everything.[9] Nor would I put Euclid or Sir Isaac Newton on a level
with the first _petit-maitre_ we might happen to meet. I consider
_AEsop's Fables_ to have been a greater work of genius than Fontaine's
translation of them; though I am not sure that I should not prefer
Fontaine, for his style only, to Gay, who has shown a great deal of
original invention. The elegant manners of people of fashion have been
objected to me, to show the frivolity of external accomplishments, and
the facility with which they are acquired. As to the last point, I
demur. There are no class of people who lead so laborious a life, or
who take more pains to cultivate their minds as well as persons, than
people of fashion. A young lady of quality who has to devote so many
hours a day to music, so many to dancing, so many to drawing, so many
to French, Italian, etc., certainly does not pass her time in idleness:
and these accomplishments are afterwards called into action by every
kind of external or mental stimulus, by the excitements of pleasure,
vanity, and interest. A Ministerial or Opposition Lord goes through
more drudgery than half-a-dozen literary hacks; nor does a reviewer by
profession read half the same number of publications as a modern fine
lady is obliged to labour through. I confess, however, I am not a
competent judge of the degree of elegance or refinement implied in the
general tone of fashionable manners. The successful experiment made by
_Peregrine Pickle_, in introducing his strolling mistress into genteel
company, does not redound greatly to their credit.
1815.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] Sheer impudence answers almost the same purpose. 'Those
impenetrable whiskers have confronted flames.' Many persons, by
looking big and talking loud, make their way through the world without
any one good quality. I have here said nothing of mere personal
qualifications, which are another set-off against sterling merit.
Fielding was of opinion that 'the more solid pretensions of virtue and
understanding vanish before perfect beauty.' 'A certain lady of a
manor' (says _Don Quixote_ in defence of his attachment to _Dulcinea_,
which, however, was quite of the Platonic kind), 'had cast the eyes of
affection on a certain squat, brawny lay brother of a neighbouring
monastery, to whom she was lavish of her favours. The head of the
order remonstrated with her on this preference shown to one whom he
represented as a very low, ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior
pretensions of himself, and his more learned brethren. The lady having
heard him to an end, made answer: All that you have said may be very
true; but know that in those points which I admire, Brother Chrysostom
is as great a philosopher, nay greater, than Aristotle himself!' So
the _Wife of Bath_:
'To chirche was myn housbond brought on morwe
With neighebors that for him made sorwe,
And Jankyn oure clerk was oon of tho.
As help me God, whan that I saugh him go
After the beere, methought he had a paire
Of legges and of feet so clene and faire,
That al myn hert I yaf unto his hold.'
'All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down.'
ESSAY X
ON CONSISTENCY OF OPINION
'----Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab inceptu processerit, et sibi constet.'
Many people boast of being masters in their own house. I pretend to be
master of my own mind. I should be sorry to have an ejectment served
upon me for any notions I may choose to entertain there. Within that
little circle I would fain be an absolute monarch. I do not profess
the spirit of martyrdom; I have no ambition to march to the stake, or
up to a masked battery, in defence of an hypothesis: I do not court
the rack: I do not wish to be flayed alive for affirming that two and
two make four, or any other intricate proposition: I am shy of bodily
pains and penalties, which some are fond of--imprisonment, fine,
banishment, confiscation of goods: but if I do not prefer the
independence of my mind to that of my body, I at least prefer it to
everything else. I would avoid the arm of power, as I would escape
from the fangs of a wild beast: but as to the opinion of the world, I
see nothing formidable in it. 'It is the eye of childhood that fears a
painted devil.' I am not to be browbeat or wheedled out of any of my
settled convictions. Opinion to opinion, I will face any man.
Prejudice, fashion, the cant of the moment, go for nothing; and as for
the reason of the thing, it can only be supposed to rest with me or
another, in proportion to the pains we have taken to ascertain it.
Where the pursuit of truth has been the habitual study of any man's
life, the love of truth will be his ruling passion. 'Where the
treasure is, there the heart is also.' Every one is most tenacious of
that to which he owes his distinction from others. Kings love power,
misers gold, women flattery, poets reputation--and philosophers truth,
when they can find it. They are right in cherishing the only privilege
they inherit. If 'to be wise were to be obstinate,' I might set up for
as great a philosopher as the best of them; for some of my conclusions
are as fixed and as incorrigible to proof as need be. I am attached to
them in consequence of the pains, and anxiety, and the waste of time
they have cost me. In fact, I should not well know what to do without
them at this time of day; nor how to get others to supply their place.
I would quarrel with the best friend I have sooner than acknowledge
the absolute right of the Bourbons. I see Mr. Northcote seldomer than
I did, because I cannot agree with him about the _Catalogue Raisonne_.
I remember once saying to this gentleman, a great while ago, that I
did not seem to have altered any of my ideas since I was sixteen years
old. 'Why then,' said he, 'you are no wiser now than you were then!' I
might make the same confession, and the same retort would apply still.
Coleridge used to tell me, that this pertinacity was owing to a want
of sympathy with others. What he calls _sympathising with others_ is
their admiring him; and it must be admitted that he varies his battery
pretty often, in order to accommodate himself to this sort of mutual
understanding. But I do not agree in what he says of me. On the other
hand, I think that it is my sympathising _beforehand_ with the
different views and feelings that may be entertained on a subject,
that prevents me retracting my judgment, and flinging myself into the
contrary extreme _afterwards_. If you proscribe all opinion opposite
to your own, and impertinently exclude all the evidence that does not
make for you, it stares you in the face with double force when it
breaks in unexpectedly upon you, or if at any subsequent period it
happens to suit your interest or convenience to listen to objections
which vanity or prudence had hitherto overlooked. But if you are aware
from the first suggestion of a subject, either by subtlety, or tact,
or close attention, of the full force of what others possibly feel and
think of it, you are not exposed to the same vacillation of opinion.
The number of grains and scruples, of doubts and difficulties, thrown
into the scale while the balance is yet undecided, add to the weight
and steadiness of the determination. He who anticipates his opponent's
arguments, confirms while he corrects his own reasonings. When a
question has been carefully examined in all its bearings, and a
principle is once established, it is not liable to be overthrown by
any new facts which have been arbitrarily and petulantly set aside,
nor by every wind of idle doctrine rushing into the interstices of a
hollow speculation, shattering it in pieces, and leaving it a mockery
and a bye-word; like those tall, gawky, staring, pyramidal erections
which are seen scattered over different parts of the country, and are
called the _Follies_ of different gentlemen! A man may be confident in
maintaining a side, as he has been cautious in choosing it. If after
making up his mind strongly in one way, to the best of his capacity
and judgment, he feels himself inclined to a very violent revulsion of
sentiment, he may generally rest assured that the change is in himself
and his motives, not in the reason of things.
I cannot say that, from my own experience, I have found that the
persons most remarkable for sudden and violent changes of principle
have been cast in the softest or most susceptible mould. All their
notions have been exclusive, bigoted, and intolerant. Their want of
consistency and moderation has been in exact proportion to their want
of candour and comprehensiveness of mind. Instead of being the
creatures of sympathy, open to conviction, unwilling to give offence
by the smallest difference of sentiment, they have (for the most part)
been made up of mere antipathies--a very repulsive sort of
personages--at odds with themselves, and with everybody else. The
slenderness of their pretensions to philosophical inquiry has been
accompanied with the most presumptuous dogmatism. They have been
persons of that narrowness of view and headstrong self-sufficiency of
purpose, that they could see only one side of a question at a time,
and whichever they pleased. There is a story somewhere in _Don
Quixote_, of two champions coming to a shield hung up against a tree
with an inscription written on each side of it. Each of them
maintained, that the words were what was written on the side next him,
and never dreamt, till the fray was over, that they might be different
on the opposite side of the shield. It would have been a little more
extraordinary if the combatants had changed sides in the heat of the
scuffle, and stoutly denied that there were any such words on the
opposite side as they had before been bent on sacrificing their lives
to prove were the only ones it contained. Yet such is the very
situation of some of our modern polemics. They have been of all sides
of the question, and yet they cannot conceive how an honest man can be
of any but one--that which they hold at present. It seems that they
are afraid to look their old opinions in the face, lest they should be
fascinated by them once more. They banish all doubts of their own
sincerity by inveighing against the motives of their antagonists.
There is no salvation out of the pale of their strange inconsistency.
They reduce common sense and probity to the straitest possible
limits--the breasts of themselves and their patrons. They are like
people out at sea on a very narrow plank, who try to push everybody
else off. Is it that they have so little faith in the course to which
they have become such staunch converts, as to suppose that, should
they allow a grain of sense to their old allies and new antagonists,
they will have more than they? Is it that they have so little
consciousness of their own disinterestedness, that they feel, if they
allow a particle of honesty to those who now differ with them, they
will have more than they? Those opinions must needs be of a very
fragile texture which will not stand the shock of the least
acknowledged opposition, and which lay claim to respectability by
stigmatising all who do not hold them as 'sots, and knaves, and
cowards.' There is a want of well-balanced feeling in every such
instance of extravagant versatility; a something crude, unripe, and
harsh, that does not hit a judicious palate, but sets the teeth on
edge to think of. 'I had rather hear my mother's cat mew, or a wheel
grate on the axletree, than one of these same metre-ballad-mongers'
chaunt his incondite, retrograde lays, without rhyme and without
reason.
The principles and professions change: the man remains the same. There
is the same spirit at the bottom of all this pragmatical fickleness
and virulence, whether it runs into one extreme or another: to wit, a
confinement of view, a jealousy of others, an impatience of
contradiction, a want of liberality in construing the motives of
others, either from monkish pedantry, or a conceited overweening
reference of everything to our own fancies and feelings. There is
something to be said, indeed, for the nature of the political
machinery, for the whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel which
has of late wrenched men's understandings almost asunder, and 'amazed
the very faculties of eyes and ears'; but still this is hardly a
sufficient reason, why the adept in the old as well as the new school
should take such a prodigious latitude himself, while at the same time
he makes so little allowance for others. His whole creed need not be
turned topsy-turvy, from the top to the bottom, even in times like
these. He need not, in the rage of party spirit, discard the proper
attributes of humanity, the common dictates of reason. He need not
outrage every former feeling, nor trample on every customary decency,
in his zeal for reform, or in his greater zeal against it. If his
mind, like his body, has undergone a total change of essence, and
purged off the taint of all its early opinions, he need not carry
about with him, or be haunted in the persons of others with, the
phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and execrate them. He
need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts,
hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the shrine of
matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a living
and ignominious satire on himself.
A gentleman went to live, some years ago, in a remote part of the
country, and as he did not wish to affect singularity, he used to have
two candles on his table of an evening. A romantic acquaintance of his
in the neighbourhood, smit with the love of simplicity and equality,
used to come in, and without ceremony snuff one of them out, saying,
it was a shame to indulge in such extravagance, while many poor
cottagers had not even a rushlight to see to do their evening's work
by. This might be about the year 1802, and was passed over as among
the ordinary occurrences of the day. In 1816 (oh! fearful lapse of
time, pregnant with strange mutability) the same enthusiastic lover of
economy, and hater of luxury, asked his thoughtless friend to dine
with him in company with a certain lord, and to lend him his
manservant to wait at table; and just before they were sitting down to
dinner, he heard him say to the servant in a sonorous whisper--'and be
sure you don't forget to have six candles on the table!' Extremes
meet. The event here was as true to itself as the oscillation of the
pendulum. My informant, who understands moral equations, had looked
for this reaction, and noted it down as characteristic. The
impertinence in the first instance was the cue to the ostentatious
servility in the second. The one was the fulfilment of the other, like
the type and anti-type of a prophecy. No--the keeping of the character
at the end of fourteen years was as unique as the keeping of the
thought to the end of the fourteen lines of a sonnet! Would it sound
strange if I were to whisper it in the reader's ear, that it was the
same person who was thus anxious to see six candles on the table to
receive a lord, who once (in ages past) said to me, that 'he saw
nothing to admire in the eloquence of such men as Mansfield and
Chatham; and what did it all end in, but their being made lords?' It
is better to be a lord than a lacquey to a lord! So we see that the
swelling pride and preposterous self-opinion which exalts itself above
the mightiest, looking down upon and braving the boasted pretensions
of the highest rank and the most brilliant talents as nothing,
compared with its own conscious powers and silent unmoved
self-respect, grovels and licks the dust before titled wealth, like a
lacquered slave, the moment it can get wages and a livery! Would
Milton or Marvel have done this?
Mr. Coleridge, indeed, sets down this outrageous want of keeping to an
excess of sympathy, and there is, after all, some truth in his
suggestion. There is a craving after the approbation and concurrence
of others natural to the mind of man. It is difficult to sustain the
weight of an opinion singly for any length of way. The intellect
languishes without cordial encouragement and support. It exhausts both
strength and patience to be always striving against the stream.
_Contra audentior ito_ is the motto but of few. Public opinion is
always pressing upon the mind, and, like the air we breathe, acts
unseen, unfelt. It supplies the living current of our thoughts, and
infects without our knowledge. It taints the blood, and is taken into
the smallest pores. The most sanguine constitutions are, perhaps, the
most exposed to its influence. But public opinion has its source in
power, in popular prejudice, and is not always in accord with right
reason, or a high and abstracted imagination. Which path to follow
where the two roads part? The heroic and romantic resolution prevails
at first in high and heroic tempers. They think to scale the heights
of truth and virtue at once with him 'whose genius had angelic wings,
and fed on manna,'--but after a time find themselves baffled, toiling
on in an uphill road, without friends, in a cold neighbourhood,
without aid or prospect of success. The poet
'Like a worm goes by the way.'
He hears murmurs loud or suppressed, meets blank looks or scowling
faces, is exposed to the pelting of the pitiless press, and is stunned
by the shout of the mob, that gather round him to see what sort of a
creature a poet and a philosopher is. What is there to make him proof
against all this? A strength of understanding steeled against
temptation, and a dear love of truth that smiles opinion to scorn.
These he perhaps has not. A lord passes in his coach. Might he not get
up, and ride out of the reach of the rabble-rout? He is invited to
stop dinner. If he stays he might insinuate some wholesome truths. He
drinks in rank poison--flattery! He recites some verses to the ladies,
who smile delicious praise, and thank him through their tears. The
master of the house suggests a happy allusion in the turn of an
expression. 'There's sympathy.' This is better than the company he
lately left. Pictures, statues meet his raptured eye. Our Ulysses
finds himself in the gardens of Alcinous: our truant is fairly caught.
He wanders through enchanted ground. Groves, classic groves, nod unto
him, and he hears 'ancestral voices' hailing him as brother bard! He
sleeps, dreams, and wakes cured of his thriftless prejudices and
morose philanthropy. He likes this courtly and popular sympathy
better. 'He looks up with awe to kings; with honour to nobility; with
reverence to magistrates,' etc. He no longer breathes the air of
heaven and his own thoughts, but is steeped in that of palaces and
courts, and finds it agree better with his constitutional temperament.
Oh! how sympathy alters a man from what he was!
'I've heard of hearts unkind,
Kind deeds with cold returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Has oftener set me mourning.'
A spirit of contradiction, a wish to monopolise all wisdom, will not
account for uniform consistency, for it is sure to defeat and turn
against itself. It is 'everything by turns, and nothing long.' It is
warped and crooked. It cannot bear the least opposition, and sooner
than acquiesce in what others approve it will change sides in a day.
It is offended at every resistance to its captious, domineering
humour, and will quarrel for straws with its best friends. A person
under the guidance of this demon, if every whimsy or occult discovery
of his own is not received with acclamation by one party, will wreak
his spite by deserting to the other, and carry all his talent for
disputation with him, sharpened by rage and disappointment. A man, to
be steady in a cause, should be more attached to the truth than to the
acquiescence of his fellow citizens.
I can hardly consider Mr. Coleridge a deserter from the cause he first
espoused, unless one could tell what cause he ever heartily espoused,
or what party he ever belonged to, in downright earnest. He has not
been inconsistent with himself at different times, but at all times.
He is a sophist, a casuist, a rhetorician, what you please, and might
have argued or declaimed to the end of his breath on one side of a
question or another, but he never was a pragmatical fellow. He lived
in a round of contradictions, and never came to a settled point. His
fancy gave the cue to his judgment, and his vanity set his invention
afloat in whatever direction he could find most scope for it, or most
_sympathy_, that is, admiration. His Life and Opinions might naturally
receive the title of one of Hume's Essays--_A Sceptical Solution of
Sceptical Doubts_. To be sure, his _Watchman_ and his _Friend_ breathe
a somewhat different tone on subjects of a particular description,
both of them apparently pretty high-raised, but whoever will be at the
pains to examine them closely, will find them to be _voluntaries_,
fugues, solemn capriccios, not set compositions with any malice
prepense in them, or much practical meaning. I believe some of his
friends, who were indebted to him for the suggestion of plausible
reasons for conformity, and an opening to a more qualified view of the
letter of their paradoxical principles, have lately disgusted him by
the virulence and extravagance to which they have carried hints, of
which he never suspected that they would make the least possible use.
But if Mr. Coleridge is satisfied with the wandering Moods of his
Mind, perhaps this is no reason that others may not reap the solid
benefit. He himself is like the idle seaweed on the ocean, tossed from
shore to shore: they are like barnacles fastened to the vessel of
state, rotting its goodly timbers!
There are some persons who are of too fastidious a turn of mind to
like anything long, or to assent twice to the same opinion. ----
always sets himself to prop the falling cause, to nurse the rickety
bantling. He takes the part which he thinks in most need of his
support, not so much out of magnanimity, as to prevent too great a
degree of presumption or self-complacency on the triumphant side.
'Though truth be truth, yet he contrives to throw such changes of
vexation on it as it may lose some colour.' I have been delighted to
hear him expatiate with the most natural and affecting simplicity on a
favourite passage or picture, and all the while afraid of agreeing
with him, lest he should instantly turn round and unsay all that he
had said, for fear of my going away with too good an opinion of my own
taste, or too great an admiration of my idol--and his own. I dare not
ask his opinion twice, if I have got a favourable sentence once, lest
he should belie his own sentiments to stagger mine. I have heard him
talk divinely (like one inspired) of Boccaccio, and the story of the
Pot of Basil, describing 'how it grew, and it grew, and it grew,' till
you saw it spread its tender leaves in the light of his eye, and wave
in the tremulous sound of his voice; and yet if you asked him about it
another time, he would, perhaps, affect to think little of it, or to
have forgotten the circumstance. His enthusiasm is fickle and
treacherous. The instant he finds it shared in common, he backs out of
it. His enmity is equally refined, but hardly so unsocial. His
exquisitely-turned invectives display all the beauty of scorn, and
impart elegance to vulgarity. He sometimes finds out minute
excellences, and cries up one thing to put you out of conceit with
another. If you want him to praise Sir Joshua _con amore_, in his best
manner, you should begin with saying something about Titian--if you
seem an idoliser of Sir Joshua, he will immediately turn off the
discourse, gliding like the serpent before Eve, wary and beautiful, to
the graces of Sir Peter Lely, or ask if you saw a Vandyke the other
day, which he does not think Sir Joshua could stand near. But find
fault with the Lake Poets, and mention some pretended patron of rising
genius, and you need not fear but he will join in with you and go all
lengths that you can wish him. You may calculate upon him there.
'Pride elevates, and joy brightens his face.' And, indeed, so eloquent
is he, and so beautiful in his eloquence, that I myself, with all my
freedom from gall and bitterness, could listen to him untired, and
without knowing how the time went, losing and neglecting many a meal
and hour,
----'From morn to noon,
From noon to dewy eve, a summer's day.'
When I cease to hear him quite, other tongues, turned to what accents
they may of praise or blame, would sound dull, ungrateful, out of
tune, and harsh, in the comparison.