say) sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system
alone, and of that rage for classification, by which, in matters of
taste at least, we are perpetually perplexing, instead of arranging,
our ideas, that would make us concede to the work of Poussin above
mentioned, and deny to this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious
composition.
We are forever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call
one man a great historical painter, because he has taken for his
subjects kings or great men, or transactions over which time has
thrown a grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and
set him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, without
reflecting whether the quantity of thought shown by the latter may
not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of
subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from
that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an
interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call
history.
I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of
Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and
stifle the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names
and classifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the
greatest ornaments of England.
I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the
countenances of his _Staring_ and _Grinning Despair_, which he has
given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be
anything comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the
face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the _Rake's
Progress_,[1] where a letter from the manager is brought to him to
say that his play "will not do?" Here all is easy, natural,
undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated!--the
long history of a misspent life is compressed into the countenance as
plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no
attempt at Gorgonian looks, which are to freeze the beholder--no
grinning at the antique bedposts--no face-making, or consciousness of
the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept
to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which
great anguish sometimes brings with it,--a final leave taken of
hope,--the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,--a beginning
alienation of mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the
mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together,--matter to
feed and fertilize the mind. It is too real to admit one thought
about the power of the artist who did it. When we compare the
expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find
the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere
contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid, in the one
case, in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and, in the other, in the
State Prison of Pisa, or the bedroom of a cardinal,--or that the
subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is
matter of history,--so weigh down the real points, of the comparison,
as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or
subject (though confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the
soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius
(who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like
disgrace?[2]
[Footnote 1: The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious
expression. That which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded
morning countenance of the debauchee in the second plate of the
_Marriage Alamode_, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as
audibly as anything in Ecclesiastes.]
[Footnote 2: Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his Lectures, speaks
of the _presumption_ of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in
painting, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.
Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what
he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have
expression of _some sort or other_ in them,--the _Child Moses before
Pharaoh's Daughter_, for instance: which is more than can be said of
Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Repose in Egypt_, painted for Macklin's Bible,
where for a Madonna he has substituted a sleepy, insensible,
unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the
Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor
feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But indeed the race
of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch,
at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to give life
to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential
awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers
of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances
inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in
the person of their Heaven-born Infant.]
_The Boys under Demoniacal Possession_ of Raphael and Domenichino, by
what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to
the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class
the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am
sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one
that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human
suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by
strong mental agony, the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness,--yet
all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to
madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to
them in this face. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the
natural face of agony. This is high tragic painting, and we might as
well deny to Shakspeare the honors of a great tragedian, because he
has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business of his
plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for the two concluding
scenes of the _Rake's Progress_, because of the Comic Lunatics[1]
which he has thrown into the one, or the Alchymist that he has
introduced in the other, who is paddling in the coals of his furnace,
keeping alive the flames of vain hope within the very walls of the
prison to which the vanity has conducted him, which have taught the
darker lesson of extinguished hope to the desponding figure who is
the principal person of the scene.
[Footnote 1:
"There are of madmen, as there are of tame,
All humor'd not alike. We have here some
So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;
And though 'twould grieve a soul to see God's image
So blemish'd and defac'd, yet do they act
Such antick and such pretty lunacies,
That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile.
Others again we have, like angry lions,
Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies."
_Honest Whore_.]
It is the force of these kindly admixtures which assimilates the
scenes of Hogarth and of Shakspeare to the drama of real life, where
no such thing as pure tragedy is to be found; but merriment and
infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twiformed
births, disagreeing complexions of one intertexture, perpetually
unite to show forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that
the poet or painter shows his art, when in the selection of these
comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve,
contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to
his principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in _Hamlet_,
the Fool in _Lear_, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in
with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt: while the comic
stuff in _Venice Preserved_, and the doggerel nonsense of the Cook
and his poisoning associates in the _Rollo_ of Beaumont and Fletcher,
are pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords,--as bad as the
quarrelling dog and cat under the table of the _Lord and the
Disciples at Emmaus_ of Titian?
Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints which he
may not be fortunate enough to possess, it may be sufficient to
remark, that the same tragic cast of expression and incident, blended
in some instances with a greater alloy of comedy, characterizes his
other great work, the _Marriage Alamode_, as well as those less
elaborate exertions of his genius, the prints called _Industry_ and
_Idleness_, _the Distrest Poet_, &c., forming, with the _Harlot's_
and _Rake's Progresses_, the most considerable, if not the largest
class of his productions,--enough surely to rescue Hogarth from the
imputation of being a mere buffoon, or one whose general aim was only
to _shake the sides_.
There remains a very numerous class of his performances, the object
of which must be confessed to be principally comic. But in all of
them will be found something to distinguish them from the droll
productions of Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we
do not merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by
them. In this respect they resemble the characters of Chaucer's
_Pilgrims_, which have strokes of humor in them enough to designate
them for the most part as comic, but our strongest feeling still is
wonder at the comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet
and painter have done, into one small canvas so many diverse yet
cooperating materials.
The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, as in
caricatures, or those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes
catch a glance of in the street, and, struck with their whimsicality,
wish for a pencil and the power to sketch them down; and forget them
again as rapidly,--but they are permanent abiding ideas. Not the
sports of nature, but her necessary eternal classes. We feel that we
cannot part with any of them, lest a link should be broken.
It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a mean or
insignificant countenance.[1] Hogarth's mind was eminently
reflective; and, as it has been well observed of Shakspeare, that he
has transfused his own poetical character into the persons of his
drama (they are all more or less _poets_) Hogarth has impressed a
_thinking character_ upon the persons of his canvas. This remark must
not be taken universally. The exquisite idiotism of the little
gentleman in the bag and sword beating his drum in the print of the
_Enraged Musician_, would of itself rise up against so sweeping an
assertion. But I think it will be found to be true of the generality
of his countenances. The knife-grinder and Jew flute-player in the
plate just mentioned, may serve as instances instead of a thousand.
They have intense thinking faces, though the purpose to which they
are subservient by no means required it; but indeed it seems as if it
was painful to Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance.
[Footnote 1: If there are any of that description, they are in his
_Strolling Players_, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford
as the richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know, in
the mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but
in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably
poor and wanting; it is perhaps the only one of his performances at
which we have a right to feel disgusted.]
This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the faces of his
characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so much more than
those of any other artist, are objects of meditation. Our
intellectual natures love the mirror which gives them back their own
likenesses. The mental eye will not bend long with delight upon
vacancy.
Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common
painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often
confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the most unpromising
subjects seems never wholly to have deserted him. "Hogarth himself,"
says Mr. Coleridge,[1] from whom I have borrowed this observation,
speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more
ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, than this
effect occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those
beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, _in whom the satirist
never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a
poet_, so often and so gladly introduces as the central figure in a
crowd of humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of
true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act as a contrast; but
diffuses through all and over each of the group a spirit of
reconciliation and human kindness; and even when the attention is no
longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still
blends its tenderness with our laughter: and _thus prevents the
instructive merriment at the whims of nature, or the foibles or
humors of our fellow-men, from degenerating into the heart-poison of
contempt or hatred_." To the beautiful females in Hogarth, which Mr.
C. has pointed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of
children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular delight in)
into his pieces. They have a singular effect in giving tranquillity
and a portion of their own innocence to the subject. The baby riding
in its mother's lap in the _March to Finchley_, (its careless
innocent face placed directly behind the intriguing time-furrowed
countenance of the treason-plotting French priest,) perfectly sobers
the whole of that tumultuous scene. The boy mourner winding up his
top with so much unpretending insensibility in the plate of the
_Harlot's Funeral_, (the only thing in that assembly that is not a
hypocrite,) quiets and soothes the mind that has been disturbed at the
sight of so much depraved man and woman kind.
[Footnote 1: _The Friend_, No. XVI.]
I had written thus far, when I met with a passage in the writings of
the late Mr. Barry, which, as it falls in with the _vulgar notion_
respecting Hogarth, which this Essay has been employed in combating,
I shall take the liberty to transcribe, with such remarks as may
suggest themselves to me in the transcription; referring the reader
for a full answer to that which has gone before.
"Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does undoubtedly entitle him
to an honorable place among the artists, and that his little
compositions, considered as so many dramatic representations,
abounding with humor, character, and extensive observations on
the various incidents of low, faulty, and vicious life, are
very ingeniously brought together, and frequently tell their
own story with more facility than is often found in many of
the elevated and more noble inventions of Raphael and other
great men; yet it must be honestly confessed, that in what is
called knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly
observed, that Hogarth is often so raw and unformed, as hardly
to deserve the name of an artist. But this capital defect is
not often perceivable, as examples of the naked and of
elevated nature but rarely occur in his subjects, which are
for the most part filled with characters that in their nature
tend to deformity; besides his figures are small, and the
jonctures, and other difficulties of drawing that might occur
in their limbs, are artfully concealed with their clothes,
rags, &c. But what would atone for all his defects, even if
they were twice told, is his admirable fund of invention, ever
inexhaustible in its resources; and his satire, which is
always sharp and pertinent, and often highly moral, was
(except in a few instances, where he weakly and meanly
suffered his integrity to give way to his envy) seldom or
never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way. Hogarth has been
often imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his
humorous: but very few have attempted to rival him in his
moral walk. The line of art pursued by my very ingenious
predecessor and brother Academician, Mr. Penny, is quite
distinct from that of Hogarth, and is of a much more delicate
and superior relish; he attempts the heart, and reaches it,
whilst Hogarth's general aim is only to shake the sides; in
other respects no comparison can be thought of, as Mr. Penny
has all that knowledge of the figure and academical skill
which the other wanted. As to Mr. Bunbury, who had so happily
succeeded in the vein of humor and caricatura, he has for some
time past altogether relinquished it, for the more amiable
pursuit of beautiful nature: this, indeed, is not to be
wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in Mrs. Bunbury,
so admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and beauty
continually at his elbow. But (to say all that occurs to me on
this subject) perhaps it may be reasonably doubted, whether
the being much conversant with Hogarth's method of exposing
meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of his works, is not
rather a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit; which,
if it does not find a false relish and a love of and search
after satire and buffoonery in the spectator, is at least not
unlikely to give him one. Life is short; and the little
leisure of it is much better laid out upon that species of art
which is employed about the amiable and the admirable, as it
is more likely to be attended with better and nobler
consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art may be
compared with two sets of people with whom we might associate;
if we give ourselves up to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c. we
shall be continually busied and paddling in whatever is
ridiculous, faulty, and vicious in life; whereas there are
those to be found with whom we should be in the constant
pursuit and study of all that gives a value and a dignity to
human nature." [Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great
Boom of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at
the Adelphi, by James Barry, R.A., Professor of Painting to
the Royal Academy, reprinted in the last quarto edition of his
works.]
"----It must be honestly confessed, that in what is called
knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed," &c.
It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of
criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man's works, and
to pass over in silence what they do. That Hogarth did not draw the
naked figure so well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, especially
as "examples of the naked," as Mr. Barry acknowledges, "rarely (he
might almost have said never) occur in his subjects;" and that his
figures under their draperies do not discover all the fine graces of
an Antinoüs or an Apollo, may be conceded likewise; perhaps it was
more suitable to his purpose to represent the average forms of
mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses it) of the age in
which he lived: but that his figures in general, and in his best
subjects, are so glaringly incorrect as is here insinuated, I dare
trust my own eye so far as positively to deny the fact. And there is
one part of the figure in which Hogarth is allowed to have excelled,
which these foreigners seem to have overlooked, or perhaps
calculating from its proportion to the whole (a seventh or an eighth,
I forget which,) deemed it of trifling importance; I mean the human
face; a small part, reckoning by geographical inches, in the map of
man's body, but here it is that the painter of expression must
condense the wonders of his skill, even at the expense of neglecting
the "jonctures and other difficulties of drawing in the limbs," which
it must be a cold eye that, in the interest so strongly demanded by
Hogarth's countenances, has leisure to survey and censure.
"The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother
Academician, Mr. Penny."
The first impression caused in me by reading this passage was an
eager desire to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser of
Hogarth in the "delicacy of his relish," and the "line which he
pursued," where is he, what are his works, what has he to show? In
vain I tried to recollect, till by happily putting the question to a
friend who is more conversant in the works of the illustrious obscure
than myself, I learnt that he was the painter of a _Death of Wolfe_
which missed the prize the year that the celebrated picture of West
on the same subject obtained it; that he also made a picture of the
_Marquis of Granby relieving a Sick Soldier_; moreover, that he was
the inventor of two pictures of _Suspended and Restored Animation_,
which I now remember to have seen in the Exhibition some years since,
and the prints from which are still extant in good men's houses.
This, then, I suppose, is the line of subjects in which Mr. Penny was
so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of that opinion. The
relieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young man to
his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Humane Society,
are doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to teach the first
rudiments of humanity; they amount to about as much instruction as
the stories of good boys that give away their custards to poor
beggar-boys in children's books. But, good God! is this _milk for
babes_ to be set up in opposition to Hogarth's moral scenes, his
_strong meat for men_? As well might we prefer the fulsome verses
upon their own goodness to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund
annually sit still with such shameless patience to listen, to the
satires of Juvenal and Persius; because the former are full of tender
images of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity stretching out her
hand to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme of the latter is men's
crimes and follies with their black consequences--forgetful meanwhile
of those strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart-touches, which
these poets (in _them_ chiefly showing themselves poets) are
perpetually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their
subject--consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty
mankind have made us even to despair for our species, that there is
such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in the world, that her
unquenchable spark is not utterly out--refreshing admonitions, to
which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity of the
general satire.
And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth? nothing which
"attempts and reaches the heart?"--no aim beyond that of "shaking the
sides?"--If the kneeling ministering female in the last scene of the
_Rake's Progress_, the Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before,
and have dared almost to parallel it with the most absolute idea of
Virtue which Shakspeare has left us, be not enough to disprove the
assertion; if the sad endings of the Harlot and the Rake, the
passionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the
adulterous wife is pouring forth to her assassinated and dying lord
in the last scene but one of the _Marriage Alamode_,--if these be not
things to touch the heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative
tenderness: is there nothing sweetly conciliatory in the mild patient
face and gesture with which the wife seems to allay and ventilate the
feverish irritated feelings of her poor poverty-distracted mate (the
true copy of the _genus irritabile_), in the print of the _Distrest
Poet_? or if an image of maternal love be required, where shall we
find a sublimer view of it than in that aged woman in _Industry and
Idleness_ (plate V.) who is clinging with the fondness of hope not
quite extinguished to her brutal vice-hardened child, whom she is
accompanying to the ship which is to bear him away from his native
soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy: in whose shocking face
every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute
beast's to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who
watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered, and
feels it must belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of
his country shall be suffered to continue to beat in it. Compared
with such things, what is Mr. Penny's "knowledge of the figure and
academical skill which Hogarth wanted?"
With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the
congratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of "humor and
caricatura," in which it appears he was in danger of travelling side
by side with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs.
Hogarth knew _her_ province better than, by disturbing her husband at
his palette, to divert him from that universality of subject, which
has stamped him perhaps, next to Shakspeare, the most inventive
genius which this island has produced, into the "amiable pursuit of
beautiful nature," _i.e._, copying ad infinitum the individual charms
and graces of Mrs. H. "Hogarth's method of exposing meanness,
deformity, and vice, paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and
vicious."
A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatized would be apt to
imagine that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but
subjects of the coarsest and most repulsive nature. That his
imagination was naturally unsweet, and that he delighted in raking
into every species of moral filth. That he preyed upon sore places
only, and took a pleasure in exposing the unsound and rotten parts of
human nature:--whereas, with the exception of some of the plates of
the _Harlot's Progress_, which are harder in their character than any
of the rest of his productions (the _Stages of Cruelty_ I omit as
mere worthless caricatures, foreign to his general habits, the
offspring of his fancy in some wayward humor), there is scarce one of
his pieces where vice is most strongly satirized, in which some
figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest satisfied;
a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good-humoredness and
carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, yet enough to give a
relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, and keep the general air
from tainting. Take the mild, supplicating posture of patient Poverty
in the poor woman that is persuading the pawnbroker to accept her
clothes in pledge, in the plate of _Gin Lane_, for an instance. A
little does it, a little of the _good_ nature overpowers a world of
_bad_. One cordial honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely clears the
atmosphere that was reeking with the black putrefying breathings of a
hypocrite Blifil. One homely expostulating shrug from Strap warms the
whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingratitude from his
friend Random had begun to freeze. One "Lord bless us!" of Parson
Adams upon the wickedness of the times, exorcises and purges off the
mass of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could
cull out and rake together. But of the severer class of Hogarth's
performances, enough, I trust, has been said to show that they do not
merely shock and repulse; that there is in them the "scorn of vice"
and the "pity" too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive the
sense of moral beauty; the "lacrymæ rerum," and the sorrowing by
which the heart is made better. If they be bad things, then is satire
and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and
sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations: let us
"----wink, and shut our apprehensions up
From common sense of what men were and are:"
let us _make believe_ with the children, that everybody is good and
happy; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.
But that larger half of Hogarth's works, which were painted more for
entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of
his mind that there is always something to be learnt from them), his
humorous scenes,--are they such as merely to disgust and set us
against our species?
The confident assertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr.
Barry to have been, have that weight of authority in them which
staggers at first hearing, even a long preconceived opinion. When I
read his pathetic admonition concerning the shortness of life, and
how much better the little leisure of it were laid out upon "that
species of art which is employed about the amiable and the
admirable;" and Hogarth's "method," proscribed as a "dangerous or
worthless pursuit," I began to think there was something in it; that
I might have been indulging all my life a passion for the works of
this artist, to the utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense; but
my first convictions gradually returned, a world of good-natured
English faces came up one by one to my recollection, and a glance at
the matchless _Election Entertainment_, which I have the happiness to
have hanging up in my parlor, subverted Mr. Barry's whole theory in
an instant.
In that inimitable print (which in my judgment as far exceeds the
more known and celebrated _March to Finchley_, as the best comedy
exceeds the best farce that ever was written), let a person look till
he be saturated, and when he has done wondering at the inventiveness
of genius which could bring so many characters (more than thirty
distinct classes of face) into a room and set them down at table
together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural a manner,
engage them in so many easy sets and occupations, yet all partaking
of the spirit of the occasion which brought them together, so that we
feel that nothing but an election time could have assembled them;
having no central figure or principal group, (for the hero of the
piece, the Candidate, is properly set aside in the levelling
indistinction of the day, one must look for him to find him,) nothing
to detain the eye from passing from part to part, where every part is
alike instinct with life,--for here are no furniture-faces, no
figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all
dramatis personæ; when he shall have done wondering at all these
faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the
finest miniature; when he shall have done admiring the numberless
appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles which rich genius
flings into the heap when it has already done enough, the
over-measure which it delights in giving, as if it felt its stores
were exhaustless; the dumb rhetoric of the scenery,--for tables, and
chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth are living and significant
things; the witticisms that are expressed by words (all artists but
Hogarth have failed when they have endeavored to combine two mediums
of expression, and have introduced words into their pictures), and
the unwritten numberless little allusive pleasantries that are
scattered about; the work that is going on in the scene, and beyond
it, as is made visible to the "eye of mind," by the mob which chokes
up the doorway, and the sword that has forced an entrance before its
master; when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth of
genius, let him fairly say what is the _result_ left on his mind. Is
it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of his species? or
is it not the general feeling which remains, after the individual
faces have ceased to act sensibly on his mind, a _kindly one in favor
of his species?_ was not the general air of the scene wholesome? did
it do the heart hurt to be among it? Something of a riotous spirit to
be sure is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of the faces, a
Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous
degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion
of calling so much good company together; but is not the general cast
of expression in the faces of the good sort? do they not seem cut out
of the _good old rock_, substantial English honesty? would one fear
treachery among characters of their expression? or shall we call
their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names
of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow, that is grasping
his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home
which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since
he came into the room), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to
fit all the capacities of his soul the slender joke, which that
facetious wag his neighbor is practising upon the gouty gentleman,
whose eyes the effort to suppress pain has made as round as
rings--does it shock the "dignity of human nature" to look at that
man, and to sympathize with him in the seldom-heard joke which has
unbent his careworn, hard-working visage, and drawn iron smiles from
it? or with that full-hearted cobbler, who is honoring with the grasp
of an honest fist the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the
license of the time has seated next him?
I can see nothing "dangerous" in the contemplation of such scenes as
this, or the _Enraged Musician_, or the _Southwark Fair_, or twenty
other pleasant prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in
which the restless activities, the diversified bents and humors, the
blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather
than their "vices and follies," are held up in a laughable point of
view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency.
There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills
Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and
cherishes it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a
hearty laugh at the simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams,
where a sense of the ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a
perception of the amiable? That tumultuous harmony of singers that
are roaring out the words, "The world shall bow to the Assyrian
throne," from the opera of _Judith_, in the third plate of the series
called the _Four Groups of Heads_; which the quick eye of Hogarth
must have struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred
oratorios in this country, while "Music yet was young;" when we have
done smiling at the deafening distortions, which these tearers of
devotion to rags and tatters, these takers of heaven by storm, in
their boisterous mimicry of the occupation of angels, are
making,--what unkindly impression is left behind, or what more of
harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle Toby
and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The
conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause
of a Raphael or Correggio, (the twist of body which his conceit has
thrown him into has something of the Correggiesque in it,) is
contemplating the picture of a bottle, which he is drawing from an
actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the print of _Beer
Street_,--while we smile at the enormity of the self-delusion, can we
help loving the good-humor and self-complacency of the fellow? would
we willingly wake him from his dream?
I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have,
necessarily, something in them to make us like them; some are
indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, and only made
interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the
painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling
of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and
disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides,
that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,--they
give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which
escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of
the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that
_tædium quotidianarum formarum_, which an unrestricted passion for
ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in
many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett
or Fielding.
* * * * *
ON THE
POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER
The poems of G. Wither are distinguished by a hearty homeliness of
manner, and a plain moral speaking. He seems to have passed his life
in one continued act of an innocent self-pleasing. That which he
calls his _Motto_ is a continued self-eulogy of two thousand lines,
yet we read it to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost
without a consciousness that we have been listening all the while to
a man praising himself. There are none of the cold particles in it,
the hardness and self-ends, which render vanity and egotism hateful.
He seems to be praising another person, under the mask of self: or
rather, we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the
virtue which he celebrates; whether another's bosom or his own were
its chosen receptacle. His poems are full, and this in particular is
one downright confession, of a generous self-seeking. But by self he
sometimes means a great deal,--his friends, his principles, his
country, the human race.
Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of
those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or
Pope, will be grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished
characters, no nice traits of individual nature, few or no
personalities. The game run down is coarse general vice, or folly as
it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is _stript and
whipt;_ no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously
anatomized, and read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a
charm of moral sensibility running through them, which amply
compensates the want of those luxuries. Wither seems everywhere
bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base
actions. At this day it is hard to discover what parts of the poem
here particularly alluded to, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, could have
occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in High Places
more suspicious than now? had she more power; or more leisure to
listen after ill reports? That a man should be convicted of a libel
when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is
like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful
is arraigned for having "railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and
spoken contemptibly of his honorable friends, the Lord Old Man, the
Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy
could have tempted the great men of those days to appropriate such
innocent abstractions to themselves?
Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own
possible virtue. He is forever anticipating persecution and
martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try how he can bear
them. Perhaps his premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to
censures which he would otherwise have slipped by.
The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in
the present day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from a
poet "soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and
his singing robes about him;"[1] nor is it such as
he has shown in his _Philarete_, and in some parts of his _Shepherds
Hunting_. He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary
humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober
gray or black; but in their humility consists their sweetness. The
deepest tone of moral feeling in them (though all throughout is
weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions
against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled
_Revenge_. The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly
interesting. While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger,
the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know, that it
was some higher principle than _fear_ which counselled this
forbearance.
[Footnote 1: Milton.]
Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems to have
abated a jot of that free spirit which sets its mark upon his
writings, as much as a predominant feature of independence impresses
every page of our late glorious Burns; but the elder poet wraps his
proof-armor closer about him, the other wears his too much outwards;
he is thinking too much of annoying the foe to be quite easy within;
the spiritual defences of Wither are a perpetual source of inward
sunshine, the magnanimity of the modern is not without its alloy of
soreness, and a sense of injustice, which seems perpetually to gall
and irritate. Wither was better skilled in the "sweet uses of
adversity;" he knew how to extract the "precious jewel" from the head
of the "toad," without drawing any of the "ugly venom" along with it.
The prison-notes of Wither are finer than the wood-notes of most of
his poetical brethren. The description in the Fourth Eclogue of his
_Shepherds Hunting_ (which was composed during his imprisonment in
the Marshalsea) of the power of the Muse to extract pleasure from
common objects, has been oftener quoted, and is more known, than any
part of his writings. Indeed, the whole Eclogue is in a strain so
much above not only what himself, but almost what any other poet has
written, that he himself could not help noticing it; he remarks that
his spirits had been raised higher than they were wont, "through the
love of poesy." The praises of Poetry have been often sung in ancient
and in modern times; strange powers have been ascribed to it of
influence over animate and inanimate auditors; its force over
fascinated crowds has been acknowledged; but, before Wither, no one
ever celebrated its power _at home_, the wealth and the strength
which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too
after death, was all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves
from their art. It seems to have been left to Wither to discover that
poetry was a present possession, as well as a rich reversion, and
that the Muse had promise of both lives,--of this, and of that which
was to come.
The _Mistress of Philarete_ is in substance a panegyric protracted
through several thousand lines in the mouth of a single speaker, but
diversified, so as to produce an almost dramatic effect, by the
artful introduction of some ladies, who are rather auditors than
interlocutors in the scene; and of a boy, whose singing furnishes
pretence for an occasional change of metre: though the seven-syllable
line, in which the main part of it is written, is that in which
Wither has shown himself so great a master, that I do not know that I
am always thankful to him for the exchange.
Wither has chosen to bestow upon the lady whom he commends the name
of Arete, or Virtue; and, assuming to himself the character of
Philarete, or Lover of Virtue, there is a sort of propriety in that
heaped measure of perfections which he attributes to this partly
real, partly allegorical personage. Drayton before him had shadowed
his mistress under the name of Idea, or Perfect Pattern, and some of
the old Italian love-strains are couched in such religious terms as
to make it doubtful whether it be a mistress, or Divine Grace, which
the poet is addressing.
In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages of preeminent
merit. The first is where the lover, after a flight of rapturous
commendation, expresses his wonder why all men that are about his
mistress, even to her very servants, do not view her with the same
eyes that he does.
"Sometime I do admire
All men burn not with desire:
Nay, I muse her servants are not
Pleading love; but 0! they dare not.
And I therefore wonder, why
They do not grow sick and die.
Sure they would do so, but that,
By the ordinance of fate,
There is some concealed thing,
So each gazer limiting,
He can see no more of merit,
Than beseems his worth and spirit.
For in her a grace there shines,
That o'er-daring thoughts confines,
Making worthless men despair
To be loved of one so fair.
Yea, the destinies agree,
Some _good judgments_ blind should be,
And not gain the power of knowing
Those rare beauties in her growing.
Reason doth as much imply:
For, if every judging eye,
Which beholdeth her, should there
Find what excellences are,
All, o'ercome by those perfections,
Would be captive to affections.
So, in happiness unblest,
She for lovers should not rest."
The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties to gold, and
stars, and the most excellent things in nature; and, fearing to be
accused of hyperbole, the common charge against poets, vindicates
himself by boldly taking upon him, that these comparisons are no
hyperboles; but that the best things in nature do, in a lover's eye,
fall short of those excellences which he adores in her.
"What pearls, what rubies can
Seem so lovely fair to man,
As her lips whom he doth love,
When in sweet discourse they move,
Or her lovelier teeth, the while
She doth bless him with a smile?
Stars indeed fair creatures be;
Yet amongst us where is he
Joys not more the whilst he lies
Sunning in his mistress' eyes,
Than in all the glimmering light
Of a starry winter's night?
Note the beauty of an eye--
And if aught you praise it by
Leave such passion in your mind,
Let my reason's eye be blind.
Mark if ever red or white
Any where gave such delight,
As when they have taken place
In a worthy woman's face.
* * * * *
"I must praise her as I may,
Which I do mine own rude way,
Sometimes setting forth her glories
By unheard of allegories "--&c.
To the measure in which these lines are written the wits of Queen
Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby-Pamby, in ridicule
of Ambrose Philips, who has used it in some instances, as in the
lines on Cuzzoni, to my feeling at least, very deliciously; but
Wither, whose darling measure it seems to have been, may show, that
in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the subtilest movements
of passion. So true it is, which Drayton seems to have felt, that it
is the poet who modifies the metre, not the metre the poet; in his
own words, that
"It's possible to climb;
To kindle, or to stake;
Altho' in Skelton's rhime."[1]
[Footnote 1: A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the
_Shepherds Hunting_ take the following--
"If thy verse doth bravely tower,
_As she makes wing, she gets power;_
Yet the higher she doth soar,
She's affronted still the more,
'Till she to the high'st hath past,
Then she rests with fame at last."
What longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this! what
Alexandrine is half so long in pronouncing or expresses _labor slowly
but strongly surmounting difficulty_ with the life with which it is
done in the second of these lines? or what metre could go beyond
these from _Philarete_--
"Her true beauty leaves behind
Apprehensions in my mind
Of more sweetness, than all art
Or inventions can impart.
_Thoughts too deep to be expressed,
And too strong to be suppressed._"]
LETTERS,
UNDER ASSUMED SIGNATURES, PUBLISHED IN "THE
REFLECTOR."
* * * * *
THE LONDONER.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REFLECTOR."
Mr. Reflector,--I was born under the shadow of St. Dunstan's steeple,
just where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this
twofold city meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar.
The same day which gave me to the world, saw London happy in the
celebration of her great annual feast. This I cannot help looking
upon as a lively omen of the future great good-will which I was
destined to bear toward the city, resembling in kind that solicitude
which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever
concerns her interests and well-being. Indeed I consider myself in
some sort a speculative Lord Mayor of London: for though
circumstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of ever arriving at
the dignity of a gold chain and Spital Sermon, yet thus much will I
say of myself in truth, that Whittington with his cat (just emblem of
vigilance and a furred gown) never went beyond me in affection which
I bear to the citizens.
I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot in me an
entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost
insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion
was never interrupted or suspended, except for a few years in the
younger part of my life, during a period in which I had set my
affections upon a charming young woman. Every man, while the passion
is upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows
and purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I
contracted just familiarity enough with rural objects to understand
tolerably well ever after the _poets_, when they declaim in such
passionate terms in favor of a country-life.
For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in
declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit-door of
Drury Lane Theatre, just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand
sincerer pleasures, than I could ever receive from all the flocks of
silly sheep that ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs.
This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in London. The
man must have a rare _recipe_ for melancholy who can be dull in Fleet
Street. I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it
vanishes, like all other ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or
distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed
my humor, till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies
with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to
present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime.
The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from
habit do not displease me. The endless succession of shops where
_Fancy miscalled Folly_ is supplied with perpetual gauds and toys,
excite in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appetite
supplied with its proper food. The obliging customer, and the obliged
tradesman--things which live by bowing, and things which exist but
for homage--do not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive
nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover
meanness: I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the
medium most familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of honor at
work in the dirty ring which encompasses two combatants with fists,
and principles of no less eternal justice in the detection of a
pickpocket. The salutary astonishment with which an execution is
surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than a hundred volumes of
abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man in all ages has
leaned to order and good government.
Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest incidents of a
town life is attained by the same well-natured alchemy with which the
Foresters of Arden, in a beautiful country,
"Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
Where has spleen her food but in London! Humor, Interest, Curiosity,
suck at her measureless breasts without a possibility of being
satiated. Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what
have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with
usury to such scenes!
I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
A LONDONER.
ON BURIAL SOCIETIES;
AND
THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REFLECTOR."
Mr. Reflector,--I was amused the other day with having the following
notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner
of Fleet Market. Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made
him judge such notice seasonable, I cannot say; I might perhaps carry
in a countenance (naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which
had not long left me. Those fellows have a good instinctive way of
guessing at the sort of people that are likeliest to pay attention to
their papers.
"BURIAL SOCIETY.
"A favorable opportunity now offers to any person, of either sex, who
would wish to be buried in a genteel manner, by paying one shilling
entrance, and twopence per week for the benefit of the stock. Members
to be free in six months. The money to be paid at Mr. Middleton's, at
the sign of the _First_ and the _Last_, Stonecutter's Street, Fleet
Market. The deceased to be furnished as follows:--A strong elm
coffin, covered with superfine black, and furnished with two rows,
all round, close drove, best japanned nails, and adorned with
ornamental drops, a handsome plate of inscription, Angel above, and
Flower beneath, and four pair of handsome handles, with wrought
gripes; the coffin to be well pitched, lined, and ruffled with fine
crape; a handsome crape shroud, cap, and pillow. For use, a handsome
velvet pall, three gentlemen's cloaks, three crape hat-bands, three
hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves; two porters equipped to
attend the funeral, a man to attend the same with band and gloves;
also, the burial-fees paid, if not exceeding one guinea."
"Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a noble animal, splendid in ashes,
and pompous in the grave." Whoever drew up this little advertisement
certainly understood this appetite in the species, and has made
abundant provision for it. It really almost induces a _tædium vitæ_
upon one to read it. Methinks I could be willing to die, in death to
be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black
japanned nails,--how feelingly do they invite, and almost
irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down! what aching
head can resist the temptation to repose, which the crape shroud, the
cap, and the pillow present; what sting is there in death, which the
handles with wrought gripes are not calculated to pluck away? what
victory in the grave which the drops and the velvet pall do not
render at least extremely disputable? but, above all, the pretty
emblematic plate, with the Angel above and the Flower beneath, takes
me mightily.
The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society has been
established but a very few years, upwards of eleven hundred persons
have put down their names. It is really an affecting consideration to
think of so many poor people, of the industrious and hard-working
class (for none but such would be possessed of such a generous
forethought) clubbing their two-pences to save the reproach of a
parish funeral. Many a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that Angel and
Flower kept from the _Angel_ and _Punchbowl_, while, to provide
himself a bier, he has curtailed himself of _beer_. Many a savory
morsel has the living body been deprived of, that the lifeless one
might be served up in a richer state to the worms. And sure, if the
body could understand the actions of the soul, and entertain generous
notions of things, it would thank its provident partner, that she had
been more solicitous to defend it from dishonors at its dissolution,
than careful to pamper it with good things in the time of its union.
If Cæsar were chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most
decently, every Burial Society may be considered as a club of Cæsars.
Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poorer sort of
people, a generous horror of the work-house more than the manner in
which pauper funerals are conducted in this metropolis. The coffin
nothing but a few naked planks coarsely put together,--the want of a
pall (that decent and well-imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin
that hides the body, keeps that which would shock us at two removes
from us), the colored coats of the men that are hired, at cheap
rates, to carry the body,--altogether give the notion of the deceased
having been some person of an ill life and conversation, some one who
may not claim the entire rites of Christian burial,--one by whom some
parts of the sacred ceremony would be desecrated if they should be
bestowed upon him. I meet these meagre processions sometimes in the
street. They are sure to make me out of humor and melancholy all the
day after. They have a harsh and ominous aspect.
If there is anything in the prospectus issued from Mr. Middleton's,
Stonecutter's Street, which pleases me less than the rest, it is to
find that the six pair of gloves are to be returned, that they are
only lent, or, as the bill expresses it, for use on the occasion. The
hood, scarfs, and hat-bands, may properly enough be given up after
the solemnity; the cloaks no gentlemen would think of keeping; but a
pair of gloves, once fitted on, ought not in courtesy to be
redemanded. The wearer should certainly have the fee-simple of them.
The cost would be but trifling, and they would be a proper memorial
of the day. This part of the Proposal wants reconsidering. It is not
conceived in the same liberal way of thinking as the rest. I am also
a little doubtful whether the limit, within which the burial-fee is
made payable, should not be extended to thirty shillings.
Some provision too ought undoubtedly to be made in favor of those
well-intentioned persons and well-wishers to the fund, who, having
all along paid their subscriptions regularly, are so unfortunate as
to die before the six months, which would entitle them to their
freedom, are quite completed. One can hardly imagine a more
distressing case than that of a poor fellow lingering on in a
consumption till the period of his freedom is almost in sight, and
then finding himself going with a velocity which makes it doubtful
whether he shall be entitled to his funeral honors: his quota to
which he nevertheless squeezes out, to the diminution of the comforts
which sickness demands. I think, in such cases, some of the
contribution money ought to revert. With some such modifications,
which might easily be introduced, I see nothing in these Proposals of
Mr. Middleton which is not strictly fair and genteel; and heartily
recommend them to all persons of moderate incomes, in either sex, who
are willing that this perishable part of them should quit the scene
of its mortal activities with as handsome circumstances as possible.
Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against a scandal,
which they may be apt to take at the place whence these Proposals
purport to be issued. From the sign of the _First_ and the _Last_,
they may conclude that Mr. Middleton is some publican, who, in
assembling a club of this description at his house, may have a
sinister end of his own, altogether foreign to the solemn purpose for
which the club is pretended to be instituted. I must set them right
by informing them that the issuer of these Proposals is no publican,
though he hangs out a sign, but an honest superintendent of funerals,
who, by the device of a Cradle and a Coffin, connecting both ends of
human existence together, has most ingeniously contrived to
insinuate, that the framers of these _first_ and _last_ receptacles
of mankind divide this our life betwixt them, and that all that
passes from the midwife to the undertaker may, in strict propriety,
_go for nothing_: an awful and instructive lesson to human vanity.
Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands by chance,
and appear to have been written about the beginning of the last
century, I stumbled, among the rest, upon the following short Essay,
which the writer calls, "_The Character of an Undertaker_." It is
written with some stiffness and peculiarities of style, but some
parts of it, I think, not unaptly characterize the profession to
which Mr. Middleton has the honor to belong. The writer doubtless had
in his mind the entertaining character of _Sable_, in Steele's
excellent comedy of _The Funeral_.
CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER.
"He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning assemblies,
grand marshal at funeral processions, the only true yeoman of the
body, over which he exercises a dictatorial authority from the moment
that the breath has taken leave to that of its final commitment to
the earth. His ministry begins where the physician's, the lawyer's,
and the divine's end. Or if some part of the functions of the latter
run parallel with his, it is only _in ordine ad spiritualia_. His
temporalities remain unquestioned. He is arbitrator of all questions
of honor which may concern the defunct; and upon slight inspection
will pronounce how long he may remain in this upper world with credit
to himself, and when it will be prudent for his reputation that he
should retire. His determination in these points is peremptory and
without appeal. Yet, with a modesty peculiar to his profession, he
meddles not out of his own sphere. With the good or bad actions of
the deceased in his lifetime he has nothing to do. He leaves the
friends of the dead man to form their own conjectures as to the place
to which the departed spirit is gone. His care is only about the
exuviæ. He concerns not himself even about the body, as it is a
structure of parts internal, and a wonderful microcosm. He leaves
such curious speculations to the anatomy professor. Or, if anything,
he is averse to such wanton inquiries, as delighting rather that the
parts which he has care of should be returned to their kindred dust
in as handsome and unmutilated condition as possible; that the grave
should have its full and unimpaired tribute,--a complete and just
carcass. Nor is he only careful to provide for the body's entireness,
but for its accommodation and ornament. He orders the fashion of its
clothes, and designs the symmetry of its dwelling. Its vanity has an
innocent survival in him. He is bedmaker to the dead. The pillows
which he lays never rumple. The day of interment is the theatre in
which he displays the mysteries of his art. It is hard to describe
what he is, or rather to tell what he is not, on that day: for, being
neither kinsman, servant, nor friend, he is all in turns; a
transcendant, running through all those relations. His office is to
supply the place of self-agency in the family, who are presumed
incapable of it through grief. He is eyes, and ears, and hands, to
the whole household. A draught of wine cannot go round to the
mourners, but he must minister it. A chair may hardly be restored to
its place by a less solemn hand than his. He takes upon himself all
functions, and is a sort of ephemeral major-domo! He distributes his
attentions among the company assembled according to the degree of
affliction, which he calculates from the degree of kin to the
deceased; and marshals them accordingly in the procession. He himself
is of a sad and tristful countenance; yet such as (if well examined)
is not without some show of patience and resignation at bottom;
prefiguring, as it were, to the friends of the deceased, what their
grief shall be when the hand of Time shall have softened and taken
down the bitterness of their first anguish; so handsomely can he
fore-shape and anticipate the work of Time. Lastly, with his wand, as
with another divining rod, he calculates the depth of earth at which
the bones of the dead man may rest, which he ordinarily contrives may
be at such a distance from the surface of this earth, as may
frustrate the profane attempts of such as would violate his repose,
yet sufficiently on this side the centre to give his friends hopes of
an easy and practicable resurrection. And here we leave him, casting
in dust to dust, which is the last friendly office that he
_undertakes_ to do."
Begging your pardon for detaining you so long among "graves, and
worms, and epitaphs," I am, Sir,
Your humble servant,
MORITURUS.
* * * * *
ON THE
DANGER OF CONFOUNDING MORAL WITH PERSONAL
DEFORMITY.
WITH A HINT TO THOSE WHO HAVE THE FRAMING OF
ADVERTISEMENTS FOR APPREHENDING OFFENDERS.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REFLECTOR."
MR. REFLECTOR,--There is no science in their pretensions to which
mankind are more apt to commit grievous mistakes, than in the
supposed very obvious one of physiognomy. I quarrel not with the
principles of this science, as they are laid down by learned
professors; much less am I disposed, with some people, to deny its
existence altogether as any inlet of knowledge that can be depended
upon. I believe that there is, or may be, an art to "read the mind's
construction in the face." But, then, in every species of _reading_,
so much depends upon the eyes of the reader; if they are blear, or
apt to dazzle, or inattentive, or strained with too much attention,
the optic power will infallibly bring home false reports of what it
reads. How often do we say, upon a cursory glance at a stranger,
"What a fine open countenance he has!" who, upon second inspection,
proves to have the exact features of a knave? Nay, in much more
intimate acquaintances, how a delusion of this kind shall continue
for months, years, and then break up all at once.
Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short space of time,
if those blue eyes where, during so many years of anxious courtship,
truth, sweetness, serenity, seemed to be written in characters which
could not be misunderstood--ask him if the characters which they now
convey be exactly the same?--if for truth he does not _read_ a dull
virtue (the mimic of constancy) which changes not, only because it
wants the judgment to make a preference?--if for sweetness he does
not _read_ a stupid habit of looking pleased at everything?--if for
serenity he does not _read_ animal tranquillity, the dead pool of the
heart, which no breeze of passion can stir into health? Alas! what is
this book of the countenance good for, which when we have read so
long, and thought that we understood its contents, there comes a
countless list of heart-breaking errata at the end!
But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I
have inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose
quite an opposite blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall,
through hate. How ugly a person looks upon whose reputation some
awkward aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his countenance clears up
with his character! I remember being persuaded of a man whom I had
conceived an ill opinion of, that he had a very bad set of teeth;
which, since I have had better opportunities of being acquainted with
his face and facts, I find to have been the very reverse of the
truth. _That crooked old woman_, I once said, speaking of an ancient
gentlewoman, whose actions did not square altogether with my notions
of the rule of right. The unanimous surprise of the company before
whom I uttered these words soon convinced me that I had confounded
mental with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous
about the old lady but her deeds.
This humor of mankind to deny personal comeliness to those with whose
moral attributes they are dissatisfied, is very strongly shown in
those advertisements which stare us in the face from the walls of
every street, and, with the tempting bait which they hang forth,
stimulate at once cupidity and an abstract love of justice in the
breast of every passing peruser: I mean, the advertisements offering
rewards for the apprehension of absconded culprits, strayed
apprentices, bankrupts who have conveyed away their effects, debtors
that have run away from their bail. I observe, that in exact
proportion to the indignity with which the prosecutor, who is
commonly the framer of the advertisement, conceives he has been
treated, the personal pretensions of the fugitive are denied, and his
defects exaggerated.
A fellow whose misdeeds have been directed against the public in
general, and in whose delinquency no individual shall feel himself
particularly interested, generally meets with fair usage. A coiner or
a smuggler shall get off tolerably well. His beauty, if he has any,
is not much underrated, his deformities are not much magnified. A
runaway apprentice, who excites perhaps the next least degree of
spleen in his prosecutor, generally escapes with a pair of bandy
legs; if he has taken anything with him in his flight, a hitch in his
gait is generally superadded. A bankrupt, who has been guilty of
withdrawing his effects, if his case be not very atrocious, commonly
meets with mild usage. But a debtor, who has left his bail in
jeopardy, is sure to be described in characters of unmingled
deformity. Here the personal feelings of the bail, which may be
allowed to be somewhat poignant, are admitted to interfere; and, as
wrath and revenge commonly strike in the dark, the colors are laid on
with a grossness which I am convinced must often defeat its own
purpose. The fish that casts an inky cloud about him that his enemies
may not find him, cannot more obscure himself by that device than the
blackening representations of these angry advertisers must inevitably
serve to cloak and screen the persons of those who have injured them
from detection. I have before me at this moment one of these bills,
which runs thus:--
"FIFTY POUNDS REWARD.
"Run away from his bail, John Tomkins, formerly resident in Princes
Street, Soho, but lately of Clerkenwell. Whoever shall apprehend, or
cause to be apprehended and lodged in one of his Majesty's jails, the
said John Tomkins, shall receive the above reward. He is a thick-set,
sturdy man, about five foot six inches high, halts in his left leg,
with a stoop in his gait, with coarse red hair, nose short and cocked
up, with little gray eyes, (one of them bears the effect of a blow
which he has lately received,) with a pot-belly; speaks with a thick
and disagreeable voice; goes shabbily drest; had on when he went away
a greasy shag great-coat with rusty yellow buttons."
Now, although it is not out of the compass of possibility that John
Tomkins aforesaid may comprehend in his agreeable person all the
above-mentioned aggregate of charms, yet, from my observation of the
manner in which these advertisements are usually drawn up, though I
have not the pleasure of knowing the gentleman, yet would I lay a
wager, that an advertisement to the following effect would have a
much better chance of apprehending and laying by the heels this John
Tomkins than the above description, although penned by one who, from
the good services which he appears to have done for him, has not
improbably been blessed with some years of previous intercourse with
the said John. Taking, then, the above advertisement to be true, or
nearly so, down to the words "left leg" inclusive, (though I have
some doubt if the blemish there implied amount to a positive
lameness, or be perceivable by any but the nearest friends of John,)
I would proceed thus:--
--"Leans a little forward in his walk; his hair thick and inclining
to auburn; his nose of the middle size, a little turned up at the
end; lively hazel eyes (the contusion, as its effects are probably
gone off by this time, I judge better omitted); inclines to be
corpulent; his voice thick, but pleasing, especially when he sings;
had on a decent shag great-coat with yellow buttons."
Now I would stake a considerable wager (though by no means a positive
man) that some such mitigated description would lead the beagles of
the law into a much surer track for finding this ungracious varlet,
than to set them upon a false scent after fictitious ugliness and
fictitious shabbiness; though, to do those gentlemen justice, I have
no doubt their experience has taught them in all such cases to abate
a great deal of the deformity which they are instructed to expect,
and has discovered to them that the Devil's agents upon this earth,
like their master, are far less ugly in reality than they are
painted.
I am afraid, Mr. Reflector, that I shall be thought to have gone wide
of my subject, which was to detect the practical errors of
physiognomy, properly so called; whereas I have introduced physical
defects, such as lameness, the effects of accidents upon a man's
person, his wearing apparel, &c., as circumstances on which the eye
of dislike, looking askance, may report erroneous conclusions to the
understanding. But if we are liable, through a kind or an unkind
passion, to mistake so grossly concerning things so exterior and
palpable, how much more are we likely to err respecting those nicer
and less perceptible hints of character in a face whose detection
constitutes the triumph of the physiognomist!
To revert to those bestowers of unmerited deformity, the framers of
advertisements for the apprehension of delinquents, a sincere desire
of promoting the end of public justice induces me to address a word
to them on the best means of attaining those ends. I will endeavor to
lay down a few practical, or rather negative, rules for their use,
for my ambition extends no further than to arm them with cautions
against the self-defeating of their own purposes:--
1. Imprimis, then, Mr. Advertiser! If the culprit whom you are
willing to recover be one to whom in times past you have shown
kindness, and been disposed to think kindly of him yourself, but he
has deceived your trust, and has run away, and left you with a load
of debt to answer for him,--sit down calmly and endeavor to behold
him through the spectacles of memory rather than of present conceit.
Image to yourself, before you pen a tittle of his description, the
same plausible, good-looking man who took you in, and try to put away
from your mind every intrusion of that deceitful spectre which
perpetually obtrudes itself in the room of your former friend's known
visage. It will do you more credit to have been deceived by such a
one; and depend upon it, the traitor will convey to the eyes of the
world in general much more of that first idea which you formed
(perhaps in part erroneous) of his physiognomy, than of that
frightful substitute which you have suffered to creep in upon your
mind and usurp upon it; a creature which has no archetype except in
your own brain.
2. If you be a master that have to advertise a runaway apprentice,
though the young dog's faults are known only to you, and no doubt his
conduct has been aggravating enough, do not presently set him down as
having crooked ankles. He may have a good pair of legs, and run away
notwithstanding. Indeed, the latter does rather seem to imply the
former.
3. If the unhappy person against whom your laudable vengeance is
directed be a thief, think that a thief may have a good nose, good
eyes, good ears. It is indispensable to his profession that he be
possessed of sagacity, foresight, vigilance; it is more than
probable, then, that he is endued with the bodily types or
instruments of these qualities to some tolerable degree of
perfectness.
4. If petty larceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not confound
meanness of crime with diminutiveness of stature. These things have
no connection. I have known a tall man stoop to the basest action, a
short man aspire to the height of crime, a fair man be guilty of the
foulest actions, &c.
5. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some atrocious and
aggravated murder. Here is the most difficult case of all. It is
above all requisite that such a daring violator of the peace and
safety of society should meet with his reward, a violent and
ignominious death. But how shall we get at him? Who is there among us
that has known him before he committed the offence, that shall take
upon him to say he can sit down coolly and pen a dispassionate
description of a murderer? The tales of our nursery,--the reading of
our youth,--the ill-looking man that was hired by the Uncle to
despatch the Children in the Wood,--the grim ruffians who smothered
the babes in the Tower,--the black and beetle-browed assassin of Mrs.
Ratcliffe,--the shag-haired villain of Mr. Monk Lewis,--the Tarquin
tread, and mill-stone dropping eyes, of Murder in Shakspeare,--the
exaggerations of picture and of poetry,--what we have read and what
we have dreamed of,--rise up and crowd in upon us such eye-scaring
portraits of the man of blood, that our pen is absolutely
forestalled; we commence poets when we should play the part of
strictest historians, and the very blackness of horror which the deed
calls up, serves as a cloud to screen the doer. The fiction is
blameless, it is accordant with those wise prejudices with which
nature has guarded our innocence, as with impassable barriers,
against the commission of such appalling crimes; but, meantime, the
criminal escapes; or if,--owing to that wise abatement in their
expectation of deformity, which, as I hinted at before, the officers
of pursuit never fail to make, and no doubt in cases of this sort
they make a more than ordinary allowance,--if, owing to this or any
accident, the offender is caught and brought to his trial, who that
has been led out of curiosity to witness such a scene has not with
astonishment reflected on the difference between a real committer of
a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and
heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c.? The fellow,
perhaps, is a sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and
eyebrows,--the latter by no means jutting out or like a crag,--and
with none of those marks which our fancy had pre-bestowed upon him.
I find I am getting unawares too serious; the best way on such
occasions is to leave off, which I shall do by generally recommending
to all prosecuting advertisers not to confound crimes with ugliness;
or rather, to distinguish between that physiognomical deformity,
which I am willing to grant always accompanies crime, and mere
_physical ugliness_,--which signifies nothing, is the opponent of
nothing, and may exist in a good or bad person indifferently.
CRITO.
ON THE INCONVENIENCES RESULTING FROM
BEING HANGED.
* * * * *
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REFLECTOR."
Sir,--I am one of those unhappy persons whose misfortunes, it seems,
do not entitle them to the benefit of pure pity. All that is bestowed
upon me of that kindest alleviator of human miseries comes dashed
with a double portion of contempt. My griefs have nothing in them
that is felt as sacred by the bystanders. Yet is my affliction, in
truth, of the deepest grain--the heaviest task that was ever given to
mortal patience to sustain. Time, that wears out all other sorrows,
can never modify or soften mine. Here they must continue to gnaw as
long at that fatal mark----
Why was I ever born? Why was innocence in my person suffered to be
branded with a stain which was appointed only for the blackest guilt?
What had I done, or my parents, that a disgrace of mine should
involve a whole posterity in infamy? I am almost tempted to believe,
that, in some preëxistent state, crimes to which this sublunary life
of mine hath been as much a stranger as the babe that is newly born
into it, have drawn down upon me this vengeance, so disproportionate
to my actions on this globe.
My brain sickens, and my bosom labors to be delivered of the weight
that presses upon it, yet my conscious pen shrinks from the avowal.
But out it must----
O, Mr. Reflector! guess at the wretch's misery who now writes this to
you, when, with tears and burning blushes, he is obliged to confess
that he has been--HANGED----
Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from you, as your
imagination presents to you fearful images of your correspondent
unknown--_hanged!_
Fear not, Mr. Editor. No disembodied spirit has the honor of
addressing you. I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate system of bones,
muscles, sinews, arteries, like yourself.
_Then, I presume, you mean to be pleasant.--That expression of yours,
Mr. Correspondent, must be taken somehow in a metaphorical sense----_
In the plainest sense, without trope or figure--Yes, Mr. Editor! this
neck of mine has felt the fatal noose,--these hands have tremblingly
held up the corroborative prayer-book,--these lips have sucked the
moisture of the last consolatory orange,--this tongue has chanted the
doleful cantata which no performer was ever called upon to
repeat,--this face has had the veiling nightcap drawn over it----
But for no crime of mine.--Far be it from me to arraign the justice
of my country, which, though tardy, did at length recognize my
innocence. It is not for me to reflect upon judge or jury, now that
eleven years have elapsed since the erroneous sentence was
pronounced. Men will always be fallible, and perhaps circumstances
did appear at the time a little strong----
Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes (as the spectators
were pleased to compute it,--a man that is being strangled, I know
from experience, has altogether a different measure of time from his
friends who are breathing leisurely about him,--I suppose the minutes
lengthen as time approaches eternity, in the same manner as the miles
get longer as you travel northward),--after hanging four minutes,
according to the best calculation of the bystanders, a reprieve came,
and I was CUT DOWN--
Really I am ashamed of deforming your pages with these technical
phrases--if I knew how to express my meaning shorter--
But to proceed.--My first care after I had been brought to myself by
the usual methods (those methods that are so interesting to the
operator and his assistants, who are pretty numerous on such
occasions,--but which no patient was ever desirous of undergoing a
second time for the benefit of science), my first care was to provide
myself with an enormous stock or cravat to hide the place--you
understand me; my next care was to procure a residence as distant as
possible from that part of the country where I had suffered. For that
reason I chose the metropolis, as the place where wounded honor (I
had been told) could lurk with the least danger of exciting inquiry,
and stigmatized innocence had the best chance of hiding her disgrace
in a crowd. I sought out a new circle of acquaintance, and my
circumstances happily enabling me to pursue my fancy in that respect,
I endeavored, by mingling in all the pleasures which the town
affords, to efface the memory of what I had undergone.
But, alas! such is the portentous and all-pervading chain of
connection which links together the head and members of this great
community, my scheme of lying perdu was defeated almost at the
outset. A countryman of mine, whom a foolish lawsuit had brought to
town, by chance met me, and the secret was soon blazoned about.
In a short time I found myself deserted by most of those who had been
my intimate friends. Not that any guilt was supposed to attach to my
character. My officious countryman, to do him justice, had been
candid enough to explain my perfect innocence.
But, somehow or other, there is a want of strong virtue in mankind.
We have plenty of the softer instincts, but the heroic character is
gone. How else can I account for it, that of all my numerous
acquaintance, among whom I had the honor of ranking sundry persons of
education, talents, and worth, scarcely here and there one or two
could be found who had the courage to associate with a man that had
been hanged.
Those few who did not desert me altogether were persons of strong but
coarse minds; and from the absence of all delicacy in them I suffered
almost as much as from the superabundance of a false species of it in
the others. Those who stuck by me were the jokers, who thought
themselves entitled by the fidelity which they had shown towards me
to use me with what familiarity they pleased. Many and unfeeling are
the jests that I have suffered from these rude (because faithful)
Achateses. As they passed me in the streets, one would nod
significantly to his companion and say, pointing to me, Smoke his
cravat, and ask me if I had got a wen, that I was so solicitous to
cover my neck. Another would inquire, What news from * * * Assizes?
(which you may guess, Mr. Editor, was the scene of my shame,) and
whether the sessions was like to prove a maiden one? A third would
offer to insure me from drowning. A fourth would tease me with
inquiries how I felt when I was swinging, whether I had not something
like a blue flame dancing before my eyes? A fifth took a fancy never
to call me anything but _Lazarus_. And an eminent bookseller and
publisher,--who, in his zeal to present the public with new facts,
had he lived in those days, I am confident, would not have scrupled
waiting upon the person himself last mentioned, at the most critical
period of his existence, to solicit a _few facts relative to
resuscitation_,--had the modesty to offer me--guineas per sheet, if I
would write, in his magazine, a physiological account of my feelings
upon coming to myself.
But these were evils which a moderate fortitude might have enabled me
to struggle with. Alas! Mr. Editor, the women,--whose good graces I
had always most assiduously cultivated, from whose softer minds I had
hoped a more delicate and generous sympathy than I found in the
men,--the women began to shun me--this was the unkindest blow of all.
But is it to be wondered at? How couldst thou imagine, wretchedest of
beings, that that tender creature Seraphina would fling her pretty
arms about that neck which previous circumstances had rendered
infamous? That she would put up with the refuse of the rope, the
leavings of the cord? Or that any analogy could subsist between the
knot which binds true lovers, and the knot which ties malefactors?
I can forgive that pert baggage Flirtilla, who, when I complimented
her one day on the execution which her eyes had done, replied, that,
to be sure, Mr. * * * was a judge of those things. But from thy more
exalted mind, Celestina, I expected a more unprejudiced decision. The
person whose true name I conceal under this appellation, of all the
women that I was ever acquainted with had the most manly turn of
mind, which she had improved by reading and the best conversation.
Her understanding was not more masculine than her manners and whole
disposition were delicately and truly feminine. She was the daughter
of an officer who had fallen in the service of his country, leaving
his widow, and Celestina, an only child, with a fortune sufficient to
set them above want, but not to enable them to live in splendor. I
had the mother's permission to pay my addresses to the young lady,
and Celestina seemed to approve of my suit.
Often and often have I poured out my overcharged soul in the presence
of Celestina, complaining of the hard and unfeeling prejudices of the
world; and the sweet maid has again and again declared, that no
irrational prejudice should hinder her from esteeming every man
according to his intrinsic worth. Often has she repeated the
consolatory assurance, that she could never consider as essentially
ignominious an _accident_, which was indeed to be deprecated, but
which might have happened to the most innocent of mankind. Then would
she set forth some illustrious example, which her reading easily
furnished, of a Phocion or a Socrates unjustly condemned; of a
Raleigh or a Sir Thomas More, to whom late posterity had done
justice; and by soothing my fancy with some such agreeable parallel,
she would make me almost to triumph in my disgrace, and convert my
shame into glory.
In such entertaining and instructive conversations the time passed
on, till I importunately urged the mistress of my affections to name
the day for our union. To this she obligingly consented, and I
thought myself the happiest of mankind. But how was I surprised one
morning on the receipt of the following billet from my charmer:--
SIR,--You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse failing,
ingratitude, if, with anguish of heart, I feel myself compelled by
irresistible arguments to recall a vow which I fear I made with too
little consideration. I never can be yours. The reasons of my
decision, which is final, are in my own breast, and you must
everlastingly remain a stranger to them. Assure yourself that I can
never cease to esteem you as I ought.
CELESTINA.
At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to Celestina's
lodgings, where I learned, to my infinite mortification, that the
mother and daughter were set off on a journey to a distant part of
the country, to visit a relation, and were not expected to return in
less than four months.
Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage to solicit an
explanation by letter, even if I had known where they were, (for the
particular address was industriously concealed from me,) I waited
with impatience the termination of the period, in the vain hope that
I might be permitted to have a chance of softening the harsh decision
by a personal interview with Celestina after her return. But before
three months were at an end, I learned from the newspapers that my
beloved had----given her hand to another.
Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account for the
strange step which she had taken; and it was not till some years
after that I learned the true reason from a female relation of hers,
to whom it seems Celestina had confessed in confidence, that it was
no demerit of mine that had caused her to break off the match so
abruptly, nor any preference which she might feel for any other
person, for she preferred me (she was pleased to say) to all mankind;
but when she came to lay the matter closer to her heart, she found
that she never should be able to bear the sight--(I give you her very
words as they were detailed to me by her relation)--the sight of a
man in a nightcap who had appeared on a public platform--it would
lead to such a disagreeable association of ideas! And to this
punctilio I was sacrificed.
To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to which
this last and heaviest might well render me callous, behold me here,
Mr. Editor! in the thirty-seventh year of my existence, (the twelfth,
reckoning from my reanimation,) cut off from all respectable
connections: rejected by the fairer half of the community,--who in my
case alone seem to have laid aside the characteristic pity of their
sex; punished because I was once punished unjustly: suffering for no
other reason than because I once had the misfortune to suffer without
any cause at all. In no other country, I think, but this, could a man
have been subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his
innocence had been clearly established.
Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the horrible
dungeons of the Inquisition,--had I heaved myself up from a half
bastinado in China, or been torn from the just-entering, ghastly
impaling stake in Barbary,--had I dropt alive from the knout in
Russia, or come off with a gashed neck from the half-mortal,
scarce-in-time-retracted cimeter of an executioneering slave in
Turkey,--I might have borne about the remnant of this frame (the
mangled trophy of reprieved innocence) with credit to myself in any
of those barbarous countries. No scorn, at least, would have mingled
with the pity (small as it might be) with which what was left of me
would have been surveyed.
The singularity of my case has often led me to inquire into the
reasons of the general levity with which the subject of hanging is
treated as a topic in this country. I say, as a topic: for let the
very persons who speak so lightly of the thing at a distance be
brought to view the real scene,--let the platform be bona fide
exhibited, and the trembling culprit brought forth,--the case is
changed; but as a topic of conversation, I appeal to the vulgar jokes
which pass current in every street. But why mention them, when the
politest authors have agreed in making use of this subject as a
source of the ridiculous? Swift, and Pope, and Prior, are fond of
recurring to it. Gay has built an entire drama upon this single
foundation. The whole interest of the _Beggar's Opera_ may be said to
hang upon it. To such writers as Fielding and Smollett it is a
perfect _bonne-bouche_.--Hear the facetious Tom Brown, in his
_Comical View of London and Westminster_, describe the _Order of the
Show at one of the Tyburn Executions_ in his time:--"Mr. Ordinary
visits his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight. Doleful procession
up Holborn Hill about eleven. Men handsome and proper that were never
thought so before, which is some comfort however. Arrive at the fatal
place by twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and sabbath-breaking, repented
of. Some few penitential drops fall under the gallows. Sheriffs' men,
parson, pickpockets, criminals, all very busy. The last concluding
peremptory psalm struck up. Show over by one."--In this sportive
strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so
serious, which yet he would hardly have done if he had not known that
there existed a predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable
countrymen to consider the subject as a jest. But what shall we say
to Shakspeare, who, (not to mention the solution which the
_Gravedigger_ in _Hamlet_ gives of his fellow-workman's problem,) in
that scene in _Measure for Measure_, where the _Clown_ calls upon
_Master Barnardine_ to get up and be hanged, which he declines on the
score of being sleepy, has actually gone out of his way to gratify
this amiable propensity in his countrymen; for it is plain, from the
use that was to be made of his head, and from _Abhorson's_ asking,
"Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?" that beheading, and not hanging,
was the punishment to which _Barnardine_ was destined. But Shakspeare
knew that the axe and block were pregnant with no ludicrous images,
and therefore falsified the historic truth of his own drama (if I may
so speak), rather than he would leave out such excellent matter for a
jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature in mid-air has been ever
esteemed to be by Englishmen.
One reason why the ludicrous never fails to intrude itself into our
contemplations upon this mode of death, I suppose to be, the absurd
posture into which a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the
vulgar delight to express it, upon nothing. To see him whisking and
wavering in the air,
"As the wind you know will wave a man;"[1]
to behold the vacant carcass, from which the life is newly dislodged,
shifting between earth and heaven, the sport of every gust; like a
weathercock, serving to show from which point the wind blows; like a
maukin, fit only to scare away birds; like a nest left to swing upon
a bough when the bird is flown: these are uses to which we cannot
without a mixture of spleen and contempt behold the human carcass
reduced. We string up dogs, foxes, bats, moles, weasels. Man surely
deserves a steadier death.
[Footnote 1: Hieronimo in the Spanish Tragedy.]
Another reason why the ludicrous associates more forcibly with this
than with any other mode of punishment, I cannot help thinking to be,
the senseless costume with which old prescription has thought fit to
clothe the exit of malefactors in this country. Let a man do what he
will to abstract from his imagination all idea of the whimsical,
something of it will come across him when he contemplates the figure
of a fellow-creature in the daytime (in however distressing a
situation) in a nightcap. Whether it be that this nocturnal addition
has something discordant with daylight, or that it is the dress which
we are seen in at those times when we are "seen," as the Angel in
Milton expresses it, "least wise,"--this, I am afraid, will always be
the case; unless, indeed, as in my instance, some strong personal
feeling overpower the ludicrous altogether. To me, when I reflect
upon the train of misfortunes which have pursued men through life,
owing to that accursed drapery, the cap presents as purely frightful
an object as the sleeveless yellow coat and devil-painted mitre of
the San Benitos.--An ancestor of mine, who suffered for his loyalty
in the time of the civil wars, was so sensible of the truth of what I
am here advancing, that on the morning of execution, no entreaties
could prevail upon him to submit to the odious dishabille, as he
called it, but he insisted upon wearing, and actually suffered in,
the identical, flowing periwig which he is painted in, in the gallery
belonging to my uncle's seat in ----shire.
Suffer me, Mr. Editor, before I quit the subject, to say a word or
two respecting the minister of justice in this country; in plain
words, I mean the hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the
mode of inflicting capital punishments with us, there is too much of
the ministry of the human hand. The guillotine, as performing its
functions more of itself and sparing human agency, though a cruel and
disgusting exhibition, in my mind has many ways the advantage over
_our way_. In beheading, indeed, as it was formerly practised in
England, and in whipping to death, as is sometimes practised now, the
hand of man is no doubt sufficiently busy; but there is something
less repugnant in these downright blows than in the officious
barber-like ministerings of _the other_. To have a fellow with his
hangman's hands fumbling about your collar, adjusting the thing as
your valet would regulate your cravat, valuing himself on his menial
dexterity----
I never shall forget meeting my rascal,--I mean the fellow who
officiated for me,--in London last winter. I think I see him now,--in
a waistcoat that had been mine,--smirking along as if he knew me----
In some parts of Germany, that fellow's office is by law declared
infamous, and his posterity incapable of being ennobled. They have
hereditary hangmen, or had at least, in the same manner as they had
hereditary other great officers of state; and the hangmen's families
of two adjoining parishes intermarried with each other, to keep the
breed entire. I wish something of the same kind were established in
England.
But it is time to quit a subject which teems with disagreeable
images----
Permit me to subscribe myself, Mr. Editor,
Your unfortunate friend,
PENSILIS.
* * * * *
ON THE MELANCHOLY OF TAILORS.
"Sedet, asternumque sedebit,
Infelix Theseus." VIRGIL.
That there is a professional melancholy, if I may so express myself,
incident to the occupation of a tailor, is a fact which I think very
few will venture to dispute. I may safely appeal to my readers,
whether they ever knew one of that faculty that was not of a
temperament, to say the least, far removed from mercurial or jovial.
Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock is not more
tender, from a consciousness of his peculiar infirmity, than a
gentleman of this profession is of being known by the same infallible
testimonies of his occupation. "Walk, that I may know thee."
Do you ever see him go whistling along the footpath like a carman, or
brush through a crowd like a baker, or go smiling to himself like a
lover? Is he forward to thrust into mobs, or to make one at the
ballad-singer's audiences? Does he not rather slink by assemblies and
meetings of the people, as one that wisely declines popular
observation?
How extremely rare is a noisy tailor! a mirthful and obstreperous
tailor!
"At my nativity," says Sir Thomas Browne, "my ascendant was the
earthly sign of Scorpius; I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn,
and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me." One would
think that he were anatomizing a tailor! save that to the latter's
occupation, methinks, a woollen planet would seem more consonant, and
that he should be born when the sun was in Aries.--He goes on; "I am
no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardise of
company." How true a type of the whole trade! Eminently economical of
his words, you shall seldom hear a jest come from one of them. He
sometimes furnishes subject for a repartee, but rarely (I think)
contributes one _ore proprio_.
Drink itself does not seem to elevate him, or at least to call out of
him any of the external indications of vanity. I cannot say that it
never causes his pride to swell, but it never breaks out. I am even
fearful that it may swell and rankle to an alarming degree inwardly.
For pride is near of kin to melancholy!--a hurtful obstruction from
the ordinary outlets of vanity being shut. It is this stoppage which
engenders proud humors. Therefore a tailor may be proud. I think he
is never vain. The display of his gaudy patterns, in that book of his
which emulates the rainbow, never raises any inflations of that
emotion in him, corresponding to what the wig-maker (for instance)
evinces, when he expatiates on a curl or a bit of hair. He spreads
them forth with a sullen incapacity for pleasure, a real or affected
indifference to grandeur. Cloth of gold neither seems to elate, nor
cloth of frieze to depress him--according to the beautiful motto
which formed the modest imprese of the shield worn by Charles Brandon
at his marriage with the king's sister. Nay, I doubt whether he would
discover any vainglorious complacence in his colors, though "Iris"
herself "dipt the woof."
In further corroboration of this argument--who ever saw the wedding
of a tailor announced in the newspapers, or the birth of his eldest
son?
When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself a good
dancer, or to perform exquisitely on the tight-rope, or to shine in
any such light and airy pastimes? to sing, or play on the violin?
Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ringing of
bells, firing of cannons, &c.?
Valiant I know they can be; but I appeal to those who were witnesses
to the exploits of Eliot's famous troop, whether in their fiercest
charges they betrayed anything of that thoughtless oblivion of death
with which a Frenchman jigs into battle, or whether they did not show
more of the melancholy valor of the Spaniard, upon whom they charged;
that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary habits
breathe?
Are they often great newsmongers?--I have known some few among them
arrive at the dignity of speculative politicians; but that light and
cheerful every-day interest in the affairs and goings-on of the
world, which makes the barber[1] such delightful company, I think is
rarely observable in them.
[Footnote 1: Having incidentally mentioned the barber in a comparison
of professional temperaments, I hope no other trade will take
offence, or look upon it as an incivility done to them if I say, that
in courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces
which "gladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his.
Indeed, so great is the goodwill which I bear to this useful and
agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the Inns of Court
(where the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps at
the universities), there are seven of them to whom I am personally
known, and who never pass me without the compliment of the hat on
either side. My truly polite and urbane friend Mr. A----m, of
Flower-de-luce Court, in Fleet Street, will forgive my mention of him
in particular. I can truly say that I never spent a quarter of an
hour under his hands without deriving some profit from the agreeable
discussions which are always going on there.]
This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder
none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy,
should have mentioned it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract
of all the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of
every species of this malady, from the _hypochondriacal_ or _windy_
to the _heroical_ or _love-melancholy_, has strangely omitted it.
Shakspeare himself has overlooked it. "I have neither the scholar's
melancholy (saith Jaques), which is emulation; nor the courtier's,
which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is politic; nor the lover's,
which is all these:" and then, when you might expect him to have
brought in, "nor the tailor's, which is," so and so, he comes to an
end of his enumeration, and falls to a defining of his own
melancholy.
Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity
of bringing it in, in his _Penseroso_.
But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the
existence of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavor to
ascertain the causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant
in people of this profession above all others.
And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being
derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products
of that unhappy event, a certain _seriousness_ (to say no more of it)
may in the order of things have been intended to be impressed upon
the minds of that race of men to whom in all ages the care of
contriving the human apparel has been intrusted, to keep up the
memory of the first institution of clothes, and serve as a standing
remonstrance against those vanities which the absurd conversion of a
memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to
produce? Correspondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that
the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the caballistic
language of his order is said to have _certain melancholy_ regions
always open under his feet.--But waiving further inquiry into final
causes, where the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try
to discover the efficient causes of this melancholy.
I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some
subordinate ones, viz.:
The sedentary habits of the tailor.--
Something peculiar in his diet.--
First, his _sedentary habits_.--In Dr. Norris's famous narrative of
the frenzy of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, being questioned as to
the occasion of the swelling in his legs, replies that it came "by
criticism;" to which the learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a
distemper which he had never read of, Dennis (who appears not to have
been mad upon all subjects) rejoins, with some warmth, that it was no
distemper, but a noble art; that he had sat fourteen hours a day at
it; and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know that there was
a communication between the brain and the legs.
When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously,
which the critic probably practised only while he was writing his
"remarks," is no more than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance
of his art, submits to daily (Sundays excepted) throughout the year,
shall we wonder to find the brain affected, and in a manner
overclouded, from that indissoluble sympathy between the noble and
less noble parts of the body which Dennis hints at? The unnatural and
painful manner of his sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil,
insomuch that I have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their
boards to so many envious Junos, _sitting cross-legged to hinder the
birth of their own felicity_. The legs transversed thus
[Illustration: X lying on its side] crosswise, or decussated, was
among the ancients the posture of malediction. The Turks, who
practise it at this day, are noted to be a melancholy people.
Secondly, his _diet_.--To which purpose I find a most remarkable
passage in Burton, in his chapter entitled "Bad diet a cause of
melancholy." "Amongst herbs to be eaten (he says) I find gourds,
cucumbers, melons, disallowed; but especially CABBAGE. It causeth
troublesome dreams, and sends up black vapors to the brain. Galen,
_Loc. Affect_, lib. iii. cap. 6, of all herbs condemns CABBAGE. And
Isaack, lib. ii. cap. 1, _animæ gravitatem facit_, it brings
heaviness to the soul." I could not omit so flattering a testimony
from an author who, having no theory of his own to serve, has so
unconsciously contributed to the confirmation of mine. It is well
known that this last-named vegetable has, from the earliest periods
which we can discover, constituted almost the sole food of this
extraordinary race of people.
BURTON, _Junior_.
* * * * *
HOSPITA
ON THE IMMODERATE INDULGENCE OF THE PLEASURES
OF THE PALATE.
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REFLECTOR."
MR. REFLECTOR,--My husband and I are fond of company, and being in
easy circumstances, we are seldom without a party to dinner two or
three days in a week. The utmost cordiality has hitherto prevailed at
our meetings; but there is a young gentleman, a near relation of my
husband's, that has lately come among us, whose preposterous behavior
bids fair, if not timely checked, to disturb our tranquillity. He is
too great a favorite with my husband in other respects, for me to
remonstrate with him in any other than this distant way. A letter
printed in your publication may catch his eye; for he is a great
reader, and makes a point of seeing all the new things that come out.
Indeed, he is by no means deficient in understanding. My husband says
that he has a good deal of wit; but for my part I cannot say I am any
judge of that, having seldom observed him open his mouth except for
purposes very foreign to conversation. In short, sir, this young
gentleman's failing is, an immoderate indulgence of his palate. The
first time he dined with us, he thought it necessary to extenuate the
length of time he kept the dinner on the table, by declaring that he
had taken a very long walk in the morning, and came in fasting; but
as that excuse could not serve above once or twice at most, he has
latterly dropped the mask altogether, and chosen to appear in his own
proper colors, without reserve or apology.
You cannot imagine how unpleasant his conduct has become. His way of
staring at the dishes as they are brought in, has absolutely
something immodest in it: it is like the stare of an impudent man of
fashion at a fine woman, when she first comes into a room. I am
positively in pain for the dishes, and cannot help thinking they have
consciousness, and will be put out of countenance, he treats them so
like what they are not.
Then again he makes no scruple of keeping a joint of meat on the
table, after the cheese and fruit are brought in, till he has what he
calls _done with it_. Now how awkward this looks, where there are
ladies, you may judge, Mr. Reflector,--how it disturbs the order and
comfort of a meal. And yet I always make a point of helping him
first, contrary to all good manners,--before any of my female friends
are helped, that he may avoid this very error. I wish he would eat
before he comes out.
What makes his proceedings more particularly offensive at our house
is, that my husband, though out of common politeness he is obliged to
set dishes of animal food before his visitors, yet himself and his
whole family (myself included) feed entirely on vegetables. We have a
theory, that animal food is neither wholesome nor natural to man; and
even vegetables we refuse to eat until they have undergone the
operation of fire, in consideration of those numberless little living
creatures which the glass helps us to detect in every fibre of the
plant or root before it be dressed. On the same theory we boil our
water, which is our only drink, before we suffer it to come to table.
Our children are perfect little Pythagoreans: it would do you good to
see them in their nursery, stuffing their dried fruits, figs,
raisins, and _milk_, which is the only approach to animal food which
is allowed. They have no notion how the substance of a creature that
ever had life can become food for another creature. A beefsteak is an
absurdity to them; a mutton-chop, a solecism in terms; a cutlet, a
word absolutely without any meaning; a butcher is nonsense, except so
far as it is taken for a man who delights in blood, or a hero. In
this happy state of innocence we have kept their minds, not allowing
them to go into the kitchen, or to hear of any preparations for the
dressing of animal food, or even to know that such things are
practised. But as a state of ignorance is incompatible with a certain
age, and as my eldest girl, who is ten years old next Midsummer, must
shortly be introduced into the world and sit at table with us, where
she will see some things which will shock all her received notions, I
have been endeavoring by little and little to break her mind, and
prepare it for the disagreeable impressions which must be forced upon
it. The first hint I gave her upon the subject, I could see her
recoil from it with the same horror with which we listen to a tale of
Anthropophagism; but she has gradually grown more reconciled to it,
in some measure, from my telling her that it was the custom of the
world,--to which, however senseless, we must submit, so far as we
could do it with innocence, not to give offence; and she has shown so
much strength of mind on other occasions, which I have no doubt is
owing to the calmness and serenity superinduced by her diet, that I
am in good hopes when the proper season for her _début_ arrives, she
may be brought to endure the sight of a roasted chicken, or a dish of
sweet-breads for the first time without fainting. Such being the
nature of our little household, you may guess what inroads into the
economy of it,--what resolutions and turnings of things upside down,
the example of such a feeder as Mr. ---- is calculated to produce.
I wonder, at a time like the present, when the scarcity of every kind
of food is so painfully acknowledged, that _shame_ has no effect upon
him. Can he have read Mr. Malthus's Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to
Population? Can he think it reasonable that one man should consume
the sustenance of many?
The young gentleman has an agreeable air and person, such as are not
unlikely to recommend him on the score of matrimony. But his fortune
is not over-large; and what prudent young woman would think of
embarking hers with a man who would bring three or four mouths (or
what is equivalent to them) into a family? She might as reasonably
choose a widower in the same circumstances, with three or four
children.
I cannot think who he takes after. His father and mother, by all
accounts, were very moderate eaters; only I have heard that the
latter swallowed her victuals very fast, and the former had a tedious
custom of sitting long at his meals. Perhaps he takes after both.
I wish you would turn this in your thoughts, Mr. Reflector, and give
us your ideas on the subject of excessive eating, and, particularly,
of animal food.
HOSPITA.
EDAX ON APPETITE.
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE REFLECTOR."
MR. REFLECTOR,--I am going to lay before you a case of the most
iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil suffered.
You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever
since my birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy?
Yet out it must. My sufferings, then, have all arisen from a most
inordinate appetite----
Not for wealth, not for vast possessions,--then might I have hoped to
find a cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or
poets,--those verba et voces which Horace speaks of:--
"quibus hunc lenire dolorem
Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem;"
not for glory, not for fame, not for applause,--for against this
disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has
chosen to render it,
"Rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied,
Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride;"
nor yet for pleasure, properly so called: the strict and virtuous
lessons which I received in early life from the best of parents,--a
pious clergyman of the Church of England, now no more,--I trust have
rendered me sufficiently secure on that side:----
No, Sir, for none of these things; but an appetite, in its coarsest
and least metaphorical sense,--an appetite for _food_.
The exorbitances of my arrowroot and pappish days I cannot go back
far enough to remember; only I have been told that my mother's
constitution not admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman who
had the care of me for that purpose used to make most extravagant
demands for my pretended excesses in that kind; which my parents,
rather than believe anything unpleasant of me, chose to impute to the
known covetousness and mercenary disposition of that sort of people.
This blindness continued on their part after I was sent for home, up
to the period when it was thought proper, on account of my advanced
age, that I should mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had
hitherto done. I was accordingly sent to boarding-school.
Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The
prying republic of which a great school consists soon found me out:
there was no shifting the blame any longer upon other people's
shoulders,--no good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities
of which I stood accused in the article of bread and butter, besides
the crying sin of stolen ends of puddings, and cold pies strangely
missing. The truth was but too manifest in my looks,--in the evident
signs of inanition which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in
spite of the double allowance which my master was privately
instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the
ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold
more active and alert in boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt
of their arrows,--the mark against which every puny leveller directed
his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were
raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. Ventri
natus--Ventri deditus,--Vesana gula,--Escarum gurges,--Dapibus
indulgens,--Non dans fræna gulæ,-Sectans lautæ fercula mensæ,
resounded wheresoever I passed. I led a weary life, suffering the
penalties of guilt for that which was no crime, but only following
the blameless dictates of nature. The remembrance of those childish
reproaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams. My school-days come
again, and the horror I used to feel, when in some silent corner,
retired from the notice of my unfeeling playfellows, I have sat to
mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread allotted me by the bounty of
considerate friends, and have ached at heart because I could not
spare a portion of it, as I saw other boys do, to some favorite boy;
for if I know my own heart, I was never selfish,--never possessed a
luxury which I did not hasten to communicate to others; but my food,
alas! was none; it was an indispensable necessary; I could as soon
have spared the blood in my veins, as have parted that with my
companions.
Well, no one stage of suffering lasts forever: we should grow
reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The miseries of my
school-days had their end; I was once more restored to the paternal
dwelling. The affectionate solicitude of my parents was directed to
the good-natured purpose of concealing, even from myself, the
infirmity which haunted me. I was continually told that I was
growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely represented as
being nothing more than a symptom and an effect of that. I used even
to be complimented upon it. But this temporary fiction could not
endure above a year or two. I ceased to grow, but, alas! I did not
cease my demands for alimentary sustenance.
Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist
the fond concealment--the indulgent blindness--the delicate
overlooking--the compassionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left
exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which
nothing can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a
balance; that which appetite demands is set down to the account of
gluttony--a sin which my whole soul abhors--nay, which Nature herself
has put it out of my power to commit. I am constitutionally
disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess who
never can get enough? Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and
leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of
fragments, and the supernaturally replenished cup of old Baucis: and
be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue,
have saved them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of
them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one
calls it, is supplied. Alas! I am doomed to stop short of that
continence.
What am I to do? I am by disposition inclined to conviviality and the
social meal. I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should
despise the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting. Those
vivacious, long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed, I
justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up
with, I could be content with. Dentatus I have been called, among
other unsavory jests. Doublemeal is another name which my
acquaintance have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy
which I put in practice for some time without being found out; which
was--going the round of my friends, beginning with the most primitive
feeders among them, who take their dinner about one o'clock, and so
successively dropping in upon the next and the next, till by the time
I got among my more fashionable intimates, whose hour was six or
seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and complete meal (as
I reckon it), without taking more than one dinner (as they account of
dinners) at one person's house. Since I have been found out, I
endeavor to make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go
out. But, alas! with me, increase of appetite truly grows by what it
feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me at those dinner-parties
is, the senseless custom of cheese, and the dessert afterwards. I
have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit, and those
other vain vegetable substitutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate
aliment for human creatures since the Flood, as I take it to be
deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and
his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I
remember a pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells, very much to this
purpose, in his Fable of the Bees:--He brings in a Lion arguing with
a Merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts
upon his violent methods of feeding. The Lion thus retorts:--"Savage
I am, but no creature can be called cruel but what either by malice
or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity. The Lion was born
without compassion: we follow the instinct of our nature; the gods
have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other animals,
and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the
living; 'tis only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport.
Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables.--(Under
favor of the Lion, if he meant to assert this universally of mankind,
it is not true. However, what he says presently is very
sensible.)--Your violent fondness to change, and greater eagerness
after novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of animals
without justice or necessity. The Lion has a ferment within him, that
consumes the toughest skin and hardest bones, as well as the flesh of
all animals without exception. Your squeamish stomach, in which the
digestive heat is weak and inconsiderable, won't so much as admit of
the most tender parts of them, unless above half the concoction has
been performed by artificial fire beforehand; and yet what animal
have you spared, to satisfy the caprices of a languid appetite?
Languid, I say; for what is man's hunger if compared with the Lion's?
Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you faint; mine makes me mad:
oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay the violence of it,
but in vain: nothing but large quantities of flesh can any ways
appease it."--Allowing for the Lion not having a prophetic instinct
to take in every lusus naturæ that, was possible of the human
appetite, he was, generally speaking, in the right; and the Merchant
was so impressed with his argument that, we are told, he replied not,
but fainted away. O, Mr. Reflector, that I were not obliged to add,
that the creature who thus argues was but a type of me! Miserable
man! _I am that Lion!_ "Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to
allay that violence, but in vain; nothing but----."
Those tales which are renewed as often as the editors of papers want
to fill up a space in their unfeeling columns, of great
eaters,--people that devour whole geese and legs of mutton _for
wagers_,--are sometimes attempted to be drawn to a parallel with my
case. This wilful confounding of motives and circumstances, which
make all the difference of moral or immoral in actions, just suits
the sort of talent which some of my acquaintance pride themselves
upon. _Wagers_!--I thank Heaven, I was never mercenary, nor could
consent to prostitute a gift (though but a left-handed one) of
nature, to the enlarging of my worldly substance; prudent as the
necessities, which that fatal gift have involved me in, might have
made such a prostitution to appear in the eyes of an indelicate
world.
Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction of that talent which was
given me, I have been content to sacrifice no common expectations;
for such I had from an old lady, a near relation of our family, in
whose good graces I had the fortune to stand, till one fatal
evening----. You have seen, Mr. Reflector, if you have ever passed
your time much in country towns, the kind of suppers which elderly
ladies in those places have lying _in petto_ in an adjoining parlor,
next to that where they are entertaining their periodically invited
coevals with cards and muffins. The cloth is usually spread some
half-hour before the final rubber is decided, whence they adjourn to
sup upon what may emphatically be called _nothing_ ;--a sliver of
ham, purposely contrived to be transparent to show the china-dish
through it, neighboring a slip of invisible brawn, which abuts upon
something they call a tartlet, as that is bravely supported by an
atom of marmalade, flanked in its turn by a grain of potted beef,
with a power of such dishlings, _minims of hospitality_, spread in
defiance of human nature, or rather with an utter ignorance of what
it demands. Being engaged at one of these card-parties, I was obliged
to go a little before _supper-time_ (as they facetiously called the
point of time in which they are taking these shadowy refections), and
the old lady, with a sort of fear shining through the smile of
courteous hospitality that beamed in her countenance, begged me to
step into the next room and take something before I went out in the
cold,--a proposal which lay not in my nature to deny. Indignant at
the airy prospect I saw before me, I set to, and in a trice
dispatched the whole meal intended for eleven persons,--fish, flesh,
fowl, pastry,--to the sprigs of garnishing parsley, and the last
fearful custard that quaked upon the board. I need not describe the
consternation, when in due time the dowagers adjourned from their
cards. Where was the supper?--and the servants' answer, Mr. ---- had
eat it all.--That freak, however, jested me out of a good three
hundred pounds a year, which I afterwards was informed for a
certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention it not in
illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; for any
unlucky wag of a school-boy, with a tolerable appetite, could have
done as much without feeling any hurt after it,--only that you may
judge whether I am a man likely to set my talent to sale, or to
require the pitiful stimulus of a wager.
I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, of a reptile
in Africa, whose venom is of that hot, destructive quality, that
wheresoever it fastens its tooth, the whole substance of the animal
that has been bitten in a few seconds is reduced to dust, crumbles
away, and absolutely disappears: it is called, from this quality, the
Annihilator. Why am I forced to seek, in all the most prodigious and
portentous facts of Natural History, for creatures typical of myself?
_I am that snake, that Annihilator:_ "wherever I fasten, in a few
seconds----."
O happy sick men, that are groaning under the want of that very
thing, the excess of which is my torment! O fortunate, too fortunate,
if you knew your happiness, invalids! What would I not give to
exchange this fierce concoctive and digestive heat,--this rabid fury
which vexes me, which tears and torments me,--for your quiet,
mortified, hermit-like, subdued, and sanctified stomachs, your cool,
chastened inclinations and coy desires for food!
To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I owe this
unnatural craving, I must leave to the anatomists and the physicians
to determine: they, like the rest of the world, have doubtless their
eye upon me; and as I have been cut up alive by the sarcasms of my
friends, so I shudder when I contemplate the probability that this
animal frame, when its restless appetites shall have ceased their
importunity, may be cut up also (horrible suggestion!) to determine
in what system of solids or fluids this original sin of my
constitution lay lurking. What work will they make with their acids
and alkalines, their serums and coagulums, effervescences, viscous
matter, bile, chyle, and acrimonious juices, to explain that cause
which Nature, who willed the effect to punish me for my sins, may no
less have determined to keep in the dark from them, to punish them
for their presumption!
You may ask, Mr. Reflector, to what purpose is my appeal to you; what
can you do for me? Alas! I know too well that my case is out of the
reach of advice,--out of the reach of consolation. But it is some
relief to the wounded heart to impart its tale of misery; and some of
my acquaintance, who may read my case in your pages under a borrowed
name, may be induced to give it a more humane consideration than I
could ever yet obtain from them under my own. Make them, if possible,
to _reflect_, that an original peculiarity of constitution is no
crime; that not that which goes into the mouth desecrates a man, but
that which comes out of it,--such as sarcasm, bitter jests, mocks and
taunts, and ill-natured observations; and let them consider, if there
be such things (which we have all heard of) as Pious Treachery,
Innocent Adultery, &c., whether there may not be also such a thing as
Innocent Gluttony.
I shall only subscribe myself,
Your afflicted servant,
EDAX.
CURIOUS FRAGMENTS,
EXTRACTED FROM A COMMONPLACE-BOOK,
WHICH BELONGED TO ROBERT BURTON, THE FAMOUS AUTHOR OF THE
ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY.
* * * * *
EXTRACT I.
I, Democritus Junior, have put my finishing pen to a tractate _De
Melancholia_, this day, December 5, 1620. First, I blesse the
Trinity, which hath given me health to prosecute my worthlesse
studies thus far, and make supplication, with a _Laus Deo_, if in any
case these my poor labours may be found instrumental to weede out
black melancholy, carking cares, harte-grief, from the mind of man.
_Sed hoc magis volo quam expecto._
I turn now to my book, _i nunc liber, goe forth, my brave Anatomy,
child of my brain-sweat_, and yee, _candidi lectores_, lo! here I
give him up to you, even do with him what you please, my masters.
Some, I suppose, will applaud, commend, cry him up (these are my
friends), hee is a _flos rarus_, forsooth, a nonesuch, a Phoenix
(concerning whom see _Plinius_ and _Mandeuille_, though _Fienus de
Monstris_ doubteth at large of such a bird, whom _Montaltus_
confuting argueth to have been a man _malæ scrupulositatis_, of a
weak and cowardlie faith: _Christopherus a Vega_ is with him in
this). Others again will blame, hiss, reprehende in many things, cry
down altogether my collections, for crude, inept, putid, _post coenam
scripta, Coryate could write better upon a full meal_, verbose,
inerudite, and not sufficiently abounding in authorities, _dogmata_,
sentences of learneder writers which have been before me, when as
that first-named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours to bee
nothing else but a _messe of opinions_, a vortex attracting
indiscriminate, gold, pearls, hay, straw, wood, excrement, an
exchange, tavern, marte, for foreigners to congregate, Danes, Swedes,
Hollanders, Lombards, so many strange faces, dresses, salutations,
languages, all which _Wolfius_ behelde with great content upon the
Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly in his book the World's
Epitome, which _Sannazar_ so bepraiseth, _e contra_ our Polydore can
see nothing in it; they call me singular, a pedant, fantastic, words
of reproach in this age, which is all too neoterick and light for my
humour.
One cometh to me sighing, complaining. He expected universal remedies
in my Anatomy; so many cures as there are distemperatures among men.
I have not put his affection in my cases. Hear you his case. My fine
Sir is a lover, an _inamorata_, a Pyramus, a Romeo; he walks seven
years disconsolate, moping, because he cannot enjoy his miss,
_insanus amor_ is his melancholy, the man is mad; _delirat_, he
dotes; all this while his Glycera is rude, spiteful, not to be
entreated, churlish, spits at him, yet exceeding fair, gentle eyes
(which is a beauty), hair lustrous and _smiling_, the trope is none
of mine, _Æneas Sylvius_ hath _crines ridentes_--in conclusion she is
wedded to his rival, a boore, a _Corydon_, a rustic, _omnino ignarus,
he can scarce construe Corderius_, yet haughty, fantastic,
_opiniâtre_. The lover travels, goes into foreign parts,
peregrinates, _amoris ergo_, sees manners, customs, not English,
converses with pilgrims, lying travellers, monks, hermits, those
cattle, pedlars, travelling gentry, _Egyptians_, natural wonders,
unicorns (though _Aldobrandus_ will have them to be figments),
satyrs, semi-viri, apes, monkeys, baboons, curiosities artificial,
_pyramides_, Virgilius his tombe, relicks, bones, which are nothing
but ivory as _Melancthon_ judges, though _Cornutus_ leaneth to think
them bones of dogs, cats, (why not men?) which subtill priests vouch
to have been saints, martyrs, _heu Pietas!_ By that time he has ended
his course, _fugit hora_, seven other years are expired, gone by,
time is he should return, he taketh ship for Britaine, much desired
of his friends, _favebant venti, Neptune is curteis_, after some
weekes at sea he landeth, rides post to town, greets his family,
kinsmen, _compotores, those jokers his friends that were wont to
tipple with him at alehouses_; these wonder now to see the change,
_quantum mutatus, the man is quite another thing_, he is
disenthralled, manumitted, he wonders what so bewitched him, he can
now both see, hear, smell, handle, converse with his mistress, single
by reason of the death of his rival, a widow having children, grown
willing, prompt, amorous, showing no such great dislike to second
nuptials, he might have her for asking, no such thing, his mind is
changed, he loathes his former meat, had liever eat ratsbane,
aconite, his humour is to die a bachelour; marke the conclusion. In
this humour of celibate seven other years are consumed in idleness,
sloth, world's pleasures, which fatigate, satiate, induce wearinesse,
vapours, _tædium vitæ:_ When upon a day, behold a wonder, _redit
Amor_, the man is as sick as ever, he is commenced lover upon the old
stock, walks with his hand thrust in his bosom for negligence, moping
he leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, eyes
sunken, _anhelus, breath wheezy and asthmatical, by reason of
over-much sighing:_ society he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what
shall he doe? all this while his mistresse is forward, coming,
_amantissima, ready to jump at once into his mouth_, her he hateth,
feels disgust when she is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, old, a
painted Jesabeel, Alecto, Megara, and Tisiphone all at once, a
Corinthian Lais, a strumpet, only not handsome; that which he
affecteth so much, that which drives him mad, distracted, phrenetic,
beside himself, is no beauty which lives, nothing _in rerum naturâ_
(so he might entertain a hope of a cure), but something _which is
not_, can never be, a certain _fantastic opinion_ or _notional image_
of his mistresse, _that which she was_, and that which hee thought
her to be, in former times, how beautiful! torments him, frets him,
follows him, makes him that he wishes to die.
This Caprichio, _Sir Humourous_, hee cometh to me to be cured. I
counsel marriage with his mistresse, according to Hippocrates his
method, together with milk-diet, herbs, aloes, and wild parsley, good
in such cases, though Avicenna preferreth some sorts of wild fowl,
teals, widgeons, beccaficos, which men in Sussex eat. He flies out in
a passion, ho! ho; and falls to calling me names, dizzard, ass,
lunatic, moper, Bedlamite, Pseudo-Democritus. I smile in his face,
bidding him be patient, tranquil, to no purpose, he still rages: I
think this man must fetch his remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land,
Islands in the Moone, &c.
EXTRACT II.
* * * * * Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst themselves, in
logomachies, subtile controversies, many dry blows given on either
side, contentions of learned men, or such as would be so thought, as
_Bodinus de Periodis_ saith of such an one, _arrident amici ridet
mundus_, in English, this man his cronies they cocker him up, they
flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, meanwhile the world
thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist. * *
* * * Philosophy running mad, madness philosophizing, much
idle-learned inquiries, what truth is? and no issue, fruit, of all
these noises, only huge books are written, and who is the wiser? * *
* * * Men sitting in the Doctor's chair, we marvel how they got there
being _homines intellectûs pulverulenti_ as _Trincauellius_ notes;
they care not so they may raise a dust to smother the eyes of their
oppugners; _homines parvulissimi_, as _Lemnius_, whom _Alcuin_ herein
taxeth of a crude Latinism; dwarfs, minims, the least little men,
these spend their time, and it is odds but they lose their time and
wits too into the bargain, chasing of nimble and retiring Truth: Her
they prosecute, her still they worship, _libant_, they make
libations, spilling the wine as those old Romans in their
sacrificials, _Cerealia, May games:_ Truth is the game all these hunt
after, to the extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the moistures
_humidum radicale exsiccant_, as _Galen_, in his counsel to one of
these wear-wits, brain-moppers, spunges saith. * * * and for all this
_nunquam metam attingunt_, and how should they? they bowle awry,
shooting beside the marke; whereas it should appear, that _Truth
absolute_ on this planet of ours is scarcely to be found, but in her
stede _Queene Opinion_ predominates, governs, whose shifting and ever
mutable _Lampas_, me seemeth, is man's destinie to follow, she
præcurseth, she guideth him, before his uncapable eyes she frisketh
her tender lights, which entertayne the child-man, untill what time
his sight be strong to endure the vision of _Very Truth_, which is in
the heavens, the vision beatifical, as _Anianus_ expounds in his
argument against certain mad wits which helde God to be corporeous;
these were dizzards, fools, _gothamites_. * * * * but and if _Very
Truth_ be extant indeede on earth, as some hold she it is which
actuates men's deeds, purposes, ye may in vaine look for her in the
learned universities, halls, colleges. Truth is no Doctoresse, she
takes no degrees at Paris or Oxford, amongst great clerks,
disputants, subtile Aristotles, men _nodosi ingenii, able to take
Lully by the chin_, but oftentimes to such an one as myself, an
_Idiota_ or common person, _no great things_, melancholizing in woods
where waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains, whereas the
silly man expecting no such matter, thinketh only how best to
delectate and refresh his mynde continually with _Natura_ her
pleasaunt scenes, woods, water-falls, or Art her statelie gardens,
parks, terraces, _Belvideres_, on a sudden the goddesse herself
_Truth_ has appeared, with a shyning lyghte, and a sparklyng
countenance, so as yee may not be able lightly to resist her. * * * *
EXTRACT III.