upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; to look
down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world
spread out under one's feet on a map; to bring the stars near; to view
the smallest insects through a microscope; to read history, and
consider the revolutions of empire and the successions of generations;
to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, and of Susa, and
to say all these were before me and are now nothing; to say I exist in
such a point of time, and in such a point of space; to be a spectator
and a part of its ever-moving scene; to witness the change of season,
of spring and autumn, of winter and summer; to feel hot and cold,
pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, right and wrong; to be
sensible to the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty world of
eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove's notes amid the forest deep;
to journey over moor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir;
to visit lighted halls, or the cathedral's gloom, or sit in crowded
theatres and see life itself mocked; to study the works of art and
refine the sense of beauty to agony; to worship fame, and to dream of
immortality; to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakspeare; to
gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future; to
listen to the trump of war, the shout of victory; to question history
as to the movements of the human heart; to seek for truth; to plead
the cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and nature
poured their treasures at our feet--to be and to do all this, and then
in a moment to be nothing--to have it all snatched from us as by a
juggler's trick, or a phantasmagoria! There is something in this
transition from all to nothing that shocks us and damps the enthusiasm
of youth new flushed with hope and pleasure, and we cast the
comfortless thought as far from us as we can. In the first enjoyment
of the state of life we discard the fear of debts and duns, and never
think of the final payment of our great debt to Nature. Art we know is
long; life, we flatter ourselves, should be so too. We see no end of
the difficulties and delays we have to encounter: perfection is slow
of attainment, and we must have time to accomplish it in. The fame of
the great names we look up to is immortal: and shall not we who
contemplate it imbibe a portion of ethereal fire, the _divinae
particula aurae_, which nothing can extinguish? A wrinkle in Rembrandt
or in Nature takes whole days to resolve itself into its component
parts, its softenings and its sharpnesses; we refine upon our
perfections, and unfold the intricacies of nature. What a prospect for
the future! What a task have we not begun! And shall we be arrested in
the middle of it? We do not count our time thus employed lost, or our
pains thrown away; we do not flag or grow tired, but gain new vigour
at our endless task. Shall Time, then, grudge us to finish what we
have begun, and have formed a compact with Nature to do? Why not fill
up the blank that is left us in this manner? I have looked for hours
at a Rembrandt without being conscious of the flight of time, but with
ever new wonder and delight, have thought that not only my own but
another existence I could pass in the same manner. This rarefied,
refined existence seemed to have no end, nor stint, nor principle of
decay in it. The print would remain long after I who looked on it had
become the prey of worms. The thing seems in itself out of all reason:
health, strength, appetite are opposed to the idea of death, and we
are not ready to credit it till we have found our illusions vanished,
and our hopes grown cold. Objects in youth, from novelty, etc., are
stamped upon the brain with such force and integrity that one thinks
nothing can remove or obliterate them. They are riveted there, and
appear to us as an element of our nature. It must be a mere violence
that destroys them, not a natural decay. In the very strength of this
persuasion we seem to enjoy an age by anticipation. We melt down years
into a single moment of intense sympathy, and by anticipating the
fruits defy the ravages of time. If, then, a single moment of our
lives is worth years, shall we set any limits to its total value and
extent? Again, does it not happen that so secure do we think
ourselves of an indefinite period of existence, that at times, when
left to ourselves, and impatient of novelty, we feel annoyed at what
seems to us the slow and creeping progress of time, and argue that if
it always moves at this tedious snail's pace it will never come to an
end? How ready are we to sacrifice any space of time which separates
us from a favourite object, little thinking that before long we shall
find it move too fast.
For my part, I started in life with the French Revolution, and I have
lived, alas! to see the end of it. But I did not foresee this result.
My sun arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not think how
soon both must set. The new impulse to ardour given to men's minds
imparted a congenial warmth and glow to mine; we were strong to run a
race together, and I little dreamed that long before mine was set, the
sun of liberty would turn to blood, or set once more in the night of
despotism. Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young,
for with that my hopes fell.
I have since turned my thoughts to gathering up some of the fragments
of my early recollections, and putting them into a form to which I
might occasionally revert. The future was barred to my progress, and I
turned for consolation and encouragement to the past. It is thus that,
while we find our personal and substantial identity vanishing from us,
we strive to gain a reflected and vicarious 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 make our cherished thoughts and
nearest interests live in the minds of others, we do not appear to
have retired altogether from the stage. We still occupy the breasts of
others, and exert an influence and power over them, and it is only our
bodies that are reduced to dust and powder. Our favourite speculations
still find encouragement, and we make as great a figure in the eye of
the world, or perhaps a greater, than in our lifetime. The demands of
our self-love are thus satisfied, and these are the most imperious and
unremitting. Besides, if by our intellectual superiority we survive
ourselves in this world, by our virtues and faith we may attain an
interest in another, and a higher state of being, and may thus be
recipients at the same time of men and of angels.
'E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.'
As we grow old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing
else, indeed, seems of any consequence. We can never cease wondering
that that which has ever been should cease to be. We find many things
remain the same: why then should there be change in us. This adds a
convulsive grasp of whatever is, a sense of a fallacious hollowness in
all we see. Instead of the full, pulpy feeling of youth tasting
existence and every object in it, all is flat and vapid,--a whited
sepulchre, fair without but full of ravening and all uncleanness
within. The world is a witch that puts us off with false shows and
appearances. The simplicity of youth, the confiding expectation, the
boundless raptures, are gone: we only think of getting out of it as
well as we can, and without any great mischance or annoyance. The
flush of illusion, even the complacent retrospect of past joys and
hopes, is over: if we can slip out of life without indignity, can
escape with little bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the calm
and respectable composure of _still-life_ before we return to physical
nothingness, it is as much as we can expect. We do not die wholly at
our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty
after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment
disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living, year after year
sees us no longer the same, and death only consigns the last fragment
of what we were to the grave. That we should wear out by slow stages,
and dwindle at last into nothing, is not wonderful, when even in our
prime our strongest impressions leave little trace but for the moment,
and we are the creatures of petty circumstance. How little effect is
made on us in our best days by the books we have read, the scenes we
have witnessed, the sensations we have gone through! Think only of the
feelings we experience in reading a fine romance (one of Sir Walter's,
for instance); what beauty, what sublimity, what interest, what
heart-rending emotions! You would suppose the feelings you then
experienced would last for ever, or subdue the mind to their own
harmony and tone: while we are reading it seems as if nothing could
ever put us out of our way, or trouble us:--the first splash of mud
that we get on entering the street, the first twopence we are cheated
out of, the feeling vanishes clean out of our minds, and we become the
prey of petty and annoying circumstance. The mind soars to the lofty:
it is at home in the grovelling, the disagreeable, and the little. And
yet we wonder that age should be feeble and querulous,--that the
freshness of youth should fade away. Both worlds would hardly satisfy
the extravagance of our desires and of our presumption.
ESSAY V
ON PUBLIC OPINION
'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 attachments 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 every one 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 places 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_.[6]
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, further, it may
happen, that 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 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
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 every one joins in
asserting, propagating, and in outwardly approving what every one, in
his private and unbiassed judgment, believes and knows to be
scandalous and untrue. For every one 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 every one 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 on 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 every one; 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 some one
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 the 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. Walk into a church
in Paris, you are struck with a number of idle forms and ceremonies,
the chanting 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, step out of the church
of St. Roche, and drop into an English reading-room hard by: what are
you the better? You see a dozen or score of your 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 a
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 their
adopted oracle (you see it in their faces) as implicitly as in Sir
John Barleycorn, as in a sirloin of beef, 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 their oracles and
champions? They know the paper before them to be a hoax, but do they
believe in the ribaldry, the 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 well be thought that the
enlightened part of the British public, persons of family and
fortunes, who have had a college education, and received the benefit
of foreign travel, see through the quackery, which they encourage for
a political purpose, without being themselves the dupes of it. This
scarcely mends the matter. Suppose an individual, of whom it has been
repeatedly asserted that he has warts on his nose, were to enter the
reading-room aforesaid, is there a single red-faced country squire who
would not be surprised at not finding this story true, would not
persuade himself five minutes after that he could not have seen
correctly, or that some art had been used to conceal the defects, or
would be led to doubt, from this instance, the general candour and
veracity of his oracle? He would disbelieve his own senses rather.
Seeing is believing, it is said: lying is believing, I say. We do not
even see with our own eyes, but must 'wink and shut our apprehension
up,' that we may be able to agree to the report of others, as a piece
of good manners and a 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 a man he did not like--and who will give up what tends to
strengthen his aversion for another? To Tory prejudice, dire as it
is--to English imagination, morbid as it is, a nickname, a ludicrous
epithet, a malignant falsehood, when it has been once propagated and
taken to the bosom 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 this sort of plenary indulgence to
speak and think with contempt of those who would abolish the one, or
throw open the other. Party-spirit is the best reason in the world for
personal antipathy and vulgar abuse.
'But, do you not think, Sir' (some dialectician may ask), '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?'
May I ask, my dear Sir, did you ever read Mr. Wordsworth's poem of
_Michael_?
'I cannot charge my memory with the fact.'
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 and work at the
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?