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 thoroughbred
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 white hat, and red face,
that I cannot, by any effort of candour, confound my personal identity
with! If Mr. ---- 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 outriders,
white favours, and a coronet on the panels; and then, too, 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 a born 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 beck, 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 may
be 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.[7] 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 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 the 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 for 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 show 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 not wonderful, therefore,
that opera-singers and dancers refuse or only _condescend_ as it
were, to accept lords, though the latter are too 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 civilisation; 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 react 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. 'What is it,
then, he does like?'--'Good victuals and drink!' As if you had these
not too; but because he has them not, he thinks of nothing else, and
laughs at you and your refinements, supposing you 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 ages, sexes,
classes meet. 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 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 _Gravedigger_. 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 are unlike us, we feel
it as a presumption and an impertinence to usurp their place; if they
are 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 theirs 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 ours! 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 like to change with--which is that
of a favoured rival. Even hatred gives way to envy. We would be
anything--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!
1828.
FOOTNOTE:
[7] 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!'
ESSAY VII
MIND AND MOTIVE
'The web of our lives is of a mingled yarn.'
'Anthony Codrus Urceus, a most learned and unfortunate Italian, born
1446, was a striking instance' (says his biographer) 'of the miseries
men bring upon themselves by setting their affections unreasonably on
trifles. This learned man lived at Forli, and had an apartment in the
palace. His room was so very dark, that he was forced to use a candle
in the day time; and one day, going abroad without putting it out, his
library was set on fire, and some papers which he had prepared for the
press were burned. The instant he was informed of this ill news, he
was affected even to madness. He ran furiously to the palace, and,
stopping at the door of his apartment, he cried aloud, "Christ Jesus!
what mighty crime have I committed? whom of your followers have I ever
injured, that you thus rage with inexpiable hatred against me?" Then
turning himself to an image of the Virgin Mary near at hand, "Virgin"
(says he) "hear what I have to say, for I speak in earnest, and with a
composed spirit. If I shall happen to address you in my dying moments,
I humbly entreat you not to hear me, nor receive me into heaven, for I
am determined to spend all eternity in hell." Those who heard these
blasphemous expressions endeavoured to comfort him, but all to no
purpose; for the society of mankind being no longer supportable to
him, he left the city, and retired, like a savage, to the deep
solitude of a wood. Some say that he was murdered there by ruffians;
others that he died at Bologna, in 1500, after much contrition and
penitence.'
Almost every one may here read the history of his own life. There is
scarcely a moment in which we are not in some degree guilty of the
same kind of absurdity, which was here carried to such a singular
excess. We waste our regrets on what cannot be recalled, or fix our
desires on what we know cannot be attained. Every hour is the slave of
the last; and we are seldom masters either of our thoughts or of our
actions. We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will,
more than of reason or self-interest. Rousseau, in his _Emilius_,
proposed to educate a perfectly reasonable man, who was to have
passions and affections like other men, but with an absolute control
over them. He was to love and to be wise. This is a contradiction in
terms. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life,
we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling
of a tea-cup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that
commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.
'Friends now fast sworn,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity. So fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep,
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends,
And interjoin their issues.'
We are little better than humoured children to the last, and play a
mischievous game at cross purposes with our own happiness and that of
others.
We have given the above story as a striking contradiction to the
prevailing doctrine of modern systems of morals and metaphysics, that
man is purely a sensual and selfish animal, governed solely by a
regard either to his immediate gratification or future interest. This
doctrine we mean to oppose with all our might, whenever we meet with
it. We are, however, less disposed to quarrel with it, as it is
opposed to reason and philosophy, than as it interferes with common
sense and observation. If the absurdity in question had been confined
to the schools, we should not have gone out of our way to meddle with
it: but it has gone abroad in the world, has crept into ladies'
boudoirs, is entered in the commonplace book of beaux, is in the mouth
of the learned and ignorant, and forms a part of popular opinion. It
is perpetually applied as a false measure to the characters and
conduct of men in the common affairs of the world, and it is therefore
our business to rectify it, if we can. In fact, whoever sets out on
the idea of reducing all our motives and actions to a simple
principle, must either take a very narrow and superficial view of
human nature, or make a very perverse use of his understanding in
reasoning on what he sees. The frame of our minds, like that of his
body, is exceedingly complicated. Besides mere sensibility to pleasure
and pain, there are other original independent principles, necessarily
interwoven with the nature of man as an active and intelligent being,
and which, blended together in different proportions, give their form
and colour to our lives. Without some other essential faculties, such
as will, imagination, etc., to give effect and direction to our
physical sensibility, this faculty could be of no possible use or
influence; and with those other faculties joined to it, this pretended
instinct of self-love will be subject to be everlastingly modified and
controlled by those faculties, both in what regards our own good and
that of others; that is, must itself become in a great measure
dependent on the very instruments it uses. The two most predominant
principles in the mind, besides sensibility and self-interest, are
imagination and self-will, or (in general) the love of strong
excitement, both in thought and action. To these sources may be traced
the various passions, pursuits, habits, affections, follies and
caprices, virtues and vices of mankind. We shall confine ourselves,
in the present article, to give some account of the influence
exercised by the imagination over the feelings. To an intellectual
being, it cannot be altogether arbitrary what ideas it shall have,
whether pleasurable or painful. Our ideas do not originate in our love
of pleasure, and they cannot, therefore, depend absolutely upon it.
They have another principle. If the imagination were 'the servile
slave' of our self-love, if our ideas were emanations of our sensitive
nature, encouraged if agreeable, and excluded the instant they became
otherwise, or encroached on the former principle, then there might be
a tolerable pretence for the epicurean philosophy which is here spoken
of. But for any such entire and mechanical subserviency of the
operations of the one principle to the dictates of the other, there is
not the slightest foundation in reality. The attention which the mind
gives to its ideas is not always owing to the gratification derived
from them, but to the strength and truth of the impressions
themselves, _i.e._ to their involuntary power over the mind. This
observation will account for a very general principle in the mind,
which cannot, we conceive, be satisfactorily explained in any other
way, we mean _the power of fascination_. Every one has heard the story
of the girl who, being left alone by her companions, in order to
frighten her, in a room with a dead body, at first attempted to get
out, and shrieked violently for assistance, but finding herself shut
in, ran and embraced the corpse, and was found senseless in its arms.
It is said that in such cases there is a desperate effort made to get
rid of the dread by converting it into the reality. There may be some
truth in this account, but we do not think it contains the whole
truth. The event produced in the present instance does not bear out
the conclusion. The progress of the passion does not seem to have been
that of diminishing or removing the terror by coming in contact with
the object, but of carrying this terror to its height from an intense
and irresistible impulse overcoming every other feeling.
It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge
of a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without
being in danger of throwing themselves down; not, we presume, from a
principle of self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea
having taken possession of the mind from which it cannot well escape,
which absorbs every other consideration, and confounds and overrules
all self-regards. The impulse cannot in this case be resolved into a
desire to remove the uneasiness of fear, for the only danger arises
from the fear. We have been told by a person not at all given to
exaggeration, that he once felt a strong propensity to throw himself
into a cauldron of boiling lead, into which he was looking. These are
what Shakspeare calls 'the toys of desperation.' People sometimes
marry, and even fall in love on this principle--that is, through mere
apprehension, or what is called a fatality. In like manner, we find
instances of persons who are, as it were, naturally delighted with
whatever is disagreeable--who catch all sorts of unbecoming tones and
gestures--who always say what they should not, and what they do not
mean to say--in whom intemperance of imagination and incontinence of
tongue are a disease, and who are governed by an almost infallible
instinct of absurdity.
The love of imitation has the same general source. We dispute for ever
about Hogarth, and the question can never be decided according to the
common ideas on the subject of taste. His pictures appeal to the love
of truth, not to the sense of beauty: but the one is as much an
essential principle of our nature as the other. They fill up the void
of the mind; they present an everlasting succession and variety of
ideas. There is a fine observation somewhere made by Aristotle, that
the mind has a natural appetite of curiosity or desire to know; and
most of that knowledge which comes in by the eye, for this presents
us with the greatest variety of differences. Hogarth is relished only
by persons of a certain strength of mind and penetration into
character; for the subjects in themselves are not pleasing, and this
objection is only redeemed by the exercise and activity which they
give to the understanding. The great difference between what is meant
by a severe and an effeminate taste or style, depends on the
distinction here made.