He is too much taken up with himself either to attend to
right reason, or to judge correctly of what passes around him. He
mistakes strength of purpose and passion, not only for truth but for
success. Because he can give fifty good reasons for a thing, he thinks
it not only _ought_ to be, but _must_ be. Because he is swayed so
entirely by his wishes and humours, he believes others will be ready to
give up their prejudices, interests, and resentments to oblige him. He
persuades himself that he is the fittest person to represent Westminster
in parliament, and he considers this point (once proved) tantamount to
his return. He knows no more of the disposition or sentiments of the
people of Westminster than of the inhabitants of the moon (except from
what he himself chooses to say or write of them), and it is this want of
sympathy which, as much as anything, prevents his being chosen. The
exclusive force and bigotry of his opinions deprives them of half their
influence and effect, by allowing no toleration to others, and
consequently setting them against him.
Mr. Cobbett seemed disappointed, at one time, at not succeeding in the
character of a legacy-hunter. Why, a person to succeed in this
character, ought to be a mere skin or bag to hold money, a place to
deposit it in, a shadow, a deputy, a trustee who keeps it for the
original owner—so that the transfer is barely nominal, and who, if he
were to return from the other world, would modestly yield it up—one who
has no personal identity of his own, no will to encroach upon or dispose
of it otherwise than his patron would wish after his death—not a
hair-brained egotist, a dashing adventurer, to squander, hector and
flourish away with it in wild schemes and ruinous experiments, every one
of them at variance with the opinions of the testator; in new methods of
turnip hoeing; in speculations in madder—this would be to tear his soul
from his body twice over—
‘His patron’s ghost from Limbo lake the while
Sees this which more damnation doth upon him pile!’
Mr. Cobbett complained, that in his last interview with Baron Mazeres,
that gentleman was in his dotage, and that the reverend legatee sat at
the bottom of the table, cutting a poor figure, and not contradicting a
word the Baron said. No doubt, as he has put this in print in the
exuberance of his dissatisfaction, he let both gentlemen see pretty
plainly what he thought of them, and fancied that this expression of his
contempt, as it gratified him, was the way to ensure the good will of
the one to make over his whole estate, or the good word of the other to
let him _go snacks_. This is a new way of being _quits_ with one’s
benefactors, and an egregious _quid pro quo_. If Baron Mazeres had left
Mr. Cobbett 200,000_l._ it must have been not to write his epitaph, or
visit him in his last moments!
A gossiping chambermaid who only smiles and assents when her mistress
wishes her to talk, or an ignorant country clown who stands with his hat
off when he has a favour to ask of the squire, (and if he is wise, at
all other times,) knows more of the matter. A knowledge of mankind is
little more than the Scotch instinct of _bowing_, or of ‘never standing
upright in the presence of a great man,’ or of that great blockhead, the
world. It is not a perception of truth, but a sense of power, and an
instant determination of the will to submit to it. It is therefore less
an intellectual acquirement than a natural disposition. It is on this
account that I think both cunning and wisdom are a sort of original
endowments, or attain maturity much earlier than is supposed, from their
being moral qualities, and having their seat in the heart rather than
the head. The difference depends on the _manner_ of seeing things. The
one is a selfish, the other is a disinterested view of nature. The one
is the clear open look of integrity, the other is a contracted and
blear-eyed obliquity of mental vision. If any one has but the courage
and honesty to look at an object as it is in itself, or divested of
prejudice, fear, and favour, he will be sure to see it pretty right; as
he who regards it through the refractions of opinion and fashion, will
be sure to see it distorted and falsified, however the error may rebound
to his own advantage. Certainly, he who makes the universe tributary to
his convenience, and subjects all his impressions of what is right or
wrong, true or false, black or white, round or square, to the standard
and maxims of the world, who never utters a proposition but he fancies a
patron close at his elbow who overhears him, who is even afraid, in
private, to suffer an honest conviction to rise in his mind, lest it
should mount to his lips, get wind, and ruin his prospects in life,
ought to gain something in exchange for the restraint and force put upon
his thoughts and faculties: on the contrary, he who is confined by no
such petty and debasing trammels, whose comprehension of mind is ‘in
large heart enclosed,’ finds his inquiries and his views expand in a
degree commensurate with the universe around him; makes truth welcome
wherever he meets her, and receives her cordial embrace in return. To
see things divested of passion and interest, is to see them with the eye
of history and philosophy. It is easy to judge right, or at least to
come to a mutual understanding in matters of history and abstract
morality. Why then is it so difficult to arrive at the same calm
certainty in actual life? Because the passions and interests are
concerned, and it requires so much more candour, love of truth, and
independence of spirit to encounter ‘the world and its dread laugh,’ to
throw aside every sinister consideration, and grapple with the plain
merits of the case. To be wiser than other men is to be honester than
they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.
Perhaps the courage may be also owing to the strength; but both go
together, and are natural, and not acquired. Do we not see in fables the
force of the moral principle in detecting the truth? The only effect of
fables is, by making inanimate or irrational things actors in the scene,
to remove the case completely from our own sphere, to take our self-love
off its guard, to simplify the question; and yet the result of this
obvious appeal is allowed to be universal and irresistible. Is not this
another example that ‘the heart of man is deceitful above all things;’
or, that it is less our incapacity to distinguish what is right, than
our secret determination to adhere to what is wrong, that prevents our
discriminating one from the other? It is not that great and useful
truths are not manifest and discernible in themselves; but little, dirty
objects get between them and us, and from being near and gross, hide the
lofty and distant! The first business of the patriot and the
philanthropist is to overleap this barrier, to rise out of this material
dross. Indignation, contempt of the base and grovelling, makes the
philosopher no less than the poet; and it is the power of looking beyond
self that enables each to inculcate moral truth and nobleness of
sentiment, the one by general precepts, the other by individual example.
I have no quarrel with men of the world, mere _muck-worms_: every one
after his fashion, ‘as the flesh and fortune shall serve;’ but I confess
I have a little distaste to those, who, having set out as loud and
vaunting enthusiasts, have turned aside to ‘tread the primrose path of
dalliance,’ and to revile those who did not choose to follow so edifying
an example. The candid brow and elastic spring of youth may be exchanged
for the wrinkles and crookedness of age; but at least we should retain
something of the erectness and openness of our first unbiassed thoughts.
I cannot understand how any degree of egotism can dispense with the
consciousness of personal identity. As we advance farther in life, we
are naturally inclined to revert in imagination to its commencement; but
what can those dwell upon there who find only feelings that they
despise, and opinions that they have abjured? ‘If thine eye offend thee,
pull it out and cast it from thee:’ but the operation is a painful one,
and the body remains after it only a mutilated fragment. Generally,
those who are cut off from this resource in former recollections, make
up for it (as well as they can) by an exaggerated and uxorious fondness
for their late-espoused convictions—a thing unsightly and indecent! Why
does he, who, at one time, despises ‘the little chapel-bell,’ afterwards
write ‘the Book of the Church?’ The one is not an atonement for the
other: each shows only a juvenile or a superannuated precocity of
judgment. It is uniting Camille-Desmoulins and Camille-Jourdan,
(_Jourdan of the Chimes_) in one character. I should like (not out of
malice, but from curiosity) to see Mr. Southey re-write the beautiful
poem on ‘his own miniature-picture, when he was two years old,’ and see
what he would substitute for the lines—
‘And it was thought,
That thou shouldst tread preferment’s flowery path,
Young Robert!’
There must here, I think, be _hiatus in manuscriptis_: the verse must
halt a little! The laureate and his friends say that they are still
labouring on the same design as ever, correcting the outlines and
filling up the unfinished sketch of their early opinions. They seem
rather to have blotted them quite out, and to have taken a fresh canvas
to begin another and no less extravagant caricature. Or their new and
old theories remind one of those heads in picturedealers’ shops, where
one half of the face is thoroughly cleaned and repaired, and the other
left covered with stains and dirt, to show the necessity of the
picture-scourer’s art: the transition offends the sight. It may be made
a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, any more than they
grow stronger or healthier or honester. They may, in one sense, imbibe a
greater portion of worldly wisdom, and have their romantic flights tamed
to the level of every day’s practice and experience; but perhaps it
would be better if some of the extravagance and enthusiasm of youth
could be infused into the latter, instead of being absorbed (perforce)
in that sink of pride, envy, selfishness, ignorance, conceit, prejudice,
and hypocrisy. One thing is certain, that this is the present course of
events, and that if the individual grows wiser as he gains experience,
the world does not, and that the tardy penitent who is treading back his
steps, may meet the world advancing as he is retreating, and adopting
more and more of the genuine impulses and disinterested views of youth
into its creed. It is, indeed, only by conforming to some such original
and unsophisticated standard, that it can acquire either soundness or
consistency. The appeal is a fair one, from the bad habits of society to
the unprejudiced aspirations and impressions of human nature.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The London Weekly Review._] [_December 15, 1827._
It seems, in truth, a hard case to have all the world against us, and to
require uncommon fortitude (not to say presumption) to stand out single
against such a host. The bare suggestion must ‘give us pause,’ and has
no doubt overturned many an honest conviction. The _opinion of the
world_, (as it pompously entitles itself,) if it means anything more
than a set of local and party prejudices, with which only our interest,
not truth, is concerned, is a shadow, a bugbear, and a contradiction in
terms. _Having all the world against us_, is a phrase without a meaning;
for in those points in which all the world agree, no one differs from
the world. If all the world were of the same way of thinking, and always
kept in the same mind, it would certainly be a little staggering to have
them against you. But however widely and angrily they may differ from
you, they differ as much so from one another, and even from themselves.
What is gospel at one moment, is heresy the next:—different countries
and climates have different notions of things. When you are put on your
trial, therefore, for impugning the public opinion, you may always
_subpœna_ this great body against itself. For example, I have been
twitted for somewhere calling Tom Paine a great writer, and no doubt his
reputation at present ‘does somewhat smack:’ yet in 1792 he was so
great, or so popular an author, and so much read and admired by numbers
who would not now mention his name, that the Government was obliged to
suspend the Constitution, and to go to war to counteract the effects of
his popularity. His extreme popularity was then the cause (by a common
and vulgar _reaction_) of his extreme obnoxiousness. If the opinion of
the world, then, contradicts itself, why may not I contradict it, or
choose at what time, and to what extent I will agree with it? I have
been accused of abusing dissenters, and saying that sectaries, in
general, are dry and suspicious; and I believe that all the world will
say the same thing except themselves. I have said that the church people
are proud and overbearing, which has given them umbrage, though in this
I have all the sectaries on my side. I have laughed at the Methodists,
and for this I have been accused of glancing at religion: yet who does
not laugh at the Methodists as well as myself? But I also laugh at those
who laugh at them. I have pointed out by turns the weak sides and
foibles of different sects and parties, and they themselves maintain
that they are perfect and infallible: and this is what is called having
all the world against me. I have inveighed all my life against the
insolence of the Tories, and for this I have the authority both of Whigs
and Reformers; but then I have occasionally spoken against the
imbecility of the Whigs, and the extravagance of the Reformers, and thus
have brought all three on my back, though two out of the three regularly
agree with all I say of the third party. Poets do not approve of what I
have said of their turning prose-writers; nor do the politicians approve
of my tolerating the fooleries of the fanciful tribe at all: so they
make common cause to _damn_ me between them. People never excuse the
drawbacks from themselves, nor the concessions to an adversary: such is
the justice and candour of mankind! Mr. Wordsworth is not satisfied with
the praise I have heaped upon himself, and still less, that I have
allowed Mr. Moore to be a poet at all. I do not think I have ever set my
face against the popular idols of the day; I have been among the
foremost in crying up Mrs. Siddons, Kean, Sir Walter Scott, Madame
Pasta, and others; and as to the great names of former times, my
admiration has been lavish, and sometimes almost mawkish. I have
dissented, it is true, in one or two instances; but that only shows that
I judge for myself, not that I make a point of contradicting the general
taste. I have been more to blame in trying to push certain Illustrious
Obscure into notice:—they have not forgiven the obligation, nor the
world the tacit reproach. As to my personalities, they might quite as
well be termed _impersonalities_. I am so intent on the abstract
proposition and its elucidation, that I regard everything else as of
very subordinate consequence: my friends, I conceive, will not refuse to
contribute to so laudable an undertaking, and my enemies _must_! I have
found fault with the French, I have found fault with the English; and
pray, do they not find great, mutual, and just fault with one another?
It may seem a great piece of arrogance in any one, to set up his
individual and private judgment against that of ten millions of people;
but cross the channel, and you will have thirty millions on your side.
Even should the thirty millions come over to the opinions of the ten, (a
thing that may happen to-morrow,) still one need not despair. I remember
my old friend Peter Finnerty, laughing very heartily at something I had
written about the Scotch, but it was followed up by a sketch of the
Irish, on which he closed the book, looked grave, and said he
disapproved entirely of all national reflections. Thus you have all the
world on your side, except when it is the party concerned. What any set
of people think or say of themselves is hardly a rule for others: yet,
if you do not attach yourself to some one set of people and principles,
and stick to them through thick and thin, instead of giving your opinion
fairly and fully all round, you must expect to have all the world
against you, for no other reason than because you express sincerely, and
_for their good_, not only what they say of others, but what is said of
themselves, which they would fain keep a profound secret, and prevent
the divulging of it under the severest pains and penalties. When I told
J—— that I had composed a work in which I had ‘in some sort handled’
about a score of leading characters, he said, ‘Then you will have one
man against you, and the remaining nineteen for you!’ I have not found
it so. In fact, these persons would agree pretty nearly to all that I
say, and allow that, in nineteen points out of twenty, I am right; but
the twentieth, that relates to some imperfection of their own, weighs
down all the rest, and produces an unanimous verdict against the author.
There is but one thing in which the world agree, a certain bigoted
blindness, and conventional hypocrisy, without which, according to
Mandeville, (that is, if they really spoke what they thought and knew of
one another,) they would fall to cutting each other’s throats
immediately.
We find the same contrariety and fluctuation of opinion in different
ages, as well as countries and classes. For about a thousand years,
during ‘the high and palmy state’ of the Romish hierarchy, it was agreed
(_nemine contradicente_) that _two and two made five_: afterwards, for
above a century, there was great battling and controversy to prove that
they made four and a half; then, for a century more, it was thought a
great stride taken to come down to four and a quarter; and, perhaps, in
another century or two, it will be discovered for a wonder that _two and
two actually make four_! It is said, that this slow advance and
perpetual interposition of impediments is a salutary check to the
rashness of innovation, and to hazardous experiments. At least, it is a
very effectual one, amounting almost to a prohibition. One age is
employed in building up an absurdity, and the next exhausts all its wit
and learning, zeal and fury, in battering it down, so that at the end of
two generations you come to the point where you set out, and have to
begin again. These heats and disputes about external points of faith may
be things of no consequence, since under all the variations of form or
doctrine the essentials of practice remain the same. It does not seem
so; at any rate, the non-essentials appear to excite all the interest,
and ‘keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads;’ and when the dogma is
once stripped of mystery and intolerance, and reduced to common sense,
no one appears to take any further notice of it.
The appeal, then, to the authority of the world, chiefly resolves itself
into the old proverb, that ‘when you are at Rome you must do as those at
Rome do;’ that is, it is a shifting circle of local prejudices and
gratuitous assumptions, a successful conformity to which is best insured
by a negation of all other qualities that might interfere with it: solid
reason and virtue are out of the question. But it may be insisted, that
there are qualities of a more practical order that may greatly
contribute to and facilitate our advancement in life, such as presence
of mind, convivial talents, insight into character, thorough
acquaintance with the profounder principles and secret springs of
society, and so forth. I do not deny that all this may be of advantage
in extraordinary cases, and often abridge difficulties; but I do not
think that it is either necessary or generally useful. For instance,
habitual caution and reserve is a surer resource than that presence of
mind, or quick-witted readiness of expedient, which, though it gets men
out of scrapes, as often leads them into them by begetting a false
confidence. Persons of agreeable and lively talents often find to their
cost that one indiscretion procures them more enemies then ten agreeable
sallies do friends. A too great penetration into character is less
desirable than a certain power of hoodwinking ourselves to their
defects, unless the former is accompanied with a profound hypocrisy,
which is also liable to detection and discomfiture: and as to general
maxims and principles of worldly knowledge, I conceive that an
instinctive sympathy with them is much more profitable than their
incautious discovery and formal announcement. Thus, the politic rule,
‘When a great wheel goes up a hill, cling fast to it; when a great wheel
runs down a hill, let go your hold of it,’ may be useful as a hint or
warning to the shyness or fidelity of an Englishman; a North Briton
feels its truth instinctively, and acts upon it unconsciously. When it
is observed in the _History of a Foundling_, that ‘Mr. Alworthy had done
so many charitable actions that he had made enemies of the whole
parish,’ the sarcasm is the dictate of a generous indignation at
ingratitude rather than a covert apology for selfish niggardliness.
Misanthropic reflections have their source in philanthropic sentiments;
the real despiser of the world keeps up appearances with it, and is at
pains to varnish over its vices and follies, even to himself, lest his
secret should be betrayed, and do him an injury. Those who see
completely into the world begin to play tricks with it, and overreach
themselves by being too knowing: it is even possible to _out-cant_ it,
and get laughed at that way. Fielding knew something of the world, yet
he did not make a fortune. Sir Walter Scott has twice made a fortune by
descriptions of nature and character, and has twice lost it by the same
fondness for speculative gains. Wherever there is a strong faculty for
anything, the exercise of that faculty becomes its own end and reward,
and produces an indifference or inattention to other things; so that the
best security for success in the world is an incapacity for success in
any other way. A bookseller to succeed in his business should have no
knowledge of books, except as marketable commodities: the instant he has
a taste, an opinion of his own on the subject, he may consider himself
as a ruined man. In like manner, a picture-dealer should know nothing of
pictures but the catalogue price, the cant of the day. The moment he has
a feeling for the art, he will be tenacious of it: a Guido, a Salvator
‘will be the fatal Cleopatra for which he will lose all he is worth, and
be content to lose it.’ Should a general then know nothing of war, a
physician of medicine? No: because this is an art and not a trick, and
the one has to contend with nature, and the other with an enemy, and not
to pamper or cajole the follies of the world. It requires also great
talents to overturn the world; not, to push one’s fortune in it: to rule
the state like Cromwell or Buonaparte; not, to rise in it like
Castlereagh or Croker. Yet, even in times of crisis and convulsion, he
who outrages the feeling of the moment and echoes the wildest
extravagance, succeeds; as, in times of peace and tranquillity, he does
so who acquiesces most tamely in the ordinary routine of things. This
may serve to point out another error, common to men of the world, who
sometimes, giving themselves credit for more virtue than they possess,
declare very candidly that if they had to begin life over again, they
would have been _great rogues_. The answer to this is, that then they
would have been _hanged_! No: the way to get on in the world is to be
neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your
neighbours, neither to be a ‘reformer nor a house-breaker,’ neither to
advance before the age nor lag behind it, but to be as like it as
possible, to reflect its image and superscription at every turn, and
then you will be its darling and its delight, and it will dandle you and
fondle you, and make much of you, as a monkey doats upon its young! The
knowledge of vice—that is, of _statutable_ vice—is not the knowledge of
the world: otherwise a Bow-street runner and the keeper of a house of
ill fame, would be the most knowing characters, and would soon rise
above their professions.
ON PUBLIC OPINION
_The London Weekly Review._] [_January 19, 1828._
‘Scared at the sound itself has made.’
Once asking a friend why he did not bring forward an explanation of a
circumstance, in which his conduct had been called in question, he said,
‘His friends were satisfied on the subject, and he cared very little
about the opinion of the world.’ I made answer that I did not consider
this a good ground to rest his defence upon, for that a man’s friends
seldom thought better of him than the world did. I see no reason to
alter this opinion. Our friends, indeed, are more apt than a mere
stranger to join in with, or be silent under any imputation thrown out
against us, because they are apprehensive they may be indirectly
implicated in it, and they are bound to betray us to save their own
credit. To judge of our jealousy, our sensibility, our high notions of
responsibility on this score, only consider if a single individual lets
fall a solitary remark implying a doubt of the wit, the sense, the
courage of a friend,—how it staggers us—how it makes us shake with
fear—how it makes us call up all our eloquence and airs of
self-consequence in his defence, lest our partiality should be supposed
to have blinded our perceptions, and we should be regarded as the dupes
of a mistaken admiration. We already begin to meditate an escape from a
losing cause, and try to find out some other fault in the character
under discussion, to show that we are not behind-hand (if the truth must
be spoken) in sagacity, and a sense of the ridiculous. If, then, this is
the case with the first flaw, the first doubt, the first speck that dims
the sun of friendship, so that we are ready to turn our backs on our
sworn attachment and well-known professions the instant we have not all
the world with us, what must it be when we have all the world against
us; when our friend, instead of a single stain, is covered with mud from
head to foot; how shall we expect our feeble voices not to be drowned in
the general clamour? how shall we dare to oppose our partial and
mis-timed suffrages to the just indignation of the public? Or if it
should not amount to this, how shall we answer the silence and contempt
with which his name is received? how shall we animate the great mass of
indifference or distrust with our private enthusiasm? how defeat the
involuntary smile, or the suppressed sneer, with the burst of generous
feeling and the glow of honest conviction? It is a thing not to be
thought of, unless we would enter into a crusade against prejudice and
malignity, devote ourselves as martyrs to friendship, raise a
controversy in every company we go into, quarrel with every person we
meet, and after making ourselves and everyone else uncomfortable, leave
off, not by clearing our friend’s reputation, but by involving our own
pretensions to decency and common sense. People will not fail to
observe, that a man may have his reasons for his faults or vices; but
that for another to volunteer a defence of them, is without excuse. It
is, in fact, an attempt to deprive them of the great and only benefit
they derive from the supposed errors of their neighbours and
contemporaries—the pleasure of backbiting and railing at them, which
they call _seeing justice done_. It is not a single breath of rumour or
opinion; but the whole atmosphere is infected with a sort of aguish
taint of anger and suspicion, that relaxes the nerves of fidelity, and
makes our most sanguine resolutions sicken and turn pale; and he who is
proof against it, must either be armed with a love of truth, or a
contempt for mankind, which place him out of the reach of ordinary rules
and calculations. For myself, I do not shrink from defending a cause or
a friend _under a cloud_; though in neither case will cheap or common
efforts suffice. But, in the first, you merely stand up for your own
judgment and principles against fashion and prejudice, and thus assume a
sort of manly and heroic attitude of defiance: in the last, (which makes
it a matter of greater nicety and nervous sensibility,) you sneak behind
another to throw your gauntlet at the whole world, and it requires a
double stock of stoical firmness not to be laughed out of your boasted
zeal and independence as a romantic and _amiable weakness_.[54]
There is nothing in which all the world agree but in running down some
obnoxious individual. It may be supposed, that this is not for nothing,
and that they have good reasons for what they do. On the contrary, I
will undertake to say, that so far from there being invariably just
grounds for such an universal outcry, the universality of the outcry is
often the only ground of the opinion; and that it is purposely raised
upon this principle, that all other proof or evidence against the person
meant to be run down is wanting. Nay, farther, it may happen, while the
clamour is at the loudest; while you hear it from all quarters; while it
blows a perfect hurricane; while ‘the world rings with the vain
stir’—not one of those who are most eager in hearing and echoing it
knows what it is about, or is not fully persuaded, that the charge is
equally false, malicious, and absurd. It is like the wind, that ‘no man
knoweth whence it cometh, or whither it goeth.’ It is _vox et praeterea
nihil_. What then is it that gives it its confident circulation and its
irresistible force? It is the loudness of the organ with which it is
pronounced, the Stentorian lungs of the multitude; the number of voices
that take it up and repeat it, because others have done so; the rapid
flight and the impalpable nature of common fame, that makes it a
desperate undertaking for any individual to inquire into or arrest the
mischief that, in the deafening buzz or loosened roar of laughter or of
indignation, renders it impossible for the still small voice of reason
to be heard, and leaves no other course to honesty or prudence than to
fall flat on the face before it as before the pestilential blast of the
Desert, and wait till it has passed over. Thus everyone joins in
asserting, propagating, and in outwardly approving what everyone, in his
private and unbiassed judgment, believes and knows to be scandalous and
untrue. For everyone in such circumstances keeps his own opinion to
himself, and only attends to or acts upon that which he conceives to be
the opinion of everyone but himself. So that public opinion is not
seldom a farce, equal to any acted upon the stage. Not only is it
spurious and hollow in the way that Mr. Locke points out, by one man’s
taking up at second-hand the opinion of another, but worse than this,
one man takes up what he believes another _will_ think and which the
latter professes only because he believes it held by the first! All
therefore that is necessary, to control public opinion, is, to gain
possession of some organ loud and lofty enough to make yourself heard,
that has power and interest on its side; and then, no sooner do you blow
a blast in this trump of _ill-fame_, like the horn hung up by an old
castle-wall, than you are answered, echoed, and accredited on all sides:
the gates are thrown open to receive you, and you are admitted into the
very heart of the fortress of public opinion, and can assail from the
ramparts with every engine of abuse, and with privileged impunity, all
those who may come forward to vindicate the truth, or to rescue their
good name from the unprincipled keeping of authority, servility,
sophistry and venal falsehood! The only thing wanted is to give an
alarm—to excite a panic in the public mind of being left _in the lurch_,
and the rabble (whether in the ranks of literature or war) will throw
away their arms, and surrender at discretion to any bully or impostor
who, for a _consideration_, shall choose to try the experiment upon
them!
What I have here described is the effect even upon the candid and
well-disposed:—what must it be to the malicious and idle, who are eager
to believe all the ill they can hear of everyone; or to the prejudiced
and interested, who are determined to credit all the ill they hear
against those who are not of their own side? To these last it is only
requisite to be understood that the butt of ridicule or slander is of an
opposite party, and they presently give you _carte blanche_ to say what
you please of him. Do they know that it is true? No; but they believe
what all the world says, till they have evidence to the contrary. Do you
prove that it is false? They dare say, that if not, that something worse
remains behind; and they retain the same opinion as before, for the
honour of their party. They hire someone to pelt you with mud, and then
affect to avoid you in the street as a dirty fellow. They are told that
you have a hump on your back, and then wonder at your assurance or want
of complaisance in walking into a room where they are, without it.
Instead of apologising for the mistake, and, from finding one aspersion
false, doubting all the rest, they are only more confirmed in the
remainder from being deprived of one handle against you, and resent
their disappointment, instead of being ashamed of their credulity.
People talk of the bigotry of the Catholics, and treat with contempt the
absurd claim of the Popes to infallibility—I think, with little right to
do so. I walk into a church in Paris, where I am struck with a number of
idle forms and ceremonies, the chaunting of the service in Latin, the
shifting of the surplices, the sprinkling of holy-water, the painted
windows ‘casting a dim religious light,’ the wax-tapers, the pealing
organ: the common people seem attentive and devout, and to put entire
faith in all this—Why? Because they imagine others to do so, they see
and hear certain signs and supposed evidences of it, and it amuses and
fills up the void of the mind, the love of the mysterious and wonderful,
to lend their assent to it. They have assuredly, in general, no better
reason—all our Protestant divines will tell you so. Well, I step out of
the church of St. Roche, and drop into an English reading-room hard by:
what am I the better? I see a dozen or a score of my countrymen, with
their faces fixed, and their eyes glued to a newspaper, a magazine, a
review—reading, swallowing, profoundly ruminating on the lie, the cant,
the sophism of the day! Why? It saves them the trouble of thinking; it
gratifies their ill-humour, and keeps off _ennui_! Does any gleam of
doubt, an air of ridicule or a glance of impatience pass across their
features at the shallow and monstrous things they find? No, it is all
passive faith and dull security; they cannot take their eyes from the
page, they cannot live without it. They believe in Mr. Blackwood, (you
see it in their faces) as implicitly as in Sir John Barleycorn; in the
John Bull as in a sirloin of beef; in the Quarterly as assuredly as in
quarter-day—as they hope to receive their rents, or to see old England
again! Are not the Popes, the Fathers, the Councils, as good as these
oracles, scouts, and champions of theirs? They know that the John Bull,
for instance, is a hoax, a humbug, an impudent imposture, got up, week
by week, to puff whom it pleases, to bully whom it pleases, to traduce
whom it pleases, without any principle but a hint from its patrons, or
without a pretence to any other principle. Do they believe in the known
lie, the gross ribaldry, the foul calumny, the less on that account?
They believe the more in it: because it is got up solely and expressly
to serve a cause that needs such support—and they swear by whatever is
devoted to this object.
The greater the profligacy, the effrontery, the servility, the greater
the faith. Strange! that the British public (whether at home or abroad)
should shake their heads at the Lady of Loretto, and repose deliciously
on Mr. Theodore Hook! It may be thought that the enlightened part of the
British public (persons of family and fortune, and often title, who have
had a college-education and received the benefit of foreign travel) see
through the quackery, which they encourage only for a political purpose,
without being themselves the dupes of it. Suppose an individual of whom
it has been repeatedly asserted that he has warts on his nose, were to
enter the reading-room aforesaid in the Rue de la Paix—is there a single
red-faced country squire who would not be surprised at not finding this
part of the story true—would not persuade himself five minutes after
that he could not have been seen correctly, or that some art had been
used to conceal the defect, or would be led to doubt, from this
instance, Mr. Blackwood’s general candour and veracity? On the contrary,
the gentleman would be obliged to disbelieve his senses rather than give
Mr. Blackwood the lie, who is read and believed by the whole world. He
would have a host of witnesses against him: there is not a reader of
Blackwood who would not swear to the fact. Seeing is believing, it is
said. Lying is believing, say I. We do not even see with our own eyes,
but must ‘wink and shut our apprehensions up,’ that we may be able to
agree to the report of others, as a piece of good manners and point of
established etiquette.—Besides, the supposed deformity answered his
wishes: the abuse ‘fed fat the ancient grudge he owed’ some presumptuous
scribbler, for not agreeing in a number of points with his betters: it
gave him a personal advantage over one he did not like—and who will give
up what tends to strengthen his aversion against another? To Tory
prejudice, sore as it is—to English imagination, morbid as it is, a
nickname, a ludicrous epithet, a malignant falsehood (when it has once
been propagated and taken to bosoms as a welcome consolation) becomes a
precious property, a vested right; and people would as soon give up a
sinecure, or a share in a close borough, as a plenary indulgence
(published monthly with the court privilege) to speak and think with
contempt of those who would abolish the one or throw open the other.
ON THE CAUSES OF POPULAR OPINION
_The London Weekly Review._] [_February 16, 1828._
Party-Spirit is the best reason in the world for personal antipathy and
vulgar abuse.
‘But, do you not think, Sir,’ (methinks I hear some Scotch dialectician
exclaim,) ‘that belief is involuntary, and that we judge in all cases
according to the precise degree of evidence and the positive facts
before us?’
No, Sir.
‘You believe, then, in the doctrine of philosophical free-will?’
Indeed, Sir, I do not.
‘How then, Sir, am I to understand so unaccountable a diversity of
opinion from the most approved writers on the philosophy of the human
mind, such as Mr. Dugald Stewart and the Editors of the Edinburgh
Encyclopædia?’
May I ask, my dear Sir, did you ever read Mr. Wordsworth’s poem of
Michael?
‘I cannot charge my memory with the fact; or I paid no particular
attention to it at the time, as I have always agreed with the Edinburgh
Review in considering Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry as remarkably silly and
puerile.’
But still true to Nature in a humble way.
‘Why, I think, Sir, something of that kind is admitted (either by way of
ridicule or praise) in the article in the Review.’
Well, Sir, this Michael is an old shepherd, who has a son who goes to
sea, and who turns out a great reprobate by all the accounts received of
him. Before he went, however, the father took the boy with him into a
mountain-glen, and made him lay the first stone of a sheep-fold, which
was to be a covenant and a remembrance between them if anything ill
happened. For years after, the old man used to go to work at this
sheep-fold—
‘Among the rocks
He went, and still look’d up upon the sun,
And listen’d to the wind’—
and sat by the half-finished work, expecting the lad’s return, or hoping
to hear some better tidings of him. Was this hope founded on reason—or
was it not owing to the strength of affection which, in spite of
everything, could not relinquish its hold of a favourite object, indeed
the only one that bound it to existence?
Not being able to make my Scotchman answer kindly to interrogatories, I
must get on without him. Indeed, I have generally found the natives of
that country greater hindrances than helps. In matters of absolute
demonstration and speculative indifferences, I grant, that belief is
involuntary, and the proof not to be resisted; but then, in such
matters, there is no difference of opinion, or the difference is
adjusted amicably and rationally. Hobbes is of opinion, that if their
passions or interests could be implicated in the question, men would
deny stoutly that the three angles of a right-angled triangle are equal
to two right ones: and the disputes in religion look something like it.
I only contend, however, that in all cases not of this peremptory and
determinate cast, and where disputes commonly arise, inclination, habit,
and example have a powerful share in throwing in the casting-weight to
our opinions; and that he who is only tolerably free from these, and not
their regular dupe or slave, is indeed ‘a man of ten thousand.’ Take,
for instance, the example of a Catholic clergyman in a Popish country:
it will generally be found that he lives and dies in the faith in which
he was brought up, as the Protestant clergyman does in his.—Shall we say
that the necessity of gaining a livelihood, or the prospect of
preferment, that the early bias given to his mind by education and
study, the pride of victory, the shame of defeat, the example and
encouragement of all about him, the respect and love of his flock, the
flattering notice of the great, have no effect in giving consistency to
his opinions and carrying them through to the last? Yet, who will
suppose that in either case this apparent uniformity is mere hypocrisy,
or that the intellects of the two classes of divines are naturally
adapted to the arguments in favour of the two religions they have
occasion to profess? No: but the understanding takes a tincture from
outward impulses and circumstances, and is led to dwell on those
suggestions which favour, and to blind itself to the objections which
impugn, the side to which it previously and morally inclines. Again,
even in those who oppose established opinions, and form the little,
firm, formidable phalanx of dissent, have not early instruction,
spiritual pride, the love of contradiction, a resistance to usurped
authority, as much to do with the keeping up the war of sects and
schisms as the abstract love of truth or conviction of the
understanding? Does not persecution fan the flame in such fiery tempers,
and does it not expire, or grow lukewarm, with indulgence and neglect? I
have a sneaking kindness for a Popish priest in this country; and to a
Catholic peer I would willingly bow in passing. What are national
antipathies, individual attachments, but so many expressions of the
_moral_ principle in forming our opinions? All our opinions become
grounds on which we act, and build our expectations of good or ill; and
this good or ill mixed up with them is soon changed into the ruling
principle which modifies or violently supersedes the original cool
determination of the reason and senses. The will, when it once gets a
footing, turns the sober judgment out of doors. If we form an attachment
to anyone, are we not slow in giving it up? or, if our suspicions are
once excited, are we not equally rash and violent in believing the
worst? Othello characterizes himself as one
‘Who loved not wisely, but too well;
As one not easily wrought—but, being jealous,
Perplex’d in the extreme.’
And this answers to the movements and irregularities of passion and
opinion which take place in human nature. If we wish a thing, we are
disposed to believe it; if we have been accustomed to believe it, we are
the more obstinate in defending it on that account: if all the world
differ from us in any questions of moment, we are ashamed to own it; or
are hurried by peevishness and irritation into extravagance and paradox.
The weight of example presses upon us (whether we feel it or not) like
the law of gravitation. He who sustains his opinion by the strength of
conviction and evidence alone, unmoved by ridicule, neglect, obloquy, or
privation, shows no less resolution than the Hindoo who makes and keeps
a vow to hold his right arm in the air till it grows rigid and callous.
To have all the world against us is trying to a man’s temper and
philosophy. It unhinges even our opinion of our own motives and
intentions. It is like striking the actual world from under our feet:
the void that is left, the death-like pause, the chilling suspense, is
fearful. The growth of an opinion is like the growth of a limb: it
receives its actual support and nourishment from the general body of the
opinions, feelings, and practice of the world: without that, it soon
withers, festers, and becomes useless. To what purpose write a good
book, if it is sure to be pronounced a bad one, even before it is read?
If our thoughts are to be blown stifling back upon ourselves, why utter
them at all? It is only exposing what we love most to contumely and
insult, and thus depriving ourselves of our own relish and satisfaction
in them. Language is only made to communicate our sentiments, and if we
can find no one to receive them, we are reduced to the silence of
dumbness, we live but in the solitude of a dungeon. If we do not
vindicate our opinions, we seem poor creatures who have no right to
them; if we speak out, we are involved in continual brawls and
controversy. If we contemn what others admire, we make ourselves odious:
if we admire what they despise, we are equally ridiculous. We have not
the applause of the world nor the support of a party: we can neither
enjoy the freedom of social intercourse, nor the calm of privacy. With
our respect for others, we lose confidence in ourselves: everything
seems to be a subject of litigation—to want proof or confirmation; we
doubt, by degrees, whether we stand on our head or our heels—whether we
know our right hand from our left. If I am assured that I never wrote a
sentence of common English in my life, how can I know that that is not
the case? If I am told at one time that my writings are as heavy as
lead, and at another, that they are more light than the gossamer—what
resource have I but to choose between the two? I could say, if this were
the place, what those writings are.—‘Make it the place, and never stand
upon punctilio!’
They are not, then, so properly the works of an author by profession, as
the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter. They are subtle
and difficult problems translated into hieroglyphics. I thought for
several years on the hardest subjects, on Fate, Free-Will, Foreknowledge
absolute, without ever making use of words or images at all, and that
has made them come in such throngs and confused heaps when I burst from
that void of abstraction. In proportion to the tenuity to which my ideas
had been drawn, and my abstinence from ornament and sensible objects,
was the tenaciousness with which actual circumstances and picturesque
imagery laid hold of my mind, when I turned my attention to them, or had
to look round for illustrations. Till I began to paint, or till I became
acquainted with the author of _The Ancient Mariner_, I could neither
write nor speak. He encouraged me to write a book, which I did according
to the original bent of my mind, making it as dry and meagre as I could,
so that it fell still-born from the press, and none of those who abuse
me for a shallow _catch-penny_ writer have so much as heard of it. Yet,
let me say that that work contains an important metaphysical discovery,
supported by a continuous and severe train of reasoning, nearly as
subtle and original as anything in Hume or Berkeley. I am not accustomed
to speak of myself in this manner, but impudence may provoke modesty to
justify itself. Finding this method did not answer, I despaired for a
time: but some trifle I wrote in the Morning Chronicle meeting the
approbation of the Editor and the town, I resolved to turn over a new
leaf—to take the public at its word, to muster all the tropes and
figures I could lay hands on, and, though I am a plain man, never to
appear abroad but in an embroidered dress. Still, old habits will
prevail; and I hardly ever set about a paragraph or a criticism, but
there was an undercurrent of thought, or some generic distinction on
which the whole turned. Having got my clue, I had no difficulty in
stringing pearls upon it; and the more recondite the point, the more I
laboured to bring it out and set it off by a variety of ornaments and
allusions. This puzzled the court-scribes, whose business it was to
crush me. They could not see the meaning: they would not see the
colouring, for it hurt their eyes. Oh, had I been but one of them, I
might even have dined with Mr. Murray! One cried out, it was dull;
another, that it was too fine by half: my friends took up this last
alternative as the most favourable; and since then it has been agreed
that I am a florid writer, somewhat flighty and paradoxical. Yet, when I
wished to unburthen my mind in the Edinburgh by an article on English
(not Scotch) metaphysics, J—— who echoes this _florid_ charge, said he
preferred what I wrote for effect, and was afraid of its being thought
heavy—by the side of Macculloch! I have accounted for the flowers;—the
paradoxes may be accounted for in the same way. All abstract reasoning
is in extremes, or only takes up one view of a question, or what is
called the principle of the thing; and if you want to give this
popularity and effect, you are in danger of running into extravagance
and hyperbole. I have had to bring out some obscure distinction, or to
combat some strong prejudice, and in doing this with all my might, may
have often overshot the mark. It was easy to correct the excess of truth
afterwards. I have been accused of inconsistency, for writing an essay,
for instance, on the Advantages of Pedantry, and another, on the
_Ignorance of the Learned_, as if ignorance had not its comforts as well
as knowledge. The personalities I have fallen into have never been
gratuitous. If I have sacrificed my friends, it has always been to a
theory. I have been found fault with for repeating myself, and for a
narrow range of ideas. To a want of general reading, I plead guilty, and
am sorry for it; but perhaps if I had read more, I might have thought
less. As to my barrenness of invention, I have at least glanced over a
number of subjects—painting, poetry, prose, plays, politics,
parliamentary speakers, metaphysical lore, books, men, and things. There
is some point, some fancy, some feeling, some taste shown in treating of
these. Which of my conclusions has been reversed? Is it what I said ten
years ago of the Bourbons which raised the warwhoop against me? Surely
all the world are of that opinion now. I have, then, given proofs of
some talent, and of more honesty: if there is haste or want of method,
there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust; and if I do
not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am. If the
Editor of the Atlas will do me the favour to look over my _Essay on the
Principles of Human Action_, will dip into any essay I ever wrote
(except one that appeared in the Retrospective Review, which was not my
own, though I was very handsomely paid the full price of an original
composition for it), and will take a sponge and clear the dust from the
face of my _Old Woman_ (which he can see at a common friend’s), I hope
he will, upon second thoughts, acquit me of an absolute dearth of
resources and want of versatility in the direction of my studies.
A FAREWELL TO ESSAY-WRITING
_The London Weekly Review._] [_March 29, 1828._
‘This life is best, if quiet life is best.’
Food, warmth, sleep, and a book; these are all I at present ask—the
_ultima thule_ of my wandering desires. Do you not then wish for
‘A friend in your retreat,
Whom you may whisper, solitude is sweet?’
Expected, well enough:—gone, still better. Such attractions are
strengthened by distance. Nor a mistress? ‘Beautiful mask! I know thee!’
When I can judge of the heart from the face, of the thoughts from the
lips, I may again trust myself. Instead of these, give me the robin
red-breast, pecking the crumbs at the door, or warbling on the leafless
spray, the same glancing form that has followed me wherever I have been,
and ‘done its spiriting gently;’ or the rich notes of the thrush that
startle the ear of winter, and seem to have drunk up the full draught of
joy from the very sense of contrast. To these I adhere and am faithful,
for they are true to me; and, dear in themselves, are dearer for the
sake of what is departed, leading me back (by the hand) to that dreaming
world, in the innocence of which they sat and made sweet music, waking
the promise of future years, and answered by the eager throbbings of my
own breast. But now ‘the credulous hope of mutual minds is o’er,’ and I
turn back from the world that has deceived me, to nature that lent it a
false beauty, and that keeps up the illusion of the past. As I quaff my
libations of tea in a morning, I love to watch the clouds sailing from
the west, and fancy that ‘the spring comes slowly up this way.’ In this
hope, while ‘fields are dank and ways are mire,’ I follow the same
direction to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the dry, level
greensward, I can see my way for a mile before me, closed in on each
side by copse-wood, and ending in a point of light more or less
brilliant, as the day is bright or cloudy. What a walk is this to me! I
have no need of book or companion—the days, the hours, the thoughts of
my youth are at my side, and blend with the air that fans my cheek. Here
I can saunter for hours, bending my eye forward, stopping and turning to
look back, thinking to strike off into some less trodden path, yet
hesitating to quit the one I am in, afraid to snap the brittle threads
of memory. I remark the shining trunks and slender branches of the birch
trees, waving in the idle breeze; or a pheasant springs up on whirring
wing; or I recall the spot where I once found a wood-pigeon at the foot
of a tree, weltering in its gore, and think how many seasons have flown
since ‘it left its little life in air.’ Dates, names, faces come back—to
what purpose? Or why think of them now? Or rather, why not think of them
oftener? We walk through life, as through a narrow path, with a thin
curtain drawn around it; behind are ranged rich portraits, airy harps
are strung—yet we will not stretch forth our hands and lift aside the
veil, to catch glimpses of the one, or sweep the chords of the other. As
in a theatre, when the old-fashioned green curtain drew up, groups of
figures, fantastic dresses, laughing faces, rich banquets, stately
columns, gleaming vistas appeared beyond; so we have only at any time to
‘peep through the blanket of the past,’ to possess ourselves at once of
all that has regaled our senses, that is stored up in our memory, that
has struck our fancy, that has pierced our hearts:—yet to all this we
are indifferent, insensible, and seem intent only on the present
vexation, the future disappointment. If there is a Titian hanging up in
the room with me, I scarcely regard it: how then should I be expected to
strain the mental eye so far, or to throw down, by the magic spells of
the will, the stone-walls that enclose it in the Louvre? There is one
head there of which I have often thought, when looking at it, that
nothing should ever disturb me again, and I would become the character
it represents—such perfect calmness and self-possession reigns in it!
Why do I not hang an image of this in some dusky corner of my brain, and
turn an eye upon it ever and anon, as I have need of some such talisman
to calm my troubled thoughts? The attempt is fruitless, if not natural;
or, like that of the French, to hang garlands on the grave, and to
conjure back the dead by miniature pictures of them while living! It is
only some actual coincidence, or local association that tends, without
violence, to ‘open all the cells where memory slept.’ I can easily, by
stooping over the long-sprent grass and clay-cold clod, recall the tufts
of primroses, or purple hyacinths, that formerly grew on the same spot,
and cover the bushes with leaves and singing-birds, as they were
eighteen summers ago; or prolonging my walk and hearing the sighing gale
rustle through a tall, strait wood at the end of it, can fancy that I
distinguish the cry of hounds, and the fatal group issuing from it, as
in the tale of Theodore and Honoria. A moaning gust of wind aids the
belief; I look once more to see whether the trees before me answer to
the idea of the horror-stricken grove, and an air-built city towers over
their grey tops.
‘Of all the cities in Romanian lands,
The chief and most renown’d Ravenna stands.’
I return home resolved to read the entire poem through, and, after
dinner, drawing my chair to the fire, and holding a small print close to
my eyes, launch into the full tide of Dryden’s couplets (a stream of
sound), comparing his didactic and descriptive pomp with the simple
pathos and picturesque truth of Boccacio’s story, and tasting with a
pleasure, which none but an habitual reader can feel, some quaint
examples of pronunciation in this accomplished versifier.
‘Which when Honoria view’d,
The fresh _impulse_ her former fright renew’d.—
_Theodore and Honoria._
‘And made th’ _insult_, which in his grief appears,
The means to mourn thee with my pious tears.’
_Sigismonda and Guiscardo._
These trifling instances of the wavering and unsettled state of the
language give double effect to the firm and stately march of the verse,
and make me dwell with a sort of tender interest on the difficulties and
doubts of an earlier period of literature. They pronounced words then in
a manner which we should laugh at now; and they wrote verse in a manner
which we can do anything but laugh at. The pride of a new acquisition
seems to give fresh confidence to it; to impel the rolling syllables
through the moulds provided for them, and to overflow the envious bounds
of rhyme into time-honoured triplets. I am much pleased with Leigh
Hunt’s mention of Moore’s involuntary admiration of Dryden’s free,
unshackled verse, and of his repeating _con amore_, and with an Irish
spirit and accent, the fine lines—
‘Let honour and preferment go for gold,
But glorious beauty isn’t to be sold.’
What sometimes surprises me in looking back to the past, is, with the
exception already stated, to find myself so little changed in the time.
The same images and trains of thought stick by me: I have the same
tastes, likings, sentiments, and wishes that I had then. One great
ground of confidence and support has, indeed, been struck from under my
feet; but I have made it up to myself by proportionable pertinacity of
opinion. The success of the great cause, to which I had vowed myself,
was to me more than all the world: I had a strength in its strength, a
resource which I knew not of, till it failed me for the second time.
‘Fall’n was Glenartny’s stately tree!
Oh! ne’er to see Lord Ronald more!’
It was not till I saw the axe laid to the root, that I found the full
extent of what I had to lose and suffer. But my conviction of the right
was only established by the triumph of the wrong; and my earliest hopes
will be my last regrets. One source of this unbendingness, (which some
may call obstinacy,) is that, though living much alone, I have never
worshipped the Echo. I see plainly enough that black is not white, that
the grass is green, that kings are not their subjects; and, in such
self-evident cases, do not think it necessary to collate my opinions
with the received prejudices. In subtler questions, and matters that
admit of doubt, as I do not impose my opinion on others without a
reason, so I will not give up mine to them without a better reason; and
a person calling me names, or giving himself airs of authority, does not
convince me of his having taken more pains to find out the truth than I
have, but the contrary. Mr. Gifford once said, that ‘while I was sitting
over my gin and tobacco-pipes, I fancied myself a Leibnitz.’ He did not
so much as know that I had ever read a metaphysical book:—was I
therefore, out of complaisance or deference to him, to forget whether I
had or not? I am rather disappointed, both on my own account and his,
that Mr. Hunt has missed the opportunity of explaining the character of
a friend, as clearly as he might have done. He is puzzled to reconcile
the shyness of my pretensions with the inveteracy and sturdiness of my
principles. I should have thought they were nearly the same thing. Both
from disposition and habit, I can _assume_ nothing in word, look, or
manner. I cannot steal a march upon public opinion in any way. My
standing upright, speaking loud, entering a room gracefully, proves
nothing; therefore I neglect these ordinary means of recommending myself
to the good graces and admiration of strangers, (and, as it appears,
even of philosophers and friends). Why? Because I have other resources,
or, at least, am absorbed in other studies and pursuits. Suppose this
absorption to be extreme, and even morbid, that I have brooded over an
idea till it has become a kind of substance in my brain, that I have
reasons for a thing which I have found out with much labour and pains,
and to which I can scarcely do justice without the utmost violence of
exertion (and that only to a few persons,)—is this a reason for my
playing off my out-of-the-way notions in all companies, wearing a prim
and self-complacent air, as if I were ‘the admired of all observers?’ or
is it not rather an argument, (together with a want of animal spirits,)
why I should retire into myself, and perhaps acquire a nervous and
uneasy look, from a consciousness of the disproportion between the
interest and conviction I feel on certain subjects, and my ability to
communicate what weighs upon my own mind to others? If my ideas, which I
do not avouch, but suppose, lie below the surface, why am I to be always
attempting to dazzle superficial people with them, or smiling,
delighted, at my own want of success?
What I have here stated is only the excess of the common and well-known
English and scholastic character. I am neither a buffoon, a fop, nor a
Frenchman, which Mr. Hunt would have me to be. He finds it odd that I am
a close reasoner and a loose dresser. I have been (among other follies)
a hard liver as well as a hard thinker; and the consequences of that
will not allow me to dress as I please. People in real life are not like
players on a stage, who put on a certain look or _costume_, merely for
effect. I am aware, indeed, that the gay and airy pen of the author does
not seriously probe the errors or misfortunes of his friends—he only
glances at their seeming peculiarities, so as to make them odd and
ridiculous; for which forbearance few of them will thank him. Why does
he assert that I was vain of my hair when it was black, and am equally
vain of it now it is grey, when this is true in neither case? This
transposition of motives makes me almost doubt whether Lord Byron was
thinking so much of the rings on his fingers as his biographer was.
These sort of criticisms should be left to women. I am made to wear a
little hat, stuck on the top of my head the wrong way. Nay, I commonly
wear a large slouching hat over my eyebrows; and if ever I had another,
I must have twisted it about in any shape to get rid of the annoyance.
This probably tickled Mr. Hunt’s fancy, and retains possession of it, to
the exclusion of the obvious truism, that I naturally wear ‘a melancholy
hat.’
I am charged with using strange gestures and contortions of features in
argument, in order to ‘look energetic.’ One would rather suppose that
the heat of the argument produced the extravagance of the gestures, as I
am said to be calm at other times. It is like saying that a man in a
passion clenches his teeth, not because he is, but in order to seem,
angry. Why should everything be construed into air and affectation? With
Hamlet, I may say, ‘I know not _seems_.’
Again, my old friend and pleasant ‘Companion’ remarks it, as an anomaly
in my character, that I crawl about the Fives Court like a cripple till
I get the racket in my hand, when I start up as if I was possessed with
a devil. I have then a motive for exertion; I lie by for difficulties
and extreme cases. _Aut Cæsar aut nullus._ I have no notion of doing
nothing with an air of importance, nor should I ever take a liking to
the game of battledoor and shuttlecock. I have only seen by accident a
page of the unpublished Manuscript relating to the present subject,
which I dare say is, on the whole, friendly and just, and which has been
suppressed as being too favourable, considering certain prejudices
against me.
In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions have not
been quite shallow or hasty, is the circumstance of their having been
lasting. I have the same favourite books, pictures, passages that I ever
had: I may therefore presume that they will last me my life—nay, I may
indulge a hope that my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of
impression is the only thing on which I pride myself. Even L——, whose
relish of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a
surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his select
authors or particular friends, after a lapse of ten years. As to myself,
any one knows where to have me. What I have once made up my mind to, I
abide by to the end of the chapter. One cause of my independence of
opinion is, I believe, the liberty I give to others, or the very
diffidence and distrust of making converts. I should be an excellent man
on a jury: I might say little, but should starve ‘the other eleven
obstinate fellows’ out. I remember Mr. Godwin writing to Mr. Wordsworth,
that ‘his tragedy of Antonio could not fail of success.’ It was damned
past all redemption. I said to Mr. Wordsworth that I thought this a
natural consequence; for how could any one have a dramatic turn of mind
who judged entirely of others from himself? Mr. Godwin might be
convinced of the excellence of his work; but how could he know that
others would be convinced of it, unless by supposing that they were as
wise as himself, and as infallible critics of dramatic poetry—so many
Aristotles sitting in judgment on Euripides! This shows why pride is
connected with shyness and reserve; for the really proud have not so
high an opinion of the generality as to suppose that they can understand
them, or that there is any common measure between them. So Dryden
exclaims of his opponents with bitter disdain—
‘Nor can I think what thoughts they can conceive.’
I have not sought to make partisans, still less did I dream of making
enemies; and have therefore kept my opinions myself, whether they were
currently adopted or not. To get others to come into our ways of
thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in
order to lead. At the time I lived here formerly, I had no suspicion
that I should ever become a voluminous writer; yet I had just the same
confidence in my feelings before I had ventured to air them in public as
I have now. Neither the outcry _for_ or _against_ moves me a jot: I do
not say that the one is not more agreeable than the other.
Not far from the spot where I write, I first read Chaucer’s _Flower and
Leaf_, and was charmed with that young beauty, shrouded in her bower,
and listening with ever-fresh delight to the repeated song of the
nightingale close by her—the impression of the scene, the vernal
landscape, the cool of the morning, the gushing notes of the songstress,
‘And ayen, methought she sung close by mine ear,’
is as vivid as if it had been of yesterday; and nothing can persuade me
that that is not a fine poem. I do not find this impression conveyed in
Dryden’s version, and therefore nothing can persuade me that that is as
fine. I used to walk out at this time with Mr. and Miss L—— of an
evening, to look at the Claude Lorraine skies over our heads, melting
from azure into purple and gold, and to gather mushrooms, that sprung up
at our feet, to throw into our hashed mutton at supper. I was at that
time an enthusiastic admirer of Claude, and could dwell for ever on one
or two of the finest prints from him hung round my little room; the
fleecy flocks, the bending trees, the winding streams, the groves, the
nodding temples, the air-wove hills, and distant sunny vales; and tried
to translate them into their lovely living hues. People then told me
that Wilson was much superior to Claude. I did not believe them. Their
pictures have since been seen together at the British Institution, and
all the world have come into my opinion. I have not, on that account,
given it up. I will not compare our hashed mutton with Amelia’s; but it
put us in mind of it, and led to a discussion, sharply seasoned and well
sustained, till midnight, the result of which appeared some years after
in the Edinburgh Review. Have I a better opinion of those criticisms on
that account, or should I therefore maintain them with greater vehemence
and tenaciousness? Oh no! Both rather with less, now that they are
before the public, and it is for them to make their election.
It is in looking back to such scenes that I draw my best consolation for
the future. Later impressions come and go, and serve to fill up the
intervals; but these are my standing resource, my true classics. If I
have had few real pleasures or advantages, my ideas, from their sinewy
texture, have been to me in the nature of realities; and if I should not
be able to add to the stock, I can live by husbanding the interest. As
to my speculations, there is little to admire in them but my admiration
of others; and whether they have an echo in time to come or not, I have
learned to set a grateful value on the past, and am content to wind up
the account of what is personal only to myself and the immediate circle
of objects in which I have moved, with an act of easy oblivion,
‘And curtain close such scene from every future view.’
BYRON AND WORDSWORTH
_The London Weekly Review._] [_April 5, 1828._
I am much surprised at Lord Byron’s haste to return a volume of Spenser,
which was lent him by Mr. Hunt, and at his apparent indifference to the
progress and (if he pleased) _advancement_ of poetry up to the present
day. Did he really think that all genius was concentred in his own time,
or in his own bosom? With his pride of ancestry, had he no curiosity to
explore the heraldry of intellect? or did he regard the Muse as an
upstart—a mere modern _bluestocking_ and fine lady? I am afraid that
high birth and station, instead of being (as Mr. Burke predicates,) ‘a
cure for a narrow and selfish mind,’ only make a man more full of
himself, and, instead of enlarging and refining his views, impatient of
any but the most inordinate and immediate stimulus. I do not recollect,
in all Lord Byron’s writings, a single recurrence to a feeling or object
that had ever excited an interest before; there is no display of natural
affection—no twining of the heart round any object: all is the restless
and disjointed effect of first impressions, of novelty, contrast,
surprise, grotesque costume, or sullen grandeur. _His_ beauties are the
_houris_ of Paradise, the favourites of a seraglio, the changing visions
of a feverish dream. His poetry, it is true, is stately and dazzling,
arched like a rainbow, of bright and lovely hues, painted on the cloud
of his own gloomy temper—perhaps to disappear as soon! It is easy to
account for the antipathy between him and Mr. Wordsworth. Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetical mistress is a Pamela; Lord Byron’s an Eastern
princess or a Moorish maid. It is the extrinsic, the uncommon that
captivates him, and all the rest he holds in sovereign contempt. This is
the obvious result of pampered luxury and high-born sentiments. The
mind, like the palace in which it has been brought up, admits none but
new and costly furniture. From a scorn of homely simplicity, and a
surfeit of the artificial, it has but one resource left in exotic
manners and preternatural effect. So we see in novels, written by ladies
of quality, all the marvellous allurements of a fairy tale, jewels,
quarries of diamonds, giants, magicians, condors and ogres.[55] The
author of the Lyrical Ballads describes the lichen on the rock, the
withered fern, with some peculiar feeling that he has about them: the
author of Childe Harold describes the stately cypress, or the fallen
column, with the feeling that every schoolboy has about them. The world
is a grown schoolboy, and relishes the latter most. When Rousseau called
out—‘_Ah! voila de la pervenche!_’ in a transport of joy at sight of the
periwinkle, because he had first seen this little blue flower in company
with Madame Warens thirty years before, I cannot help thinking, that any
astonishment expressed at the sight of a palm-tree, or even of Pompey’s
Pillar, is vulgar compared to this! Lord Byron, when he does not saunter
down Bond-street, goes into the East: when he is not occupied with the
passing topic, he goes back two thousand years, at one poetic, gigantic
stride! But instead of the sweeping mutations of empire, and the vast
lapses of duration, shrunk up into an antithesis, commend me to the
‘slow and creeping foot of time,’ in the commencement of Ivanhoe, where
the jester and the swine-herd watch the sun going down behind the
low-stunted trees of the forest, and their loitering and impatience make
the summer’s day seem so long, that we wonder how we have ever got to
the end of the six hundred years that have passed since! That where the
face of nature has changed, time should have rolled on its course, is
but a common-place discovery; but that where all seems the same, (the
long rank grass, and the stunted oaks, and the innocent pastoral
landscape,) all should have changed—this is to me the burthen and the
mystery. The ruined pile is a memento and a monument to him that reared
it—oblivion has here done but half its work; but what yearnings, what
vain conflicts with its fate come over the soul in the other case, which
makes man seem like a grasshopper—an insect of the hour, and all that he
is, or that others have been—nothing!
ON CANT AND HYPOCRISY
A Fragment
_The London Weekly Review._] [_December 6, 1828._
‘If to do were as easy as to teach others what were good to be done,
chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’
Mr. Addison, it is said, was fond of tippling; and Curl, it is added,
when he called on him in the morning, used to ask as a particular favour
for a glass of Canary, by way of ingratiating himself, and that the
other might have a pretence to join him and finish the bottle. He fell a
martyr to this habit, and yet (some persons more nice than wise
exclaim,) he desired that the young Earl of Warwick might attend him on
his death-bed, ‘to see how a Christian could die!’ I see no
inconsistency nor hypocrisy in this. A man may be a good Christian, a
sound believer, and a sincere lover of virtue, and have,
notwithstanding, one or more failings. If he had recommended it to
others to get drunk, then I should have said he was a hypocrite, and
that his pretended veneration for the Christian religion was a mere
cloak put on to suit the purposes of fashion or convenience. His doing
what it condemned was no proof of any such thing: ‘The spirit was
willing, but the flesh was weak.’ He is a hypocrite who professes what
he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or
approves. It might on the same ground be argued, that a man is a
hypocrite who admires Raphael or Shakespeare, because he cannot paint
like the one, or write like the other. If any one really despised what
he affected outwardly to admire, this would be hypocrisy. If he affected
to admire it a great deal more than he really did, this would be cant.
Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts,
and not between our belief and actions. The last constantly belie the
strongest convictions and resolutions in the best of men; it is only the
base and dishonest who give themselves credit with their tongue, for
sentiments and opinions which in their hearts they disown.
I do not therefore think that the old theological maxim—‘The greater the
sinner, the greater the saint’—is so utterly unfounded. There is some
mixture of truth in it. For as long as man is composed of two parts,
body and soul; and while these are allowed to pull different ways, I see
no reason why, in proportion to the length the one goes, the opposition
or reaction of the other should not be more violent. It is certain, for
example, that no one makes such good resolutions as the sot and the
gambler in their moments of repentance, or can be more impressed with
the horrors of their situation;—should this disposition, instead of a
transient, idle pang, by chance become lasting, who can be supposed to
feel the beauty of temperance and economy more, or to look back with
greater gratitude to their escape from the trammels of vice and passion?
Would the ingenious and elegant author of the SPECTATOR feel less regard
for the Scriptures, because they denounced in pointed terms the
infirmity that ‘most easily beset him,’ that was the torment of his
life, and the cause of his death? Such reasoning would be true, if man
was a simple animal or a logical machine, and all his faculties and
impulses were in strict unison; instead of which they are eternally at
variance, and no one hates or takes part against himself more heartily
or heroically than does the same individual. Does he not pass sentence
on his own conduct? Is not his conscience both judge and accuser? What
else is the meaning of all our resolutions against ourselves, as well as
of our exhortations to others? _Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor_, is not the language of hypocrisy, but of human nature.
The hypocrisy of priests has been a butt for ridicule in all ages; but I
am not sure that there has not been more wit than philosophy in it. A
priest, it is true, is obliged to affect a greater degree of sanctity
than ordinary men, and probably more than he possesses; and this is so
far, I am willing to allow, hypocrisy and solemn grimace. But I cannot
admit, that though he may exaggerate, or even make an ostentatious
display of religion and virtue through habit and spiritual pride, that
this is a proof he has not these sentiments in his heart, or that his
whole behaviour is the mere acting of a part. His character, his
motives, are not altogether pure and sincere: are they therefore all
false and hollow? No such thing. It is contrary to all our observation
and experience so to interpret it. We all wear some disguise—make some
professions—use some artifice to set ourselves off as being better than
we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and
praiseworthy qualities at bottom, though we may endeavour to keep some
others that we think less to our credit as much as possible in the
back-ground:—why then should we not extend the same favourable
construction to monks and friars, who may be sometimes caught tripping
as well as other men—with less excuse, no doubt; but if it is also with
greater remorse of conscience, which probably often happens, their
pretensions are not all downright, barefaced imposture. Their sincerity,
compared with that of other men, can only be judged of by the proportion
between the degree of virtue they profess, and that which they practice,
or at least carefully seek to realise. To conceive it otherwise, is to
insist that characters must be all perfect, or all vicious—neither of
which suppositions is even possible. If a clergyman is notoriously a
drunkard, a debauchee, a glutton, or a scoffer, then for him to lay
claim at the same time to extraordinary inspirations of faith or grace,
is both scandalous and ridiculous. The scene between the Abbot and the
poor brother in the ‘Duenna’ is an admirable exposure of this
double-faced dealing. But because a parson has a relish for the good
things of this life, or what is commonly called a _liquorish tooth in
his head_, (beyond what he would have it supposed by others, or even by
himself,) that he has therefore no fear or belief of the next, I hold
for a crude and vulgar prejudice. If a poor half-starved parish priest
pays his court to an _olla podrida_, or a venison pasty, with uncommon
_gusto_, shall we say that he has no other sentiments in offering his
devotions to a crucifix, or in counting his beads? I see no more ground
for such an inference, than for affirming that Handel was not in earnest
when he sat down to compose a Symphony, because he had at the same time
perhaps a bottle of cordials in his cupboard; or that Raphael was not
entitled to the epithet of _divine_, because he was attached to the
Fornarina! Everything has its turn in this chequered scene of things,
unless we prevent it from taking its turn by over-rigid conditions, or
drive men to despair or the most callous effrontery, by erecting a
standard of perfection, to which no one can conform in reality! Thomson,
in his ‘Castle of Indolence,’ (a subject on which his pen ran riot,) has
indulged in rather a free description of ‘a little round, fat, oily man
of God—
‘Who shone all glittering with ungodly dew,
If a tight damsel chanced to trippen by;
Which, when observed, he shrunk into his mew,
And straight would recollect his piety anew.’
Now, was the piety in this case the less real, because it had been
forgotten for a moment? Or even if this motive should not prove the
strongest in the end, would this therefore show that it was none, which
is necessary to the argument here combated, or to make out our little
plump priest a very knave! A priest may be honest, and yet err; as a
woman may be modest, and yet half-inclined to be a rake. So the virtue
of prudes may be suspected, though not their sincerity. The strength of
their passions may make them more conscious of their weakness, and more
cautious of exposing themselves; but not more to blind others than as a
guard upon themselves. Again, suppose a clergyman hazards a jest upon
sacred subjects, does it follow that he does not believe a word of the
matter? Put the case that any one else, encouraged by his example, takes
up the banter or levity, and see what effect it will have upon the
reverend divine. He will turn round like a serpent trod upon, with all
the vehemence and asperity of the most bigoted orthodoxy. Is this
dictatorial and exclusive spirit then put on merely as a mask and to
browbeat others? No; but he thinks he is privileged to trifle with the
subject safely himself, from the store of evidence he has in reserve,
and from the nature of his functions; but he is afraid of serious
consequences being drawn from what others might say, or from his seeming
to countenance it; and the moment the Church is in danger, or his own
faith brought in question, his attachment to each becomes as visible as
his hatred to those who dare to impugn either the one or the other. A
woman’s attachment to her husband is not to be suspected, if she will
allow no one to abuse him but herself! It has been remarked, that with
the spread of liberal opinions, or a more general scepticism on articles
of faith, the clergy and religious persons in general have become more
squeamish and jealous of any objections to their favourite doctrines:
but this is what must follow in the natural course of things—the
resistance being always in proportion to the danger; and arguments and
books that were formerly allowed to pass unheeded, because it was
supposed impossible they could do any mischief, are now denounced or
prohibited with the most zealous vigilance, from a knowledge of the
contagious nature of their influence and contents. So in morals, it is
obvious that the greatest nicety of expression and allusion must be
observed, where the manners are the most corrupt, and the imagination
most easily excited, not out of mere affectation, but as a dictate of
common sense and decency.
One of the finest remarks that has been made in modern times, is that of
Lord Shaftesbury, that there is no such thing as a perfect Theist, or an
absolute Atheist; that whatever may be the general conviction
entertained on the subject, the evidence is not and cannot be at all
times equally present to the mind; that even if it were, we are not in
the same humour to receive it: a fit of the gout, a shower of rain
shakes our best-established conclusions; and according to circumstances
and the frame of mind we are in, our belief varies from the most
sanguine enthusiasm to lukewarm indifference, or the most gloomy
despair. There is a point of conceivable faith which might prevent any
lapse from virtue, and reconcile all contrarieties between theory and
practice; but this is not to be looked for in the ordinary course of
nature, and is reserved for the abodes of the blest. Here, ‘upon this
bank and shoal of time,’ the utmost we can hope to attain is, a strong
habitual belief in the excellence of virtue, or the dispensations of
Providence; and the conflict of the passions, and their occasional
mastery over us, far from disproving or destroying this general,
rational conviction, often fling us back more forcibly upon it, and like
other infidelities and misunderstandings, produce all the alternate
remorse and raptures of repentance and reconciliation.
It has been frequently remarked that the most obstinate heretic or
confirmed sceptic, witnessing the service of the Roman Catholic church,
the elevation of the host amidst the sounds of music, the pomp of
ceremonies, the embellishments of art, feels himself spell-bound: and is
almost persuaded to become a renegade to his reason or his religion.
Even in hearing a vespers chaunted on the stage, or in reading an
account of a torch-light procession in a romance, a superstitious awe
creeps over the frame, and we are momentarily charmed out of ourselves.
When such is the obvious and involuntary influence of circumstances on
the imagination, shall we say that a monkish recluse surrounded from his
childhood by all this pomp, a stranger to any other faith, who has
breathed no other atmosphere, and all whose meditations are bent on this
one subject both by interest and habit and duty, is to be set down as a
rank and heartless mountebank in the professions he makes of belief in
it, because his thoughts may sometimes wander to forbidden subjects, or
his feet stumble on forbidden ground? Or shall not the deep shadows of
the woods in Vallombrosa enhance the solemnity of this feeling, or the
icy horrors of the Grand Chartreux add to its elevation and its purity?
To argue otherwise is to misdeem of human nature, and to limit its
capacities for good or evil by some narrow-minded standard of our own.
Man is neither a God nor a brute; but there is a prosaic and a poetical
side to everything concerning him, and it is as impossible absolutely
and for a constancy to exclude either one or the other from the mind, as
to make him live without air or food. The _ideal_, the empire of thought
and aspiration after truth and good, is inseparable from the nature of
an intellectual being—what right have we then to catch at every strife
which in the mortified professors of religion the spirit wages with the
flesh as grossly vicious, or at every doubt, the bare suggestion of
which fills them with consternation and despair, as a proof of the most
glaring hypocrisy? The grossnesses of religion and its stickling for
mere forms as its essence, have given a handle, and a just one, to its
impugners. At the feast of Ramadan (says Voltaire) the Mussulmans wash
and pray five times a day, and then fall to cutting one another’s
throats again with the greatest deliberation and good-will. The two
things, I grant, are sufficiently at variance; but they are, I contend,
equally sincere in both. The Mahometans are savages, but they are not
the less true believers—they hate their enemies as heartily as they
revere the Koran. This, instead of showing the fallacy of the _ideal_
principle, shows its universality and indestructible essence. Let a man
be as bad as he will, as little refined as possible, and indulge
whatever hurtful passions or gross vices he thinks proper, these cannot
occupy the whole of his time; and in the intervals between one scoundrel
action and another he may and must have better thoughts, and may have
recourse to those of religion (true or false) among the number, without
in this being guilty of hypocrisy or of making a jest of what is
considered as sacred. This, I take it, is the whole secret of Methodism,
which is a sort of modern vent for the ebullitions of the spirit through
the gaps of unrighteousness.
We often see that a person condemns in another the very thing he is
guilty of himself. Is this hypocrisy? It may, or it may not. If he
really feels none of the disgust and abhorrence he expresses, this is
quackery and impudence. But if he really expresses what he feels, (and
he easily may, for it is the abstract idea he contemplates in the case
of another, and the immediate temptation to which he yields in his own,
so that he probably is not even conscious of the identity or connexion
between the two,) then this is not hypocrisy, but want of strength and
keeping in the moral sense. All morality consists in squaring our
actions and sentiments to our ideas of what is fit and proper; and it is
the incessant struggle and alternate triumph of the two principles, the
_ideal_ and the physical, that keeps up this ‘mighty coil and pudder’
about vice and virtue, and is one great source of all the good and evil
in the world. The mind of man is like a clock that is always running
down, and requires to be as constantly wound up. The _ideal_ principle
is the master-key that winds it up, and without which it would come to a
stand: the sensual and selfish feelings are the dead weights that pull
it down to the gross and grovelling. Till the intellectual faculty is
destroyed, (so that the mind sees nothing beyond itself, or the present
moment,) it is impossible to have all brutal depravity: till the
material and physical are done away with, (so that it shall contemplate
everything from a purely spiritual and disinterested point of view,) it
is impossible to have all virtue. There must be a mixture of the two, as
long as man is compounded of opposite materials, a contradiction and an
eternal competition for the mastery. I by no means think a single bad
action condemns a man, for he probably condemns it as much as you do;
nor a single bad habit, for he is probably trying all his life to get
rid of it. A man is only thoroughly profligate when he has lost the
sense of right and wrong; or a thorough hypocrite, when he has not even
the wish to be what he appears. The greatest offence against virtue is
to speak ill of it. To recommend certain things is worse than to
practise them. There may be an excuse for the last in the frailty of
passion; but the former can arise from nothing but an utter depravity of
disposition. Any one may yield to temptation, and yet feel a sincere
love and aspiration after virtue: but he who maintains vice in theory,
has not even the conception or capacity for virtue in his mind. Men err:
fiends only make a mock at goodness.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The London Weekly Review._] [_December 13, 1828._
We sometimes deceive ourselves, and think worse of human nature than it
deserves, in consequence of judging of character from names, and
classes, and modes of life. No one is simply and absolutely any one
thing, though he may be branded with it as a name. Some persons have
expected to see his crimes written in the face of a murderer, and have
been disappointed because they did not, as if this impeached the
distinction between virtue and vice. Not at all. The circumstance only
showed that the man was other things, and had other feelings besides
those of a murderer. If he had nothing else,—if he had fed on nothing
else,—if he had dreamt of nothing else, but schemes of murder, his
features would have expressed nothing else: but this perfection in vice
is not to be expected from the contradictory and mixed nature of our
motives. Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers; nay, modesty in
a brothel. Even among the most abandoned of the other sex, there is not
unfrequently found to exist (contrary to all that is generally supposed)
one strong and individual attachment, which remains unshaken to the
last. Virtue may be said to steal, like a guilty thing, into the secret
haunts of vice and infamy; it clings to their devoted victim, and will
not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart. Again,
there is a heroism in crime, as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have
also their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their
favour, but is a proof of the heroical disinterestedness of man’s
nature, and that whatever he does, he must fling a dash of romance and
sublimity into it; just as some grave biographer has said of
Shakespeare, that ‘even when he killed a calf, he made a speech and did
it in a great style.’
It is then impossible to get rid of this original distinction and
contradictory bias, and to reduce everything to the system of French
levity and Epicurean indifference. Wherever there is a capacity of
conceiving of things as different from what they are, there must be a
principle of taste and selection—a disposition to make them better, and
a power to make them worse. Ask a Parisian milliner if she does not
think one bonnet more becoming than another—a Parisian dancing-master if
French grace is not better than English awkwardness—a French cook if all
sauces are alike—a French _blacklegs_ if all throws are equal on the
dice? It is curious that the French nation restrict rigid rules and
fixed principles to cookery and the drama, and maintain that the great
drama of human life is entirely a matter of caprice and fancy. No one
will assert that Raphael’s histories, that Claude’s landscapes are not
better than a daub: but if the expression in one of Raphael’s faces is
better than the most mean and vulgar, how resist the consequence that
the feeling so expressed is better also? It does not appear to me that
all faces or all actions are alike. If goodness were only a theory, it
were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of
things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for
instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will—the
very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else
that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed
satire against them. It is no small consideration that the mind is
capable even of feigning such things. So I would contend against that
reasoning which would have it thought that if religion is not true,
there is no difference between mankind and the beasts that perish;—I
should say, that this distinction is equally proved, if religion is
supposed to be a mere fabrication of the human mind; the capacity to
conceive it makes the difference. The idea alone of an over-ruling
Providence, or of a future state, is as much a distinctive mark of a
superiority of nature, as the invention of the mathematics, which are
true,—or of poetry, which is a fable. Whatever the truth or falsehood of
our speculations, the power to make them is peculiar to ourselves.
The contrariety and warfare of different faculties and dispositions
within us has not only given birth to the Manichean and Gnostic
heresies, and to other superstitions of the East, but will account
for many of the mummeries and dogmas both of Popery and
Calvinism,—confession, absolution, justification by faith, &c.;
which, in the hopelessness of attaining perfection, and our
dissatisfaction with ourselves for falling short of it, are all
substitutes for actual virtue, and an attempt to throw the burthen
of a task, to which we are unequal or only half disposed, on the
merits of others, or on outward forms, ceremonies, and professions
of faith. Hence the crowd of
‘Eremites and friars,
White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.’
If we do not conform to the law, we at least acknowledge the
jurisdiction of the court. A person does wrong; he is sorry for it; and
as he still feels himself liable to error, he is desirous to make
atonement as well as he can, by ablutions, by tithes, by penance, by
sacrifices, or other voluntary demonstrations of obedience, which are in
his power, though his passions are not, and which prove that his will is
not refractory, and that his understanding is right towards God. The
stricter tenets of Calvinism, which allow of no medium between grace and
reprobation, and doom man to eternal punishment for every breach of the
moral law, as an equal offence against infinite truth and justice,
proceed (like the paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics) from taking a
half-view of this subject, and considering man as amenable only to the
dictates of his understanding and his conscience, and not excusable from
the temptations and frailty of human ignorance and passion. The mixing
up of religion and morality together, or the making us accountable for
every word, thought, or action, under no less a responsibility than our
everlasting future welfare or misery, has also added incalculably to the
difficulties of self-knowledge, has superinduced a violent and spurious
state of feeling, and made it almost impossible to distinguish the
boundaries between the true and false, in judging of human conduct and
motives. A religious man is afraid of looking into the state of his
soul, lest at the same time he should reveal it to Heaven; and tries to
persuade himself that by shutting his eyes to his true character and
feelings, they will remain a profound secret both here and hereafter.
This is a strong engine and irresistible inducement to self-deception;
and the more zealous any one is in his convictions of the truth of
religion, the more we may suspect the sincerity of his pretensions to
piety and morality.
Thus, though I think there is very little downright hypocrisy in the
world, I do think there is a great deal of _cant_—‘cant religious, cant
political, cant literary,’ &c. as Lord Byron said. Though few people
have the face to set up for the very thing they in their hearts despise,
we almost all want to be thought better than we are, and affect a
greater admiration or abhorrence of certain things than we really feel.
Indeed, some degree of affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress
is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to
produce any effect at all. There was formerly the two hours’ sermon, the
long-winded grace, the nasal drawl, the uplifted hands and eyes; all
which, though accompanied with some corresponding emotion, expressed
more than was really felt, and were in fact intended to make up for the
conscious deficiency. As our interest in anything wears out with time
and habit, we exaggerate the outward symptoms of zeal as mechanical
helps to devotion, dwell the longer on our words as they are less felt,
and hence the very origin of the term, _cant_. The cant of
sentimentality has succeeded to that of religion. There is a cant of
humanity, of patriotism and loyalty—not that people do not feel these
emotions, but they make too great a _fuss_ about them, and drawl out the
expression of them till they tire themselves and others. There is a cant
about Shakespeare. There is a cant about _Political Economy_ just now.
In short, there is and must be a cant about everything that excites a
considerable degree of attention and interest, and that people would be
thought to know and care rather more about than they actually do. Cant
is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment;
hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and
have no wish for. Mr. Coleridge is made up of _cant_, that is, of
mawkish affectation and sensibility; but he has not sincerity enough to
be a _hypocrite_, that is, he has not hearty dislike or contempt enough
for anything, to give the lie to his puling professions of admiration
and esteem for it. The fuss that Mr. Liberal Snake makes about Political
Economy is not cant, but what Mr. Theodore Hook politely calls _humbug_;
he himself is hardly the dupe of his own pompous reasoning, but he
wishes to make it the _stalking-horse_ of his ambition or interest to
sneak into a place and curry favour with the Government....
POETRY
_The Atlas._] [_March 8, 1829._
As there are two kinds of rhyme, one that is rhyme to the ear, and
another to the eye only; so there may be said to be two kinds of poetry,
one that is a description of objects to those who have never seen or but
slightly studied them; the other is a description of objects addressed
to those who have seen and are intimately acquainted with them, and
expressing the feeling which is the result of such knowledge. It is
needless to add that the first kind of poetry is comparatively
superficial and common-place; the last profound, lofty, nay often
divine. Take an example (one out of a thousand) from Shakspeare. In
enumerating the wished-for contents of her basket of flowers, _Perdita_
in the _Winter’s Tale_ mentions among others——
‘Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids.’
This passage which knocks down John Bull with its perfumed and melting
softness, and savours of ‘that fine madness which our first poets had,’
is a mystery, an _untranslateable_ language, to all France: Racine could
not have conceived what it was about—the stupidest Englishman feels a
certain pride and pleasure in it. What a privilege (if that were all) to
be born on this the cloudy and poetical side of the Channel! We may in
part clear up this contradiction in tastes by the clue above given. The
French are more apt at taking the patterns of their ideas from words;
we, who are slower and heavier, are obliged to look closer at things
before we can pronounce upon them at all, which in the end perhaps opens
a larger field both of observation and fancy. Thus the phrase ‘violets
_dim_,’ to those who have never seen the object, or who, having paid no
attention to it, refer to the description for their notion of it, seems
to convey a slur rather than a compliment, dimness being no beauty in
itself; so this part of the story would not have been ventured upon in
French or tinsel poetry. But to those who have seen, and been as it were
enamoured of the little hedge-row candidate for applause, looking at it
again and again (as misers contemplate their gold—as fine ladies hang
over their jewels), till its image has sunk into the soul, what other
word is there that (far from putting the reader out of conceit with it)
so well recals its deep purple glow, its retired modesty, its sullen,
conscious beauty? Those who have not seen the flower cannot form an idea
of its character, nor understand the line without it. Its aspect is
dull, obtuse, faint, absorbed; but at the same time soft, luxurious,
proud, and full of meaning. People who look at nature without being
sensible to these distinctions and contrarieties of feeling, had better
(instead of the flower) look only at the label on the stalk.
Connoisseurs in French wines pretend to know all these depths and
refinements of taste, though connoisseurs in French poetry pretend to
know them not. To return to our text——
‘Violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath.’
How _bizarre_! cries one hypercritic. What far-fetched metaphors!
exclaims another. We shall not dwell on the allusion to ‘Cytherea’s
breath,’ it is obvious enough: but how can the violet’s smell be said to
be ‘sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes?’ Oh! honeyed words, how ill
understood! And is there no true and rooted analogy between our
different sensations, as well as a positive and literal identity? Is
there not a sugared, melting, half-sleepy look in some eyelids, like the
luscious, languid smell of flowers? How otherwise express that air of
scorn and tenderness which breathes from them? Is there not a balmy dew
upon them which one would kiss off? Speak, ye lovers! if any such remain
in these degenerate days to take the part of genuine poetry against
cold, barren criticism; for poetry is nothing but an intellectual
love——Nature is the poet’s mistress, and the heart in his case lends
words and harmonious utterance to the tongue.——Again, how full of truth
and pity is the turn which is given to the description of the pale and
faded primrose, watching for the sun’s approach as for the torch of
Hymen! Milton has imitated this not so well in ‘cowslips wan that hang
the pensive head.’ Cowslips are of a gold colour, rather than wan. In
speaking of the daffodils, it seems as if our poet had been struck with
these ‘lowly children of the ground’ on their first appearance, and
seeing what bright and unexpected guests they were at that cold,
comfortless season, wondered how ‘they came before the swallow (the
harbinger of summer) dared,’ and being the only lovely thing in nature,
fancied the winds of March were taken with them, and tamed their fury at
the sight. No one but a poet who has spent his youth in the company of
nature could so describe it, as no reader who has not experienced the
same elementary sensations, their combinations and contrasts, can
properly enter into it when so described. The finest poetry, then, is
not a paradox nor a trite paraphrase; but a bold and happy enunciation
of truths and feelings deeply implanted in the mind——Apollo, the god of
poetry and day, evolving the thoughts of the breast, as he does the seed
from the frozen earth, or enables the flower to burst its folds. Poetry
is, indeed, a fanciful structure; but a fanciful structure raised on the
ground-work of the strongest and most intimate associations of our
ideas: otherwise, it is good for nothing, _vox et preterea nihil_. A
literal description goes for nothing in poetry, a pure fiction is of as
little worth; but it is the extreme beauty and power of an impression
with all its accompaniments, or the very intensity and truth of feeling,
that pushes the poet over the verge of matter-of-fact, and justifies him
in resorting to the licence of fiction to express what without his
‘winged words’ must have remained for ever untold. Thus the feeling of
the contrast between the roughness and bleakness of the winds of March
and the tenderness and beauty of the flowers of spring is already in the
reader’s mind, if he be an observer of nature: the poet, to show the
utmost extent and conceivable effect of this contrast, _feigns_ that the
winds themselves are sensible of it and smit with the beauty on which
they commit such rude assaults. Lord Byron, whose imagination was not of
this compound character, and more wilful than natural, produced splendid
exaggerations. Mr. Shelley, who felt the want of originality without the
power to supply it, distorted every thing from what it was, and his pen
produced only abortions. The one would say that the sun was a ‘ball of
dazzling fire;’ the other, not knowing what to say, but determined ‘to
elevate and surprize,’ would swear that it was _black_. This latter
class of poetry may be denominated the _Apocalyptical_.
ENGLISH GRAMMAR
_The Atlas._] [_March 15, 1829._
This is one of those subjects on which the human understanding has
played the fool, almost as egregiously, though with less dire
consequences, than on many others; or rather one on which it has not
chosen to exert itself at all, being hoodwinked and led blindfold by
mere precedent and authority. Scholars who have made and taught from
English grammars were previously and systematically initiated in the
Greek and Latin tongues, so that they have, without deigning to notice
the difference, taken the rules of the latter and applied them
indiscriminately and dogmatically to the former. As well might they
pretend that there is a _dual number_ in the Latin language because
there is one in the Greek.
The _Definitions_ alone are able to corrupt a whole generation of
ingenuous youth. They seem calculated for no other purpose than to
_mystify_ and _stultify_ the understanding, and to inoculate it betimes
with a due portion of credulity and verbal sophistry. After repeating
them by rote, to maintain that two and two makes five is easy, and a
thing of course. What appears most extraordinary is that notwithstanding
the complete exposure of their fallacy and nonsense by Horne Tooke and
others, the same system and method of instruction should be persisted
in; and that grammar succeeds grammar and edition edition, re-echoing
the same point-blank contradictions and shallow terms. Establishments
and endowments of learning (which subsist on a ‘foregone conclusion’)
may have something to do with it; independently of which, and for each
person’s individual solace, the more senseless the absurdity and the
longer kept up, the more reluctant does the mind seem to part with it,
whether in the greatest things or mere trifles and technicalities; for
in the latter, as the retracting an error could produce no startling
sensation, and be accompanied with no redeeming enthusiasm, its
detection must be a pure loss and pitiful mortification. One might
suppose, that out of so many persons as have their attention directed to
this subject, some few would find out their mistake and protest against
the common practice; but the greater the number of professional
labourers in the vineyard, who seek not truth but a livelihood, and can
_pay with words_ more currently than with things, the less chance must
there be of this, since the majority will always set their faces against
it, and insist upon the old _Mumpsimus_ in preference to the new
_Sumpsimus_. A schoolmaster who should go so far out of his way as to
take the Diversions of Purley for a text-book, would be regarded by his
brethren of the rod as ‘a man of Ind,’ and would soon have the dogs of
the village bark at him. It is said without blushing, by both masters
and ushers who do not chuse to be ‘wise above what is written,’ that a
noun is the name of a _thing_, _i.e._ substance, as if _love_, _honour_,
_colour_, were the names of substances. An adjective is defined to be
the name of a quality; and yet in the expressions, a _gold_ snuff-box, a
_wooden_ spoon, an _iron_ chest, &c., the words _gold_, _wooden_,
_iron_, are allowed by all these profound writers, grammarians, and
logicians, to be essentially adjectives. A verb is likewise defined to
be a word denoting _being_, _action_, or _suffering_; and yet the words
_being_, _action_, _suffering_ (or passion), are all substantives; so
that these words cannot be supposed to have any reference to the things
whose names they bear, if it be the peculiar and sole office of the verb
to denote them. If a system were made in burlesque and purposely to call
into question and expose its own nakedness, it could not go beyond this,
which is gravely taught in all seminaries, and patiently learnt by all
school-boys as an exercise and discipline of the intellectual faculties.
Again, it is roundly asserted that there are _six cases_ (why not
seven?) in the English language; and a case is defined to be a peculiar
termination or inflection added to a noun to show its position in the
sentence. Now in the Latin language there are no doubt a number of
cases, inasmuch as there are a number of inflections;[56] and for the
same reason (if words have a meaning) in the English Language there are
none, or only one, the genitive; because if we except this, there is no
inflection or variety whatever in the terminations. Thus to instance in
the present noun—A case, Of a case, To a case, A case, O case, From a
case—they tell you that the word _case_ is here its own nominative,
genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, and ablative, though the deuce
of any case—that is inflection of the noun—is there in the case.
Nevertheless, many a pedagogue would swear till he was black in the face
that it is so; and would lie awake many a restless night boiling with
rage and vexation that any one should be so lost to shame and reason as
to suspect that there is here also a distinction without a difference.
In strictness, in the Latin word there are only four, _casus_, _casui_,
_casum_, _casu_; and the rest are conceded out of uniformity with other
cases where the terminations are six times varied:[57] but why insist on
the full complement, where there is no case in the whole language (but
for the arbitrary one already excepted) to bear it out? Again, it is
agreed on all hands, that English nouns have genders. Except with a few,
where the termination is borrowed from another language, such as
_Empress_, &c., there is no possibility of generally telling the sex
implied from the form of the termination: but men looking at the point
with their Latin eyes, see genders wherever they have been accustomed to
find them in a foreign tongue. The difference of sex is vernacularly
conveyed in English by a different word—_man_, _woman_, _stag_, _deer_,
_king_, _queen_, &c.; and there is no such thing as conventional gender
in neutral things—_house_, _church_, _field_, and so on. All this might
be excusable as a prejudice or oversight; but then why persist in it in
the thirty-eighth edition of a standard book published by the great firm
in Paternoster-row? We sometimes think mankind have a propensity to
lying not more in matters-of-fact than theory. They maintain what they
know to be without a shadow of foundation, and in the sheer spirit of
contradiction, or because they hate to be convinced. In the same manner
as the cases and genders of nouns, the whole ramification of the verb is
constructed, and hung up for the admiration of the credulous upon the
ideal of the Latin and Greek verb, with all its tenses, persons, moods,
and participles, whether there be anything more than a mere skeleton of
a resemblance to suspend all this learned patch-work upon or not. ‘I
_love_, thou _lovest_ he _loves_; we, ye, they _love_.’ There is a
difference in the three first, so that from announcing the verb, you
know the prefix; but in the three last, what difference is there, what
sign of separation from one another, or from the first person singular?
‘I _loved_’ is the past tense doubtless: it is a difference of
inflection denoting time: but ‘I _did_ love, I _have loved_, I _will_,
_can_, _shall_, _would_ love,’ are not properly tenses or moods of the
verb _love_, but other verbs with the infinitive or participle of the
first verb appended to them. Thus is our irregular verb professionally
licked into regularity and shape. When the thing is wanting it is
supplied by the name. _Empedocles was a cobbler, even when he did not
cobble._ A conjunction is held to be a part of speech without any
meaning in itself, but that serves to connect sentences together, such
as _that_, _and_, &c. It is proved by Mr. Horne Tooke, that the
conjunction _that_ is no other than the pronoun _that_ (with the words
_thing_ or _proposition_ understood)—as _and_ is the imperative of the
old Saxon verb _anandad_ (to add), upon a similar principle—‘I say this
_and_ (or add) that’—and though it is above fifty years since this
luminous discovery was published to the world, no hint of it has crept
into any Grammar used in schools, and by authority. It seems to be taken
for granted that all sound and useful knowledge is by rote, and that if
it ceased to be so, the Church and State might crumble to pieces like
the conjunctions _and_ and _that_. There may be some truth in that.
It is strange that Mr. Horne Tooke, with all his logical and
etymological acuteness, should have been so bad a metaphysician as to
argue that all language was merely a disjointed tissue of names of
objects (with certain abbreviations), and that he should have given or
attempted no definition of the verb. He barely hints at it in one place,
_viz._—that the verb is _quod loquimur_, the noun _de quo_; that is, the
noun expresses the name of any thing or points out the object; the verb
signifies the opinion or will of the speaker concerning it. What then
becomes of the _infinitive mood_, which neither affirms, denies, nor
commands any thing, but is left like a log of wood in the high road of
grammar, to be picked up by the first jaunting-car of ‘winged words’
that comes that way with its moods, persons, and tenses, flying, and
turned to any use that may be wanted? Mr. Tooke was in the habit of
putting off his guests at Wimbledon with promising to explain some
_puzzle_ the following Sunday; and he left the world in the dark as to
the definition of the verb, much in the same spirit of _badinage_ and
mystery. We do not know when the deficiency is likely to be supplied,
unless it has been done by Mr. Fearn in his little work called
Anti-Tooke. We have not seen the publication, but we know the author to
be a most able and ingenious man, and capable of lighting upon nice
distinctions which few but himself would ever dream of. An excess of
modesty, which doubts every thing, is much more favourable to the
discovery of truth than that spirit of dogmatism which presumptuously
takes every thing for granted; but at the same time it is not equally
qualified to place its conclusions in the most advantageous and imposing
light; and we accordingly too often find our quacks and impostors
collecting a crowd with their drums, trumpets, and _placards_ of
themselves at the end of a street, while the ‘still, small’ pipe of
truth and simplicity is drowned in the loud din and bray, or forced to
retire to a distance to solace itself with its own low tones and
fine-drawn distinctions. Having touched upon this subject, we may be
allowed to add that some of our most eminent writers, as, for instance,
Mr. Maculloch with his _Principles of Political Economy_, and Mr. Mill
with his _Elements of Political Economy_, remind us of two barrel-organ
grinders in the same street, playing the same tune and contending for
precedence and mastery. What is Mozart to any of the four?
MEMORABILIA OF MR. COLERIDGE
_The Atlas._] [_March 22, 1829._
He said of an old cathedral, that it always appeared to him like a
_petrified religion_.
Hearing some one observe that the religious sentiments introduced in
Sheridan’s _Pizarro_ met with great applause on the stage, he replied,
that he thought this a sure sign of the decay of religion; for when
people began to patronise it as an amiable theatrical sentiment, they
had no longer any real faith in it.
He said of a Mr. H——, a friend of Fox’s, who always put himself forward
to interpret the great orator’s sentiments, and almost took the words
out of his mouth, that it put him in mind of the steeple of St. Thomas,
on Ludgate-hill, which is constantly getting in the way when you wish to
see the dome of St. Paul’s.
Seeing a little soiled copy of Thomson’s _Seasons_ lying in the
window-seat of an obscure inn on the sea-coast of Somersetshire, he
said, ‘_That_ is true fame.’
He observed of some friend, that he had _thought himself_ out of a
handsome face, and into a fine one.
He said of the French, that they received and gave out sensations too
quickly, to be a people of imagination. He thought Moliere’s father must
have been an Englishman.
According to Mr. Coleridge, common rhetoricians argued by metaphors;
Burke reasoned _in_ them.
He considered acuteness as a _shop-boy_ quality compared with subtlety
of mind; and quoted Paine as an example of the first, Berkeley as the
perfection of the last.
He extolled Bishop Butler’s _Sermons at the Rolls’ Chapel_ as full of
thought and sound views of philosophy; and conceived that he had proved
the love of piety and virtue to be as natural to the mind of man as the
delight it receives from the colour of a rose or the smell of a lily. He
spoke of the _Analysis_ as theological special-pleading.
He had no opinion of Hume, and very idly disputed his originality. He
said the whole of his argument on miracles was to be found stated (as an
objection) somewhere in Barrow.
He said Thomson was a true poet, but an indolent one. He seldom wrote a
good line, but he ‘rewarded resolution’ by following it up with a bad
one. Cowper he regarded as the reformer of the Della Cruscan style in
poetry, and the founder of the modern school.
Being asked which he thought the greater man, Milton or Shakspeare, he
replied that he could hardly venture to pronounce an opinion—that
Shakspeare appeared to him to have the strength, the stature of his
rival, with infinitely more agility; but that he could not bring himself
after all to look upon Shakspeare as any thing more than a beardless
stripling, and that if he had ever arrived at man’s estate, he would not
have been a man but a monster of intellect.
Being told that Mrs. Wolstonecraft exerted a very great ascendancy over
the mind of her husband, he said—‘It was always the case: people of
imagination naturally took the lead of people of mere understanding and
acquirement.’ This was scarcely doing justice to the author of _Caleb
Williams_.
He spoke of Mackintosh as deficient in original resources: he was
neither the great merchant nor manufacturer of intellectual riches; but
the ready warehouseman, who had a large assortment of goods, not
properly his own, and who knew where to lay his hand on whatever he
wanted. An argument which he had sustained for three hours together with
another erudite person on some grand question of philosophy, being
boasted of in Coleridge’s hearing as a mighty achievement, the latter
bluntly answered—‘Had there been a man of genius among you, he would
have settled the point in five minutes.’
Having been introduced to a well-known wit and professed jester, and his
own silence being complained of, he said he should no more think of
speaking where Mr. —— was present, than of interrupting an actor on the
stage.
Mr. Coleridge preferred Salvator Rosa to Claude, therein erring. He
however spoke eloquently and feelingly of pictures, where the
subject-matter was poetical, and where ‘more was meant than met the
eye.’ Thus he described the allegorical picture by Giotto in the
cemetery at Pisa, the _Triumph of Death_, where the rich, the young, and
the prosperous, are shrinking in horror and dismay from the grim
monster; and the wretched, the cripple, and the beggar, are invoking his
friendly aid, both in words and tones worthy of the subject. Mr.
Coleridge’s was the only conversation we ever heard in which the ideas
seemed set to music—it had the materials of philosophy and the sound of
music; or if the thoughts were sometimes poor and worthless, the
accompaniment was always fine.
He stated of Henderson, the actor, or some person of whom a very
indifferent jest was repeated, that it was the strongest proof of his
ability, and of the good things he _must have said_ to make his bad ones
pass current.
He characterised the _Prometheus Bound_ of Æschylus, as being less a
drama than an _Ode to Justice_.
He said that formerly men concealed their vices; but now, in the change
of manners and the laxity of theories, they boasted of those they had
not.
He sometimes told a story well, though but rarely. He used to speak with
some drollery and unction of his meeting in his tour in Germany with a
Lutheran clergyman, who expressed a great curiosity about the fate of
Dr. Dodd in a Latin gibberish which he could not at first understand.
‘_Doctorem Tott, Doctorem Tott! Infelix homo, collo suspensus!_‘—he
called out in an agony of suspense, fitting the action to the word, and
the idea of the reverend divine just then occurring to Mr. Coleridge’s
imagination. The Germans have a strange superstition that Dr. Dodd is
still wandering in disguise in the Hartz forest in Germany; and his
_Prison Thoughts_ are a favourite book with the initiated.
If these remarkable sayings are fewer than the reader might expect, they
are all we remember; and we might avail ourselves of the answer which
Quevedo puts into the mouth of the door-keeper of Hell, when the poet is
surprised to find so few kings in his custody—‘There are all that ever
existed!’
PETER PINDAR
_The Atlas._] [_April 5, 1829._
This celebrated wit and character lived to a great age, and retained his
spirit and faculties to the last. In person he did not at all answer to
Mr. Cobbett’s description of authors, as a lean, starveling, puny
race—‘men made after supper of a cheese-paring’—he was large, robust,
portly, and florid; or in Chaucer’s phrase,
‘A manly man to ben an abbot able.’
In his latter years he was blind, and had his head close shaved; and as
he sat bare-headed, presented the appearance of a fine old monk—a Luther
or a _Friar John_, with the gravity of the one and the wit and fiery
turbulence of the other. Peter had something clerical in his aspect: he
looked like a venerable father of poetry, or an unworthy son of the
church, equally fitted to indict a homily and preach a crusade, or to
point an epigram, and was evidently one of those children of Momus in
whom the good things of the body had laid the foundation of and given
birth to the good things of the mind. He was one of the few authors who
did not disappoint the expectations raised of them on a nearer
acquaintance; and the reason probably was what has been above hinted at,
namely, that he did not take to this calling from nervous despondency
and constitutional poverty of spirit, but from the fulness and
exuberance of his intellectual resources and animal spirits. Our
satirist was not a mere wit, but a man of strong sense and observation,
critical, argumentative, a good declaimer, and with a number of
acquirements of various kinds. His poetry, instead of having absorbed
all the little wit he had (which is so often the case), was but ‘the
sweepings of his mind.’ He said just as good things every hour in the
day. He was the life and soul of the company where he was—told a story
admirably, gave his opinion freely, spoke equally well, and with
thorough knowledge of poetry, painting, or music, could ‘haloo an
anthem’ with stentorian lungs in imitation of the whole chorus of
children at St. Paul’s, or bring the black population of the West Indies
before you like a swarm of flies in a sugar-basin, by his manner of
describing their antics and odd noises. Dr. Wolcot’s conversation was
rich and powerful (not to say overpowering)—there was an extreme unction
about it, but a certain tincture of grossness. His criticism was his
best. We remember in particular his making an excellent analysis of
Dryden’s _Alexander’s Feast_ in a controversy on its merits with Mr.
Curran; and as a specimen of his _parallelisms_ between the sister-arts,
he used to say of Viotti (the celebrated violin-player), that ‘he was
the Michael Angelo of the fiddle.’ He had a heresy in painting, which
was, that Claude Lorraine was inferior to Wilson; but the orthodox
believers were obliged to be silent before him. A short time before his
death he had a private lodging at Somers’ Town, where he received a few
friends. He sat and talked familiarly and cheerfully, asking you whether
you thought his head would not make a fine bust? He had a decanter of
rum placed on the table before him, from which he poured out a
glass-full as he wanted it and drank it pure, taking no other beverage,
but not exceeding in this. His infirmities had made no alteration in his
conversation, except perhaps a little more timidity and hesitation; for
blindness is the _lameness_ of the mind. He could not see the effect of
what he said lighting up the countenances of others; and in this case,
the tongue may run on the faster, but hardly so well. After coffee,
which he accompanied with the due quantity of _merum sal_, he would ask
to be led down into a little parlour below, which was hung round with
some early efforts of his own in landscape-painting, and with some of
Wilson’s unfinished sketches. Though he could see them no longer,
otherwise than in his mind’s eye, he was evidently pleased to be in the
room with them, as they brought back former associations. Youth and age
seem glad to meet as it were on the last hill-top of life, to shake
hands once more and part for ever! He spoke slightingly of his own
performances (though they were by no means contemptible), but launched
out with great fervour in praise of his favourite Wilson, and in
disparagement of Claude, enlarging on the fine broad manner and bold
effects of the one, and on the finical littleness of the other, and
‘making the worse appear the better reason.’ It was here we last parted
with this fine old man, and it is with mixed pleasure and regret we turn
to the subject. Peter Pindar, besides his vein of comic humour, excelled
when he chose in the serious and pathetic; and his ‘Lines to a Fly
drowned in Treacle,’ and ‘To an Expiring Taper,’ are among his best
pieces.
LOGIC
_The Atlas._] [_April 12, 1829._
Much has been said and written of the importance of logic to the
advancement of truth and learning, but not altogether convincingly. Its
use is chiefly confined by some to being a guide to the mind when first
feeling its way out of the night of ignorance and barbarism, or a curb
to the wilful and restive spirit that is a rebel to reason and common
sense. But the extent of the benefit in either case may be doubted;
since the rude and uninstructed will not submit to artificial trammels,
or get up into this _go-cart_ of the understanding, and the perverse and
obstinate will jump out of it whenever their prejudices or passions are
wound up to a height to make its restraints necessary. The wilful man
will have his way in spite of the dictates of his reason or the evidence
of his senses either. The study of logic has been compared to the
getting ready and sharpening the tools with which the mind works out the
truth; but all that is of value in it is more like the natural use of
our hands, or resembles the mould in which truth must be cast, and which
is born with us, rather than an external instrument with which it must
be fashioned; for all syllogisms reduce themselves either to identical
propositions, or to certain forms and relations of ideas in the
understanding, which are antecedent to, and absolutely govern, our
conclusions with the rules for drawing them. The mind cannot _make an
instrument to make truth_, as it contrives an instrument to make a
certain object; for in the latter case, the object depends upon the act
and will of the mind; but in the former, the mind is passive to the
impression of given objects upon it, and this depends on certain laws
over which it has itself no control. Logic at best only lays down the
rules and laws by which our reason operates; but it must operate
according to those rules and laws equally whether they are adverted to
or not, or they could not be laid down as infallible. Truth is, in a
word, the shape which our ideas take in the moulds of the understanding,
just as the potter’s clay derives its figure (whether round or square)
from the mould in which it is cast. Thus, if we are told that one
wine-glass is less than another, and that the larger wine-glass is less
than a third, we know that the third wine-glass is larger than the
first, without either comparing them or having any general rule to prove
it by. We can no more conceive it otherwise, or do away that regular
gradation and proportion between the objects so defined and
characterised, than we can imagine the same thing to grow bigger and
become less at the same time. Reasoning is allowed (at least by the
schoolmen and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, though not by
our wise sceptical moderns) to be the linking of one judgment on to two
others: _this_ and _that_ being given, why then something else follows.
Thus, suppose two roads to take a diverging direction, you are sure,
without measuring, that the farther you go in the one, the farther you
get from the other. You know that you advance: you _infer_ that you
recede. Now the difficulty lies here—if the premises are the same with
the conclusion, it amounts only to an identical proposition: if they are
different, what is the connection between them? But in the example just
given, there are two circumstances, or properties, stated at the outset
of the question, _viz._—not merely the existence, but the direction, of
the road; and to sustain the inference, all that seems necessary is,
that both these circumstances should be borne in mind. For if the road
do not continue to _diverge_, the conclusion will not hold good; and if
it still continue to diverge, what is this but saying, not only that it
advances, but that it advances in a direction which, by the supposition,
carries it farther at every step from the former road? That is, two
things are affirmed of a given object; the mind sets out with a complex
proposition, and what it has to do is not to forget one half of it by
the way. It would be long enough before the abstract idea of a road
would imply its distance from another; but it would also be hard if a
diverging road—that is, a road that recedes while it advances—did not
recede. A mathematical line and its direction are not two things, like
the feet of a pair of compasses—that while the line is moving one way,
the direction may be going astray in another—but mutually implied and
inseparably connected together in nature or the understanding—let the
_realists_ or _idealists_ determine which they please. Or, as the wise
man said to the daughter of King Cophetua, ‘That which is, is; for what
is _that_ but _that_, and _is_ but _is_?’[58] The worst of the matter
is, that the most important conclusions are not to be so easily enclosed
in pews and forms of words and definitions; and that to catch the truth
as it flies, is as nice a point as hedging the cuckoo: though they say
that its wings have been lately clipped and a pound built for it
somewhere in Westminster. Not to proceed farther in this subject, and
get ‘over shoes, over boots’ in the mire of metaphysics, we shall
conclude this article with what we meant to state at the commencement of
it, to wit—that the commonest form of the syllogism is the worst of all,
being a downright fallacy and _petitio principii_. It consists in
including the individual in the species, and runs thus: ‘All men are
mortal; John is a man; therefore John is mortal.’ Let any one deny this
at his peril; but what is, or can be gained by such parroting? The first
branch of the premises takes for granted and supposes that you already
know all that you want to prove in the conclusion. For before you are
entitled to assert roundly that all men are mortal, you must know this
of John in particular, who is a man, which is the point you are
labouring to establish; or, if you do not know this of every individual
man, and of John among the rest, then you have no right to make such a
sweeping general assertion, which falls to the ground of itself. Either
the premises are hasty or false, and the conclusion rotten that way; or
if they be sound, and proved as matter-of-fact to the extent which is
pretended, then you have anticipated your conclusion, and your syllogism
is pedantic and superfluous. In fact, this form of the syllogism is an
unmeaning play upon words, or resolves itself into the merely probable
or analogical argument, that because all other men _have died_, John,
who is one of of them, _will die_ also. The inference relating to
historical truth, and founded on the customary connection between cause
and effect, is very different from logical proof, or the impossibility
of conceiving of certain things otherwise than as inseparable. Suppose I
see a row of pillars before me, and that I chuse to affirm—‘Those
hundred pillars are all of white marble; the pillar directly facing me
is one of the hundred; therefore that pillar is also of white
marble’—would not this be arrant trifling both with my own understanding
and with that of any one who had patience to hear me? But if I were to
see a number of pillars resembling each other in outward appearance, and
on examining all of them but one, found them of white marble and
concluded that that one was of white marble too, there would be some
common sense in this, but no logic. The mind, however, has a natural
bias to wrap up its conclusions (of whatever kind or degree) in regular
forms of words, and to deposit them in an imposing framework of
demonstration; it prefers the shadow of certainty to the substance of
truth and candour; and will not, if it can help it, leave a single
loop-hole for doubt to creep in at. Hence the tribe of logicians,
dogmatists, and verbal pretenders of all sorts.
THE LATE MR. CURRAN
_The Atlas._] [_April 26, 1829._
This celebrated wit and orator in his latter days was a little in the
back-ground. He had lodgings at Brompton; and riding into town one day,
and hearing two gentlemen in the Park disputing about Mathews’s Curran,
he said—‘In faith, it’s the only Mr. Curran, that is ever talked of
now-a-days.’ He had some qualms about certain peccadillos of his past
life, and wanted to make confessors of his friends. Certainly, a
monastery is no unfit retreat for those who have been led away by the
thoughtless vivacity of youth, and wish to keep up the excitement by
turning the tables on themselves in age. The crime and the remorse are
merely the alternations of the same passionate temperament. Mr. Curran
had a flash of the eye, a musical intonation of voice, such as we have
never known excelled. Mr. Mathews’s imitation of him, though it had been
much admired, does not come up to the original. Some of his bursts of
forensic eloquence deserve to be immortal, such as that appalling
expression applied to a hired spy and informer, that he ‘had been buried
as a man, and was dug up a witness.’ A person like this might find
language to describe the late _shots_ at Edinburgh. Mr. Curran did not
shine so much in Parliament; but he sometimes succeeded admirably in
turning the laugh against his opponents. He compared the situation of
government after they had brought over a member of Opposition to their
side, and found the renegado of no use to them, to the story of the
country-gentleman who bought Punch and complained of his turning out
dull company. Some of Mr. Curran’s _bon-mots_ and sallies of humour were
first-rate. He sometimes indulged in poetry, in which he did not excel.
His taste in it was but indifferent. He neither liked _Paradise Lost_
nor _Romeo and Juliet_. He had an ear for music, and both played and
sung his native ballads delightfully. He contended that the English had
no national music. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Siddons. He
said of John Kemble, that, ‘he had an eye rather to _look at_ than to
_look with_.’ His great passion was a love of English literature and the
society of literary men. He occasionally found his account in it. Being
one day in a group of philosophers, and the invention of fire being
spoken of, one of the party suggested that it was from seeing a horse’s
shoe strike fire; ‘and I suppose,’ said Curran triumphantly, ‘the
horse-shoe was afterwards made with that fire.’
THE COURT JOURNAL—A DIALOGUE
_The Atlas._] [_June 7, 1829._
_M._—Have you seen the _Court Journal_?
_G._—No: I only read some ‘Maxims on Love,’ which I seemed to have met
with in some pre-existent work.
_M._—Then you may tell C— from me it will not last three months. People
of fashion do not want to read accounts of themselves, written by those
who know nothing of the matter. This eternal babble about high life is
an affront to every one else, and an impertinence with respect to those
whom it is stupidly meant to flatter. What do those care about tiresome
descriptions of satin ottomans and ormolu carvings, who are sick of
seeing them from morning till night? No! they would rather read an
account of Donald Bean Lean’s Highland cave, strewed with rushes, or a
relation of a _row_ in a night-cellar in St. Giles’s. What they and all
mankind want, is to vary the monotonous round of their existence; to go
out of themselves as much as possible; and not to have their own
oppressive and idle pretensions served up to them again in a hash of
mawkish affectation. They read _Cobbett_—it is like an electrical shock
to them, or a plunge in a cold-bath: it braces while it jars their
enervated fibres. He is a sturdy, blunt yeoman: the other is a foppish
footman, dressed up in cast-off finery. Or if Lord L—— is delighted with
a description (not well-done) of his own house and furniture, do you
suppose that Lord H——, who is his rival in gewgaws and upholstery, will
not be equally uneasy at it? As to the vulgar, what they like is to see
fine sights and not to hear of them. They like to get inside a fine
house, to see fine things and touch them if they dare, and not to be
tantalized with a vapid inventory, which does not gratify their senses,
and mortifies their pride and sense of privation. The exaggerated
admiration only makes the exclusion more painful: it is like a staring
sign to a show which one has not money in one’s pocket to pay for
seeing. Mere furniture or private property can never be a subject to
interest the public: the possessor is entitled to the sole benefit of
it. If there were an account in the newspaper that all this finery was
burnt to ashes, then all the world would be eager to read it, saying all
the time how sorry they were, and what a shocking thing it was.
_G._—Servants and country people always turn to the accidents and
offences in a newspaper.
_M._—And their masters and mistresses too. Did you never read the
_Newgate Calendar_?
_G._—Yes.
_M._—Well, that is not _genteel_. This is what renders the _Beggar’s
Opera_ so delightful; you despise the actors in the scene, and yet the
wit galls and brings down their _betters_ from their airy flight with
all their borrowed plumage, so that we are put absolutely at our ease
for the time with respect to our own darling pretensions. G—— was here
the other evening; he said he thought the _Beggar’s Opera_ came after
Shakspeare. I wonder who put that in his head; it was hardly his own
discovery.
_G._—It seems neither Lord Byron nor Burke liked the _Beggar’s Opera_.
_M._—They were the losers by that opinion: but how do you account for
it?
_G._—Lord Byron was a _radical_ peer, Burke an upstart plebeian; neither
of them felt quite secure in the _niche_ where they had stationed
themselves from the random-shots that were flying on the stage. They
could not say with _Hamlet_, ‘Our withers are unwrung.’ As to Lord
Byron, he might not relish the point of _Mrs. Peachum’s_ speech,
‘Married a highwayman! Why, hussey, you will be as ill-treated and as
much neglected as if you had married a lord!’ Did you ever hear the
story of Miss ——, when she was quite a girl, going to see Mrs. Siddons
in the _Fatal Marriage_, and being taken out fainting into the lobby,
and calling out, ‘Oh _Biron, Biron_!’—‘Egad!’ said the cool narrator of
the story, ‘she has had enough of Byron since!’ With regard to Burke,
there was a rotten core, a Serbonian bog in his understanding, in which
not only Gay’s masterpiece but the whole of what modern literature, wit,
and reason had done for the world, sunk and was swallowed up in a fetid
abyss for ever! But I am sorry you think no better of the _Court
Journal_. I was in hopes it might succeed, as a very old friend of mine
has something to do with it.
_M._—Oh! but mischief must be put a stop to. This is the most nauseous
_toad-eating_, and it is as awkwardly done as it is ill-meant. There is
a fulsome pretence set up in one paper that rank consists in birth and
blood. It is at once to neutralise all the present race of fashion. The
civil wars of York and Lancaster put an end to almost all the old
nobility—there are none of the Plantagenets left now. Those who go to
court think themselves lucky if they can trace as far back as the Nell
Gwynns and Duchess of Clevelands in Charles the Second’s days. Besides,
all this prejudice about nobility and ancestry should be understood and
worshipped in silence and at a distance, not thrown in the teeth of such
people, as if they had nothing else to boast of. They should be told of
perfections which they have not, as you praise a wit for her beauty and
a fool for her wit. Your friend should read _Count Grammont_ to learn
how to flatter and cajole. Does not Mr. C—— know enough from experience
of the desire of lords and ladies to turn authors, and shine, not in a
ballroom, but on _his_ counter?
_G._—He expects the K—— to write; nay, it was with difficulty he was
dissuaded from offering a round sum.
_M._—How much, pray?
_G._—Five thousand guineas for half a page.
_M._—It would not sell a single copy. People would think it was a hoax
and would not buy it. Those who believed it would not read it. Oh! there
is a letter of Louis XVIII. in a late number, on the death of some lady
he was attached to: it is prettily done, but it is such good English,
that I suspect it can hardly be a translation or an original. If they
could procure curious documents of this kind, and had a magazine of the
secrets, anecdotes, and correspondence of people of high rank,
undoubtedly it would answer; but this would be another edition of the
_Jockey Club_, and very different from its present insipidity. Even
children will not be crammed with honey.
_G._—I understand there is to be no scandal. All the great are to be
supposed to be elegantly good, and to wear virtue with a grace peculiar
to people of fashion.
_M._—That will at any rate be new. And then I see there are criticisms
on pictures: the writer is thrown into raptures with the portraits of
Lord and Lady Castlereagh. And this is followed by a drawling, pitiable
account of two little Corregios, as if they were miracles and had
descended from heaven—the ‘Madonna’ and ‘Mercury teaching Cupid to
read.’ They are well enough, though Sir Joshua has done the same thing
better. But higher praise could not be lavished on the ‘St. Jerome’ or
the ‘Night at Dresden,’ or the ‘Ceiling at Parma,’ which is his best,
though it has fallen into decay.
_G._—Collectors think one Corregio just as good as another; and it is to
meet this feeling, probably, that the article is written.
THE LATE DR. PRIESTLEY
_The Atlas._] [_June 14, 1829._
The epithet of _the late_ could not be applied to this celebrated
character in the sense in which it has been turned upon some _late_ wits
and dinner-hunters as never being in time; if he had a fault, it was
that of being precipitate and premature, of sitting down to the banquet
which he had prepared for others before it was half-done; of seeing
things with too quick and hasty a glance, of finding them in embryo, and
leaving them too often in an unfinished state. This turn of his
intellect had to do with his natural temper—he was impatient, somewhat
peevish and irritable in little things, though not from violence or
acerbity, but from seeing what was proper to be done quicker than
others, and not liking to wait for an absurdity. On great and trying
occasions, he was calm and resigned, having been schooled by the lessons
of religion and philosophy, or, perhaps, from being, as it were, taken
by surprise, and never having been accustomed to the indulgence of
strong passions or violent emotions. His frame was light, fragile,
neither strong nor elegant; and in going to any place, he walked on
before his wife (who was a tall, powerful woman) with a primitive
simplicity, or as if a certain restlessness and hurry impelled him on
with a projectile force before others. His personal appearance was
altogether singular and characteristic. It belonged to the class which
may be called _scholastic_. His feet seemed to have been entangled in a
gown, his features to have been set in a wig or taken out of a mould.
There was nothing to induce you to say with the poet, that ‘his body
thought’; it was merely the envelop of his mind. In his face there was a
strange mixture of acuteness and obtuseness; the nose was sharp and
turned up, yet rounded at the end, a keen glance, a quivering lip, yet
the aspect placid and indifferent, without any of that expression which
arises either from the close workings of the passions or an intercourse
with the world. You discovered the prim, formal look of the
Dissenter—none of the haughtiness of the churchman nor the wildness of
the visionary. He was, in fact, always the student in his closet, moved
in or out, as it happened, with no perceptible variation: he sat at his
breakfast with a folio volume before him on one side and a note-book on
the other; and if a question were asked him, answered it like an absent
man. He stammered, spoke thick, and huddled his words ungracefully
together. To him the whole business of life consisted in _reading and
writing_; and the ordinary concerns of this world were considered as a
frivolous or mechanical interruption to the more important interests of
science and of a future state. Dr. PRIESTLEY might, in external
appearance, have passed for a French priest, or the lay-brother of a
convent: in literature, he was the Voltaire of the Unitarians. He did
not, like Mr. Southey, to be sure (who has been denominated the English
Voltaire,) vary from prose to poetry, or from one side of a question to
another; but he took in a vast range of subjects of very opposite
characters, treated them all with the same acuteness, spirit, facility,
and perspicuity, and notwithstanding the intricacy and novelty of many
of his speculations, it may be safely asserted that there is not an
obscure sentence in all he wrote. _Those who run may read._ He wrote on
history, grammar, law, politics, divinity, metaphysics, and natural
philosophy—and those who perused his works fancied themselves entirely,
and were in a great measure, masters of all these subjects. He was one
of the very few who could make abstruse questions popular; and in this
respect he was on a par with Paley with twenty times his discursiveness
and subtlety. Paley’s loose casuistry, which is his strong-hold and
chief attraction, he got (every word of it) from Abraham Tucker’s _Light
of Nature_. A man may write fluently on a number of topics with the same
pen, and that pen a very blunt one; but this was not Dr. Priestley’s
case; the studies to which he devoted himself with so much success and
_eclat_ required different and almost incompatible faculties. What for
instance can be more distinct or more rarely combined than metaphysical
refinement and a talent for experimental philosophy? The one picks up
the grains, the other spins the threads of thought. Yet Dr. Priestley
was certainly the best controversialist of his day, and one of the best
in the language; and his chemical experiments (so curious a variety in a
dissenting minister’s pursuits) laid the foundation and often nearly
completed the superstructure of most of the modern discoveries in that
science. This is candidly and gratefully acknowledged by the French
chemists, however the _odium theologicum_ may slur over the obligation
in this country, or certain fashionable lecturers may avoid the
repetition of startling names. Priestley’s _Controversy with Dr. Price_
is a masterpiece not only of ingenuity, vigour, and logical clearness,
but of verbal dexterity and artful evasion of difficulties, if any one
need a model of this kind. His antagonist stood no chance with him in
‘the dazzling fence of argument,’ and yet Dr. Price was no mean man. We
should like to have seen a tilting-bout on some point of scholastic
divinity between the little Presbyterian parson and the great Goliath of
modern Calvinism, Mr. Irving; he would have had his huge Caledonian
boar-spear, his Patagonian club out of his hands in a twinkling with his
sharp Unitarian foil. The blear-eyed demon of vulgar dogmatism and
intolerance would have taken his revenge by gnashing his teeth, rolling
his eyes in a resistless phrenzy, and denouncing as out of the pale of
Christian charity a man who placed his chief comfort in this life in his
hope of the next, and who would have walked firmly and cheerfully to a
stake in the fulness of his belief of the Christian revelation. Out upon
these pulpit demigorgons, ‘Anthropagi and men who eat each other,’ to
gratify the canine malice and inward gnawing of their morbid
understandings, and worse than the infuriated savage, not contented to
kill the body, would ‘cast both body and soul into hell;’ and unless
they can see from their crazy thrones of spiritual pride and mountebank
effrontery, the whole world cowering like one outstretched congregation
in a level sea of bare heads and upturned wondering looks at their feet,
prone and passive, and aghast under the thunders of their voice, the
flashes of their eye—would snatch Heaven’s own bolt to convert the solid
globe into a sea of fire to torture millions of their fellow-creatures
in for the slightest difference of opinion from them, or dissent from
the authority of a poor, writhing, agonised reptile, who works himself
up in imagination by raving and blasphemy into a sort of fourth person
in the Trinity, and would avenge his mortified ambition, his
moonstruck-madness, and ebbing popularity as the wrongs of the MOST
HIGH!—‘Nay, an you mouth, we’ll rant as well as you!’—To return to Dr.
Priestley and common sense, if it be possible to get down these from the
height of _melo-dramatic_ and apocalyptic orthodoxy. We do not place the
subject of this notice in the first class of metaphysical reasoners
either for originality or candour: but in boldness of inquiry,
quickness, and elasticity of mind, and ease in making himself
understood, he had no superior. He had wit too, though this was a
resource to which he resorted only in extreme cases. Mr. Coleridge once
threw a respectable dissenting congregation into an unwonted
forgetfulness of their gravity, by reciting a description, from the pen
of the transatlantic fugitive, of the manner in which the first man
might set about making himself, according to the doctrine of the
Atheists. Mr. Coleridge put no marks of quotation either before or after
the passage, which was extremely grotesque and ludicrous; but imbibed
the whole of the applause it met with in his flickering smiles and oily
countenance. Dr. Priestley’s latter years were unhappily embittered by
his unavailing appeals to the French philosophers in behalf of the
Christian religion; and also by domestic misfortunes, to which none but
a Cobbett could have alluded in terms of triumph. We see no end to the
rascality of human nature; all that there is good in it is the constant
butt of the base and brutal.
SECTS AND PARTIES
_The Atlas._] [_August 2, 1829._
We from our souls sincerely hate all cabals and _coteries_; and this is
our chief objection to sects and parties. People who set up to judge for
themselves on every question that comes before them, and quarrel with
received opinions and established usages, find so little sympathy from
the rest of the world that they are glad to get any one to agree with
them, and with that proviso the poorest creature becomes their _Magnus
Apollo_. The mind sets out indeed in search of truth and on a principle
of independent inquiry; but is so little able to do without leaning on
someone else for encouragement and support, that we presently see those
who have separated themselves from the mere mob, and the great masses of
prejudice and opinion, forming into little groups of their own and
appealing to one another’s approbation, as if they had secured a
monopoly of common sense and reason. Wherever two or three of this sort
are gathered together, there is self-conceit in the midst of them. ‘You
grant me judgment, and I grant you wit’—is the key-note from which an
admirable duett, trio, or quartett of the understanding may be struck up
at any time to the entire satisfaction of the parties concerned, though
the bye-standers may be laughing at or execrating the unwelcome discord.
The principle of all reform is this, that there is a tendency to
dogmatism, to credulity and intolerance in the human mind itself, as
well as in certain systems of bigotry or superstition; and until
reformers are themselves aware of, and guard carefully against, the
natural infirmity which besets them in common with all others, they must
necessarily run into the error which they cry out against. Without this
self-knowledge and circumspection, though the great wheel of vulgar
prejudice and traditional authority may be stopped or slackened in its
course, we shall only have a number of small ones of petulance,
contradiction, and partisanship set a-going to our frequent and daily
annoyance in its place: or (to vary the figure) instead of crowding into
a common stage-coach or hum-drum vehicle of opinion to arrive at a
conclusion, every man will be for mounting his own _velocipede_, run up
against his neighbours, and exhaust his breath and agitate his limbs in
vain. In Mr. Bentham’s _Book of Fallacies_ we apprehend are not to be
found the crying sins of singularity, rash judgment, and self-applause.
What boots it, we might ask, to get rid of tests and subscription to
thirty-nine articles of orthodox belief, if, in lieu of this wholesale
and comprehensive mode of exercising authority over our fellows, a DOGMA
is placed upon the table at breakfast time, sits down with us to dinner,
or is laid on our pillow at night, rigidly prescribing what we are to
eat, drink, and how many hours we are to sleep? Or be it that the
authority of Aristotle and the schoolmen is gone by, what shall the
humble and serious inquirer after truth profit by it, if he still cannot
say that his soul is his own for the sublime dulness of Mr. Maculloch,
and the Dunciad of political economists? The imprimatur of the Star
Chamber, the _cum privilegio regis_ is taken off from printed books—what
does the freedom of the press or liberality of sentiment gain, if a
board of _Utility_ at Charing Cross must affix its stamp, before a jest
can find its way into a newspaper, or must knock a flower of speech on
the head with the sledge-hammer of cynical reform? The cloven-foot, the
overweening, impatient, exclusive spirit breaks out in different ways,
in different times and circumstances. While men are quite ignorant and
in the dark, they trust to others, and force you to do so under pain of
fire and faggot:—when they have learned a little they think they know
every thing, and would compel you to conform to that opinion, under pain
of their impertinence, maledictions, and sarcasms, which are the modern
rack and thumb-screw. The mode of torture, it must be confessed, is
refined, though the intention is the same. Their ill-temper and want of
toleration fall the hardest on their own side, for those who adhere to
fashion and power care no more about their good or ill word, than about
the short, unmelodious gruntings of any other sordid stye. But how is
any poor devil who has got into their clutches to shelter himself from
their malevolence and party-spite? Why, by enlisting under their
banners, swearing to all that they say, and going all lengths with them.
Otherwise, he is a _black sheep_ in the flock, and made a butt of by the
rest. This is a self-evident process. For the fewer people any sect or
party have to sympathise with them, the more entire must that sympathy
be: it must be without flaw or blemish, as a set-off to the numbers on
the other side; and they who set up to be wiser than all the world put
together, cannot afford to acknowledge themselves wrong in any
particular. You must, therefore, agree to all their sense or nonsense,
allow them to be judges equally of what they do or do not understand,
adopt their cant, repeat their jargon, have no notions but what they
have, caricature their absurdities, make yourself obnoxious for their
satisfaction, and a slave and lacquey to their opinions, humours, and
convenience; or they black-ball you, send you to Coventry, and play the
devil with you. Thus, for any writer in a highly enlightened and liberal
morning paper, not merely to question the grand arcanum of population or
the doctrine of rent, would be both great and petty treason; but it
would be as much as his _place_ was worth, to suggest a hint that Mrs.
Chatterley is not a fine woman and a charming actress. Fanatics and
innovators formerly appealed in support of their dreams and
extravagancies to inspiration and an inward light; the modern race of
philosophical projectors, not having this resource, are obliged to
fortify themselves in a double crust of confidence in themselves, and
contempt for their predecessors and contemporaries. It is easy to
suppose what a very repulsive sort of people they must be! Indeed, to
remedy what was thought a hard exterior and an intolerable air of
assumption on the part of the professors of the new school, a machine,
it is said, has been completed in Mr. Bentham’s garden in Westminster,
which turns out a very useful invention of jurisprudence, morals, logic,
political economy, constitutions, and codifications, as infallibly and
with as little variation as a barrel-organ plays ‘God save the King,’ or
‘Rule Britannia’:—nay, so well does it work and so little trouble or
attendance does it require from the adepts, that the latter mean to sign
a truce with gravity and ‘wise saws,’ some of them having entered at the
bar, others being about to take orders in the church, others having got
places in the India-house, and all being disposed to let the
Bentham-machine shift for itself! _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile
dulci_:—Mr. Bentham is old, and doubtless has made his will! Reformers
will hardly see themselves in religious schismatics and sectarians, whom
they despise. Perhaps others may be struck with the likeness. _Rational
dissenters_, for example, think, because they alone profess the title,
they alone possess the thing. All rational dissenters are with them wise
and good. An Unitarian is another name for sense and honesty; and must
it not be so, when to those of an opposite faith it is a name of enmity
and reproach? But the intolerance on one side, though it accounts for,
does not disprove the weakness on the other. We have heard of devotees
who employ a _serious_ baker, a _serious_ tailor, a _serious_ cobbler,
etc. So there are staunch reformists who would prefer a _radical_
compositor, a _radical_ stationer or bookbinder, to all others; and
think little of those on their side of the question who, besides
adhering to a principle, have not, in their over-zeal and contempt for
their adversaries, contrived to render it offensive or ridiculous. A
sound practical consistency does not satisfy the wilful restlessness of
the advocates of change. They must have the piquancy of startling
paradoxes, the pruriency of romantic and ticklish situations, the pomp
of itinerant professors of patriotism and _placarders_ of their own
_lives_, _travels_, and _opinions_. Why must a man stand up in a
three-cornered hat and canonicals to bear testimony against the
Christian religion, and in favour of reform? We hate all such
impertinent masquerading and _double entendre_. Those who are accustomed
to judge for themselves, and express their convictions at some risk and
loss, are too apt to come from thinking that opinions may be right,
_though_ they are singular, to conclude that they are right, _because_
they are singular. The more they differ from the world, the more
convinced they are, because it flatters their self-love; and they are
only quite satisfied and at their ease when they shock and disgust every
one around them. They no longer consider the connexion between the
conclusion and the premises, but between any idle hypothesis and their
personal vanity. They cling obstinately to opinions, as they have been
hastily formed; and patronize every whim that they fancy is their own.
They are most confident of ‘what they are least assured;’ and will stake
all they are worth on the _forlorn hope_ of their own imaginary sagacity
and clearness. An _idiosyncrasy_ steals into every thing; _their_ way is
best. Always regarding the world at large as an old dotard, they think
any single individual in it quite beneath their notice—unless it is an
_alter idem_ of the select _coterie_—neither consult you about their
affairs, nor deign you an answer on your own, and have a model of
perfection in their minds to which they refer all public and private
transactions. There are _methodists_ in business as well as in religion,
who have a peculiar happy knack in folding a letter, or in saying _How
d’ye do_, who postpone the main object to some pragmatical theory or
foppish punctilio, and who might take for their motto—_all for conceit
or the world well lost_.
CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (1)
_The Atlas._] [_September 20, 1829._
_T._—Windham was very intimate with Gilray afterwards—or perhaps before;
for he also had been on both sides.
_J._—What I object to in Hogarth is, that he was not accomplished enough
even for the task he undertook. An instance occurred the other day. A
servant-girl had been decoyed from her situation, and on complaint being
made before the magistrate, the officers traced her to Duke’s-place, and
brought her back to her friends in Wardour-Street. She was dressed up
quite in the height of the fashion; and every one that went to see her,
came away astonished at her perfect beauty. Could Hogarth have painted
this? Yet here was a scene quite in his way. He selects what is bad in
St. Giles’s, not what is best in nature. That old Mother W—— lives for
ever. It was she who decoyed away Emily Coventry that sat to Sir Joshua
for his _Thais_. She was a chimney-sweeper’s daughter, or something of
that kind; but she was a vast beauty, and Mother W—— found her out in
spite of her rags and dirt. She had a hawk’s eye for anything of this
sort. I sat facing her once in an upper box at the Opera. I never saw
such an expression—her look went through you.
_T._—But I suppose you looked at her again.
_J._—Fielding has tried to describe _Sophia_ as a beauty, but makes a
wretched hand of it. He says first she was a beauty; and then to let you
know what sort of a beauty she was, that she was like the _Venus of
Medici_; then that her nose inclined to be Roman, which the _Venus de
Medici’s_ does not; then that she resembled Kneller’s portrait of Lady
Ranelagh, which is like neither. The truth is, he did not know what she
was like; nor that he could not in words give a description of beauty,
which is the painter’s province.
_T._—Coleridge used to remark that description was the vice of poetry,
and allegory of painting.
_J._—Nothing can be better said. Since you told me that remark of his
about _Paul and Virginia_, he has risen vastly in my estimation. Again,
why does the correspondent in the Atlas take me up short for saying that
‘we laugh at a person who is rolled in the gutter?’ He observes on this,
‘if it is an accident, the laughter is silly, and not a case in point;
if inflicted as a punishment for some petty injustice, we do not laugh,
but rub our hands.’ So that we are to laugh in neither case. Is the
ridicule merited where the cobbler, in the ‘Election Dinner,’ has
smutted the face of his next neighbour? Or does the cobbler laugh the
less, or will he not laugh on for ever, on this account? Has not Hogarth
immortalised this piece of silliness in this disgraceful scene? Who will
set limits (by the author’s _crambo_) to the length to which he lolls
out his tongue, or to the portentous rolling of his eyes in a squint of
ecstasy? Is the sly leer and drooping of the widow’s eyelids, or the
position of the parson’s hands in the ‘Harlot’s Funeral,’ drawing as
well as character and invention? Or is the fighting of the dog and the
man for the bone on a perfect footing of equality (to show that hunger
levels all distinctions), or the mother letting the child fall over the
wall in the ‘Gin-lane,’ or the girl in the ‘Noon,’ ‘with her pie-dish
tottering like her virtue, and the contents running over,’ (as I have
seen it somewhere expressed,) an example of skill in drawing? It is easy
to paint a face without a nose, or with a wry one; the difficulty is to
make it straight. Few persons can draw a circle; any one may draw a
crooked line.
_T._—But has not Hogarth hit off the exact character and expression; and
is not that a proof of the painter’s hand and eye?
_J._—It may be so; but you cannot be sure of it. The correspondent of
the paper laughs at the idea of Hogarth’s coming under the article of
writing. He _has_ come under the article of writing. Does not the critic
speak of his ‘immortal tales?’ Does Mr. Lamb expatiate on the drawing,
colour, and effects of light and shade, or only on the moral and story?
He has left out one half of the language of painting in the prints; and
they are the better for it. Nor do I see what objection there is to the
comparison of Hogarth to buffoons on the stage. For my part, I think
Liston comes much nearer to Hogarth than Emery’s _Tyke_; and I am sure
his _Lord Grizzle_ is just as good _in its way_ as anything can possibly
be. Why then does the critic scout the comparison? Because it would be
ridiculous to say, that Liston’s _Lord Grizzle_ is as fine as Mrs.
Siddons’s _Lady Macbeth_; that both fulfilled their parts equally, and
that neither could do more without infringing on the integrity of their
characters. Yet if the dignity of the subject is to be left out of the
question, Liston may be put into the scale with Mrs. Siddons just as
well as Emery; but if not, then neither one nor the other can. Any one
for me may say he likes _Punch and the puppet-show_ as well as the
finest tragedy—I should think it honest and natural enough—but I hate
putting up at a half-way house between farce and tragedy, and pretending
that there is no difference in the case. Persons who have no taste for,
but an aversion to whatever is great and elevated, are ashamed openly to
patronise farce, lest they should be laughed at; and they, therefore,
get something intermediate between that and tragedy, and set it up as
the finest thing in the world, to escape ridicule and satisfy their own
perverse inclination. It is necessary to set one’s face against such
vulgar critics; for, like other vulgar people, if you do not keep them
quite out, they will constantly encroach and turn you out of your most
settled convictions with their mongrel theories.
_T._—What is the aim of all high tragedy? It is to resolve the sense of
pain or suffering into the sense of _power_ by the aid of imagination,
and by grandeur of conception and character. What is the object of
Hogarth’s tragicomedy? To reverse this order: that is, he gives us the
extremest distress in the most revolting circumstances and in connection
with the most unfeeling and weakest characters, so as either to produce
the utmost disgust or excite as little sympathy as possible. Why must
maternal affection be displayed, and, as it were, outraged in the
strength of attachment to a most brutish and worthless moon-calf of a
son? The moral may be strictly true, but the mode of conveying it is no
less a penance. Why must the feeling of love be exemplified in the
persevering attachment of the victim of seduction to her profligate and
contemptible seducer? This is essential to Hogarth’s conception of
passion, that it should be at variance with its object, incongruous, and
bordering on the absurd and ludicrous. Why must a fine feeling or
sentiment be dragged through the kennel or stuck in the pillory before
it can be tolerated in his graphic designs? There is neither unity nor
grandeur. Mr. Lamb admires the expression of the losing gamester in the
‘Rake’s Progress:’ it is exactly what Liston would give in attempting
such a part, and not unlike him. Why show the extreme of passion in
faces unsusceptible of it, or kill the sympathy by the meanness and
poverty of the associations? Mr. Lamb despises Kean’s face in _Othello_:
I prefer it to any of Hogarth’s tragic faces, which are generally of the
mock-heroic class.[59] The Methodist preacher in the cart with the _Idle
Apprentice_ is another _Mawworm_, a fantastic figure, tossed about by
the wind or the spirit, though the conception would be fine for a novel
or _written_ story: the apprentice himself is a scare-crow, the sport of
the mob, with whose indifference you take part, not with the sufferings
of the hero, if he is supposed to have any. The whole is a game at
tragic cross-purposes. The sublimity (such as it is) rests on a
foundation of the squalid and scurrilous. The incongruous was Hogarth’s
element, and he could not get out of his own or (what is I fear) the
national character, which delights in laughing at and exulting over the
defects and mishaps of others, not from any concern for them, but as a
foil to its own discontented humour and conscious want of higher
resources. Defoe, who was in the same age and class, had more
imagination. His _Robinson Crusoe_ is in perfect keeping. He is not
solitary, but solitude: from being shut out from the world, he fills the
universe with himself, and his being expands to the circumference of the
ocean and sky. Hogarth would have shut him up in a workhouse or a gaol,
with boys hooting at him through the bars, and no escape left on the
wings of the imagination or the strength of will. This may be very
intense, but it is not to my taste. A disciple of this school should not
go to see Madame _Pasta_ act. He would like Madame _Pesaroni_ better,
for she is ugly, squat, and her voice is masculine and loud. The other,
who is all harmony, would oppress and make him uneasy for want of some
salvo to his self-love. Would a critic of this order like to see a
tragic actress with a wooden leg? For this is Hogarth. Mr. Lamb admires
_Moll Flanders_; would he marry _Moll Flanders_? There ought to be
something in common in our regard for the original and the copy. A taste
for the odd and eccentric eats like a canker into the mind; and if not
checked, drives out all relish for the noble and consistent as stiff and
pedantic. The drollery is certainly less; and if there is not some
set-off in earnestness and dignity, the serious must be at a low ebb
indeed, and _Hudibras_ is finer than _Paradise Lost_. It would be a
proof of bad taste to like to look at a mean or ill-formed face, for the
sake of laughing at it, rather than at a fine one. And so in art: the
representation of brutality, coarseness, and want of capacity and
feeling is surely less desirable than the representation of the opposite
qualities; or it is saying that you laugh at and despise a thing for
falling short of a certain excellence and perfection, and when it gains
that excellence and perfection, it is no better than it was before.
_J._—You remember the drawing I showed you by Lane, after the ‘Possessed
Boy’ of Domenichino? There was there infinite sensibility, infinite
delicacy, agony with sweetness, beauty in the midst of distortion. You
saw there that every fine feeling had passed through the painter’s mind,
or he could not have expressed them; you were made to sympathise with
them, and to understand and revere them as a part of your own nature.
Compared with works like this, which are the pure mirrors of truth and
beauty, Hogarth’s subjects are the very ‘measles’ of art—the scum and
offal—it is like going on a voyage in a convict-ship, with an
alternation of the same humours and the same horrors—it is a bad
prospect for life.
_T._—There is some limit. The late Edinburgh murders would not bear
being transferred to the canvass, though the group at Ambrose’s would
make a subject for a sketch, so nice are the distinctions of taste.
_J._—The comic sets off the serious by contrast, and is a necessary
relief; but how little a way does the sense of defect go towards a
conception of, or power to embody the reverse! Look at Hogarth’s
attempts at dignified subjects, and see how poor and feeble they are.
His ‘Pool of Bethesda’ is pitiable; but in the burlesque composition,
where he introduces the devil cutting away the leg of the stool on which
St. Paul is preaching, he is himself again, and worthy of all imitation.
The critic in the Atlas asks what I mean by originality, as if I thought
it independent of any prototypes in nature? No, originality consists in
seeing nature for yourself; but it does not follow that everyone can do
this or is to see nature alike, or there would be nothing remarkable in
it.
_T._—Crabbe is an original writer; but it is to be hoped he will have
few followers. Mr. Lamb, by softening the disagreeableness of one of his
tales, has taken out the sting.
_J._—Hogarth is an exception to general rules; I said so before. He is
the only great comic painter; and he is so for this reason—that painting
is not the mother-tongue of comedy. Would not this be allowed of
sculpture? I have not seen the ‘Tam O’Shanter’; but some Scotch critics
are already, I hear, for exploding the _antique_. Painting is a dry,
plodding art; a bottle-nose, if you come to examine it closely, becomes
a very dull affair. We _talk_ of a hump-back or a sore leg, which is
enough of a good thing; the painter is obliged to give them entire,
which is too much. Neither can he carry off this grossness by brilliancy
of illustration, or rapidity of narrative. The eye and the mind take in
a group or a succession of incidents in an instant; the hand follows
lamely and slowly after, and naturally loses, in the mechanical details
of each object, the surprise, odd starts, and contrasts, which are the
life of comedy. Hogarth alone, by his double allusions, and by his
giving motion (which is time) overcame this difficulty, or painted as if
he were no painter, but set down each figure by a stroke of the pencil,
or in a kind of _short-hand_ of the art, being obliged to run neither
into caricature nor still-life. This extreme facility or tenaciousness
(amounting to a two-fold language) was his peculiar _forte_, and that in
which he was, and will remain, unrivalled. Ducrow acts romances on
horseback; but it is not the best way of acting them; and few will
imitate him without breaking their necks.
_T._—Do not the same remarks apply in some measure to painting history?
_J._—In some measure, they do; and therefore grand and dignified
subjects are in general to be preferred to the more violent and
distressing ones. Therefore Titian’s portraits are on a par with
history. You who admire Titian, how you must look at Hogarth! You see
they avoid the sight of blood even on the stage. In short, it is a
question, whether low and disagreeable subjects are fit to be painted;
and Sir Joshua, among others, did not much approve of them. It is _not_
a question whether grace and grandeur are fit subjects for painting—this
alone settles the preference, and is some excuse for the author of the
_Discourses_ in perhaps making it a little too exclusive. If it were
true that Hogarth is universal, or contains the highest kind of
excellence, no one would dispute about him. After all, a _hurdygurdy_ is
neither a lute nor an organ.
CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (2)
_The Atlas._] [_November 1, 1829._
_T._—Was I not right in stating it to be an error to suppose that
character is one thing, and to be judged of from a single circumstance?
The simplicity of language constantly runs us into false abstractions.
We call a man by one name, and forget the heap of contradictions of
which he is composed. An acquaintance was wondering not long ago, how a
man of sense that he mentioned could be guilty of such absurdities in
practice. I answered that a man’s understanding often had no more
influence over his will than if they belonged to two different persons;
nor frequently so much, since we sometimes consented to be governed by
advice, though we could not controul our passions if left to ourselves.
_J._—That is very true; but I do not see why you should express so much
eagerness about it, as if your life depended on it.
_T._—Nor I neither: I was not aware that I did so.
_J._—You lay too much stress on these speculative opinions and abstruse
distinctions. You fancy it is the love of truth: it is quite as much the
pride of understanding. Are you as ready to be convinced yourself as you
are bent on convincing others? You and those like you pretend to benefit
mankind by discovering something new; but you can find out nothing that
has not been invented and forgotten a hundred times. The world turns
round just the same, in spite of the chirping of all the grasshoppers or
squabbles of all the philosophers upon it. I told G. so the other day,
who did not much like it—I said he gave a power of _creation_ to the
human mind, which did not belong to it. Even Shakspeare, who was so
original and saw so deeply into the springs of nature, created nothing:
he only brought forward what existed before. I said, ‘You may observe
and combine, but you can add nothing—neither a colour to the rainbow,
nor a note to music, nor a faculty to the mind. And it’s well that you
cannot; for my belief is, that if you could create the smallest thing,
the world would not last three months, so little are you to be trusted
with power.’ G. retorted by a charge of misanthropy; and I asked him who
were those dignifiers of the species to whom he wished me to look up
with so much awe and reverence. He answered, somewhat to my surprise,
Burke, Fox, and Sheridan. I expected he would have named Lord Bacon, or
some of those. I was not much staggered by his authorities.
_T._—I did not know G. was so parliamentary: he might, while he was
about it, have mentioned the three last speakers of the House of
Commons, Lord Colchester, Lord Sidmouth, and Mr. Onslow.
_J._—He should have gone farther off: it is distance that hides defects
and magnifies. So it is with that prejudice of classical learning. You
lock up names in an obsolete language, and they become sacred. I do not
wish to speak against a classical education; it refines and softens, I
grant; and I see the want of it in Cobbett, and others, who may be
regarded as upstarts in letters. But surely it often gives a false
estimate of men and things. Every one brought up in colleges, and
drugged with Latin and Greek for a number of years, firmly believes
_that there have been about five people in the world, and that they are
dead_. All that actually exists, he holds to be nothing. The world about
him is a phantasmagoria: he considers it a personal affront that any one
should have common sense, or be able to find his way along the street,
without looking for it in Plato or Aristotle. The classical standard
turns shadows into realities and realities into shadows. A man of sense
is trying to get the better of this early prejudice all his life; and
hardly succeeds, after infinite mortification, at last. The dunces and
pedants are the best off; they never suspect that there is any wisdom in
the world but that of the ancients, of which they are the depositaries.
_T._—I do not think G. goes that length; but he only exists in his
passion for books and for literary fame. You cannot shock him more than
by questioning any established reputation.
_J._—Yes, he conceives himself to be a free-thinker, and yet is a bigot
in his way.
_T._—Men will have some idol, some mythology of their own—the _dii
majores_ or _minores_—something that they think greater than themselves,
or that they would wish to resemble; and G. would be as angry at a
sceptic on the subject of Burke’s style, as a Catholic would be at a
heretic who denied the virtues and miracles of his patron saint.
TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR
_The Atlas_] [_September 27 and October 4, 1829._
I. There is no flattery so gross or extravagant but it will be
acceptable. It leaves some sting of pleasure behind, since its very
excess seems to imply that there must be some foundation for it. Tell
the ugliest person in the world that he is the handsomest, the greatest
fool that he is a wit, and he will believe and thank you. There is a
possibility at least that you may be sincere. Even the sycophant’s
ironical laugh turns to a smile of self-complacency at our own fancied
perfections.
II. There is no abuse so foul or unprovoked but some part of it will
_stick_. Ill words break the charm of good deeds. Call a man names all
the year round, and at the end of the year (for no other reason) his
best friends will not care to mention his name. It is no pleasant
reflection that a man has been accused, however unjustly, of a folly or
a crime. We involuntarily associate words with things; and the
imagination retains an unfavourable impression long after the
understanding is disabused. Or if we repel the charge and resent the
injustice, this is making a toil of a pleasure, and our cowardice and
indolence soon take part with the malice of mankind. The assailants are
always the more courageous party. It degrades a man even to be subjected
to undeserved reproach, for it seems as if without some flaw or blemish
no one would dare to attack him; so that the viler and more unprincipled
the abuse, the lower it sinks, not him who offers, but him who is the
object of it, in general estimation. If we see a man covered with mud we
avoid him without expressing the cause. The favourites of the public,
like Cæsar’s wife, must not be suspected; and it is enough if we admire
and bear witness to the superiority of another under the most favourable
circumstances—to do this in spite of secret calumny and vulgar clamour
is a pitch of generosity which the world has not arrived at.
III. A certain _manner_ makes more conquests than either wit or beauty.
Suppose a woman to have a graceful ease of deportment, and a mild
self-possession pervading every look and tone of voice; this exercises
an immediate influence on a person of an opposite and irritable
temperament—it calms and enchants him at once. It is like soft music
entering the room—from that time he can only breathe in her presence,
and to be torn from her is to be torn from himself for ever.
IV. Fame and popularity are _disparate_ quantities, having no common
measure. A poet or painter now living may be as great as any poet or
painter that ever did live; and if he be so, he will be so thought of by
future ages, but he cannot by the present. Persons of overweening vanity
and short-sighted ambition, who would forestall the meed of fame, show
themselves unworthy of it, for they reduce it to a level with the
reputation they have already earned. They should surely leave something
to look forward to. It is weighing dross against gold—comparing a meteor
with the polar star. Lord Byron’s narrowness or presumption in this
respect was remarkable. What! did he not hope to live two hundred years
himself, that he should say it was merely a fashion to admire Milton and
Shakspeare as it was the fashion to admire him? Those who compare Sir
Walter Scott with Shakspeare do not know what they are doing. They may
blunt the feeling with which we regard Shakspeare as an old and tried
friend, though they cannot transfer it to Sir Walter Scott, who is,
after all, but a new and dazzling acquaintance. To argue that there is
no difference in the circumstances is not to put the author of
‘Waverley’ into actual possession of the reversion of fame, but to say
that he shall never enjoy it, since it is no better than a chimera and
an illusion. It is striking at the foundation of true and lasting
renown, and overturning with impatient and thoughtless hands the proud
pre-eminence, the golden seats and blest abodes which the predestined
heirs of immortality wait for beyond the tomb. The living are merely
candidates (more or less successful) for popular applause, the _dead_
are a religion, or they are nothing.
V. Persons who tell an artist that he is equal to Claude, or a writer
that he is as great as Bacon, do not add to the satisfaction of their
hearers, but pay themselves a left-handed compliment, by supposing that
their judgment is equivalent to the suffrage of posterity.
VI. A French artist advised young beginners against being too fond of a
variety of colours, which might do very well on a smaller scale, but
when they came to paint a large picture they would find they had soon
lavished all their resources. So superficial writers may deck out their
barren round of _common-places_ in the finest phrases imaginable; but
those who are accustomed to _work out_ a subject by dint of study, must
not use up their whole stock of eloquence at once, they must bring
forward their most appropriate expressions as they approach nearer to
the truth, and raise their style with their thoughts. A good general
keeps his reserve, the _élite_ of his troops, to charge at the critical
moment.
VII. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’ It is singular that we are
so often loth to begin what gives us great satisfaction in the progress,
and what, after we have once begun it, we are as loth to leave off. The
reason is, that the imagination is not excited till the first step is
taken or the first blow is struck. Before we begin a certain task, we
have little notion how we shall set about it, or how we shall proceed:
it is like attempting something of which we have no knowledge, and which
we feel we are incapable of doing. It is no wonder, therefore, that a
strong repugnance accompanies this seeming inaptitude: it is having to
_make bricks without straw_. But after the first effort is over, and we
have turned our minds to the subject, one thing suggests another, our
ideas pour in faster than we can use them, and we launch into the stream
which bears us on with ease and pleasure to ourselves. The painter who
did not like to mix his colours or begin on a new canvas in the morning,
sees the light close in upon him with unwilling eyes; and the essayist,
though gravelled for a thought, or at a loss for words at the outset of
his labours, winds up with alacrity and spirit.
VIII. Conversation is like a game at tennis, or any other game of skill.
A person shines in one company who makes no figure in another—just as a
tolerably good cricketer, who might be an acquisition to a country club,
would have his wicket struck down at the first bowl at _Lord’s-ground_.
The same person is frequently dull at one time and brilliant at another:
sometimes those who are most silent at the beginning of an entertainment
are most loquacious at the end. There is a _run in the luck_ both in
cards and conversation. Some people are good speakers but bad hearers:
these are put out, unless they have all the talk to themselves. Some are
best in a _tête-à-tête_; others in a mixed company. Some persons talk
well on a set subject, who can hardly answer a common question, still
less pay a compliment or make a _repartee_. Conversation may be divided
into the _personal_ or the _didactic_: the one resembles the style of a
lecture, the other that of a comedy. There are as many who fail in
conversation from aiming at too high a standard of excellence, and
wishing only to utter oracles or _jeux-d’esprit_, as there are who
expose themselves from having no standard at all, and saying whatever
comes into their heads. Pedants and gossips compose the largest class.
Numbers talk on without paying any attention to the effect they produce
upon their audience: some few take no part in the discourse but by
assenting to everything that is said, and these are not the worst
companions in the world. An outcry is sometimes raised against dull
people, as if it were any fault of theirs. The most brilliant performers
very soon grow dull, and we like people to begin as they end. There is
then no disappointment nor false excitement. The great ingredient in
society is good-will. He who is pleased with what he himself has to say,
and listens in his turn with patience and good-humour, is wise and witty
enough for us. We do not covet those parties where one wit dares not go,
because another is expected. How delectable must the encounter of such
pretenders be to one another! How edifying to the bye-standers!
IX. It was well said by Mr. Coleridge, that people never improve by
contradiction, but by _agreeing to differ_. If you discuss a question
amicably you may gain a clear insight into it; if you dispute about it
you only throw dust in one another’s eyes. In all angry or violent
controversy, your object is not to learn wisdom, but to prove your
adversary a fool; and in this respect, it must be admitted, both parties
usually succeed.
X. Envy is the ruling passion of mankind. The explanation is obvious. As
we are of infinitely more importance in our own eyes than all the world
beside, the chief bent and study of the mind is directed to impress
others with this self-evident but disputed distinction, and to arm
ourselves with the exclusive signatures and credentials of our
superiority, and to hate and stifle all that stands in the way of, or
obscures, our absurd pretensions. Each individual looks upon himself in
the light of a dethroned monarch, and the rest of the world as his
rebellious subjects and runaway slaves, who withhold the homage that is
his natural due, and burst the chains of opinion he would impose upon
them: the madman in Hogarth (sooth to say), with his crown of straw and
wooden sceptre, is but a type and _common-place_ emblem of every-day
life.
XI. It has been made a subject of regret that in forty or fifty years’
time (if we go on as we have done) no one will read Fielding. What a
falling off! Already, if you thoughtlessly lend _Joseph Andrews_ to a
respectable family, you find it returned upon your hands as an improper
book. To be sure, people read ‘Don Juan’; but _that_ is in verse. The
worst is, that this senseless fastidiousness is more owing to an
affectation of gentility than to a disgust at vice. It is not the scenes
that are described at an alehouse, but the _alehouse_ at which they take
place that gives the mortal stab to taste and refinement. One comfort
is, that the manners and characters which are objected to as _low_ in
Fielding have in a great measure disappeared or taken another shape; and
this at least is one good effect of all excellent satire—that it
destroys ‘the very food whereon it lives.’ The generality of readers,
who only seek for the representation of existing models, must therefore,
after a time, seek in vain for this obvious verisimilitude in the most
powerful and popular works of the kind; and will be either disgusted or
at a loss to understand the application. People of sense and
imagination, who look beyond the surface or the passing folly of the
day, will always read _Tom Jones_.
XII. There is a set of critics and philosophers who have never read
anything but what has appeared within the last ten years, and to whom
every mode of expression or turn of thought extending beyond that period
has a very odd effect. They cannot comprehend how people used such
out-of-the-way phrases in the time of Shakspeare; the style of Addison
would not do now—even Junius, they think, would make but a shabby
_thread-bare_ figure in the columns of a modern newspaper—all the riches
that the language has acquired in the course of time, all the idiomatic
resources arising from study or accident, are utterly discarded—sink
under-ground: and all that is admired by the weak or sought after by the
vain, is a thin surface of idle affectation and glossy innovations. Even
spelling and pronunciation have undergone such changes within a short
time, that Pope and Swift require a little _modernizing_ to accommodate
them to ‘ears polite;’ and that a _bluestocking belle_ would be puzzled
in reciting Dryden’s sounding verse with its occasional barbarous,
old-fashioned accenting, if it were the custom to read Dryden aloud in
those serene, morning circles. There is no class more liable to set up
this narrow superficial standard, than people of fashion, in their
horror of what is vulgar and ignorance of what really is so; they have a
jargon of their own, but scout whatever does not fall in with it as
Gothic and _outré_; the English phrases handed down from the last age
they think come east of Temple-bar, and they perform a sedulous
quarantine against them. The _Times_, having found it so written in some
outlandish _depêche_ of the Marquis of Wellesley’s, chose as a mark of
the _haute literature_, to spell _dispatch_ with an _e_, and for a long
time he was held for a novice or an affected and absolute writer who
spelt it otherwise. The _Globe_, with its characteristic good sense and
sturdiness of spirit has restored the old English spelling in defiance
of scandal. Some persons who were growing jealous that the author of
_Waverley_ had eclipsed their favourite luminaries may make themselves
easy; he himself is on the wane with those whose opinions ebb and flow
with the ‘inconstant moon’ of fashion, and has given way (if Mr.
Colburn’s advertisements speak true, ‘than which what’s truer?’) to a
set of titled nonentities. Nothing solid is to go down, or that is
likely to last three months; instead of the standing dishes of old
English literature we are to take up with the _nicknacks_ and whipt
syllabubs of modern taste; are to be occupied with a stream of
titlepages, extracts, and specimens, like passing figures in a _camera
obscura_, and are to be puzzled in a mob of new books as in the mob of
new faces in what was formerly the narrow part of the Strand.
XIII. Never pity people because they are ill-used. They only wait the
opportunity to use others just as ill. Hate the oppression and prevent
the evil if you can; but do not fancy there is any virtue in being
oppressed, or any love lost between the parties. The unfortunate are not
a jot more amiable than their neighbours, though they give themselves
out so, and our pity takes part with those who have disarmed our envy.
XIV. The human mind seems to improve, because it is continually in
progress. But as it moves forward to new acquisitions and trophies, it
loses its hold on those which formerly were its chief boast and
employment. Men are better chemists than they were, but worse divines;
they read the newspapers, it is true, but neglect the classics.
Everything has its turn. Neither is error extirpated so much as it takes
a new form and puts on a more artful disguise. Folly shifts its ground,
but finds its level: absurdity is never left without a subterfuge. The
dupes of dreams and omens in former times, are now the converts to
graver and more solemn pieces of quackery. The race of the sanguine, the
visionary, and the credulous, of those who believe what they wish, or
what excites their wonder, in preference to what they know, or can have
rationally explained, will never wear out; and they only transfer their
innate love of the marvellous from old and exploded chimeras to
fashionable theories, and the _terra incognita_ of modern science.
XV. It is a curious speculation to take a modern _belle_, or some
accomplished female acquaintance, and conceive what her
great-great-grandmother was like, some centuries ago. Who was the Mrs.
—— of the year 200? We have some standard of grace and elegance among
eastern nations 3000 years ago, because we read accounts of them in
history; but we have no more notion of, or faith in, our own ancestors
than if we had never had any. We _cut the connexion_ with the Druids and
the Heptarchy; and cannot fancy ourselves (by any transformation)
inmates of caves and woods, or feeders on acorns and sloes. We seem
_engrafted_ on that low stem—a bright, airy, and insolent excrescence.
XVI. There is this advantage in painting, if there were no other, that
it is the truest and most self-evident kind of history. It shows that
there were people long ago, and also _what_ they were, not in a book
darkly, but face to face. It is not the half-formed clay, the
old-fashioned dress, as we might conceive; but the living lineaments,
the breathing expression. You look at a picture by Vandyke, and there
see as in an enchanted mirror, an English woman of quality two hundred
years ago, sitting in unconscious state with her child playing at her
feet, and with all the dove-like innocence of look, the grace and
refinement that it is possible for virtue and breeding to bestow. It is
enough to make us proud of our nature and our countrywomen; and
dissipates at once the idle, _upstart_ prejudice that all before our
time was sordid and scarce civilised. If our progress does not appear so
great as our presumption has suggested, what does it signify? With such
models kept in view, our chief object ought to be not to degenerate; and
though the future prospect is less gaudy and imposing, the retrospect
opens a larger and brighter _vista_ of excellence.
XVII. I am by education and conviction inclined to republicanism and
puritanism. In America they have both; but I confess I feel a little
staggered in the practical efficacy and saving grace of _first
principles_, when I ask myself, ‘Can they throughout the United States,
from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head like one of Titian’s
Venetian nobles, nurtured in all the pride of aristocracy and all the
blindness of popery?’ Of all the branches of political economy, the
human face is perhaps the best criterion of _value_.
COMMON SENSE
_The Atlas._] [_October 11, 1829._
Common sense is a rare and enviable quality. It may be truly said that
‘its price is above rubies.’ How many learned men, how many wits, how
many geniuses, how many dull and ignorant people, how many cunning
knaves, how many well-meaning fools are without it! How few have it, and
how little do they or others know of it, except from the infallible
results—for one of its first requisites is the utter absence of all
pretension! The vulgar laugh at the pedant and enthusiast for the want
of it, while they themselves mistake bigotry and narrow-minded notions
for it. It is not one of the sciences, but has been well pronounced to
be ‘fairly worth the seven.’ It is a kind of mental instinct, that feels
the air of truth and propriety as the fingers feel objects of touch. It
does not consist with ignorance, for we cannot pronounce on what we do
not know; and on the other hand, the laying in a stock of knowledge, or
mastering any art or science, seems to destroy that native simplicity,
and to warp and trammel the unbiassed freedom of mind which is necessary
to its receiving and giving their due weight to ordinary and casual
impressions. Common sense is neither a peculiar talent nor a laborious
acquirement, but may be regarded as a sound and impartial judgment
operating on the daily practice of life, or on what ‘comes home to the
business and bosoms of men’; combined with great attainments and
speculative inquiries, it would justly earn the title of _wisdom_; but
of the latter we have never known a single instance, though we have met
with a few of the former; that is, we have known a number of persons who
were wise in the affairs of the world and in what concerned their own
interest, but none who, beyond this, and in judging of general
questions, were not the dupes of some flaw of temper, of some weakness
or vanity, or even striking advantage of their own. To give an example
of two in illustration. A person may be an excellent scholar, a good
mathematician, well versed in law and history, a first-rate
chess-player, a dazzling fencer, in a word, a sort of _admirable
Crichton_—you are disposed to admire or envy so many talents united—you
smile to see him wanting in common sense, and getting into a dispute
about a _douceur_ to a paltry police-officer, and thinking to interest
all Europe and both Houses of Parliament in his success. It is true, he
has law and reason on his side, has Grotius and Puffendorf and the
_statutes at large_ doubled down in dog-ears for the occasion, has a
vast and lively apparatus of well-arranged premises and conclusions
ready to play off against his adversaries; but he does not consider that
he has to deal with interest and custom, those impalpable, intangible
essences, that ‘fear no discipline of human wit.’ Does he think to
check-mate the police? Will he stop the mouth of a hungry tide-waiter
with a syllogism? Or supersede a perquisite by the _reductio ad
absurdum_? It is a want of common sense, or the not distinguishing
properly between the definite and the indefinite. No one can have
arrived at years of discretion without knowing or feeling that he cannot
take a single step without some compromise with existing circumstances;
that the path of life is intercepted with innumerable turnpike-gates, at
which he must pay down the toll of his own convictions and of strict
justice; that he cannot walk the streets but by tacit allowance; and
that to disregard all impediments in the right line of reason and
written forms is to imitate the conduct of _Commodore Trunnion_, who
mistook the land for the sea, and went to be married by the wind and
compass. The proofs of this occur every hour of the day—they may not be
registered, they may not be remembered, but they are virtually and
effectively noted down by the faculty of common sense, which does not
feel its way the less surely because it proceeds often mechanically and
blindly. There may be exceptions indeed to ordinary rules, on which a
man may go to martyrdom and a stake (such as that of Hampden and
ship-money), but these occur once in a century, and are only met with at
the corners of streets by those who have an excess of logical
discrimination, and have to pay a certain tax for being too clever by
half. It is the fashion at present among the philosophical vulgar to
decry _feeling_, both the name and the thing. It would be difficult,
however, to do without it: for this word embraces all that mass of
knowledge and of common sense which lies between the extremes of
positive proof or demonstration and downright ignorance; and those who
would pragmatically confine their own convictions or those of others to
what is absolutely known and understood, would at best become scientific
pedants and artificial barbarians. There are some persons who are the
victims of argument; as there are others who are the slaves of minute
details and matters of fact. One class will have a reason for every
thing, and will admit the greatest absurdities that are formally
proposed to them; the other must have facts to support every conclusion,
and can never see an inch beyond their noses. The last have the _organ
of individuality_ largely developed, and are proportionably deficient in
common sense. Their ideas are all local and literal. To borrow the
language of a great but obscure metaphysician, their minds are
_epileptic_; that is, are in perpetual throes and convulsions, fasten on
every object in their way not to help but to hinder their progress, and
have no voluntary power to let go their hold of a particular
circumstance, to grasp the whole of any question, or suspend their
judgment for an instant. The fact that is before them is every thing;
the rest goes for nothing. They are always at cross-purposes with
themselves, for their decisions are the result of the last evidence,
without any corrective or qualifier in common sense; in the hunt after
proofs, they forget their principles, and gain their point, though they
lose their cause.
The Scotch have much of this _matter-of-fact_ understanding, and bigotry
to personal and actual statistics. They would persuade you that there is
no country but Scotland, nothing but what is Scotch. Mr. Mac Alpine
shifts the discourse from the metropolis, hurries rapidly over the
midland counties, crosses the border, and sits down to an exordium in
praise of the ‘kindly Scot.’ Charity has its home and hearth by
Tweed-side, where he was born and bred, Scotch beggars were quite
different from English beggars: there was none of the hard-heartedness
towards them that was always shown in England. His mother, though not a
rich woman, always received them kindly, and had a bag of meal out of
which she always gave them something, as they went their rounds. ‘Lord!
Mr. Mac Alpine!’ says Mrs. Mac Alpine, ‘other people have mothers as
well as you, and there are beggars in England as well as Scotland. Why,
in Yorkshire, where I was brought up, common beggars used to come round
just as you describe, and my mother, who was no richer than yours, used
to give them a crust of bread or broken victuals just in the same way;
you make such a _fuss_ about nothing.’ Women are best to set these
follies to rights:—
‘They have no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy thought draws in the brains of men.’
If no great philosophers, they do not want common sense; and are only
misled in what lies beyond their sphere of feeling and observation, by
taking up the opinions of their _better halves_. The common people in
like manner do not want common sense in what falls under their especial
cognizance and daily practice. A country-shoemaker or plough-man
understands shoemaking, and can ‘crack of ploughs and kine,’ though he
knows nothing of the Catholic question. If an old woman in a
country-town believes she shall be burnt at a stake, now that this
question is settled, it is because she is told so by those who ought to
know better, and who impose _their_ prejudices upon _her_ ignorance.
Vulgar errors which are taken on trust, or are traditional, or are the
blunders of ignorance on points of learning, have nothing to do with
common sense, which decides only on facts and feelings which have come
under its own notice. Common sense and _common-place_ are also the
antipodes of each other: the one is a collection of true experiences,
the other a routine of cant phrases. All affectation is the death of
common sense, which requires the utmost simplicity and sincerity. Liars
must be without common sense, for instead of considering what things
really are, their whole time and attention are taken up in imposing
false appearances on themselves and their neighbours. No conceited
person can have the faculty we have been speaking of, since all objects
are tinged and changed from their proper hue by the idle reflection of
their fancied excellence and superiority. Great talkers are in the same
predicament, for they sacrifice truth to a fine speech or sentiment, and
conceal the real consequences of things from their view by a cloud of
words, of empty breath. They look at nature not to study what it is, but
to discover what they can say about it. Passionate people are generally
thought to be devoid of judgment. They may be so, when their passions
are touched to the quick; but without a certain degree of natural
irritability, we do not conceive truth leaves sufficient stings in the
mind, and we judge correctly of things according to the interest we take
in them. No one can be a physiognomist, for example, or have an insight
into character and expression, without the correspondent germs of these
in his own breast. Phlegmatic C——, with all his husbandry acquirements,
is but half a philosopher, half a clown. Poets, if they have not common
sense, can do very well without it. What need have they to conform their
ideas to the actual world, when they can create a world according to
their fancy? We know of no remedy for want of tact and insight into
human affairs, any more than for the defect of any other organ. _Tom
Jones_ is, we think, the best horn-book for students in this way; and if
the novice should rise up no wiser from its repeated perusal, at least
such an employment of his time will be better than playing the fool or
talking nonsense. After all, the most absurd characters are those who
are so, not from a want of common sense, but who act in defiance of
their better knowledge. The capricious and fickle who change every
moment, the perverse who aim only at what is placed out of their reach,
the obstinate who pursue a losing cause, the idle and vicious who ruin
themselves and every one connected with them, do it as often with their
eyes open as from blind infatuation; and it is the bias of their wills,
not the deficiency of their understandings, that is in fault. The
greatest fools in practice are sometimes the wisest men in theory, for
they have all the advantage of their own experience and self-reflection
to prompt them; and they can give the best advice to others, though they
do not conceive themselves bound to follow it in their own instance.
_Video meliora proboque_, etc. Their judgments may be clear and just,
but their habits and affections lie all the wrong way; and it is as
useless as it would be cruel to expect them to reform, since they only
delight and can only exist in their darling absurdities and daily and
hourly _escapades_ from common sense and reason.
THE SPIRIT OF CONTROVERSY
_The Atlas._] [_January 31, 1830._
The Spirit of Controversy has often been arraigned as the source of much
bitterness and vexation, as productive of ‘envy, malice, and all
uncharitableness’: and the charge, no doubt, is too well founded. But it
is said to be _an ill wind that blows nobody good_; and there are few
evils in life that have not some qualifying circumstance attending them.
It is one of the worst consequences of this very spirit of controversy
that it has led men to regard things too much in a single and
exaggerated point of view. Truth is not one thing, but has many aspects
and many shades of difference; it is neither all black nor all white;
sees something wrong on its own side, something right in others; makes
concessions to an adversary, allowances for human frailty, and is nearer
akin to charity than the dealers in controversy or the declaimers
against it are apt to imagine. The bigot and partisan (influenced by the
very spirit he finds fault with) sees nothing in the endless disputes
which have tormented and occupied men’s thoughts but an abuse of
learning and a waste of time: the philosopher may still find an excuse
for so bad and idle a practice. One frequent objection made to the
incessant wrangling and collision of sects and parties is, _What does it
all come to?_ And the answer is, _What would they have done without it?_
The pleasure of the chase, or the benefit derived from it, is not to be
estimated by the value of the game after it is caught, so much as by the
difficulty of starting it and the exercise afforded to the body and the
excitement of the animal spirits in hunting it down: and so it is in the
exercises of the mind and the pursuit of truth, which are chiefly
valuable (perhaps) less for their results when discovered, than for
their affording continual scope and employment to the mind in its
endeavours to reach the fancied goal, without its being ever (or but
seldom) able to attain it. _Regard the end_, is an ancient saying, and a
good one, if it does not mean that we are to forget the _beginning_ and
the _middle_. By insisting on the ultimate value of things when all is
over, we may acquire the character of _grave_ men, but not of wise ones.
_Passe pour cela._ If we would set up such a sort of fixed and final
standard of moral truth and worth, we had better try to construct life
over again, so as to make it a _punctum stans_, and not a thing in
progress; for as it is, every end, before it can be realised, implies a
previous imagination, a warm interest in, and an active pursuit of,
itself, all which are integral and vital parts of human existence, and
it is a begging of the question to say that an end is only of value in
itself, and not as it draws out the living resources, and satisfies the
original capacities of human nature. When the play is over, the curtain
drops, and we see nothing but a green cloth; but before this, there have
been five acts of brilliant scenery and high-wrought declamation, which,
if we come to plain matter-of-fact and history, are still something.
According to the contrary theory, nothing is real but a blank. This
flatters the paradoxical pride of man, whose motto is, _all or none_.
Look at that pile of school divinity! Behold where the demon of
controversy lies buried! The huge tomes are mouldy and worm-eaten:—did
their contents the less eat into the brain, or corrode the heart, or
stir the thoughts, or fill up the void of lassitude and _ennui_ in the
minds of those who wrote them? Though now laid aside and forgotten, if
they had not once had a host of readers, they would never have been
written; and their hard and solid bulk asked the eager tooth of
curiosity and zeal to pierce through it. We laugh to see their ponderous
dulness weighed in scales, and sold for waste paper. We should not laugh
too soon. On the smallest difference of faith or practice discussed in
them, the fate of kingdoms hung suspended; and not merely so (which was
a trifle) but Heaven and Hell trembled in the balance, according to the
full persuasion of our pious forefathers. Many a drop of blood flowed in
the field or on the scaffold, from these tangled briars and thorns of
controversy; many a man marched to a stake to bear testimony to the most
frivolous and incomprehensible of their dogmas. This was an untoward
consequence; but if it was an evil to be burnt at a stake, it was well
and becoming to have an opinion (whether right or wrong) for which a man
was willing to be burnt at a stake. Read Baxter’s _Controversial Works_:
consider the flames of zeal, the tongues of fire, the heights of faith,
the depths of subtlety, which they unfold, as in a darkly illuminated
scroll; and then ask how much we are gainers by an utter contempt and
indifference to all this? We wonder at the numberless volumes of sermons
that have been written, preached, and printed on the Arian and Socinian
controversies, on Calvinism and Arminianism, on surplices and stoles, on
infant or adult baptism, on image-worship and the defacing of images;
and we forget that it employed the preacher all the week to prepare his
sermon (be the subject what it would) for the next Lord’s day, with
infinite collating of texts, authorities, and arguments; that his flock
were no less edified by listening to it on the following Sunday; and how
many _David Deans’s_ came away convinced that they had been listening to
the ‘root of the matter’! See that group collected after service-time
and pouring over the gravestones in the churchyard, from whence, to the
eye of faith, a light issues that points to the skies! See them
disperse; and as they take different paths homeward while the evening
closes in, still discoursing of the true doctrine and the glad tidings
they have heard, how ‘their hearts burn within them by the way’! Then
again, we should set down, among other items in the account, how the
schoolboy is put to it to remember the text, and how the lazy
servant-wench starts up to find herself asleep in church-time! Such is
the business of human life; and we, who fancy ourselves above it, are
only so much the more taken up with follies of our own. We look down in
this age of reason on those controverted points and nominal distinctions
which formerly kept up such ‘a coil and pudder’ in the world, as idle
and ridiculous, because we are not parties to them; but if it was the
_egotism_ of our predecessors that magnified them beyond all rational
bounds, it is no less egotism in us who undervalue their opinions and
pursuits because they are not ours; and, indeed, to leave egotism out of
human nature, is ‘to leave the part of _Hamlet_ out of the play of
_Hamlet_.’ Or what are we the better with our _Utilitarian
Controversies_, Mr. Taylor’s discourses (delivered in canonicals)
against the evidence of the Christian religion, or the changes of
ministry and disagreements between the Duke of Wellington and the Duke
of Newcastle?
‘Strange! that such difference should be
’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee!’
But the prevalence of religious controversy is reproached with fomenting
spiritual pride and intolerance, and sowing heart-burnings, jealousies,
and fears, ‘like a thick scurf o’er life;’ yet, had it not been for
this, we should have been tearing one another to pieces like savages for
fragments of raw flesh, or quarrelling with a herd of swine for a
windfall of acorns under an oak-tree. The world has never yet done, and
will never be able to do, without some apple of discord—some bone of
contention—any more than courts of law can do without pleadings, or
hospitals without the sick. When a thing ceases to be a subject of
controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest. Why need we regret
the various hardships and persecutions for conscience-sake, when men
only clung closer to their opinions in consequence? They loved their
religion in proportion as they paid dear for it. Nothing could keep the
Dissenters from going to a conventicle while it was declared an unlawful
assembly, and was the highroad to a prison or the plantations—take away
tests and fines, and make the road open and easy, and the sect dwindles
gradually into insignificance. A thing is supposed to be worth nothing
that costs nothing. Besides, there is always pretty nearly the same
quantity of malice afloat in the world; though with the change of time
and manners it may become a finer poison, and kill by more unseen ways.
When the sword has done its worst, slander, ‘whose edge is sharper than
the sword,’ steps in to keep the blood from stagnating. Instead of slow
fires and paper caps fastened round the heads of the victims, we arrive
at the same end by a politer way of nicknames and anonymous criticism.
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ is the modern version of Fox’s _Book of Martyrs_.
Discard religion and politics (the two grand topics of controversy), and
people would hate each other as cordially, and torment each other as
effectually about the preference to be given to Mozart or Rossini, to
Malibran or Pasta. We indeed fix upon the most excellent things, as God,
our country, and our King, to account for the excess of our zeal; but
this depends much less upon the goodness of our cause than on the
strength of our passions, and our overflowing gall and rooted antipathy
to whatever stands in the way of our conceit and obstinacy. We set up an
idol (as we set up a mark to shoot at) for others to bow down to, on
peril of our utmost displeasure, let the value of it be what it may——
‘Of whatsoe’er descent his Godhead be,
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his servants are as bold
As if he had been born of beaten gold.’
It is, however, but fair to add, in extenuation of the evils of
controversy, that if the points at issue had been quite clear, or the
advantage all on one side, they would not have been so liable to be
contested about. We condemn controversy, because we would have matters
all our own way, and think that ours is the only side that has a title
to be heard. We imagine that there is but one view of a subject that is
right; and that all the rest being plainly and wilfully wrong, it is a
shocking waste of speech, and a dreadful proof of prejudice and party
spirit, to have a word to say in their defence. But this is a want of
liberality and comprehension of mind. For in general we dispute either
about things respecting which we are a good deal in the dark, and where
both parties are very possibly in the wrong, and may be left to find out
their mutual error; or about those points, where there is an opposition
of interests and passions, and where it would be by no means safe to cut
short the debate by making one party judges for the other. They must,
therefore, be left to fight it out as well as they can; and, between the
extremes of folly and violence, to strike a balance of common sense and
even-handed justice. Every sect or party will, of course, run into
extravagance and partiality; but the probability is, that there is some
ground of argument, some appearance of right, to justify the grossest
bigotry and intolerance. The fury of the combatants is excited because
there is something to be said on the other side of the question. If men
were as infallible as they suppose themselves, they would not dispute.
If every novelty were well founded, truth might be discovered by a
receipt; but as antiquity does not always turn out an old woman, this
accounts for the _vis inertiæ_ of the mind in so often pausing and
setting its face against innovation. Authority has some advantages to
recommend it as well as reason, or it would long ago have been scouted.
Aristocracy and democracy, monarchy and republicanism, are not all pure
good or pure evil, though the abettors or antagonists of each think so,
and that all the mischief arises from others entertaining any doubt
about the question, and insisting on carrying their absurd theories into
practice. The French and English are grossly prejudiced against each
other; but still the interests of each are better taken care of under
this exaggerated notion than if that vast mass of rights and
pretensions, which each is struggling for, were left to the tender
mercies and ruthless candour of the other side. ‘_Every man for himself
and God for us all_’ is a rule that will apply here. Controversy,
therefore, is a necessary evil or good (call it which you will) till all
differences of opinion or interest are reconciled, and absolute
certainty or perfect indifference alike takes away the possibility or
the temptation to litigation and quarrels. We need be under no immediate
alarm of coming to such a conclusion. There is always room for doubt,
food for contention. While we are engrossed with one controversy,
indeed, we think every thing else is clear; but as soon as one point is
settled, we begin to cavil and start objections to that which has before
been taken for gospel. The Reformers thought only of opposing the Church
of Rome, and never once anticipated the schisms and animosities which
arose among Protestants: the Dissenters, in carrying their point against
the Church of England, did not dream of that crop of infidelity and
scepticism which, to their great horror and scandal, sprung up in the
following age, from their claim of free inquiry and private judgment.
The _non-essentials_ of religion first came into dispute; then the
essentials. Our own opinion, we fancy, is founded on a rock; the rest we
regard as stubble. But no sooner is one out-work of established faith or
practice demolished, than another is left a defenceless mark for the
enemy, and the engines of wit and sophistry immediately begin to batter
it. Thus we proceed step by step, till, passing through the several
gradations of vanity and paradox, we came to doubt whether we stand on
our head or our heels, alternately deny the existence of spirit and
matter, maintain that black is white, call evil good and good evil, and
defy any one to prove the contrary. As faith is the prop and cement that
upholds society by opposing fixed principles as a barrier against the
inroads of passion, so reason is the _menstruum_ which dissolves it by
leaving nothing sufficiently firm or unquestioned in our opinions to
withstand the current and bias of inclination. Hence the decay and ruin
of states—then barbarism, sloth, and ignorance—and so we commence the
circle again of building up all that it is possible to conceive out of a
rude chaos, and the obscure shadowings of things, and then pulling down
all that we have built up, till not a trace of it is left. Such is the
effect of the ebb and flow and restless agitation of the human mind.
ENVY
_The Atlas._] [_February 14, 1830._
Envy is the _grudging_ or receiving pain from any accomplishment or
advantage possessed by another. It is one of the most tormenting and
odious of the passions, inasmuch as it does not consist in the enjoyment
or pursuit of any good to ourselves, but in the hatred and jealousy of
the good fortune of others and the debarring and defrauding them of
their due and what is of no use to us, on the _dog in the manger_
principle; and it is at the same time as mean as it is revolting, as
being accompanied with a sense of weakness and a desire to conceal and
tamper with the truth and its own convictions, out of paltry spite and
vanity. It is, however, but an excess or excrescence of the other
passions (such as pride or avarice) or of a wish to monopolise all the
good things of life to ourselves, which makes us impatient and
dissatisfied at seeing any one else in possession of that to which we
think we have the only fair title. Envy is the deformed and distorted
offspring of _egotism_; and when we reflect on the strange and
disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the
perversity and waywardness of the child. Such is the absorbing and
exorbitant quality of our self-love, that it represents us as of
infinitely more importance in our own eyes than the whole universe put
together, and would sacrifice the claims and interest of all the world
beside to the least of its caprices or extravagances; need we be
surprised then that this little, upstart, overweening self, that would
trample on the globe itself and then weep for new ones to conquer,
should be uneasy, mad, mortified, eaten up with chagrin and melancholy,
and hardly able to bear its own existence, at seeing a single competitor
among the crowd cross its path, jostle its pretensions, and stagger its
opinion of its exclusive right to admiration and superiority? This it is
that constitutes the offence, that gives the shock, that inflicts the
wound, that some poor creature (as we would fain suppose) whom we had
before overlooked and entirely disregarded as not worth our notice,
should of a sudden enter the lists and challenge comparison with us. The
presumption is excessive; and so is our thirst of revenge. From the
moment, however, that the eye fixes on another as the object of envy, we
cannot take it off; for our pride and self-conceit magnify that which
obstructs our success and lessens our self-importance into a monster; we
see nothing else, we hear of nothing else, we dream of nothing else, it
haunts us and takes possession of our whole souls; and as we are
engrossed by it ourselves, so we fancy that all the rest of the world
are equally taken up with our petty annoyances and disappointed pride.
Hence the ‘jealous leer malign’ of envy, which, not daring to look that
which provokes it in the face, cannot yet keep its eyes from it, and
gloats over and becomes as it were enamoured of the very object of its
loathing and deadly hate. We pay off the score which our littleness and
vanity has been running up, by ample and gratuitous concessions to the
first person that gives a check to our swelling self-complacency, and
forces us to drag him into an unwilling comparison with ourselves. It is
no matter who the person is, what his pretensions—if they are a
counterpoise to our own, we think them of more consequence than anything
else in the world. This often gives rise to laughable results. We see
the jealousies among servants, hackney-coachmen, cobblers in a stall; we
are amused with the rival advertisements of quacks and stage-coach
proprietors, and smile to read the significant intimation on some shop
window, ‘No connection with the next door;’ but the same folly runs
through the whole of life; each person thinks that he who stands in his
way or outstrips him in a particular pursuit, is the most enviable, and
at the same time the most hateful character in the world. Nothing can
show the absurdity of the passion of envy in a more striking point of
view than the number of rival claims which it entirely overlooks, while
it would arrogate all excellence to itself. The loftiness of our
ambition and the narrowness of our views are equal, and indeed both
depend upon the same cause. The player envies only the player, the poet
envies only the poet, because each confines his idea of excellence to
his own profession and pursuit, and thinks, if he could but remove some
hapless competitor out of his way, he should have a clear stage to
himself, or be a ‘Phœnix gazed by all:’ as if, though we crushed one
rival, another would not start up; or as if there were not a thousand
other claims, a thousand other modes of excellence and praiseworthy
acquirements, to divide the palm and defeat his idle pretension to the
sole and unqualified admiration of mankind. Professors of every class
see merit only in their own line; yet they would blight and destroy that
_little bit_ of excellence which alone they acknowledge to exist, except
as it centres in themselves. Speak in praise of an actor to another
actor, and he turns away with impatience and disgust: speak
disparagingly of the first as an actor in general, and the latter
eagerly takes up the quarrel as his own: thus the _esprit de corps_ only
comes in as an appendage to our self-love. It is perhaps well that we
are so blind to merit out of our immediate sphere, for it might only
prove an additional _eye-sore_, increase the obliquity of our mental
vision, multiply our antipathies, or end in total indifference and
despair. There is nothing so bad as a cynical apathy and contempt for
every art and science from a superficial _smattering_ and general
acquaintance with them all. The merest pedantry and the most tormenting
jealousy and heart-burnings of envy are better than this. Those who are
masters of different advantages and accomplishments, are seldom the more
satisfied with them: they still aim at something else (however
contemptible) which they have not or cannot do. So Pope says of Wharton—
‘Though wondering senates hung on all he spoke,
The club must hail him master of the joke.
Shall parts so various aim at nothing new?
He’ll shine a Tully and a Wilmot too.’
The world, indeed, are pretty even with these constellations of splendid
and superfluous qualities in their fastidious estimate of their own
pretensions, for (if possible) they never give any individual credit for
more than one leading attainment. If a man is an artist, his being a
fine musician adds nothing to his fame. When the public strain a point
to own one claim, it is on condition that the fortunate candidate waives
every other. The mind is prepared with a plausible antithesis in such
cases against the formidable encroachments of vanity: one qualification
is regularly made a foil to another. We allow no one to be two things at
a time: it quite unsettles our notions of personal identity. If we allow
a man wit, it is part of the bargain that he wants judgment: if style he
wants matter. Rich, but a fool or miser—a beauty, but vain; _so runs the
bond_. ‘But’ is the favourite monosyllable of envy and self-love.
Raphael could draw and Titian could colour—we shall never get beyond
this point while the world stands; the human understanding is not cast
in a mould to receive double proofs of entire superiority to itself. It
is folly to expect it. If a farther claim be set up, we call in question
the solidity of the first, incline to retract it, and suspect that the
whole is a juggle and a piece of impudence, as we threaten a common
beggar with the stocks for following us to ask a second alms. This is,
in fact, one source of the prevalence and deep root which envy has in
the human mind: we are incredulous as to the truth and justice of the
demands which are so often made upon our pity or our admiration; but let
the distress or the merit be established beyond all controversy, and we
open our hearts and purses on the spot, and sometimes run into the
contrary extreme when charity or admiration becomes the fashion. No one
envies the _Author of Waverley_, because all admire him, and are
sensible that admire him how they will, they can never admire him
enough. We do not envy the sun for shining, when we feel the benefit and
see the light. When some persons start an injudicious parallel between
him and Shakspeare, we then may grow jealous and uneasy, because this
interferes with our older and more firmly rooted conviction of genius,
and one which has stood a severer and surer test. Envy has, then, some
connexion with a sense of justice—is a defence against imposture and
quackery. Though we do not willingly give up the secret and silent
consciousness of our own worth to vapouring and false pretences, we do
homage to the true candidate for fame when he appears, and even exult
and take a pride in our capacity to appreciate the highest desert. This
is one reason why we do not envy the dead—less because they are removed
out of our way, than because all doubt and diversity of opinion is
dismissed from the question of their title to veneration and respect.
Our tongue, having a license, grows wanton in their praise. We do not
envy or stint our admiration of Rubens, because the mists of uncertainty
or prejudice are withdrawn by the hand of time from the splendour of his
works. Fame is to genius—
‘Like to a gate of steel fronting the sun,
That renders back its figure and its heat.’
We give full and unbounded scope to our impressions when they are
confirmed by successive generations; as we form our opinions coldly and
slowly while we are afraid our judgment may be reversed by posterity. We
trust the testimony of ages, for it is true; we are no longer in pain
lest we should be deceived by varnish and tinsel; and feel assured that
the praise and the work are both sterling. In contemporary reputation,
the greater and more transcendant the merit, the less is the envy
attending it; which shows that this passion is not, after all, a mere
barefaced hatred and detraction from acknowledged excellence. Mrs.
Siddons was not an object of envy; her unrivalled powers defied
competitors or gainsayers. If Kean had a party against him, it was
composed of those who could not or would not see his merits through his
defects; and in like manner, John Kemble’s elevation to the tragic
throne was not carried by loud and tumultuous acclamation, because the
stately height which he attained was the gradual result of labour and
study, and his style of acting did not flash with the inspiration of the
God. We are backward to bestow a heaped measure of praise, whenever
there is any inaptitude or incongruity that acts to damp or throw a
stumbling-block in the way of our enthusiasm. Hence the jealousy and
dislike shown towards upstart wealth, as we cannot in our imaginations
reconcile the former poverty of the possessors with their present
magnificence—we despise fortune-hunters in ambition as well as in
love—and hence, no doubt, one strong ground of hereditary right. We
acquiesce more readily in an assumption of superiority that in the first
place implies no merit (which is a great relief to the baser sort), and
in the second, that baffles opposition by seeming a thing inevitable,
taken for granted, and transmitted in the common course of nature. In
contested elections, where the precedence is understood to be awarded to
rank and title, there is observed to be less acrimony and obstinacy than
when it is supposed to depend on individual merit and fitness for the
office; no one willingly allows another more ability or honesty than
himself, but he cannot deny that another may be _better born_. Learning
again is more freely admitted than genius, because it is of a more
positive quality, and is felt to be less essentially a part of a man’s
self; and with regard to the grosser and more invidious distinction of
wealth, it may be difficult to substitute any finer test of
respectability for it, since it is hard to fathom the depth of a man’s
understanding, but the length of his purse is soon known; and besides,
there is a little collusion in the case:—
‘The learned pate ducks to the golden fool.’
We bow to a patron who gives us a good dinner and his countenance for
our pains, and interest bribes and lulls envy asleep. The most painful
kind of envy is the envy towards inferiors; for we cannot bear to think
that a person (in other respects utterly insignificant) should have or
seem to have an advantage over us in any thing we have set our hearts
upon, and it strikes at the very root of our self-love to be foiled by
those we despise. There is some dignity in a contest with power and
acknowledged reputation: but a triumph over the sordid and the mean is
itself a mortification, while a defeat is intolerable.
ON PREJUDICE
_The Atlas._] [_April 11, 1830._
Prejudice, in its ordinary and literal sense, is _prejudging_ any
question without having sufficiently examined it, and adhering to our
opinion upon it through ignorance, malice, or perversity, in spite of
every evidence to the contrary. The little that we know has a strong
alloy of misgiving and uncertainty in it: the mass of things of which we
have no means of judging, but of which we form a blind and confident
opinion as if we were thoroughly acquainted with them, is monstrous.
Prejudice is the child of ignorance; for as our actual knowledge falls
short of our desire to know, or curiosity and interest in the world
about us, so must we be tempted to decide upon a greater number of
things at a venture; and having no check from reason or inquiry, we
shall grow more obstinate and bigoted in our conclusions, according as
they have been rash and presumptuous. The absence of proof, instead of
suspending our judgments, only gives us an opportunity to make things
out according to our wishes and fancies; mere ignorance is a blank
canvas on which we lay what colours we please, and paint objects black
or white, as angels or devils, magnify or diminish them at our option;
and in the vacuum either of facts or arguments, the weight of prejudice
and passion falls with double force, and bears down everything before
it. If we enlarge the circle of our previous knowledge ever so little,
we may meet with something to create doubt and difficulty; but as long
as we remain confined to the cell of our native ignorance, while we know
nothing beyond the routine of sense and custom, we shall refer
everything to that standard, or make it out as we would have it to be,
like spoiled children who have never been from home, and expect to find
nothing in the world that does not accord with their wishes and notions.
It is evident, that the fewer things we know, the more ready we shall be
to pronounce upon and condemn, what is new and strange to us; that is,
the less capable we shall be of varying our conceptions, and the more
prone to mistake a part for the whole. What we do not understand the
meaning of must necessarily appear to us ridiculous and contemptible;
and we do not stop to inquire, till we have been taught by repeated
experiments and warnings of our own fallibility, whether the absurdity
is in ourselves or in the object of our dislike and scorn. The most
ignorant people are rude and insolent, as the most barbarous are cruel
and ferocious. All our knowledge at first lying in a narrow compass
(bounded by local and physical causes) whatever does not conform to this
shocks us as out of reason and nature. The less we look abroad, the more
our ideas are introverted; and our habitual impressions, from being made
up of a few particulars always repeated, grow together into a kind of
concrete substance, which will not bear taking to pieces, and where the
smallest deviation destroys the whole feeling. Thus the difference of
colour in a black man was thought to forfeit his title to belong to the
species, till books of voyages and travels, and old Fuller’s quaint
expression of ‘God’s image carved in ebony,’ have brought the two ideas
into a forced union, and Mr. Murray no longer libels men of colour with
impunity. The word _republic_ has a harsh and incongruous sound to ears
bred under a constitutional monarchy; and we strove hard for many years
to overturn the French republic, merely because we could not reconcile
it to ourselves that such a thing should exist at all, notwithstanding
the examples of Holland, Switzerland, and many others. This term has
hardly yet performed quarantine: to the loyal and patriotic it has an
ugly taint in it, and is scarcely fit to be mentioned in good company.
If, however, we are weaned by degrees from our prejudices against
certain words that shock opinion, this is not the case with all; for
those that offend good manners grow more offensive with the progress of
refinement and civilization, so that no writer now dare venture upon
expressions that unwittingly disfigure the pages of our elder writers,
and in this respect, instead of becoming callous or indifferent, we
appear to become more fastidious every day. There is then a real
grossness which does not depend on familiarity or custom. This account
of the concrete nature of prejudice, or of the manner in which our ideas
by habit and the dearth of general information coalesce together into
one indissoluble form, will show (what otherwise seems unaccountable)
how such violent antipathies and animosities have been occasioned by the
most ridiculous or trifling differences of opinion, or outward symbols
of it; for, by constant custom, and the want of reflection, the most
insignificant of these was as inseparably bound up with the main
principle as the most important, and to give up any part was to give up
the whole essence and vital interests of religion, morals, and
government. Hence we see all sects and parties mutually insist on their
own technical distinctions as the essentials and fundamentals of
religion, and politics, and, for the slightest variation in any of
these, unceremoniously attack their opponents as atheists and
blasphemers, traitors and incendiaries. In fact, these minor points are
laid hold of in preference, as being more obvious and tangible, and as
leaving more room for the exercise of prejudice and passion. Another
thing that makes our prejudices rancorous and inveterate, is, that as
they are taken up without reason, they seem to be _self-evident_; and we
thence conclude, that they not only are so to ourselves, but must be so
to others, so that their differing from us is wilful, hypocritical, and
malicious. The Inquisition never pretended to punish its victims for
being heretics or infidels, but for avowing opinions which with their
eyes open they knew to be false. That is, the whole of the Catholic
faith, ‘that one entire and perfect chrysolite,’ appeared to them so
completely without flaw and blameless, that they could not conceive how
any one else could imagine it to be otherwise, except from stubbornness
and contumacy, and would rather admit (to avoid so improbable a
suggestion) that men went to a stake for an opinion, not which they
held, but counterfeited, and were content to be burnt for the pleasure
of playing the hypocrite. Nor is it wonderful that there should be so
much repugnance to admit the existence of a serious doubt in matters of
such vital and eternal interest, and on which the whole fabric of the
church hinged, since the first doubt that was expressed on any single
point drew all the rest after it; and the first person who started a
conscientious scruple, and claimed the _trial by reason_, threw down, as
if by a magic spell, the strongholds of bigotry and superstition, and
transferred the determination of the issue from the blind tribunal of
prejudice and implicit faith to a totally different ground, the fair and
open field of argument and inquiry. On this ground a single champion is
a match for thousands. The decision of the majority is not here enough:
unanimity is absolutely necessary to infallibility; for the only secure
plea on which such a preposterous pretension could be set up is, by
taking it for granted that there can be no possible doubt entertained
upon the subject, and by diverting men’s minds from ever asking
themselves the question of the truth of certain dogmas and mysteries,
any more than whether _two and two make four_. Prejudice in short is
egotism: we see a part, and substitute it for the whole; a thing strikes
us casually and by halves, and we would have the universe stand proxy
for our decision, in order to rivet it more firmly in our own belief;
however insufficient or sinister the grounds of our opinions, we would
persuade ourselves that they arise out of the strongest conviction, and
are entitled to unqualified approbation; slaves of our own prejudices,
caprice, ignorance, we would be lords of the understandings and reason
of others; and (strange infatuation!) taking up an opinion solely from
our own narrow and partial point of view, without consulting the
feelings of others, or the reason of things, we are still uneasy if all
the world do not come into our way of thinking.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Atlas._] [_April 18, 1830._
The most dangerous enemies to established opinions are those who, by
always defending them, call attention to their weak sides. The priests
and politicians, in former times, were therefore wise in preventing the
first approaches of innovation and inquiry; in preserving inviolate the
smallest link in the adamantine chain with which they had bound the
bodies and the souls of men; in closing up every avenue or pore through
which a doubt could creep in; for they knew that through the slightest
crevice floods of irreligion and heresy would break in like a tide.
Hence the constant alarm at free discussion and inquiry; hence the
clamour against innovation and reform; hence our dread and detestation
of those who differ with us in opinion, for this at once puts us on the
necessity of defending ourselves, or of owning ourselves weak or in the
wrong, if we cannot, and converts that which was before a bed of roses,
while we slept undisturbed upon it, into a cushion of thorns; and hence
our natural tenaciousness of those points which are most vulnerable, and
of which we have no proof to offer; for, as reason fails us, we are more
annoyed by the objections and require to be soothed and supported by the
concurrence of others. Bigotry and intolerance, which pass as
synonymous, are, if rightly considered, a contradiction in terms; for,
if in drawing up the articles of our creed, we are blindly bigoted to
our impressions and views, utterly disregarding all others, why should
we afterwards be so haunted and disturbed by the last, as to wish to
exterminate every difference of sentiment with fire and sword? The
difficulty is only solved by considering that unequal compound, the
human mind, alternately swayed by individual biasses and abstract
pretensions, and where reason so often panders to, or is made the puppet
of, the will. To show at once the danger and extent of prejudice, it may
be sufficient to observe that all our convictions, however arrived at,
and whether founded on strict demonstration or the merest delusion, are
crusted over with the same varnish of confidence and conceit, and afford
the same firm footing both to our theories and practice; or if there be
any difference, we are in general ‘most ignorant of what we are most
assured,’ the strength of will and impatience of contradiction making up
for the want of evidence. Mr. Burke says, that we ought to ‘cherish our
prejudices because they are prejudices;’ but this view of the case will
satisfy the demands of neither party, for prejudice is never easy unless
it can pass itself off for reason, or abstract undeniable truth: and
again, in the eye of reason, if all prejudices are to be equally
respected as such, then the prejudices of others are right, and ours
must in their turn be wrong. The great stumbling-block to candour and
liberality is the difficulty of being fully possessed of the excellence
of any opinion or pursuits of our own, without proportionably condemning
whatever is opposed to it; nor can we admit the possibility that when
our side of the shield is black, the other should be white. The largest
part of our judgments is prompted by habit and passion; but because
habit is like a second nature, and we necessarily approve what passion
suggests, we will have it that they are founded entirely on reason and
nature, and that all the world must be of the same opinion, unless they
wilfully shut their eyes to the truth. Animals are free from prejudice,
because they have no notion or care about anything beyond themselves,
and have no wish to generalise or talk big on what does not concern
them: man alone falls into absurdity and error by setting up a claim to
superior wisdom and virtue, and to be a dictator and lawgiver to all
around him, and on all things that he has the remotest conception of. If
mere prejudice were dumb, as well as deaf and blind, it would not so
much signify; but as it is, each sect, age, country, profession,
individual, is ready to prove that they are exclusively in the right,
and to go together by the ears for it. ‘Rings the earth with the vain
stir?’ It is the trick for each party to raise an outcry against
prejudice; as by this they flatter themselves, and would have it
supposed by others, that they are perfectly free from it, and have all
the reason on their own side. It is easy indeed, to call names, or to
separate the word _prejudice_ from the word _reason_; but not so easy to
separate the two things. Reason seems a very positive and palpable thing
to those who have no notion of it but as expressing their own views and
feelings; as prejudice is evidently a very gross and shocking absurdity
(that no one can fall into who wishes to avoid it), as long as we
continue to apply this term to the prejudices of other people. To
suppose that we cannot make a mistake is the very way to run headlong
into it; for, if the distinction were so broad and glaring as our
self-conceit and dogmatism lead us to imagine it is, we could never, but
by design, mistake truth for falsehood. Those, however, who think they
can _make a clear stage of it_, and frame a set of opinions on all
subjects by an appeal to reason alone, and without the smallest
intermixture of custom, imagination, or passion, know just as little of
themselves as they do of human nature. The best way to prevent our
running into the wildest excesses of prejudice and the most dangerous
aberrations from reason, is, not to represent the two things as having a
great gulph between them, which it is impossible to pass without a
violent effort, but to show that we are constantly (even when we think
ourselves most secure) treading on the brink of a precipice; that
custom, passion, imagination, insinuate themselves into and influence
almost every judgment we pass or sentiment we indulge, and are a
necessary help (as well as hindrance) to the human understanding; and
that, to attempt to refer every question to abstract truth and precise
definition, without allowing for the frailty of prejudice, which is the
unavoidable consequence of the frailty and imperfection of reason, would
be to unravel the whole web and texture of human understanding and
society. Such daring anatomists of morals and philosophy think that the
whole beauty of the mind consists in the skeleton; cut away, without
remorse, all sentiment, fancy, taste, as superfluous excrescences; and,
in their own eager, unfeeling pursuit of scientific truth and elementary
principles, they ‘murder to dissect.’ But of this I may say something in
another paper.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
It is a mistake, however, to suppose that all prejudices are false,
though it is not an easy matter to distinguish between true and false
prejudice. Prejudice is properly an opinion or feeling, not for which
there is no reason, but of which we cannot render a satisfactory account
on the spot. It is not always possible to assign a ‘reason for the faith
that is in us,’ not even if we take time and summon up all our strength;
but it does not therefore follow that our faith is hollow and unfounded.
A false impression may be defined to be an effect without a cause, or
without any adequate one; but the effect may remain and be true, though
the cause is concealed or forgotten. The grounds of our opinions and
tastes may be deep, and be scattered over a large surface; they may be
various, remote and complicated, but the result will be sound and true,
if they have existed at all, though we may not be able to analyse them
into classes, or to recall the particular time, place, and circumstances
of each individual case or branch of the evidence. The materials of
thought and feeling, the body of facts and experience, are infinite, are
constantly going on around us, and acting to produce an impression of
good or evil, of assent or dissent to certain inferences; but to require
that we should be prepared to retain the whole of this mass of
experience in our memory, to resolve it into its component parts, and be
able to quote chapter and verse for every conclusion we unavoidably draw
from it, or else to discard the whole together as unworthy the attention
of a rational being, is to betray an utter ignorance both of the limits
and the several uses of the human capacity. The _feeling_ of the truth
of anything, or the soundness of the judgment formed upon it from
repeated, actual impressions, is one thing: the power of vindicating and
enforcing it, by distinctly appealing to or explaining those
impressions, is another. The most fluent talkers or most plausible
reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
To deny that we can, in a certain sense, know and be justified in
believing anything of which we cannot give the complete demonstration,
or the exact _why_ and _how_, would only be to deny that the clown, the
mechanic (and not even the greatest philosopher), can know the commonest
thing; for in this new and dogmatical process of reasoning, the greatest
philosopher can trace nothing _above_, nor proceed a single step without
taking something for granted;[60] and it is well if he does not take
more things for granted than the most vulgar and illiterate, and what he
knows a great deal less about. A common mechanic can tell how to work an
engine better than the mathematician who invented it. A peasant is able
to foretell rain from the appearance of the clouds, because (time out of
mind) he has seen that appearance followed by that consequence; and
shall a pedant catechise him out of a conviction which he has found true
in innumerable instances, because he does not understand the composition
of the elements, or cannot put his notions into a logical shape? There
may also be some collateral circumstance (as the time of day), as well
as the appearance of the clouds, which he may forget to state in
accounting for his prediction; though, as it has been a part of his
familiar experience, it has naturally guided him in forming it, whether
he was aware of it or not. This comes under the head of the well-known
principle of the _association of ideas_; by which certain impressions,
from frequent recurrence, coalesce and act in unison truly and
mechanically—that is, without our being conscious of anything but the
general and settled result. On this principle it has been well said,
that ‘there is nothing so true as habit;’ but it is also blind: we feel
and can produce a given effect from numberless repetitions of the same
cause; but we neither inquire into the cause, nor advert to the mode. In
learning any art or exercise, we are obliged to take lessons, to watch
others, to proceed step by step, to attend to the details and means
employed; but when we are masters of it, we take all this for granted,
and do it without labour and without thought, by a kind of habitual
instinct—that is, by the trains of our ideas and volitions having been
directed uniformly, and at last flowing of themselves into the proper
channel.
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of
doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives
to speak a language correctly or idiomatically. They do not succeed in
this from knowledge or reflection, but from inveterate custom, which is
a cord that cannot be loosed. In fact, in all that we do, feel, or
think, there is a leaven of _prejudice_ (more or less extensive), viz.
something implied, of which we do not know or have forgotten the
grounds.
If I am required to prove the possibility, or demonstrate the mode of
whatever I do before I attempt it, I can neither speak, walk, nor see;
nor have the use of my hands, senses, or common understanding. I do not
know what muscles I use in walking, nor what organs I employ in speech:
those who do, cannot speak or walk better on that account; nor can they
tell how these organs and muscles themselves act. Can I not discover
that one object is near, and another at a distance, from the _eye_
alone, or from continual impressions of sense and custom concurring to
make the distinction, without going through a course of perspective and
optics?—or am I not to be allowed an opinion on the subject, or to act
upon it, without being accused of being a very _prejudiced_ and
obstinate person? An artist knows that, to imitate an object in the
horizon, he must use less colour; and the naturalist knows that this
effect is produced by the intervention of a greater quantity of air: but
a country fellow, who knows nothing of either circumstance, must not
only be ignorant but a blockhead, if he could be persuaded that a hill
ten miles off was close before him, only because he could not state the
grounds of his opinion scientifically. Not only must we (if restricted
to reason and philosophy) distrust the notices of sense, but we must
also dismiss all that mass of knowledge and perception which falls under
the head of _common sense_ and _natural feeling_, which is made up of
the strong and urgent, but undefined impressions of things upon us, and
lies between the two extremes of absolute proof and the grossest
ignorance. Many of these pass for instinctive principles and _innate
ideas_; but there is nothing in them ‘more than natural.’
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my
way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any
circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may play
the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were to
wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and
multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand still.
Even men of science, after they have gone over the proofs a number of
times, abridge the process, and _jump at a conclusion_: is it therefore
false, because they have always found it to be true? Science after a
certain time becomes presumption; and learning reposes in ignorance. It
has been observed, that women have more _tact_ and insight into
character than men, that they find out a pedant, a pretender, a
blockhead, sooner. The explanation is, that they trust more to the first
impressions and natural indications of things, without troubling
themselves with a learned theory of them; whereas men, affecting greater
gravity, and thinking themselves bound to justify their opinions, are
afraid to form any judgment at all, without the formality of proofs and
definitions, and blunt the edge of their understandings, lest they
should commit some mistake. They stay for facts, till it is too late to
pronounce on the characters. Women are naturally physiognomists, and men
phrenologists. The first judge by sensations; the last by rules.
Prejudice is so far then an involuntary and stubborn _association of
ideas_, of which we cannot assign the distinct grounds and origin; and
the answer to the question, ‘How do we know whether the prejudice is
true or false?’ depends chiefly on that other, whether the first
connection between our ideas has been real or imaginary. This again
resolves into the inquiry—Whether the subject in dispute falls under the
province of our own experience, feeling, and observation, or is
referable to the head of authority, tradition, and fanciful conjecture?
Our practical conclusions are in this respect generally right; our
speculative opinions are just as likely to be wrong. What we derive from
our personal acquaintance with things (however narrow in its scope or
imperfectly digested), is, for the most part, built on a solid
foundation—that of Nature; it is in trusting to others (who give
themselves out for guides and doctors) that we are _all abroad_, and at
the mercy of quackery, impudence, and imposture. Any impression, however
absurd, or however we may have imbibed it, by being repeated and
indulged in, becomes an article of implicit and incorrigible belief. The
point to consider is, how we have first taken it up, whether from
ourselves or the arbitrary dictation of others. ‘Thus shall we try the
doctrines, whether they be of nature or of man.’
So far then from the charge lying against vulgar and illiterate
prejudice as the bane of truth and common sense, the argument turns the
other way; for the greatest, the most solemn, and mischievous
absurdities that mankind have been the dupes of, they have imbibed from
the dogmatism and vanity or hypocrisy of the self-styled wise and
learned, who have imposed profitable fictions upon them for self-evident
truths, and contrived to enlarge their power with their pretensions to
knowledge. Every boor sees that the sun shines above his head; that ‘the
moon is made of green cheese,’ is a fable that has been taught him.
Defoe says, that there were a hundred thousand stout country-fellows in
his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing
whether popery was a man or a horse. This, then, was a prejudice that
they did not fill up of their own heads. All the great points that men
have founded a claim to superiority, wisdom, and illumination upon, that
they have embroiled the world with, and made matters of the last
importance, are what one age and country differ diametrically with each
other about, have been successively and justly exploded, and have been
the levers of opinion and the grounds of contention, precisely because,
as their expounders and believers are equally in the dark about them,
they rest wholly on the fluctuations of will and passion, and as they
can neither be proved nor disproved, admit of the fiercest opposition or
the most bigoted faith. In what ‘comes home to the business and bosoms
of men,’ there is less of this uncertainty and presumption; and there,
in the little world of our own knowledge and experience, we can hardly
do better than attend to the ‘still, small voice’ of our own hearts and
feelings, instead of being browbeat by the effrontery, or puzzled by the
sneers and cavils of pedants and sophists, of whatever school or
description.
If I take a prejudice against a person from his face, I shall very
probably be in the right; if I take a prejudice against a person from
hearsay, I shall quite as probably be in the wrong. We have a prejudice
in favour of certain books, but it is hardly without knowledge, if we
have read them with delight over and over again. Fame itself is a
prejudice, though a fine one. Natural affection is a prejudice: for
though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others,
we have no reason to think them better than others. The error here is,
when that which is properly a dictate of the heart passes out of its
sphere, and becomes an overweening decision of the understanding. So in
like manner of the love of country; and there is a prejudice in favour
of virtue, genius, liberty, which (though it were possible) it would be
a pity to destroy. The passions, such as avarice, ambition, love, &c.,
are prejudices, that is amply exaggerated views of certain objects, made
up of habit and imagination beyond their real value; but if we ask what
is the real value of any object, independently of its connection with
the power of habit, or its affording natural scope for the imagination,
we shall perhaps be puzzled for an answer. To reduce things to the scale
of abstract reason would be to annihilate our interest in them, instead
of raising our affections to a higher standard; and by striving to make
man rational, we should leave him merely brutish.
Animals are without prejudice: they are not led away by authority or
custom, but it is because they are gross, and incapable of being taught.
It is, however, a mistake to imagine that only the vulgar and ignorant,
who can give no account of their opinions, are the slaves of bigotry and
prejudice; the noisiest declaimers, the most subtle casuists, and most
irrefragable doctors, are as far removed from the character of true
philosophers, while they strain and pervert all their powers to prove
some unintelligible dogma, instilled into their minds by early
education, interest, or self-importance; and if we say the peasant or
artisan is a Mahometan because he is born in Turkey, or a papist because
he is born in Italy, the mufti at Constantinople or the cardinal at Rome
is so, for no better reason, in the midst of all his pride and learning.
Mr. Hobbes used to say, that if he had read as much as others, he should
have been as ignorant as they.
After all, most of our opinions are a mixture of reason and prejudice,
experience and authority. We can only judge for ourselves in what
concerns ourselves, and in things about us: and even there we must trust
continually to established opinion and current report; in higher and
more abstruse points we must pin our faith still more on others. If we
believe only what we know at first hand, without trusting to authority
at all, we shall disbelieve a great many things that really exist; and
the suspicious coxcomb is as void of judgment as the credulous fool. My
habitual conviction of the existence of such a place as Rome is not
strengthened by my having seen it; it might be almost said to be
obscured and weakened, as the reality falls short of the imagination. I
walk along the streets without fearing that the houses will fall on my
head, though I have not examined their foundation; and I believe firmly
in the Newtonian system, though I have never read the _Principia_. In
the former case, I argue that if the houses were inclined to fall they
would not wait for me; and in the latter I acquiesce in what all who
have studied the subject, and are capable of understanding it, agree in,
having no reason to suspect the contrary. That _the earth turns round_
is agreeable to my understanding, though it shocks my sense, which is
however too weak to grapple with so vast a question.
ON PARTY SPIRIT
_The Atlas._] [_April 25, 1830._
Party spirit is one of the _profoundnesses of Satan_, or in more modern
language, one of the dexterous _equivoques_ and contrivances of our
self-love, to prove that we, and those who agree with us, combine all
that is excellent and praiseworthy in our own persons (as in a
ring-fence) and that all the vices and deformity of human nature take
refuge with those who differ from us. It is extending and fortifying the
principle of the _amour-propre_, by calling to its aid the _esprit de
corps_ and screening and surrounding our favourite propensities and
obstinate caprices in the hollow squares or dense phalanxes of sects and
parties. This is a happy mode of pampering our self-complacency, and
persuading ourselves that we and those that side with us, are ‘the salt
of the earth;’ of giving vent to the morbid humours of our pride, envy,
and all uncharitableness, those natural secretions of the human heart,
under the pretext of self-defence, the public safety, or a voice from
Heaven, as it may happen; and of heaping every excellence into one
scale, and throwing all the obloquy and contempt into the other, in
virtue of a nickname, a watch-word of party, a badge, the colour of a
ribbon, the cut of a dress. We thus desolate the globe, or tear a
country in pieces, to show that we are the only people fit to live in
it; and fancy ourselves angels, while we are playing the devil. In this
manner, the Huron devours the Iroquois, because he is an Iroquois, and
the Iroquois the Huron for a similar reason; neither suspects that he
does it, because he himself is a savage and no better than a wild beast;
and is convinced in his own breast that the difference of name and tribe
makes a total difference in the case. The Papist persecutes the
Protestant, the Protestant persecutes the Papist in his turn; and each
fancies that he has a plenary right to do so, while he keeps in view
only the offensive epithet which ‘cuts the common link of brotherhood
between them.’ The church of England ill-treated the Dissenters, and the
Dissenters, when they had the opportunity, did not spare the church of
England. The Whig calls the Tory a knave, the Tory compliments the Whig
with the same title, and each thinks the abuse sticks to the party-name,
and has nothing to do with himself or the generic name of _man_. On the
contrary, it cuts both ways; but while the Whig says ‘The Tory is a
knave, because he is a Tory,’ this is as much as to say, ‘I cannot be a
knave, because I am a Whig;’ and by exaggerating the profligacy of his
opponent, he imagines he is laying the sure foundation, and raising the
lofty superstructure of his own praises. But if he says, which is the
truth, ‘The Tory is not a rascal because he is a Tory, but because human
nature in power, and with the temptation, is a rascal,’ then this would
imply that the seeds of depravity are sown in his own bosom, and might
shoot out into full growth and luxuriance if he got into place, which he
does not wish to appear _till he does get into place_.
We may be intolerant even in advocating the cause of Toleration, and so
bent on making proselytes to Free-thinking as to allow no one to think
freely but ourselves. The most boundless liberality in appearance may
amount in reality to the most monstrous ostracism of opinion—not in
condemning this or that tenet, or standing up for this or that sect or
party, but in assuming a supercilious superiority to all sects and
parties alike, and proscribing in the lump and in one sweeping clause
all arts, sciences, opinions, and pursuits but our own. Till the time of
Locke and Toland a general toleration was never dreamt of: it was
thought right on all hands to punish and discountenance heretics and
schismatics, but each party alternately claimed to be true Christians
and orthodox believers. Daniel Defoe, who spent his whole life, and
wasted his strength in asserting the right of the Dissenters to a
toleration (and got no thanks for it but the pillory), was scandalized
at the proposal of the general principle, and was equally strenuous in
excluding Quakers, Anabaptists, Socinians, Sceptics, and all who did not
agree in the _essentials_ of Christianity, that is, who did not agree
with him, from the benefit of such an indulgence to tender consciences.
We wonder at the cruelties formerly practised upon the Jews: is there
anything wonderful in it? They were at the time the only people to make
a butt and a bugbear of, to set up as a mark of indignity and as a foil
to our self-love, for the _feræ naturæ_ principle that is within us and
always craving its prey to hunt down, to worry and make sport of at
discretion, and without mercy—the unvarying uniformity and implicit
faith of the Catholic church had imposed silence, and put a curb on our
jarring dissensions, heart-burnings, and ill-blood, so that we had no
pretence for quarrelling among ourselves for the glory of God or the
salvation of men:—a JORDANUS BRUNO, an Atheist or sorcerer, once in a
way, would hardly suffice to stay the stomach of our theological
rancour, we therefore fell with might and main upon the Jews as a
_forlorn hope_ in this dearth of objects of spite or zeal; or, as the
whole of Europe was reconciled in the bosom of holy mother church, went
to the holy land in search of a difference of opinion and a ground of
mortal offence; but no sooner was there a division of the Christian
world than Papist fell upon Protestant, Protestants upon schismatics,
and schismatics upon one another, with the same loving fury as they had
before fallen upon Turks and Jews. The disposition is always there, like
a muzzled mastiff—the pretext only is wanting; and this is furnished by
a name, which, as soon as it is affixed to different sects or parties,
gives us a license, we think, to let loose upon them all our
malevolence, domineering humour, love of power and wanton mischief, as
if they were of different species. The sentiment of the pious English
bishop was good, who, on seeing a criminal led to execution, exclaimed,
‘There goes my wicked self!’
If we look at common patriotism, it will furnish an illustration of
party-spirit. One would think by an Englishman’s hatred of the French,
and his readiness to die fighting with and for his countrymen, that all
the nation were united as one man in heart and hand—and so they are in
war-time—and as an exercise of their loyalty and courage; but let the
crisis be over, and they cool wonderfully, begin to feel the
distinctions of English, Irish, and Scotch, fall out among themselves
upon some minor distinction; the same hand that was eager to shed the
blood of a Frenchman will not give a crust of bread or a cup of cold
water to a fellow-countryman in distress; and the heroes who defended
the wooden walls of Old England are left to expose their wounds and
crippled limbs to gain a pittance from the passenger, or to perish of
hunger, cold, and neglect in our highways. Such is the effect of our
boasted nationality: it is active, fierce in doing mischief; dormant,
lukewarm in doing good. We may also see why the greatest stress is laid
on trifles in religion, and why the most violent animosities arise out
of the smallest differences in politics and religion. In the first
place, it would never do to establish our superiority over others by the
acquisition of greater virtues, or by discarding our vices; but it is
charming to do this by merely repeating a different _formula_ of prayer,
or turning to the east instead of the west. He should fight boldly for
such a distinction, who is persuaded it will furnish him with a passport
to the other world, and entitle him to look down on the rest of his
fellows as _given over to perdition_. Secondly, we often hate those most
with whom we have only a slight shade of difference, whether in politics
or religion; because as the whole in a contest for precedence and
infallibility, we find it more difficult to draw the line of distinction
where so many points are conceded, and are staggered in our conviction
by the arguments of those whom we cannot despise as totally and
incorrigibly in the wrong. The high-church party in Queen Anne’s time
were disposed to sacrifice the low church and Dissenters to the Papists,
because they were more galled by their arguments and disconcerted with
their pretensions. In private life, the reverse of the foregoing
reasoning holds good; that is, trades and professions present a direct
contrast to sects and parties. A conformity in sentiment strengthens our
party and opinion; but those who have a similarity of pursuit are rivals
in interest; and hence the old maxim, that _two of a trade cannot
agree_.
PROJECT FOR A NEW THEORY OF CIVIL AND CRIMINAL LEGISLATION
When I was about fourteen (as long ago as the year 1792), in consequence
of a dispute, one day after coming out of meeting, between my father and
an old lady of the congregation, respecting the repeal of the
Corporation and Test Acts and the limits of religious toleration, I set
about forming in my head (the first time I ever attempted to think) the
following system of political rights and general jurisprudence.
It was this circumstance that decided the fate of my future life; or
rather, I would say it was from an original bias or craving to be
satisfied of the reason of things, that I seized hold of this accidental
opportunity to indulge in its uneasy and unconscious determination. Mr.
Currie, my old tutor at Hackney, may still have the rough draught of
this speculation, which I gave him with tears in my eyes, and which he
good-naturedly accepted in lieu of the customary _themes_, and as a
proof that I was no idler, but that my inability to produce a line on
the ordinary school topics arose from my being involved in more
difficult and abstruse matters. He must smile at the so oft-repeated
charge against me of florid flippancy and tinsel. If from those briars I
have since plucked roses, what labour has it not cost me? The Test and
Corporation Acts were repealed the other day. How would my father have
rejoiced if this had happened in his time, and in concert with his old
friends Dr. Price, Dr. Priestley, and others! but now that there is no
one to care about it, they give as a boon to indifference what they so
long refused to justice, and thus ascribed by some to the liberality of
the age! Spirit of contradiction! when wilt thou cease to rule over
sublunary affairs, as the moon governs the tides? Not till the
unexpected stroke of a comet throws up a new breed of men and animals
from the bowels of the earth; nor then neither, since it is included in
the very idea of all life, power, and motion. _For_ and _against_ are
inseparable terms. But not to wander any farther from the point—
I began with trying to define what a _right_ meant; and this I settled
with myself was not simply that which is good or useful in itself, but
that which is thought so by the individual, and which has the sanction
of his will as such. 1. Because the determining what is good in itself
is an endless question. 2. Because one person’s having a right to any
good, and another being made the judge of it, leaves him without any
security for its being exercised to his advantage, whereas self-love is
a natural guarantee for our self-interest. 3. A thing being willed is
the most absolute moral reason for its existence: that a thing is good
in itself is no reason whatever why it should exist, till the will
clothes it with a power to act as a motive; and there is certainly
nothing to prevent this will from taking effect (no law or admitted plea
above it) but another will opposed to it, and which forms a right on the
same principle. A good is only so far a right, inasmuch as it virtually
determines the will; for a _right_ meant that which contains within
itself, and as respects the bosom in which it is lodged, a cogent and
unanswerable reason why it should exist. Suppose I have a violent
aversion to one thing and as strong an attachment to something else, and
that there is no other being in the world but myself, shall I not have a
self-evident right, full title, liberty, to pursue the one and avoid the
other? That is to say, in other words, there can be no authority to
interpose between the strong natural tendency of the will and its
desired effect, but the will of another. It may be replied that reason,
that affection, may interpose between the will and the act; but there
are motives that influence the conduct by first altering the will; and
the point at issue is, that these being away, what other principle or
lever is there always left to appeal to, before we come to blows? Now,
such a principle is to be found in self-interest; and such a barrier
against the violent will is erected by the limits which this principle
necessarily sets to itself in the claims of different individuals. Thus,
then, a right is not that which is right in itself, or best for the
whole, or even for the individual, but that which is good in his own
eyes, and according to his own will; and to which, among a number of
equally selfish and self-willed beings, he can lay claim, allowing the
same latitude and allowance to others. Political justice is that which
assigns the limits of these individual rights in society, or it is the
adjustment of force against force, of will against will, to prevent
worse consequences. In the savage state there is nothing but an appeal
to brute force, or the right of the strongest; Politics lays down a rule
to curb and measure out the wills of individuals in equal portions;
Morals has a higher standard still, and ought never to appeal to force
in any case whatever. Hence I always found something wanting in Mr.
Godwin’s _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_ (which I read soon after
with great avidity, and hoped, from its title and its vast reputation,
to get entire satisfaction from it), for he makes no distinction between
political justice, which implies an appeal to force, and moral justice,
which implies only an appeal to reason. It is surely a distinct
question, what you can persuade people to do by argument and fair
discussion, and what you may lawfully compel them to do, when reason and
remonstrance fail. But in Mr. Godwin’s system the ‘omnipotence of
reason’ supersedes the use of law and government, merges the
imperfection of the means in the grandeur of the end, and leaves but one
class of ideas or motives, the highest and the least attainable
possible. So promises and oaths are said to be of no more value than
common breath; nor would they, if every word we uttered was infallible
and oracular, as if delivered from a Tripod. But this is pragmatical,
and putting an imaginary for a real state of things. Again, right and
duties, according to Mr. Godwin, are reciprocal. I could not comprehend
this without an arbitrary definition that took away the meaning. In my
sense, a man might have a right, a discriminating power, to do
something, which others could not deprive him of, without a manifest
infraction of certain rules laid down for the peace and order of
society, but which it might be his duty to waive upon good reasons
shown; rights are seconded by force, duties are things of choice. This
is the import of the words in common speech: why then pass over this
distinction in a work confessedly rhetorical as well as logical, that
is, which laid an equal stress on sound and sense? Right, therefore, has
a personal or selfish reference, as it is founded on the law which
determines a man’s actions in regard to his own being and well-being;
and political justice is that which assigns the limits of these
individual rights on their compatibility or incompatibility with each
other in society. Right, in a word, is the duty which each man owes to
himself; or it is that portion of the general good of which (as being
principally interested) he is made the special judge, and which is put
under his immediate keeping.
The next question I asked myself was, what is law and the real and
necessary ground of civil government? The answer to this is found in the
former statement. _Law_ is something to abridge, or, more properly
speaking, to ascertain, the bounds of the original right, and to coerce
the will of individuals in the community. Whence, then, has the
community such a right? It can only arise in self-defence, or from the
necessity of maintaining the equal rights of every one, and of opposing
force to force in case of any violent and unwarrantable infringement of
them. Society consists of a given number of individuals; and the
aggregate right of government is only the consequence of these inherent
rights, balancing and neutralising one another. How those who deny
natural rights get at any sort of right, divine or human, I am at a loss
to discover; for whatever exists in combination, exists beforehand in an
elementary state. The world is composed of atoms, and a machine cannot
be made without materials. First, then, it follows that law or
government is not the mere creature of a social compact, since each
person has a certain right which he is bound to defend against another
without asking that other’s leave, or else the right would always be at
the mercy of whoever chose to invade it. There would be a right to do
wrong, but none to resist it. Thus I have a natural right to defend my
life against a murderer, without any mutual compact between us; hence
society has an aggregate right of the same kind, and to make a law to
that effect, forbidding and punishing murder. If there be no such
immediate value and attachment to life felt by the individual, and a
consequent justifiable determination to defend it, then the formal
pretension of society to vindicate a right, which, according to this
reasoning, has no existence in itself, must be founded on air, on a
word, or a lawyer’s _ipse dixit_. Secondly, society, or government, as
such, has no right to trench upon the liberty or rights of the
individuals its members, except as these last are, as it were, forfeited
by interfering with and destroying one another, like opposite mechanical
forces or quantities in arithmetic. Put the basis that each man’s will
is a sovereign law to itself: this can only hold in society as long as
he does not meddle with others; but as long as he does not do this, the
first principle retains its force, for there is no other principle to
impeach or overrule it. The will of society is not a sufficient plea;
since this is, or ought to be, made up of the wills or rights of the
individuals composing it, which by the supposition remain entire, and
consequently without power to act. The good of society is not a
sufficient plea, for individuals are only bound (on compulsion) not to
do it harm, or to be barely just: benevolence and virtue are voluntary
qualities. For instance, if two persons are obliged to do all that is
possible for the good of both, this must either be settled voluntarily
between them, and then it is friendship, and not force; or if this is
not the case, it is plain that one must be the slave, and lie at the
caprice and mercy of the other: it will be one will forcibly regulating
two bodies. But if each is left master of his own person and actions,
with only the implied proviso of not encroaching on those of the other,
then both may continue free and independent, and contented in their
several spheres. One individual has no right to interfere with the
employment of my muscular powers, or to put violence on my person, to
force me to contribute to the most laudable undertaking if I do not
approve of it, any more than I have to force him to assist me in the
direct contrary: if one has not, ten have not, nor a million, any such
arbitrary right over me. What one can be _made_ to do for a million is
very trifling: what a million may do by being left free in all that
merely concerns themselves, and not subject to the perpetual caprice and
insolence of authority, and pretext of the public good, is a very
different calculation. By giving up the principle of political
independence, it is not the million that will govern the one, but the
one that will in time give law to the million. There are some things
that cannot be free in natural society, and against which there is a
natural law; for instance, no one can be allowed to knock out another’s
brains or to fetter his limbs with impunity. And government is bound to
prevent the same violations of liberty and justice. The question is,
whether it would not be possible for a government to exist, and for a
system of laws to be framed, that confined itself to the punishment of
such offences, and left all the rest (except the suppression of force by
force) optional or matter of mutual compact. What are a man’s natural
rights? Those, the infringement of which cannot on any supposition go
unpunished: by leaving all but cases of necessity to choice and reason,
much would be perhaps gained, and nothing lost.
COROLLARY 1. It results from the foregoing statement, that there is
nothing naturally to restrain or oppose the will of one man, but the
will of another meeting it. Thus, in a desert island, it is evident that
my will and rights would be absolute and unlimited, and I might say with
Robinson Crusoe, ‘I am monarch of all I survey.’
COROLLARY 2. It is coming into society that circumscribes my will and
rights, by establishing equal and mutual rights, instead of the original
uncircumscribed ones. They are still ‘founded as the rock,’ though not
so broad and general as the casing air, for the only thing that limits
them is the solidity of another right, no better than my own, and, like
stones in a building, or a mosaic pavement, each remains not the less
firmly riveted to its place, though it cannot encroach upon the next to
it. I do not belong to the state, nor am I a nonentity in it, but I am
one part of it, and independent in it, for that very reason that every
one in it is independent of me. Equality, instead of being destroyed by
society, results from and is improved by it; for in politics, as in
physics, the action and reaction are the same: the right of resistance
on their part implies the right of self-defence on mine. In a theatre,
each person has a right to his own seat, by the supposition that he has
no right to intrude into any one else’s. They are convertible
propositions. Away, then, with the notion that liberty and equality are
inconsistent. But here is the artifice: by merging the rights and
independence of the individual in the fictitious order of society, those
rights become arbitrary, capricious, equivocal, removable at the
pleasure of the state or ruling power; there is nothing substantial or
durable implied in them: if each has no positive claim, naturally, those
of all taken together can mount up to nothing; right and justice are
mere blanks to be filled up with arbitrary will, and the people have
thenceforward no defence against the government. On the other hand,
suppose these rights to be not empty names or artificial arrangements,
but original and inherent like solid atoms, then it is not in the power
of government to annihilate one of them, whatever may be the confusion
arising from their struggle for mastery, or before they can settle into
order and harmony. Mr. Burke talks of the reflections and refractions of
the rays of light as altering their primary essence and direction. But
if there were no original rays of light, there could be neither
refraction, nor reflections. Why, then, does he try by cloudy sophistry
to blot the sun out of heaven? One body impinges against and impedes
another in the fall, but it could not do this, but for the principle of
gravity. The author of the _Sublime and Beautiful_ would have a single
atom outweigh the great globe itself; or an empty title, a bloated
privilege, or a grievous wrong overturn the entire mass of truth and
justice. The question between the author and his opponents appears to be
simply this: whether politics, or the general good, is an affair of
reason or imagination! and this seems decided by another consideration,
viz., that Imagination is the judge of individual things, and Reason of
generals. Hence the great importance of the principle of universal
suffrage; for if the vote and choice of a single individual goes for
nothing, so, by parity of reasoning, may that of all the rest of the
community: but if the choice of every man in the community is held
sacred, then what must be the weight and value of the whole.
Many persons object that by this means property is not represented, and
so, to avoid that, they would have nothing but property represented, at
the same time that they pretend that if the elective franchise were
thrown open to the poor, they would be wholly at the command of the
rich, to the prejudice and exclusion of the middle and independent
classes of society. Property always has a natural influence and
authority; it is only people without property that have no natural
protection, and require every artificial and legal one. _Those that have
much, shall have none; and those that have little, shall have less._
This proverb is no less true in public than in private life. The _better
orders_ (as they are called, and who, in virtue of this title, would
assume a monopoly in the direction of state affairs) are merely and in
plain English those who are _better off_ than others; and as they get
the wished-for monopoly into their hands, others will be uniformly
_worse off_, and will sink lower and lower in the scale; so that it is
essentially requisite to extend the elective franchise in order to
counteract the excess of the great and increasing goodness of the better
orders to themselves. I see no reason to suppose that in any case
popular feeling (if free course were given to it) would bear down public
opinion. Literature is at present pretty nearly on the footing of
universal suffrage, yet the public defer sufficiently to the critics;
and when no party bias interferes, and the government do not make a
point of running a writer down, the verdict is tolerably fair and just.
I do not say that the result might not be equally satisfactory, when
literature was patronised more immediately by the great; but then lords
and ladies had no interest in praising a bad piece and condemning a good
one. If they could have laid a tax on the town for not going to it, they
would have run a bad play forty nights together, or the whole year
round, without scruple. As things stand, the worse the law, the better
for the lawmakers: it takes everything from others to give it to _them_.
It is common to insist on universal suffrage and the ballot together.
But if the first were allowed, the second would be unnecessary. The
ballot is only useful as a screen from arbitrary power. There is nothing
manly or independent to recommend it.
COROLLARY 3. If I was out at sea in a boat with a _jure divino_ monarch,
and he wanted to throw me overboard, I would not let him. No gentleman
would ask such a thing, no freeman would submit to it. Has he, then, a
right to dispose of the lives and liberties of thirty millions of men?
Or have they more right than I have to resist his demands? They have
thirty millions of times that right, if they had a particle of the same
spirit that I have. It is not the individual, then, whom in this case I
fear (to me ‘there’s _no_ divinity doth hedge a king’), but thirty
millions of his subjects that call me to account in his name, and who
are of a most approved and indisputable loyalty, and who have both the
right and power. The power rests with the multitude, but let them beware
how the exercise of it turns against their own rights! It is not the
idol but the worshippers that are to be dreaded, and who, by degrading
one of their fellows, render themselves liable to be branded with the
same indignities.
COROLLARY 4. No one can be born a slave; for my limbs are my own, and
the power and the will to use them are anterior to all laws, and
independent of the control of every other person. No one acquires a
right over another but that other acquires some reciprocal right over
him; therefore the relation of master and slave is a contradiction in
political logic. Hence, also, it follows that combinations among
labourers for the rise of wages are always just and lawful, as much as
those among master manufacturers to keep them down. A man’s labour is
his own, at least as much as another’s goods; and he may starve if he
pleases, but he may refuse to work except on his own terms. The right of
property is reducible to this simple principle, that one man has not a
right to the produce of another’s labour, but each man has a right to
the benefit of his own exertions and the use of his natural and
inalienable powers, unless for a supposed equivalent and by mutual
consent. Personal liberty and property therefore rest upon the same
foundation. I am glad to see that Mr. Macculloch, in his _Essay on
Wages_, admits the right of combination among journeymen and others. I
laboured this point hard, and, I think, satisfactorily, a good while
ago, in my _Reply to Mr. Malthus_. ‘Throw your bread upon the waters,
and after many days you shall find it again.’
There are four things that a man may especially call his own. 1. His
person. 2. His actions. 3. His property. 4. His opinions. Let us see how
each of these claims unavoidably circumscribes and modifies those of
others, on the principle of abstract equity and necessity and
independence above laid down.
FIRST, AS TO THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS. My intention is to show that the
right of society to make laws to coerce the will of others, is founded
on the necessity of repelling the wanton encroachment of that will on
their rights; that is, strictly on the right of self-defence or
resistance to aggression. Society comes forward and says, ‘Let us alone,
and we will let you alone, otherwise we must see which is strongest;’
its object is not to patronise or advise individuals for their good, and
against their will, but to protect itself: meddling with others forcibly
on any other plea or for any other purpose is impertinence. But equal
rights destroy one another; nor can there be a right to impossible or
impracticable things. Let A, B, C, D, &c., be different component parts
of any society, each claiming to be the centre and master of a certain
sphere of activity and self-determination: as long as each keeps within
his own line of demarcation there is no harm done, nor any penalty
incurred—it is only the superfluous and overbearing will of particular
persons that must be restrained or lopped off by the axe of the law. Let
A be the culprit; B, C, D, &c., or the rest of the community, are
plaintiffs against A, and wish to prevent his taking any unfair or
unwarranted advantage over them. They set up no pretence to dictate or
domineer over him, but merely to hinder his dictating to and domineering
over them; and in this, having both might and right on their side, they
have no difficulty in putting it in execution. Every man’s independence
and discretionary power over what peculiarly and exclusively concerns
himself, is his _castle_ (whether round, square, or, according to Mr.
Owen’s new map of improvements, in the form of a parallelogram). As long
as he keeps within this, he is safe—society has no hold of him: it is
when he quits it to attack his neighbours that they resort to reprisals,
and make short work of the interloper. It is, however, time to endeavour
to point out in what this natural division of right, and separate
advantage consists. In the first place, A, B, C, D have the common and
natural rights of persons, in so far that none of these has a right to
offer violence to, or cause bodily pain or injury to any of the others.
Sophists laugh at natural rights: they might as well deny that we have
natural persons; for while the last distinction holds true and good by
the constitution of things, certain consequences must and will follow
from it—‘while this machine is to us Hamlet,’ &c. For instance, I should
like to know whether Mr. Burke, with his _Sublime and Beautiful_
fancies, would deny that each person has a particular body and senses
belonging to him, so that he feels a peculiar and natural interest in
whatever affects these more than another can, and whether such a
peculiar and paramount interest does not imply a direct and unavoidable
right in maintaining this circle of individuality inviolate. To argue
otherwise is to assert that indifference, or that which does not feel
either the good or the ill, is as capable a judge and zealous a
discriminator of right and wrong as that which does. The right, then, is
coeval and co-extended with the interest, not a product of convention,
but inseparable from the order of the universe; the doctrine itself is
natural and solid; it is the contrary fallacy that is made of air and
words. Mr. Burke, in such a question, was like a man out at sea in a
haze, and could never tell the difference between land and clouds. If
another break my arm by violence, this will not certainly give him
additional health or strength; if he stun me by a blow or inflict
torture on my limbs, it is I who feel the pain, and not he; and it is
hard if I, who am the sufferer, am not allowed to be the judge. That
another should pretend to deprive me of it, or pretend to judge for me,
and set up his will against mine, in what concerns this portion of my
existence—where I have all at stake and he nothing—is not merely
injustice but impudence. The circle of personal security and right,
then, is not an imaginary and arbitrary line fixed by law and the will
of the prince, or the scaly finger of Mr. Hobbes’s _Leviathan_, but is
real and inherent in the nature of things, and itself the foundation of
law and justice. ‘Hands off is fair play’—according to the old adage.
One, therefore, has not a right to lay violent hands on another, or to
infringe on the sphere of his personal identity; one must not run foul
of another, or he is liable to be repelled and punished for the offence.
If you meet an Englishman suddenly in the street, he will run up against
you sooner than get out of your way, which last he thinks a compromise
of his dignity and a relinquishment of his purpose, though he expects
you to get out of his. A Frenchman in the same circumstances will come
up close to you, and try to walk over you, as if there was no one in his
way; but if you take no notice of him, he will step on one side, and
make you a low bow. The one is a fellow of stubborn will, the other a
_petit maître_. An Englishman at a play mounts upon a bench, and refuses
to get down at the request of another, who threatens to call him to
account the next day. ‘Yes,’ is the answer of the first, ‘if your master
will let you!’ His abuse of liberty, he thinks, is justified by the
other’s want of it. All an Englishman’s ideas are modifications of his
will; which shows, in one way, that right is founded on will, since the
English are at once the freest and most wilful of all people. If you
meet another on the ridge of a precipice, are you to throw each other
down? Certainly not. You are to pass as well as you can. ‘Give and
take,’ is the rule of natural right, where the right is not all on one
side and cannot be claimed entire. Equal weights and scales produce a
balance, as much as where the scales are empty: so it does not follow
(as our votaries of absolute power would insinuate) that one man’s right
is nothing because another’s is something. But suppose there is not time
to pass, and one or other must perish, in the case just mentioned, then
each must do the best for himself that he can, and the instinct of
self-preservation prevails over everything else. In the streets of
London, the passengers take the right hand of one another and the wall
alternately; he who should not conform to this rule would be guilty of a
breach of the peace. But if a house were falling, or a mad ox driven
furiously by, the rule would be, of course, suspended, because the case
would be out of the ordinary. Yet I think I can conceive, and have even
known, persons capable of carrying the point of gallantry in political
right to such a pitch as to refuse to take a precedence which did not
belong to them in the most perilous circumstances, just as a soldier may
waive a right to quit his post, and takes his turn in battle. The actual
collision or case of personal assault and battery, is, then, clearly
prohibited, inasmuch as each person’s body is clearly defined: but how
if A use other means of annoyance against B, such as a sword or poison,
or resort to what causes other painful sensations besides tangible ones,
for instance, certain disagreeable sounds and smells? Or, if these are
included as a violation of personal rights, then how draw the line
between them and the employing certain offensive words and gestures or
uttering opinions which I disapprove? This is a puzzler for the dogmatic
school; but they solve the whole difficulty by an assumption of
_utility_, which is as much as to tell a person that the way to any
place to which he asks a direction is ‘to follow his nose.’ We want to
know by given marks and rules what is best and useful; and they assure
us very wisely, that this is infallibly and clearly determined by what
is best and useful. Let us try something else. It seems no less
necessary to erect certain little _fortalices_, with palisades and
outworks about them, for RIGHT to establish and maintain itself in, than
as landmarks to guide us across the wide waste of UTILITY. If a person
runs a sword through me, or administers poison, or procures it to be
administered, the effect, the pain, disease or death is the same, and I
have the same right to prevent it, on the principle that I am the
sufferer; that the injury is offered to me, and he is no gainer by it,
except for mere malice or caprice, and I therefore remain master and
judge of my own remedy, as in the former case; the principle and
definition of right being to secure to each individual the determination
and protection of that portion of sensation in which he has the
greatest, if not a sole interest, and, as it were, identity with it.
Again, as to what are called _nuisances_, to wit offensive smells,
sounds, &c., it is more difficult to determine on the ground that _one
man’s meat is another man’s poison_. I remember a case occurred in the
neighbourhood where I was, and at the time I was trying my best at this
question, which puzzled me a good deal. A rector of a little town in
Shropshire, who was at variance with all his parishioners, had conceived
a particular spite to a lawyer who lived next door to him, and as a
means of annoying him, used to get together all sorts of rubbish, weeds,
and unsavoury materials, and set them on fire, so that the smoke should
blow over into his neighbour’s garden; whenever the wind set in that
direction, he said, as a signal to his gardener,’It’s a fine Wicksteed
wind to-day;’ and the operation commenced. Was this an action of assault
and battery, or not? I think it was, for this reason, that the offence
was unequivocal, and that the only motive for the proceeding was the
giving this offence. The assailant would not like to be served so
himself. Mr. Bentham would say, the malice of the motive was a set-off
to the injury. I shall leave that _prima philosophia_ consideration out
of the question. A man who knocks out another’s brains with a bludgeon
may say it pleases him to do so; but will it please him to have the
compliment returned? If he still persists, in spite of this punishment,
there is no preventing him; but if not, then it is a proof that he
thinks the pleasure less than the pain to himself, and consequently to
another in the scales of justice. The _lex talionis_ is an excellent
test. Suppose a third person (the physician of the place) had said, ‘It
is a fine Egerton wind to-day,’ our rector would have been non-plussed;
for he would have found that, as he suffered all the hardship, he had
the right to complain of and to resist an action of another, the
consequences of which affected principally himself. Now mark: if he had
himself had any advantage to derive from the action, which he could not
obtain in any other way, then he would feel that his neighbour also had
the same plea and right to follow his own course (still this might be a
doubtful point); but in the other case it would be sheer malice and
wanton interference; that is, not the exercise of a right, but the
invasion of another’s comfort and independence. Has a person, then, a
right to play on the horn or on a flute, on the same staircase? I say,
yes; because it is for his own improvement and pleasure, and not to
annoy another; and because, accordingly, every one in his own case would
wish to reserve this or a similar privilege to himself. I do not think a
person has a right to beat a drum under one’s window, because this is
altogether disagreeable, and if there is any extraordinary motive for
it, then it is fit that the person should be put to some little
inconvenience in removing his sphere of liberty of action to a
reasonable distance. A tallow-chandler’s shop or a steam-engine is a
nuisance in a town, and ought to be removed into the suburbs; but they
are to be tolerated where they are least inconvenient, because they are
necessary somewhere, and there is no remedying the inconvenience. The
right to protest against and to prohibit them rests with the suffering
party; but because this point of the greatest interest is less clear in
some cases than in others, it does not follow that there is no right or
principle of justice in the case. 3. As to matters of contempt and the
expression of opinion, I think these do not fall under the head of
force, and are not, on that ground, subjects of coercion and law. For
example, if a person inflicts a sensation upon me by material means,
whether tangible or otherwise, I cannot help that sensation; I am so far
the slave of that other, and have no means of resisting him but by
force, which I would define to be material agency. But if another
proposes an opinion to me, I am not bound to be of this opinion; my
judgment and will is left free, and therefore I have no right to resort
to force to recover a liberty which I have not lost. If I do this to
prevent that other from pressing that opinion, it is I who invade his
liberty, without warrant, because without necessity. It may be urged
that material agency, or force, is used in the adoption of sounds or
letters of the alphabet, which I cannot help seeing or hearing. But the
injury is not here, but in the moral and artificial inference, which I
am at liberty to admit or reject, according to the evidence. There is no
force but argument in the case, and it is reason, not the will of
another, that gives the law. Further, the opinion expressed, generally
concerns not one individual, but the general interest; and of that my
approbation or disapprobation is not a commensurate or the sole judge. I
am judge of my own interests, because it is my affair, and no one’s
else; but by the same rule, I am not judge, nor have I a _veto_ on that
which appeals to all the world, merely because I have a prejudice or
fancy against it. But suppose another expresses by signs or words a
contempt for me? _Answer._ I do not know that he is bound to have a
respect for me. Opinion is free; for if I wish him to have that respect,
then he must be left free to judge for himself, and consequently to
arrive at and to express the contrary opinion, or otherwise the verdict
and testimony I aim at could not be obtained; just as players must
consent to be hissed, if they expect to be applauded. Opinion cannot be
forced, for it is not grounded on force, but on evidence and reason, and
therefore these last are the proper instruments to control that opinion,
and to make it favourable to what we wish, or hostile to what we
disapprove. In what relates to action, the will of another is force, or
the determining power: in what relates to opinion, the mere will or
_ipse dixit_ of another is of no avail but as it gains over other
opinions to its side, and therefore neither needs nor admits of force as
a counteracting means to be used against it. But in the case of calumny
or indecency: 1. I would say that it is the suppression of truth that
gives falsehood its worst edge. What transpires (however maliciously or
secretly) in spite of the law, is taken for gospel, and as it is
impossible to prevent calumny, so it is impossible to counteract it on
the present system, or while every attempt to answer it is attributed to
the people’s not daring to speak the truth. If any single fact or
accident peeps out, the whole character, having this legal screen before
it, is supposed to be of a piece; and the world, defrauded of the means
of coming to their own conclusion, naturally infer the worst. Hence the
saying, that reputation once gone never returns. If, however, we grant
the general license or liberty of the press, in a scheme where publicity
is the great object, it seems a manifest _contre-sens_ that the author
should be the only thing screened or kept a secret: either, therefore,
an anonymous libeller would be heard with contempt, or if he signed his
name thus —, or thus — —, it would be equivalent to being branded
publicly as a calumniator, or marked with the T. F. (_travail forcé_) or
the broad R. (rogue) on his back. These are thought sufficient
punishments, and yet they rest on opinion without stripes or labour. As
to indecency, in proportion as it is flagrant is the shock and
resentment against it; and as vanity is the source of indecency, so the
universal discountenance and shame is its most effectual antidote. If it
is public, it produces immediate reprisals from public opinion which no
brow can stand; and if secret, it had better be left so. No one can then
say it is obtruded on him; and if he will go in search of it, it seems
odd he should call upon the law to frustrate the object of his pursuit.
Further, at the worst, society has its remedy in its own hands whenever
its moral sense is outraged, that is, it may send to Coventry, or
excommunicate like the church of old; for though it may have no right to
prosecute, it is not bound to protect or patronise, unless by voluntary
consent of all parties concerned. Secondly, as to rights of action, or
personal liberty. These have no limit but the rights of persons or
property aforesaid, or to be hereafter named. They are the channels in
which the others run without injury and without impediment, as a river
within its banks. Every one has a right to use his natural powers in the
way most agreeable to himself, and which he deems most conducive to his
own advantage, provided he does not interfere with the corresponding
rights and liberties of others. He has no right to coerce them by a
decision of his individual will, and as long as he abstains from this he
has no right to be coerced by an expression of the aggregate will, that
is, by law. The law is the emanation of the aggregate will, and this
will receives its warrant to act only from the forcible pressure from
without, and its indispensable resistance to it. Let us see how this
will operate to the pruning and curtailment of law. The rage of
legislation is the first vice of society; it ends by limiting it to as
few things as possible, 1. There can, according to the principle here
imperfectly sketched, be no laws for the enforcement of morals; because
morals have to do with the will and affections, and the law only puts a
restraint on these. Every one is politically constituted the judge of
what is best for himself; it is only when he encroaches on others that
he can be called to account. He has no right to say to others, You shall
do as I do; how then should they have a right to say to him, You shall
do as we do? Mere numbers do not convey the right, for the law addresses
not one, but the whole community. For example, there cannot rightly be a
law to set a man in the stocks for getting drunk. It injures his health,
you say. That is his concern, and not mine. But it is detrimental to his
affairs; if so, he suffers most by it. But it is ruinous to his wife and
family: he is their natural and legal guardian. But they are thrown upon
the parish: the parish need not take the burden upon itself, unless it
chooses or has agreed to do so. If a man is not kind to or fond of his
wife I see no law to make him. If he beats her, or threatens her life,
she as clearly has a right to call in the aid of a constable or justice
of peace. I do not see, in like manner, how there can be law against
gambling (against cheating there may), nor against usury. A man gives
twenty, forty, a hundred per cent. with his eyes open, but would he do
it if strong necessity did not impel him? Certainly no man would give
double if he could get the same advantage for half. There are
circumstances in which a rope to save me from drowning, or a draught of
water, would be worth all I have. In like manner, lotteries are fair
things; for the loss is inconsiderable, and the advantage may be
incalculable. I do not believe the poor put into them, but the reduced
rich, the _shabby-genteel_. Players were formerly prohibited as a
nuisance, and fortune-tellers still are liable to the Vagrant Act, which
the parson of the parish duly enforces, in his zeal to prevent cheating
and imposture, while he himself has his two livings, and carries off a
tenth of the produce of the soil. Rape is an offence clearly punishable
by law; but I would not say that simple incontinence is so. I will give
one more example, which, though quaint, may explain the distinction I
aim at. A man may commit suicide if he pleases, without being
responsible to any one. He may quit the world as he would quit the
country where he was born. But if any person were to fling himself from
the gallery into the pit of a play-house, so as to endanger the lives of
others, if he did not succeed in killing himself, he would render
himself liable to punishment for the attempt, if it were to be supposed
that a person so desperately situated would care about consequences.
Duelling is lawful on the same principle, where every precaution is
taken to show that the act is voluntary and fair on both sides. I might
give other instances, but these will suffice. 2. There should be a
perfect toleration in matters of religion. In what relates to the
salvation of a man’s soul, he is infinitely more concerned than I can
be; and to pretend to dictate to him in this particular is an infinite
piece of impertinence and presumption. But if a man has no religion at
all? That does not hinder me from having any. If he stood at the church
door and would not let me enter, I should have a right to push him
aside; but if he lets me pass by without interruption, I have no right
to turn back and drag him in after me. He might as well force me to have
no religion as I force him to have one, or burn me at a stake for
believing what he does not. Opinion, ‘like the wild goose, flies
unclaimed of any man:’ heaven is like ‘the marble air, accessible to
all;’ and therefore there is no occasion to trip up one another’s heels
on the road, or to erect a turnpike gate to collect large sums from the
passengers. How have I a right to make another pay for the saving of my
soul, or to assist me in damning his? There should be no secular
interference in sacred things; no laws to suppress or establish any
church or sect in religion, no religious persecutions, tests, or
disqualifications; the different sects should be left to inveigle and
hate each other as much as they please; but without the love of
exclusive domination and spiritual power there would be little
temptation to bigotry and intolerance.
3. AS TO THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY. It is of no use a man’s being left to
enjoy security, or to exercise his freedom of action, unless he has a
right to appropriate certain other things necessary to his comfort and
subsistence to his own use. In a state of nature, or rather of solitary
independence, he has a right to all he can lay his hands on: what then
limits this right? Its being inconsistent with the same right in others.
This strikes a mathematical or logical balance between two extreme and
equal pretensions. As there is not a natural and indissoluble connection
between the individual and his property, or those outward objects of
which he may have need (they being detached, unlimited, and
transferable), as there is between the individual and his person, either
as an organ of sensation or action, it is necessary, in order to prevent
endless debate and quarrels, to fix upon some other criterion or common
ground of preference. Animals, or savages, have no idea of any other
right than that of the strongest, and seize on all they can get by
force, without any regard to justice or an equal claim. 1. One mode of
settling the point is to divide the spoil. That is allowing an equal
advantage to both. Thus boys, when they unexpectedly find anything, are
accustomed to cry ‘_Halves!_’ But this is liable to other difficulties,
and applies only to the case of joint finding. 2. Priority of possession
is a fair way of deciding the right of property; first, on the mere
principle of a lottery, or the old saying, ‘_First come, first served_;’
secondly, because the expectation having been excited, and the will more
set upon it, this constitutes a powerful reason for not violently
forcing it to let go its hold. The greater strength of volition is, we
have seen, one foundation of right; for supposing a person to be
absolutely indifferent to anything, he could properly set up no claim to
it. 3. Labour, or the having produced a thing or fitted it for use by
previous exertion, gives this right, chiefly, indeed, for moral and
final causes; because if one enjoyed what another had produced, there
would be nothing but idleness and rapacity; but also in the sense we are
inquiring into, because on a merely selfish ground the labour undergone,
or the time lost, is entitled to an equivalent, _cæteris manentibus_. 4.
If another, voluntarily, or for a consideration, resigns to me his right
in anything, it to all intents and purposes becomes mine. This accounts
not only for gifts, the transfer of property by bargains, &c., but for
legacies and the transmission of property in families or otherwise. It
is hard to make a law to circumscribe this right of disposing of what we
have as we please; yet the boasted law of primogeniture, which is
professedly the bulwark and guardian of property is in direct violation
of this principle. 5, and lastly. Where a thing is common, and there is
enough for all, and no one contributes to it, as air or water, there can
be no property in it. The proximity to a herring-fishery, or the having
been the first to establish a particular traffic in such commodities,
may perhaps give this right by aggravating our will, as having a nearer
or longer power over them; but the rule is the other way. It is on same
principle that poaching is a kind of honest thieving, for that which
costs no trouble and is confined to no limits seems to belong to no one
exclusively (why else do poachers or country people seize on this kind
of property with the least reluctance, but that it is the least like
stealing?); and as the game laws and the tenaciousness of the rights to
that which has least the character of property, as most a point of
honour, produced a revolution in one country, so they are not unlikely
to produce it in another. The object and principle of the laws of
property, then, is this: 1. To supply individuals and the community with
what they need. 2. To secure an equal share to each individual, other
circumstances being the same. 3. To keep the peace and promote industry
and plenty, by proportioning each man’s share to his own exertions, or
to the good-will and discretion of others. The intention, then, being
that no individual should rob another, or be starved but by his refusing
to work (the earth and its produce being the natural estate of the
community, subject to these regulations of individual right and public
welfare), the question is, whether any individual can have a right to
rob or starve the whole community: or if the necessary discretion left
in the application of the principle has led to a state of things
subversive of the principle itself, and destructive to the welfare and
existence of the state, whether the end being defeated, the law does not
fall to the ground, or require either a powerful corrective or a total
reconstruction. The end is superior to the means, and the use of a thing
does not justify its abuse. If a clock is quite out of order and always
goes wrong, it is no argument to say it was set right at first and on
true mechanical principles, and therefore it must go on as it has done,
according to all the rules of art; on the contrary, it is taken to
pieces, repaired, and the whole restored to the original state, or, if
this is impossible, a new one is made. So society, when out of order,
which it is whenever the interests of the many are regularly and
outrageously sacrificed to those of the few, must be repaired, and
either a reform or a revolution cleanse its corruptions and renew its
elasticity. People talk of the poor laws as a grievance. Either they or
a national bankruptcy, or a revolution, are necessary. The labouring
population have not doubled in the last forty years; there are still no
more than are necessary to do the work in husbandry, &c., that is
indispensably required; but the wages of a labouring man are no higher
than they were forty years ago, and the price of food and necessaries is
at least double what it was then, owing to taxes, grants, monopolies,
and immense fortunes gathered during the war by the richer or more
prosperous classes, who have not ceased to propagate in the geometrical
ratio, though the poor have not done it, and the maintaining of whose
younger and increasing branches in becoming splendour and affluence
presses with double weight on the poor and labouring classes. The
greater part of a community ought not to be paupers or starving; and
when a government by obstinacy and madness has reduced them to that
state, it must either take wise and effectual measures to relieve them
from it, or pay the forfeit of its own wickedness and folly.
It seems, then, that a system of just and useful laws may be constructed
nearly, if not wholly, on the principle of the right of self-defence, or
the security for person, liberty, and property. There are exceptions,
such, for instance, as in the case of children, idiots, and insane
persons. These common sense dictates for a general principle can only
hold good where the general conditions are complied with. There are also
mixed cases, partaking of civil and moral justice. Is a man bound to
support his children? Not in strict political right; but he may be
compelled to forego all the benefits of civil society, if he does not
fulfil an engagement which, according to the feelings and principles of
that society, he has undertaken. So in respect to marriage. It is a
voluntary contract, and the violation of it is punishable on the same
plea of sympathy and custom. Government is not necessarily founded on
common consent, but on the right which society has to defend itself
against all aggression. But am I bound to pay or support the government
for defending the society against any violence or injustice? No: but
then they may withdraw the protection of the law from me if I refuse,
and it is on this ground that the contributions of each individual to
the maintenance of the state are demanded. Laws are, or ought to be,
founded on the supposed infraction of individual rights. If these
rights, and the best means of maintaining them, are always clear, and
there could be no injustice or abuse of power on the part of the
government, every government might be its own lawgiver: but as neither
of these is the case, it is necessary to recur to the general voice for
settling the boundaries of right and wrong, and even more for preventing
the government, under pretence of the general peace and safety, from
subjecting the whole liberties, rights, and resources of the community
to its own advantage and sole will.
ON THE CONDUCT OF LIFE; OR, ADVICE TO A SCHOOLBOY
MY DEAR LITTLE FELLOW,—You are now going to settle at school, and may
consider this as your first entrance into the world. As my health is so
indifferent, and I may not be with you long, I wish to leave you some
advice (the best I can) for your conduct in life, both that it may be of
use to you, and as something to remember me by. I may at least be able
to caution you against my own errors, if nothing else.
As we went along to your new place of destination, you often repeated
that ‘You durst say they were a set of stupid, disagreeable people,’
meaning the people at the school. You were to blame in this. It is a
good old rule to hope for the best. Always, my dear, believe things to
be right, till you find them the contrary; and even then, instead of
irritating yourself against them, endeavour to put up with them as well
as you can, if you cannot alter them. You said ‘You were sure you should
not like the school where you were going.’ This was wrong. What you
meant was that you did not like to leave home. But you could not tell
whether you should like the school or not, till you had given it a
trial. Otherwise, your saying that you should not like it was
determining that you would not like it. Never anticipate evils; or,
because you cannot have things exactly as you wish, make them out worse
than they are, through mere spite and wilfulness.
You seemed at first to take no notice of your school-fellows, or rather
to set yourself against them, because they were strangers to you. They
knew as little of you as you did of them; so that this would have been a
reason for their keeping aloof from you as well, which you would have
felt as a hardship. Learn never to conceive a prejudice against others,
because you know nothing of them. It is bad reasoning, and makes enemies
of half the world. Do not think ill of them, till they behave ill to
you; and then strive to avoid the faults which you see in them. This
will disarm their hostility sooner than pique or resentment or
complaint.
I thought you were disposed to criticise the dress of some of the boys
as not so good as your own. Never despise any one for any thing that he
cannot help—least of all, for his poverty. I would wish you to keep up
appearances yourself as a defence against the idle sneers of the world,
but I would not have you value yourself upon them. I hope you will
neither be the dupe nor victim of vulgar prejudices. Instead of saying
above—‘Never despise any one for any thing that he cannot help’—I might
have said, ‘Never despise any one at all;’ for contempt implies a
triumph over and pleasure in the ill of another. It means that you are
glad and congratulate yourself on their failings or misfortunes. The
sense of inferiority in others, without this indirect appeal to our
self-love, is a painful feeling, and not an exulting one.
You complain since, that the boys laugh at you and do not care about
you, and that you are not treated as you were at home. My dear, that is
one chief reason for your being sent to school, to inure you betimes to
the unavoidable rubs and uncertain reception you may meet with in life.
You cannot always be with me, and perhaps it is as well that you cannot.
But you must not expect others to show the same concern about you as I
should. You have hitherto been a spoiled child, and have been used to
have your own way a good deal, both in the house and among your
play-fellows, with whom you were too fond of being a leader: but you
have good-nature and good sense, and will get the better of this in
time. You have now got among other boys who are your equals, or bigger
and stronger than yourself, and who have something else to attend to
besides humouring your whims and fancies, and you feel this as a repulse
or piece of injustice. But the first lesson to learn is that there are
other people in the world besides yourself. There are a number of boys
in the school where you are, whose amusements and pursuits (whatever
they may be) are and ought to be of as much consequence to them as yours
can be to you, and to which therefore you must give way in your turn.
The more airs of childish self-importance you give yourself, you will
only expose yourself to be the more thwarted and laughed at. True
equality is the only true morality or true wisdom. Remember always that
you are but one among others, and you can hardly mistake your place in
society. In your father’s house, you might do as you pleased: in the
world, you will find competitors at every turn. You are not born a
king’s son to destroy or dictate to millions: you can only expect to
share their fate, or settle your differences amicably with them. You
already find it so at school; and I wish you to be reconciled to your
situation as soon and with as little pain as you can.
It was my misfortune perhaps to be bred up among Dissenters, who look
with too jaundiced an eye at others, and set too high a value on their
own peculiar pretensions. From being proscribed themselves, they learn
to proscribe others; and come in the end to reduce all integrity of
principle and soundness of opinion within the pale of their own little
communion. Those who were out of it and did not belong to the class of
_Rational Dissenters_, I was led erroneously to look upon as hardly
deserving the name of rational beings. Being thus satisfied as to the
select few who are ‘the salt of the earth,’ it is easy to persuade
ourselves that we are at the head of them, and to fancy ourselves of
more importance in the scale of true desert than all the rest of the
world put together, who do not interpret a certain text of Scripture in
the manner that we have been taught to do. You will (from the difference
of education) be free from this bigotry, and will, I hope, avoid every
thing akin to the same exclusive and narrow-minded spirit. Think that
the minds of men are various as their faces—that the modes and
employments of life are numberless as they are necessary—that there is
more than one class of merit—that though others may be wrong in some
things, they are not so in all—and that countless races of men have been
born, have lived and died without ever hearing of any one of those
points in which you take a just pride and pleasure—and you will not err
on the side of that spiritual pride or intellectual coxcombry which has
been so often the bane of the studious and learned!
I observe you have got a way of speaking of your school-fellows as
‘_that_ Hoare, _that_ Harris,’ and so on, as if you meant to mark them
out for particular reprobation, or did not think them good enough for
you. It is a bad habit to speak disrespectfully of others: for it will
lead you to think and feel uncharitably towards them. Ill names beget
ill blood. Even where there may be some repeated trifling provocation,
it is better to be courteous, mild, and forbearing, than captious,
impatient, and fretful. The faults of others too often arise out of our
own ill-temper; or though they should be real, we shall not mend them,
by exasperating ourselves against them. Treat your playmates, as Hamlet
advises Polonius to treat the players, ‘according to your own dignity,
rather than their deserts.’ If you fly out at every thing in them that
you disapprove or think done on purpose to annoy you, you lie constantly
at the mercy of their caprice, rudeness, or ill-nature. You should be
more your own master.
Do not begin to quarrel with the world too soon: for, bad as it may be,
it is the best we have to live in—here. If railing would have made it
better, it would have been reformed long ago: but as this is not to be
hoped for at present, the best way is to slide through it as contentedly
and innocently as we may. The worst fault it has, is want of charity:
and calling _knave_ and _fool_ at every turn will not cure this failing.
Consider (as a matter of vanity) that if there were not so many knaves
and fools as we find, the wise and honest would not be those rare and
shining characters that they are allowed to be; and (as a matter of
philosophy) that if the world be really incorrigible in this respect, it
is a reflection to make one sad, not angry. We may laugh or weep at the
madness of mankind: we have no right to vilify them, for our own sakes
or theirs. Misanthropy is not the disgust of the mind at human nature,
but with itself; or it is laying its own exaggerated vices and foul
blots at the door of others! Do not, however, mistake what I have here
said. I would not have you, when you grow up, adopt the low and sordid
fashion of palliating existing abuses or of putting the best face upon
the worst things. I only mean that indiscriminate, unqualified satire
can do little good, and that those who indulge in the most revolting
speculations on human nature, do not themselves always set the fairest
examples, or strive to prevent its lower degradation. They seem rather
willing to reduce it to their theoretical standard. For the rest, the
very outcry that is made (if sincere) shews that things cannot be quite
so bad as they are represented. The abstract hatred and scorn of vice
implies the capacity for virtue: the impatience expressed at the most
striking instances of deformity proves the innate idea and love of
beauty in the human mind. The best antidote I can recommend to you
hereafter against the disheartening effect of such writings as those of
Rochefoucault, Mandeville, and others, will be to look at the pictures
of Raphael and Correggio. You need not be altogether ashamed, my dear
little boy, of belonging to a species which could produce such faces as
those; nor despair of doing something worthy of a laudable ambition,
when you see what such hands have wrought! You will, perhaps, one day
have reason to thank me for this advice.
As to your studies and school-exercises, I wish you to learn Latin,
French, and dancing. I would insist upon the last more particularly,
both because it is more likely to be neglected, and because it is of the
greatest consequence to your success in life. Every thing almost depends
upon first impressions; and these depend (besides _person_, which is not
in our power) upon two things, _dress_ and _address_, which every one
may command with proper attention. These are the small coin in the
intercourse of life, which are continually in request; and perhaps you
will find at the year’s end, or towards the close of life, that the
daily insults, coldness, or contempt, to which you have been exposed by
a neglect of such superficial recommendations, are hardly atoned for by
the few proofs of esteem or admiration which your integrity or talents
have been able to extort in the course of it. When we habitually
disregard those things which we know will ensure the favourable opinion
of others, it shews we set that opinion at defiance, or consider
ourselves above it, which no one ever did with impunity. An inattention
to our own persons implies a disrespect to others, and may often be
traced no less to a want of good-nature than of good sense. The old
maxim—_Desire to please, and you will infallibly please_—explains the
whole matter. If there is a tendency to vanity and affectation on this
side of the question, there is an equal alloy of pride and obstinacy on
the opposite one. Slovenliness may at any time be cured by an effort of
resolution, but a graceful carriage requires an early habit, and in most
cases the aid of the dancing-master. I would not have you, from not
knowing how to enter a room properly, stumble at the very threshold in
the good graces of those on whom it is possible the fate of your future
life may depend. Nothing creates a greater prejudice against any one
than awkwardness. A person who is confused in manner and gesture seems
to have done something wrong, or as if he was conscious of no one
qualification to build a confidence in himself upon. On the other hand,
openness, freedom, self-possession, set others at ease with you by
shewing that you are on good terms with yourself. Grace in women gains
the affections sooner, and secures them longer, than any thing else—it
is an outward and visible sign of an inward harmony of soul—as the want
of it in men, as if the mind and body equally hitched in difficulties
and were distracted with doubts, is the greatest impediment in the
career of gallantry and road to the female heart. Another thing I would
caution you against is not to pore over your books till you are bent
almost double—a habit you will never be able to get the better of, and
which you will find of serious ill consequence. _A stoop in the
shoulders_ sinks a man in public and in private estimation. You are at
present straight enough, and you walk with boldness and spirit. Do
nothing to take away the use of your limbs, or the spring and elasticity
of your muscles. As to all worldly advantages, it is to the full of as
much importance that your deportment should be erect and manly as your
actions.
You will naturally find out all this and fall into it, if your attention
is drawn out sufficiently to what is passing around you; and this will
be the case, unless you are absorbed too much in books and those
sedentary studies,
‘Which waste the marrow, and consume the brain.’
You are, I think, too fond of reading as it is. As one means of avoiding
excess in this way, I would wish you to make it a rule, never to read at
meal-times, nor in company when there is any (even the most trivial)
conversation going on, nor ever to let your eagerness to learn encroach
upon your play-hours. Books are but one inlet of knowledge; and the
pores of the mind, like those of the body, should be left open to all
impressions. I applied too close to my studies, soon after I was of your
age, and hurt myself irreparably by it. Whatever may be the value of
learning, health and good spirits are of more.
I would have you, as I said, make yourself master of French, because you
may find it of use in the commerce of life; and I would have you learn
Latin, partly because I learnt it myself, and I would not have you
without any of the advantages or sources of knowledge that I
possessed—it would be a bar of separation between us—and secondly,
because there is an atmosphere round this sort of classical ground, to
which that of actual life is gross and vulgar. Shut out from this garden
of early sweetness, we may well exclaim—
‘How shall we part and wander down
Into a lower world, to this obscure
And wild? How shall we breathe in other air
Less pure, accustom’d to immortal fruits?’
I do not think the Classics so indispensable to the cultivation of your
intellect as on another account, which I have seen explained elsewhere,
and you will have no objection to turn with me to the passage.
‘The study of the Classics is less to be regarded as an exercise of the
intellect, than as _a discipline of humanity_. The peculiar advantage of
this mode of education consists not so much in strengthening the
understanding, as in softening and refining the taste. It gives men
liberal views; it accustoms the mind to take an interest in things
foreign to itself; to love virtue for its own sake; to prefer fame to
life, and glory to riches; and to fix our thoughts on the remote and
permanent, instead of narrow and fleeting objects. It teaches us to
believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world,
surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and
raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present
power and upstart authority. Rome and Athens filled a place in the
history of mankind, which can never be occupied again. They were two
cities set on a hill, which could not be hid; all eyes have seen them,
and their light shines like a mighty sea-mark into the abyss of time.
“Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;
Secure from flames, from envy’s fiercer rage,
Destructive war, and all-involving age.
Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,
Immortal heirs of universal praise!
Whose honours with increase of ages grow,
As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow!”
It is this feeling more than any thing else which produces a marked
difference between the study of the ancient and modern languages, and
which, by the weight and importance of the consequences attached to the
former, stamps every word with a monumental firmness. By conversing with
the _mighty dead_, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become
strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us,
except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the
presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and
actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.’
Because, however, you have learnt Latin and Greek, and can speak a
different language, do not fancy yourself of a different order of beings
from those you ordinarily converse with. They perhaps know and can do
more _things_ than you, though you have learnt a greater variety of
_names_ to express the same thing by. The great object indeed of these
studies is to be ‘a cure for a narrow and selfish spirit,’ and to carry
the mind out of its petty and local prejudices to the idea of a more
general humanity. Do not fancy, because you are intimate with Homer and
Virgil, that your neighbours who can never attain the same posthumous
fame are to be despised, like those impudent valets who live in noble
families and look down upon every one else. Though you are master of
Cicero’s ‘Orations,’ think it possible for a cobbler at a stall to be
more eloquent than you. ‘But you are a scholar, and he is not.’ Well,
then, you have that advantage over him, but it does not follow that you
are to have every other. Look at the heads of the celebrated poets and
philosophers of antiquity in the collection at Wilton, and you will say
they answer to their works: but you will find others in the same
collection whose names have hardly come down to us, that are equally
fine, and cast in the same classic mould. Do you imagine that all the
thoughts, genius, and capacity of those old and mighty nations are
contained in a few odd volumes, to be thumbed by school-boys? This
reflection is not meant to lessen your admiration of the great names to
which you will be accustomed to look up, but to direct it to that solid
mass of intellect and power, of which they were the most shining
ornaments. I would wish you to excel in this sort of learning and to
take a pleasure in it, because it is the path that has been chosen for
you: but do not suppose that others do not excel equally in their line
of study or exercise of skill, or that there is but one mode of
excellence in art or nature. You have got on vastly beyond the point at
which you set out; but others have been getting on as well as you in the
same or other ways, and have kept pace with you. What then, you may ask,
is the use of all the pains you have taken, if it gives you no
superiority over mankind in general? It is this—You have reaped all the
benefit of improvement and knowledge yourself; and farther, if you had
not moved forwards, you would by this time have been left behind. Envy
no one, disparage no one, think yourself above no one. Their demerits
will not piece out your deficiences; nor is it a waste of time and
labour for you to cultivate your own talents, because you cannot bespeak
a monopoly of all advantages. You are more learned than many of your
acquaintance who may be more active, healthy, witty, successful in
business or expert in some elegant or useful art than you; but you have
no reason to complain, if you have attained the object of your ambition.
Or if you should not be able to compass this from a want of genius or
parts, yet learn, my child, to be contented with a mediocrity of
acquirements. You may still be respectable in your conduct, and enjoy a
tranquil obscurity, with more friends and fewer enemies than you might
otherwise have had.
There is one almost certain drawback on a course of scholastic study,
that it unfits men for active life. The _ideal_ is always at variance
with the _practical_. The habit of fixing the attention on the imaginary
and abstracted deprives the mind equally of energy and fortitude. By
indulging our imaginations on fictions and chimeras, where we have it
all our own way and are led on only by the pleasure of the prospect, we
grow fastidious, effeminate, lapped in idle luxury, impatient of
contradiction, and unable to sustain the shock of real adversity, when
it comes; as by being taken up with abstract reasoning or remote events
in which we are merely passive spectators, we have no resources to
provide against it, no readiness, or expedients for the occasion, or
spirit to use them, even if they occur. We must think again before we
determine, and thus the opportunity for action is lost. While we are
considering the very best possible mode of gaining an object, we find
that it has slipped through our fingers, or that others have laid rude,
fearless hands upon it. The youthful tyro reluctantly discovers that the
ways of the world are not his ways, nor their thoughts his thoughts.
Perhaps the old monastic institutions were not in this respect unwise,
which carried on to the end of life the secluded habits and romantic
associations with which it began, and which created a privileged world
for the inhabitants, distinct from the common world of men and women.
You will bring with you from your books and solitary reveries a wrong
measure of men and things, unless you correct it by careful experience
and mixed observation. You will raise your standard of character as much
too high at first as from disappointed expectation it will sink too low
afterwards. The best qualifier of this theoretical _mania_ and of the
dreams of poets and moralists (who both treat of things as _they ought
to be_ and not as _they are_) is in one sense to be found in some of our
own popular writers, such as our Novelists and periodical Essayists. But
you had, after all, better wait and see what things are than try to
anticipate the results. You know more of a road by having travelled it
than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world. You will find
the business of life conducted on a much more varied and individual
scale than you would expect. People will be concerned about a thousand
things that you have no idea of, and will be utterly indifferent to what
you feel the greatest interest in. You will find good and evil, folly
and discretion more mingled, and the shades of character running more
into each other than they do in the ethical charts. No one is equally
wise or guarded at all points, and it is seldom that any one is quite a
fool. Do not be surprised, when you go out into the world, to find men
talk exceedingly well on different subjects, who do not derive their
information immediately from books. In the first place, the light of
books is diffused very much abroad in the world in conversation and at
second-hand; and besides, common sense is not a monopoly, and experience
and observation are sources of information open to the man of the world
as well as to the retired student. If you know more of the outline and
principles, he knows more of the details and ‘practique part of life.’ A
man may discuss the adventures of a campaign in which he was engaged
very agreeably without having read the _Retreat of the Ten Thousand_, or
give a singular account of the method of drying teas in China without
being a profound chemist. It is the vice of scholars to suppose that
there is no knowledge in the world but that of books. Do you avoid it, I
conjure you; and thereby save yourself the pain and mortification that
must otherwise ensue from finding out your mistake continually!
Gravity is one great ingredient in the conduct of life, and perhaps a
certain share of it is hardly to be dispensed with. Few people can
afford to be quite unaffected. At any rate, do not put your worst
qualities foremost. Do not seek to distinguish yourself by being
ridiculous; nor entertain that miserable ambition to be the sport and
butt of the company. By aiming at a certain standard of behaviour or
intellect, you will at least show your taste and value for what is
excellent. There are those who _blurt_ out their good things with so
little heed of what they are about that no one thinks any thing of them;
as others by keeping their folly to themselves gain the reputation of
wisdom. Do not, however, affect to speak only in oracles, or to deal in
_bon-mots_: condescend to the level of the company, and be free and
accessible to all persons. Express whatever occurs to you, that cannot
offend others or hurt yourself. Keep some opinions to yourself. Say what
you please of others, but never repeat what you hear said of them to
themselves. If you have nothing to offer yourself, laugh with the witty,
assent to the wise; they will not think the worse of you for it. Listen
to information on subjects you are unacquainted with, instead of always
striving to lead the conversation to some favourite one of your own. By
the last method you will shine, but will not improve. I am ashamed
myself ever to open my lips on any question I have ever written upon. It
is much more difficult to be able to converse on an equality with a
number of persons in turn, than to soar above their heads, and excite
the stupid gaze of all companies by bestriding some senseless topic of
your own and confounding the understandings of those who are ignorant of
it. Be not too fond of argument. Indeed, by going much into company
(which I do not, however, wish you to do) you will be weaned from this
practice, if you set out with it. Rather suggest what remarks may have
occurred to you on a subject than aim at dictating your opinions to
others or at defending yourself at all points. You will learn more by
agreeing in the main with others and entering into their trains of
thinking, than by contradicting and urging them to extremities. Avoid
singularity of opinion as well as of everything else. Sound conclusions
come with practical knowledge, rather than with speculative refinements:
in what we really understand, we reason but little. Long-winded disputes
fill up the place of common sense and candid inquiry. Do not imagine
that you will make people friends by showing your superiority over them:
it is what they will neither admit nor forgive, unless you have a high
and acknowledged reputation beforehand, which renders this sort of petty
vanity more inexcusable. Seek to gain the good-will of others, rather
than to extort their applause; and to this end, be neither too tenacious
of your own claims, nor inclined to press too hard on their weaknesses.
Do not affect the society of your inferiors in rank, nor court that of
the great. There can be no real sympathy in either case. The first will
consider you as a restraint upon them, and the last as an intruder or
_upon sufferance_. It is not a desirable distinction to be admitted into
company as a man of talents. You are a mark for invidious observation.
If you say nothing or merely behave with common propriety and
simplicity, you seem to have no business there. If you make a studied
display of yourself, it is arrogating a consequence you have no right
to. If you are contented to pass as an indifferent person, they despise
you; if you distinguish yourself, and show more knowledge, wit, or taste
than they do, they hate you for it. You have no alternative. I would
rather be asked out to sing than to talk. Every one does not pretend to
a fine voice, but every one fancies he has as much understanding as
another. Indeed, the secret of this sort of intercourse has been pretty
well found out. Literary men are seldom invited to the tables of the
great; they send for players and musicians, as they keep monkeys and
parrots!
I would not, however, have you run away with a notion that the rich are
knaves or that lords are fools. They are for what I know as honest and
as wise as other people. But it is a trick of our self-love, supposing
that another has the decided advantage of us in one way, to strike a
balance by taking it for granted (as a moral antithesis) that he must be
as much beneath us in those qualities on which we plume ourselves, and
which we would appropriate almost entirely to our own use. It is hard
indeed if others are raised above us not only by the gifts of fortune,
but of understanding too. It is not to be credited. People have an
unwillingness to admit that the House of Lords can be equal in talent to
the House of Commons. So in the other sex, if a woman is handsome, she
is an idiot or no better than she should be: in ours, if a man is worth
a million of money, he is a miser, a fellow that cannot spell his own
name, or a poor creature in some way, to bring him to our level. This is
malice, and not truth. Believe all the good you can of every one. Do not
measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not,
let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and
you need envy no one. If you have but the magnanimity to allow merit
wherever you see it—understanding in a lord or wit in a cobbler—this
temper of mind will stand you instead of many accomplishments. Think no
man too happy. Raphael died young. Milton had the misfortune to be
blind. If any one is vain or proud, it is from folly or ignorance. Those
who pique themselves excessively on some one thing, have but that one
thing to pique themselves upon, as languages, mechanics, &c. I do not
say that this is not an enviable delusion where it is not liable to be
disturbed; but at present knowledge is too much diffused and pretensions
come too much into collision for this to be long the case; and it is
better not to form such a prejudice at _first_ than to have it to undo
all the rest of one’s life. If you learn any two things, though they may
put you out of conceit one with the other, they will effectually cure
you of any conceit you might have of yourself, by shewing the variety
and scope there is in the human mind beyond the limits you had set to
it.
You were convinced the first day that you could not learn Latin, which
now you find easy. Be taught from this, not to think other obstacles
insurmountable that you may meet with in the course of your life, though
they seem so at first sight.
Attend above all things to your health; or rather, do nothing wilfully
to impair it. Use exercise, abstinence, and regular hours. Drink water
when you are alone, and wine or very little spirits in company. It is
the last that are ruinous by leading to unlimited excess. There is not
the same headlong _impetus_ in wine. But one glass of brandy and water
makes you want another, that other makes you want a third, and so on, in
an increased proportion. Therefore no one can stop midway who does not
possess the resolution to abstain altogether; for the inclination is
sharpened with its indulgence. Never gamble. Or if you play for any
thing, never do so for what will give you uneasiness the next day. Be
not precise in these matters: but do not pass certain limits, which it
is difficult to recover. Do nothing in the irritation of the moment, but
take time to reflect. Because you have done one foolish thing, do not do
another; nor throw away your health or reputation or comfort, to thwart
impertinent advice. Avoid a spirit of contradiction, both in words and
actions. Do not aim at what is beyond your reach, but at what is within
it. Indulge in calm and pleasing pursuits, rather than violent
excitements; and learn to conquer your own will, instead of striving to
obtain the mastery of that of others.
With respect to your friends, I would wish you to choose them neither
from caprice nor accident, and to adhere to them as long as you can. Do
not make a surfeit of friendship, through over-sanguine enthusiasm, nor
expect it to last for ever. Always speak well of those with whom you
have once been intimate, or take some part of the censure you bestow on
them to yourself. Never quarrel with tried friends, or those whom you
wish to continue such. Wounds of this kind are sure to open again. When
once the prejudice is removed that sheathes defects, familiarity only
causes jealousy and distrust. Do not keep on with a mockery of
friendship after the substance is gone—but part, while you can part
friends. Bury the carcase of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
As to the books you will have to read by choice or for amusement, the
best are the commonest. The names of many of them are already familiar
to you. Read them as you grow up with all the satisfaction in your
power, and make much of them. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure you
will have in life, the one you will think of longest, and repent of
least. If my life had been more full of calamity than it has been (much
more than I hope yours will be) I would live it over again, my poor
little boy, to have read the books I did in my youth.
In politics I wish you to be an honest man, but no brawler. Hate
injustice and falsehood for your own sake. Be neither a martyr, nor a
sycophant. Wish well to the world without expecting to see it much
better than it is; and do not gratify the enemies of liberty by putting
yourself at their mercy, if it can be avoided with honour.
If you ever marry, I would wish you to marry the woman you like. Do not
be guided by the recommendation of friends. Nothing will atone for or
overcome an original distaste. It will only increase from intimacy; and
if you are to live separate, it is better not to come together. There is
no use in dragging a chain through life, unless it binds one to the
object we love. Choose a mistress from among your equals. You will be
able to understand her character better, and she will be more likely to
understand yours. Those in an inferior station to yourself will doubt
your good intentions, and misapprehend your plainest expressions. All
that you swear is to them a riddle or downright nonsense. You cannot by
possibility translate your thoughts into their dialect. They will be
ignorant of the meaning of half you say, and laugh at the rest. As
mistresses, they will have no sympathy with you; and as wives, you can
have none with them. But they will do all they can to thwart you, and to
retrieve themselves in their own opinion by trick and low cunning. No
woman ever married into a family above herself that did not try to make
all the mischief she could in it. Be not in haste to marry, nor to
engage your affections, where there is no probability of a return. Do
not fancy every woman you see the heroine of a romance, a Sophia
Western, a Clarissa, or a Julia; and yourself the potential hero of it,
Tom Jones, Lovelace, or St. Preux. Avoid this error as you would shrink
back from a precipice. All your fine sentiments and romantic notions
will (of themselves) make no more impression on one of these delicate
creatures, than on a piece of marble. Their soft bosoms are steel to
your amorous refinements, if you have no other pretensions. It is not
what you think of them that determines their choice, but what they think
of you. Endeavour, if you would escape lingering torments and the
gnawing of the worm that dies not, to find out this, and to abide by the
issue. We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached
to us, and follow those that fly from us. ‘We hunt the wind, we worship
a statue, cry aloud to the desert.’ Do you, my dear boy, stop short in
this career, if you find yourself setting out in it, and make up your
mind to this, that if a woman does not like you of her own accord, that
is, from involuntary impressions, nothing you can say or do or suffer
for her sake will make her, but will set her the more against you. So
the song goes—
‘Quit, quit for shame; this will not move:
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing will make her, the devil take her!’
Your pain is her triumph; the more she feels you in her power, the worse
she will treat you: the more you make it appear you deserve her regard,
the more will she resent it as an imputation on her first judgment.
Study first impressions above all things; for every thing depends on
them, in love especially. Women are armed by nature and education with a
power of resisting the importunity of men, and they use this power
according to their discretion. They enforce it to the utmost rigour of
the law against those whom they do not like, and relax their extreme
severity proportionably in favour of those that they do like and who in
general care as little about them. Hence we see so many desponding
lovers and forlorn damsels. Love in women (at least) is either vanity,
or interest, or fancy. It is a merely selfish feeling. It has nothing to
do (I am sorry to say) with friendship, or esteem, or even pity. I once
asked a girl, the pattern of her sex in shape and mind and attractions,
whether she did not think Mr. Coleridge had done wrong in making the
heroine of his beautiful ballad story of Geneviève take compassion on
her hapless lover—
‘When on the yellow forest-leaves
A dying man he lay—’
And whether she believed that any woman ever fell in love through a
sense of compassion; and she made answer—‘Not if it was against her
inclination!’ I would take the lady’s word _for a thousand pound_, on
this point. Pain holds antipathy to pleasure; pity is not akin to love;
a dying man has more need of a nurse than of a mistress. There is no
forcing liking. It is as little to be fostered by reason and
good-nature, as it can be controlled by prudence or propriety. It is a
mere blind, headstrong impulse. Least of all flatter yourself that
talents or virtue will recommend you to the favour of the sex, in lieu
of exterior advantages. Oh! no. Women care nothing about poets, or
philosophers, or politicians. They go by a man’s looks and manner.
Richardson calls them ‘an eye-judging sex;’ and I am sure he knew more
about them than I can pretend to do. If you run away with a pedantic
notion that they care a pin’s-point about your head or your heart, you
will repent it too late. Some bluestocking may have her vanity flattered
by your reputation or be edified by the solution of a metaphysical
problem or a critical remark or a dissertation on the state of the
nation, and fancy that she has a taste for intellect and is an epicure
in sentiment. No true woman ever regarded any thing but her lover’s
person and address. Gravity will here answer all the same purpose
without understanding, gaiety without wit, folly without good-nature,
and impudence without any other pretension. The natural and instinctive
passion of love is excited by qualities not peculiar to artists,
authors, and men of letters. It is not the jest but the laugh that
follows, not the sentiment but the glance that accompanies it, that
_tells_—in a word, the sense of actual enjoyment that imparts itself to
others, and excites mutual understanding and inclination. Authors, on
the other hand, feel nothing spontaneously. The common incidents and
circumstances of life with which others are taken up, make no alteration
in them, nor provoke any of the common expressions of surprise, joy,
admiration, anger, or merriment. Nothing stirs their blood or
accelerates their juices or tickles their veins. Instead of yielding to
the first natural and lively impulses of things, in which they would
find sympathy, they screw themselves up to some far-fetched view of the
subject in order to be unintelligible. Realities are not good enough for
them, till they undergo the process of imagination and reflection. If
you offer them your hand to shake, they will hardly take it; for this
does not amount to a proposition. If you enter their room suddenly, they
testify neither surprise nor satisfaction: no new idea is elicited by
it. Yet if you suppose this to be a repulse, you are mistaken. They will
enter into your affairs or combat your ideas with all the warmth and
vehemence imaginable, as soon as they have a subject started. But their
faculty for thinking must be set in motion, before you can put any soul
into them. They are intellectual dram-drinkers; and without their
necessary stimulus, are torpid, dead, insensible to every thing. They
have great life of mind, but none of body. They do not drift with the
stream of company or of passing occurrences, but are straining at some
hyperbole or striking out a bye-path of their own. Follow them who list.
Their minds are a sort of Herculaneum, full of old, petrified
images;—are set in stereotype, and little fitted to the ordinary
occasions of life.
What chance, then, can they have with women, who deal only in the
pantomime of discourse, in gesticulation and the flippant bye-play of
the senses, ‘nods and winks and wreathed smiles;’ and to whom to offer a
remark is an impertinence, or a reason an affront? The only way in which
I ever knew mental qualities or distinction tell was in the clerical
character; and women do certainly incline to this with some sort of
favourable regard. Whether it is that the sanctity of pretension piques
curiosity, or that the habitual submission of their understandings to
their spiritual guides subdues the will, a popular preacher generally
has the choice among the _élite_ of his female flock. According to Mrs.
Inchbald (see her ‘Simple Story’) there is another reason why religious
courtship is not without its charms! But as I do not intend you for the
church, do not, in thinking to study yourself into the good graces of
the fair, study yourself out of them, millions of miles. Do not place
thought as a barrier between you and love: do not abstract yourself into
the regions of truth, far from the smile of earthly beauty. Let not the
cloud sit upon your brow: let not the canker sink into your heart. Look
up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the fire in
your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, and your
animal spirits, and you will pass for a fine man. But should you let
your blood stagnate in some deep metaphysical question, or refine too
much in your ideas of the sex, forgetting yourself in a dream of exalted
perfection, you will want an eye to cheer you, a hand to guide you, a
bosom to lean on, and will stagger into your grave, old before your
time, unloved and unlovely. If you feel that you have not the necessary
advantages of person, confidence, and manner, and that it is _up-hill_
work with you to gain the ear of beauty, quit the pursuit at once, and
seek for other satisfactions and consolations.
A spider, my dear, the meanest creature that crawls or lives, has its
mate or fellow: but a scholar has no mate or fellow. For myself, I had
courted thought, I had felt pain; and Love turned away his face from me.
I have gazed along the silent air for that smile which had lured me to
my doom. I no more heard those accents which would have burst upon me,
like a voice from heaven. I loathed the light that shone on my disgrace.
Hours, days, years, passed away; and only turned false hope to fixed
despair. And as my frail bark sails down the stream of time, the God of
Love stands on the shore, and as I stretch out my hands to him in vain,
claps his wings, and mocks me as I pass!
There is but one other point on which I meant to speak to you, and that
is the choice of a profession. This, probably, had better be left to
time or accident or your own inclination. You have a very fine ear, but
I have somehow a prejudice against men-singers, and indeed against the
stage altogether. It is an uncertain and ungrateful soil. All
professions are bad that depend on reputation, which is ‘as often got
without merit as lost without deserving.’ Yet I cannot easily reconcile
myself to your being a slave to business, and I shall hardly be able to
leave you an independence. A situation in a public office is secure, but
laborious and mechanical, and without the two great springs of life,
Hope and Fear. Perhaps, however, it might ensure you a competence, and
leave you leisure for some other favourite amusement or pursuit. I have
said all reputation is hazardous, hard to win, harder to keep. Many
never attain a glimpse of what they have all their lives been looking
for, and others survive a passing shadow of it. Yet if I were to name
one pursuit rather than another, I should wish you to be a good painter,
if such a thing could be hoped. I have failed in this myself, and should
wish you to be able to do what I have not—to paint like Claude or
Rembrandt or Guido or Vandyke, if it were possible. Artists, I think,
who have succeeded in their chief object, live to be old, and are
agreeable old men. Their minds keep alive to the last. Cosway’s spirits
never flagged till after ninety, and Nollekins, though nearly blind,
passed all his mornings in giving directions about some group or bust in
his workshop. You have seen Mr. Northcote, that delightful specimen of
the last age. With what avidity he takes up his pencil, or lays it down
again to talk of numberless things! His eye has not lost its lustre, nor
‘paled its ineffectual fire.’ His body is a shadow: he himself is a pure
spirit. There is a kind of immortality about this sort of ideal and
visionary existence that dallies with Fate and baffles the grim monster,
Death. If I thought you could make as clever an artist and arrive at
such an agreeable old age as Mr. Northcote, I should declare at once for
your devoting yourself to this enchanting profession; and in that
reliance, should feel less regret at some of my own disappointments, and
little anxiety on your account!
BELIEF, WHETHER VOLUNTARY?
‘Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.’
It is an axiom in modern philosophy (among many other false ones) that
belief is absolutely involuntary, since we draw our inferences from the
premises laid before us and cannot possibly receive any other impression
of things than that which they naturally make upon us. This theory, that
the understanding is purely passive in the reception of truth, and that
our convictions are not in the power of our will, was probably first
invented or insisted upon as a screen against religious persecution, and
as an answer to those who imputed bad motives to all who differed from
the established faith, and thought they could reform heresy and impiety
by the application of fire and the sword. No doubt, that is not the way:
for the will in that case irritates itself and grows refractory against
the doctrines thus absurdly forced upon it; and as it has been said, the
blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. But though force and
terror may not be always the surest way to make converts, it does not
follow that there may not be other means of influencing our opinions,
besides the naked and abstract evidence for any proposition: the sun
melts the resolution which the storm could not shake. In such points as,
whether less an object is black or white, or whether two and two make
four,[61] we may not be able to believe as we please or to deny the
evidence of our reason and senses: but in those points on which mankind
differ, or where we can be at all in suspense as to which side we shall
take, the truth is not quite so plain or palpable; it admits of a
variety of views and shades of colouring, and it should appear that we
can dwell upon whichever of these we choose, and heighten or soften the
circumstances adduced in proof, according as passion and inclination
throw their casting-weight into the scale. Let any one, for instance,
have been brought up in an opinion, let him have remained in it all his
life, let him have attached all his notions of respectability, of the
approbation of his fellow-citizens or his own self-esteem to it, let him
then first hear it called in question and a strong and unforeseen
objection stated to it, will not this startle and shock him as if he had
seen a spectre, and will he not struggle to resist the arguments that
would unsettle his habitual convictions, as he would resist the
divorcing of soul and body? Will he come to the consideration of the
question impartially, indifferently, and without any wrong bias, or give
the painful and revolting truth the same cordial welcome as the
long-cherished and favourite prejudice? To say that the truth or
falsehood of a proposition is the only circumstance that gains it
admittance into the mind, independently of the pleasure or pain it
affords us, is itself an assertion made in pure caprice or desperation.
A person may have a profession or employment connected with a certain
belief, it may be the means of livelihood to him, and the changing it
may require considerable sacrifices or may leave him almost without
resource (to say nothing of mortified pride)—this will not mend the
matter. The evidence against his former opinion may be so strong (or may
appear so to him) that he may be obliged to give it up, but not without
a pang and after having tried every artifice and strained every nerve to
give the utmost weight to the arguments favouring his own side, and to
make light of and throw those against him into the back-ground. And nine
times in ten this bias of the will and tampering with the proofs will
prevail. It is only with very vigorous or very candid minds, that the
understanding exercises its just and boasted prerogative and induces its
votaries to relinquish a profitable delusion and embrace the dowerless
truth. Even then they have the sober and discreet part of the world, all
the _bons pères de famille_, who look principally to the main-chance,
against them, and they are regarded as little better than lunatics or
profligates to fling up a good salary and a provision for themselves and
families for the sake of that foolish thing, a _Conscience_! With the
herd, belief on all abstract and disputed topics is voluntary, that is,
is determined by considerations of personal ease and convenience, in the
teeth of logical analysis and demonstration, which are set aside as mere
waste of words. In short, generally speaking, people stick to an opinion
that they have long supported and that supports them. How else shall we
account for the regular order and progression of society: for the
maintenance of certain opinions in particular professions and classes of
men, as we keep water in cisterns, till in fact they stagnate and
corrupt: and that the world and every individual in it is not ‘blown
about with every wind of doctrine’ and whisper of uncertainty? There is
some more solid ballast required to keep things in their established
order than the restless fluctuation of opinion and ‘infinite agitation
of wit.’ We find that people in Protestant countries continue
Protestants and in Catholic countries Papists. This, it may be answered,
is owing to the ignorance of the great mass of them; but is their faith
less bigoted, because it is not founded on a regular investigation of
the proofs, and is merely an obstinate determination to believe what
they have been told and accustomed to believe? Or is it not the same
with the doctors of the church and its most learned champions, who read
the same texts, turn over the same authorities, and discuss the same
knotty points through their whole lives, only to arrive at opposite
conclusions? How few are shaken in their opinions, or have the grace to
confess it! Shall we then suppose them all impostors, and that they keep
up the farce of a system, of which they do not believe a syllable? Far
from it: there may be individual instances, but the generality are not
only sincere but bigots. Those who are unbelievers and hypocrites
scarcely know it themselves, or if a man is not quite a knave, what
pains will he not take to make a fool of his reason, that his opinions
may tally with his professions? Is there then a Papist and a Protestant
understanding—one prepared to receive the doctrine of transubstantiation
and the other to reject it? No such thing: but in either case the ground
of reason is preoccupied by passion, habit, example—_the scales are
falsified_. Nothing can therefore be more inconsequential than to bring
the authority of great names in favour of opinions long established and
universally received. Cicero’s being a Pagan was no proof in support of
the Heathen mythology, but simply of his being born at Rome before the
Christian era; though his lurking scepticism on the subject and sneers
at the augurs told against it, for this was an acknowledgment drawn from
him in spite of a prevailing prejudice. Sir Isaac Newton and Napier of
Marchiston both wrote on the _Apocalypse_; but this is neither a ground
for a speedy anticipation of the Millennium, nor does it invalidate the
doctrine of the gravitation of the planets or the theory of logarithms.
One party would borrow the sanction of these great names in support of
their wildest and most mystical opinions; others would arraign them of
folly and weakness for having attended to such subjects at all. Neither
inference is just. It is a simple question of chronology, or of the time
when these celebrated mathematicians lived, and of the studies and
pursuits which were then chiefly in vogue. The wisest man is the slave
of opinion, except on one or two points on which he strikes out a light
for himself and holds a torch to the rest of the world. But we are
disposed to make it out that all opinions are the result of reason,
because they profess to be so; and when they are _right_, that is, when
they agree with ours, that there can be no alloy of human frailty or
perversity in them; the very strength of our prejudice making it pass
for pure reason, and leading us to attribute any deviation from it to
bad faith or some unaccountable singularity or infatuation. _Alas, poor
human nature!_ Opinion is for the most part only a battle, in which we
take part and defend the side we have adopted, in the one case or the
other, with a view to share the honour or the spoil. Few will stand up
for a losing cause or have the fortitude to adhere to a proscribed
opinion; and when they do, it is not always from superior strength of
understanding or a disinterested love of truth, but from obstinacy and
sullenness of temper. To affirm that we do not cultivate an acquaintance
with truth as she presents herself to us in a more or less pleasing
shape, or is shabbily attired or well-dressed, is as much as to say that
we do not shut our eyes to the light when it dazzles us, or withdraw our
hands from the fire when it scorches us.
‘Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes.’
Are we not averse to believe bad news relating to ourselves—forward
enough if it relates to others? If something is said reflecting on the
character of an intimate friend or near relative, how unwilling we are
to lend an ear to it, how we catch at every excuse or palliating
circumstance, and hold out against the clearest proof, while we
instantly believe any idle report against an enemy, magnify the
commonest trifles into crimes, and torture the evidence against him to
our heart’s content! Do not we change our opinion of the same person,
and make him out to be _black_ or _white_ according to the terms we
happen to be on? If we have a favourite author, do we not exaggerate his
beauties and pass over his defects, and _vice versâ_? The human mind
plays the interested advocate much oftener than the upright and
inflexible judge, in the colouring and relief it gives to the facts
brought before it. We believe things not more because they are true or
probable, than because we desire, or (if the imagination once takes that
turn) because we dread them. ‘Fear has more devils than vast hell can
hold.’ The sanguine always hope, the gloomy always despond, from
temperament and not from forethought. Do we not disguise the plainest
facts from ourselves if they are disagreeable. Do we not flatter
ourselves with impossibilities? What girl does not look in the glass to
persuade herself she is handsome? What woman ever believes herself old,
or does not hate to be called so: though she knows the exact year and
day of her age, the more she tries to keep up the appearance of youth to
herself and others? What lover would ever acknowledge a flaw in the
character of his mistress, or would not construe her turning her back on
him into a proof of attachment? The story of _January and May_ is pat to
our purpose; for the credulity of mankind as to what touches our
inclinations has been proverbial in all ages: yet we are told that the
mind is passive in making up these wilful accounts, and is guided by
nothing but the _pros_ and _cons_ of evidence. Even in action and where
we still may determine by proper precaution the event of things, instead
of being compelled to shut our eyes to what we cannot help, we still are
the dupes of the feeling of the moment, and prefer amusing ourselves
with fair appearances to securing more solid benefits by a sacrifice of
Imagination and stubborn Will to Truth. The blindness of passion to the
most obvious and well known consequences is deplorable. There seems to
be a particular fatality in this respect. Because a thing is in our
power _till_ we have committed ourselves, we appear to dally, to trifle
with, to make light of it, and to think it will still be in our power
_after_ we have committed ourselves. Strange perversion of the reasoning
faculties, which is little short of madness, and which yet is one of the
constant and practical sophisms of human life! It is as if one should
say—I am in no danger from a tremendous machine unless I touch such a
spring and therefore I will approach it, I will play with the danger, I
will laugh at it, and at last in pure sport and wantonness of heart,
from my sense of previous security, I _will_ touch it—and _there’s an
end_. While the thing remains in contemplation, we may be said to stand
safe and smiling on the brink: as soon as we proceed to action we are
drawn into the vortex of passion and hurried to our destruction. A
person taken up with some one purpose or passion is intent only upon
that: he drives out the thought of every thing but its gratification: in
the pursuit of that he is blind to consequences: his first object being
attained, they all at once, and as if by magic, rush upon his mind. The
engine recoils, he is caught in his own snare. A servant-girl, for some
pique, or for an angry word, determines to poison her mistress. She
knows before hand (just as well as she does afterwards) that it is at
least a hundred chances to one she will be hanged if she succeeds, yet
this has no more effect upon her than if she had never heard of any such
matter. The only idea that occupies her mind and hardens it against
every other, is that of the affront she has received, and the desire of
revenge; she broods over it; she meditates the mode, she is haunted with
her scheme night and day; it works like poison; it grows into a madness,
and she can have no peace till it is accomplished and _off her mind_;
but the moment this is the case, and her passion is assuaged, fear takes
place of hatred, the slightest suspicion alarms her with the certainty
of her fate from which she before wilfully averted her thoughts; she
runs wildly from the officers before they know any thing of the matter;
the gallows stares her in the face, and if none else accuses her, so
full is she of her danger and her guilt, that she probably betrays
herself. She at first would see no consequences to result from her crime
but the getting rid of a present uneasiness; she now sees the very
worst. The whole seems to depend on the turn given to the imagination,
on our immediate disposition to attend to this or that view of the
subject, the evil or the good. As long as our intention is unknown to
the world, before it breaks out into action, it seems to be deposited in
our own bosoms, to be a mere feverish dream, and to be left with all its
consequences under our imaginary control: but no sooner is it realised
and known to others, than it appears to have escaped from our reach, we
fancy the whole world are up in arms against us, and vengeance is ready
to pursue and overtake us. So in the pursuit of pleasure, we see only
that side of the question which we approve: the disagreeable
consequences (which may take place) make no part of our intention or
concern, or of the wayward exercise of our will: if they should happen
we cannot help it; they form an ugly and unwished-for contrast to our
favourite speculation: we turn our thoughts another way, repeating the
adage _quod sic mihi ostendis incredulus odi_. It is a good remark in
‘Vivian Grey,’ that a bankrupt walks the streets the day before his name
is in the Gazette with the same erect and confident brow as ever, and
only feels the mortification of his situation after it becomes known to
others. Such is the force of sympathy, and its power to take off the
edge of internal conviction! As long as we can impose upon the world, we
can impose upon ourselves, and trust to the flattering appearances,
though we know them to be false. We put off the evil day as long as we
can, make a jest of it as the certainty becomes more painful, and refuse
to acknowledge the secret to ourselves till it can no longer be kept
from all the world. In short, we believe just as little or as much as we
please of those things in which our will can be supposed to interfere;
and it is only by setting aside our own interests and inclinations on
more general questions that we stand any chance of arriving at a fair
and rational judgment. Those who have the largest hearts have the
soundest understandings; and he is the truest philosopher who can forget
himself. This is the reason why philosophers are often said to be mad,
for thinking only of the abstract truth and of none of its worldly
adjuncts,—it seems like an absence of mind, or as if the devil had got
into them! If belief were not in some degree voluntary, or were grounded
entirely on strict evidence and absolute proof, every one would be a
martyr to his opinions, and we should have no power of evading or
glossing over those matter-of-fact conclusions for which positive
vouchers could be produced, however painful these conclusions might be
to our own feelings, or offensive to the prejudices of others.
DEFINITION OF WIT
Wit is the putting together in jest, _i.e._ in fancy, or in bare
supposition, ideas between which there is a serious, _i.e._ a customary
incompatibility, and by this pretended union, or juxtaposition, to point
out more strongly some lurking incongruity. Or, wit is the dividing a
sentence or an object into a number of constituent parts, as suddenly
and with the same vivacity of apprehension to compound them again with
other objects, ‘wherein the most distant resemblance or the most partial
coincidence may be found.’ It is the _polypus_ power of the mind, by
which a distinct life and meaning is imparted to the different parts of
a sentence or object after they are severed from each other; or it is
the prism dividing the simplicity and candour of our ideas into a parcel
of motley and variegated hues; or it is the mirror broken into pieces,
each fragment of which reflects a new light from surrounding objects; or
it is the untwisting the chain of our ideas, whereby each link is made
to hook on more readily to others than when they were all bound up
together by habit, and with a view to a _set_ purpose. Ideas exist as a
sort of _fixtures_ in the understanding; they are like _moveables_ (that
will also unscrew and take to pieces) in the wit or fancy. If our grave
notions were always well founded; if there were no aggregates of power,
of prejudice, and absurdity; if the value and importance of an object
went on increasing with the opinion entertained of it, and with the
surrender of our faith, freedom, and every thing else to aggrandise it,
then ‘the squandering glances’ of the wit, ‘whereby the wise man’s folly
is anatomised,’ would be as impertinent as they would be useless. But
while gravity and imposture not only exist, but reign triumphant; while
the proud, obstinate, sacred tumours rear their heads on high, and are
trying to get a new lease of for ever and a day; then oh! for the
Frenchman’s art (‘Voltaire’s?—the same’) to break the torpid spell, and
reduce the bloated mass to its native insignificance! When a Ferdinand
still rules, seated on his throne of darkness and blood, by English
bayonets and by English gold (that have no mind to remove him thence)
who is not glad that an Englishman has the wit and spirit to translate
the title of _King Ferdinand_ into _Thing Ferdinand_; and does not
regret that, instead of pointing the public scorn and exciting an
indignant smile, the stroke of wit has not the power to shatter, to
wither, and annihilate in its lightning blaze the monstrous assumption,
with all its open or covert abettors? This would be a _set-off_, indeed,
to the joint efforts of pride, ignorance, and hypocrisy: as it is, wit
plays its part, and does not play it ill, though it is too apt to cut
both ways. It may be said that what I have just quoted is not an
instance of the decomposition of an idea or word into its elements, and
finding a solid sense hid in the unnoticed particles of wit, but is the
addition of another element or letter. But it was the same lively
perception of individual and salient points, that saw the word KING
stuck up in capital letters, as it were, and like a transparency in the
_Illuminated Missal_ of the Fancy, that enabled the satirist to conjure
up the letter T before it, and made the transition (urged by contempt)
easy. For myself, with all my blind, rooted prejudices against the name,
it would be long enough before I should hit upon so happy a mode of
expressing them. My mind is not sufficiently alert and disengaged. I
cannot run along the letters composing it like the spider along its web,
to see what they are or how to combine them anew; I am crushed like the
worm, and writhing beneath the load. I can give no reasons for the faith
that is in me, unless I read a novel of Sir Walter’s, but there I find
plenty of examples to justify my hatred of kings in former times, and to
prevent my wishing to ‘revive the ancient spirit of loyalty’ in this!
Wit, then, according to this account of it, depends on the rapid
analysis or solution of continuity in our ideas, which, by detaching,
puts them into a condition to coalesce more readily with others, and
form new and unexpected combinations: but does all analysis imply wit,
or where is the difference? Does the examining the flowers and leaves in
the cover of a chair-bottom, or the several squares in a marble
pavement, constitute wit? Does looking through a microscope amount to
it? The painter analyses the face into features—nose, eyes, and
mouth—the features into their component parts: but this process of
observation and attention to details only leads him to discriminate more
nicely, and not to confound objects. The mathematician _abstracts_ in
his reasonings, and considers the same line, now as forming the side of
a triangle, now of a square figure; but does he laugh at the discovery,
or tell it to any one else as a monstrous good jest? These questions
require an answer; and an evasive one will not do. With respect to the
wit of words, the explanation is not difficult; and if all wit were
verbal, my task would be soon ended. For language, being in its own
nature arbitrary and ambiguous; or consisting of ‘sounds significant,’
which are now applied to one thing, now to something wholly different
and unconnected, the most opposite and jarring mixtures may be
introduced into our ideas by making use of this medium which looks two
ways at once, either by applying the same word to two different
meanings, or by dividing it into several parts, each probably the sign
of a different thing, and which may serve as the starting-post of a
different set of associations. The very circumstance which at first one
might suppose would convert all the world into punsters and
word-catchers, and make a Babel and chaos of language, _viz._ the
arbitrary and capricious nature of the symbols it uses, is that which
prevents them from becoming so; for words not being substantive things
in themselves, and utterly valueless and unimportant except as the index
of thought, the mind takes no notice of or lays no kind of stress upon
them, passes on to what is to follow, uses them mechanically and almost
unconsciously; and thus the syllables of which a word may be composed,
are lost in its known import, and the word itself in the general
context. We may be said neither to hear nor see the words themselves; we
attend only to the inference, the intention they are meant to
communicate. This merging of the sound in the sense, of the means in the
end, both common sense, the business of life, and the limitation of the
human faculties dictate. But men of wit and leisure are not contented
with this; in the discursiveness of their imaginations and with their
mercurial spirits, they find it an amusement to attend not only to the
conclusion or the meaning of words, but to criticise and have an eye to
the words themselves. Dull, plodding people go no farther than the
literal, or more properly, the practical sense; the parts of a word or
phrase are _massed together_ in their habitual conceptions; their rigid
understandings are confined to the one meaning of any word predetermined
by its place in the sentence, and they are propelled forward to the end
without looking to the right or the left. The others, who are less the
creatures of habit and have a greater quantity of disposable activity,
take the same words out of harness, as it were, lend them wings, and
flutter round them in all sorts of fantastic combinations, and in every
direction that they choose to take. For instance: the word _elder_
signifies in the dictionary either _age_ or a certain sort of _tree_ or
_berry_; but if you mention _elder wine_ all the other senses sink into
the dictionary as superfluous and nonsensical, and you think only of the
wine which happens to bear this name. It required, therefore, a man of
Mr. Lamb’s wit and disdain of the ordinary trammels of thought, to cut
short a family dispute over some very excellent wine of this
description, by saying, ‘I wonder what it is that makes _elder wine_ so
very pleasant, when _elder brothers_ are so extremely disagreeable?’
_Compagnons du lys_, may mean either the _companions of the order of the
flower-de-luce_, or the _companions of Ulysses_—who were transformed
into swine—according as you lay the emphasis. The French wits, at the
restoration of Louis XVIII., with admirable point and truth, applied it
in this latter sense. Two things may thus meet, in the casual
construction and artful encounters of language, wide as the poles
asunder and yet perfectly alike; and this is the perfection of wit, when
the physical sound is the same, the physical sense totally unlike, and
the moral sense absolutely identical. What is it that in things supplies
the want of the _double entendre_ of language?—ABSURDITY. And this is
the very signification of the term. For it is only when the two
contradictory natures are found in the same object that the verbal wit
holds good, and the real wit or _jeu d’esprit_ exists and may be brought
out wherever this contradiction is obvious with or without the
_jeu-de-mots_ to assist it. We can comprehend how the evolving or
disentangling an unexpected coincidence, hid under the same name, is
full of ambiguity and surprise; but an absurdity may be written on the
face of a thing without the help of language; and it is in detecting and
embodying this that the finest wit lies. Language is merely one
instrument or handle that forwards the operation: Fancy is the midwife
of wit. But how?—If we look narrowly and attentively, we shall find that
there is a language of things as well as words, and the same variety of
meaning, a hidden and an obvious, a partial and a general one, in both
the one and the other. For things, any more than words, are not
detached, independent existences, but are connected and cohere together
by habit and circumstances in certain sets of association, and consist
of an alphabet, which is thus formed into words and regular
propositions, which being once done and established as the understood
order of the world, the particular ideas are either not noticed, or
_determined_ to a set purpose and ‘foregone conclusion,’ just as the
letters of a word are sunk in the word, or the different possible
meanings of a word adjusted by the context. One part of an object being
habitually associated with others, or one object with a set of other
objects, we _lump_ the whole together, take the general rule for
granted, and merge the details in a blind and confused idea of the
aggregate result. This, then, is the province of wit; to penetrate
through the disguise or crust with which indolence and custom ‘skin and
slur over’ our ideas, to move this slough of prejudice, and to resolve
these aggregates or bundles of things into their component parts by a
more lively and unshackled conception of their distinctions, and the
possible combinations of these, so as to throw a glancing and fortuitous
light upon the whole. There is then, it is obvious, a _double meaning_
in things or ideas as well as in words (each being ordinarily regarded
by the mind merely as the mechanical signs or links to hold together
other ideas connected with them)—and it is in detecting this _double
meaning_ that wit in either case is shown. Having no books at hand to
refer to for examples, and in the dearth of imagination which I
naturally labour under, I must look round the room in search of
illustrations. I see a number of stars or diamond figures in the carpet,
with the violent contrast of red and yellow and fantastic wreaths of
flowers twined round them, without being able to extract either
edification or a particle of amusement from them: a joint-stool and a
fire-screen in a corner are equally silent on the subject—the first hint
I receive (or glimmering of light) is from a pair of tongs which, placed
formally astride on the fender, bear a sort of resemblance to the human
figure called _long legs and no body_. The absurdity is not in the tongs
(for that is their usual shape) but in the human figure which has
borrowed a likeness foreign to itself. With this _contre-sens_, and the
uneasiness and confusion in our habitual ideas which it excites, and the
effort to clear up this by throwing it from us into a totally distinct
class of objects, where by being made plain and palpable, it is proved
to have nothing to do with that into which it has obtruded itself, and
to which it makes pretensions, commences the operation of wit and the
satisfaction it yields to the mind. This I think is the cause of the
delightful nature of wit, and of its relieving, instead of aggravating,
the pains of defect or deformity, by pointing it out in the most glaring
colours, inasmuch as by so doing, we, as it were, completely detach the
peccant part and restore the sense of propriety which, in its undetected
and unprobed state, it was beginning to disturb. It is like taking a
grain of sand out of the eye, a thorn out of the foot. We have
discharged our mental reckoning, and had our revenge. Thus, when we say
of a _snub-nose_, that it is like an ace of clubs, it is less out of
spite to the individual than to vindicate and place beyond a doubt the
propriety of our notions of form in general. Butler compares the
knight’s red, formal-set beard to a tile:—
‘In cut and die so like a tile,
A sudden view it would beguile;’
we laugh in reading this, but the triumph is less over the wretched
precisian than it is the triumph of common sense. So Swift exclaims:—
‘The house of brother Van I spy,
In shape resembling a goose-pie.’
Here, if the satire was just, the characteristics of want of solidity,
of incongruity, and fantastical arrangement were inherent in the
building, and written on its front to the discerning eye, and only
required to be brought out by the simile of the goose-pie, which is an
immediate test and illustration (being an extreme case) of those
qualities. The absurdity, which before was either admired, or only
suspected, now stands revealed, and is turned into a laughing stock, by
the new version of the building into a goose-pie (as much as if the
metamorphosis had been effected by a play of words, combining the most
opposite things), for the mind in this case having narrowly escaped
being imposed upon by taking a trumpery edifice for a stately pile, and
perceiving the cheat, naturally wishes to cut short the dispute by
finding out the most discordant object possible, and nicknames the
building after it. There can be no farther question whether a goose-pie
is a fine building. Butler compares the sun rising after the dark night
to a lobster boiled, and ‘turned from black to red.’ This is equally
mock-wit and mock-poetry, as the sun can neither be exalted nor degraded
by the comparison. It is a play upon the ideas, like what we see in a
play upon words, without meaning. In a pantomime at Sadler’s Wells, some
years ago, they improved upon this hint, and threw a young
chimney-sweeper into a cauldron of boiling water, who came out a smart,
dapper volunteer. This was _practical wit_; so that wit may exist not
only without the play upon words, but even without the use of them.
Hogarth may be cited as an instance, who abounds in wit almost as much
as he does in humour, considering the inaptitude of the language he
used, or in those double allusions which throw a reflected light upon
the same object, according to Collins’s description of wit,
‘Like jewels in his crisped hair.’
Mark Supple’s calling out from the Gallery of the House of Commons—‘A
song from Mr. Speaker!’ when Addington was in the chair and there was a
pause in the debate, was undoubtedly wit, though the relation of any
such absurd circumstance actually taking place, would only have been
humour. A gallant calling on a courtesan (for it is fair to illustrate
these intricacies how we can) observed, ‘he should only make her a
present every other time.’ She answered, ‘Then come only every other
time.’ This appears to me to offer a sort of touchstone to the question.
The sense here is, ‘Don’t come unless you pay.’ There is no wit in this:
the wit then consists in the mode of conveying the hint: let us see into
what this resolves itself. The object is to point out as strongly as can
be, the absurdity of not paying; and in order to do this, an
impossibility is assumed by running a parallel on the phrases, ‘paying
every other time,’ and ‘coming every other time,’ as if the coming went
for nothing without paying, and thus, by the very contrast and
contradiction in the terms, showing the most perfect contempt for the
literal coming, of which the essence, viz. paying, was left out. It is,
in short, throwing the most killing scorn upon, and fairly annihilating
the coming without paying, as if it were possible to come and not to
come at the same time, by virtue of an identical proposition or form of
speech applied to contrary things. The wit so far, then, consists in
suggesting, or insinuating indirectly, an apparent coincidence between
two things, to make the real incongruity, by the recoil of the
imagination, more palpable than it could have been without this feigned
and artificial approximation to an union between them. This makes the
difference between jest and earnest, which is essential to all wit. It
is only _make-believe_. It is a false pretence set up, or the making one
thing pass in supposition for another, as a foil to the truth when the
mask is removed. There need not be laughter, but there must be deception
and surprise: otherwise, there can be no wit. When Archer, in order to
bind the robbers, suddenly makes an excuse to call out to Dorinda, ‘Pray
lend me your garter, Madam,’ this is both witty and laughable. Had there
been any propriety in the proposal or chance of compliance with it, it
would no longer have been a joke: had the question been quite absurd and
uncalled-for, it would have been mere impudence and folly; but it is the
mixture of sense and nonsense, that is, the pretext for the request in
the fitness of a garter to answer the purpose in question, and the
totally opposite train of associations between a lady’s garter
(particularly in the circumstances which had just happened in the play)
and tying a rascally robber’s hands behind his back, that produces the
delightful _equivoque_ and unction of the passage in Farquhar. It is
laughable, because the train of inquiry it sets in motion is at once on
pleasant and on forbidden ground. We did not laugh in the former
case—‘Then only come every other time’—because it was a mere ill-natured
exposure of an absurdity, and there was an end of it: but here, the
imagination courses up and down along a train of ideas, by which it is
alternately repelled and attracted, and this produces the natural
drollery or inherent ludicrousness. It is the difference between the wit
of humour and the wit of sense. Once more, suppose you take a stupid,
unmeaning likeness of a face, and throwing a wig over it, stick it on a
peg, to make it look like a barber’s block—this is wit without words.
You give that which is stupid in itself the additional accompaniments of
what is still more stupid, to enhance and verify the idea by a
falsehood. We know the head so placed is not a barber’s block; but it
might, we see, very well pass for one. This is caricature or the
_grotesque_. The face itself might be made infinitely laughable, and
great humour be shown in the delineation of character: it is in
combining this with other artificial and aggravating circumstances, or
in the setting of this piece of lead that the wit appears.[62]
RECAPITULATION. It is time to stop short in this list of digressions,
and try to join the scattered threads together. We are too apt, both
from the nature of language and the turn of modern philosophy, which
reduces every thing to simple sensations, to consider whatever bears one
name as one thing in itself, which prevents our ever properly
understanding those _mixed modes_ and various clusters of ideas, to
which almost all language has a reference. Thus if we regard _wit_ as
something resembling a drop of quicksilver, or a spangle from off a
cloak, a little nimble substance, that is pointed and glitters (we do
not know how) we shall make no progress in analysing its varieties or
its essence; it is a mere word or an atom: but if we suppose it to
consist in, or be the result of, several sets and sorts of ideas
combined together or acting upon each other (like the tunes and
machinery of a barrel-organ) we may stand some chance of explaining and
getting an insight into the process. Wit is not, then, a single idea or
object, but it is one mode of viewing and representing nature, or the
differences and similitudes, harmonies and discords in the links and
chains of our ideas of things at large. If all our ideas were literal,
physical, confined to a single impression of the object, there could be
no faculty for, or possibility of, the existence of wit, for its first
principle is _mocking_ or making a jest of anything, and its first
condition or postulate, therefore, is the distinction between jest and
earnest. First of all, wit implies a jest, that is, the bringing forward
a pretended or counterfeit illustration of a thing; which, being
presently withdrawn, makes the naked truth more apparent by contrast. It
is lessening and undermining our faith in any thing (in which the
serious consists) by heightening or exaggerating the vividness of our
idea of it, so as by carrying it to extremes to show the error in the
first concoction, and from a received practical truth and object of
grave assent, to turn it into a laughing stock to the fancy. This will
apply to Archer and the lady’s garter, which is ironical: but how does
it connect with the comparison of Hudibras’s beard to a tile, which is
only an exaggeration; or the _Compagnons d’Ulysse_, which is meant for a
literal and severe truth, as well as a play upon words? More generally
then, wit is the conjuring up in the fancy any illustration of an idea
by likeness, combination of other images, or by a form of words, that
being intended to point out the _eccentricity_ or departure of the
original idea from the class to which it belongs does so by referring it
contingently and obliquely to a totally opposite class, where the
surprise and mere possibility of finding it, proves the inherent want of
congruity. Hudibras’s beard is transformed (by wit) into a tile: a
strong man is transformed (by imagination) into a tower. The objects,
you will say, are unlike in both cases; yet the comparison in one case
is meant seriously, in the other it is merely to tantalize. The
imagination is serious, even to passion, and exceeds truth by laying a
greater stress on the object; wit has no feeling but contempt, and
exceeds truth to make light of it. In a poetical comparison there cannot
be a sense of incongruity or surprise; in a witty one there must. The
reason is this: It is granted stone is not flesh, a tile is not hair,
but the associated feelings are alike, and naturally coalesce in one
instance, and are discordant and only forced together by a trick of
style in the other. But how can that be, if the objects occasioning
these feelings are equally dissimilar?—Because the qualities of
stiffness or squareness and colour, objected to in Hudibras’s beard, are
themselves peculiarities and oddities in a beard, or contrary to the
nature or to our habitual notion of that class of objects; and
consequently (not being natural or rightful properties of a beard) must
be found in the highest degree in, and admit of, a grotesque and
irregular comparison with a class of objects, of which squareness and
redness[63] are the essential characteristics (as of a tile), and which
can have, accordingly, no common point of union in general qualities or
feeling with the first class, but where the ridicule must be just and
pointed from this very circumstance, that is, from the coincidence in
that one particular only, which is the flaw and singularity of the first
object. On the other hand, size and strength, which are the qualities on
which the comparison of a man to a tower hinges, are not repugnant to
the general constitution of man, but familiarly associated with our
ideas of him: so that there is here no sense of impropriety in the
object, nor of incongruity or surprise in the comparison: all is grave
and decorous, and instead of burlesque, bears the aspect of a loftier
truth. But if strength and magnitude fall within our ordinary
contemplations of man as things not out of the course of nature, whereby
he is enabled, with the help of imagination, to rival a tower of brass
or stone, are not littleness and weakness the counterpart of these, and
subject to the same rule? What shall we say, then, to the comparison of
a dwarf to a pigmy, or to Falstaff’s comparison of _Silence_ to ‘a
forked radish, or a man made after supper of a cheese-paring?’ Once more
then, strength and magnitude are qualities which impress the imagination
in a powerful and substantive manner; if they are an excess above the
ordinary or average standard, it is an excess to which we lend a ready
and admiring belief, that is, we _will_ them to be if they are not,
because they _ought to be_—whereas, in the other case of peculiarity and
defect, the mind is constantly at war with the impression before it; our
affections do not tend that way; we will it _not_ to be; reject, detach,
and discard it from the object as much and as far as possible; and
therefore it is, that there being no voluntary coherence but a constant
repugnance between the peculiarity (as of _squareness_) and the object
(as a _beard_), the idea of a beard as being both naturally and properly
of a certain form and texture remains as remote as ever from that of a
tile; and hence the double problem is solved, why the mind is at once
surprised and not shocked by the allusion; for first, the mind being
made to see a beard so unlike a beard, is glad to have the discordance
increased and put beyond controversy, by comparing it to something still
more unlike one, _viz._, a tile; and secondly, _squareness_ never having
been admitted as a desirable and accredited property of a beard as it is
of a tile, by which the two classes of ideas might have been reconciled
and compromised (like those of a man and a tower) through a feeling or
quality common (in will) to both, the transition from one to the other
continues as new and startling, that is, as witty as ever;—_which was to
be demonstrated_. I think I see my way clearly so far. Wit consists in
two things, the perceiving the incongruity between an object and the
class to which it generally belongs, and secondly, the pointing out or
making this incongruity more manifest, by transposing it to a totally
different class of objects in which it is prescriptively found in
perfection. The medium or link of connexion between the opposite classes
of ideas is in the unlikeness of one of the things in question _to
itself_, _i.e._ the class it belongs to: this peculiarity is the narrow
bridge or line along which the fancy runs to link it to a set of objects
in all other respects different from the first, and having no sort of
communication, either in fact or inclination, with it, and in which the
pointedness and brilliancy, or the _surprise_ and _contrast_ of wit
consists. The faculty by which this is done is the rapid, careless
decomposition and recomposition of our ideas, by means of which we
easily and clearly detach certain links in the chain of our associations
from the place where they stand, and where they have an infirm footing,
and join them on to others, to show how little intimacy they had with
the former set.
The motto of wit seems to be, _Light come, light go_. A touch is
sufficient to dissever what already hangs so loose as folly, like froth
on the surface of the wave; and an hyperbole, an impossibility, a pun or
a nickname will push an absurdity, which is close upon the verge of it,
over the precipice. It is astonishing how much wit or laughter there is
in the world—it is one of the staple commodities of daily life—and yet,
being excited by what is _out of the way_ and singular, it ought to be
rare, and gravity should be the order of the day. Its constant
recurrence from the most trifling and trivial causes, shows that the
contradiction is less to what we find things than to what we wish them
to be. A circle of milliner’s-girls laugh all day long at nothing, or
day after day at the same things—the same cant phrase supplies the wags
of the town with wit for a month—the same set of nicknames has served
the _John Bull_ and _Blackwood’s Magazine_ ever since they started. It
would appear by this that its essence consisted in monotony, rather than
variety. Some kind of incongruity however seems inseparable from it,
either in the object or language. For instance, admiration and flattery
become wit by being expressed in a quaint and abrupt way. Thus, when the
dustman complimented the Duchess of Devonshire by saying, as she passed,
‘I wish that lady would let me light my pipe at her eyes,’ nothing was
meant less than to ridicule or throw contempt, yet the speech was wit
and not serious flattery. The putting a wig on a stupid face and setting
it on a barber’s pole is wit or humour:—the fixing a pair of wings on a
beautiful figure to make it look more like an angel is poetry; so that
the _grotesque_ is either serious or ludicrous, as it professes to exalt
or degrade. Whenever any thing is proposed to be _done_ in the way of
wit, it must be in mockery or jest; since if it were a probable or
becoming action, there would be no drollery in suggesting it; but this
does not apply to illustrations by comparison, there is here no line
drawn between what is to take place and what is not to take place—they
must only be extreme and unexpected. Mere nonsense, however, is not wit.
For however slight the connexion, it will never do to have none at all;
and the more fine and fragile it is in some respects, the more close and
deceitful it should be in the particular one insisted on. Farther, mere
sense is not wit. Logical subtilty or ingenuity does not amount to wit
(although it may mimic it) without an immediate play of fancy, which is
a totally different thing. The comparing the phrenologist’s division of
the same portion of the brain into the organs of form and colour to the
cutting a Yorkshire pudding into two parts, and calling the one
_custard_ and the other _plum-cake_ may pass for wit with some, but not
with me. I protest (if required) against having a grain of wit.[64]
PERSONAL POLITICS
‘Ay, every inch a king!’
Many persons are surprised at the conduct of Charles X. in pushing
things to extremities: the wonder would have been, if he had not. All
the time of the _Restoration_ under a charter, he was employed in
thinking how to get rid of that charter, to throw off that incubus, to
cancel that juggle, to breathe once more the air of divine right. Till
this were done—no matter by what delays, after what length of time, by
what jesuitical professions, by what false oaths, by what stratagems, by
what unmasked insolence, by what loud menaces, by what violence, by what
blood—the French monarch (whether Charles or Louis), felt himself
‘cooped, confined, and cabined in, by saucy doubts and fears;’ but this
phantom of a constitution once out of the way he would be ‘himself
again.’ He would then first cry _Vive la Charte!_ without a pang—with
his eyes running over, and his heart bursting with laughter. If he had a
right to be _where_ he was, he had a right to be _what_ he was, and what
he was born to be. This was the first idea instilled into his mind, the
last he would forget. All else was a compromise with circumstances, a
base surrender of an inalienable claim, a concession extorted under
_duresse_, so much the more eagerly to be retracted, as an appearance of
compliance had been the longer and more studiously kept up. A throne not
founded on inherent right was a mockery and insult. All power shared
with the people, supposed to be derived from them, for which the
possessor was accountable to them, held during pleasure or good
behaviour, was pollution to his thoughts, odious to him as the leprosy.
Be sure of this, popular right coiled round the sceptre of hereditary
kings is like the viper clinging to our hands, which we shake off with
fear and loathing. There is in despots (born and bred) a natural and
irreconcilable antipathy to the people, and to all obligations to them.
The very name of freedom is a screech-owl in their ears. They have been
brought up with the idea that they were entitled to absolute power, that
there was something in their blood that gave them a right to it without
condition or reserve, or being called to account for the use or abuse of
it; and they reject with scorn and impatience anything short of this.
They will either be absolute or they will be nothing. The Bourbons for
centuries had been regarded as the gods of the earth, as a superior race
of beings, who had a sovereign right to trample on mankind, and crush
them in their wrath or spare them in their mercy. Would Charles X.
derogate from his ancestors, would he be the degenerate scion of that
royal line, to wear a tarnished and dishonoured crown, to be raised by
the shout of a mob, to wait the assent of a Chamber of Deputies, to owe
every thing to the people, to be a king on liking and on sufferance, a
sort of state prisoner in his own kingdom, shut up and spell-bound in
the nickname of a Constitution? He would as soon consent to go on
all-fours. The latter would not shock his pride and prejudices more:
would not be a greater degradation in his eyes, or a more total
inversion of the order of nature. It is not that the successor to a
despotic throne will not, but he cannot be the king of a free people:
the very supposition is in his mind a contradiction in terms. It is
something base and mechanical, not amounting even to the rank of a
private gentleman who does what he pleases with his estate; and kings
consider mankind as their estate. If a herd of overloaded asses were to
turn against their drivers and demand their liberty and better usage,
these could not be more astonished than the Bourbons were when the
French people turned against them and demanded their rights. Will these
same Bourbons, who have been rocked and cradled in the notion of
arbitrary power, and of their own exclusive privileges as a separate and
sacred race, who have sucked it in with their mothers’ milk, who inherit
it in their blood, who have nursed it in exile and in solitude, and
gloated over it once more, since their return, as within their reach,
ever be brought to look Liberty in the face except as a mortal and
implacable foe, or ever give up the hope of removing that obstacle to
all that they have been or still have a fancied right to be? The last
thing that they can be convinced of will be to make them comprehend that
they are _men_. This is a discovery of the last forty years, that has
been forced upon them in no very agreeable manner; by the beheading of
more than one of their race, the banishment of the rest, by their long
wanderings and unwelcome return to their own country, from whence they
have been driven twice since—but up to that period they find no such
levelling doctrine inscribed either in the records of history or on
their crest and coat of arms or in the forms of religion or in the
ancient laws and institutions of the kingdom. Which version will they
then believe or turn a deaf ear to: that which represents them as God’s
vicegerents upon earth, or that which holds them up as the enemies of
the human race and the scoff and outcasts of their country? Every, the
meanest individual has a standard of estimation in his own breast, which
is that he is of more importance than all the rest of the world put
together; but a king is the only person with respect to whom all the
rest of the world join or have ever joined in the same conclusion; and
be assured that having encouraged him in this opinion, he will do every
thing in his power to keep them to it till his last gasp. You have sworn
to a man that he is a god: this is indeed the most solemn of compacts.
Any attempt to infringe it, any breath throwing a doubt upon it, is
treason, rebellion, impiety. Would you be so unjust as to retract the
boon, he will not be so unjust to himself as to let you. He would sooner
suffer ten deaths and forfeit twenty kingdoms than patiently submit to
the indignity of having his right called in question. It is said,
Charles X. is a good-natured man: it may be so, and that he would not
hurt a fly; but in that quarrel he would shed the blood of millions of
men. If he did not do so, he would consider himself as dead to honour, a
recreant to fame, and a traitor to the cause of kings. Touch but that
string, the inborn dignity of kings and their title to ‘solely sovereign
sway and masterdom,’ and the milk of human kindness in the best-natured
monarch turns to gall and bitterness. You might as well present a naked
sword to his breast, as be guilty of a word or look that can bear any
other construction than that of implicit homage and obedience. There is
a spark of pride lurking at the bottom of his heart, however glozed over
by smiles and fair speeches, ever ready (with the smallest opposition to
his will) to kindle into a flame, and desolate kingdoms. Let but the
voice of freedom speak, and to resist ‘shall be in him remorse, what
bloody work soever’ be the consequence. Good-natured kings, like
good-natured men, are often merely lovers of their own ease who give
themselves no trouble about other people’s affairs: but interfere in the
slightest point with their convenience, interest, or self-love, and a
tigress is not more furious in defence of her young. While the Royal
Guards were massacring the citizens of Paris, Charles X. was
partridge-shooting at St. Cloud, to show that the shooting of his
subjects and the shooting of game were equally among the _menus
plaisirs_ of royalty. This is what is meant by mild paternal sway, by
the perfection of a good-natured monarch, when he orders the destruction
of as great a number of people as will not do what he pleases, without
any discomposure of dress or features. Away with such trifling! There is
no end of the confusion and mischief occasioned by the application of
this mode of arguing from personal character and appearances to public
measures and principles. If we are to believe the fashionable cant on
this subject, a man cannot do a dirty action because he wears a clean
shirt: he cannot break an oath to a nation, because he pays a gambling
debt; and because he is delighted with the universal homage that is paid
him, with having every luxury and every pomp at his disposal, he cannot,
under the mask of courtesy and good humour, conceal designs against a
Constitution, or ‘smile and smile and be a _tyrant_!’ Such is the logic
of the _Times_. This paper, ‘ever strong upon the stronger side,’ laughs
to scorn the very idea entertained by our ‘restless and mercurial
neighbours’ (as if the _Times_ had nothing of the _tourniquet_ principle
in its composition) that so amiable, so well-meaning and prosperous a
gentleman as Charles X. should nourish an old and inveterate grudge
against the liberties of his country or wish to overturn that happy
order of things which the _Times_ had so great a share in establishing.
But he no sooner verifies the predictions of the French journalists and
is tumbled from his throne, than the _Times_ with its jolly, swaggering,
_thrasonical_ air falls upon him and calls him all the _vagabonds_ it
can get its tongue to. We do not see the wit of this, any more than of
its assuring us, with unabated confidence, that there is not the least
shadow of foundation for the apprehensions of those who are perverse
enough to think, that a Ministry that have set up and countenanced the
Continental despotisms, and uniformly shown themselves worse than
indifferent to the blood and groans of thousands of victims in foreign
countries (sacrificed under their guarantee of the _deliverance of
mankind_) may have an _arrière-pensée_ against the liberties of their
own. We grant the premises of the _Times_ in either case, that the
French king was good-humoured and that the Duke has a vacant face; but
these favourable appearances have not prevented a violent catastrophe in
the one case and may not in the other. Mr. Brougham a short time ago, in
a speech at a public meeting, gave his hearty approbation of the late
Revolution in France, and clenched his argument by asking what fate an
English monarch would merit, and probably meet, who acted in the same
manner as the besotted Charles; who annulled the liberty of the press,
who prevented the meeting of the representatives of the people, who
disfranchised four-fifths of the electors by an arbitrary decree, and
proposed to reign without law, and raise the taxes without a Parliament?
This is not exactly the point at issue. A more _home_ question would be,
what fate a king of England would deserve, not who did or attempted all
this in his own person, but who fearing to do that, as the next best
thing and to show which way his inclinations tended, aided and abetted
with all the might and resources of a people calling itself free, and
tried to force back upon a neighbouring state, by a long and cruel war
and with the ruin of his own subjects, a king like Charles X., who by
every act and circumstance of his life had shown himself hostile to the
welfare and freedom of his country, and whose conduct, if repeated here,
would justly incur the forfeiture of his own crown? It would be
‘premature,’ in the judgment of some, to give an opinion on this subject
till after the thing has happened, and then it would be neither loyal
nor patriotic to condemn the conduct of our own cabinet; but we hope at
least that the next time the English government undertake to force a
king upon the French people, they will send them a baboon instead of a
Bourbon, as the less insult of the two!—To return to the question of
_personal politics_. Our last king but one was a good domestic
character; but this had little or nothing to do with the wisdom or folly
of his public measures. He might be faithful to his conjugal vows, but
might put a construction on some clause in his Coronation-oath fatal to
the peace and happiness of a large part of his subjects. He might be an
exceedingly well-meaning, moral man, but might have notions instilled
into him in early youth respecting the prerogatives of the crown and the
relation between the sovereign and the people, that might not quit him
to his latest breath, and might embroil his subjects and the world in
disastrous wars and controversies during his whole reign. His son
succeeded him without the same reputation for domestic virtue, but
adopted all the measures of his father’s ministers. If the private
character and the public conduct were to be submitted to the same test,
this could not have happened. But the late king was cried up for his
elegant accomplishments, and as the _fine gentleman_ of his family; and
this, with equally sound logic, atoned for the absence of less shewy
qualities, and stamped his public proceedings with the character of a
wise and liberal policy. We are already assured of a fortunate and
peaceful reign, because the present king looks pleased and good-humoured
on his accession to the crown; though the smallest cloud in the
political horizon may scatter the ruddy smiles and overcast the whole
prospect. Mr. Coleridge complains, somewhere, of politicians who pretend
to guide the state, and yet have ruined their own affairs. Would the
author of the _Ancient Mariner_ apply the same rule to other things, and
affirm that no one could be a poet or a philosopher who had not made his
fortune? One would suppose, that all the people of sense and worth were
confessedly on one side of the question in the great disputes in
religion or politics that have agitated and torn the world in pieces,
and all the knaves and fools on the other. This is hardly tenable
ground. Charles IX., of happy memory was we believe a good-tempered man
and a most religious prince: this did not hinder him from authorising
the massacre of St. Bartholomew and shooting at the Huguenots out of the
palace-windows with his own hands. This was the prejudice of his time:
we have still certain prejudices to contend with in ours, which have
nothing to do with the looks, temper, or private character of those who
hold them. We wonder at the cruelties and atrocities of religious
fanatics in former times, and would not have them repeated: were none of
these persecutors honest, conscientious men? Take any twelve
inquisitors: six of them shall be angels and the other six scoundrels,
yet they will all agree in one unanimous verdict, condemning you or me
to the flames for not believing in the infallibility of the Pope. This
is the thing to be avoided _by all means_; and not to lose our time in
idle discussions about the amiableness of the characters of these pious
exterminators, nor in admiring the fineness of their countenances, nor
the picturesque effect of the scenery and _costume_. Charles X., the gay
and gallant Count d’Artois, wears a hair-shirt, is fond of
partridge-shooting, and wanted to put a yoke on the necks of his
subjects. The last is that on which issue was joined. Let him go where
he chooses, with a handsome pension; but let him not be sent back again
(as he was once before) at the expense of millions of lives![65]
EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS
‘_Player._ We have reformed that indifferently, my lord.
_Hamlet._ Oh! reform it altogether.’
The emancipation of the Jews is but a natural step in the progress of
civilisation. Laws and institutions are positive things: opinions and
sentiments are variable; and it is in conforming the stubbornness and
perversity of the former to the freedom and boldness of the latter, that
the harmony and beauty of the social order consist. But it is said, ‘The
Jews at present have few grievances to complain of; they are well off,
and should be thankful for the indulgence they receive.’ It is true, we
no longer burn them at a stake, or plunder them of their goods: why then
continue to insult and fix an idle stigma on them? At Rome a few years
ago they made the Jews run races (naked) in the Corso on Good Friday. At
present, they only oblige them to provide asses to run races on the same
day for the amusement of the populace, and to keep up the spirit of the
good old custom, though by altering it they confess that the custom was
wrong, and that they are ashamed of it. They also shut up the Jews in a
particular quarter of the city (called Il Ghetto Judaico), and at the
same time will not suffer the English as heretics to be buried within
the walls of Rome. An Englishman smiles or is scandalised at both these
instances of bigotry; but if he is asked, ‘Why, then, do you not
yourselves emancipate the Catholics and the Jews?’ he may answer, ‘We
_have_ emancipated the one.’ And why not the other? ‘Because we are
intolerant.’ This and this alone is the reason.
We throw in the teeth of the Jews that they are prone to certain sordid
vices. If they are vicious it is we who have made them so. Shut out any
class of people from the path to fair fame, and you reduce them to
grovel in the pursuit of riches and the means to live. A man has long
been in dread of insult for no just cause, and you complain that he
grows reserved and suspicious. You treat him with obloquy and contempt,
and wonder that he does not walk by you with an erect and open brow.
We also object to their trades and modes of life; that is, we shut
people up in close confinement and complain that they do not live in the
open air. The Jews barter and sell commodities, instead of raising or
manufacturing them. But this is the necessary traditional consequence of
their former persecution and pillage by all nations. They could not set
up a trade when they were hunted every moment from place to place, and
while they could count nothing their own but what they could carry with
them. They could not devote themselves to the pursuit of agriculture,
when they were not allowed to possess a foot of land. You tear people up
by the roots and trample on them like noxious weeds, and then make an
outcry that they do not take root in the soil like wholesome plants. You
drive them like a pest from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom, and
then call them vagabonds and aliens.
When reason fails, the Christian religion is, as usual, called in aid of
persecution. The admission of the Jews, it is said, to any place of
trust or emolument in the state ought not to be sanctioned, because they
expect the coming of the Messiah, and their restoration, one day or
other, to their own country: and Christianity, it is said, is part of
the law of the land.
As to their exclusion because they expect the coming of the Messiah, and
their restoration, one day or other, to their own country, a few words
will be sufficient. Even if it is too much for a people, with this
reversion in the promised land, to have a ‘stake in the country’ added
to it; and the offer of a seat in the House of Commons is too much for
any one who looks forward to a throne in the _New Jerusalem_: this
objection comes with but an ill grace from the followers of him who has
declared, ‘My kingdom is not of this world;’ and who on that plea
profess to keep all the power and authority in their own hands. Suppose
an attempt were made to exclude Christians from serving the office of
constable, jury-man, or knight of the shire, as expressly contrary to
the great principle of their religion, which inculcates an entire
contempt for the things of this life, and a constant preparation for a
better. Would not this be considered as an irony, and not a very civil
one? Yet it is the precise counterpart of this argument. The restoration
of the Jews to their own country, however firmly believed in as an
article of faith, has been delayed eighteen hundred years, and may be
delayed eighteen hundred more. Are they to remain indifferent to the
good or evil, to the respectability or odium that may attach to them all
this while? The world in general do not look so far; and the Jews have
not been accused, more than others, of sacrificing the practical to the
speculative. But according to this objection, there can be no
amalgamation of interests with a people of such fantastic principles and
abstracted ties; they cannot care how soon a country goes to ruin, which
they are always on the point of quitting. Suppose a Jew to have amassed
a large fortune in the last war, and to have laid by money in the funds,
and built himself a handsome house in the neighbourhood of the
metropolis; would he be more likely by his vote in the House of Commons
to promote a revolution, so as to cause a general bankruptcy; or to
encourage the mob to pull down his house, or root up his favourite
walks, because after all, at the end of several centuries, he and the
rest of his nation indulge in the prospect of returning to their own
country? The most clear-sighted John Bull patriotism hardly reaches
beyond ourselves and our heirs.
As to the assertion that Christianity is part of the law of the land, as
Popery is a part of the law of the land at Rome, and a good reason for
hunting Jews and refusing Christian burial to Protestants, by whom is it
made? Not by our Divines. They do not distrust the power of our
religion; and they will tell you that if Christianity, as sanctioning
these cruelties or any miserable remnant of them, is part of the law of
the land, then the law of the land is no part of Christianity. They do
not forget the original character of the Jewish people, and will not say
anything against it. We and modern Europe derived from them the whole
germ of our civilisation, our ideas on the unity of the Deity, or
marriage, on morals,
‘And pure religion breathing household Laws.’
The great founder of the Christian religion was himself born among that
people, and if the Jewish Nation are still to be branded with his death,
it might be asked on what principle of justice ought we to punish men
for crimes committed by their co-religionists near two thousand years
ago? That the Jews, as a people, persist in their blindness and
obstinacy is to be lamented; but it is at least, under the
circumstances, a proof of their sincerity; and as adherents to a losing
cause, they are entitled to respect and not contempt. Is it the language
of Lawyers? They are too intelligent, and, in the present times, not
favourers of hypocrisy. They know that this law is not on our statute
book, and if it were, that it would be law as long as it remained there
and no longer; they know that the supposition originated in the
unadvised dictum of a Judge, and, if it had been uttered by a Puritan
Divine, it would have been quoted at this day as a specimen of
puritanical nonsense and bigotry. Religion cannot take on itself the
character of law without ceasing to be religion; nor can law recognise
the obligations of religion for its principles, nor become the pretended
guardian and protector of the faith, without degenerating into
inquisitorial tyranny.
The proposal to admit Jews to a seat in Parliament in this country is
treated as an irony or a burlesque on the Catholic question. At the same
time, it is said to be very proper and rational in France and America,
Denmark and the Netherlands, because there, though they are nominally
admitted, court influence excludes them in the one, and popular opinion
in the other, so that the law is of no avail: that is, in other words,
in England as there is neither court influence nor popular prejudice;
and as every thing in this country is done by money alone, the Stock
Exchange would soon buy up the House of Commons, and if a single Jew
were admitted, the whole would shortly be a perfect Sanhedrim. This is a
pleasant account of the spirit of English patriotism, and the texture of
the House of Commons. All the wealth of the Jews cannot buy them a
single seat there; but if a certain formal restriction were taken off,
Jewish gold would buy up the fee simple of the consciences, prejudices
and interests of the country, and turn the kingdom _topsy-turvy_. Thus
the bed-rid imagination of prejudice sees some dreadful catastrophe in
every improvement, and no longer feeling the ground of custom under its
feet, fancies itself on an abyss of ruin and lawless change. How truly
has it been said of prejudice, ‘that it has the singular ability of
accommodating itself to all the possible varieties of the human mind.
Some passions and vices are but thinly scattered among mankind, and find
only here and there a fitness of reception. But prejudice, like the
spider, makes every where its home. It has neither taste nor choice of
place, and all that it requires is room. There is scarcely a situation,
except fire and water, in which a spider will not live. So let the mind
be as naked as the walls of an empty and forsaken tenement, gloomy as a
dungeon, or ornamented with the richest abilities of thinking; let it be
hot, cold, dark or light, lonely or inhabited, still prejudice, if
undisturbed, will fill it with cobwebs, and live like the spider, where
there seems nothing to live on. If the one prepares her food by
poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same; and as
several of our passions are strongly characterised by the animal world,
prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.’
Three hundred years ago all this was natural and in order, because it
accorded with the prejudices of the time; now it is absurd and Gothic,
because it is contrary to men’s reason and feelings. Hatred is the food
and growth of ignorance. While we know nothing but ourselves and our own
notions, we can conceive of nothing else as possible; and every
deviation from our practice or opinions gives a shock to our faith that
nothing can expiate but blows. Those who differ from us in the smallest
particular are considered as of a different species, and we treat them
accordingly. But this barrier of prejudice, which is founded on
ignorance, is thrown down by the diffusion of light and knowledge; nor
can any thing build it up again. In the good old times a Jew was
regarded by the vulgar and their betters as a sort of monster, a _lusus
naturæ_ whose existence they could not account for, and would not
tolerate. The only way to get rid of the obnoxious opinion was to
destroy the _man_. Besides, in those dark ages, they wanted some object
of natural antipathy, as in country places they get a strange dog or an
idiot to hunt down and be the bugbear of the village. But it is the test
of reason and refinement to be able to subsist without bugbears. While
it was supposed that ‘the Jews eat little children,’ it was proper to
take precautions against them. But why keep up ill names and the ill
odour of a prejudice when the prejudice has ceased to exist? It has long
ceased amongst the reflecting part of the community; and, although the
oldest prejudices are, it is to be lamented, preserved longest in the
highest places, and governments have been slow to learn good manners, we
cannot but be conscious that these errors are passing away. We begin to
see, if we do not fully see, that we have no superiority to boast of but
reason and philosophy, and that it is well to get rid of vulgar
prejudices and nominal distinctions as fast as possible.
ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH
The view which has been taken of the subject by Beccaria and other
modern writers appears to be erroneous or defective in some of the most
important circumstances relating to this question.
_First objection._ It is assumed as a general maxim, that, ‘it is not
the intensity of punishment, but its duration, which makes the greatest
impression on the human mind.’
This maxim will be found to be in direct opposition to all experience,
and to every principle of human nature. It supposes that a number of
impressions, feeble in themselves, and dissipated over a long interval
of time, produce a stronger effect upon the mind, than a single object,
however powerful and striking, presented to it at once: that is, that
the passions are excited more by reason than imagination, by the real,
than by the apparent quantity of good or evil. This principle is indeed,
in general, denied by Mr. Bentham, but admitted by him, as far as
relates to the influence of the fear of death on malefactors. If it be
true with respect to them in particular (which there is reason to
doubt,) it is not because the fear of a continued punishment influences
them more than the fear of an intense one, but because death is to them
not an intense punishment.
Again, it has been said, that ‘crimes are more effectually prevented by
the certainty than by the severity of the punishment.’ Now I cannot
think that this is either self-evident, or true universally and in the
abstract. It is not true of human nature in general, and it is still
less so as applied to the more lawless and abandoned classes of the
community. It is evident from the very character of such persons, that
if they are not to be acted upon by violent motives, by what appeals
strongly to their imagination and their passions, they cannot be acted
upon at all, they are out of the reach of all moral discipline. The
dull, sober certainties of common life, and the real consequences of
things when set in competition with any favourite inclination, or
vicious indulgence, they altogether despise. It is only when the
certainty of punishment is immediate, obvious, and connected with
circumstances, which strike upon the imagination, that it operates
effectually in the prevention of crimes. This principle is however true,
as it has been sometimes applied to cases where the law has become a
dead letter. _When a moderate punishment is strictly and vigorously
enforced, and a severe punishment is as generally and systematically
evaded, the mind will, undoubtedly, be more affected by what it
considers as a serious reality, than by what it will regard as an idle
threat._ So far the principle is true in its application, but no
farther.
_First maxim._ It is not the _real_, but the apparent severity of the
punishment which most effectually deters from the commission of crimes.
For this reason, an intense punishment will have more effect than a
continued one, because more easily apprehended. Neither is the certainty
of punishment to be depended on, except when it is apparent. _It is not
the calculation of consequences, but their involuntary and irresistible
impression on the mind that produces action. The laws to prevent crimes
must appeal to the passions of men, and not to their reason: for crimes
proceed from passion, and not from reason. If men were governed by
reason, laws would be unnecessary._
_Second objection._ It seems to be taken for granted by speculative
writers, (at least the contrary is not stated with sufficient
distinctness) that punishment operates by terror alone, or by the fear
which each individual has of the consequences to himself.
It is indeed a prevailing maxim of philosophy, that self-interest is the
sole spring of action, and it has thus probably been inferred, that the
fear of punishment could only operate on this principle of cool,
calculating self-interest. But it is quite certain that sympathy with
others, whatever may be its origin, is, practically speaking, an
independent and powerful principle of action. The opinions and feelings
of others do actually and constantly influence our conduct, in
opposition to our strongest interests and inclinations. That punishment,
therefore, will not be the most dreaded, nor, consequently, the most
effectual, which is the greatest to the individual, unless it is at the
same time thought so by others, and expresses the greatest general
disapprobation of the crime. Thus, though a malefactor, consulting only
his own inclinations or feelings, might prefer death to perpetual
imprisonment and hard labour, yet he may regard it as the worst of
punishments, in as far as it demonstrates the greatest abhorrence and
indignation in the community against the crime.
_Second maxim._ Punishment operates by sympathy, as well as by terror.
Penal laws have a tendency to repress crimes not more by exciting a
dread of the consequences, than by marking the strong sense entertained
by others of their enormity, and the detestation in which they are held
by mankind in general. The most severe laws will always be the most
effectual, as long as they are expressions of the public sentiment; but
they will become ineffectual, in proportion as the sentiment is wanting.
The disproportion between the crime and the punishment in the public
opinion, will then counteract the dread of the severity of the law.
Setting this feeling aside, the most severe laws will be the most
effectual. The argument drawn from the inefficacy of severe punishments,
when inflicted on trifling or common offences, does not prove that they
must be ineffectual, when applied to great crimes, which rouse the
public indignation and justify the severity.
_Third objection._ It is farther implied in the foregoing statements,
that the only object of punishment is to prevent actual crimes, or that
those laws are the best, which most effectually answer this end by
deterring criminals.
This I also conceive to be a narrow and imperfect view of the question,
which respects not merely the motives and conduct of criminals, but the
motives and sentiments of the community at large. It is of the first
importance that the ill disposed should be coerced, but it is also of
importance that they should be coerced in such a manner, and by such
means, as it is most consistent with the public morals to employ. In
defending the state, we are not to forget that the state ought to be
worth defending. As the sentiments of society have a powerful effect in
enforcing the laws, so the laws re-act powerfully on the sentiments of
society. This is evident with respect to barbarous punishments. The evil
of a law operating in this way on manners, by holding out an example of
cruelty and injustice, however effectual it might be found, is not
denied. In like manner, a law falling short of or disappointing the just
indignation and moral sense of the community, is, for the same reason,
faulty as one that exceeds and outrages it. One end of punishment,
therefore, is to satisfy this natural sense of justice in the public
mind, and to strengthen the opinion of the community by its act. As the
arm of justice ought not to be mocked and baffled by the impunity of
offences, so neither ought it to be unnerved by thwarting and
prevaricating with the common sentiments of mankind, or by substituting
remote, indirect, and artificial punishments for obvious and direct
ones. I call a punishment natural when it is dictated by the _passion_
excited against the crime. A punishment will therefore be the most
beneficial when it arises out of, and co-operates with that strong sense
of right or wrong, that firm and healthy tone of public sentiment, which
is the best preservative against crime.
_Illustration._ Thus even if it were shewn that perpetual imprisonment
and hard labour would be equally effectual in deterring malefactors from
the commission of murder, it would by no means necessarily follow, that
this mode of punishment would be preferable to capital punishment,
unless it could at the same time be made to appear that it would equally
enforce the principle of the connexion between the crime and the
punishment, or the rule of natural justice, by which he who shews
himself indifferent to the life of another, forfeits his own. There is a
natural and home-felt connexion between the hardened obduracy which has
shewn itself insensible to the cries of another for mercy and the
immediate burst of indignation which dooms the criminal to feel that he
has no claims on the pity of others: but there is no connexion, because
there is no ascertainable proportion, in the mind either of the criminal
or the public, between the original crime, and the additional half-hour
in the day after the lapse of twenty years, which the malefactor is
condemned to labour, or the lash of the whip which urges him to complete
his heavy task. That reasoning which stops the torrent of public
indignation, and diverts it from its object only to dole it out to its
miserable victim, drop by drop, and day by day, through a long
protracted series of time with systematic, deliberate, unrelenting
severity, is in fact neither wise nor humane. Punishments of this kind
may be so contrived as to intimidate the worst part of mankind, but they
will also be the aversion of the best, and will confound and warp the
plain distinctions between right and wrong.
_Third maxim._ The end of punishment is not only to prevent actual
crimes, but to form a standard of public opinion, and to confirm and
sanction the moral sentiments of the community. The mode and degree of
the punishment ought, therefore, to be determined with a view to this
object, as well as with a view to the regulation of the police.
_Fourth objection._ The theory here alluded to, is farther objectionable
in this, that it makes familiarity with the punishment essential to its
efficacy, and therefore recommends those punishments, the example of
which is the most lasting, and, as it were, constantly before the eyes
of the public, as the most salutary. On the contrary, those punishments
are the best which require the least previous familiarity with objects
of guilt and misery to make them formidable, which come least into
contact with the mind, which tell at a distance, the bare mention of
which startles the ear, which operate by an imaginary instead of an
habitual dread, and which produce their effect once for all, without
destroying the erectness and elasticity of social feeling by the
constant spectacle of the degradation of the species. No one would wish
to have a gibbet placed before his door, to deter his neighbours from
robbing him. Punishments which require repeated ocular inspection of the
evils which they occasion, cannot answer their end in deterring
individuals, without having first operated as a penance on society. They
are a public benefit only so far as they are a public nuisance. Laws
framed entirely on this principle, would convert the world into a large
prison, and divide mankind into two classes, felons and their keepers!
_Maxim fourth._ Those punishments are the best which produce the
strongest apprehension, with the least actual suffering or contemplation
of evil. Such is in general the effect of those punishments which appeal
to the imagination, rather than to our physical experience; which are
immediately connected with a principle of honour, with the passions in
general, with natural antipathies, the fear of pain, the fear of death,
etc. These punishments are, in Mr. Bentham’s phrase, the most
_economical_; they do their work with the least expense of individual
suffering, or abuse of public sympathy. Private punishments are, so far,
preferable to public ones.
_General inference._ There ought to be a gradation of punishments
proportioned to the offence, and adapted to the state of society.
In order to strike the imagination and excite terror, severe punishments
ought not to be common.[66]
To be effectual, from the sympathy of mankind in the justice of the
sentence, the highest punishments ought not to be assigned to the lowest
or to very different degrees of guilt. The absence of the sanction of
public opinion not only deadens the execution of the law, but by giving
confidence to the offender, produces that sort of resistance to it,
which is always made to oppression. The ignominy attached to the
sentence of the law, is thus converted into pity. If the law is enacted
but not enforced, this must either be to such a degree as to take away
the terror of the law, or if the terror still remains, it will be a
terror of injustice, which will necessarily impair the sense of right
and wrong in the community. But if the law is regularly carried into
execution, the effect will be still worse. In general, all laws are bad
which are not seconded by the manners of the people, and laws are not in
conformity with the manners of the people when they are not executed.
This is the case at present with a great proportion of the English laws.
Is it to be wondered at that they should be so? Manners have changed,
and will always change insensibly, and irresistibly, from the force of
circumstances. The laws, as things of positive institution, remain the
same. So that without a constant, gradual assimilation of the laws to
the manners, the manners will, in time, necessarily become at variance
with the laws, and will render them odious, ineffectual, and
mischievous—a clog, instead of a furtherance to the wheels of justice.
NOTES
FUGITIVE WRITINGS
THE FIGHT
First republished in _Literary Remains_, vol. II. p. 193. For another
account of the fight and, more particularly, of the journey home, see P.
G. Patmore’s _My Friends and Acquaintance_, III. 41, _et seq._ The fight
(between Hickman, the ‘Gas-man’ and Bill Neat) took place on Dec. 11,
1821. For an account of Tom Hickman (who was thrown from a chaise and
killed in the following December) see Pierce Egan’s _Boxiana_, where
particulars will be found of all the ‘Fancy’ heroes referred to by
Hazlitt in this essay.
PAGE
1. ‘_The fight_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_Jack Randall’s._ Cf. vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), note to p. 202.
‘_The proverb ... musty._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
2. _Jo. Toms._ Joseph Parkes (1796–1865), the Radical politician, at
that time articled to a London solicitor.
‘_So carelessly_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act I. Sc. 1.
_Jack Pigott._ P. G. Patmore.
‘_What more felicity_,’ _etc._ Spenser, _Muiopotmos_, st. 27.
_Tom Belcher’s._ Tom Belcher (1783–1854), a younger brother of
the better known prizefighter, James Belcher, kept the ‘Castle’
tavern in Holborn.
‘_Well, we meet at Philippi._’ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
3. ‘_I follow Fate_,’ _etc._ Cf. Dryden, _The Indian Emperor_, IV.
3.
4. _Tom Turtle._ According to the author’s son (see _Literary
Remains_, II. 201) this was John Thurtell (1794–1824),
afterwards notorious as the murderer of Weare.
‘_Quite chap-fallen._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_Martin._ Jack Martin, known as ‘The Master of the Rolls.’
_Mr. Richmond._ Bill Richmond, presumably, the veteran coloured
hero, who had recently taken to teaching the art of boxing.
‘_Where good digestion_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
5. ‘_Follows so_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act IV. Sc. 1.
‘_More figures_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_His dream_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_Seriously inclined._’ Cf. _Ibid._ Act I. Sc. 3.
6. ‘_A lusty man_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Canterbury Tales_, Prologue, 167.
7. ‘_Standing_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_He moralised_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_A firebrand like Bardolph’s._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Loud and furious fun._’ Cf. ‘The mirth and fun grew fast and
furious.’ Burns, _Tam O’Shanter_.
7. _Cribb’s beating Jem_, _etc._ Cribb defeated Jem Belcher twice,
in 1807 and 1809. Belcher had lost an eye in 1803 through an
accident when playing at rackets.
8. _Gully._ John Gully (1783–1863), afterwards well known in the
racing world, had retired from the ring in 1808 after two
victories over Bob Gregson.
‘_Alas!_’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Alas! Leviathan is not so tamed.’ Cowper,
_The Task_, II. 322.
9. _The Game Chicken._ Henry Pearce (1777–1809).
‘_That man was made to mourn._’ The title and refrain of ‘A
Dirge’ by Burns.
10. ‘_Between the acting_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_With Atlantean shoulders_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 306.
11. ‘_Grinned horrible_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._ II. 846.
‘_Like two clouds_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ibid._ II. 714–716.
12. _Jackson._ Presumably John Jackson (1769–1845), the well-known
pugilist (retired 1803), known as ‘Gentleman Jackson.’
Note. _Scroggins._ Jack Scroggins, another well-known
prizefighter.
Note. ‘_In doleful dumps_,’ _etc._ _Chevy-Chace_, st. 50.
13. _Procul este profani._ _Æneid_, VI. 258.
14. _Ned Turner._ Ned Turner (1791–1826), the conqueror of Scroggins.
_Broughton and George Stevenson._ Jack Broughton’s (1704–1789)
fight with George Stevenson ‘The Coachman,’ took place, not in
1770, but in 1741.
MERRY ENGLAND
First republished in _Sketches and Essays._
16. ‘_I have been merry_,’ _etc._ Cf. _2 Henry IV._, Act V. Sc.
3.
‘_He chirped over his cups._’ _Rabelais._ See vol. I. (_The Round
Table_), p. 52.
‘_There were pippins_,’ _etc._ Sir Hugh Evans in _The Merry Wives
of Windsor_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Continents_,’ _etc._ Hobbes, _Human Nature_ (_Works_, ed.
Molesworth, IV. 50).
‘_They ... amused themselves_,’ _etc._ Cf. vol. I. (_The Round
Table_), note to p. 100.
‘_Eat_,’ _etc._ _S. Luke_ XII. 19.
17. ‘_Hair-breadth ‘scapes._’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_Old Lord’s cricket-ground._ Hazlitt refers to the original
‘Lord’s,’ established about 1782 by Thomas Lord, on the site
now occupied by Dorset Square, where the game continued to be
played till 1810. The present ‘Lord’s,’ dates from 1814.
18. ‘_A cry more tuneable_,’ _etc._ Cf. _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_,
Act IV. Sc. 1.
Note. ‘_The gentle and free passage of arms at Ashby._’ Described
by Scott in _Ivanhoe_, chap. viii.
19. ‘_Brothers of the angle._’ _The Compleat Angler_, part I. chap.
i.
‘_The Cockney character_,’ _etc._ This sentence was omitted in
_Sketches and Essays._
20. ‘_Book of Sports._’ James I.’s declaration (1618) authorising
certain forms of recreation after divine service on Sundays.
The declaration was republished by Charles I. in 1633.
‘_And e’en on Sunday_,’ _etc._ Burns, _Tam O’Shanter_.
_Gilray’s shop-window._ Miss Humphrey’s shop, 29 St. James’s
Street, where James Gilray (1757–1815), the caricaturist, spent
the last years of his life, and where his works were on view.
_Sketches and Essays_ prints ‘Fore’s shop-window.’
22. ‘_Merry and wise._’ ’Tis good to be merry and wise,’ a frequently
quoted old proverb.
‘_That under Heav’n_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. vii. 32.
Cf. also Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine the Great_, Part II. Act IV.
Sc. 4.
24. _Nell, etc._ Nell in _The Devil to Pay_; Little Pickle in _The
Spoil’d Child_, a part created by Mrs. Jordan, March 22, 1790;
Lingo in _The Agreeable Surprise_; Nipperkin in _Sprigs of
Laurel_, a part created by Munden, May 11, 1793; old Dornton in
_The Road to Ruin_; Ranger in _The Suspicious Husband_; the
Copper Captain in _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_, one of Lewis’s
great parts; Filch in _The Beggar’s Opera_; Hodge in _Love in a
Village_; Flora in _The Wonder_; Lady Grace in _The Provoked
Husband_.
‘_Tut!_’ _etc._ Cf. _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_What’s our Britain_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._
25. _As I write this, etc._ See vol. IX. (_Notes of a Journey through
France and Italy_), pp. 281 _et seq._
‘_And gaudy butterflies_,’ _etc._ Cf. Gay, _The Beggar’s Opera_,
Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_All appliances_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
ON PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN
Republished in _Literary Remains_ and _Winterslow_.
26. ‘_Come like shadows_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
_B——._ B—— here and throughout the essay is Lamb. The essay
professes to describe a conversation which took place at one of
Lamb’s ‘Wednesdays’ at 16 Mitre Court Buildings, where Lamb
resided from 1801 to 1809. Hazlitt (p. 27) describes the
conversation as having taken place ‘twenty years ago.’
_The defence of Guy Faux._ See vol. XI. pp. 317 _et seq._ and
notes.
‘_Never so sure_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Moral Essays_, II. 51–2.
_A——._ Here and throughout the essay William Ayrton (1777–1858),
the musician.
27. ‘_In his habit_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.
_Fulke Greville._ See vol. V. (_Lectures on the Age of
Elizabeth_), p. 231 and note, and Lamb’s _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets_.
‘_And call up him_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, 109–110.
28. _Wished that mankind, etc._ _Religio Medici_, Part II. Sec. ix.
_The portrait prefixed to the old edition._ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, in
_Memoirs, etc._ (1867), vol. I. p. 276 note, suggests that
Hazlitt refers to the 12mo edition of 1669 which Lamb
possessed.
‘_Here lies a She-Sun_,’ _etc._ _Poems_ (‘Muses Library’) I. 86,
_Epithalamion on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine_.
29. ‘_Lisped in numbers_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Prologue to the Satires_,
128.
30. _His interview with Petrarch, etc._ The editor of _The New
Monthly Magazine_ adds a footnote: ‘Query, did they ever meet?’
Chaucer was in Italy in 1372–3, and may have met Petrarch. Cf.
_The Canterbury Tales_, The Clerk’s Prologue, to which Hazlitt
no doubt refers. Chaucer may have met Boccaccio also.
_A fine portrait of Ariosto._ Hazlitt possibly refers to the
‘Portrait of a Poet’ in the National Gallery, now ascribed to
Palma. Titian’s portrait of Aretine is in the Pitti Gallery.
‘_The mighty dead._’ Thomson, _The Seasons, Winter_, 432.
‘_A creature_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Comus_, 299–301.
‘_That was Arion_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, IV. xi. 23.
_Captain C._ Captain Burney; M. C., Martin Burney. See vol. VI.
_Table-Talk_, note to p. 209.
31. _Miss D——._ In _Literary Remains_ this name is given as
‘Mrs. Reynolds,’ presumably the lady who had been Lamb’s
schoolmistress. See Lamb’s _Letters_, ed. W. C. Hazlitt,
I. 121.
_A harsh, croaking voice._ Not to be identified. As to Johnson’s
life during 1745–6 see Boswell’s _Life_ (ed. G. B. Hill), I.
176 and notes.
‘_With lack-lustre eye._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
‘_Despise low joys_,’ _etc._ _Imitations of Horace_, _Epistles_,
I. vi. (to Mr. Murray), 60–62.
‘_Conspicuous scene_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._ 50–53.
‘_Why rail they then_,’ _etc._ _Epilogue to the Satires_, II.
138–9.
32. ‘_But why then publish_,’ _etc._ _Prologue to the Satires_,
135–146.
_E——._ In _Literary Remains_ and _Winterslow_ this blank is
filled with the name of ‘Erasmus Phillips,’ but Hazlitt must
refer to Lamb’s lifelong friend, Edward Phillips, secretary to
Speaker Abbott (see Lamb’s _Letters_, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, I. 76;
II. 346), or, possibly, to Colonel Phillips (_Ibid._ II. 148,
346).
33. ‘_Nigh-sphered in Heaven._’ Collins, Ode, _On the Poetical
Character_, 66.
_J. F——._ According to _Literary Remains_ this was Barron Field
(1786–1846).
34. ‘_A vast species alone._’ Cowley, _The Praise of Pindar_, l. 2.
_G——._ Godwin, according to _Literary Remains_.
_Eugene Aram._ Eugene Aram (1704–1759), hanged in 1759 for the
murder of Daniel Clark several years earlier at Knaresborough.
_H——._ _Literary Remains_ reads ‘Hunt.’
35. _The Duchess of Bolton._ Lavinia Fenton (1708–1760), the original
Polly, married the third Duke of Bolton in 1751.
_Captain Sentry._ See _The Spectator_, No. 2.
36. _Giotto, etc._ Giotto di Bondone (d. 1337), Giovanni Cimabue (?
1240–? 1302), and Domenico Bigardi (1449–1494), known as
Ghirlandaio—three of the most famous early Florentine masters.
‘_Whose names_,’ _etc._ See vol. X. (_Contributions to the
Edinburgh Review_), note to p. 63.
37. _The Duchess of Newcastle._ Lamb is never tired of praising her.
See, _e.g._, _The Two Races of Men_ (Elia).
_Mrs. Hutchinson._ Lucy Hutchinson (b. 1620). Her Life of her
husband, Colonel Hutchinson, was first published in 1806.
_One in the room, etc._ Mary Lamb.
_Ninon de l’Enclos._ Ninon de Lenclos (1616–1706), the famous
beauty.
‘_Your most exquisite reason._’ Cf. _Twelfth Night_, Act II. Sc.
3.
_G——._ Godwin, according to _Literary Remains_.
‘_Oh! ever right_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Coriolanus_, Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_There is only one other person_,’ _etc._ It should be noted
that _Literary Remains_ and _Winterslow_ wrongly attribute this
speech to Lamb. The Magazine clearly gives it to H——, that is,
to Leigh Hunt. It is, of course, conceivable that the editor of
_Literary Remains_ silently corrected an error in the Magazine,
but that does not seem likely, because, in the first place, the
speech seems more characteristic of Hunt than of Lamb, and,
secondly, because the volume of the _New Monthly_ (XVI.) in
which the essay appeared contains a list of errata in which two
corrections (one of them relating to initials) are made in the
essay and yet this ‘H——’ is left uncorrected.
ON THE CONVERSATION OF LORDS
Published in _Sketches and Essays_.
PAGE
38. ‘_An infinite deal of nothing._’ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act I.
Sc. 1.
39. ‘_The wish_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act IV. Sc. 5.
40. ‘_Bestow his tediousness._’ Cf. _Much Ado About Nothing_, Act
III. Sc. 5.
41. ‘_Treatise on Horsemanship._’ The Duke of Newcastle (1592–1676),
husband of Lamb’s favourite (see _ante_, note to p. 37), wrote
two works on horsemanship, (i) _La Methode et Invention
Nouvelle de dresser les Chevaux_ (Antwerp, 1657), and (ii) _A
New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, etc._
(1667). Hazlitt probably refers to the first, which was
published in English with 43 plates in vol. I. of _A General
System of Horsemanship_ (1743).
‘_A question_,’ _etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc. 4.
‘_The act_’ [art], _etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Sc. 1.
42. ‘_The feast of reason_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_,
Satire I. l. 128.
‘_Catch glimpses_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The world is
too much with us,’ etc.
43. ‘_Face to face_,’ _etc._ Cf. _1 Corinthians_ xiii. 12.
‘_With jealous leer malign._’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 503.
‘_Best can feel them_,’ _etc._ ‘He best can paint them who shall
feel them most.’ Pope, _Eloisa to Abelard_, 366.
_The Roxburgh Club._ Founded in 1812 to celebrate the sale of the
third Duke of Roxburgh’s great library.
‘_With sparkling eyes_,’ _etc._ Cf. Watts, _Hymns and Spiritual
Songs_, Book II. Hymn 65.
44. ‘_Pure in the last recesses_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Dryden, Translations
from Persius_, Sat. II. l. 133.
‘_Or write_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_, I. 137.
45. ‘_Held on their way_,’ _etc._ See vol. IV. (_Reply to Malthus_),
note to p. 42.
‘_The labour_’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 3.
46. ‘_From every work_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queen_, I. iv. 20.
_Otium cum dignitate._ Cicero, _Pro P. Sestio_, c. 45.
_N——._ Probably Northcote.
_A celebrated critic._ ? Jeffrey, whom Hazlitt had visited at
Craigcrook.
47. ‘_That there are powers_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Expostulation and
Reply_, 21–24.
50. ‘_A man’s mind_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Antony and Cleopatra_, III. 13.
_The Letter to Sir William Wyndham_. Published by Mallet in 1753.
_Lord Bolingbroke had, it seems_, _etc._ This cannot be true,
though Chatham’s admiration of Bolingbroke’s eloquence is well
known.
‘_As if a man_,’ _etc._ _Coriolanus_, v. 3.
ON A SUN-DIAL
First republished in _Sketches and Essays_, where it is said to have
been written in Italy in 1825.
51. ‘_To carve out dials_,’ _etc._ _3 Henry VI._, Act II. Sc. 5.
52. ‘_Morals on the time._’ Cf. _As You Like it_, Act II. Sc. 7.
54. ‘_How sweet the moonlight_,’ _etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
V. Sc. 1.
_The account given by Rousseau_, _etc._ Hazlitt is probably
referring to a somewhat similar story told in _Les
Confessions_, Partie II. Livre XI.
55. ‘_Allons, mon fils_,’ _etc._ _Les Confessions_, Partie I. Livre
I.
‘_Lend it_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_With its brazen throat_,’ _etc._ Cf. _King John_, Act III. Sc.
3.
‘_Swinging slow_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, 76.
56. _Even George IV._, _etc._ This sentence is omitted in _Sketches
and Essays_.
‘_The poor man’s only music._’ Coleridge, _Frost at Midnight_,
29.
57. _Goes to church_, _etc._ Cf. _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Sing those witty rhymes_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth, _The
Fountain_, 13–15.
58. ‘_As in a map_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, VI. 17.
‘_With light-winged toys_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Diana and her fawn_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt seems to be quoting from
himself. See vol. IX. p. 107.
59. ‘_With lack-lustre eye._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
_I have done something of the kind before._ Hazlitt probably
refers to the sketch of his father in ‘My First Acquaintance
with Poets’ (_post_, pp. 262–3). Cf. also vol. III. (_Political
Essays_), pp. 265–6.
WHY THE HEROES OF ROMANCE ARE INSIPID
Published in _Sketches and Essays_.
60. ‘_To gild refined gold_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
‘_Faultless monsters._’ John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham,
_Essay on Poetry_.
61. _The grand Cyruses, the Artamenes._ Mlle. de Scudéry’s _Artamène
ou le Grand Cyrus_ was published in 10 vols., 1649–53.
_Oroondates._ In _La Calprenède’s Cassandra_.
‘_Mistress’ eyebrow._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
62. ‘_Be mine_,’ _etc._ Gray, _Letters_ (ed. Tovey), I. 97.
‘_The Princess of Cleves._’ By Madame de la Fayette (1678).
_The Duke de Nemours._ In _La Princesse de Clèves_.
‘_Ugly all over_,’ _etc._ See vol. II. (_Life of Holcroft_), note
to p. 130.
64. _Narcissa and Emily Gauntlet._ Narcissa in _Roderick Random_;
Emily Gauntlet in _Peregrine Pickle_; Winifred Jenkins in
_Humphry Clinker_.
‘_Her heroes_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Most women have no characters at
all.’ Pope, _Moral Essays_, II. 2.
_Theodore_, _Valancourt_. Theodore in _The Romance of the
Forest_; Valancourt in _The Mysteries of Udolpho_.
65. _Miss Milner._ Miss Milner and Dorriforth in _A Simple Story_
(1791); Lord Norwynne in _Nature and Art_ (1796).
67. ‘_All germins_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Tears such as angels shed_ [weep].’ _Paradise Lost_, I. 620.
THE SHYNESS OF SCHOLARS
Republished in _Literary Remains_.
68. ‘_And of his port_,’ _etc._ _The Canterbury Tales._ The Prologue,
69.
‘_If you have not seen_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act III.
Sc. 2.
70. ‘_Fools rush in_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_, III.
625.
71. ‘_In peace_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act III. Sc. 1.
72. ‘_Gods of his idolatry._’ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
73. ‘_Will not have_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Coriolanus_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Vix ea nostra voco._’ Ovid, _Metam._ XIII. 141.
75. ‘_Scholar’s melancholy._’ _As You Like It_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
‘_He held_,’ _etc._ Cf. Gray’s _Elegy_, Stanza III., which
Hazlitt seems to have had in mind.
‘_From humble porter_ [port],’ _etc._ Townley, _High Life Below
Stairs_, II. 1.
76. ‘_Modest as morning_,’ _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc.
3.
‘_Deprived of its natural patrons_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burke,
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed.
Payne, II. 93).
THE MAIN-CHANCE
Published in _Literary Remains_ with omissions and a few additions. The
additions are printed in the text within square brackets. In other
respects the Essay is printed _verbatim_ from the Magazine.
78. ‘_Search then_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, III. 174–179.
82. ‘_Sown_,’ _etc._ Cf. Middleton, _The Witch_, Act I. Sc. 2.
83. _Mr. F._ Beckford sold Fonthill to John Farquhar in 1822.
86. Note. ‘_Men act from calculation_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Principles of
Morals and Legislation_, Ch. XIV. Sec. xxviii.
Note. ‘_A Mad World._’ _etc._ John Taylor, _Wandering to see the
Wonders of the West_ (1649).
88. ‘_Now all ye ladies_,’ _etc._ These lines by Scott form the motto
of chap. xii. of _The Betrothed_, where they are entitled
‘Family Quarrels.’
Note. ‘_Have I not seen_,’ _etc._ _The Betrothed_, chap. XII.
Note. ‘_I would take_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. II.
Note. _Dr. Jamieson._ John Jamieson (1759–1838), whose
_Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language_ appeared in
1808.
90. ‘_Some trick_,’ _etc._ _Coriolanus_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
91. _Mr. Bartholine Saddletree._ In _The Heart of Midlothian_.
_Peter Peebles._ In _Redgauntlet_.
_The Baron of Bradwardine, etc._ In _Waverley_.
‘_The age of chivalry_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
‘_Smack of honour._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 2.
93. ‘_An ounce_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, I. iii. 30.
95. ‘_Masterless passion_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
IV. Sc. 1.
SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE
These two papers were republished in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839), but
were omitted in the second edition (1852). Mr. W. C. Hazlitt restored
them in his edition in Bohn’s Standard Library, where he states that
they were written in Italy in 1825, and represent a conversation between
the author, Landor and Captain Medwin.
PAGE
96. ‘_Sound significant._’ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of Milton’s
words, ‘the sound symphonious.’ _Paradise Lost_, VII. 558.
‘_These needs_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
99. ‘_Nihil humani_,’ _etc._ Terence, _Heauton-Timoroumenos_, I. 1.
‘_Greater love_,’ _etc._ Cf. _St. John_ XV. 13.
102. ‘_Letting I should not_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
104. ‘_Throw honour_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ibid._ Act V. Sc. 3.
104. _Very’s._ A well-known restaurant in Paris. Cf. Moore’s _The
Fudge Family in Paris_, Letter III.
_The Count de Stutt-Tracy._ See Vol. VII. (_The Plain Speaker_),
p. 323 and note.
105. ‘_This one entire_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
‘_Precious jewel_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ibid._ Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_Plain truth_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Imitations of Horace_,
_Epistles_, I. 6, l. 3.
_C. D._ See _post_, note to p. 119.
‘_I shall be ever_,’ _etc._ Cf. Garrick’s verses in reply to Dr.
John Hill. They are quoted in Doran’s _Annals of the English
Stage_, II. 326.
106. ‘_No more of that_,’ _etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc. 4.
108. ‘_Come, but no farther_,’ _Job_ xxxviii. 11.
112. ‘_Come, let me clutch thee._’ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 1.
113. ‘_And coming events_,’ _etc._ Campbell, _Lochiel’s Warning_.
115. ‘_Made and moulded of things past._’ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act
III. Sc. 3.
‘_Thou art to continue_,’ _etc._ _Measure for Measure_, Act II.
Sc. 1.
‘_Here and hereafter_,’ _etc._ Byron, _Sardanapalus_, Act IV. Sc.
1.
116. ‘_I do not think_,’ _etc._ See vol. VII. (_Essay on the
Principles of Human Action_), pp. 430–3.
119. _J. D._ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, in his edition of _Sketches and
Essays_, states that on a folio leaf in his possession, the
initials are J. L. and C. L., and that Lamb and his brother are
evidently the persons intended. If that be so, A. and C. can
hardly be Landor and Medwin. Possibly A. represents Ayrton and
Captain C. Captain Burney, but all the initials are merely
matter for conjecture, and it is extremely unlikely that the
dialogue ever took place in anything like its present form.
‘_This is the strangest tale_,’ _etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act V. Sc.
4.
THE FREE ADMISSION
Now republished for the first time. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs,
etc._, I. xxx.
120. ‘_Loop-holes of retreat._’ Cowper, _The Task_, IV. 88.
121. ‘_He is all ear and eye_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Comus_, 560–2.
‘_The fly_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Oh! leave me_,’ _etc._ Cf. Gray, _The Vegtam’s Kivitha_.
_My beloved corner._ See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs, etc._, I.
205.
‘_The arm-chair at an inn._ ‘A tavern chair is the throne of
human felicity.’ Johnson (Boswell’s _Life_, ed. G. B. Hill, II.
452, note 1).
‘_Witching time of night._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Like bees in spring-time_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 768–9.
122. ‘_A discipline of humanity._’ Bacon (_Essays_, ‘Of Marriage and
Single Life’) applies the phrase to wife and children. Hazlitt
himself applies it to books (vol. I. _The Round Table_, p.
123).
‘_Retire, the world shut out_,’ _etc._ Young, _Night Thoughts_,
IX.
‘_Still, small voice._’ _1 Kings_ xix. 12.
_Miss Ford._ Hazlitt refers to Miss Forde as Cherry in _The Beaux
Stratagem_ (revived Covent Garden, Dec. 31, 1828). In _Lectures
on the Comic Writers_ (VIII. 88) he refers to the dialogue in
Act III. Sc. 2 as a ‘love catechism.’
_Mrs. Humby._ Mrs. Humby (fl. 1817–1849) played Luise in
Planché’s _The Green-eyed Monster_ at the Haymarket, Aug. 18,
1828. Wilkinson played Krout.
_Mrs. Goodall’s Rosalind._ Charlotte Goodall, after acting at
Bath, made her first appearance in London (Drury Lane, Oct. 2,
1788) as Rosalind. Nothing is known of her after 1813, when she
was divorced.
122. ‘_Blow, blow_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
‘_Strut and fret_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 5.
123. ‘_See o’er the stage_,’ _etc._ Cf. Thomson, _The Seasons_,
Winter, 646–8.
‘_Takes his ease._’ Cf. _1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 3.
124. ‘_All that mighty heart_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s Sonnet, _Earth
has not anything to shew more fair, etc._
‘_Thy freedom_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Thy beauty hath made me effeminate.’
_Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_Teddy the Tiler._’ A farce by G. H. B. Rodwell (1800–1852),
produced at Covent Garden, Feb. 8, 1830.
‘_Robert the Devil._’ A ‘Musical Romance’ by Raymond, produced at
Covent Garden, Feb. 2, 1830.
‘_What avails_,’ _etc._ The Rev. Sneyd Davies, _To the Honourable
and Reverend F. C._ (Dodsley, _A Collection of Poems_, VI.
138).
‘_The frozen winter_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt is quoting loosely from
_Paradise Lost_, IV. 267–8.
_Cowley’s Gallery._ The reference is to Cowley’s _The Chronicle_.
THE SICK CHAMBER
First republished in the volume of Selections edited by Mr. Ireland, who
states, apparently upon the evidence of dates and the nature of the
subject, that this was the last essay which Hazlitt wrote. This cannot
be certainly known, and it seems more likely that the essay on ‘Personal
Politics’ (_post_, pp. 456–61) was written later. The essay on ‘Footmen’
appeared in a later number of the _New Monthly_. Hazlitt died on Sept.
18, 1830.
PAGE
125. ‘_The body of this death._’ _Romans_ vii. 24.
‘_Cooped and cabined in._’ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_Peep through the blanket_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_A consummation_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
126. _Hoc erat in votis._ Horace, _Satires_, II. vi. 1.
‘_Our very gorge_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_Hermit poor_,’ _etc._ These lines are quoted in Lamb’s _John
Woodvil_, Act V.
‘_Vows made in pain_’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 97.
‘_The Devil_,’ _etc._ This old proverb is quoted by Rabelais,
Liv. IV. Chap. 24.
127. ‘_Like life and death_,’ _etc._ Cf. Lamb, _John Woodvil_, Act II.
‘_Trouble deaf Heaven_,’ _etc._ Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, No.
XXIX.
‘_Moralise our complaints_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act II.
Sc. 1.
‘_They have drugged_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Puzzling o’er the doubt._’ Cf. Cowper, _The Needless Alarm_,
77–78.
128. ‘_Like Samson_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, V. 737.
‘_The worst of every evil_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Temistocle_, Act III.
Sc. 2.
129. ‘_A world_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth, _Personal Talk_, l. 34.
‘_A foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
130. ‘_We see the children_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth, Ode, _Intimations
of Immortality_, 170–1.
_Paul Clifford._ Bulwer’s _Paul Clifford_ appeared in 1830.
‘_Lively_,’ _etc._ _Coriolanus_, Act IV. Sc. 5.
‘_The true pathos_,’ _etc._ Burns, _Epistle to Dr. Blacklock_.
FOOTMEN
Republished in _Sketches and Essays_.
PAGE
131. _Sewell and Cross’s._ Linen-drapers and silk-mercers, 44 and 45
Old Compton Street, Soho.
_The Bazaar._ Established in 1815.
‘_The Corinthian capitals_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burke’s _Reflections on
the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 164).
132. _As I look down Curzon Street._ The essay would seem to have been
written at 40 Half-Moon Street, where Hazlitt lodged from 1827
to 1829.
133. ‘_Brothers of the groves._’ Cf. vol. VIII. note to p. 467.
_Mr. N——._ _Sketches and Essays_ prints ‘Northcote.’
‘_High Life Below Stairs._’ By James Townley (1714–1788),
produced in 1759.
_Mr. C——._? Coleridge.
_Cassock._ _Sketches and Essays_ prints _hassock_.
_The fate of the footman_, _etc._ See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s
_Epistle from Arthur Grey, the Footman, to Mrs. Murray_.
134. ‘_Vine-covered hills_,’ _etc._ From lines ‘Written in 1788’ by
William Roscoe and parodied in _The Anti-Jacobin_.
‘_As pigeons pick up peas._’ Cf. _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, V. 2.
135. ‘_No more—where ignorance_,’ _etc._ Gray, _On a Distant Prospect
of Eton College_.
_M. de Bausset._ Louis François Joseph, Baron de Bausset (b.
1770), author of _Mémoires anecdotiques sur l’intérieur du
palais_ (1827–8).
136. _Wear green spectacles._ These three words, which seem to have a
personal application, were omitted in _Sketches and Essays_.
Cf. _post_, p. 217.
ON THE WANT OF MONEY
Republished in _Literary Remains_.
137. ‘_The heaviest stone_,’ _etc._ Sir T. Browne, _Hydriotaphia_,
chap. IV.
138. ‘_That Mr. Moore_,’ _etc._ Moore’s Life of Sheridan appeared in
1825. This sentence was omitted in _Literary Remains_.
139. Note. ‘_Such gain_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 3.
140. ‘_Screw one’s courage_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
‘_As kind_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _The Hind and the Panther_, I. 271.
141. ‘_Of formal cut._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
_The fair Aurora._ _Gil Blas_, Livre IV.
_Monsieur de Very._ See _ante_, note to p. 104.
_Apicius._ Marcus Gabius Apicius, the notorious Roman epicure,
referred to by Pliny, X. 48, 68, § 133.
_Amelia’s hashed mutton._ _Amelia_, Book X. chap. V.
142. ‘_And ever_,’ _etc._ _L’Allegro_, 135–6.
‘_We called_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Colonel Jack_, chap. 1.
‘_The Colonel_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._
_The City Madam._ See Massinger’s, _The City Madam_, III. 3.
‘_Spanish Rogue._’ Hazlitt refers to Mateo Aleman’s _Guzman de
Alfarache_ (1599). Cf. vol. VIII. (_Lectures on the Comic
Writers_), p. 111.
142. _Mr. Lamb has referred_, _etc._ See Lamb’s _Specimens_, note to
Rowley’s _A New Wonder_ (_Works_, ed. E. V. Lucas, IV. 126).
Note. ‘_His daughter and his ducats._’ _The Merchant of Venice_,
Act II. Sc. 8.
143. ‘_By their so potent art._’ Cf. _The Tempest_, Act V. Sc. 1.
144. ‘_We know_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Sc. 5.
‘_Within that lowest deep_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, IV.
76–77.
146. _I never knew but one man_, _etc._ ? Jeffrey.
‘_With wine_,’ _etc._ Cf. Milton’s Sonnet, _Lawrence, of virtuous
father_, etc.
149. ‘_Pure in the last recesses of the mind._’ Dryden, _The Second
Satire of Persius_, 133.
_Mr. Thomas Wedgwood._ Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805), Coleridge’s
friend.
‘_We can hold_,’ _etc._ _Richard II._, Act I. Sc. 3.
ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH
Republished with many omissions and variations in _Literary Remains_ and
_Winterslow_.
PAGE
150. ‘_Life is a pure flame_,’ _etc._ Sir T. Browne, _Hydriotaphia_,
chap. V.
_My brother’s._ John Hazlitt (1767–1837), the miniature-painter.
See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Four Generations of a Literary
Family_, I. 210–18.
151. ‘_The vast_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘The wide, the unbounded prospect, lies
before me.’ Addison, _Cato_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_Bear a charmed life._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 8.
‘_Bidding_,’ _etc._ Collins’s Ode, _The Passions_, 32.
‘_This sensible_,’ _etc._ _Measure for Measure_, Act III. Sc. 1.
152. ‘_Wine of life_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 3.
‘_As in a glass darkly._’ Cf. _1 Corinthians_ xiii. 12.
‘_So am not I._’ Sterne, _Tristram Shandy_, vol. V. chap. vii.
Note. _The Art of War_ (1795) by Joseph Fawcett (d. 1804), an
early friend of Hazlitt’s. See vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), 224–5
and Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs, etc._, I. 75–79.
153. ‘_The feast of reason_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_,
Sat. I. 128.
‘_Brave sublunary things._’ Cf. ‘Those brave translunary things.’
Michael Drayton, _To Henry Reynolds_.
‘_The stockdove_,’ _etc._ Cf. Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_,
I. St. 4.
Note. ‘_Had it not been_,’ _etc._ _Works_, II. 254.
Note. _She says of Richardson._ See _Works_, II. 285 _et seq._
and 222.
Note. _Monstrum ingens biforme._ Cf. _Æneid_, III. 658.
Note. ‘_His spirits_,’ _etc._ _Works_, II. 283.
156. ‘_The purple light of love._’ Gray, _The Progress of Poesy_, 41.
‘_The Raphael grace_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Match Raphael’s grace with thy
loved Guido’s air. ‘Pope, _Moral Essays_, VIII. 36.
‘_Gain new vigour_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _Charity_, 104.
157. ‘_Beguile_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Lose and neglect the creeping hours of
time.’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
158. ‘_Robbers._’ Schiller’s play, produced in 1782.
‘_From the Dungeon_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, Sonnet, ‘To the Author of
_The Robbers_.’
_Don Carlos._ Schiller’s play (1787).
158. ‘_That time is past_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth, _Lines composed a
few miles above Tintern Abbey_, 83–85.
159. ‘_Even from the tomb_,’ _etc._ Gray’s _Elegy_, 91–92.
‘_All the life_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘For a’ the life of life is dead.’
Burns, _Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn_, st. 6.
‘_From the last dregs_,’ _etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Aurengzebe_, Act IV.
Sc. 1.
160. ‘_Treason domestic_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Reverbs its own hollowness._’ Cf. _King Lear_, Act I. Sc. 1.
ON READING NEW BOOKS
Published with omissions in _Sketches and Essays_. The essay was written
at Florence. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs, etc._ II. 154.
PAGE
161. Note. See vol. VIII. (_Lectures on the Comic Writers_), p. 22 and
note.
162. ‘_Has just come_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Richard III._, Act I. Sc. 1.
164. _A Manuscript of Cicero’s._ Hazlitt probably refers to Cardinal
Angelo Mai’s (1782–1854) discoveries.
_A Noble Lord._ The Marquis of Blandford, who bought Valdarfer’s
edition of Boccaccio for £2260 at the Roxburgh sale in 1812.
Cf. _ante_, p. 43.
_Mr. Thomas Taylor._ Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), the Platonist.
The ‘old Duke of Norfolk’ (Bernard Edward, 12th Duke,
1765–1842) was his patron, and locked up nearly the whole of
Taylor’s edition of _Plato_ (5 vols., 1804) in his library.
_Ireland’s celebrated forgery._ The main forgery, _Vortigern_, by
William Henry Ireland, was produced at Drury Lane on April 2,
1796.
Note. _Mr. G. D.’s chambers._ Lamb’s friend George Dyer
(1755–1841) lived in Clifford’s Inn from 1792. _His History of
the University and Colleges of Cambridge, etc._ was published
in 2 vols. in 1814. In reference to the number of corrections
in this work, Lamb spoke of Dyer as ‘Cancellarius Magnus.’
Note. _Another friend of mine_, _etc._ Leigh Hunt. See his essay
‘Jack Abbot’s Breakfast’ reprinted in _Men, Women, and Books_
(1847).
166. ‘_Proud as when_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc.
3.
167. ‘_Like sunken wreck_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Henry V._, Act I. Sc. 2.
168. ‘_Full of wise_ σατυς,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
‘_An insolent piece of paper._’ ‘A piece of arrogant paper.’
Massinger, _A New Way to pay Old Debts_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
‘_Somewhat musty._’ Cf. ‘Something musty.’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc.
2.
_Longinus complains_, _etc_. See Longinus, _On the Sublime_, IX.
169. _Irving’s orations._ Cf. vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the Age_), p.
228.
_The Jew’s letters._ Dr. Philip le Fanu published in 1777 a
translation of the Abbé Guenée’s _Lettres de certaines Juives à
M. Voltaire_.
_That Van Diemen’s Land of letters._ These words were omitted in
_Sketches and Essays_.
_Flocci-nauci_, _etc._ Shenstone, Letter xxi. 1741 (_Works_,
1791, III. 49).
‘_Flames in the forehead_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, 171.
170. _Mr. Godwin composed an Essay_, _etc._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to
the letter added by ‘Edward Baldwin’ to his own English
Grammar. See vol. VI. p. 388.
Note. _A certain poet._ This note was omitted in _Sketches and
Essays_.
171. ‘_By Heavens_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth Sonnet, _The world is too much
with us_.
171. ‘_Trampled_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 93).
‘_Kept like an apple_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
172. Note. ‘_Speak evil of dignities._’ _2 Peter_ ii. 10.
Note. _The Queens matrimonial-ladder._ One of William Hone’s
squibs, published in 1820, and illustrated with fourteen cuts
by Cruikshank.
ON DISAGREEABLE PEOPLE
Republished in _Sketches and Essays_.
174. ‘_Discourse of reason_,’ _etc._ Loosely quoted from _Hamlet_. Cf.
Act I. Sc. 2 and Act IV. Sc. 4.
‘_The whole_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_ ix. 12.
‘_As when_,’ _etc._ Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_, St. 64.
177. ‘_Yea, into our heart of hearts._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_The volumes_,’ _etc._ Roscommon, _Horace’s Art of Poetry_.
‘_That dallies_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Twelfth Night_, Act II. Sc. 4.
178. ‘_Wit at the helm_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Youth on the prow, and Pleasure
at the helm.’ Gray, _The Bard_, 74.
179. _A butt, according to the Spectator_, _etc._ See _The Spectator_,
No. 47.
181. ‘_Hew you_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_Tempora_, _etc._ Cf. _Æneid_, IV. 293–4.
‘_Not to admire_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, Epistles
I. vi. 1–2.
_The Westminster School of Reform._ Hazlitt refers to the
writers, including Bentham and James Mill, associated with _The
Westminster Review_, founded in 1824.
182. ‘_Milk of human kindness._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
ON MEANS AND ENDS
Published in _Literary Remains_ with many variations presumably
introduced by the editor, and again in the same form in _Winterslow_.
PAGE
184. ‘_We work by wit_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 3.
185. ‘_Leaps at once_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, V. 686.
‘_From Indus_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Eloisa to Abelard_, 58.
187. _Hinc illæ lachrymæ._ Horace, _Epistles_, I. xix. 41.
188. ‘_Constrained by mastery._’ Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_, The
Franklin’s Tale, 36; Wordsworth quotes the line in _The
Excursion_, VI. 162–5.
189. ‘_Makes a sunshine_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. iii. 4.
190. _David’s and Girodet’s pictures._ Jacques Louis David (1748–1825)
and Anne Louis Girodet (1767–1824).
‘_Potations, pottle-deep._’ _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 3.
192. ‘_In a phantasma_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_Courage_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 108.
193. ‘_His thoughts_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ibid._, IX. 467.
Note. _Strong passion_, _etc._ Cf. _The Rambler_, No. 1.
Note. ‘_The lunatic_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V.
Sc. 1.
194. ‘_Set but a Scotsman_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burns, _The Author’s Earnest
Cry and Prayer_, Postscript, St. 4.
‘_And it alone_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_We read his works._’ Lamb’s Essay ‘On the Genius and Character
of Hogarth’ (_Works_, ed. E. V. Lucas, I. 71).
195. ‘_The darlings of his precious eye._’ Cf. ‘Make it a darling like
your precious eye.’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 4.
196. ‘_The jovial thigh_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Cymbeline_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
197. ‘_They are careful_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ X. 41–42.
198. ‘_And with their darkness_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, I. 391.
‘_They also serve_,’ _etc._ Adapted from Milton’s Sonnet, No.
XX., ‘When I consider how my light is spent,’ etc.
ON PERSONAL IDENTITY
Published with some omissions in _Winterslow_.
‘_Ha! here be_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_If I were not Alexander_,’ _etc._ The saying is given by
Plutarch.
Note. _Zoffani._ Johann Zoffany, or Zaufelly (1733–1810).
Note. _Reynolds’s Speculation._ A comedy by Frederick Reynolds,
produced in 1795. George III. was much amused by it. See _Life
of Reynolds_, II. 208–210.
199. ‘_Wishing to be_,’ _etc._ Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet XXIX.
‘_The rub_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_Put off_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._
200. ‘_What more felicity_,’ _etc._ Spenser, _Muiopotmos_, St. 27.
201. ‘_That something_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 3–4.
‘_Very choice Italian._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Vows_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, IV. 97.
‘_The native hue_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
202. ‘_Shut up_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_I’d sooner_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
_Sir Thomas Lethbridge._ A sturdy Tory, member for Somersetshire.
He is possibly the L—— referred to in vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_),
p. 94. Though a staunch Protectionist, he voted for Reform and
Catholic Emancipation.
203. ‘_Ethereal braid_,’ _etc._ See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the
Age_), note to p. 216.
_Had I been a lord I should have married_, _etc._ This sentence
and the next were omitted in _Winterslow_.
204. ‘_Give me_,’ _etc._ Cf. _3 Henry VI._, Act I. Sc. 4.
‘_Monarchise_,’ _etc._ _Richard II._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Tenth transmitters_,’ _etc._ Richard Savage, _The Bastard_.
‘_In the catalogue_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_Swinish multitude._’ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 93).
205. ‘_The fair_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_The person who bought Punch._ Cf. _post_, p. 353.
206. _Why will Mr. Cobbett_, _etc._ Cobbett had recently (1826)
unsuccessfully contested Preston.
_The bird described by Chaucer._ See Chaucer, _The Canterbury
Tales_, The Manciple’s Tale, 59 _et seq._, and The Squiere’s
Tale, 603 _et seq._
_You say there is a common language_, _etc._ These words, down to
‘And he will laugh in your face,’ were omitted in _Winterslow_.
207. ‘_A certain tender bloom_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘A certain tender gloom
o’erspread his face.’ Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_, I.
St. 57.
208. ‘_Stuff o’ the conscience._’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Laggard age._’ Collins, Ode, _The Passions_, 112.
209. _Like Benvenuto Cellini_, _etc._ See _Life of Benvenuto Cellini_,
Part II. lxxviii.
APHORISMS ON MAN
Now republished for the first time. In _The Monthly Magazine_ they
appeared as follows: I.–XI. October 1830; XII.–XXXVI. November 1830;
XXXVII.–XLVII. December 1830; XLVIII.–LV. April 1831; LVI.–LXVI. May
1831; LXVII.–LXX. June 1831. They are described as ‘by the late William
Hazlitt.’
PAGE
210. _Monmouth-street._ In St. Giles’s, now partly occupied by
Shaftesbury Avenue. Allusions to its old-clothes shops are very
frequent in eighteenth-century literature.
211. ‘_In the deep bosom_,’ _etc._ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_At one fell swoop._’ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
214. _O’Connell._ Hazlitt no doubt refers to the proceedings of
O’Connell after his election for Co. Clare in 1828.
215. ‘_The soft collar_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 90).
‘_The iron rod_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘When the scourge inexorably, and the torturing hour,
Calls us to penance.’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 90–2.
217. _An editor._ Cf. _ante_, p. 136.
218. ‘_There goes my wicked self._’ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of
the saying attributed to John Bradford (1510?–1555), who, on
seeing some criminals going to execution, is said to have
exclaimed: ‘But for the grace of God, there goes John
Bradford.’
‘_To be honest_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_L——._? Lamb.
219. ‘_Leave others poor indeed._’ Cf. _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_To be direct_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
220. ‘_Tout homme_,’ _etc._ Cf. vol. I. (_The Round Table_), note to
p. 117.
221. _A popular author._ Scott, no doubt.
‘_Writes himself_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act
I. Sc. 1.
223. ‘_To triumph_,’ _etc._ Gray, _The Bard_, 142.
224. _A certain bookseller._ Sir Richard Phillips. See vol. VI. (_Mr.
Northcote’s Conversations_), p. 418.
225. ‘_From every work_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. IV. 20.
226. ‘_Melted_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_Beau Didapper._ See _Joseph Andrews_, Book IV. chap. IX.
228. ‘_Damned spot._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 1.
229. ‘_The web_,’ _etc._ _All’s Well that Ends Well_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
_The Devil’s Elixir_, _etc._ _The Devil’s Elixir, or the
Shadowless Man_, a musical romance by Edward Fitzball
(1792–1873), produced at Covent Garden, April 20, 1829; _The
Bottle Imp_, a melodrama by Richard Brinsley Peake (1792–1847),
produced at the Lyceum, July 7, 1828, and at Covent Garden,
Oct. 17, 1828.
_Mr. Farley._ Charles Farley (1771–1859), the actor, to whose
skill as a theatrical machinist at Covent Garden Hazlitt here
refers.
230. ‘_La Belle Assemblée’s dresses for May._’ Cf. ‘In the manner
of—Ackerman’s dresses for May’ (Moore, _Horace_, XI. ii.),
quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
_M. Stultz._ M. Stulz, the well-known tailor, referred to by
Bulwer in _Pelham_ and (more than once) by Thackeray.
A CHAPTER ON EDITORS
Republished with some omissions in _Sketches and Essays_. In the
Magazine there is the following note by the Editor:—‘We give insertion
to this article, one of the posthumous papers of Mr. Hazlitt, to shew
that we do not consider ourselves implicated in the abuses complained
of; and that we have no right to any share of indignation so whimsically
lavished upon our fraternity. Ed.’
PAGE
230. ‘_Our withers_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Tittle-tattle._’ The phrase is so printed in the Magazine and
in _Sketches and Essays_, but Hazlitt probably wrote ‘kittle
cattle,’ a distinctively Scots expression for what he meant to
say.
‘_Lay the flattering unction_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc.
4.
231. _As Mr. Horne Tooke said_, _etc._ See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of
the Age_), p. 236 and note.
232. _We only know one Editor._ Hazlitt possibly refers to the Editor
of _Blackwood’s Magazine_.
_We will not mention names_, _etc._ This sentence was omitted in
_Sketches and Essays_.
‘_More subtle web_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, II. xii. 77.
233. _The conductor_, _etc._ This sentence and the next but one were
omitted in _Sketches and Essays_.
‘_Here’s the rub._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
THE LETTER-BELL
Reprinted with considerable omissions in _Sketches and Essays_.
235 ‘_One entire_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2
_Blue hills._ Cf. vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), p. 256.
236. ‘_I should notice_,’ _etc._ A long passage from this point to
‘accumulate to a tolerable sum’ (p. 237) was omitted from
_Sketches and Essays_.
_From —— to ——._ _Sketches and Essays_ reads ‘From Wem to
Shrewsbury.’ Cf. _My First Acquaintance with Poets_, _post_, p.
260.
‘_And by the vision splendid_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s Ode,
_Intimations of Immortality_, 73–74.
‘_What though the radiance_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._ 179–82.
‘_Like morn_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, v. 310–11.
_And may he not yet greet the yellow light_, _etc._ Cf. _post_,
p. 271.
‘_And from his neck so free_,’ _etc._ _The Ancient Mariner_,
289–91.
238. _Vangoyen._ Jan Van Goyen (1596–1666), one of whose landscapes,
it would seem, Hazlitt had copied.
‘_The slow canal_,’ _etc._ Goldsmith, _The Traveller_, 293–4.
‘_While with an eye_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Lines composed a few
miles above Tintern Abbey_, 47–49.
‘_The secrets_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Entire affection_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, I. viii.
40.
‘_His shame_,’ _etc._ Cf. Goldsmith, _The Deserted Village_, 412.
‘_Made good digestion_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
239. _An ingenious friend and arch-critic._ ? Jeffrey.
‘_More germain_ [germane],’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 2.
240. ‘_Hark!_’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, IV. 1, _et seq._
_Lord Byron denies_, _etc._ See vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), p. 210
and note, and vol. XI. (_Fugitive Writings_), p. 492.
240. _The telegraphs._ A system of semaphores, presumably. Electric
telegraphs belong to a later date.
_The new revolution._ The Revolution of July 1830. Cf. _post_,
pp. 456, _et seq._
_The beacon-fires._ See the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, ll. 281–316.
ON THE SPIRIT OF MONARCHY
Republished in _Literary Remains_. The essay was published (? 1835) as a
pamphlet (together with ‘The Moral Effects of Aristocracy,’ by Godwin).
PAGE
242. ‘_And by the vision_,’ _etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 236.
_The madman in Hogarth._ _The Rake’s Progress_, Plate VIII.
‘_There goes_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 218.
_We once heard_, _etc._ In vol. VI. (_Mr. Northcote’s
Conversations_), p. 387, this sentiment is attributed to a ‘Mr.
R——.’ It is clear from the present passage that this person was
not Mr. Railton, but William Roscoe (1753–1831), the well-known
historian, and that therefore the reading of _The London Weekly
Review_ was correct. See note to vol. VI. p. 387.
243. ‘_That within_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_To fear_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
244. ‘_Peep through_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Great is Diana_,’ _etc._ _Acts_ xix. 28.
‘_Your gods_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_ xiii. 13.
_In contempt of their worshippers._ Cf. Burke’s _Reflections on
the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 17).
Note. Dryden, _Absalom and Achitophel_, I. 100–3.
245. ‘_Gods partial_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, III. 257–8.
‘_Any mark_,’ _etc._ Cf. I _Henry IV._ Act III. Sc. 2.
246. Note. See vol. III. (_Political Essays_), p. 298 and notes.
247. ‘_From the crown_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Isaiah_ i. 6.
_Virtue, says Montesquieu_, _etc._ _Esprit des Lois_, III. 6.
‘_Honour dishonourable._’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 314–15.
‘_Of outward shew_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ibid._ VIII. 538–9.
248. ‘_To tread_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Nice customs_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._ Act V. Sc. 2.
‘_In form and motion_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Vice is undone_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_, I.
142–9.
249. _A Coronation-day._ The coronation of George IV. had taken place
on July 19, 1821.
250. _Prince Leopold._ Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (1790–1865), who
had married the Princess Charlotte, and afterwards (1831)
became King of the Belgians.
_Castlereagh ... unstained_, _etc._ Castlereagh committed suicide
on Aug. 12, 1822.
‘_A present deity_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_, 35–6.
251. ‘_Worth makes the man_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV.
203–4.
‘_The only amaranthine flower_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, III.
268–9.
252. ‘_A man may read_,’ _etc._ _Holy Dying_, chap. i. § 2.
ON THE SCOTCH CHARACTER
Now republished for the first time. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs,
etc._ (1867), I. xxvii.
PAGE
253. ‘_Edina’s darling seat._’ ‘Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!’ Burns,
_Address to Edinburgh_.
253. _Lismahago._ In _Humphry Clinker_.
254. _Lord Erskine._ Lord Erskine was entertained at a banquet in
Edinburgh on Feb. 21, 1820. He had not been in Scotland for
more than fifty years.
255. _Teres et_ [atque] _rotundus_. Horace, _Satires_, II. vii. 86.
_A very learned man._ (?) Sir David Brewster, editor of _The
Edinburgh Encyclopædia_. Cf. _post_, p. 316.
_Mr. Macvey Napier._ Macvey Napier (1776–1847), editor of a
supplement to the 4th, 5th, and 6th editions and of the 7th
edition of _The Encyclopædia Britannica_, and Jeffrey’s
successor as editor of _The Edinburgh Review_. Hazlitt had
contributed to the Supplement. See vol. IX. (_Essays on the
Fine Arts_), p. 377 and note. In _A Selection from the
Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, Esq._ (1879), p. 21,
there is the following letter from Hazlitt to Napier:—
‘Winterslow Hut, near Salisbury,
‘_August 26, 1818_.
‘MY DEAR SIR,—I am sorry to be obliged, from want of health and a
number of other engagements, which I am little able to perform,
to decline the flattering offer you make me. I have got to
write, between this and the end of October, an octavo volume or
a set of lectures on the Comic Drama of this country for the
Surrey Institution, which I am anxious not to slur over, and it
will be as much as I can do to get it ready in time. I am also
afraid that I should not be able to do the article in question,
or yourself, justice, for I am not only without books, but
without knowledge of what books are necessary to be consulted
on the subject. To get up an article in a Review on any subject
of general literature is quite as much as I can do without
exposing myself. The object of an Encyclopædia is, I take it,
to condense and combine all the facts relating to a subject,
and all the theories of any consequence already known or
advanced. Now, where the business of such a work ends, is just
where I begin, that is, I might perhaps throw in an idle
speculation or two of my own, not contained in former accounts
of the subject, and which would have very little pretensions to
rank as scientific. I know something about Congreve, but
nothing at all of Aristophanes, and yet I conceive that the
writer of an article on the _Drama_ ought to be as well
acquainted with the one as the other. If you should see Mr.
Constable, will you tell him I am writing _nonsense_ for him as
fast as I can?—Your very humble servant,
W. HAZLITT.’
It is difficult to know what ‘nonsense’ Hazlitt was writing for
Constable.
256. ‘_Damnable iteration._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 2.
_Not like La Fleur_, _etc._ See Sterne, _The Sentimental
Journey_, The Passport, Paris.
Note 1. _Cockney School of Poetry._ See vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_),
99 and note.
Note 1. ‘_Kernes and Gallowglasses._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 2.
258. ‘_Sins_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hebrews_ xii. 1.
_A much-talked-of publication._ Hazlitt no doubt refers to _The
Beacon_, which, like _John Bull_, was intended to counteract
the progress of Radical doctrine during the period of the
Queen’s trial. For an account of it and of Scott’s connection
with it, see Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, v. 152–3.
‘_Leaning_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, I. vi. 14.
259. _The editor._ Theodore Hook, the editor of _John Bull_, was an
Englishman.
‘_Entire affection_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, I. viii.
40.
MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS
Republished in _Literary Remains_ and _Winterslow_. The germ of the
essay appeared in a short letter to _The Examiner_, reprinted in
_Political Essays_. See vol. III. pp. 152–3 and notes.
PAGE
259. _W——m._ Wem.
‘_Dreaded name_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 964–5.
‘_Fluttering_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Coriolanus_, Act V. Sc. 6.
260. ‘_High-born Hoel’s harp_,’ _etc._ Gray, _The Bard_, 28.
‘_Bound them_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day_, 90–91.
_The fires in the Agamemnon._ Cf. _ante_, p. 240 and note.
_It was in January_, _etc._ This paragraph and the next are from
_The Examiner_. See the notes to vol. III. (_Political
Essays_), pp. 152–3.
262. ‘_As are the children_,’ _etc._ Cf. Thomson, _The Castle of
Indolence_, II. xxxiii.
‘_A certain tender bloom_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 207 and note.
‘_Somewhat fat and pursy._’ Cf. ‘He’s fat and scant of breath’
(_Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 2), and ‘For in the fatness of these
pursy times,’ etc. (_Ibid._ Act III. Sc. 4).
263. ‘_No figures_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
264. Note 1. For an account of the Rev. William Hazlitt, see Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt’s _Four Generations of a Literary Family_, The First
Generation.
265. _T. Wedgwood._ A Life of Tom Wedgwood was published recently
(1903) by the late Mr. R. B. Litchfield.
‘_Sounding on his way._’ See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the Age_),
note to p. 214.
266. _Credat Judæus Apella!_ Horace, _Satires_, I. v. 100.
‘_Thus I refute him, Sir._’ See Boswell’s _Life_ (ed. G. B.
Hill), I. 471.
267. ‘_Kind and affable_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 648–50.
_He has somewhere told himself._ See _Biographia Literaria_,
chap. x.
_That other Vision of Judgment._ Byron’s, first published in _The
Liberal_, No. 1.
_Bridge-street junto._ Cf. vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), p. 190 and
note.
268. _Tom Jones and the adventure of the muff._ See _Tom Jones_, Book
X. chap. v. _et seq._
_At Tewkesbury._ According to the essay ‘On Going a Journey,’ it
was at Bridgwater. See vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), p. 186.
269. _A friend of the poet’s._ This is a mistake. Wordsworth paid £23
a year for Alfoxden. The agreement is given in Mrs. Henry
Sandford’s _Thomas Poole and his Friends_, I. 225.
270. ‘_In spite of pride_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, I. 293.
‘_While yet_,’ _etc._ Cf. Thomson, _The Seasons_, Spring, 18.
‘_Of Providence_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 559–560.
271. _Chantry’s bust._ Sir Francis Chantrey’s bust, now at Coleorton.
_Castle Spectre._ Originally produced (at Drury Lane) December
14, 1797.
‘_His face_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
272. _Tom Poole._ Thomas Poole (1765–1837), for an account of whom see
Mrs. Sandford’s _Thomas Poole and his Friends_.
‘_Followed in the chase_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 3.
_Sir Walter Scott’s_, _etc._ Hazlitt probably refers to the
banquet given to George IV. by the Magistrates of Edinburgh,
August 24, 1822.
273. _The Death of Abel._ Solomon Gessner’s _Tod Abels_ (1758).
274. ‘_Ribbed sea-sands._’ _The Ancient Mariner_, 227. This was one of
the lines for which Coleridge was indebted to Wordsworth.
275. ‘_But there is matter_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Hart-leap Well_,
95–96.
PULPIT ORATORY, ETC.
Now reprinted for the first time. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs,
etc._, I. xxvii. Cf. the essay on Edward Irving in _The Spirit of the
Age_ (vol. IV. pp. 222–231). After Hazlitt’s essay there follows a
savage attack on Irving (? by T. J. Hogg), as to which the editor says:
‘The following has also lost its way to us. We take it in as a
foundling, but without adopting all its sentiments.’
PAGE
‘_Got the start_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Kingly Kensington._’ Swift’s Ballad, _Duke Upon Duke_, St. 14.
276. _Lady Bluemount._ Lady Beaumont presumably, the wife of
Wordsworth’s friend, Sir George Howland Beaumont.
_Mr. Botherby._? William Sotheby (1757–1833), whose persistent
attempts as a dramatic author may explain the nickname.
_Mr. Theodore Flash._ Theodore Hook, no doubt, who afterwards
denounced Irving as a humbug. See _John Bull_, July 20, 1823.
Note. _Mr. Dubois._ Edward Dubois (1774–1850), wit and
journalist.
Note. ‘_Rose_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
277. ‘_His foot mercurial_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
‘_The iron_,’ _etc._ _The Psalter_, Psalm CV. 18.
‘_Come, let me clutch thee._’ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 1.
280. ‘_Spins_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_Loop or peg_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
281. ‘_Fire hot from Hell._’ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act III. Sc. 1.
282. _The swimmer._ See this passage quoted by Hazlitt in vol. V.
(_Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_), pp. 323–4.
283. _Mr. Croly._ George Croly (1780–1860), a regular contributor to
_Blackwood’s Magazine_, had published _Paris in 1815_ (1817).
284. ‘_Best virtue._’ Cf. _All’s Well That Ends Well_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
‘_We pause for a reply._’ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act III. Sc. 2.
285. _Daniel Wilson._ Daniel Wilson (1778–1858), at this time
incumbent of St. John’s Chapel, Bedford Row, Bloomsbury,
afterwards Bishop of Calcutta.
‘_Oh! for an eulogy_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Oh, for a curse to kill with.’
Otway, _Venice Preserved_, Act II. Sc. 2.
ARGUING IN A CIRCLE
Now reprinted for the first time. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs,
etc._, I. xxvii.
PAGE
285. ‘_Fancies and good-nights._’ Cf. _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Base cullionly fellow._’ Cf. _2 Henry VI._, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Beggarly, unmannered corse._’ Cf. _1 Henry IV._ Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_The age of chivalry_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
‘_The melancholy Jacques_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
1.
286. _The present Duke of Buckingham._ Richard Temple Nugent Brydges
Chandos, created Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Feb. 1822.
‘_New manners_,’ _etc._ Thomas Warton, Sonnet, _Written in a
Blank Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon_.
‘_Submits_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 90).
287. ‘_Long insulted_,’ _etc._ Quoted elsewhere. See vol. III.
(_Political Essays_), pp. 13 and 100.
‘_With jealous leer malign._’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 503.
288. ‘_Cause was hearted._’ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_The open_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, X. 112–113.
‘_The shame_,’ _etc._ Cf. _2 Samuel_ i. 16.
289. _The Editor of the New Times._ Dr. Stoddart.
‘_Make the worse_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 114.
‘_So musical_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, IV. 1.
290. ‘_So well_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, IX. 549.
_Mr. Canning’s present ... situation._ Canning had become Foreign
Secretary in 1822, and had shortly afterwards acknowledged the
independence of the Spanish American Colonies.
291. ‘_Turnspit of the king’s kitchen._’ See Burke’s ‘Speech on
Economical Reform,’ (_Works_, Bohn, II. 85–86), and cf. vol. I.
(_The Round Table_), p. 427.
‘_Undoing all_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry VI._, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_Though that their joy_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 1.
292. ‘_Like an exhalation_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Comus_, 556.
‘_Ride in the whirlwind_,’ _etc._ Addison, _The Campaign_, and
Pope, _The Dunciad_, III. 264.
293. _Noctes_, _etc._ Horace, _Satires_, II. vi. 65.
‘_The beautiful_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _The Death of Wallenstein_,
Act V. Sc. 1.
294. ‘_A thick scarf._’ See _ante_, note to p. 82.
‘_Sweet smelling gums._’ _Paradise Lost_, XI. 327.
‘_Dews of Castalie._’ Cf. Spenser, _The Ruines of Time_, 431.
295. _The Six Acts._ Passed by Lord Sidmouth in 1819 after the
Manchester reform meeting.
QUERIES AND ANSWERS; OR THE RULE OF CONTRARY
Now republished for the first time. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs_,
_etc._ (1867), I. xxix.
PAGE
297. _Thimble._ Cf. a passage, _ante_, at the foot of p. 39. The
editors have not been able to identify the person here referred
to as ‘Thimble.’
ON KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD
This paper and the two following ones were republished in _Sketches and
Essays_.
‘_Who shall go about_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
II. Sc. 9.
298. ‘_Subtle_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_The children_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ xvi. 8.
299. ‘_To see ourselves_,’ _etc._ Burns, _To a Louse_, St. 8.
‘_No figures_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_His soul_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, I. 101–2.
300. ‘_What shall it profit_,’ _etc._ _S. Mark_ viii. 36.
301. _Non ex quovis_, _etc._ Erasmus, _Adagiorum Chiliades_, ‘Munus
aptum.’
‘_No mark_,’ _etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_The soul_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
PAGE
301. _Bub Doddington said_, _etc._ Cf. vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), p. 100
and note.
_Salus populi_, _etc._ The Twelve Tables, _De Officio Consulis_.
_The upstart_, _etc._ This sentence was omitted in _Sketches and
Essays_.
302. _Mr. Cobbett seemed disappointed_, _etc._ The reference is
probably to _The Weekly Political Register_ for Oct. 29, 1825,
where Cobbett deplores the fact that Baron Maseres (1731–1824),
who had visited him in prison, had left the bulk of his large
property to a ‘little _Protestant parson_.’
‘_His patron’s ghost_,’ _etc._ Cf. Thomson, _The Castle of
Indolence_, I. St. 51.
303. ‘_Never standing upright_,’ _etc._ See Macklin’s _The Man of the
World_, II. 1.
‘_In large heart enclosed._’ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VII. 486.
304. ‘_The world_,’ _etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Autumn, 233.
‘_The heart of man_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Jeremiah_ xvii. 9.
‘_As the flesh_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Measure for Measure_, Act II. Sc.
1.
‘_Tread_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 3.
305. ‘_If thine eye_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_ v. 29.
‘_The little chapel-bell_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt refers to _The Chapel
Bell_, an early poem of Southey’s (1793), and _The Book of the
Church_, published by Southey in 1824.
_Camille-Desmoulins_, _etc._ Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794),
the well-known Revolutionary pamphleteer; Camille Jordan
(1771–1821), called ‘Jordan Carillon,’ from a speech (July 4,
1797) in which he proposed to restore the use of bells to the
clergy. See Hazlitt’s _Life of Napoleon_, chap. 15.
‘_His own miniature-picture_,’ _etc._ ‘On my own Miniature
Picture’ (1796).
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
306. ‘_Give us pause._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_Does somewhat smack._’ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act II.
Sc. 2.
307. _Peter Finnerty._ Peter Finnerty (1766?–1822) at one time on the
staff of _The Morning Chronicle_ with Hazlitt.
308. _J——._ Jeffrey.
‘_In some sort handled._’ Cf. _Henry V._ Act II. Sc. 3.
‘_The high and palmy state._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 1.
309. ‘_Keep this dreadful pudder_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act III. Sc.
2.
‘_When a great wheel_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ibid._ Act II. Sc. 4.
310. ‘_Will be_,’ _etc._ Dr. Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (_Works_,
Oxford, 1825, vol. V., p. 118).
ON PUBLIC OPINION
Published (together with the next essay) in _Winterslow_.
311. ‘_Scared_,’ _etc._ Cf. Collins’s Ode, _The Passions_, 20.
312. ‘_The world rings_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, III. 129–30.
313. ‘_No man knoweth_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. John_ iii. 8.
314. ‘_Casting_,’ _etc._ _Il Penseroso_, 160.
315. ‘_Wink_,’ _etc._ Cf. Marston, _Antonio’s Revenge_, Prologue.
‘_Fed fat_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act I. Sc. 3.
ON THE CAUSES OF POPULAR OPINION
Published (with preceding essay) in _Winterslow_.
PAGE
316. _The Editors of the Edinburgh Encyclopædia._ _The Edinburgh
Encyclopædia_ (18 vols., 1810–30) was edited by Sir David
Brewster.
‘_Among the rocks_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Michael_, 455–7.
317. ‘_A man of ten thousand._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
318. ‘_Who loved_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
320. _J——._ Jeffrey.
A FAREWELL TO ESSAY-WRITING
Republished in an imperfect form in _Winterslow_. In the Magazine the
essay is dated ‘Winterslow, Feb. 20, 1828.’
PAGE
321. ‘_This life is best_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_A friend_,’ _etc._ Cf. Cowper, _Retirement_, 741–2.
‘_Done its spiriting gently._’ Cf. _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_The spring_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _Christabel_, 22.
‘_Fields are dank_,’ _etc._ Milton’s Sonnet (XX.), ‘Lawrence, of
virtuous father virtuous son.’
322. ‘_Peep_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Open_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, VI. 11–12.
323. ‘_Of all the cities_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Theodore and Honoria_,
1–2.
‘_Which when Honoria view’d_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._ 342–3.
‘_And made th’ insult_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Sigismonda and
Guiscardo_, 668–9.
_I am much pleased_, _etc._ This sentence (to the end of the
paragraph) was omitted in _Winterslow_.
324. ‘_Fall’n_,’ _etc._ Scott, _Glenfinlas_, last stanza.
_Mr. Gifford once said_, _etc._ See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the
Age_) p. 307.
_I am rather disappointed_, _etc._ This sentence was omitted in
_Winterslow_.
325. ‘_The admired_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
_What I have here stated_, _etc._ This paragraph and the next two
were omitted in _Winterslow_.
‘_I know not seems._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
326. _L——._ Lamb, no doubt.
_Antonio._ Godwin’s _Antonio_ was produced at Drury Lane and
damned Dec. 13, 1800.
‘_Nor can I think_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _The Hind and the Panther_,
I. 315.
327. _Chaucer’s Flower and Leaf._ See vol. V. (_Lectures on the
English Poets_) p. 27 and note.
‘_And ayen_,’ _etc._ _The Flower and the Leaf_, St. 15.
_Mr. and Miss L——._ Charles and Mary Lamb.
328. ‘_And curtain close_,’ _etc._ Cf. Collins’s Ode, _On the Poetical
Character_, 76.
BYRON AND WORDSWORTH
Now republished for the first time. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs,
etc._ I. xxix.
PAGE
328. _Lord Byron’s haste_, _etc._ See Leigh Hunt’s _Lord Byron and his
Contemporaries_, I. 77.
‘_A cure_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 164).
329. ‘_Ah! voila_,’ _etc._ _Confessions_, Part I. Liv. VI.
‘_Slow_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
Note. _Ada Reis; a Tale_, by Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828),
published in 1823.
ON CANT AND HYPOCRISY
This essay and the next were published with some omissions in _Sketches
and Essays_.
PAGE
330. ‘_If to do_,’ _etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_Curl._ Edmund Curll (1675–1747).
‘_The spirit_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_ xxvi. 41.
331. ‘_Most easily_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hebrews_ xii. 1.
_Video_, _etc._ Ovid, _Metam._, VII. 20–1.
332. ‘_Duenna._’ See Act III. Sc. 5.
‘_A little round_,’ _etc._ _The Castle of Indolence_, I. St. 69.
333. _Lord Shaftesbury._ See _Characteristicks_, An Inquiry concerning
Virtue, or Merit, Part I. Sect. II.
‘_Upon this bank_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
335. ‘_Mighty coil_,’ _etc._ Cf. _King Lear_, Act III. Sc. 2.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
337. ‘_Eremites_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 474–5.
338. ‘_Cant religious_,’ _etc._ See Byron’s Letter to Murray on
Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope.
_Letters_, etc., ed. Prothero, v. 536.
339. _Mr. Coleridge_, _etc._ Nearly the whole of this passage from
this point to the end was omitted in _Sketches and Essays_. In
the Magazine the essay concludes with the words ‘_Cetera
desunt_.’
_Mr. Liberal Snake._ See Disraeli’s _Vivian Grey_.
POETRY
Now republished for the first time. Some of the essays now first
republished from _The Atlas_ are identified as Hazlitt’s in Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt’s _Memoirs_, etc. (see I. xxix. and xxx.). The others have been
included on the strength of the internal evidence of authorship. A short
paper, attributed to Hazlitt by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (_Memoirs_, I. xxix.),
and entitled ‘Richesse de la Langue,’ had appeared in _The Atlas_ for
Jan. 25, 1829. It runs as follows:—
‘How should one convey by a single word an expression of face
which having arisen from some strong passion, uneasiness or
emotion, is converted into an habitual character, and remains
without any immediate object to excite it? In the English language
there are above thirty ways of doing this, or else approaching to,
and hovering round the point. As for instance, we may express this
look by the following epithets, more or less pointedly, and with
various inflections of meaning attached to them:—_wild_, _scared_,
_startled_, _haggard_, _harassed_, _hunted_, _nervous_,
_agitated_, _apprehensive_, _terrified_, _dismayed_, _abstracted_,
_stunned_, _panick-struck_, _odd_, _strange_, _wayward_,
_flighty_, _uncouth_, _unaccountable_, _eccentric_, _embarrassed_,
_unsettled_, _uneasy_, _overconscious_, _morbid_, _careworn_,
_blighted_, _scare-crow_, _hang-dog_, _ghastly_, _wilful_,
_dogged_, _staring_, _fierce_, _etc._ All these come tolerably
near the mark, and differ from each other; yet none of them is the
very word that is wanted to express the thing in question, though
we have no doubt there is such a word in the English language, and
that it might be suggested by some one who has a greater command
of its resources. The above remarks may serve to guard the student
of English, whether a foreigner or merely a stranger to his native
tongue, against unmeaning _synonymes_ or monotonous common-place.’
PAGE
339. ‘_Daffodils_,’ _etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
340. ‘_That fine madness_,’ _etc._ Cf. Drayton, Elegy, _To Henry
Reynolds, Esq._
341. ‘_Cowslips wan_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, 147.
_Lowly children_, _etc._ Cf. ‘With all the lowly children of the
shade.’ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Spring, 450.
342. ‘_To elevate and surprise._’ The Duke of Buckingham, _The
Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc. 1.
ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Now republished for the first time. Cf. vol. IV. pp. 231 _et seq._ and
389 _et seq._
‘_Foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
343. ‘_A man of Ind._’ Cf. _The Tempest_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Wise_,’ _etc._ Cf. _1 Corinthians_ iv. 6.
344. _A standard book._ Lindley Murray’s _English Grammar_, no doubt,
the later editions of which were published by Longmans.
345. _Mr. Fearn._ Hazlitt’s friend. _Anti-Tooke_ was published in
1824. Cf. vol. VI. (_Table-Talk_), 63–4.
‘_Still, small._’ _1 Kings_ xix. 12.
MEMORABILIA OF MR. COLERIDGE
Now republished for the first time. Many of the opinions expressed are
referred to by Hazlitt elsewhere.
PAGE
346. _Barrow._ Cf. _ante_, p. 266, where Hume is said to have borrowed
from South.
347. ‘_More was meant_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Il Penseroso_, 120.
348. _Dr. Dodd._ William Dodd (1729–1777), executed for forgery in
1777. His _Thoughts in Prison_ appeared in the same year.
PETER PINDAR
Now republished for the first time.
‘_Men_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_A manly man_,’ _etc._ Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_,
Prologue, 167.
349. ‘_Haloo_,’ _etc._ Cf. _2 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 2.
_Viotti._ Giovanni Battista Viotti (1753–1824).
‘_Making the worse_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 113–14.
LOGIC
Now republished for the first time.
PAGE
351. ‘_That which is_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Twelfth Night_, Act IV. Sc. 2. The
mistake of ‘Cophetua’ for ‘Gorboduc’ is made elsewhere by
Hazlitt.
332. ‘_Over shoes, over boots._’ Cf. _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_,
Act I. Sc. 1.
THE LATE MR. CURRAN
Now republished for the first time.
353. _The late shots at Edinburgh._ Hazlitt may refer to the
conviction and execution (Jan. 28, 1829) of the notorious
William Burke. His partner Hare had given evidence against him
and had been released.
THE COURT JOURNAL—A DIALOGUE
Now republished for the first time. The _Court Journal_ was a weekly
paper founded by Henry Colburn, May 2, 1829.
PAGE
355. ‘_Our withers_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Married a highwayman_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, I. 1.
‘_The story of Miss ——_,’ _etc._ Cf. vol. XI. (_Fugitive
Writings_), p. 383 note.
356. _Mr. C——._ Henry Colburn presumably.
THE LATE DR. PRIESTLEY
Now republished for the first time.
357. ‘_His body thought._’ Cf. Donne, _An Anatomy of the World_, The
Second Anniversary, 245–6.
358. _Controversy with Dr. Price._ Published in 1778.
‘_Dazzling_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Comus_, 791.
359. ‘_Anthropagi_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Nay, an you mouth_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_None but a Cobbett_,’ _etc._ See Cobbett’s _Observations on
Priestley’s Emigration_ (_Selections_, _etc._ I. 15, _et
seq._).
SECTS AND PARTIES
Now republished for the first time.
361. _A board of Utility at Charing Cross._ Hazlitt may have had in
his mind Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross,
whose house was well known as a Radical meeting-place, but the
essay attacks the Utilitarian party at large.
362. _Mrs. Chatterley._ The wife of the actor William Simmonds
Chatterley. It is difficult to understand what Hazlitt’s
innuendo is. The journal he refers to is presumably the
_Morning Chronicle_.
363. ‘_What they are least assured._’ Cf. _Measure for Measure_, Act
II. Sc. 2,
CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (1)
These two papers, now republished for the first time, were omitted for
some reason by Hazlitt when he brought out _Mr. Northcote’s
Conversations_. See vol. VI. note to p. 420. T. is Hazlitt, J.,
Northcote. This first Conversation would have followed after
Conversation the Twentieth. See for Hogarth, vol. VIII. (_English Comic
Writers_) 133 _et seq._, and Lamb’s essay ‘On the Genius and Character
of Hogarth’ (_Works_, ed. E. V. Lucas, I. 70).
PAGE
364. _That old Mother W._ It is not clear to what figure Northcote
refers. The procuress in _The Harlot’s Progress_ (Plate I.) was
the notorious Mother Needham who died in 1731.
_Fielding has tried_, _etc._ _Tom Jones_, Book IV. chap. ii.
_That remark of his._ Cf. _ante_, p. 268, and vol. VIII. p. 442.
‘_With her pie-dish_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt’s phrase. See vol. VIII. p.
137.
367. _The ‘Possessed Boy.’_ A fresco in the chapel of San Nilo,
Grotta Ferrata. The drawing from this fresco was presumably
by John Bryant Lane (1788–1868), who spent ten years in Rome
(1817–1827).
_The late Edinburgh murders._ See _ante_, p. 353 and note.
_The group at Ambrose’s._ See Wilson’s _Noctes Ambrosianæ_.
368. _One of his tales._ Crabbe’s tale ‘The Confidant,’ upon which
Lamb founded _The Wife’s Trial; or, the Intruding Widow_,
published in _Blackwood_, 1828.
_Tam O’Shanter._ Statues of Tam O’Shanter and Souter Johnny, by
Thoms, were exhibited in London in 1829.
_Ducrow._ Andrew Ducrow (1793–1842), the equestrian performer.
CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (2)
369. G. Godwin, probably.
370. _A classical education._ Cf. vol. I. (_The Round Table_), p. 5
and note.
TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR
Republished by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in his edition of _The Round Table_
(Bohn, 1871). Nos. I.–X. appeared in _The Atlas_ on Sept. 27, 1829; Nos.
XI.–XVII. on Oct. 4, 1829. The following additional ‘Trifle’ (XVIII.)
appeared in Bohn’s Library, though not in the Magazine: ‘The French
Revolutionists in the “Reign of Terror,” with Robespierre at their head,
made one grand mistake. They really thought that by getting rid of the
patrons and abettors of the ancient _régime_ they should put an end to
the breed of tyrants and slaves; whereas in order to do this it would be
necessary to put an end to the whole human race.’
PAGE
372. _It was merely a fashion_, _etc._ See Byron’s letter to Murray on
Bowles and Pope (_Letters, etc._, ed. Prothero, V. 553 and
note).
‘_Procrastination_,’ _etc._ Young, _Night Thoughts_, I. 393.
375. ‘_Ears polite._’ Pope, _Moral Essays_, IV. 150.
‘_Inconstant moon._’ _Romeo and Juliet_, II. 2.
COMMON SENSE
Now republished for the first time.
PAGE
377. ‘_Its price_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Job_ xxviii. 18.
‘_Fairly worth the seven._’ Pope, _Moral Essays_, IV. 44.
‘_Comes home_,’ _etc._ Bacon, _Essays_, Dedication.
378. ‘_Fear_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, II. 325.
_Commodore Trunnion_, _etc._ See _Peregrine Pickle_, Chap. viii.
379. ‘_They have_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Julius Cæsar_, Act II. Sc. 1.
380. ‘_Crack_,’ _etc._ ‘The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and
kye.’ Burns, _Cotter’s Saturday Night_, St. VIII.
_Phlegmatic C——._ Hazlitt probably refers to Cobbett. Cf. a
passage in _Table-Talk_ (vol. VI. p. 102).
THE SPIRIT OF CONTROVERSY
Now republished for the first time.
381. ‘_Envy_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘From envy, hatred, and malice, and all
uncharitableness.’ _The Litany._
383. ‘_Root of the matter._’ _Job_ xix. 28.
‘_Their hearts_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ xxiv. 32.
‘_A coil and pudder._’ See _ante_, notes to pp. 309 and 335.
_Mr. Taylor’s discourses._ Robert Taylor (1784–1844), the
notorious deistical clergyman, who, early in 1828, had been
sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for a blasphemous discourse.
_The Duke of Newcastle._ The fourth Duke (1785–1851), a violent
opponent of Catholic Emancipation passed by Wellington’s
ministry in 1829.
‘_Strange_,’ _etc._ Byrom, _On the Feuds between Handel and
Bononcini_.
384. ‘_Like a thick scarf_,’ _etc._ See _ante_, note to p. 82.
‘_Whose edge_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_Of whatsoe’er descent_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Absalom and
Achitophel_, I. 100–3.
ENVY
Republished in _Sketches and Essays_.
387. ‘_Jealous leer malign._’ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 503.
388. _‘Phœnix_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._ v. 272.
‘_Though wondering senates_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, I.
184–7.
390. ‘_Like to a gate_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III.
Sc. 3.
391. ‘_The learned pate_,’ _etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
ON PREJUDICE
This and the two following essays were published together in _Sketches
and Essays_.
392. ‘_God’s image_,’ _etc._ Fuller, _The Holy State_, II. 20, ‘The
Good Sea-Captain.’
_Mr. Murray no longer libels men of colour._ In _Sketches and
Essays_ these words were changed to ‘men of colour are no
longer to be libelled.’
393. ‘_That one_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
PAGE
395. ‘_Most ignorant_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Measure for Measure_, Act II. Sc.
2.
‘_Cherish_,’ _etc._ _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 102).
‘_Rings the earth_,’ _etc._ Cf. Cowper, _The Task_, III. 129–30.
396. ‘_Murder to dissect._’ Wordsworth, _The Tables Turned_, l. 28.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
This essay, which does not seem to have been published in _The Atlas_,
is printed from _Sketches and Essays_.
PAGE
396. ‘_Reason_,’ _etc._ Cf. _1 Peter_ iii. 15.
398. ‘_There is nothing_,’ _etc._ Cf. vol. VIII. (_English Comic
Writers_) p. 124 and note.
400. ‘_Thus shall we_,’ _etc._ Cf. _1 John_ iv. I.
‘_Comes home_,’ _etc._ Bacon, _Essays_, Dedication.
‘_Still, small voice._’ _1 Kings_ xix. 12.
ON PARTY SPIRIT
Published in _Winterslow_.
402. ‘_The salt of the earth._’ _S. Matthew_ v. 13.
‘_Cuts_,’ _etc._ Cf. Cowper, _The Task_, III. 208–9.
‘_The sentiment_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 218 and note.
PROJECT FOR A NEW THEORY, ETC.
This essay was published in _Literary Remains_, and again, more fully,
in _Winterslow_, where it is dated 1828. It may possibly have been
printed in _The Atlas_ for 1829, a complete file of which the Editors
have not been able to find. The essay is here printed from _Winterslow_.
See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs_ (1867), I. 24 _et seq._
PAGE
405. _Mr. Currie._ This should apparently be Corrie. See _Memoirs_, I.
25.
_The Test and Corporation Acts._ Repealed in 1828.
409. ‘_I am monarch_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _Verses supposed to be written
by Alexander Selkirk_.
‘_Founded as the rock._’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
410. _Mr. Burke talks_, _etc._ Hazlitt seems to refer to Burke’s
Essay, _On the Sublime and Beautiful_, Part IV. §25.
411. ‘_There’s no divinity_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act IV. Sc. 5.
412. _Essay on Wages. An Essay on the Circumstances which determine
the Rate of Wages, etc._ (1826).
‘_Throw your bread_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ecclesiastes_ xi. 1.
413. ‘_While this machine_,’ etc. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
419. ‘_Like the wild goose_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
ON THE CONDUCT OF LIFE, ETC.
Published in _Literary Remains_, from which it is here reprinted. See
Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs_ (1867), I. 16, where the date of the essay
is fixed as 1822, when Hazlitt’s son was ten years old.
PAGE
425. ‘_The salt of the earth._’ _S. Matthew_ v. 13.
‘_According to your own dignity_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II.
Sc. 2.
428. ‘_How shall we part_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, XI. 282–5.
‘_The study of the Classics_,’ _etc._ See vol. I. (_The Round
Table_) p. 4 and notes.
431. ‘_Practique_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Sc. 1.
435. ‘_We hunt the wind_,’ _etc._ See _Don Quixote_, Part I. Book II.
chap. xiii.
‘_Quit, quit_,’ _etc._ Cf. Suckling’s Song, ‘Why so pale and wan,
fond lover?’
436. ‘_When on the yellow_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _Love_, St. 16.
437. ‘_Nods and winks_,’ _etc._ Cf. _L’Allegro_, 28.
439. ‘_Paled_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
BELIEF, WHETHER VOLUNTARY?
Published in _Literary Remains_ (from which it is here printed) and in
_Winterslow_.
‘_Thy wish_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act IV. Sc. 5.
Note. Cf. _ante_, p. 317.
441. ‘_Blown about_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Ephesians_ iv. 14.
‘_Infinite agitation of wit._’ Bacon, _The Advancement of
Learning_, Book I. iv. 5.
_Sir Isaac Newton, etc._ Newton published _Observations on the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John_ (1733),
and Napier of Merchiston _A Plaine Discovery of the whole
Revelation of St. John_ (1594).
442. ‘_Masterless passion_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
IV. Sc. 1.
‘_Fear_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V. Sc. 1.
443. _January and May._ See Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_, ‘The
Merchant’s Tale.’
444. _A good remark in ‘Vivian Grey.’_ See Book IV. chap. V.
DEFINITION OF WIT
Published in _Literary Remains_ from which it is here reprinted. Cf. the
essay ‘On Wit and Humour’ in vol. VIII. (_English Comic Writers_) pp.
5–30.
PAGE
445. ‘_Wherein_,’ _etc._ See vol. VIII. pp. 18–19.
‘_The squandering glances_,’ _etc._ _As You Like it_, Act II. Sc.
7.
446. ‘_Revive_,’ _etc._ Quoted elsewhere from Scott.
448. ‘_Foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_Skin_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.
449. ‘_In cut and dye_,’ _etc._ _Hudibras_, I. I. 243–4.
‘_The house_,’ _etc._ Misquoted from Swift’s _Vanbrugh’s House_.
450. ‘_Turned from black to red._’ _Hudibras_, II. II. 32.
‘_Like jewels_,’ _etc._ Collins, Ode, _The Manners_, 55.
451. ‘_Pray lend me_,’ _etc._ Farquhar, _The Beaux Stratagem_, Act V.
Sc. 4.
453. ‘_A forked radish_,’ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 2.
PERSONAL POLITICS
Published in _Literary Remains_, where the author’s son says that it was
‘written during my father’s last illness, immediately after the French
Revolution of 1830.’ The essay, which must have been written after the
‘Three Days’ (see _post_, p. 461, note) is here reprinted from _Literary
Remains_.
PAGE
456. ‘_Ay, every inch a King!_’ _King Lear_, Act IV. Sc. 6.
‘_Cooped_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_Himself again._’ _Richard III._ (Cibber’s version), Act V. Sc.
3.
458. ‘_Solely_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Shall be in him_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
459. ‘_Smile_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Ever strong_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act III. Sc. 1.
460. _The late King._ George IV. died on June 26, 1830.
461. _Let him go where he chooses._ Charles X. arrived in England on
Aug. 17, 1830.
Note. _The Revolution of the Three Days._ This began on July 27,
1830.
EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS
This paper was printed in Leigh Hunt’s _The Tatler_ for March, 1831
(vol. II.), and also, separately, in pamphlet form. Mr. Bertram Dobell
kindly showed to the Editors a copy of this pamphlet in his possession
which bore the following (anonymous) marginal note: ‘Written by Hazlitt,
and a little altered by Mr. Basil Montagu—Mr. Isaac Goldsmid caused this
little tract to be written, and defrayed all the expenses of authorship,
printing, etc. It was the last production, I think, of Hazlitt’s pen.’
From a proof in the Editors’ possession it is clear that the essay was
sent by Hazlitt’s son to _The Daily News_ and set up in type in 1849,
but it seems never to have been published by that journal. The essay is
here reprinted from the pamphlet. _The Tatler_ and _The Daily News_
proof show only trifling typographical variations. It will be remembered
that Macaulay’s maiden speech (April 5, 1830) was in favour of a bill
for the removal of Jewish disabilities. The emancipation of the Jews was
not effected till 1858.
PAGE
461. ‘_We have reformed_,’ _etc._ Cf. Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 2.
463. ‘_My kingdom_,’ _etc._ _S. John_ xviii. 36.
464. ‘_And pure religion_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, Sonnet, _Written in
London, September 1802_.
ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH
_Fraser’s Magazine_ for January 1831 contains an article on Capital
Punishment in which the author introduces an extract from an essay by
Hazlitt on the same subject. The extract is thus introduced: ‘It forms
part of an essay which was written a few years ago by the late W.
Hazlitt, at the request of a society then existing in London for
obtaining a repeal of that formidable law, and seems to contain pretty
much the sum of what might be brought forward against that punishment by
a philosophical reasoner. It has never yet been published.’ Hazlitt’s
essay has not been discovered, and this rather obscure fragment is
reprinted from _Fraser’s Magazine_.
PAGE
466. _Beccaria._ Cesare, Marchese de Beccaria (1735?–1794), whose
famous work, _On Crimes and Punishments_, appeared in 1764.
‘_It is not the intensity_,’ _etc._ Cf. Beccaria, chap. xxviii.
‘_Crimes are more effectually prevented_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._ chap,
xxvii.
470. _In Mr. Bentham’s phrase._ See (e.g) _Theory of Legislation_,
Part III. chap. vi.
Note. For Burgh’s book see vol. IV. (_Reply to Malthus_), p. 85
_et seq._ and notes.
ADDENDA TO THE NOTES IN VOLS. I.–XI.
VOL. I.
PAGE
3. _The miser ‘robs himself,’_ _etc._ Cf. _Joseph Andrews_, Book
IV. chap. vii.
23. ‘_Because on earth_,’ _etc._ See vol. X., note to p. 63.
52. ‘_A mistress_,’ _etc._ Goldsmith, _The Traveller_, 152.
57. ‘_Pure_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Persius_, Sat. II. l. 133.
68. ‘_Two happy things_,’ _etc._ _The Tatler_ (No. 40) quotes the
epigram thus:
‘In marriage are two happy things allowed,
A wife in wedding-sheets, and in a shroud.
How can a marriage state then be accursed,
Since the last day’s as happy as the first?’
85. ‘_Painting was jealous_,’ _etc._ Vasari records a similar
saying (_Lives_, ed. Blashfield and Hopkins, 1897, vol. IV. p.
218).
105. ‘_In that first garden_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘In that first garden
of our simpleness.’ Daniel, _Hymen’s Triumph_, I. 1.
112. ‘_And visions_,’ _etc._ This couplet, a favourite quotation
of Hazlitt’s, occurs in a letter from Gray to Horace Walpole
(_Letters_, ed. Tovey, I. 7–8). The lines are apparently a
translation (by Gray) of Virgil, _Æneid_, VI. 282–84.
135. ‘_Heaves no sigh_,’ _etc._ See vol. V., note to p. 30.
139. _The new Patent Blacking._ Cf. Moore’s _Parody of a
Celebrated Letter_, 94–6.
391. ‘_The word_,’ _etc._ Cf. _2 Henry IV._, III. 2.
292. ‘_Go, go_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wycherley, _The Plain Dealer_, v. I.
427. _Turnspit of the King’s kitchen._ See vol. XII. (_Fugitive
Writings_), p. 291 and note.
VOL. II.
310. ‘_Both living and loving._’ Lamb’s version of Thekla’s Song
in _The Piccolomini_. See Coleridge’s _Poetical Works_, ed. J.
D. Campbell, p. 648.
311. ‘_Winged wound._’ Dryden, _The Hind and the Panther_, I. 6.
347. ‘_Who had been beguiled_,’ _etc._ Leigh Hunt, _The Story of
Rimini_, Canto III.
363. ‘_Throws a cruel sunshine on a fool._’ Armstrong, _The Art
of Preserving Health_, Book IV.
396. _The man who bought Punch._ See vol. XII. p. 353.
VOL. III.
38. _The Room over the way._ See Cobbett’s _Weekly Political
Register_, Sept. 1817 (_Selections, etc._, v. 259).
41. _St. Peter is well at Rome._ _Don Quixote_, Part II. Book
III. chap, xli., and elsewhere.
45. ‘_Lest the courtiers_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, II. 2.
60. ‘_One note day and night._’ Burke, _Regicide Peace_ (_Select
Works_, ed. Payne, p. 51).
63. ‘_Which fear_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, II. 325.
166. ‘_In Philharmonia’s undivided dale._’ Cf. ‘O’er peaceful
Freedom’s undivided dale.’ Coleridge, _Monody on the Death of
Chatterton_, 140.
171. ‘_Unslacked of motion._’ See vol. IV. p. 42 and note.
174. ‘_Of whatsoever race_,’ _etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Absalom and
Achitophel_, I. 100–103.
239. ‘_Meek mouths ruminant._’ Cf. ‘With ruminant meek mouths.’
Leigh Hunt, _The Story of Rimini_, Canto II.
243. The Essay on ‘The Effects of War and Taxes,’ appeared also
in The _New Scots Magazine_ for Oct. 1818.
259. ‘_Soul-killing lies_,’ _etc._ Lamb, _John Woodvil_, Act II.
268. ‘_Certain so wroth_,’ _etc._ Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_,
The Prologue, 451–2.
273. ‘_People of the nicest imaginations_,’ _etc._ Cf. Swift,
_Thoughts on Various Subjects_.
284. ‘_Resemble the flies of a summer._’ Cf. ‘Men would become
little better than the flies of a summer.’ Burke, _Reflections
on the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II.
112).
328. ‘_A new creation_,’ _etc._ Goldsmith, _The Traveller_, 296.
VOL. IV.
17. ‘_Sacro_,’ _etc._ Quoted in the notes to Junius. See notes to
Letter XXXVI.
24. _To elevate and surprise._ The Duke of Buckingham’s _The
Rehearsal_, I. 1.
44. ‘_Your very nice people_,’ _etc._ See _ante_, note to vol.
III. p. 273.
147. ‘_Where he picks clean teeth._’ Cowper, _The Task_, II. 627.
217. ‘_When he saw_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _Remorse_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
220. _Pingo in eternitatem._ A saying attributed to Zeuxis. See
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s _Discourses_, No. III.
311. ‘_Sithence no fairy lights_,’ _etc._ See vol. XI. pp. 224,
268, and notes.
VOL. V.
9. ‘_And visions_,’ _etc._ See _ante_, note to vol. I. p. 112.
10. ‘_Obscurity_,’ _etc._ See vol. XI. p. 224 and note.
120. ‘_And that green wreath_,’ _etc._ Southey, _Carmen
Nuptiale_, Proem, St. 9.
215. ‘_A foot_,’ _etc._ Cf. Donne, _The Storm_, 3–4.
277. _Friar Onion._ See Boccaccio, _The Decameron_, Sixth Day,
Novel X.
280. ‘_That, like a trumpet_,’ _etc._ Cf. Leigh Hunt, _The Story
of Rimini_, Canto III.
345. ‘_The last of those fair clouds_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth,
_The Excursion_, VII. 1014–16.
372. For the note on Lord Dorset _read_ Charles Sackville
(1638–1706), sixth Earl of Dorset, author of ‘To all you ladies
now on land,’ included with other songs in Hazlitt’s _Select
British Poets_.
VOL. VI.
23. ‘_Those suns and skies so pure._’ Warton, Sonnet (IX.) to the
River Lodon.
93. ‘_The fair variety of things._’ Akenside, _Pleasures of the
Imagination_, I. 78.
94. _A neighbouring Baronet._ See vol. XII., note to p. 202.
96. ‘_Like life and death_,’ _etc._ Cf. Lamb., _John Woodvil_,
Act II.
106. ‘_The beautiful is vanished_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _The Death
of Wallenstein_, v. I.
113. ‘_Like a faint shadow_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, II.
vii. 29.
152. Note. ‘_The worse, the second fall of man._’ Cf. Windham,
_Speeches_, I. 311 (March 13, 1797).
156. ‘_To warn and scare._’ Rev. Sneyd Davies, _To the Honourable
and Reverend F. C._ (Dodsley, _Collection of Poems_, VI. 138).
189. ‘_The vine-covered hills_,’ _etc._ William Roscoe, _Lines
written in 1788_, parodied in _The Anti-Jacobin_.
211. ‘_Free from the Sirian star_,’ _etc._ Beaumont and Fletcher,
_Philaster_, Act v. Sc. 3.
218. ‘_It was out of all plumb_,’ _etc._ _Tristram Shandy_, Book
III. chap. xii.
225. ‘_Stud of night-mares._’ Cf. ‘I confess an occasional
night-mare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of
them.’ Lamb, _Essays of Elia_ (Witches, and other Night-Fears).
243. ‘_Tall, opaque words._’ Hazlitt was perhaps quoting from
himself. See vol. VIII. p. 257.
259. ‘_To angels ’twas most like._’ _The Flower and the Leaf_,
St. 19.
308. ‘_Wild wit_,’ _etc._ Gray, Ode, _On a Distant Prospect of
Eton College_.
317. ‘_As much again to govern it._’ This line is not Butler’s,
but Pope’s. See _An Essay on Criticism_, 80–81:
‘There are whom heav’n has blest with store of wit,
Yet want as much again to manage it.’
The couplet was changed in the 4to edition of 1743.
VOL. VII.
189. ‘_Subtilised savages._’ ‘Nor as yet have we subtilised
ourselves into savages.’ Burke, _Refections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 101).
273. ‘_As a saving of cheese-parings_,’ _etc._ See Windham’s
_Speeches_, I. 311 (March 13, 1797).
282. ‘_As if they thrilled_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, II.
xii. 78.
VOL. VIII.
93. ‘_Not one of the angles_,’ _etc._ _Tristram Shandy_, Book
III. chap. xii.
164. ‘_Shines like Hesperus_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I.
vii. 30.
371. ‘_A singing face._’ _Bombastes Furioso_, Sc. I.
437. ‘_Such were the joys_,’ _etc._ Bickerstaffe, _Love in a
Village_, II. 1.
VOL. IX.
64. ‘_Play at bowls_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt elsewhere quotes these
words as from ‘an old song.’
106. ‘_To dream and be an Emperour._’ Cf. ‘I am like a man that
dreamt he was an Emperour.’ Fletcher, _The Spanish Curate_, II.
2.
245. ‘_Perceive a fury_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, IV. 2.
292. ‘_Retire, the world shut out_,’ _etc._ Young, _Night
Thoughts_ (IX.).
429. _The Gods_, ‘_the children of Homer_.’ Lucien Buonaparte,
_Charlemagne_. See vol XI. (_Fugitive Writings_), p. 232.
VOL. X.
187. ‘_Empurpling all the ground._’ Cf. _Lycidas_, 141.
208. ‘_Relegated to obscure cloisters_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burke,
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed.
Payne, II. 121).
260. ‘_Yet his infelicity_,’ _etc._ Cf. Webster, _The Duchess of
Malfy_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
314. _The American Farmer’s Letters._ _Letters from an American
Farmer_, by Hector St. John Crevecœur (1731–1813), published
1794.
378. ‘_Hold our hands_,’ _etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_,
72.
VOL. XI.
277. ‘_I take her body_,’ _etc._ These lines are not Suckling’s,
but from a song by Congreve, beginning ‘Tell me no more I am
deceived.’
336. ‘_Loud as a trumpet_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Palamon and Arcite_,
III. 85.
338. ‘_Like importunate Guinea fowls_,’ _etc._ Burke’s _Regicide
Peace_ (ed. Payne, p. 51).
427 (and p. 501). ‘_Hymns its good god_,’ _etc._ Cf. Thomson,
_The Castle of Indolence_, I. x.
488. ‘_Each other’s beams to share_,’ Collins, Ode, _The
Manners_, 56.
The following printer’s errors may be noted:—
Vol. I. p. 436 (note to p. 142). Read _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act I. Sc.
1.
Vol. II. p. 440 (note to p. 391). For _Huckman_ read _Hackman_.
Vol. V. p. 391 (note to p. 97). Read _The Spirit of the Age_, vol. IV.,
etc.
Vol. V. p. 406 (note to p. 254). Read _Here be woods_.
Vol. V. p. 410 (note to p. 318). The words ‘The Countess ... in 1690’
belong to the note above.
Vol. VI. p. 519 (note to p. 435). For 1870 _read_ 1780.
Vol. IX. p. 458 (note to p. 247). _Read_ Sir Martin Archer Shee.
Vol. IX. p. 463 (note to p. 317). For Mallard _read_ Mallord.
INDEX
TO THE TITLES OF HAZLITT’S WRITINGS
Abstract Ideas, On, xi. 1.
Acted Drama in London, Essays on, contributed to the London Magazine,
viii. 381.
Actors and Acting, On, i. 153, 156.
—— and the Public, xi. 348.
—— ought to sit in the Boxes? Whether, vi. 272.
Adelaide, or the Emigrants, viii. 308.
All’s Well that Ends Well, i. 329.
Alsop’s Rosalind, Mrs., viii. 252.
American Literature, Dr. Channing, x. 310.
Ancient and Modern Literature, On the Spirit of—On the German Drama,
contrasted with that of the Age of Elizabeth, v. 345.
Angerstein’s Collection, Mr., ix. 7.
Anglade Family, The, viii. 279.
Antiquity, On, vii. 252.
Antony and Cleopatra, i. 228; viii. 190.
Apostates, On Modern, iii. 155.
Application to Study, On, vii. 55.
Arguing in a Circle, xii. 285.
Aristocracy of Letters, On the, vi. 205.
Art, Fragments on, ix. 489.
Artaxerxes, viii. 192.
Arts are not Progressive? Why the, A Fragment, i. 160.
As You Like It, i. 338.
Bacon’s Works, Character of Lord, compared as to style with Sir Thomas
Browne and Jeremy Taylor, v. 326.
Ballads, On the Old English, v. 123.
Ballets, Two New, viii. 353.
Bannister’s Farewell, Mr., viii. 229.
Barbarossa, viii. 372.
Barry, James, ix. 413.
Beaumont, F., v. 295.
—— and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger, On, v. 248.
Beauty, On, i. 68.
Beggar’s Opera, On the, i. 65; viii. 193, 254; xi. 373.
Belief, Whether Voluntary, xii. 439.
Bentham, Jeremy, iv. 189; xi. 411.
Bertram, viii. 304.
Bonaparte, iii. 52; iii. 350.
—— and Muller, iii. 154.
Bonaparte’s Collection, etc., Lucien, xi. 237.
Booth’s Duke of Gloster, Mr., viii. 354;
Iago, viii. 355;
Richard, viii. 357.
Bourbons and Bonaparte, The, iii. 52.
Bowles, Mr., xi. 486.
Boyle’s Rosalind, Miss, viii. 336.
British Institution, xi. 242, 246, 248.
Brougham, Mr., iv. 318.
—— Esq., M.P., The Speech of Henry, iii. 127, 132.
Browne, Sir Thomas, v. 326.
Brunton’s Rosalind, Miss, xi. 396.
Buncle, On John, i. 51.
Burdett, Sir F., iv. 319.
Burke, Character of, Mr., iii. 252, 325.
Burleigh House, Pictures at, ix. 62.
Burns and the Old English Ballads, On, v. 123.
Busy Body, The, viii. 270.
Butler, viii. 49.
Byron, Lord, iv. 253; xi. 486.
—— and Wordsworth, xii. 328.
Campbell, Mr., iv. 343.
Canning, Character of, xi. 334.
Cant and Hypocrisy, On, xii. 330, 336.
Castle of Andalusia, viii. 329.
Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution, On the, i. 140, 146; ix.
311.
Chalmers, Dr., xii. 275.
Channing, Dr., x. 310.
Chapman, v. 223.
Characteristics in the Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, i. 351.
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, i. 165.
Charlemagne: ou l’Église délivrée, xi. 230, 234.
Chatham, Character of Lord, iii. 321.
Chaucer and Spenser, On, v. 19.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, xi. 420.
Civil and Criminal Legislation, Project for a New Theory of, xii. 405.
Classical Education, On, i. 4.
Clerical Character, On the, iii. 266, 271, 277.
Cobbett, Mr., iv. 334;
Character of, vi. 50.
Coffee-House Politicians, On, vi. 189.
Coleridge, Mr., iv. 212; xi. 411;
Memorabilia of, xii. 346.
Coleridge’s Christabel, x. 411; xi. 580;
Lay-Sermon, iii. 152; x. 120;
Lectures, xi. 416;
Literary Life, x. 135.
Collins, v. 104.
Comedy of Errors, The, i. 351.
Comic Writers of the Last Century, On the, viii. 149.
Common-Place Critics, On, i. 136.
Common Places, xi. 541.
—— Sense, xii. 377.
Comus, viii. 230.
Conduct of Life, On the; or, Advice to a Schoolboy, xii. 423.
Congress, whether the Friends of Freedom can entertain any sanguine
Hopes of the favourable Results of the ensuing, iii. 103.
Congreve, viii. 70.
Conquest of Taranto, The, viii. 366.
Consistency of Opinion, On, xi. 508.
Controversy, The Spirit of, xii. 381.
Conversation of Authors, On the, vii. 24, 35.
Conversations as Good as Real, xii. 363, 369.
Coriolanus, i. 214; viii. 347.
Corporate Bodies, vi. 264.
Country People, Character of the, xi. 309.
Courier and Times Newspaper, On the, iii. 58.
—— The, and ‘the Wat Tyler,’ iii. 200.
Court Influence, On, iii. 254, 259.
—— Journal, The, A Dialogue, xii. 354.
Cowley, Butler, Suckling, Etherege, etc., On, viii. 49.
Cowper, v. 85.
Crabbe, Mr., iv. 343; xi. 603.
Criticism, On, vi. 214.
Curran, the late Mr., xii. 353.
Cymbeline, i. 179.
Dandy School, The, xi. 343.
Daniel, v. 295.
Dansomanie, The, xi. 299.
Deckar, v. 223.
D’Enghien, The Duke, xi. 577.
Defoe, Wilson’s Life and Times of Daniel, x. 355.
Depth and Superficiality, On, vii. 346.
Didone Abandonnata, viii. 196.
Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority, On the, vi. 279.
Disagreeable People, On, xii. 173.
Distant Objects Please, Why, vi. 255.
Distressed Mother, The, viii. 334.
Don Giovanni and Kean’s Eustace de St. Pierre, xi. 307.
Don Juan, viii. 362.
Dottrel-Catching, iii. 51.
Double Gallant, viii. 359.
Dowton in the Hypocrite, xi. 395.
Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, Lectures on, v. 169.
Drayton, v. 295.
Dreams, On, vii. 17.
Dryden and Pope, On, v. 68.
Duke of Milan, The, viii. 289.
Dulwich Gallery, The, ix. 17.
Dunlop’s History of Fiction, x. 5.
Edinburgh Review, Contributions to the, x. 1.
Editors, A Chapter on, xii. 230.
Edwards’s Richard III., Mr., viii. 247.
Effeminacy of Character, On, vi. 248.
Egotism, On, vii. 157.
Eldon, Lord, iv. 325.
Elgin Marbles, On the, ix. 326.
Elia, iv. 362.
Eloquence of the British Senate, iii. 387.
England in 1798, iii. 241.
English Comic Writers, Lectures on, viii. 1.
—— Grammar, xii. 342.
—— Novelists, On the, viii. 106.
—— Poets, Lectures on the, v. 1.
—— Students at Rome, ix. 367.
Envy, xii. 386;
On, vii. 97.
Essay-Writing, A Farewell to, xii. 321.
Etherege, viii. 49.
Every Man in His Humour, viii. 310.
Exit by Mistake, viii. 321.
Fair Penitent, The, viii. 287.
Fame, On Different Sorts of, i. 93.
Familiar Style, On, vi. 242.
Farquhar, viii. 70.
Fashion, On, xi. 437.
Fear of Death, On the, vi. 321.
Fight, The, xii. 1.
Fine Arts, ix. 377.
—— British Institution, xi. 187.
—— The Louvre, xi. 195.
Flaxman’s Lectures on Sculpture, x. 330.
Fletcher, v. 248.
Fletcher, P., v. 295.
Fonthill Abbey, ix. 348.
Footmen, xii. 131.
Ford, v. 248.
Four P’s, The, v. 274.
Fox, Character of Mr., iii. 337.
France and Italy, Notes on a Journey through, ix. 83.
Free Admission, The, xii. 119.
—— Thoughts on Public Affairs or Advice to a Patriot, in a Letter
addressed to a Member of the Old Opposition, iii. 1.
French Plays, xi. 352, 356.
Fudge Family in Paris, The, iii. 311.
Gainsborough’s Pictures, On, xi. 202.
Gammer Gurton’s Needle, v. 274.
Genius and Common Sense, vi. 31, 42.
—— and Originality, On, xi. 210.
—— is Conscious of its Powers? Whether, vii. 117.
Geoffrey Crayon, iv. 362.
George Barnwell, viii. 268.
German Drama, contrasted with that of the Age of Elizabeth, On the, v.
345.
Gifford, Mr., iv. 298.
—— Esq., A Letter to William, i. 363.
Godwin, William, iv. 200; x. 385.
Going a Journey, On, vi. 181.
Good-Nature, On, i. 100.
Good Old Times, Sketches of the History of the, xi. 582.
Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to a New and Improved, iv. 387.
Gray, v. 104.
Great and Little Things, On, vi. 226.
Grosvenor’s Collection of Pictures, Lord, ix. 49.
Gusto, On, i. 77.
Guy Faux, xi. 317, 323, 328.
Hamlet, i. 232.
Hampton Court, The Pictures at, ix. 42.
Harley’s Fidget, Mr., viii. 239.
Hartley and Helvetius, Remarks on the Systems of, vii. 434.
Haydon’s ‘Solomon,’ On, ix. 309.
—— ‘Christ’s Agony in the Garden,’ xi. 481.
Helvetius, vii. 434.
Henry IV., i. 277.
—— V., i. 285.
—— VI., i. 292.
—— VIII., i. 303.
Heroes of Romance are insipid, Why the, xii. 59.
Heywood, v. 192.
Hobbes, On the Writings of, xi. 25.
Hogarth’s ‘Marriage a-la-mode,’ Criticism on, ix. 75;
On, i. 25, 28.
Hogarth, On the Works of, On the grand and familiar style of painting,
viii. 133.
Holcroft, Memoirs of the late Thomas, ii. 1.
Honeymoon, The, xi. 409.
Hot and Cold, vii. 169.
Human Action, An Essay on the Principles of, vii. 383.
Humorous Lieutenant, The, viii. 353.
Hunt, Mr. Leigh, iv. 353.
Hunt’s Rimini, Leigh, x. 407.
Hypocrite, The, viii. 245.
Ideal, The, ix. 429; xi. 223.
Ignorance of the Learned, On the, vi. 70.
Imitation, On, i. 72.
—— of Nature, On the, xi. 216.
Immortality in Youth, On the Feeling of, xii. 150.
Indian Jugglers, The, vi. 77.
Iron Chest, The, viii. 342.
Irving, Rev. Mr., iv. 222; xii. 275.
Italian Opera, The, viii. 324.
Jane Shore, viii. 352.
Jealous Wife, The, viii. 316.
Jealousy and the Spleen of Party, On the, vii. 365.
Jeffrey, Mr., iv. 310.
Jews, Emancipation of the, xii. 461.
John Bull, Character of, i. 97.
—— du Bart, viii. 253.
—— Gilpin, xi. 305.
——, King, i. 306; xi. 410.
Jonson, Ben, v. 248; viii. 30.
Judging of Pictures, ix. 356.
Julius Cæsar, i. 195.
Kean, Charles, xi. 362.
—— Mr., viii. 292; xi. 389, 410.
—— and Miss O’Neill, xi. 407.
Kean’s Bajazet and ‘The Country Girl,’ Mr., xi. 274;
Eustace de St. Pierre, xi. 307;
Hamlet, viii. 185;
Iago, i. 14; viii. 190, 211, 215, 559;
Leon, viii. 233;
Macbeth, viii. 204, xi. 404;
Sir Giles Overreach, viii. 284;
Othello, viii. 189; xi. 405;
Richard, viii. 180, 200;
Richard II., viii. 221;
Richard III., xi. 399;
Romeo, viii. 208;
Shylock, viii. 179, 294;
Zanga, viii. 227.
Kemble’s Cato, Mr., viii. 342;
King John, viii. 345;
Sir Giles Overreach, viii. 302;
Penruddock, xi. 205;
Retirement, viii. 374.
King’s Proxy, The, viii. 243.
Knowledge of Character, On the, vi. 303.
—— of the World, On, xii. 297, 301, 306.
Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, x. 231.
Lawyers and Poets, On Modern, iii. 161.
Lay of the Laureate, The, Carmen Nuptiale, iii. 109.
Lay-Sermon, A.... By S. T. Coleridge, Esq., iii. 138.
Lear, i. 257.
Letter-Bell, The, xii. 235.
Liber Amoris or the New Pygmalion, ii. 283.
Libertine, The, viii. 370.
Liberty and Necessity, On, xi. 48.
Literary Character, On the, i. 131.
Living in London, viii. 242.
Living Poets, On the, v. 143.
—— to One’s-self, On, vi. 90.
Locke, Mr., as a great plagiarist, xi. 284.
Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, On, xi. 74.
Logic, xii. 350.
Londoners and Country People, On, vii. 66.
Look of a Gentleman, On the, vii. 209.
Lords, On the Conversation of, xii. 38.
Love for Love, viii. 278.
—— of Life, On the, i. 4.
—— of Power or Action as main a principle in the Human Mind as
Sensibility to Pleasure or Pain, The, xi. 263.
—— of the Country, On the, i. 17.
Lovers’ Vows, viii. 249.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, i. 332.
Lyly, v. 192.
Macbeth, i. 186.
Macirone, Francis ... Interesting Facts relating to the Fall and Death
of Joachim Murat, etc., iii. 177, 183.
Mackintosh, Sir James, iv. 279.
Macready’s Macbeth, Mr., xi. 315;
Othello, viii. 338.
Maid and the Magpie, The, viii. 244.
Main-Chance, The, xii. 78.
Malthus, Mr. iv. 287;
a Reply to the Essay on Population by the Rev. T. R., iv. 1.
Malthus’s Doctrines, An examination of Mr., iii. 356;
Essay, On the Originality of, iii. 361;
Principle to the Poor Laws, On the Application of Mr., iii. 374.
Man, Aphorisms on, xii. 209.
Man of the World, The, viii. 318, 350.
Manner, On, i. 41.
Manners, Essay on, xi. 269.
Marlow, v. 192.
Mars, Mademoiselle, vii. 324.
Marston, Chapman, Deckar, and Webster, On, v. 223.
Massinger, v. 248.
Maurice’s Parrot, Prince, iii. 101.
Maywood’s Shylock, Mr., viii. 374;
Zanga, xi. 397.
Means and Ends, On, xii. 184.
Measure for Measure, i. 345; viii. 281.
Merchant of Bruges, The, viii. 264.
—— of Venice, The, i. 320.
Merry England, xii. 15.
Merry Wives of Windsor, The, i. 349.
Merry’s Mandane, Miss, viii. 320.
Methodism, On the Causes of, i. 57.
Middleton, v. 192.
Midsummer Night’s Dream, On the, i. 61, 244; viii. 274.
Milton, v. 44.
Milton’s Eve, On the character of, i. 105;
Lycidas, On, i. 31;
Sonnets, On, vi. 174;
Versification, On, i. 36.
Miscellaneous Poems, F. Beaumont, P. Fletcher, Drayton, Daniel, etc.,
Sir P. Sidney’s Arcadia, and other Works, On, v. 295.
Modern Comedy, On, i. 10; viii. 551.
Monarchy, On the Spirit of, xii. 241.
Money, On the want of, xii. 136.
Moore, Mr. T., iv. 353.
Much Ado about Nothing, i. 335.
Muller, iii. 154.
Munden’s Sir Peter Teazle, xi. 392.
My First Acquaintance with Poets, xii. 259.
My Wife! What Wife?, viii. 237.
My Landlady’s Night-Gown, viii. 328.
New English Opera-House, viii. 314.
New Way to pay Old Debts, A, viii. 272.
Nicknames, On, xi. 442.
Northcote, Esq., R. A., Conversations of James, vi. 331.
Novelty and Familiarity, On, vii. 294.
Old Actors, Some of the, xi. 366.
Old Age of Artists, On the, vii. 88.
—— Customs, viii. 327.
—— English Writers and Speakers, On, vii. 311.
O’Neill’s Belvidera, Miss, viii. 261;
Elwina, viii. 256;
Juliet, viii. 198;
Lady Teazle, viii. 291;
Widow Cheerly, xi. 297.
Opera, The, xi. 426.
—— The Company at the, xi. 369.
Opposition, The, and ‘the Courier,’ iii. 240.
Oratorios, The, viii. 296.
Originality, ix. 423.
Oroonoko, xi. 301.
Othello, i. 200.
Oxford and Blenheim, Pictures at, ix. 69.
‘Pannel, The,’ and ‘The Ravens,’ xi. 303.
Paradox and Common-Place, On, vi. 146.
Parallel Passages in various Poets, xi. 282.
Parliamentary Eloquence, On the Present State of, xi. 464.
Partisanship, On the Spirit of, xi. 521.
Party-Spirit, On, xii. 402.
Past and Future, On the, vi. 21.
Pasta, Madame, and Mademoiselle Mars, vii. 324.
Patriotism, On, A Fragment, i. 67.
Patronage and Puffing, On, vi. 289.
Pedantry, On, i. 80, 84.
Penelope and the Dansomanie, xi. 299.
People? What is the, iii. 283, 292.
—— of Sense, On, vii. 242.
—— with One Idea, On, vi. 59.
Periodical Essayists, On the, viii. 91.
—— Press, The, x. 202.
Personal Character, On, vii. 230.
—— Identity, On, xii. 198.
—— Politics, xii. 456.
Persons One would Wish to have Seen, Of, xii. 26.
Peter Pindar, xii. 348.
‘Peveril of the Peak,’ xi. 537.
Philosophical Necessity, Doctrine of, xi. 277.
Picture-Galleries in England, Sketches of the Principal, ix. 1.
Picturesque and Ideal, On the, vi. 317.
‘Pirate, The,’ xi. 531.
Pitt and Buonaparte, iii. 350.
Pitt, Character of the late Mr., i. 125; iii. 346.
Plain Speaker, The, vii. 1.
Pleasure of Painting, On the, vi. 5, 13.
Pleasures of Hating, On the, vii. 127.
Poetry, xii. 339.
—— in General, On, v. 1.
Poetical Versatility, On, i. 151.
Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters, iii. 25.
Pope, v. 68.
—— Lord Byron and Mr. Bowles, xi. 486.
—— was a Poet, On the Question whether, xi. 430.
Popular Opinion, On the Causes of, xii. 316.
Population, On the Principle of, as affecting the schemes of Utopian
Improvement, iii. 367;
Queries relating to the Essay on, iii. 381.
Posthumous Fame, On, Whether Shakspeare was influenced by a love of it,
i. 21.
Poussin, On a Landscape of Nicolas, vi. 168.
Predominant Principles and Excitements in the Human Mind, On the, xi.
258.
Prejudice, On, xii. 391, 394, 396.
Press, The—Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Bentham, xi. 411.
Priestley, The late Dr., xii. 357.
Prose-Style of Poets, On the, vii. 5.
Public Opinion, On, xii. 311.
Pulpit Oratory, Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Irving, xii. 275.
Punishment of Death, On the, xii. 466.
Quarterly Review, The, iii. 192.
Queries and Answers; or the Rule of Contrary, xii. 296.
Racine, vii. 336.
‘Ravens, The,’ xi. 303.
Reading New Books, On, xii. 161.
—— Old Books, On, vii. 220.
Reason and Imagination, vii. 44.
Recruiting Officer, The, viii. 285.
Reform, The New School of, vii. 179.
Regal Character, On the, iii. 305.
Religious Hypocrisy, On, i. 128.
Respectable People, On, vii. 360; xi. 433.
Return from Parnassus, The, v. 274.
Reynolds, Life of Sir Joshua, x. 172.
Reynolds’s Discourses, Introduction to an account of Sir Joshua, xi.
208.
—— —— On Certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua, vi. 122, 131.
Richard Cœur de Lion, viii. 195.
—— II., i. 272.
—— III., i. 298; viii. 298.
Richesse de la langue, xii. 496.
Rochefoucault’s Maxims, On, xi. 253.
Romeo and Juliet, i. 248; viii. 300.
Round Table, The, i. 1.
Rousseau, On the Character of, i. 88.
Rowley, v. 192.
Royal Academy, ix. 434.
Salvator, Lady Morgan’s Life of, x. 276.
Schlegel on the Drama, x. 78.
Scholars, The Shyness of, xii. 68.
School for Scandal, The, viii. 250.
Scotch Character, On the, xii. 253.
Scott, Sir Walter, iv. 241.
—— —— Racine and Shakespear, vii. 336.
Sects and Parties, xii. 360.
Select British Poets, Preface and Critical List of Authors from, v.
365.
Self-Love, On, xi. 132.
—— and Benevolence, xii. 95, 104.
Shakespear, vii. 336;
Doubtful Plays of, i. 353;
On the Dramatic Writers contemporary with, Lyly, Marlow, Heywood,
Middleton, and Rowley, v. 192;
Poems and Sonnets, i. 357.
Shakespear’s Plays, Characters of, i. 165;
Female Characters, xi. 290.
Shakespeare, Historical Illustrations of, xi. 601.
Shakspeare and Ben Jonson, On, viii. 30.
—— and Milton, On, v. 44.
—— [and Posthumous Fame], i. 21.
Shelley’s Posthumous Poems, x. 256.
She Stoops to Conquer, xi. 403.
Sick Chamber, The, xi. 125.
Siddons, Mrs. viii. 312; xi. 381.
Siddons’s Lady Macbeth, Mrs., viii. 373.
Sidney’s Arcadia, Sir P., v. 295.
Single Plays, Poems, etc., The Four P’s, The Return from Parnassus,
Gammer Gurton’s Needle, and Other Works, On, v. 274.
Sismondi’s Literature of the South, x. 44.
Sitting for One’s Picture, On, vii. 107.
Smiles and Tears, viii. 266.
Society, A New View of, iii. 121.
Southey, Mr., iv. 262.
—— Poet-Laureat, iii. 48.
—— Robert.... A Letter to William Smith, iii. 210, 218, 224.
Southey’s New-Year’s Ode, Mr., iii. 49.
Spenser, v. 19.
Spirit of Obligations, vii. 78.
—— of the Age, The, iv. 185.
Spurzheim’s Theory, On Dr., vii. 137.
Spy-System, On the, iii. 232, 234.
Staël’s Account of German Philosophy and Literature, Madame de, xi.
162, 167, 172, 180.
Stafford’s Gallery, The Marquis of, ix. 27.
Stage, The, xi. 191;
A View of the English, viii. 169.
Standard Novels and Romances, x. 25.
State Prisoners, On the Treatment of, iii. 238.
Statesman’s Manual, The, ... by S. T. Coleridge, Esq., iii. 143.
Success in Life, On the Qualifications necessary to, vii. 195.
Suckling, viii. 49.
Sun-Dial, On a, xii. 51.
Swift, Young, Gray, Collins, etc., On, v. 104.
Table-Talk; or Original Essays on Men and Manners, vi. 1.
Taming of the Shrew, The, i. 341.
—— —— and L’Avare, xi. 377.
Taste, Thoughts on, xi. 450, 454, 459.
Tatler, On the, i. 7.
Taylor, Jeremy, v. 326.
Tempest, The, i. 238; viii. 234.
Tendency of Sects, On the, i. 47.
Theatres, The, and Passion Week, xi. 358.
Theatrical Debuts, viii. 341.
Thomson and Cowper, On, v. 85.
Thought and Action, On, vi. 101.
Three Quarters, etc., The, xi. 384.
Times Newspaper, The, iii. 169.
—— —— Illustration of the, iii. 155, 161.
Timon of Athens, i. 210.
Toad-Eaters and Tyrants, On the connection between, iii. 169.
Tooke, The Late Mr. Horne, iv. 231.
Tooke’s ‘Diversions of Purley,’ On, xi. 119.
Touch-Stone, The, viii. 368.
Trifles Light as Air, xii. 370.
Troilus and Cressida, i. 221.
Tucker’s Light of Nature Pursued, Preface to an Abridgment of, iv. 369.
Twelfth Night; or, What you Will, i. 313.
Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, i. 318.
Two Words, viii. 330.
Unknown Guest, The, viii. 224.
Vanbrugh, viii. 70.
Vandyke, On a Portrait of an English Lady, by, vii. 280.
Vatican, The, ix. 359.
Venice Preserved, xi. 402.
Vetus, iii. 57.
—— Illustrations of, iii. 63, 67, 73, 85, 90.
View of the English Stage, A, viii. 169.
Vulgarity and Affectation, On, vi. 156.
Walpole, Letters of Horace, x. 159.
War and Taxes, On the Effects of, iii. 243.
War, On the Late, iii. 96.
Wat Tyler, iii. 192, 200.
Webster, v. 223.
Wellesley, The Marquis, iii. 47.
Western, Esq., M.P., The Speech of Charles C., iii. 127, 132.
West’s Picture of Death on the Pale Horse, ix. 318.
Where to find a friend, viii. 258.
Wilberforce, Mr. iv. 325.
Wilkie’s Pictures, On Mr., xi. 249.
Williams’s Views in Greece, On, ix. 324.
Will-Making, On, vi. 113.
Wilson’s Landscapes, at the British Institution, xi. 198.
Wilton, Stourhead, etc., Pictures at, ix. 55.
Windsor Castle, The Pictures at, ix. 36.
Winter’s Tale, The, i. 324.
Wit and Humour, viii. 1.
Wit, Definition of, xii. 445.
Wonder, The, viii. 332; xi. 401.
Wordsworth, Mr., iv. 270; xi. 411; xii. 328.
Wordsworth’s poem, The Excursion, Observations on Mr., i. 111, 120.
—— new poem, The Excursion, Character of Mr., xi. 572.
Writing and Speaking, On the difference between, vii. 262.
Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, On, viii. 70.
Young, v. 104.
Young’s Hamlet, xi. 394.
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Footnote 1:
Those essays which are now republished for the first time are
indicated by an asterisk.
Footnote 2:
This essay was apparently not published in _The Atlas_.
Footnote 3:
Scroggins said of the Gas-man, that he thought he was a man of that
courage, that if his hands were cut off, he would still fight on with
the stumps—like that of Widrington,—
——‘In doleful dumps,
Who, when his legs were smitten off
Still fought upon his stumps.’
Footnote 4:
‘The gentle and free passage of arms at Ashby’ was, we are told, so
called by the Chroniclers of the time, on account of the feats of
horsemanship and the quantity of knightly blood that was shed. This
last circumstance was perhaps necessary to qualify it with the epithet
of ‘gentle,’ in the opinion of some of these historians. I think the
reason why the English are the bravest nation on earth is, that the
thought of blood or a delight in cruelty is not the chief excitement
with them. Where it is, there is necessarily a _reaction_; for though
it may add to our eagerness and savage ferocity in inflicting wounds,
it does not enable us to endure them with greater patience. The
English are led to the attack or sustain it equally well, because they
fight as they box, not out of malice, but to show pluck and manhood.
_Fair play and old England for ever!_ This is the only bravery that
will stand the test. There is the same determination and spirit shown
in resistance as in attack; but not the same pleasure in getting a cut
with a sabre as in giving one. There is, therefore, always a certain
degree of effeminacy mixed up with any approach to cruelty, since both
have their source in the same principle, _viz._ an over-valuing of
pain.[67] This was the reason the French (having the best cause and
the best general in the world) ran away at Waterloo, because they were
inflamed, furious, drunk with the blood of their enemies, but when it
came to their turn, wanting the same stimulus, they were panic-struck,
and their hearts and their senses failed them all at once.
Footnote 5:
The English are fond of change of scene; the French of change of
posture; the Italians like to sit still and do nothing.
Footnote 6:
Bells are peculiar to England. They jingle them in Italy during the
carnival as boys do with us at Shrovetide; but they have no notion of
ringing them. The sound of village bells never cheers you in
travelling, nor have you the lute or cittern in their stead. The
expression of ‘Merry Bells’ is a favourite and not one of the least
appropriate in our language.
Footnote 7:
The strict formality of French serious writing is resorted to as a
foil to the natural levity of their character.
Footnote 8:
See Newgate Calendar for 1758.
Footnote 9:
B—— at this time occupied chambers in Mitre court, Fleet Street.
Footnote 10:
Lord Bacon is not included in this list, nor do I know where he should
come in. It is not easy to make room for him and his reputation
together. This great and celebrated man in some of his works
recommends it to pour a bottle of claret into the ground of a morning,
and to stand over it, inhaling the perfumes. So he sometimes enriched
the dry and barren soil of speculation with the fine aromatic spirit
of his genius. His ‘Essays’ and his ‘Advancement of Learning’ are
works of vast depth and scope of observation. The last, though it
contains no positive discoveries, is a noble chart of the human
intellect, and a guide to all future inquirers.
Footnote 11:
As when a person asks you ‘whether you do not find a strong
resemblance between Rubens’s pictures and Quarles’s poetry?’—which is
owing to the critic’s having lately been at Antwerp and bought an
edition of Quarles’s Emblems. Odd combinations must take place where a
number of ideas are brought together, with only a thin, hasty
partition between them, and without a sufficient quantity of judgment
to discriminate. An Englishman, of some apparent consequence passing
by the St. Peter Martyr of Titian at Venice, observed ‘It was a copy
of the same subject by Domenichino at Bologna.’ This betrayed an
absolute ignorance both of Titian and of Domenichino, and of the whole
world of art: yet unless I had also seen the St. Peter at Bologna,
this connoisseur would have had the advantage of me, two to one, and
might have disputed the precedence of the two pictures with me, but
that chronology would have come to my aid. Thus persons who travel
from place to place, and roam from subject to subject, make up by the
extent and discursiveness of their knowledge for the want of truth and
refinement in their conception of the objects of it.
Footnote 12:
There are few things more contemptible than the conversation of mere
_men of the town_. It is made up of the technicalities and cant of all
professions, without the spirit or knowledge of any. It is flashy and
vapid, or is like the rinsings of different liquors at a night-cellar
instead of a bottle of fine old port. It is without body or clearness,
and a heap of affectation. In fact, I am very much of the opinion of
that old Scotch gentleman who owned that ‘he preferred the dullest
book he had ever read to the most brilliant conversation it had ever
fallen to his lot to hear!’
Footnote 13:
Is this a verbal fallacy? Or in the close, retired, sheltered scene
which I have imagined to myself, is not the sunflower a natural
accompaniment of the sun-dial?
Footnote 14:
‘Once more, companion of the lonely hour,
I’ll turn thee up again.’
_Bloomfield’s Poems—The Widow to her Hour-glass._
Footnote 15:
Rousseau has admirably described the effect of bells on the
imagination in a passage in the Confessions, beginning ‘_Le son des
cloches m’a toujours singulièrement affecté_,’ &c.
Footnote 16:
I have heard it said that carpenters, who do every thing by the square
and line, are honest men, and I am willing to suppose it. Shakspeare,
in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ makes Snug the Joiner the _moral_
man of the piece.
Footnote 17:
Mr. Bentham proposes to new-model the penal code, on the principle of
a cool and systematic calculation of consequences. Yet of all
philosophers, the candidates for Panopticons and Penitentiaries are
the most short-sighted and refractory. Punishment has scarcely any
effect upon them. Thieves steal under the scaffold; and if a person’s
previous feelings and habits do not prevent his running the risk of
the gallows, assuredly the fear of consequences, or his having already
escaped it, with all the good resolutions he may have made on the
occasion, will not prevent his exposing himself to it a second time.
It is true, most people have a natural aversion to being hanged. The
perseverance of culprits in their evil courses seems a fatality, which
is strengthened by the prospect of what is to follow. Mr. Bentham
argues that all ‘men act from calculation, even madmen reason.’ So far
it may be true that the world is not unlike a great Bedlam, or answers
to the title of an old play—‘A Mad World, my masters!’ This is our
world, but not his. Life, on looking back to it, too often resembles a
disturbed dream, which does not infer its having been guided by reason
in its progress.
Footnote 18:
[‘Have I not seen a household where love was not?’ says the author of
the ‘Betrothed;’ ‘where, although there was worth and good will, and
enough of the means of life, all was embittered by regrets, which were
not only vain, but criminal?’—‘I would take the _Ghost’s_ word for a
thousand pound,’ or in preference to that of any man living, though I
was told in the streets of Edinburgh, that Dr. Jamieson, the author of
the ‘Dictionary,’ was quite as great a man!]
Footnote 19:
_Certes_ more Whigs become Tories. This may also be accounted for
satisfactorily, though not very rationally.
Footnote 20:
I have said somewhere, that all professions that do not make money
_breed_ are careless and extravagant. This is not true of lawyers, &c.
I ought to have said that this is the case with all those that by the
regularity of their returns do not afford a prospect of realizing an
independence by frugality and industry.
Footnote 21:
‘Il a manqué au plus grand philosophe qu’aient eu les Francais, de
vivre dans quelque solitude des Alpes, dans quelque séjour éloigné, et
de lancer delà son livre dans Paris sans y venir jamais lui-même.
Rousseau avait trop de sensibilité et trop peu de raison, Buffon trop
d’hypocrisie à son jardin des plantes, Voltaire trop d’enfantillage
dans la tête, pour pouvoir juger le principe d’Helvétius,’—_De
l’Amour_, tom. 2. p. 230.
My friend Mr. Beyle here lays too much stress on a borrowed verbal
fallacy.
Footnote 22:
_Waverley_, vol. iii. p. 201.
Footnote 23:
This lady is not, it is true, at Covent Garden: I wish she were!
Footnote 24:
‘Mais vois la rapidité de cet astre qui vole et ne s’arrête
jamais.’—_New Eloise._
Footnote 25:
The thoughts of a captive can no more get beyond his prison-walls than
his limbs, unless they are busied in planning an escape; as, on the
contrary, what prisoner, after effecting his escape, ever suffered
them to return there, or took common precautions to prevent his own?
We indulge our fancy more than we consult our interest. The sense of
personal identity has almost as little influence in practice as it has
foundation in theory.
Footnote 26:
Taylor, of the Opera-House, used to say of Sheridan, that he could not
pull off his hat to him in the street without its costing him fifty
pounds; and if he stopped to speak to him, it was a hundred. No one
could be a stronger instance than he was of what is called _living
from hand to mouth_. He was always in want of money, though he
received vast sums which he must have disbursed; and yet nobody can
tell what became of them, for he paid nobody. He spent his wife’s
fortune (sixteen hundred pounds) in a six weeks’ jaunt to Bath, and
returned to town as poor as a rat. Whenever he and his son were
invited out into the country, they always went in two post-chaises and
four; he in one, and his son Tom following in another. This is the
secret of those who live in a round of extravagance, and are at the
same time always in debt and difficulty—they throw away all the ready
money they get upon any newfangled whim or project that comes in their
way, and never think of paying off old scores, which of course
accumulate to a dreadful amount. ‘Such gain the cap of him who makes
them fine, yet keeps his book uncrossed.’ Sheridan once wanted to take
Mrs. Sheridan a very handsome dress down into the country, and went to
Barber and Nunn’s to order it, saying he must have it by such a day,
but promising they should have ready money. Mrs. Barber (I think it
was) made answer that the time was short, but that ready money was a
very charming thing, and that he should have it. Accordingly, at the
time appointed she brought the dress, which came to five-and-twenty
pounds, and it was sent in to Mr. Sheridan: who sent out a Mr. Grimm
(one of his jackalls) to say he admired it exceedingly, and that he
was sure Mrs. Sheridan would be delighted with it, but he was sorry to
have nothing under a hundred pound bank-note in the house. She said
she had come provided for such an accident, and could give change for
a hundred, two hundred, or five hundred pound note, if it were
necessary. Grimm then went back to his principal for farther
instructions: who made an excuse that he had no stamped receipt by
him. For this, Mrs. B. said, she was also provided; she had brought
one in her pocket. At each message, she could hear them laughing
heartily in the next room at the idea of having met with their match
for once; and presently after, Sheridan came out in high good-humour,
and paid her the amount of her bill, in ten, five, and one pounds.
Once when a creditor brought him a bill for payment, which had often
been presented before, and the man complained of its soiled and
tattered state, and said he was quite ashamed to see it, ‘I’ll tell
you what I’d advise you to do with it, my friend,’ said Sheridan,
‘take it home, and write it upon _parchment_!’ He once mounted a horse
which a horse-dealer was shewing off near a coffee-house at the bottom
of St. James’s-street, rode it to Tattersall’s, and sold it, and
walked quietly back to the spot from which he set out. The owner was
furious, swore he would be the death of him; and, in quarter of an
hour afterwards they were seen sitting together over a bottle of wine
in the coffee-house, the horse-jockey with the tears running down his
face at Sheridan’s jokes, and almost ready to hug him as an honest
fellow. Sheridan’s house and lobby were beset with duns every morning,
who were told that Mr. Sheridan was not yet up, and shewn into the
several rooms on each side of the entrance. As soon as he had
breakfasted, he asked, ‘Are those doors all shut, John?’ and, being
assured they were, marched out very deliberately between them, to the
astonishment of his self-invited guests, who soon found the bird was
flown. I have heard one of his old City friends declare, that such was
the effect of his frank, cordial manner, and insinuating eloquence,
that he was always afraid to go to ask him for a debt of long
standing, lest he should borrow twice as much. A play had been put off
one night, or a favourite actor did not appear, and the audience
demanded to have their money back again: but when they came to the
door, they were told by the check-takers there was none for them, for
that Mr. Sheridan had been in the mean time, and had carried off all
the money in the till. He used often to get the old cobbler who kept a
stall under the ruins of Drury Lane to broil a beef-steak for him, and
take their dinner together. On the night that Drury Lane was burnt
down, Sheridan was in the House of Commons, making a speech, though he
could hardly stand without leaning his hands on the table, and it was
with some difficulty he was forced away, urging the plea, ‘What
signified the concerns of a private individual, compared to the good
of the state?’ When he got to Covent Garden, he went into the Piazza
Coffee-house, to steady himself with another bottle, and then strolled
out to the end of the Piazza to look at the progress of the fire. Here
he was accosted by Charles Kemble and Fawcett, who complimented him on
the calmness with which he seemed to regard so great a loss. He
declined this praise, and said—‘Gentlemen, there are but three things
in human life that in my opinion ought to disturb a wise man’s
patience. The first of these is bodily pain, and that (whatever the
ancient stoics may have said to the contrary) is too much for any man
to bear without flinching: this I have felt severely, and I know it to
be the case. The second is the loss of a friend whom you have dearly
loved; that, gentlemen, is a great evil: this I have also felt, and I
know it to be too much for any man’s fortitude. And the third is the
consciousness of having done an unjust action. That, gentlemen, is a
great evil, a very great evil, too much for any man to endure the
reflection of; but that’ (laying his hand upon his heart,) ‘but that,
thank God, I have never felt!’ I have been told that these were nearly
the very words, except that he appealed to the _mens conscia recti_
very emphatically three or four times over, by an excellent authority,
Mr. Mathews the player, who was on the spot at the time, a gentleman
whom the public admire deservedly, but with whose real talents and
nice discrimination of character his friends only are acquainted.
Sheridan’s reply to the watchman who had picked him up in the street,
and who wanted to know who he was, ‘I am Mr. Wilberforce!’—is well
known, and shews that, however frequently he might be at a loss for
money, he never wanted wit!
Footnote 27:
In Scotland, it seems, the draught of ale or whiskey with which you
commence the day, is emphatically called ‘taking your _morning_.’
Footnote 28:
Shylock’s lamentation over the loss of ‘his daughter and his ducats,’
is another case in point.
Footnote 29:
It is provoking enough, and makes one look like a fool, to receive a
printed notice of a blank in the last lottery, with a postscript
hoping for your future favours.
Footnote 30:
Fawcett’s ART OF WAR, a poem, 1794.
Footnote 31:
Lady Wortley Montague says, in one of her letters, that ‘she would
much rather be a rich _effendi_, with all his ignorance, than Sir
Isaac Newton, with all his knowledge.’ This was not perhaps an
impolitic choice, as she had a better chance of becoming one than the
other, there being many rich effendis to one Sir Isaac Newton. The
wish was not a very intellectual one. The same petulance of rank and
sex breaks out every where in these “_Letters_.” She is constantly
reducing the poets or philosophers who have the misfortune of her
acquaintance, to the figure they might make at her Ladyship’s levee or
toilette, not considering that the public mind does not sympathize
with this process of a fastidious imagination. In the same spirit, she
declares of Pope and Swift, that ‘had it not been for the
_good-nature_ of mankind, these two superior beings were entitled, by
their birth and hereditary fortune, to be only a couple of link-boys.’
Gulliver’s Travels, and the Rape of the Lock, go for nothing in this
critical estimate, and the world raised the authors to the rank of
superior beings, in spite of their disadvantages of birth and fortune,
_out of pure good-nature_! So, again, she says of Richardson, that he
had never got beyond the servants’ hall, and was utterly unfit to
describe the manners of people of quality; till in the capricious
workings of her vanity, she persuades herself that Clarissa is very
like what she was at her age, and that Sir Thomas and Lady Grandison
strongly resembled what she had heard of her mother and remembered of
her father. It is one of the beauties and advantages of literature,
that it is the means of abstracting the mind from the narrowness of
local and personal prejudices, and of enabling us to judge of truth
and excellence by their inherent merits alone. Woe be to the pen that
would undo this fine illusion (the only reality), and teach us to
regulate our notions of genius and virtue by the circumstances in
which they happen to be placed! You would not expect a person whom you
saw in a servants’ hall, or behind a counter, to write Clarissa; but
after he had written the work, to _prejudge_ it from the situation of
the writer, is an unpardonable piece of injustice and folly. His merit
could only be the greater from the contrast. If literature is an
elegant accomplishment, which none but persons of birth and fashion
should be allowed to excel in, or to exercise with advantage to the
public, let them by all means take upon them the task of enlightening
and refining mankind: if they decline this responsibility as too heavy
for their shoulders, let those who do the drudgery in their stead,
however inadequately, for want of their polite example, receive the
meed that is their due, and not be treated as low pretenders who have
encroached on the province of their betters. Suppose Richardson to
have been acquainted with the great man’s steward, or valet, instead
of the great man himself, I will venture to say that there was more
difference between him who lived in an _ideal world_, and had the
genius and felicity to open that world to others, and his friend the
steward, than between the lacquey and the mere lord, or between those
who lived in different rooms of the same house, who dined on the same
luxuries at different tables, who rode outside or inside of the same
coach, and were proud of wearing or of bestowing the same tawdry
livery. If the lord is distinguished from his valet by any thing else,
it is by education and talent, which he has in common with our author.
But if the latter shews these in the highest degree, it is asked what
are his pretensions? Not birth or fortune, for neither of these would
enable him to write a Clarissa. One man is born with a title and
estate, another with genius. That is sufficient; and we have no right
to question the genius for want of the _gentility_, unless the former
ran in families, or could be bequeathed with a fortune, which is not
the case. Were it so, the flowers of literature, like jewels and
embroidery, would be confined to the fashionable circles; and there
would be no pretenders to taste or elegance but those whose names were
found in the court list. No one objects to Claude’s Landscapes as the
work of a pastrycook, or withholds from Raphael the epithet of
_divine_, because his parents were not rich. This impertinence is
confined to men of letters; the evidence of the senses baffles the
envy and foppery of mankind. No quarter ought to be given to this
_aristocratic_ tone of criticism whenever it appears. People of
quality are not contented with carrying all the external advantages
for their own share, but would persuade you that all the intellectual
ones are packed up in the same bundle. Lord Byron was a later instance
of this double and unwarrantable style of pretension—_monstrum ingens,
biforme_. He could not endure a lord who was not a wit, nor a poet who
was not a lord. Nobody but himself answered to his own standard of
perfection. Mr. Moore carries a proxy in his pocket from some noble
persons to estimate literary merit by the same rule. Lady Mary calls
Fielding names, but she afterwards makes atonement by doing justice to
his frank, free, hearty nature, where she says ‘his spirits gave him
raptures with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in
a garret, and his happy constitution made him forget every thing when
he was placed before a venison pasty or over a flask of champagne.’
She does not want shrewdness and spirit when her petulance and conceit
do not get the better of her, and she has done ample and merited
execution on Lord Bolingbroke. She is, however, very angry at the
freedoms taken with the Great; _smells a rat_ in this indiscriminate
scribbling, and the familiarity of writers with the reading public;
and inspired by her Turkish costume, foretells a French or English
revolution as the consequence of transferring the patronage of letters
from the _quality_ to the mob, and of supposing that ordinary writers
or readers can have any notions in common with their superiors.
Footnote 32:
Is it not this that frequently keeps artists alive so long, _viz._ the
constant occupation of their minds with vivid images, with little of
the _wear-and-tear_ of the body?
Footnote 33:
‘Laws are not like women, the worse for being old.’—_The Duke of
Buckingham’s Speech in the House of Lords, in Charles the Second’s
time._
Footnote 34:
An expression borrowed from a voluble German scholar, who gave this as
an excuse for not translating the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ into
English. He might as well have said seriously, that the _Rule of
Three_ in German was different from our’s. Mr. Taylor (the Platonist,
as he was called) was a singular instance of a person in our time
believing in the heathen mythology. He had a very beautiful wife. An
impudent Frenchman, who came over to London, and lodged in the same
house, made love to her, by pretending to worship her as Venus, and so
thought to turn the tables on our philosopher. I once spent an evening
with this gentleman at Mr. G. D.’s chambers, in Clifford’s inn, (where
there was no exclusion of persons or opinions), and where we had pipes
and tobacco, porter, and bread and cheese for supper. Mr. Taylor never
smoked, never drank porter, and had an aversion to cheese. I remember
he shewed with some triumph two of his fingers, which had been bent so
that he had lost the use of them, in copying out the manuscripts of
Proclus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Such are the trophies of
human pride! It would be well if our deep studies often produced no
other crookedness and deformity! I endeavoured (but in vain) to learn
something from the heathen philosopher as to Plato’s doctrine of
abstract ideas being the foundation of particular ones, which I
suspect has more truth in it than we moderns are willing to admit.
Another friend of mine once breakfasted with Mr. D. (the most amiable
and absent of hosts), when there was no butter, no knife to cut the
loaf with, and the tea-pot was without a spout. My friend after a few
immaterial ceremonies, adjourned to Peel’s coffee-house, close by,
where he regaled himself on buttered toast, coffee, and the newspaper
of the day (a newspaper possessed some interest when we were young);
and the only interruption to his satisfaction was the fear that his
host might suddenly enter, and be shocked at his imperfect
hospitality. He would probably forget the circumstance altogether. I
am afraid this veteran of the old school has not received many proofs
of the _archaism_ of the prevailing taste; and that the corrections in
his History of the University of Cambridge, have cost him more than
the public will ever repay him for.
Footnote 35:
When a certain poet was asked if he thought Lord Byron’s name would
live three years after he was dead, he answered, ‘Not three days,
Sir!’ This was premature: it has lasted above a year. His works have
been translated into French, and there is a _Caffé Byron_ on the
Boulevards. Think of a _Caffé Wordsworth_ on the Boulevards!
Footnote 36:
Is not this partly owing to the disappointment of the public at
finding any defect in their idol?
Footnote 37:
An old friend of mine, when he read the abuse and billingsgate poured
out in certain Tory publications, used to congratulate himself upon it
as a favourable sign of the times, and of the progressive improvement
of our manners. Where we now called names, we formerly burnt each
other at a stake; and all the malice of the heart flew to the tongue
and vented itself in scolding, instead of crusades and
_auto-da-fés_—the nobler revenge of our ancestors for a difference of
opinion. An author now libels a prince; and, if he takes the law of
him or throws him into gaol, it is looked upon as a harsh and
ungentlemanly proceeding. He, therefore, gets a dirty Secretary to
employ a dirty bookseller, to hire a set of dirty scribblers, to pelt
him with dirt and cover him with blackguard epithets—till he is hardly
in a condition to walk the streets. This is hard measure, no doubt,
and base ingratitude on the part of the public, according to the
imaginary dignity and natural precedence which authors take of kings;
but the latter are men, and will have their revenge where they can get
it. They have no longer their old summary appeal—their will may still
be good—to the dungeon and the dagger. Those who ‘speak evil of
dignities’ may, therefore, think themselves well off in being merely
_sent to Coventry_; and, besides, if they have _pluck_, they can make
a Parthian retreat, and shoot poisoned arrows behind them. The good
people of Florence lift up their hands when they are shewn the
caricatures in the Queen’s Matrimonial-Ladder, and ask if they are
really a likeness of the King?
Footnote 38:
Properly, _daubs_.
Footnote 39:
Dr. Johnson has observed, that ‘strong passion deprives the lover of
that easiness of address, which is so great a recommendation to most
women.’ Is then indifference or coldness the surest passport to the
female heart? A man who is much in love has not his wits properly
about him: he can think only of her whose image is engraven on his
heart; he can talk only of her; he can only repeat the same vows, and
protestations, and expressions of rapture or despair. He may, by this
means, become importunate and troublesome—but does he deserve to lose
his mistress for the only cause that gives him a title to her—the
sincerity of his passion? We may perhaps answer this question by
another—Is a woman to accept of a madman, merely because he happens to
fall in love with her? ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet,’ as
Shakspeare has said, ‘are of imagination all compact,’ and must, in
most cases, be contented with imagination as their reward. Realities
are out of their reach, as well as beneath their notice.
Footnote 40:
Zoffani, a foreign artist, but who, by long residence in England, had
got our habits of indolence and dilatoriness, was employed by the late
King, who was fond of low comedy, to paint a scene for Reynolds’s
_Speculation_; in which Quick, Munden, and Miss Wallis were
introduced. The King called to see it in its progress; and at last it
was done—‘_all but the coat_.’ The picture, however, was not sent and
the King repeated his visit to the artist. Zoffani with some
embarrassment said, ‘It was done all but the _goat_‘—‘Don’t tell me,’
said the impatient monarch; ‘this is always the way: you said it was
done all but the coat the last time I was here.’—‘I said the _goat_,
and please your Majesty.’—‘Aye’ replied the King, ‘the _goat_ or the
_coat_, I care not which you call it; I say I will not have the
picture,’—and was going to leave the room, when Zoffani, in an agony,
repeated, ‘It is the _goat_ that is not finished,’—pointing to a
picture of a goat that was hung up in a frame as an ornament to the
scene at the theatre. The King laughed heartily at the blunder, and
waited patiently till the goat was finished. Zoffani, like other idle
people, was careless and extravagant. He made a fortune when he first
came over here, which he soon spent: he then went out to India, where
he made another, with which he returned to England, and spent also. He
was an excellent theatrical portrait-painter, and has left
delineations of celebrated actors and interesting situations, which
revive the dead, and bring the scene before us.
Footnote 41:
When Lord Byron was cut by the great, on account of his quarrel with
his wife, he stood leaning on a marble slab at the entrance of a room,
while troops of duchesses and countesses passed out. One little, pert,
red-haired girl staid a few paces behind the rest; and, as she passed
him, said with a nod, ‘Aye, you should have married me, and then all
this wouldn’t have happened to you!’
Footnote 42:
If it were a show of wild beasts, or a boxing-match, the reasoning
might be somewhat different; though I do not know that it would. No
people behave better than the _gods_ after the play once begins.
Footnote 43:
‘Of whatsoe’er descent his Godhead be,
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his servants are as bold
As if he had been made of beaten gold.’—DRYDEN.
Footnote 44:
They _would_ have a king in spite of the devil. The image-worship of
the Papists is a batch of the same leaven. The apishness of man’s
nature would not let even the Christian Religion escape.
Footnote 45:
‘In fact, the argument drawn from the supposed incapacity of the
people against a representative Government, comes with the worst grace
in the world from the patrons and admirers of hereditary government.
Surely, if government were a thing requiring the utmost stretch of
genius, wisdom, and virtue to carry it on, the office of King would
never even have been dreamt of as hereditary, any more than that of
poet, painter, or philosopher. It is easy here ‘for the Son to tread
in the Sire’s steady steps.’ It requires nothing but the will to do
it. Extraordinary talents are not once looked for. Nay, a person, who
would never have risen by natural abilities to the situation of
churchwarden or parish beadle, succeeds by unquestionable right to the
possession of a throne, and wields the energies of an empire, or
decides the fate of the world with the smallest possible share of
human understanding. The line of distinction which separates the regal
purple from the slabbering-bib is sometimes fine indeed; as we see in
the case of the two Ferdinands. Any one above the rank of an ideot is
supposed capable of exercising the highest functions of royal state.
Yet these are the persons who talk of the people as a swinish
multitude, and taunt them with their want of refinement and
philosophy.’—_Yellow Dwarf_, p. 84.
Footnote 46:
A lady of quality abroad, in allusion to the gallantries of the
reigning Prince, being told, ‘I suppose it will be your turn next?’
said, ‘No, I hope not; for you know it is impossible to refuse!’ What
a satire on the court and fashionables! If this be true, female virtue
in the blaze of royalty is no more than the moth in the candle, or ice
in the sun’s ray. What will the great themselves say to it, in whom at
this rate,
——‘the same luck holds,
They all are subjects, courtiers, and cuckolds!’
Out upon it! We’ll not believe it. Alas! poor virtue, what is to
become of the very idea of it, if we are to be told that every man
within the precincts of a palace is an _hypothetical_ cuckold, or
holds his wife’s virtue in trust for the Prince? We entertain no doubt
that many ladies of quality have resisted the importunities of a
throne, and that many more would do so in private life, if they had
the desired opportunity: nay, we have been assured by several that a
king would no more be able to prevail with them than any other man! If
however there is any foundation for the above insinuation, it throws
no small light on the Spirit of Monarchy, which by the supposition
implies in it the _virtual_ surrender of the whole sex at discretion;
and at the same time accounts perhaps for the indifference shown by
some monarchs in availing themselves of so mechanical a privilege.
Footnote 47:
Some persons have asserted that the Scotch have no humour. It is in
vain to set up this plea, since Smollett was a Scotchman.
Footnote 48:
This may be in part the reason of the blunder they have made in laying
so much stress on what they call the _Cockney School in Poetry_—as if
the people in London were proud of that distinction, and really
thought it a particular honour to get their living in the metropolis,
as the Scottish ‘Kernes and Gallowglasses’ think it a wonderful step
in their progress through life to be able to hire a lodging and pay
_scot and lot_ in the good town of Edinburgh.
Footnote 49:
It was not always so. But by knocking on the head the Jacobite loyalty
of the Scotch, their political integrity of principle has been
destroyed and dissipated to all the winds of Heaven.
Footnote 50:
My father was one of those who mistook his talent after all. He used
to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred his Letters to his
Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the first came naturally from
him. For ease, half-plays on words, and a supine, monkish, indolent
pleasantry, I have never seen them equalled.
Footnote 51:
He complained in particular of the presumption of attempting to
establish the future immortality of man ‘without’ (as he said)
‘knowing what Death was or what Life was’—and the tone in which he
pronounced these two words seemed to convey a complete image of both.
Footnote 52:
He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at this time I
had as little as he. He sometimes gives a striking account at present
of the Cartoons at Pisa, by Buffamalco and others; of one in
particular, where Death is seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and
the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would of
course understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time.
Footnote 53:
Some years ago, a periodical paper was published in London, under the
title of the Pic-Nic. It was got up under the auspices of a Mr. Fulke
Greville, and several writers of that day contributed to it, among
whom were Mr. Horace Smith, Mr. Dubois, Mr. Prince Hoare, Mr.
Cumberland, and others. On some dispute arising between the proprietor
and the gentlemen-contributors on the subject of an advance in the
remuneration for articles, Mr. Fulke Greville grew heroic, and said,
‘I have got a young fellow just come from Ireland, who will undertake
to do the whole, verse and prose, politics and scandal, for two
guineas a week, and if you will come and sup with me to-morrow night,
you shall see him, and judge whether I am not right in closing with
him,’ Accordingly, they met the next evening, and the WRITER OF ALL
WORK was introduced. He began to make a display of his native
ignorance and impudence on all subjects immediately, and no one else
had occasion to say any thing. When he was gone, Mr. Cumberland
exclaimed, ‘A talking potato, by God!’ The talking potato was Mr.
Croker, of the Admiralty. Our adventurer shortly, however, returned to
his own country, and passing accidentally through a town where they
were in want of a ministerial candidate at an Election, the gentleman
of modest assurance offered himself, and succeeded. ‘They wanted a
Jack-pudding,’ said the father of the hopeful youth, ‘and so they
chose my son.’ The case of the Duke of York and Mrs. Clarke soon after
came on, and Mr. Croker, who is a dabbler in dirt, and an adept in
love-letters, rose from the affair Secretary to the Admiralty, and the
very ‘rose and expectancy of the fair State.’
Footnote 54:
The only friends whom we defend with zeal and obstinacy are our
relations. They seem part of ourselves. We cannot shake them off till
they are hanged, nor then neither! For our other friends we are only
answerable, as long as we countenance them; and we therefore cut the
connection as soon as possible. But who ever willingly gave up the
good dispositions of a child, or the honour of a parent?
Footnote 55:
See Ada Reis.
Footnote 56:
This was necessary in Latin, where no order was observed in the words
of a sentence: in English the juxtaposition generally determines the
connection.
Footnote 57:
_Quere_, Is the vocative ever a case?
Footnote 58:
An identical proposition is not an inference; but all reasoning
consists in inference, or in finding out one thing as implied in
another. In comparing any two objects, I have nothing previously given
and cannot predict the result; but having made the comparison, I have
then something determined and fixed to go by; and what else I discover
or imagine must be in conformity with this first knowledge. This
coherence in propositions, or in the mind, is the force of _reason_,
whereby one idea acts as the ground-work or cause of another. If I
apply B as a common measure to A and C, and find it the same with
both, it follows that they are equal to one another; since otherwise I
must suppose the same thing (B) to be equal to unequal things, which
is impossible as long as I retain my senses, or more properly, my
recollection. I have ascertained two lines to be of the length of a
third; that length cannot differ from itself; and therefore having
settled what the two lines are with respect to the third, I cannot
conceive them to be different with respect to one another, without
forgetting myself, or what I know of them. If I had no power of
contemplating different propositions together, I could draw no such
conclusion; the conclusion therefore results from this comprehensive
power of the mind; and reason is the end or band that ties the bundle
of our separate ideas, or the logical _fasciculus_ together.
Footnote 59:
This is the reason that low comedians generally come out in
tragedy—they do not perceive the difference between the serious and
the burlesque.
Footnote 60:
Berkeley, in his _Minute Philosopher_, attacks Dr. Halley, who had
objected to faith and mysteries in religion, on this score; and
contends that the mathematician, no less than the theologian, is
obliged to presume on certain _postulates_, or to resort, before he
could establish a single theorem, to a formal definition of those
undefinable and hypothetical existences, points, lines, and surfaces;
and, according to the ingenious and learned Bishop of Cloyne, _solids_
would fare no better than _superficials_ in this war of words and
captious contradiction.
Footnote 61:
Hobbes is of opinion that men would deny this, if they had any
interest in doing so.
Footnote 62:
The common trick of making an imitation of the human countenance with
a napkin or the ends of the knuckles comes under the head of wit, not
humour.
Footnote 63:
A red beard is not uncommon, but it is odious.
Footnote 64:
Some one compared B——, a tall, awkward country lout to Adam, who came
into the world full grown, but without having ever made any use of his
limbs. This was wit, though true; where then is the ingredient of
incongruity? In altering the idea of Adam at pleasure, or from a mere
possibility to make it answer a ludicrous purpose. Adam is generally
supposed an active, graceful person: a lad grown up with large bones
and muscles, with no more use of them than an infant, is a laughable
subject, because it deranges or unhinges our customary associations.
The threads of our ideas (so to speak) are strong and tightened by
habit and will, just as we tighten the strings of a fiddle with pegs
and screws; and when any of these are relaxed, snapped asunder, or
unstrung by accident or folly, it is in taking up the odds and ends
(like stitches let down) as they hang light and loose, and twisting
them into some motley, ill-assorted pattern, so as to present a
fantastic and glaring contrast to custom (which is plain sense) or the
_ideal_, which strengthens and harmonizes (and which is poetry)—that
the web of wit and humour consists. The _serious_ is that which is
closely cemented together by experience and prejudice, or by common
sense: the ludicrous is the incoherent, or that which wants the cement
of habit and purpose; and wit is employed in finding out new and
opposite combinations of these detached and broken fragments (or
exceptions to established rules) so as to set off the distinction
between absurdity and propriety in the most lively and marked manner
possible. Proof is not wanted here; illustration is enough, and the
more extravagant the better; for the cause being previously condemned
in our prosing judgments, we do not stand upon punctilio, but only
wait for a smart, sly excuse to get rid of it; and hence _tricking is
fair in wit_, as well as in war: where the justice of the cause is not
the question, you have only to fight it out or make the best of the
case you can.
Footnote 65:
Even then I should not despair. The Revolution of the Three Days was
like a resurrection from the dead, and showed plainly that liberty too
has a spirit of life in it; and that the hatred of oppression is ‘the
unquenchable flame, the worm that dies not.’
Footnote 66:
‘In Scotland, at an execution, all appear melancholy, many shed tears,
and some faint away. But executions there are very rare.’—_Burgh._
Footnote 67:
Vanity is the same half-witted principle, compared with pride. It
leaves men in the lurch when it is most needed; is mortified at being
reduced to stand on the defensive, and relinquishes the field to its
more surly antagonist.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Re-indexed footnotes using numbers and collected together at the end
of the last chapter.
4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 12 (of 12)" ***
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