THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT IN TWELVE VOLUMES
VOLUME SIX
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration:
_Charles Lamb._
_From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, painted in 1805
by William Hazlitt._
]
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT
EDITED BY A. R. WALLER AND ARNOLD GLOVER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
W. E. HENLEY
❦
Table Talk and Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A.
❦
1903
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK
Edinburgh: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE
CONTENTS
PAGE
TABLE TALK 1
CONVERSATIONS OF JAMES NORTHCOTE, ESQ., R.A. 331
NOTES 467
TABLE TALK; OR, ORIGINAL ESSAYS ON MEN AND MANNERS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The first edition was published in two 8vo volumes, the first volume in
1821 with the following title-page: ‘Table-Talk; or, Original Essays. By
William Hazlitt. London: John Warren, Old Bond-Street 1821’; the second
volume in 1822 with the following title-page: ‘Table-Talk; or, Original
Essays. By William Hazlitt. Vol. II. London: Printed for Henry Colburn
and Co. 1822.’ Both volumes were printed by Thomas Davison, Whitefriars.
The first volume contained the following Advertisement: ‘It may be
proper to observe, that the Essays “On the Pleasure of Painting” and “On
the Ignorance of the Learned,” in this Volume, have already appeared in
periodical publications.’ The second volume contained a list of
‘errata.’ The second edition appeared in 1824 in two 8vo volumes. The
title-page ran as follows: ‘Table-Talk, or Original Essays on Men and
Manners. Second Edition. London: Printed for Henry Colburn, New
Burlington Street. 1824.’ The volumes were printed by J. Nichols and
Son, 25 Parliament Street. This edition, apparently a mere reprint of
the first edition, is here reprinted _verbatim_ except that the mistakes
referred to in the ‘errata’ of the first edition have been corrected. In
1825 two 8vo volumes appeared in Paris (A. & W. Galignani) entitled,
‘Table-Talk: or Original Essays, By William Hazlitt.’ This edition
omitted several of the essays included in the English editions of _Table
Talk_, and included several papers which were afterwards published in
England in _The Plain Speaker_. An Advertisement (see notes to this
volume) was prefixed to Vol. I. In the third edition (2 vols. foolscap
8vo 1845) entitled ‘Table-Talk: Original Essays on Men and Manners. By
William Hazlitt. Edited by his Son. London: C. Templeman, 6, Great
Portland Street,’ some essays were omitted, the order of the essays was
altered, and two essays, ‘On Travelling Abroad’ and ‘On the Spirit of
Controversy,’ were added. The fourth edition (1857–1861) is a reprint or
a re-issue of the third. In the fifth edition (1 volume 8vo, 1869, Bell
& Daldy), edited by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, the text and arrangement
of the first two editions are restored, but the essays are divided into
three Series. In a later edition edited by Mr. Hazlitt (1 vol. 8vo
Bohn’s Library, 1891) the essays are arranged continuously.
CONTENTS
ESSAY I.
PAGE
On the Pleasure of Painting 5
ESSAY II.
The same Subject continued 13
ESSAY III.
On the Past and Future 21
ESSAY IV.
On Genius and Common Sense 31
ESSAY V.
The same Subject continued 42
ESSAY VI.
Character of Cobbett 50
ESSAY VII.
On People with one Idea 59
ESSAY VIII.
On the Ignorance of the Learned 70
ESSAY IX.
The Indian Jugglers 77
ESSAY X.
On Living to one’s-self 90
ESSAY XI.
On Thought and Action 101
ESSAY XII.
On Will-making 113
ESSAY XIII.
On certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses 122
ESSAY XIV.
The same Subject continued 131
ESSAY XV.
On Paradox and Common-place 146
ESSAY XVI.
On Vulgarity and Affectation 156
ESSAY XVII.
On a Landscape of Nicholas Poussin 168
ESSAY XVIII.
On Milton’s Sonnets 174
ESSAY XIX.
On going a Journey 181
ESSAY XX.
On Coffee-house Politicians 189
ESSAY XXI.
On the Aristocracy of Letters 205
ESSAY XXII.
On Criticism 214
ESSAY XXIII.
On great and little Things 226
ESSAY XXIV.
On familiar Style 242
ESSAY XXV.
On Effeminacy of Character 248
ESSAY XXVI.
Why distant Objects please 255
ESSAY XXVII.
On Corporate Bodies 264
ESSAY XXVIII.
Whether Actors ought to sit in the Boxes 272
ESSAY XXIX.
On the Disadvantages of intellectual Superiority 279
ESSAY XXX.
On Patronage and Puffing 289
ESSAY XXXI.
On the Knowledge of Character 303
ESSAY XXXII.
On the Picturesque and Ideal 317
ESSAY XXXIII.
On the Fear of Death 321
TABLE TALK
ESSAY I
ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING
‘There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.’ In
writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only
to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. You sit down to your task,
and are happy. From the moment that you take up the pencil, and look
Nature in the face, you are at peace with your own heart. No angry
passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the
hand, or dim the brow: no irritable humours are set afloat: you have no
absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no
fool to annoy—you are actuated by fear or favour to no man. There is ‘no
juggling here,’ no sophistry, no intrigue, no tampering with the
evidence, no attempt to make black white, or white black: but you resign
yourself into the hands of a greater power, that of Nature, with the
simplicity of a child, and the devotion of an enthusiast—’study with joy
her manner, and with rapture taste her style.’ The mind is calm, and
full at the same time. The hand and eye are equally employed. In tracing
the commonest object, a plant or the stump of a tree, you learn
something every moment. You perceive unexpected differences, and
discover likenesses where you looked for no such thing. You try to set
down what you see—find out your error, and correct it. You need not play
tricks, or purposely mistake: with all your pains, you are still far
short of the mark. Patience grows out of the endless pursuit, and turns
it into a luxury. A streak in a flower, a wrinkle in a leaf, a tinge in
a cloud, a stain in an old wall or ruin grey, are seized with avidity as
the _spolia opima_ of this sort of mental warfare, and furnish out
labour for another half day. The hours pass away untold, without
chagrin, and without weariness; nor would you ever wish to pass them
otherwise. Innocence is joined with industry, pleasure with business;
and the mind is satisfied, though it is not engaged in thinking or in
doing any mischief.[1]
I have not much pleasure in writing these Essays, or in reading them
afterwards; though I own I now and then meet with a phrase that I like,
or a thought that strikes me as a true one. But after I begin them, I am
only anxious to get to the end of them, which I am not sure I shall do,
for I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence beforehand; and when I
have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself little more about them. I
sometimes have to write them twice over: then it is necessary to read
the _proof_, to prevent mistakes by the printer; so that by the time
they appear in a tangible shape, and one can con them over with a
conscious, sidelong glance to the public approbation, they have lost
their gloss and relish, and become ‘more tedious than a twice-told
tale.’ For a person to read his own works over with any great delight,
he ought first to forget that he ever wrote them. Familiarity naturally
breeds contempt. It is, in fact, like poring fondly over a piece of
blank paper: from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning to
the mind, are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an
interest and property in them. I have more satisfaction in my own
thoughts than in dictating them to others: words are necessary to
explain the impression of certain things upon me to the reader, but they
rather weaken and draw a veil over than strengthen it to myself. However
I might say with the poet, ‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’ yet I have
little ambition ‘to set a throne or chair of state in the understandings
of other men.’ The ideas we cherish most, exist best in a kind of
shadowy abstraction,
‘Pure in the last recesses of the mind;’
and derive neither force nor interest from being exposed to public view.
They are old familiar acquaintance, and any change in them, arising from
the adventitious ornaments of style or dress, is little to their
advantage. After I have once written on a subject, it goes out of my
mind: my feelings about it have been melted down into words, and _them_
I forget. I have, as it were, discharged my memory of its old habitual
reckoning, and rubbed out the score of real sentiment. For the future,
it exists only for the sake of others.—But I cannot say, from my own
experience, that the same process takes place in transferring our ideas
to canvas; they gain more than they lose in the mechanical
transformation. One is never tired of painting, because you have to set
down not what you knew already, but what you have just discovered. In
the former case, you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names
into things. There is a continual creation out of nothing going on. With
every stroke of the brush, a new field of inquiry is laid open; new
difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them. By
comparing the imitation with the original, you see what you have done,
and how much you have still to do. The test of the senses is severer
than that of fancy, and an over-match even for the delusions of our
self-love. One part of a picture shames another, and you determine to
paint up to yourself, if you cannot come up to nature. Every object
becomes lustrous from the light thrown back upon it by the mirror of
art: and by the aid of the pencil we may be said to touch and handle the
objects of sight. The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge of
existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas: the form of
beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the
universe is made ‘palpable to feeling as to sight.’—And see! a rainbow
starts from the canvas, with all its humid train of glory, as if it were
drawn from its cloudy arch in heaven. The spangled landscape glitters
with drops of dew after the shower. The ‘fleecy fools’ show their coats
in the gleams of the setting sun. The shepherds pipe their farewell
notes in the fresh evening air. And is this bright vision made from a
dead dull blank, like a bubble reflecting the mighty fabric of the
universe? Who would think this miracle of Rubens’ pencil possible to be
performed? Who, having seen it, would not spend his life to do the like?
See how the rich fallows, the bare stubble-field, the scanty
harvest-home, drag in Rembrandt’s landscapes! How often have I looked at
them and nature, and tried to do the same, till the very ‘light
thickened,’ and there was an earthiness in the feeling of the air! There
is no end of the refinements of art and nature in this respect. One may
look at the misty glimmering horizon till the eye dazzles and the
imagination is lost, in hopes to transfer the whole interminable expanse
at one blow upon canvas. Wilson said, he used to try to paint the effect
of the motes dancing in the setting sun. At another time, a friend
coming into his painting-room when he was sitting on the ground in a
melancholy posture, observed that his picture looked like a landscape
after a shower: he started up with the greatest delight, and said, ‘That
is the effect I intended to produce, but thought I had failed.’ Wilson
was neglected; and, by degrees, neglected his art to apply himself to
brandy. His hand became unsteady, so that it was only by repeated
attempts that he could reach the place, or produce the effect he aimed
at; and when he had done a little to a picture, he would say to any
acquaintance who chanced to drop in, ‘I have painted enough for one day:
come, let us go somewhere.’ It was not so Claude left his pictures, or
his studies on the banks of the Tiber, to go in search of other
enjoyments, or ceased to gaze upon the glittering sunny vales and
distant hills; and while his eye drank in the clear sparkling hues and
lovely forms of nature, his hand stamped them on the lucid canvas to
last there for ever!—One of the most delightful parts of my life was one
fine summer, when I used to walk out of an evening to catch the last
light of the sun, gemming the green slopes or russet lawns, and gilding
tower or tree, while the blue sky gradually turning to purple and gold,
or skirted with dusky grey, hung its broad marble pavement over all, as
we see it in the great master of Italian landscape. But to come to a
more particular explanation of the subject.
The first head I ever tried to paint was an old woman with the upper
part of the face shaded by her bonnet, and I certainly laboured it with
great perseverance. It took me numberless sittings to do it. I have it
by me still, and sometimes look at it with surprise, to think how much
pains were thrown away to little purpose,—yet not altogether in vain if
it taught me to see good in every thing, and to know that there is
nothing vulgar in nature seen with the eye of science or of true art.
Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the
spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object. Be this as
it may, I spared no pains to do my best. If art was long, I thought that
life was so too at that moment. I got in the general effect the first
day; and pleased and surprised enough I was at my success. The rest was
a work of time—of weeks and months (if need were) of patient toil and
careful finishing. I had seen an old head by Rembrandt at
Burleigh-House, and if I could produce a head at all like Rembrandt in a
year, in my life-time, it would be glory and felicity, and wealth and
fame enough for me! The head I had seen at Burleigh was an exact and
wonderful fac-simile of nature, and I resolved to make mine (as nearly
as I could) an exact fac-simile of nature. I did not then, nor do I now
believe, with Sir Joshua, that the perfection of art consists in giving
general appearances without individual details, but in giving general
appearances with individual details. Otherwise, I had done my work the
first day. But I saw something more in nature than general effect, and I
thought it worth my while to give it in the picture. There was a
gorgeous effect of light and shade: but there was a delicacy as well as
depth in the _chiaro scuro_, which I was bound to follow into all its
dim and scarce perceptible variety of tone and shadow. Then I had to
make the transition from a strong light to as dark a shade, preserving
the masses, but gradually softening off the intermediate parts. It was
so in nature: the difficulty was to make it so in the copy. I tried, and
failed again and again; I strove harder, and succeeded as I thought. The
wrinkles in Rembrandt were not hard lines; but broken and irregular. I
saw the same appearance in nature, and strained every nerve to give it.
If I could hit off this edgy appearance, and insert the reflected light
in the furrows of old age in half a morning, I did not think I had lost
a day. Beneath the shrivelled yellow parchment look of the skin, there
was here and there a streak of the blood colour tinging the face; this I
made a point of conveying, and did not cease to compare what I saw with
what I did (with jealous lynx-eyed watchfulness) till I succeeded to the
best of my ability and judgment. How many revisions were there! How many
attempts to catch an expression which I had seen the day before! How
often did we try to get the old position, and wait for the return of the
same light! There was a puckering up of the lips, a cautious
introversion of the eye under the shadow of the bonnet, indicative of
the feebleness and suspicion of old age, which at last we managed, after
many trials and some quarrels, to a tolerable nicety. The picture was
never finished, and I might have gone on with it to the present hour.[2]
I used to set it on the ground when my day’s work was done, and saw
revealed to me with swimming eyes the birth of new hopes, and of a new
world of objects. The painter thus learns to look at nature with
different eyes. He before saw her ‘as in a glass darkly, but now face to
face.’ He understands the texture and meaning of the visible universe,
and ‘sees into the life of things,’ not by the help of mechanical
instruments, but of the improved exercise of his faculties, and an
intimate sympathy with nature. The meanest thing is not lost upon him,
for he looks at it with an eye to itself, not merely to his own vanity
or interest, or the opinion of the world. Even where there is neither
beauty nor use—if that ever were—still there is truth, and a sufficient
source of gratification in the indulgence of curiosity and activity of
mind. The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of
scholars—the scholar of nature. For myself, and for the real comfort and
satisfaction of the thing, I had rather have been Jan Steen, or Gerard
Dow, than the greatest casuist or philologer that ever lived. The
painter does not view things in clouds or ‘mist, the common gloss of
theologians,’ but applies the same standard of truth and disinterested
spirit of inquiry, that influence his daily practice, to other subjects.
He perceives form, he distinguishes character. He reads men and books
with an intuitive eye. He is a critic as well as a connoisseur. The
conclusions he draws are clear and convincing, because they are taken
from the things themselves. He is not a fanatic, a dupe, or a slave: for
the habit of seeing for himself also disposes him to judge for himself.
The most sensible men I know (taken as a class) are painters; that is,
they are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about
them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds. From
their profession they in general mix more with the world than authors;
and if they have not the same fund of acquired knowledge, are obliged to
rely more on individual sagacity. I might mention the names of Opie,
Fuseli, Northcote, as persons distinguished for striking description and
acquaintance with the subtle traits of character.[3] Painters in
ordinary society, or in obscure situations where their value is not
known, and they are treated with neglect and indifference, have
sometimes a forward self-sufficiency of manner: but this is not so much
their fault as that of others. Perhaps their want of regular education
may also be in fault in such cases. Richardson, who is very tenacious of
the respect in which the profession ought to be held, tells a story of
Michael Angelo, that after a quarrel between him and Pope Julius II.
‘upon account of a slight the artist conceived the pontiff had put upon
him, Michael Angelo was introduced by a bishop, who, thinking to serve
the artist by it, made it an argument that the Pope should be reconciled
to him, because men of his profession were commonly ignorant, and of no
consequence otherwise: his holiness, enraged at the bishop, struck him
with his staff, and told him, it was he that was the blockhead, and
affronted the man himself would not offend; the prelate was driven out
of the chamber, and Michael Angelo had the Pope’s benediction
accompanied with presents. This bishop had fallen into the vulgar error,
and was rebuked accordingly.’
Besides the exercise of the mind, painting exercises the body. It is a
mechanical as well as a liberal art. To do any thing, to dig a hole in
the ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, to move a shuttle, to
work a pattern,—in a word, to attempt to produce any effect, and to
_succeed_, has something in it that gratifies the love of power, and
carries off the restless activity of the mind of man. Indolence is a
delightful but distressing state: we must be doing something to be
happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive
tendencies of the human frame; and painting combines them both
incessantly.[4] The hand furnishes a practical test of the correctness
of the eye; and the eye thus admonished, imposes fresh tasks of skill
and industry upon the hand. Every stroke tells, as the verifying of a
new truth; and every new observation, the instant it is made, passes
into an act and emanation of the will. Every step is nearer what we
wish, and yet there is always more to do. In spite of the facility, the
fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play round the pencil of
Rubens and Vandyke, however I may admire, I do not envy them this power
so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution of Correggio,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea del Sarto, where every touch appears
conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and where the painful artist
has so distinctly wrought,
‘That you might almost say his picture thought!’
In the one case, the colours seem breathed on the canvas as by magic,
the work and the wonder of a moment: in the other, they seem inlaid in
the body of the work, and as if it took the artist years of unremitting
labour, and of delightful never-ending progress to perfection.[5] Who
would wish ever to come to the close of such works,—not to dwell on
them, to return to them, to be wedded to them to the last? Rubens, with
his florid, rapid style, complained that when he had just learned his
art, he should be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow advances of his,
had lived long enough!
Painting is not, like writing, what is properly understood by a
sedentary employment. It requires not indeed a strong, but a continued
and steady exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy of the
manual operation makes up for the want of vehemence,—as to balance
himself for any time in the same position the rope-dancer must strain
every nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an
appetite for one’s dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by
riding over Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that
‘he took no other exercise than what he used in his painting-room,’—the
writer means, in walking backwards and forwards to look at his picture;
but the act of painting itself, of laying on the colours in the proper
place, and proper quantity, was a much harder exercise than this
alternate receding from and returning to the picture. This last would be
rather a relaxation and relief than an effort. It is not to be wondered
at, that an artist like Sir Joshua, who delighted so much in the sensual
and practical part of his art, should have found himself at a
considerable loss when the decay of his sight precluded him, for the
last year or two of his life, from the following up of his
profession,—‘the source,’ according to his own remark, ‘of thirty years
uninterrupted enjoyment and prosperity to him.’ It is only those who
never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to brood
incessantly on abstract ideas, that never feel _ennui_.
To give one instance more, and then I will have done with this rambling
discourse. One of my first attempts was a picture of my father, who was
then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred with
the small-pox. I drew it with a broad light crossing the face, looking
down, with spectacles on, reading. The book was Shaftesbury’s
Characteristics, in a fine old binding, with Gribelin’s etchings. My
father would as lieve it had been any other book; but for him to read
was to be content, was ‘riches fineless.’ The sketch promised well; and
I set to work to finish it, determined to spare no time nor pains. My
father was willing to sit as long as I pleased; for there is a natural
desire in the mind of man to sit for one’s picture, to be the object of
continued attention, to have one’s likeness multiplied; and besides his
satisfaction in the picture, he had some pride in the artist, though he
would rather I should have written a sermon than painted like Rembrandt
or like Raphael. Those winter days, with the gleams of sunshine coming
through the chapel-windows, and cheered by the notes of the
robin-redbreast in our garden (that ‘ever in the haunch of winter
sings’)—as my afternoon’s work drew to a close,—were among the happiest
of my life. When I gave the effect I intended to any part of the picture
for which I had prepared my colours, when I imitated the roughness of
the skin by a lucky stroke of the pencil, when I hit the clear pearly
tone of a vein, when I gave the ruddy complexion of health, the blood
circulating under the broad shadows of one side of the face, I thought
my fortune made; or rather it was already more than made, in my fancying
that I might one day be able to say with Correggio, ‘_I also am a
painter!_’ It was an idle thought, a boy’s conceit; but it did not make
me less happy at the time. I used regularly to set my work in the chair
to look at it through the long evenings; and many a time did I return to
take leave of it before I could go to bed at night. I remember sending
it with a throbbing heart to the Exhibition, and seeing it hung up there
by the side of one of the Honourable Mr. Skeffington (now Sir George).
There was nothing in common between them, but that they were the
portraits of two very good-natured men. I think, but am not sure, that I
finished this portrait (or another afterwards) on the same day that the
news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out in the afternoon,
and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage
with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh for
the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come
over again! I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand
intervening years very contentedly!—The picture is left: the table, the
chair, the window where I learned to construe Livy, the chapel where my
father preached, remain where they were; but he himself is gone to rest,
full of years, of faith, of hope, and charity!
ESSAY II
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
The painter not only takes a delight in nature, he has a new and
exquisite source of pleasure opened to him in the study and
contemplation of works of art—
‘Whate’er Lorraine light touch’d with soft’ning hue,
Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew.’
He turns aside to view a country-gentleman’s seat with eager looks,
thinking it may contain some of the rich products of art. There is an
air round Lord Radnor’s park, for there hang the two Claudes, the
Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire—round Wilton-house, for there is
Vandyke’s picture of the Pembroke family—round Blenheim, for there is
his picture of the Duke of Buckingham’s children, and the most
magnificent collection of Rubenses in the world—at Knowsley, for there
is Rembrandt’s Hand-writing on the Wall—and at Burleigh, for there are
some of Guido’s angelic heads. The young artist makes a pilgrimage to
each of these places, eyes them wistfully at a distance, ‘bosomed high
in tufted trees,’ and feels an interest in them of which the owner is
scarce conscious: he enters the well-swept walks and echoing arch-ways,
passes the threshold, is led through wainscoted rooms, is shown the
furniture, the rich hangings, the tapestry, the massy services of
plate—and, at last, is ushered into the room where his treasure is, the
idol of his vows—some speaking face or bright landscape! It is stamped
on his brain, and lives there thenceforward, a tally for nature, and a
test of art. He furnishes out the chambers of the mind from the spoils
of time, picks and chooses which shall have the best places—nearest his
heart. He goes away richer than he came, richer than the possessor; and
thinks that he may one day return, when he perhaps shall have done
something like them, or even from failure shall have learned to admire
truth and genius more.
My first initiation in the mysteries of the art was at the Orleans
Gallery: it was there I formed my taste, such as it is; so that I am
irreclaimably of the old school in painting. I was staggered when I saw
the works there collected, and looked at them with wondering and with
longing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight: the scales fell off. A
new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth stood before me. I
saw the soul speaking in the face—‘hands that the rod of empire had
swayed’ in mighty ages past—‘a forked mountain or blue promontory,’
‘—with trees upon ‘t
That nod unto the world, and mock our eyes with air.’
Old Time had unlocked his treasures, and Fame stood portress at the
door. We had all heard of the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido,
Domenichino, the Caracci—but to see them face to face, to be in the same
room with their deathless productions, was like breaking some mighty
spell—was almost an effect of necromancy! From that time I lived in a
world of pictures. Battles, sieges, speeches in parliament seemed mere
idle noise and fury, ‘signifying nothing,’ compared with those mighty
works and dreaded names that spoke to me in the eternal silence of
thought. This was the more remarkable, as it was but a short time before
that I was not only totally ignorant of, but insensible to the beauties
of art. As an instance, I remember that one afternoon I was reading the
Provoked Husband with the highest relish, with a green woody landscape
of Ruysdael or Hobbima just before me, at which I looked off the book
now and then, and wondered what there could be in that sort of work to
satisfy or delight the mind—at the same time asking myself, as a
speculative question, whether I should ever feel an interest in it like
what I took in reading Vanbrugh and Cibber?
I had made some progress in painting when I went to the Louvre to study,
and I never did any thing afterwards. I never shall forget conning over
the Catalogue which a friend lent me just before I set out. The
pictures, the names of the painters, seemed to relish in the mouth.
There was one of Titian’s Mistress at her toilette. Even the colours
with which the painter had adorned her hair were not more golden, more
amiable to sight, than those which played round and tantalised my fancy
ere I saw the picture. There were two portraits by the same hand—‘A
young Nobleman with a glove’—Another, ‘a companion to it’—I read the
description over and over with fond expectancy, and filled up the
imaginary outline with whatever I could conceive of grace, and dignity,
and an antique _gusto_—all but equal to the original. There was the
Transfiguration too. With what awe I saw it in my mind’s eye, and was
overshadowed with the spirit of the artist! Not to have been
disappointed with these works afterwards, was the highest compliment I
can pay to their transcendant merits. Indeed, it was from seeing other
works of the same great masters that I had formed a vague, but no
disparaging idea of these.—The first day I got there, I was kept for
some time in the French Exhibition-room, and thought I should not be
able to get a sight of the old masters. I just caught a peep at them
through the door (vile hindrance!) like looking out of purgatory into
paradise—from Poussin’s noble mellow-looking landscapes to where Rubens
hung out his gaudy banner, and down the glimmering vista to the rich
jewels of Titian and the Italian school. At last, by much importunity, I
was admitted, and lost not an instant in making use of my new
privilege.—It was _un beau jour_ to me. I marched delighted through a
quarter of a mile of the proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole
creation of genius, a universe of art! I ran the gauntlet of all the
schools from the bottom to the top; and in the end got admitted into the
inner room, where they had been repairing some of their greatest works.
Here the Transfiguration, the St. Peter Martyr, and the St. Jerome of
Domenichino stood on the floor, as if they had bent their knees, like
camels stooping, to unlade their riches to the spectator. On one side,
on an easel, stood Hippolito de Medici (a portrait by Titian) with a
boar-spear in his hand, looking through those he saw, till you turned
away from the keen glance: and thrown together in heaps were landscapes
of the same hand, green pastoral hills and vales, and shepherds piping
to their mild mistresses underneath the flowering shade. Reader, ‘if
thou hast not seen the Louvre, thou art damned!’—for thou hast not seen
the choicest remains of the works of art; or thou hast not seen all
these together, with their mutually reflected glories. I say nothing of
the statues; for I know but little of sculpture, and never liked any
till I saw the Elgin marbles.... Here, for four months together, I
strolled and studied, and daily heard the warning sound—‘_Quatre heures
passées, il faut fermer, Citoyens_,’ (ah! why did they ever change their
style?) muttered in coarse provincial French; and brought away with me
some loose draughts and fragments, which I have been forced to part
with, like drops of life-blood, for ‘hard money.’ How often, thou
tenantless mansion of godlike magnificence—how often has my heart since
gone a pilgrimage to thee!
It has been made a question, whether the artist, or the mere man of
taste and natural sensibility, receives most pleasure from the
contemplation of works of art? and I think this question might be
answered by another as a sort of _experimentum crucis_, namely, whether
any one out of that ‘number numberless’ of mere gentlemen and amateurs,
who visited Paris at the period here spoken of, felt as much interest,
as much pride or pleasure in this display of the most striking monuments
of art as the humblest student would? The first entrance into the Louvre
would be only one of the events of his journey, not an event in his
life, remembered ever after with thankfulness and regret. He would
explore it with the same unmeaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would
the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden in the Thuilleries, but
not with the fond enthusiasm of an artist. How should he? His is ‘casual
fruition, joyless, unendeared.’ But the painter is wedded to his art,
the mistress, queen, and idol of his soul. He has embarked his all in
it, fame, time, fortune, peace of mind, his hopes in youth, his
consolation in age: and shall he not feel a more intense interest in
whatever relates to it than the mere indolent trifler? Natural
sensibility alone, without the entire application of the mind to that
one object, will not enable the possessor to sympathise with all the
degrees of beauty and power in the conception of a Titian or a
Correggio; but it is he only who does this, who follows them into all
their force and matchless grace, that does or can feel their full value.
Knowledge is pleasure as well as power. No one but the artist who has
studied nature and contended with the difficulties of art, can be aware
of the beauties, or intoxicated with a passion for painting. No one who
has not devoted his life and soul to the pursuit of art, can feel the
same exultation in its brightest ornaments and loftiest triumphs which
an artist does. Where the treasure is, there the heart is also. It is
now seventeen years since I was studying in the Louvre (and I have long
since given up all thoughts of the art as a profession), but long after
I returned, and even still, I sometimes dream of being there again—of
asking for the old pictures—and not finding them, or finding them
changed or faded from what they were, I cry myself awake! What
gentleman-amateur ever does this at such a distance of time,—that is,
ever received pleasure or took interest enough in them to produce so
lasting an impression?
But it is said that if a person had the same natural taste, and the same
acquired knowledge as an artist, without the petty interests and
technical notions, he would derive a purer pleasure from seeing a fine
portrait, a fine landscape, and so on. This however is not so much
begging the question as asking an impossibility: he cannot have the same
insight into the end without having studied the means; nor the same love
of art without the same habitual and exclusive attachment to it.
Painters are, no doubt, often actuated by jealousy, partiality, and a
sordid attention to that only which they find useful to themselves in
painting. W— has been seen poring over the texture of a Dutch
cabinet-picture, so that he could not see the picture itself. But this
is the perversion and pedantry of the profession, not its true or
genuine spirit. If W— had never looked at any thing but megilps and
handling, he never would have put the soul of life and manners into his
pictures, as he has done. Another objection is, that the instrumental
parts of the art, the means, the first rudiments, paints, oils, and
brushes, are painful and disgusting; and that the consciousness of the
difficulty and anxiety with which perfection has been attained, must
take away from the pleasure of the finest performance. This, however, is
only an additional proof of the greater pleasure derived by the artist
from his profession; for these things which are said to interfere with
and destroy the common interest in works of art, do not disturb him; he
never once thinks of them, he is absorbed in the pursuit of a higher
object; he is intent, not on the means but the end; he is taken up, not
with the difficulties, but with the triumph over them. As in the case of
the anatomist, who overlooks many things in the eagerness of his search
after abstract truth; or the alchemist who, while he is raking into his
soot and furnaces, lives in a golden dream; a lesser gives way to a
greater object. But it is pretended that the painter may be supposed to
submit to the unpleasant part of the process only for the sake of the
fame or profit in view. So far is this from being a true state of the
case, that I will venture to say, in the instance of a friend of mine
who has lately succeeded in an important undertaking in his art, that
not all the fame he has acquired, not all the money he has received from
thousands of admiring spectators, not all the newspaper puffs,—nor even
the praise of the Edinburgh Review,—not all these, put together, ever
gave him at any time the same genuine, undoubted satisfaction as any one
half-hour employed in the ardent and propitious pursuit of his art—in
finishing to his heart’s content a foot, a hand, or even a piece of
drapery. What is the state of mind of an artist while he is at work? He
is then in the act of realising the highest idea he can form of beauty
or grandeur: he conceives, he embodies that which he understands and
loves best: that is, he is in full and perfect possession of that which
is to him the source of the highest happiness and intellectual
excitement which he can enjoy.
In short, as a conclusion to this argument, I will mention a
circumstance which fell under my knowledge the other day. A friend had
bought a print of Titian’s Mistress, the same to which I have alluded
above. He was anxious to shew it me on this account. I told him it was a
spirited engraving, but it had not the look of the original. I believe
he thought this fastidious, till I offered to shew him a rough sketch of
it, which I had by me. Having seen this, he said he perceived exactly
what I meant, and could not bear to look at the print afterwards. He had
good sense enough to see the difference in the individual instance; but
a person better acquainted with Titian’s manner and with art in general,
that is, of a more cultivated and refined taste, would know that it was
a bad print, without having any immediate model to compare it with. He
would perceive with a glance of the eye, with a sort of instinctive
feeling, that it was hard, and without that bland, expansive, and
nameless expression which always distinguished Titian’s most famous
works. Any one who is accustomed to a head in a picture can never
reconcile himself to a print from it: but to the ignorant they are both
the same. To a vulgar eye there is no difference between a Guido and a
daub, between a penny-print or the vilest scrawl, and the most finished
performance. In other words, all that excellence which lies between
these two extremes,—all, at least, that marks the excess above
mediocrity,—all that constitutes true beauty, harmony, refinement,
grandeur, is lost upon the common observer. But it is from this point
that the delight, the glowing raptures of the true adept commence. An
uninformed spectator may like an ordinary drawing better than the ablest
connoisseur; but for that very reason he cannot like the highest
specimens of art so well. The refinements not only of execution but of
truth and nature are inaccessible to unpractised eyes. The exquisite
gradations in a sky of Claude’s are not perceived by such persons, and
consequently the harmony cannot be felt. Where there is no conscious
apprehension, there can be no conscious pleasure. Wonder at the first
sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but
real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste
and knowledge. ‘I would not wish to have your eyes,’ said a good-natured
man to a critic, who was finding fault with a picture, in which the
other saw no blemish. Why so? The idea which prevented him from admiring
this inferior production was a higher idea of truth and beauty which was
ever present with him, and a continual source of pleasing and lofty
contemplations. It may be different in a taste for outward luxuries and
the privations of mere sense; but the idea of perfection, which acts as
an intellectual foil, is always an addition, a support, and a proud
consolation!
Richardson, in his Essays, which ought to be better known, has left some
striking examples of the felicity and infelicity of artists, both as it
relates to their external fortune, and to the practice of their art. In
speaking of _the knowledge of hands_, he exclaims—‘When one is
considering a picture or a drawing, one at the same time thinks this was
done by him[6] who had many extraordinary endowments of body and mind,
but was withal very capricious; who was honoured in life and death,
expiring in the arms of one of the greatest princes of that age, Francis
I. King of France, who loved him as a friend. Another is of him[7] who
lived a long and happy life, beloved of Charles V. emperour; and many
others of the first princes of Europe. When one has another in hand, we
think this was done by one[8] who so excelled in three arts, as that any
of them in that degree had rendered him worthy of immortality; and one
moreover that durst contend with his sovereign (one of the haughtiest
popes that ever was) upon a slight offered to him, and extricated
himself with honour. Another is the work of him[9] who, without any one
exterior advantage but mere strength of genius, had the most sublime
imaginations, and executed them accordingly, yet lived and died
obscurely. Another we shall consider as the work of him[10] who restored
Painting when it had almost sunk; of him whom art made honourable, but
who, neglecting and despising greatness with a sort of cynical pride,
was treated suitably to the figure he gave himself, not his intrinsic
worth; which, not having philosophy enough to bear it, broke his heart.
Another is done by one[11] who (on the contrary) was a fine gentleman,
and lived in great magnificence, and was much honoured by his own and
foreign princes; who was a courtier, a statesman, and a painter; and so
much all these, that when he acted in either character, _that_ seemed to
be his business, and the others his diversion. I say when one thus
reflects, besides the pleasure arising from the beauties and excellences
of the work, the fine ideas it gives us of natural things, the noble way
of thinking it may suggest to us, an additional pleasure results from
the above considerations. But, oh! the pleasure, when a connoisseur and
lover of art has before him a picture or drawing, of which he can say
this is the hand, these are the thoughts of him[12] who was one of the
politest, best-natured gentlemen that ever was; and beloved and assisted
by the greatest wits and the greatest men then in Rome: of him who lived
in great fame, honour, and magnificence, and died extremely lamented;
and missed a Cardinal’s hat only by dying a few months too soon; but was
particularly esteemed and favoured by two Popes, the only ones who
filled the chair of St. Peter in his time, and as great men as ever sat
there since that apostle, if at least he ever did: one, in short, who
could have been a Leonardo, a Michael Angelo, a Titian, a Correggio, a
Parmegiano, an Annibal, a Rubens, or any other whom he pleased, but none
of them could ever have been a Rafaelle.’ Page 251.
The same writer speaks feelingly of the change in the style of different
artists from their change of fortune, and as the circumstances are
little known, I will quote the passage relating to two of them.
‘Guido Reni from a prince-like affluence of fortune (the just reward of
his angelic works) fell to a condition like that of a hired servant to
one who supplied him with money for what he did at a fixed rate; and
that by his being bewitched with a passion for gaming, whereby he lost
vast sums of money; and even what he got in this his state of servitude
by day, he commonly lost at night: nor could he ever be cured of this
cursed madness. Those of his works, therefore, which he did in this
unhappy part of his life, may easily be conceived to be in a different
style to what he did before, which in some things, that is, in the airs
of his heads (in the gracious kind), had a delicacy in them peculiar to
himself, and almost more than human. But I must not multiply instances.
Parmegiano is one that alone takes in all the several kinds of
variation, and all the degrees of goodness, from the lowest of the
indifferent up to the sublime. I can produce evident proofs of this in
so easy a gradation, that one cannot deny but that he that did this,
might do that, and very probably did so; and thus one may ascend and
descend, like the angels on Jacob’s ladder, whose foot was upon the
earth, but its top reached to Heaven.
‘And this great man had his unlucky circumstance: he became mad after
the philosopher’s stone, and did but very little in painting or drawing
afterwards. Judge what that was, and whether there was not an alteration
of style from what he had done, before this devil possessed him. His
creditors endeavoured to exorcise him, and did him some good, for he set
himself to work again in his own way: but if a drawing I have of a
Lucretia be that he made for his last picture, as it probably is (Vasari
says that was the subject of it), it is an evident proof of his decay:
it is good indeed, but it wants much of the delicacy which is commonly
seen in his works; and so I always thought before I knew or imagined it
to be done in this his ebb of genius.’ Page 153.
We have had two artists of our own country, whose fate has been as
singular as it was hard. Gandy was a portrait-painter in the beginning
of the last century, whose heads were said to have come near to
Rembrandt’s, and he was the undoubted prototype of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s
style. Yet his name has scarcely been heard of; and his reputation, like
his works, never extended beyond his own county. What did he think of
himself and of a fame so bounded! Did he ever dream he was indeed an
artist? Or how did this feeling in him differ from the vulgar conceit of
the lowest pretender? The best known of his works is a portrait of an
alderman of Exeter, in some public building in that city.
Poor Dan. Stringer! Forty years ago he had the finest hand and the
clearest eye of any artist of his time, and produced heads and drawings
that would not have disgraced a brighter period in the art. But he fell
a martyr (like Burns) to the society of country-gentlemen, and then of
those whom they would consider as more his equals. I saw him many years
ago, when he treated the masterly sketches he had by him (one in
particular of the group of citizens in Shakespear ‘swallowing the
tailor’s news’) as ‘bastards of his genius, not his children;’ and
seemed to have given up all thoughts of his art. Whether he is since
dead, I cannot say: the world do not so much as know that he ever lived!
ESSAY III
ON THE PAST AND FUTURE
I have naturally but little imagination, and am not of a very sanguine
turn of mind. I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some
fondness for the past; but I am not at all given to building castles in
the air, nor to look forward with much confidence or hope to the
brilliant illusions held out by the future. Hence I have perhaps been
led to form a theory, which is very contrary to the common notions and
feelings on the subject, and which I will here try to explain as well as
I can.—When Sterne in the Sentimental Journey told the French Minister
that if the French people had a fault, it was that they were too
serious, the latter replied that if that was his opinion, he must defend
it with all his might, for he would have all the world against him; so I
shall have enough to do to get well through the present argument.
I cannot see, then, any rational or logical ground for that mighty
difference in the value which mankind generally set upon the past and
future, as if the one was every thing, and the other nothing, of no
consequence whatever. On the other hand, I conceive that the past is as
real and substantial a part of our being, that it is as much a _bona
fide_, undeniable consideration in the estimate of human life, as the
future can possibly be. To say that the past is of no importance,
unworthy of a moment’s regard, because it has gone by, and is no longer
any thing, is an argument that cannot be held to any purpose: for if the
past has ceased to be, and is therefore to be accounted nothing in the
scale of good or evil, the future is yet to come, and has never been any
thing. Should any one choose to assert that the present only is of any
value in a strict and positive sense, because that alone has a real
existence, that we should seize the instant good, and give all else to
the winds, I can understand what he means (though perhaps he does not
himself[13]): but I cannot comprehend how this distinction between that
which has a downright and sensible, and that which has only a remote and
airy existence, can be applied to establish the preference of the future
over the past; for both are in this point of view equally ideal,
absolutely nothing, except as they are conceived of by the mind’s eye,
and are thus rendered present to the thoughts and feelings. Nay, the one
is even more imaginary, a more fantastic creature of the brain than the
other, and the interest we take in it more shadowy and gratuitous; for
the future, on which we lay so much stress, may never come to pass at
all, that is, may never be embodied into actual existence in the whole
course of events, whereas the past has certainly existed once, has
received the stamp of truth, and left an image of itself behind. It is
so far then placed beyond the possibility of doubt, or as the poet has
it,
‘Those joys are lodg’d beyond the reach of fate.’
It is not, however, attempted to be denied that though the future is
nothing at present, and has no immediate interest while we are speaking,
yet it is of the utmost consequence in itself, and of the utmost
interest to the individual, because it _will have_ a real existence, and
we have an idea of it as existing in time to come. Well then, the past
also has no real existence; the actual sensation and the interest
belonging to it are both fled; but it _has had_ a real existence, and we
can still call up a vivid recollection of it as having once been; and
therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a thing perfectly
insignificant in itself, nor wholly indifferent to the mind, whether it
ever was or not. Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold
upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us to
existence. Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or
miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been
one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a
dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure
fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and the
records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender
regret to that which was at one time to me _my all_, when I revive the
glowing image of some bright reality,
‘The thoughts of which can never from my heart?’
Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my eyes on nothing, when I turn
back in fancy to ‘those suns and skies so pure’ that lighted up my early
path? Is it to think of nothing, to set an idle value upon nothing, to
think of all that has happened to me, and of all that can ever interest
me? Or, to use the language of a fine poet (who is himself among my
earliest and not least painful recollections)—
‘What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever vanish’d from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow’r’—
yet am I mocked with a lie, when I venture to think of it? Or do I not
drink in and breathe again the air of heavenly truth, when I but
‘retrace its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore?’ I cannot say with
the same poet—
‘And see how dark the backward stream,
A little moment past so smiling’—
for it is the past that gives me most delight and most assurance of
reality. What to me constitutes the great charm of the Confessions of
Rousseau is their turning so much upon this feeling. He seems to gather
up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a
precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the
beadroll that he tells over, and piously worships; he makes a rosary of
the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years. When he
begins the last of the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, ‘_Il y a
aujourd’hui, jour des Pâques Fleuris, cinquante ans depuis que j’ai
premier vu Madame Warens_,’ what a yearning of the soul is implied in
that short sentence! Was all that had happened to him, all that he had
thought and felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted nothing?
Was that long, dim, faded retrospect of years happy or miserable, a
blank that was not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint within him
in trying to grasp all that had once filled it and that had since
vanished, because it was not a prospect into futurity? Was he wrong in
finding more to interest him in it than in the next fifty years—which he
did not live to see; or if he had, what then? Would they have been worth
thinking of, compared with the times of his youth, of his first meeting
with Madame Warens, with those times which he has traced with such truth
and pure delight ‘in our heart’s tables?’ When ‘all the life of life was
flown,’ was he not to live the first and best part of it over again, and
once more be all that he then was?—Ye woods that crown the clear lone
brow of Norman Court, why do I revisit ye so oft, and feel a soothing
consciousness of your presence, but that your high tops waving in the
wind recal to me the hours and years that are for ever fled, that ye
renew in ceaseless murmurs the story of long-cherished hopes and bitter
disappointment, that in your solitudes and tangled wilds I can wander
and lose myself as I wander on and am lost in the solitude of my own
heart; and that as your rustling branches give the loud blast to the
waste below—borne on the thoughts of other years, I can look down with
patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which I feel within! Without
that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks, for ever shunning
and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking thoughts as in a dream,
without that smile which my heart could never turn to scorn, without
those eyes, dark with their own lustre, still bent on mine, and drawing
the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea of love, without that name
trembling in fancy’s ear, without that form gliding before me like Oread
or Dryad in fabled groves, what should I do, how pass away the listless
leaden-footed hours? Then wave, wave on, ye woods of Tuderley, and lift
your high tops in the air; my sighs and vows uttered by your mystic
voice breathe into me my former being, and enable me to bear the thing I
am!—The objects that we have known in better days are the main props
that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await
our future lot. The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding
all objects from our view: the past is alive and stirring with objects,
bright or solemn, and of unfading interest. What is it in fact that we
recur to oftenest? What subjects do we think or talk of? Not the
ignorant future, but the well-stored past. Othello, the Moor of Venice,
amused himself and his hearers at the house of Signor Brabantio by
‘running through the story of his life even from his boyish days;’ and
oft ‘beguiled them of their tears, when he did speak of some disastrous
stroke which his youth suffered.’ This plan of ingratiating himself
would not have answered, if the past had been, like the contents of an
old almanac, of no use but to be thrown aside and forgotten. What a
blank, for instance, does the history of the world for the next six
thousand years present to the mind, compared with that of the last! All
that strikes the imagination or excites any interest in the mighty scene
is _what has been_![14]
Neither in itself then, nor as a subject of general contemplation, has
the future any advantage over the past. But with respect to our grosser
passions and pursuits it has. As far as regards the appeal to the
understanding or the imagination, the past is just as good, as real, of
as much intrinsic and ostensible value as the future: but there is
another principle in the human mind, the principle of action or will;
and of this the past has no hold, the future engrosses it entirely to
itself. It is this strong lever of the affections that gives so powerful
a bias to our sentiments on this subject, and violently transposes the
natural order of our associations. We regret the pleasures we have lost,
and eagerly anticipate those which are to come: we dwell with
satisfaction on the evils from which we have escaped (_Posthæc meminisse
juvabit_)—and dread future pain. The good that is past is in this sense
like money that is spent, which is of no further use, and about which we
give ourselves little concern. The good we expect is like a store yet
untouched, and in the enjoyment of which we promise ourselves infinite
gratification. What has happened to us we think of no consequence: what
is to happen to us, of the greatest. Why so? Simply because the one is
still in our power, and the other not—because the efforts of the will to
bring any object to pass or to prevent it strengthen our attachment or
aversion to that object—because the pains and attention bestowed upon
any thing add to our interest in it, and because the habitual and
earnest pursuit of any end redoubles the ardour of our expectations, and
converts the speculative and indolent satisfaction we might otherwise
feel in it into real passion. Our regrets, anxiety, and wishes are
thrown away upon the past: but the insisting on the importance of the
future is of the utmost use in aiding our resolutions, and stimulating
our exertions. If the future were no more amenable to our wills than the
past; if our precautions, our sanguine schemes, our hopes and fears were
of as little avail in the one case as the other; if we could neither
soften our minds to pleasure, nor steel our fortitude to the resistance
of pain beforehand; if all objects drifted along by us like straws or
pieces of wood in a river, the will being purely passive, and as little
able to avert the future as to arrest the past, we should in that case
be equally indifferent to both; that is, we should consider each as they
affected the thoughts and imagination with certain sentiments of
approbation or regret, but without the importunity of action, the
irritation of the will, throwing the whole weight of passion and
prejudice into one scale, and leaving the other quite empty. While the
blow is coming, we prepare to meet it, we think to ward off or break its
force, we arm ourselves with patience to endure what cannot be avoided,
we agitate ourselves with fifty needless alarms about it; but when the
blow is struck, the pang is over, the struggle is no longer necessary,
and we cease to harass or torment ourselves about it more than we can
help. It is not that the one belongs to the future and the other to time
past; but that the one is a subject of action, of uneasy apprehension,
of strong passion, and that the other has passed wholly out of the
sphere of action, into the region of
‘Calm contemplation and majestic pains.’[15]
It would not give a man more concern to know that he should be put to
the rack a year hence, than to recollect that he had been put to it a
year ago, but that he hopes to avoid the one, whereas he must sit down
patiently under the consciousness of the other. In this hope he wears
himself out in vain struggles with fate, and puts himself to the rack of
his imagination every day he has to live in the mean while. When the
event is so remote or so independent of the will as to set aside the
necessity of immediate action, or to baffle all attempts to defeat it,
it gives us little more disturbance or emotion than if it had already
taken place, or were something to happen in another state of being, or
to an indifferent person. Criminals are observed to grow more anxious as
their trial approaches; but after their sentence is passed, they become
tolerably resigned, and generally sleep sound the night before its
execution.
It in some measure confirms this theory, that men attach more or less
importance to past and future events, according as they are more or less
engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune
to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the past,
for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have
nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as
in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real as
that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the remembrance of
it is left. The past still lives in the memory of those who have leisure
to look back upon the way that they have trod, and can from it ‘catch
glimpses that may make them less forlorn.’ The turbulence of action, and
uneasiness of desire, must point to the future: it is only in the quiet
innocence of shepherds, in the simplicity of pastoral ages, that a tomb
was found with this inscription—‘I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN!’
Though I by no means think that our habitual attachment to life is in
exact proportion to the value of the gift, yet I am not one of those
splenetic persons who affect to think it of no value at all. _Que peu de
chose est la vie humaine_—is an exclamation in the mouths of moralists
and philosophers, to which I cannot agree. It is little, it is short, it
is not worth having, if we take the last hour, and leave out all that
has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the subject. Such
calculators seem to say that life is nothing when it is over, and that
may in their sense be true. If the old rule—_Respice finem_—were to be
made absolute, and no one could be pronounced fortunate till the day of
his death, there are few among us whose existence would, upon those
conditions, be much to be envied. But this is not a fair view of the
case. A man’s life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of
the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not _a little matter_,
whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish
conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated desires or
forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was
young because he is grown old, or never lived because he is now dead.
The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last
steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last
stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor last hour of our
existence, but the space that parts these two—not our exit nor our
entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think while
there—that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it. Indeed
it would be easy to shew that it is the very extent of human life, the
infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and
fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the
hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it
is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of
events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual
perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in
its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing!
It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to
hold its striking groups, its endless subjects! It is light as vanity,
and yet if all its weary moments, if all its head and heart aches were
compressed into one, what fortitude would not be overwhelmed with the
blow! What a huge heap, a ‘huge, dumb heap,’ of wishes, thoughts,
feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is
composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and
intense, often pass through the mind in only one day’s thinking or
reading, for instance! How many such days are there in a year, how many
years in a long life, still occupied with something interesting, still
recalling some old impression, still recurring to some difficult
question and making progress in it, every step accompanied with a sense
of power, and every moment conscious of ‘the high endeavour or the glad
success;’ for the mind seizes only on that which keeps it employed, and
is wound up to a certain pitch of pleasurable excitement or lively
solicitude, by the necessity of its own nature. The division of the map
of life into its component parts is beautifully made by King Henry VI.
‘Oh God! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain,
To sit upon a hill as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run;
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live:
When this is known, then to divide the times;
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest,
So many hours must I contemplate,
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young,
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean,
So many months ere I shall shear the fleece;
So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years
Past over to the end they were created,
Would bring grey hairs unto a quiet grave.’
I myself am neither a king nor a shepherd: books have been my fleecy
charge, and my thoughts have been my subjects. But these have found me
sufficient employment at the time, and enough to think of for the time
to come.
The passions contract and warp the natural progress of life. They
paralyse all of it that is not devoted to their tyranny and caprice.
This makes the difference between the laughing innocence of childhood,
the pleasantness of youth, and the crabbedness of age. A load of cares
lies like a weight of guilt upon the mind: so that a man of business
often has all the air, the distraction and restlessness and hurry of
feeling of a criminal. A knowledge of the world takes away the freedom
and simplicity of thought as effectually as the contagion of its
example. The artlessness and candour of our early years are open to all
impressions alike, because the mind is not clogged and pre-occupied with
other objects. Our pleasures and our pains come single, make room for
one another, and the spring of the mind is fresh and unbroken, its
aspect clear and unsullied. Hence ‘the tear forgot as soon as shed, the
sunshine of the breast.’ But as we advance farther, the will gets
greater head. We form violent antipathies, and indulge exclusive
preferences. We make up our minds to some one thing, and if we cannot
have that, will have nothing. We are wedded to opinion, to fancy, to
prejudice; which destroys the soundness of our judgments, and the
serenity and buoyancy of our feelings. The chain of habit coils itself
round the heart, like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it. It grows rigid
and callous; and for the softness and elasticity of childhood, full of
proud flesh and obstinate tumours. The violence and perversity of our
passions comes in more and more to overlay our natural sensibility and
well-grounded affections; and we screw ourselves up to aim only at those
things which are neither desirable nor practicable. Thus life passes
away in the feverish irritation of pursuit and the certainty of
disappointment. By degrees, nothing but this morbid state of feeling
satisfies us: and all common pleasures and cheap amusements are
sacrificed to the demon of ambition, avarice, or dissipation. The
machine is over-wrought: the parching heat of the veins dries up and
withers the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy; and any pause, any release
from the rack of ecstacy on which we are stretched, seems more
insupportable than the pangs which we endure. We are suspended between
tormenting desires, and the horrors of _ennui_. The impulse of the will,
like the wheels of a carriage going down hill, becomes too strong for
the driver, reason, and cannot be stopped nor kept within bounds. Some
idea, some fancy, takes possession of the brain; and however ridiculous,
however distressing, however ruinous, haunts us by a sort of fascination
through life.
Not only is this principle of excessive irritability to be seen at work
in our more turbulent passions and pursuits, but even in the formal
study of arts and sciences, the same thing takes place, and undermines
the repose and happiness of life. The eagerness of pursuit overcomes the
satisfaction to result from the accomplishment. The mind is overstrained
to attain its purpose; and when it is attained, the ease and alacrity
necessary to enjoy it are gone. The irritation of action does not cease
and go down with the occasion for it; but we are first uneasy to get to
the end of our work, and then uneasy for want of something to do. The
ferment of the brain does not of itself subside into pleasure and soft
repose. Hence the disposition to strong _stimuli_ observable in persons
of much intellectual exertion to allay and carry off the
over-excitement. The _improvisatori_ poets (it is recorded by Spence in
his Anecdotes of Pope) cannot sleep after an evening’s continued display
of their singular and difficult art. The rhymes keep running in their
head in spite of themselves, and will not let them rest. Mechanics and
labouring people never know what to do with themselves on a Sunday,
though they return to their work with greater spirit for the relief, and
look forward to it with pleasure all the week. Sir Joshua Reynolds was
never comfortable out of his painting-room, and died of chagrin and
regret, because he could not paint on to the last moment of his life. He
used to say that he could go on retouching a picture for ever, as long
as it stood on his easel; but as soon as it was once fairly out of the
house, he never wished to see it again. An ingenious artist of our own
time has been heard to declare, that if ever the Devil got him into his
clutches, he would set him to copy his own pictures. Thus the secure
self-complacent retrospect to what is done is nothing, while the
anxious, uneasy looking forward to what is to come is every thing. We
are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future
progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed
in life, we lose the ends of being!
ESSAY IV
ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE
We hear it maintained by people of more gravity than understanding, that
genius and taste are strictly reducible to rules, and that there is a
rule for every thing. So far is it from being true that the finest
breath of fancy is a definable thing, that the plainest common sense is
only what Mr. Locke would have called a _mixed mode_, subject to a
particular sort of acquired and undefinable tact. It is asked, ‘If you
do not know the rule by which a thing is done, how can you be sure of
doing it a second time?’ And the answer is, ‘If you do not know the
muscles by the help of which you walk, how is it you do not fall down at
every step you take?’ In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide
from feeling, and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a
number of things on the mind, which impression is true and well-founded,
though you may not be able to analyse or account for it in the several
particulars. In a gesture you use, in a look you see, in a tone you
hear, you judge of the expression, propriety, and meaning from habit,
not from reason or rules; that is to say, from innumerable instances of
like gestures, looks, and tones, in innumerable other circumstances,
variously modified, which are too many and too refined to be all
distinctly recollected, but which do not therefore operate the less
powerfully upon the mind and eye of taste. Shall we say that these
impressions (the immediate stamp of nature) do not operate in a given
manner till they are classified and reduced to rules, or is not the rule
itself grounded upon the truth and certainty of that natural operation?
How then can the distinction of the understanding as to the manner in
which they operate be necessary to their producing their due and uniform
effect upon the mind? If certain effects did not regularly arise out of
certain causes in mind as well as matter, there could be no rule given
for them: nature does not follow the rule, but suggests it. Reason is
the interpreter and critic of nature and genius, not their lawgiver and
judge. He must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do
not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding, or who does
not feel and know much more than he can give a reason for.—Hence the
distinction between eloquence and wisdom, between ingenuity and common
sense. A man may be dextrous and able in explaining the grounds of his
opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, because he only sees one half
of a subject. Another may feel the whole weight of a question, nothing
relating to it may be lost upon him, and yet he may be able to give no
account of the manner in which it affects him, or to drag his reasons
from their silent lurking-places. This last will be a wise man, though
neither a logician nor rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. Johnson
in argument; that is, in assigning the specific grounds of his opinions:
Dr. Johnson was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the airy,
intuitive faculty with which he skimmed the surfaces of things, and
unconsciously formed his opinions. Common sense is the just result of
the sum-total of such unconscious impressions in the ordinary
occurrences of life, as they are treasured up in the memory, and called
out by the occasion. Genius and taste depend much upon the same
principle exercised on loftier ground and in more unusual combinations.
I am glad to shelter myself from the charge of affectation or
singularity in this view of an often debated but ill-understood point,
by quoting a passage from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, which is
full, and, I think, conclusive to the purpose. He says,
‘I observe, as a fundamental ground common to all the Arts with which we
have any concern in this Discourse, that they address themselves only to
two faculties of the mind, its imagination and its sensibility.
‘All theories which attempt to direct or to control the Art, upon any
principles falsely called rational, which we form to ourselves upon a
supposition of what ought in reason to be the end or means of Art,
independent of the known first effect produced by objects on the
imagination, must be false and delusive. For though it may appear bold
to say it, the imagination is here the residence of truth. If the
imagination be affected, the conclusion is fairly drawn; if it be not
affected, the reasoning is erroneous, because the end is not obtained;
the effect itself being the test, and the only test, of the truth and
efficacy of the means.
‘There is in the commerce of life, as in Art, a sagacity which is far
from being contradictory to right reason, and is superior to any
occasional exercise of that faculty; which supersedes it; and does not
wait for the slow progress of deduction, but goes at once, by what
appears a kind of intuition, to the conclusion. A man endowed with this
faculty feels and acknowledges the truth, though it is not always in his
power, perhaps, to give a reason for it; because he cannot recollect and
bring before him all the materials that gave birth to his opinion; for
very many and very intricate considerations may unite to form the
principle, even of small and minute parts, involved in, or dependent on,
a great system of things:—though these in process of time are forgotten,
the right impression still remains fixed in his mind.
‘This impression is the result of the accumulated experience of our
whole life, and has been collected, we do not always know how, or when.
But this mass of collective observation, however acquired, ought to
prevail over that reason, which, however powerfully exerted on any
particular occasion, will probably comprehend but a partial view of the
subject; and our conduct in life, as well as in the arts, is or ought to
be generally governed by this habitual reason: it is our happiness that
we are enabled to draw on such funds. If we were obliged to enter into a
theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be
at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
‘It appears to me therefore’ (continues Sir Joshua) ‘that our first
thoughts, that is, the effect which any thing produces on our minds, on
its first appearance, is never to be forgotten; and it demands for that
reason, because it is the first, to be laid up with care. If this be not
done, the artist may happen to impose on himself by partial reasoning;
by a cold consideration of those animated thoughts which proceed, not
perhaps from caprice or rashness (as he may afterwards conceit), but
from the fulness of his mind, enriched with the copious stores of all
the various inventions which he had ever seen, or had ever passed in his
mind. These ideas are infused into his design, without any conscious
effort; but if he be not on his guard, he may reconsider and correct
them, till the whole matter is reduced to a common-place invention.
‘This is sometimes the effect of what I mean to caution you against;
that is to say, an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling, in
favour of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories, and of
principles that seem to apply to the design in hand; without considering
those general impressions on the fancy in which real principles of
_sound reason_, and of much more weight and importance, are involved,
and, as it were, lie hid under the appearance of a sort of vulgar
sentiment. Reason, without doubt, must ultimately determine every thing;
at this minute it is required to inform us when that very reason is to
give way to feeling.’—Discourse XIII. vol. ii. p. 113–17.
Mr. Burke, by whom the foregoing train of thinking was probably
suggested, has insisted on the same thing, and made rather a perverse
use of it in several parts of his Reflections on the French Revolution;
and Windham in one of his Speeches has clenched it into an
aphorism—‘There is nothing so true as habit.’ Once more I would say,
common sense is tacit reason. Conscience is the same tacit sense of
right and wrong, or the impression of our moral experience and moral
apprehensions on the mind, which, because it works unseen, yet
certainly, we suppose to be an instinct, implanted in the mind; as we
sometimes attribute the violent operations of our passions, of which we
can neither trace the source nor assign the reason, to the instigation
of the Devil!
I shall here try to go more at large into this subject, and to give such
instances and illustrations of it as occur to me.
One of the persons who had rendered themselves obnoxious to Government,
and been included in a charge for high treason in the year 1794, had
retired soon after into Wales to write an epic poem and enjoy the
luxuries of a rural life. In his peregrinations through that beautiful
scenery, he had arrived one fine morning at the inn at Llangollen, in
the romantic valley of that name. He had ordered his breakfast, and was
sitting at the window in all the dalliance of expectation, when a face
passed of which he took no notice at the instant—but when his breakfast
was brought in presently after, he found his appetite for it gone, the
day had lost its freshness in his eye, he was uneasy and spiritless; and
without any cause that he could discover, a total change had taken place
in his feelings. While he was trying to account for this odd
circumstance, the same face passed again—it was the face of Taylor the
spy; and he was no longer at a loss to explain the difficulty. He had
before caught only a transient glimpse, a passing side-view of the face;
but though this was not sufficient to awaken a distinct idea in his
memory, his feelings, quicker and surer, had taken the alarm; a string
had been touched that gave a jar to his whole frame, and would not let
him rest, though he could not at all tell what was the matter with him.
To the flitting, shadowy, half-distinguished profile that had glided by
his window was linked unconsciously and mysteriously, but inseparably,
the impression of the trains that had been laid for him by this
person;—in this brief moment, in this dim, illegible short-hand of the
mind he had just escaped the speeches of the Attorney and
Solicitor-General over again; the gaunt figure of Mr. Pitt glared by
him; the walls of a prison enclosed him; and he felt the hands of the
executioner near him, without knowing it till the tremor and disorder of
his nerves gave information to his reasoning faculties that all was not
well within. That is, the same state of mind was recalled by one
circumstance in the series of association that had been produced by the
whole set of circumstances at the time, though the manner in which this
was done was not immediately perceptible. In other words, the feeling of
pleasure or pain, of good or evil, is revived, and acts instantaneously
upon the mind, before we have time to recollect the precise objects
which have originally given birth to it.[16] The incident here mentioned
was merely, then, one case of what the learned understand by the
_association of ideas_: but all that is meant by feeling or common sense
is nothing but the different cases of the association of ideas, more or
less true to the impression of the original circumstances, as reason
begins with the more formal developement of those circumstances, or
pretends to account for the different cases of the association of ideas.
But it does not follow that the dumb and silent pleading of the former
(though sometimes, nay often mistaken) is less true than that of its
babbling interpreter, or that we are never to trust its dictates without
consulting the express authority of reason. Both are imperfect, both are
useful in their way, and therefore both are best together, to correct or
to confirm one another. It does not appear that in the singular instance
above mentioned, the sudden impression on the mind was superstition or
fancy, though it might have been thought so, had it not been proved by
the event to have a real physical and moral cause. Had not the same face
returned again, the doubt would never have been properly cleared up, but
would have remained a puzzle ever after, or perhaps have been soon
forgot.—By the law of association, as laid down by physiologists, any
impression in a series can recal any other impression in that series
without going through the whole in order: so that the mind drops the
intermediate links, and passes on rapidly and by stealth to the more
striking effects of pleasure or pain which have naturally taken the
strongest hold of it. By doing this habitually and skilfully with
respect to the various impressions and circumstances with which our
experience makes us acquainted, it forms a series of unpremeditated
conclusions on almost all subjects that can be brought before it, as
just as they are of ready application to human life; and common sense is
the name of this body of unassuming but practical wisdom. Common sense,
however, is an impartial, instinctive result of truth and nature, and
will therefore bear the test and abide the scrutiny of the most severe
and patient reasoning. It is indeed incomplete without it. By ingrafting
reason on feeling, we ‘make assurance double sure.’
‘’Tis the last key-stone that makes up the arch—
Then stands it a triumphal mark! Then men
Observe the strength, the height, the why and when
It was erected: and still walking under,
Meet some new matter to look up, and wonder.’
But reason, not employed to interpret nature, and to improve and perfect
common sense and experience, is, for the most part, a building without a
foundation.—The criticism exercised by reason then on common sense may
be as severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as it is severe.
Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy, or
bigotted prejudice. It is systematic, ostentatious in error, closes up
the avenues of knowledge, and ‘shuts the gates of wisdom on mankind.’ It
is not enough to shew that there is no reason for a thing, that we do
not see the reason of it: if the common feeling, if the involuntary
prejudice sets in strong in favour of it, if, in spite of all we can do,
there is a lurking suspicion on the side of our first impressions, we
must try again, and believe that truth is mightier than we. So, in
offering a definition of any subject, if we feel a misgiving that there
is any fact or circumstance omitted, but of which we have only a vague
apprehension, like a name we cannot recollect, we must ask for more
time, and not cut the matter short by an arrogant assumption of the
point in dispute. Common sense thus acts as a check-weight on sophistry,
and suspends our rash and superficial judgments. On the other hand, if
not only no reason can be given for a thing, but every reason is clear
against it, and we can account from ignorance, from authority, from
interest, from different causes, for the prevalence of an opinion or
sentiment, then we have a right to conclude that we have mistaken a
prejudice for an instinct, or have confounded a false and partial
impression with the fair and unavoidable inference from general
observation. Mr. Burke said that we ought not to reject every prejudice,
but should separate the husk of prejudice from the truth it encloses,
and so try to get at the kernel within; and thus far he was right. But
he was wrong in insisting that we are to cherish our prejudices,
‘because they are prejudices:’ for if they are all well-founded, there
is no occasion to inquire into their origin or use; and he who sets out
to philosophise upon them, or make the separation Mr. Burke talks of in
this spirit and with this previous determination, will be very likely to
mistake a maggot or a rotten canker for the precious kernel of truth, as
was indeed the case with our political sophist.
There is nothing more distinct than common sense and vulgar opinion.
Common sense is only a judge of things that fall under common
observation, or immediately come home to the business and bosoms of men.
This is of the very essence of its principle, the basis of its
pretensions. It rests upon the simple process of feeling, it anchors in
experience. It is not, nor it cannot be, the test of abstract,
speculative opinions. But half the opinions and prejudices of mankind,
those which they hold in the most unqualified approbation and which have
been instilled into them under the strongest sanctions, are of this
latter kind, that is, opinions, not which they have ever thought, known,
or felt one tittle about, but which they have taken up on trust from
others, which have been palmed on their understandings by fraud or
force, and which they continue to hold at the peril of life, limb,
property, and character, with as little warrant from common sense in the
first instance as appeal to reason in the last. The _ultima ratio regum_
proceeds upon a very different plea. Common sense is neither priestcraft
nor state-policy. Yet ‘there’s the rub that makes absurdity of so long
life;’ and, at the same time, gives the sceptical philosophers the
advantage over us. Till nature has fair play allowed it, and is not
adulterated by political and polemical quacks (as it so often has been),
it is impossible to appeal to it as a defence against the errors and
extravagances of mere reason. If we talk of common sense, we are twitted
with vulgar prejudice, and asked how we distinguish the one from the
other: but common and received opinion is indeed ‘a compost heap’ of
crude notions, got together by the pride and passions of individuals,
and reason is itself the thrall or manumitted slave of the same lordly
and besotted masters, dragging its servile chain, or committing all
sorts of Saturnalian licences, the moment it feels itself freed from
it.—If ten millions of Englishmen are furious in thinking themselves
right in making war upon thirty millions of Frenchmen, and if the last
are equally bent upon thinking the others always in the wrong, though it
is a common and national prejudice, both opinions cannot be the dictate
of good sense: but it may be the infatuated policy of one or both
governments to keep their subjects always at variance. If a few
centuries ago all Europe believed in the infallibility of the Pope, this
was not an opinion derived from the proper exercise or erroneous
direction of the common sense of the people: common sense had nothing to
do with it—they believed whatever their priests told them. England at
present is divided into Whigs and Tories, Churchmen and Dissenters: both
parties have numbers on their side; but common sense and party-spirit
are two different things. Sects and heresies are upheld partly by
sympathy, and partly by the love of contradiction: if there was nobody
of a different way of thinking, they would fall to pieces of themselves.
If a whole court say the same thing, this is no proof that they think
it, but that the individual at the head of the court has said it: if a
mob agree for a while in shouting the same watch-word, this is not to me
an example of the _sensus communis_; they only repeat what they have
heard repeated by others. If indeed a large proportion of the people are
in want of food, of clothing, of shelter, if they are sick, miserable,
scorned, oppressed, and if each feeling it in himself, they all say so
with one voice and one heart, and lift up their hands to second their
appeal, this I should say was but the dictate of common sense, the cry
of nature. But to wave this part of the argument, which it is needless
to push farther, I believe that the best way to instruct mankind is not
by pointing out to them their mutual errors, but by teaching them to
think rightly on indifferent matters, where they will listen with
patience in order to be amused, and where they do not consider a
definition or a syllogism as the greatest injury you can offer them.
There is no rule for expression. It is got at solely by _feeling_, that
is, on the principle of the association of ideas, and by transferring
what has been found to hold good in one case (with the necessary
modifications) to others. A certain look has been remarked strongly
indicative of a certain passion or trait of character, and we attach the
same meaning to it or are affected in the same pleasurable or painful
manner by it, where it exists in a less degree, though we can define
neither the look itself nor the modification of it. Having got the
general clue, the exact result may be left to the imagination to vary,
to extenuate or aggravate it according to circumstances. In the
admirable profile of Oliver Cromwell after —, the drooping eye-lids, as
if drawing a veil over the fixed, penetrating glance, the nostrils
somewhat distended, and lips compressed so as hardly to let the breath
escape him, denote the character of the man for high-reaching policy and
deep designs as plainly as they can be written. How is it that we
decipher this expression in the face? First, by feeling it: and how is
it that we feel it? Not by pre-established rules, but by the instinct of
analogy, by the principle of association, which is subtle and sure in
proportion as it is variable and indefinite. A circumstance, apparently
of no value, shall alter the whole interpretation to be put upon an
expression or action; and it shall alter it thus powerfully because in
proportion to its very insignificance it shews a strong general
principle at work that extends in its ramifications to the smallest
things. This in fact will make all the difference between minuteness and
subtlety or refinement; for a small or trivial effect may in given
circumstances imply the operation of a great power. Stillness may be the
result of a blow too powerful to be resisted; silence may be imposed by
feelings too agonising for utterance. The minute, the trifling and
insipid, is that which is little in itself, in its causes and its
consequences: the subtle and refined is that which is slight and
evanescent at first sight, but which mounts up to a mighty sum in the
end, which is an essential part of an important whole, which has
consequences greater than itself, and where more is meant than meets the
eye or ear. We complain sometimes of littleness in a Dutch picture,
where there are a vast number of distinct parts and objects, each small
in itself, and leading to nothing else. A sky of Claude’s cannot fall
under this censure, where one imperceptible gradation is as it were the
scale to another, where the broad arch of heaven is piled up of
endlessly intermediate gold and azure tints, and where an infinite
number of minute, scarce noticed particulars blend and melt into
universal harmony. The subtlety in Shakespear, of which there is an
immense deal every where scattered up and down, is always the instrument
of passion, the vehicle of character. The action of a man pulling his
hat over his forehead is indifferent enough in itself, and, generally
speaking, may mean any thing or nothing: but in the circumstances in
which Macduff is placed, it is neither insignificant nor equivocal.
‘What! man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows,’ &c.
It admits but of one interpretation or inference, that which follows
it:—
‘Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.’
The passage in the same play, in which Duncan and his attendants are
introduced commenting on the beauty and situation of Macbeth’s castle,
though familiar in itself, has been often praised for the striking
contrast it presents to the scenes which follow.—The same look in
different circumstances may convey a totally different expression. Thus
the eye turned round to look at you without turning the head indicates
generally slyness or suspicion: but if this is combined with large
expanded eye-lids or fixed eyebrows, as we see it in Titian’s pictures,
it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without any
thing of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases, it may
imply merely indolent enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely’s portraits of
women. The languor and weakness of the eye-lids gives the amorous turn
to the expression. How should there be a rule for all this beforehand,
seeing it depends on circumstances ever varying, and scarce discernible
but by their effect on the mind? Rules are applicable to abstractions,
but expression is concrete and individual. We know the meaning of
certain looks, and we feel how they modify one another in conjunction.
But we cannot have a separate rule to judge of all their combinations in
different degrees and circumstances, without foreseeing all those
combinations, which is impossible: or, if we did foresee them, we should
only be where we are, that is, we could only make the rule as we now
judge without it, from imagination and the feeling of the moment. The
absurdity of reducing expression to a preconcerted system was perhaps
never more evidently shewn than in a picture of the Judgment of Solomon
by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once heard admired for the
skill and discrimination of the artist in making all the women, who are
ranged on one side, in the greatest alarm at the sentence of the judge,
while all the men on the opposite side see through the design of it.
Nature does not go to work or cast things in a regular mould in this
sort of way. I once heard a person remark of another—‘He has an eye like
a vicious horse.’ This was a fair analogy. We all, I believe, have
noticed the look of a horse’s eye, just before he is going to bite or
kick. But will any one, therefore, describe to me exactly what that look
is? It was the same acute observer that said of a self-sufficient
prating music-master—‘He talks on all subjects at _sight_’—which
expressed the man at once by an allusion to his profession. The
coincidence was indeed perfect. Nothing else could compare to the easy
assurance with which this gentleman would volunteer an explanation of
things of which he was most ignorant; but the _nonchalance_ with which a
musician sits down to a harpsichord to play a piece he has never seen
before. My physiognomical friend would not have hit on this mode of
illustration without knowing the profession of the subject of his
criticism; but having this hint given him, it instantly suggested itself
to his ‘sure trailing.’ The manner of the speaker was evident; and the
association of the music-master sitting down to play at sight, lurking
in his mind, was immediately called out by the strength of his
impression of the character. The feeling of character, and the felicity
of invention in explaining it, were nearly allied to each other. The
first was so wrought up and running over, that the transition to the
last was easy and unavoidable. When Mr. Kean was so much praised for the
action of Richard in his last struggle with his triumphant antagonist,
where he stands, after his sword is wrested from him, with his hands
stretched out, ‘as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very
phantoms of his despair had a withering power,’ he said that he borrowed
it from seeing the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver.
This assuredly did not lessen the merit of it. Thus it ever is with the
man of real genius. He has the feeling of truth already shrined in his
own breast, and his eye is still bent on nature to see how she expresses
herself. When we thoroughly understand the subject, it is easy to
translate from one language into another. Raphael, in muffling up the
figure of Elymas the Sorcerer in his garments, appears to have extended
the idea of blindness even to his clothes. Was this design? Probably
not; but merely the feeling of analogy thoughtlessly suggesting this
device, which being so suggested was retained and carried on, because it
flattered or fell in with the original feeling. The tide of passion,
when strong, overflows and gradually insinuates itself into all nooks
and corners of the mind. Invention (of the best kind) I therefore do not
think so distinct a thing from feeling, as some are apt to imagine. The
springs of pure feeling will rise and fill the moulds of fancy that are
fit to receive it. There are some striking coincidences of colour in
well-composed pictures, as in a straggling weed in the foreground
streaked with blue or red to answer to a blue or red drapery, to the
tone of the flesh or an opening in the sky:—not that this was intended,
or done by rule (for then it would presently become affected and
ridiculous), but the eye being imbued with a certain colour, repeats and
varies it from a natural sense of harmony, a secret craving and appetite
for beauty, which in the same manner soothes and gratifies the eye of
taste, though the cause is not understood. _Tact_, _finesse_, is nothing
but the being completely aware of the feeling belonging to certain
situations, passions, &c. and the being consequently sensible to their
slightest indications or movements in others. One of the most remarkable
instances of this sort of faculty is the following story, told of Lord
Shaftesbury, the grandfather of the author of the Characteristics. He
had been to dine with Lady Clarendon and her daughter, who was at that
time privately married to the Duke of York (afterwards James II.) and as
he returned home with another nobleman who had accompanied him, he
suddenly turned to him, and said, ‘Depend upon it, the Duke has married
Hyde’s daughter.’ His companion could not comprehend what he meant; but
on explaining himself, he said, ‘Her mother behaved to her with an
attention and a marked respect that it is impossible to account for in
any other way; and I am sure of it.’ His conjecture shortly afterwards
proved to be the truth. This was carrying the prophetic spirit of common
sense as far as it could go.—
ESSAY V
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
Genius or originality is, for the most part, _some strong quality in the
mind, answering to and bringing out some new and striking quality in
nature_.
Imagination is, more properly, the power of carrying on a given feeling
into other situations, which must be done best according to the hold
which the feeling itself has taken of the mind.[17] In new and unknown
combinations, the impression must act by sympathy, and not by rule; but
there can be no sympathy, where there is no passion, no original
interest. The personal interest may in some cases oppress and
circumscribe the imaginative faculty, as in the instance of Rousseau:
but in general the strength and consistency of the imagination will be
in proportion to the strength and depth of feeling; and it is rarely
that a man even of lofty genius will be able to do more than carry on
his own feelings and character, or some prominent and ruling passion,
into fictitious and uncommon situations. Milton has by allusion embodied
a great part of his political and personal history in the chief
characters and incidents of Paradise Lost. He has, no doubt, wonderfully
adapted and heightened them, but the elements are the same; you trace
the bias and opinions of the man in the creations of the poet.
Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have been a man of genius, raised
above the definition of genius. ‘Born universal heir to all humanity,’
he was ‘as one, in suffering all who suffered nothing;’ with a perfect
sympathy with all things, yet alike indifferent to all: who did not
tamper with nature or warp her to his own purposes; who ‘knew all
qualities with a learned spirit,’ instead of judging of them by his own
predilections; and was rather ‘a pipe for the Muse’s finger to play what
stop she pleased,’ than anxious to set up any character or pretensions
of his own. His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself
at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing
every object from the exact point of view in which others would see it.
He was the Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a more
obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and
self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of
doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all
excellence but its own. It is just the reverse of the cameleon; for it
does not borrow, but lend its colour to all about it: or like the
glow-worm, discloses a little circle of gorgeous light in the twilight
of obscurity, in the night of intellect, that surrounds it. So did
Rembrandt. If ever there was a man of genius, he was one, in the proper
sense of the term. He lived in and revealed to others a world of his
own, and might be said to have invented a new view of nature. He did not
discover things _out of_ nature, in fiction or fairy land, or make a
voyage to the moon ‘to descry new lands, rivers, or mountains in her
spotty globe,’ but saw things _in_ nature that every one had missed
before him, and gave others eyes to see them with. This is the test and
triumph of originality, not to shew us what has never been, and what we
may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us
what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no
suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of
intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.
Rembrandt’s conquests were not over the _ideal_, but the real. He did
not contrive a new story or character, but we nearly owe to him a fifth
part of painting, the knowledge of _chiaroscuro_—a distinct power and
element in art and nature. He had a steadiness, a firm keeping of mind
and eye, that first stood the shock of ‘fierce extremes’ in light and
shade, or reconciled the greatest obscurity and the greatest brilliancy
into perfect harmony; and he therefore was the first to hazard this
appearance upon canvas, and give full effect to what he saw and
delighted in. He was led to adopt this style of broad and startling
contrast from its congeniality to his own feelings: his mind grappled
with that which afforded the best exercise to its master-powers: he was
bold in act, because he was urged on by a strong native impulse.
Originality is then nothing but nature and feeling working in the mind.
A man does not affect to be original: he is so, because he cannot help
it, and often without knowing it. This extraordinary artist indeed might
be said to have had a particular organ for colour. His eye seemed to
come in contact with it as a feeling, to lay hold of it as a substance,
rather than to contemplate it as a visual object. The texture of his
landscapes is ‘of the earth, earthy’—his clouds are humid, heavy, slow;
his shadows are ‘darkness that may be felt,’ a ‘palpable obscure;’ his
lights are lumps of liquid splendour! There is something more in this
than can be accounted for from design or accident: Rembrandt was not a
man made up of two or three rules and directions for acquiring genius.
I am afraid I shall hardly write so satisfactory a character of Mr.
Wordsworth, though he, too, like Rembrandt, has a faculty of making
something out of nothing, that is, out of himself, by the medium through
which he sees and with which he clothes the barrenest subject. Mr.
Wordsworth is the last man to ‘look abroad into universality,’ if that
alone constituted genius: he looks at home into himself, and is ‘content
with riches fineless.’ He would in the other case be ‘poor as winter,’
if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is the greatest,
that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because he is
the greatest egotist. He is ‘self-involved, not dark.’ He sits in the
centre of his own being, and there ‘enjoys bright day.’ He does not
waste a thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively and
wholly to himself, is foreign to his views. He contemplates a
whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line of his
personal identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all other
interests with scorn and impatience, that he may repose on his own
being, that he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it,
that he may unfold the precious stores of a mind for ever brooding over
itself. His genius is the effect of his individual character. He stamps
that character, that deep individual interest, on whatever he meets. The
object is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for
old associations. If there had been no other being in the universe, Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetry would have been just what it is. If there had been
neither love nor friendship, neither ambition nor pleasure nor business
in the world, the author of the Lyrical Ballads need not have been
greatly changed from what he is—might still have ‘kept the noiseless
tenour of his way,’ retired in the sanctuary of his own heart, hallowing
the Sabbath of his own thoughts. With the passions, the pursuits, and
imaginations of other men, he does not profess to sympathise, but ‘finds
tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,
and good in every thing.’ With a mind averse from outward objects, but
ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and
feeling upon every trifling circumstance connected with his past
history. The note of the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of
other years; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight,
that stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud arch
in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to manhood; an old thorn
is buried, bowed down under the mass of associations he has wound about
it; and to him, as he himself beautifully says,
—‘The meanest flow’r that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
It is this power of habitual sentiment, or of transferring the interest
of our conscious existence to whatever gently solicits attention, and is
a link in the chain of association, without rousing our passions or
hurting our pride, that is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind
and poetry. Others have felt and shown this power before, as Withers,
Burns, &c. but none have felt it so intensely and absolutely as to lend
to it the voice of inspiration, as to make it the foundation of a new
style and school in poetry. His strength, as it so often happens, arises
from the excess of his weakness. But he has opened a new avenue to the
human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of nature,
‘sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame.’ Compared with his
lines, Lord Byron’s stanzas are but exaggerated common-place, and Walter
Scott’s poetry (not his prose) old wives’ fables.[18] There is no one in
whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken of,
nor with whom I am more disposed on certain points to quarrel: but the
love of truth and justice which obliges me to do this, will not suffer
me to blench his merits. Do what he can, he cannot help being an
original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo returns
in the spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while the
rainbow lifts its head above the storm—
‘Yet I’ll remember thee, Glencairn,
And all that thou hast done for me!’
Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring to show that there is no such thing
as proper originality, a spirit emanating from the mind of the artist
and shining through his works, has traced Raphael through a number of
figures which he has borrowed from Masaccio and others. This is a bad
calculation. If Raphael had only borrowed those figures from others,
would he, even in Sir Joshua’s sense, have been entitled to the praise
of originality? Plagiarism, I presume, in so far as it is plagiarism, is
not originality. Salvator is considered by many as a great genius. He
was what they call an irregular genius. My notion of genius is not
exactly the same as theirs. It has also been made a question whether
there is not more genius in Rembrandt’s _Three Trees_ than in all Claude
Lorraine’s landscapes? I do not know how that may be: but it was enough
for Claude to have been a perfect landscape-painter.
Capacity is not the same thing as genius. Capacity may be described to
relate to the quantity of knowledge, however acquired; genius to its
quality and the mode of acquiring it. Capacity is a power over given
ideas or combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are
not given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or
capacity is power of any sort: genius is power of a different sort from
what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding is
capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of
prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an
atom of genius. His verses that remain are dull and sterile. He could
learn all that was known of any subject: he could do any thing if others
could show him the way to do it. This was very wonderful: but that is
all you can say of it. It requires a good capacity to play well at
chess: but, after all, it is a game of skill, and not of genius. Know
what you will of it, the understanding still moves in certain tracks in
which others have trod before it, quicker or slower, with more or less
comprehension and presence of mind. The greatest skill strikes out
nothing for itself, from its own peculiar resources; the nature of the
game is a thing determinate and fixed: there is no royal or poetical
road to check-mate your adversary. There is no place for genius but in
the indefinite and unknown. The discovery of the binomial theorem was an
effort of genius; but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton’s being
able to multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied
90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would have been equally useless toil
and trouble.[19] He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable
intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new
ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet
as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the
discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the whole
meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to
some things: short-sightedness to others. Every mind is not a gauge and
measure of truth. Nature has her surface and her dark recesses. She is
deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her
fullest impressions that can penetrate her shrine or unveil her _Holy of
Holies_. It is only those whom she has filled with her spirit that have
the boldness or the power to reveal her mysteries to others. But nature
has a thousand aspects, and one man can only draw out one of them.
Whoever does this, is a man of genius. One displays her force, another
her refinement, one her power of harmony, another her suddenness of
contrast, one her beauty of form, another her splendour of colour. Each
does that for which he is best fitted by his particular genius, that is
to say, by some quality of mind in which the quality of the object sinks
deepest, where it finds the most cordial welcome, is perceived to its
utmost extent, and where again it forces its way out from the fulness
with which it has taken possession of the mind of the student. The
imagination gives out what it has first absorbed by congeniality of
temperament, what it has attracted and moulded into itself by elective
affinity, as the loadstone draws and impregnates iron. A little
originality is more esteemed and sought for than the greatest acquired
talent, because it throws a new light upon things, and is peculiar to
the individual. The other is common; and may be had for the asking, to
any amount.
The value of any work is to be judged of by the quantity of originality
contained in it. A very little of this will go a great way. If Goldsmith
had never written any thing but the two or three first chapters of the
Vicar of Wakefield, or the character of a Village-Schoolmaster, they
would have stamped him a man of genius. The Editors of Encyclopedias are
not usually reckoned the first literary characters of the age. The
works, of which they have the management, contain a great deal of
knowledge, like chests or warehouses, but the goods are not their own.
We should as soon think of admiring the shelves of a library; but the
shelves of a library are useful and respectable. I was once applied to,
in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for
an Encyclopedia, and was advised to take time and give it a systematic
and scientific form, to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be
obtained on the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I
made answer that as to the first, I had taken time to do all that I ever
pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for
twenty years of my life;[20] that I had no particular knowledge of the
subject in question, and no head for arrangement; and that the utmost I
could do in such a case would be, when a systematic and scientific
article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a
remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former
Encyclopedias) or to suggest a better definition than had been offered
in the text. There are two sorts of writing. The first is compilation;
and consists in collecting and stating all that is already known of any
question in the best possible manner, for the benefit of the uninformed
reader. An author of this class is a very learned amanuensis of other
people’s thoughts. The second sort proceeds on an entirely different
principle. Instead of bringing down the account of knowledge to the
point at which it has already arrived, it professes to start from that
point on the strength of the writer’s individual reflections; and
supposing the reader in possession of what is already known, supplies
deficiencies, fills up certain blanks, and quits the beaten road in
search of new tracts of observation or sources of feeling. It is in vain
to object to this last style that it is disjointed, disproportioned, and
irregular. It is merely a set of additions and corrections to other
men’s works, or to the common stock of human knowledge, printed
separately. You might as well expect a continued chain of reasoning in
the notes to a book. It skips all the trite, intermediate, level
common-places of the subject, and only stops at the difficult passages
of the human mind, or touches on some striking point that has been
overlooked in previous editions. A view of a subject, to be connected
and regular, cannot be all new. A writer will always be liable to be
charged either with paradox or common-place, either with dulness or
affectation. But we have no right to demand from any one more than he
pretends to. There is indeed a medium in all things, but to unite
opposite excellencies, is a task ordinarily too hard for mortality. He
who succeeds in what he aims at, or who takes the lead in any one mode
or path of excellence, may think himself very well off. It would not be
fair to complain of the style of an Encyclopedia as dull, as wanting
volatile salt; nor of the style of an Essay because it is too light and
sparkling, because it is not a _caput mortuum_. So it is rather an odd
objection to a work that is made up entirely of ‘brilliant passages’—at
least it is a fault that can be found with few works, and the book might
be pardoned for its singularity. The censure might indeed seem like
adroit flattery, if it were not passed on an author whom any objection
is sufficient to render unpopular and ridiculous. I grant it is best to
unite solidity with show, general information with particular ingenuity.
This is the pattern of a perfect style: but I myself do not pretend to
be a perfect writer. In fine, we do not banish light French wines from
our tables, or refuse to taste sparkling Champagne when we can get it,
because it has not the body of Old Port. Besides, I do not know that
dulness is strength, or that an observation is slight, because it is
striking. Mediocrity, insipidity, want of character is the great fault.
_Mediocribus esse poetis non Dii, non homines, non concessêre columnæ._
Neither is this privilege allowed to prose-writers in our time, any more
than to poets formerly.
It is not then acuteness of organs or extent of capacity that
constitutes rare genius or produces the most exquisite models of art,
but an intense sympathy with some one beauty or distinguishing
characteristic in nature. Irritability alone, or the interest taken in
certain things, may supply the place of genius in weak and otherwise
ordinary minds. As there are certain instruments fitted to perform
certain kinds of labour, there are certain minds so framed as to produce
certain _chef-d’œuvres_ in art and literature, which is surely the best
use they can be put to. If a man had all sorts of instruments in his
shop and wanted one, he would rather have that one than be supplied with
a double set of all the others. If he had them all twice over, he could
only do what he can do as it is, whereas without that one he perhaps
cannot finish any one work he has in hand. So if a man can do one thing
better than any body else, the value of this one thing is what he must
stand or fall by, and his being able to do a hundred other things merely
_as well_ as any body else, would not alter the sentence or add to his
respectability; on the contrary, his being able to do so many other
things well would probably interfere with and incumber him in the
execution of the only thing that others cannot do as well as he, and so
far be a drawback and a disadvantage. More people in fact fail from a
multiplicity of talents and pretensions than from an absolute poverty of
resources. I have given instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps
Shakespear’s tragedies would in some respects have been better, if he
had never written comedies at all; and in that case, his comedies might
well have been spared, though they might have cost us some regret.
Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave
up the cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the
tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to
the perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing
comedies as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as Crebillon. Yet I
count those persons fools who think it a pity Hogarth did not succeed
better in serious subjects. The division of labour is an excellent
principle in taste as well as in mechanics. Without this, I find from
Adam Smith, we could not have a pin made to the degree of perfection it
is. We do not, on any rational scheme of criticism, inquire into the
variety of a man’s excellences, or the number of his works, or his
facility of production. Venice Preserved is sufficient for Otway’s fame.
I hate all those nonsensical stories about Lopez de Vega and his writing
a play in a morning before breakfast. He had time enough to do it after.
If a man leaves behind him any work which is a model in its kind, we
have no right to ask whether he could do any thing else, or how he did
it, or how long he was about it. All that talent which is not necessary
to the actual quantity of excellence existing in the world, loses its
object, is so much waste talent or _talent to let_. I heard a sensible
man say he should like to do some one thing better than all the rest of
the world, and in every thing else to be like all the rest of the world.
Why should a man do more than his part? The rest is vanity and vexation
of spirit. We look with jealous and grudging eyes at all those
qualifications which are not essential; first, because they are
superfluous, and next, because we suspect they will be prejudicial. Why
does Mr. Kean play all those harlequin tricks of singing, dancing,
fencing, &c.? They say, ‘It is for his benefit.’ It is not for his
reputation. Garrick indeed shone equally in comedy and tragedy. But he
was first, not second-rate in both. There is not a greater impertinence
than to ask, if a man is clever out of his profession. I have heard of
people trying to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons. I would as soon try to
entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an argument. Good nature and common
sense are required from all people: but one proud distinction is enough
for any one individual to possess or to aspire to!
ESSAY VI
CHARACTER OF COBBETT
People have about as substantial an idea of Cobbett as they have of
Cribb. His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has
no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist;
his style stuns his readers, and he ‘fillips the ear of the public with
a three-man beetle.’ He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist;
‘lays waste’ a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon
the government itself. He is a kind of _fourth estate_ in the politics
of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful
political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the
language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English. He might
be said to have the clearness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and
the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville; if all such
comparisons were not impertinent. A really great and original writer is
like nobody but himself. In one sense, Sterne was not a wit, nor
Shakespear a poet. It is easy to describe second-rate talents, because
they fall into a class, and enlist under a standard: but first-rate
powers defy calculation or comparison, and can be defined only by
themselves. They are _sui generis_, and make the class to which they
belong. I have tried half a dozen times to describe Burke’s style
without ever succeeding;—its severe extravagance; its literal boldness;
its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its running away with a subject, and from
it at the same time—but there is no making it out, for there is no
example of the same thing any where else. We have no common measure to
refer to; and his qualities contradict even themselves.
Cobbett is not so difficult. He has been compared to Paine; and so far
it is true there are no two writers who come more into juxtaposition
from the nature of their subjects, from the internal resources on which
they draw, and from the popular effect of their writings, and their
adaptation (though that is a bad word in the present case) to the
capacity of every reader. But still if we turn to a volume of Paine’s
(his Common Sense or Rights of Man), we are struck (not to say somewhat
refreshed) by the difference. Paine is a much more sententious writer
than Cobbett. You cannot open a page in any of his best and earlier
works without meeting with some maxim, some antithetical and memorable
saying, which is a sort of starting-place for the argument, and the goal
to which it returns. There is not a single _bon-mot_, a single sentence
in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If any thing is ever quoted
from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is an excellent
hand at invention in that way, and has ‘damnable iteration in him.’ What
could be better than his pestering Erskine year after year with his
second title of Baron Clackmannan? He is rather too fond of _the Sons
and Daughters of Corruption_. Paine affected to reduce things to first
principles, to announce self-evident truths. Cobbett troubles himself
about little but the details and local circumstances. The first appeared
to have made up his mind beforehand to certain opinions, and to try to
find the most compendious and pointed expressions for them: his
successor appears to have no clue, no fixed or leading principles, nor
ever to have thought on a question till he sits down to write about it;
but then there seems no end of his matters of fact and raw materials,
which are brought out in all their strength and sharpness from not
having been squared or frittered down or vamped up to suit a theory—he
goes on with his descriptions and illustrations as if he would never
come to a stop; they have all the force of novelty with all the
familiarity of old acquaintance; his knowledge grows out of the subject,
and his style is that of a man who has an absolute intuition of what he
is talking about, and never thinks of any thing else. He deals in
premises and speaks to evidence—the coming to a conclusion and summing
up (which was Paine’s _forte_) lies in a smaller compass. The one could
not compose an elementary treatise on politics to become a manual for
the popular reader; nor could the other in all probability have kept up
a weekly journal for the same number of years with the same spirit,
interest, and untired perseverance. Paine’s writings are a sort of
introduction to political arithmetic on a new plan: Cobbett keeps a
day-book and makes an entry at full of all the occurrences and
troublesome questions that start up throughout the year. Cobbett, with
vast industry, vast information, and the utmost power of making what he
says intelligible, never seems to get at the beginning or come to the
end of any question: Paine, in a few short sentences, seems by his
peremptory manner ‘to clear it from all controversy, past, present, and
to come.’ Paine takes a bird’s-eye view of things. Cobbett sticks close
to them, inspects the component parts, and keeps fast hold of the
smallest advantages they afford him. Or, if I might here be indulged in
a pastoral allusion, Paine tries to enclose his ideas in a fold for
security and repose: Cobbett lets _his_ pour out upon the plain like a
flock of sheep to feed and batten. Cobbett is a pleasanter writer for
those to read who do not agree with him; for he is less dogmatical, goes
more into the common grounds of fact and argument to which all appeal,
is more desultory and various, and appears less to be driving at a
previous conclusion than urged on by the force of present conviction. He
is therefore tolerated by all parties, though he has made himself by
turns obnoxious to all; and even those he abuses read him. The Reformers
read him when he was a Tory, and the Tories read him now that he is a
Reformer. He must, I think, however, be _caviare_ to the Whigs.[21]
If he is less metaphysical and poetical than his celebrated prototype,
he is more picturesque and dramatic. His episodes, which are numerous as
they are pertinent, are striking, interesting, full of life and
_naïveté_, minute, double measure running over, but never
tedious—_nunquam sufflaminandus erat_. He is one of those writers who
can never tire us, not even of himself; and the reason is, he is always
‘full of matter.’ He never runs to lees, never gives us the vapid
leavings of himself, is never ‘weary, stale, and unprofitable,’ but
always setting out afresh on his journey, clearing away some old
nuisance, and turning up new mould. His egotism is delightful, for there
is no affectation in it. He does not talk of himself for lack of
something to write about, but because some circumstance that has
happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject,
and he is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible
illustration of the subject from a squeamish delicacy. He likes both
himself and his subject too well. He does not put himself before it, and
say—‘admire me first’—but places us in the same situation with himself,
and makes us see all that he does. There is no blindman’s-buff, no
conscious hints, no awkward ventriloquism, no testimonies of applause,
no abstract, senseless self-complacency, no smuggled admiration of his
own person by proxy: it is all plain and above-board. He writes himself
plain William Cobbett, strips himself quite as naked as any body would
wish—in a word, his egotism is full of individuality, and has room for
very little vanity in it. We feel delighted, rub our hands, and draw our
chair to the fire, when we come to a passage of this sort: we know it
will be something new and good, manly and simple, not the same insipid
story of self over again. We sit down at table with the writer, but it
is to a course of rich viands, flesh, fish, and wild-fowl, and not to a
nominal entertainment, like that given by the Barmecide in the Arabian
Nights, who put off his visitors with calling for a number of exquisite
things that never appeared, and with the honour of his company. Mr.
Cobbett is not a _make-believe_ writer. His worst enemy cannot say that
of him. Still less is he a vulgar one. He must be a puny, common-place
critic indeed, who thinks him so. How fine were the graphical
descriptions he sent us from America: what a transatlantic flavour, what
a native _gusto_, what a fine _sauce-piquante_ of contempt they were
seasoned with! If he had sat down to look at himself in the glass,
instead of looking about him like Adam in Paradise, he would not have
got up these articles in so capital a style. What a noble account of his
first breakfast after his arrival in America! It might serve for a
month. There is no scene on the stage more amusing. How well he paints
the gold and scarlet plumage of the American birds, only to lament more
pathetically the want of the wild wood-notes of his native land! The
groves of the Ohio that had just fallen beneath the axe’s stroke ‘live
in his description,’ and the turnips that he transplanted from Botley
‘look green’ in prose! How well at another time he describes the poor
sheep that had got the tick, and had tumbled down in the agonies of
death! It is a portrait in the manner of Bewick, with the strength, the
simplicity, and feeling of that great naturalist. What havoc he makes,
when he pleases, of the curls of Dr. Parr’s wig and of the Whig
consistency of Mr. —! His Grammar too is as entertaining as a
story-book. He is too hard upon the style of others, and not enough
(sometimes) on his own.
As a political partisan, no one can stand against him. With his
brandished club, like Giant Despair in the Pilgrim’s Progress, he knocks
out their brains; and not only no individual, but no corrupt system
could hold out against his powerful and repeated attacks, but with the
same weapon, swung round like a flail, that he levels his antagonists,
he lays his friends low, and puts his own party _hors de combat_. This
is a bad propensity, and a worse principle in political tactics, though
a common one. If his blows were straight forward and steadily directed
to the same object, no unpopular Minister could live before him; instead
of which he lays about right and left, impartially and remorselessly,
makes a clear stage, has all the ring to himself, and then runs out of
it, just when he should stand his ground. He throws his head into his
adversary’s stomach, and takes away from him all inclination for the
fight, hits fair or foul, strikes at every thing, and as you come up to
his aid or stand ready to pursue his advantage, trips up your heels or
lays you sprawling, and pummels you when down as much to his heart’s
content as ever the Yanguesian carriers belaboured Rosinante with their
pack-staves. ‘_He has the back-trick simply the best of any man in
Illyria._’ He pays off both scores of old friendship and new-acquired
enmity in a breath, in one perpetual volley, one raking fire of ‘arrowy
sleet’ shot from his pen. However his own reputation or the cause may
suffer in consequence, he cares not one pin about that, so that he
disables all who oppose, or who pretend to help him. In fact, he cannot
bear success of any kind, not even of his own views or party; and if any
principle were likely to become popular, would turn round against it to
shew his power in shouldering it on one side. In short, wherever power
is, there is he against it: he naturally butts at all obstacles, as
unicorns are attracted to oak-trees, and feels his own strength only by
resistance to the opinions and wishes of the rest of the world. To sail
with the stream, to agree with the company, is not his humour. If he
could bring about a Reform in Parliament, the odds are that he would
instantly fall foul of and try to mar his own handy-work; and he
quarrels with his own creatures as soon as he has written them into a
little vogue—and a prison. I do not think this is vanity or fickleness
so much as a pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonist power
to contend with, and only finds itself at ease in systematic opposition.
If it were not for this, the high towers and rotten places of the world
would fall before the battering-ram of his hard-headed reasoning: but if
he once found them tottering, he would apply his strength to prop them
up, and disappoint the expectations of his followers. He cannot agree to
any thing established, nor to set up any thing else in its stead. While
it is established, he presses hard against it, because it presses upon
him, at least in imagination. Let it crumble under his grasp, and the
motive to resistance is gone. He then requires some other grievance to
set his face against. His principle is repulsion, his nature
contradiction: he is made up of mere antipathies, an Ishmaelite indeed
without a fellow. He is always playing at _hunt-the-slipper_ in
politics. He turns round upon whoever is next him. The way to wean him
from any opinion, and make him conceive an intolerable hatred against
it, would be to place somebody near him who was perpetually dinning it
in his ears. When he is in England, he does nothing but abuse the
Boroughmongers, and laugh at the whole system: when he is in America, he
grows impatient of freedom and a republic. If he had staid there a
little longer, he would have become a loyal and a loving subject of his
Majesty King George IV. He lampooned the French Revolution when it was
hailed as the dawn of liberty by millions: by the time it was brought
into almost universal ill-odour by some means or other (partly no doubt
by himself) he had turned, with one or two or three others, staunch
Buonapartist. He is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party:
so far he bears a gallant shew of magnanimity; but his gallantry is
hardly of the right stamp. It wants principle: for though he is not
servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down
and pull in pieces: it is not his disposition to do otherwise. It is a
pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would
go right forward to any useful object, make thorough-stitch work of any
question, or join hand and heart with any principle. He changes his
opinions as he does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no
comfort in fixed principles: as soon as any thing is settled in his own
mind, he quarrels with it. He has no satisfaction but in the chase after
truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like
vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him
a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his
heels, and the leaders perpetually at fault. This he calls sport-royal.
He thinks it as good as cudgel-playing or single-stick, or any thing
else that has life in it. He likes the cut and thrust, the falls,
bruises, and dry blows of an argument: as to any good or useful results
that may come of the amicable settling of it, any one is welcome to them
for him. The amusement is over, when the matter is once fairly decided.
There is another point of view in which this may be put. I might say
that Mr. Cobbett is a very honest man with a total want of principle,
and I might explain this paradox thus. I mean that he is, I think, in
downright earnest in what he says, in the part he takes at the time; but
in taking that part, he is led entirely by headstrong obstinacy,
caprice, novelty, pique or personal motive of some sort, and not by a
stedfast regard for truth, or habitual anxiety for what is right
uppermost in his mind. He is not a feed, time-serving, shuffling
advocate (no man could write as he does who did not believe himself
sincere)—but his understanding is the dupe and slave of his momentary,
violent, and irritable humours. He does not adopt an opinion
‘deliberately or for money;’ yet his conscience is at the mercy of the
first provocation he receives, of the first whim he takes in his head;
he sees things through the medium of heat and passion, not with
reference to any general principles, and his whole system of thinking is
deranged by the first object that strikes his fancy or sours his
temper.—One cause of this phenomenon is perhaps his want of a regular
education. He is a self-taught man, and has the faults as well as
excellences of that class of persons in their most striking and glaring
excess. It must be acknowledged that the Editor of the Political
Register (the _two-penny trash_, as it was called, till a bill passed
the House to raise the price to sixpence) is not ‘the gentleman and
scholar:’ though he has qualities that, with a little better management,
would be worth (to the public) both those titles. For want of knowing
what has been discovered before him, he has not certain general
landmarks to refer to, or a general standard of thought to apply to
individual cases. He relies on his own acuteness and the immediate
evidence, without being acquainted with the comparative anatomy or
philosophical structure of opinion. He does not view things on a large
scale or at the horizon (dim and airy enough perhaps)—but as they affect
himself, close, palpable, tangible. Whatever he finds out, is his own,
and he only knows what he finds out. He is in the constant hurry and
fever of gestation: his brain teems incessantly with some fresh project.
Every new light is the birth of a new system, the dawn of a new world to
him. He is continually outstripping and overreaching himself. The last
opinion is the only true one. He is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
Why should he not be wiser to-morrow than he was to-day?—Men of a
learned education are not so sharp-witted as clever men without it: but
they know the balance of the human intellect better; if they are more
stupid, they are more steady; and are less liable to be led astray by
their own sagacity and the over-weening petulance of hard-earned and
late-acquired wisdom. They do not fall in love with every meretricious
extravagance at first sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a
vestal, because they are new to the ways of this old world. They do not
seize upon it as a prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as
wise and no wiser than those who went before them.
Paine said on some occasion—‘What I have written, I have written’—as
rendering any farther declaration of his principles unnecessary. Not so
Mr. Cobbett. What he has written is no rule to him what he is to write.
He learns something every day, and every week he takes the field to
maintain the opinions of the last six days against friend or foe. I
doubt whether this outrageous inconsistency, this headstrong fickleness,
this understood want of all rule and method, does not enable him to go
on with the spirit, vigour, and variety that he does. He is not pledged
to repeat himself. Every new Register is a kind of new Prospectus. He
blesses himself from all ties and shackles on his understanding; he has
no mortgages on his brain; his notions are free and unincumbered. If he
was put in trammels, he might become a vile hack like so many more. But
he gives himself ‘ample scope and verge enough.’ He takes both sides of
a question, and maintains one as sturdily as the other. If nobody else
can argue against him, he is a very good match for himself. He writes
better in favour of Reform than any body else; he used to write better
against it. Wherever he is, there is the tug of war, the weight of the
argument, the strength of abuse. He is not like a man in danger of being
_bed-rid_ in his faculties—He tosses and tumbles about his unwieldy
bulk, and when he is tired of lying on one side, relieves himself by
turning on the other. His shifting his point of view from time to time
not merely adds variety and greater compass to his topics (so that the
Political Register is an armoury and magazine for all the materials and
weapons of political warfare), but it gives a greater zest and
liveliness to his manner of treating them. Mr. Cobbett takes nothing for
granted as what he has proved before; he does not write a book of
reference. We see his ideas in their first concoction, fermenting and
overflowing with the ebullitions of a lively conception. We look on at
the actual process, and are put in immediate possession of the grounds
and materials on which he forms his sanguine, unsettled conclusions. He
does not give us samples of reasoning, but the whole solid mass, refuse
and all.
—‘He pours out all as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.’
This is one cause of the clearness and force of his writings. An
argument does not stop to stagnate and muddle in his brain, but passes
at once to his paper. His ideas are served up, like pancakes, hot and
hot. Fresh theories give him fresh courage. He is like a young and lusty
bridegroom that divorces a favourite speculation every morning, and
marries a new one every night. He is not wedded to his notions, not he.
He has not one Mrs. Cobbett among all his opinions. He makes the most of
the last thought that has come in his way, seizes fast hold of it,
rumples it about in all directions with rough strong hands, has his
wicked will of it, takes a surfeit, and throws it away.—Our author’s
changing his opinions for new ones is not so wonderful: what is more
remarkable is his facility in forgetting his old ones. He does not
pretend to consistency (like Mr. Coleridge); he frankly disavows all
connexion with himself. He feels no personal responsibility in this way,
and cuts a friend or principle with the same decided indifference that
Antipholis of Ephesus cuts Ægeon of Syracuse. It is a hollow thing. The
only time he ever grew romantic was in bringing over the relics of Mr.
Thomas Paine with him from America to go a progress with them through
the disaffected districts. Scarce had he landed in Liverpool when he
left the bones of a great man to shift for themselves; and no sooner did
he arrive in London than he made a speech to disclaim all participation
in the political and theological sentiments of his late idol, and to
place the whole stock of his admiration and enthusiasm towards him to
the account of his financial speculations, and of his having predicted
the fate of paper-money. If he had erected a little gold statue to him,
it might have proved the sincerity of this assertion: but to make a
martyr and a patron-saint of a man, and to dig up ‘his canonised bones’
in order to expose them as objects of devotion to the rabble’s gaze,
asks something that has more life and spirit in it, more mind and
vivifying soul, than has to do with any calculation of pounds,
shillings, and pence! The fact is, he _ratted_ from his own project. He
found the thing not so ripe as he had expected. His heart failed him:
his enthusiasm fled, and he made his retractation. His admiration is
short-lived: his contempt only is rooted, and his resentment
lasting.—The above was only one instance of his building too much on
practical _data_. He has an ill habit of prophesying, and goes on,
though still deceived. The art of prophesying does not suit Mr.
Cobbett’s style. He has a knack of fixing names and times and places.
According to him, the Reformed Parliament was to meet in March, 1818—it
did not, and we heard no more of the matter. When his predictions fail,
he takes no farther notice of them, but applies himself to new ones—like
the country-people who turn to see what weather there is in the almanac
for the next week, though it has been out in its reckoning every day of
the last.
Mr. Cobbett is great in attack, not in defence: he cannot fight an
up-hill battle. He will not bear the least punishing. If any one turns
upon him (which few people like to do) he immediately turns tail. Like
an overgrown school-boy, he is so used to have it all his own way, that
he cannot submit to any thing like competition or a struggle for the
mastery; he must lay on all the blows, and take none. He is bullying and
cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush
them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon
staggered by a few smart blows. Whenever he has been set upon he has
slunk out of the controversy. The Edinburgh Review made (what is called)
a dead set at him some years ago, to which he only retorted by an eulogy
on the superior neatness of an English kitchen-garden to a Scotch one. I
remember going one day into a bookseller’s shop in Fleet-street to ask
for the Review; and on my expressing my opinion to a young Scotchman,
who stood behind the counter, that Mr. Cobbett might hit as hard in his
reply, the North Briton said with some alarm—‘But you don’t think, Sir,
Mr. Cobbett will be able to injure the Scottish nation?’ I said I could
not speak to that point, but I thought he was very well able to defend
himself. He however did not, but has borne a grudge to the Edinburgh
Review ever since, which he hates worse than the Quarterly. I cannot say
I do.[22]
ESSAY VII
ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA
There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more,
they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.
There is Major C—: he has but one idea or subject of discourse,
Parliamentary Reform. Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) a
very good thing, a very good idea, and a very good subject to talk
about; but why should it be the only one? To hear the worthy and gallant
Major resume his favourite topic, is like law-business, or a person who
has a suit in Chancery going on. Nothing can be attended to, nothing can
be talked of but that. Now it is getting on, now again it is standing
still; at one time the Master has promised to pass judgment by a certain
day, at another he has put it off again and called for more papers, and
both are equally reasons for speaking of it. Like the piece of
packthread in the barrister’s hands, he turns and twists it all ways,
and cannot proceed a step without it. Some school-boys cannot read but
in their own book: and the man of one idea cannot converse out of his
own subject. Conversation it is not; but a sort of recital of the
preamble of a bill, or a collection of grave arguments for a man’s being
of opinion with himself. It would be well if there was any thing of
character, of eccentricity in all this; but that is not the case. It is
a political homily personified, a walking common-place we have to
encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man was to insist on your
hearing him go through the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges every
time you meet, or like the story of the Cosmogony in the Vicar of
Wakefield. It is a tune played on a barrel-organ. It is a common vehicle
of discourse into which they get and are set down when they please,
without any pains or trouble to themselves. Neither is it professional
pedantry or trading quackery: it has no excuse. The man has no more to
do with the question which he saddles on all his hearers than you have.
This is what makes the matter hopeless. If a farmer talks to you about
his pigs or his poultry, or a physician about his patients, or a lawyer
about his briefs, or a merchant about stock, or an author about himself,
you know how to account for this, it is a common infirmity, you have a
laugh at his expense, and there is no more to be said. But here is a man
who goes out of his way to be absurd, and is troublesome by a romantic
effort of generosity. You cannot say to him, ‘All this may be
interesting to you, but I have no concern in it:’ you cannot put him off
in that way. He retorts the Latin adage upon you—_Nihil humani a me
alienum puto_. He has got possession of a subject which is of universal
and paramount interest (not ‘a fee-grief, due to some single
breast’)—and on that plea may hold you by the button as long as he
chooses. His delight is to harangue on what nowise regards himself: how
then can you refuse to listen to what as little amuses you? Time and
tide wait for no man. The business of the state admits of no delay. The
question of Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments stands first on
the order of the day—takes precedence in its own right of every other
question. Any other topic, grave or gay, is looked upon in the light of
impertinence, and sent _to Coventry_. Business is an interruption;
pleasure a digression from it. It is the question before every company
where the Major comes, which immediately resolves itself into a
committee of the whole world upon it, is carried on by means of a
perpetual virtual adjournment, and it is presumed that no other is
entertained while this is pending—a determination which gives its
persevering advocate a fair prospect of expatiating on it to his dying
day. As Cicero says of study, it follows him into the country, it stays
with him at home: it sits with him at breakfast, and goes out with him
to dinner. It is like a part of his dress, of the costume of his person,
without which he would be at a loss what to do. If he meets you in the
street, he accosts you with it as a form of salutation: if you see him
at his own house, it is supposed you come upon that. If you happen to
remark, ‘It is a fine day, or the town is full,’ it is considered as a
temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going the
whole length of the principle. As Sancho when reprimanded for mentioning
his homely favourite in the Duke’s kitchen, defended himself by
saying—‘There I thought of Dapple, and there I spoke of him’—so the true
stickler for Reform neglects no opportunity of introducing the subject
wherever he is. Place its veteran champion under the frozen north, and
he will celebrate sweet smiling Reform: place him under the mid-day
Afric suns, and he will talk of nothing but Reform—Reform so sweetly
smiling and so sweetly promising for the last forty years—
Dulce ridentem Lalagen,
Dulce loquentem!
A topic of this sort, of which the person himself may be considered as
almost sole proprietor and patentee, is an estate for life, free from
all incumbrance of wit, thought, or study, you live upon it as a settled
income; and others might as well think to eject you out of a capital
freehold house and estate as think to drive you out of it into the wide
world of common sense and argument. Every man’s house is his castle; and
every man’s common-place is his stronghold, from which he looks out and
smiles at the dust and heat of controversy, raised by a number of
frivolous and vexatious questions—‘Rings the world with the vain stir!’
A cure for this and every other evil would be a Parliamentary Reform;
and so we return in a perpetual circle to the point from which we set
out. Is not this a species of sober madness more provoking than the
real? Has not the theoretical enthusiast his mind as much warped, as
much enslaved, by one idea as the acknowledged lunatic, only that the
former has no lucid intervals? If you see a visionary of this class
going along the street, you can tell as well what he is thinking of and
will say next as the man that fancies himself a teapot or the Czar of
Muscovy. The one is as inaccessible to reason as the other: if the one
raves, the other dotes!
There are some who fancy the Corn Bill the root of all evil, and others
who trace all the miseries of life to the practice of muffling up
children in night-clothes when they sleep or travel. They will declaim
by the hour together on the first, and argue themselves black in the
face on the last. It is in vain that you give up the point. They persist
in the debate, and begin again—‘But don’t you see—?’ These sort of
partial obliquities, as they are more entertaining and original, are
also by their nature intermittent. They hold a man but for a season. He
may have one a year or every two years; and though, while he is in the
heat of any new discovery, he will let you hear of nothing else, he
varies from himself, and is amusing undesignedly. He is not like the
chimes at midnight.
People of the character here spoken of, that is, who tease you to death
with some one idea, generally differ in their favourite notion from the
rest of the world; and indeed it is the love of distinction which is
mostly at the bottom of this peculiarity. Thus one person is remarkable
for living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to entertain you all
dinner-time with an invective against animal food. One of this
self-denying class, who adds to the primitive simplicity of this sort of
food the recommendation of having it in a raw state, lamenting the death
of a patient whom he had augured to be in a good way as a convert to his
system, at last accounted for his disappointment in a whisper—‘But she
ate meat privately, depend upon it.’ It is not pleasant, though it is
what one submits to willingly from some people, to be asked every time
you meet, whether you have quite left off drinking wine, and to be
complimented or condoled with on your looks according as you answer in
the negative or affirmative. Abernethy thinks his pill an infallible
cure for all disorders. A person once complaining to his physician that
he thought his mode of treatment had not answered, he assured him it was
the best in the world,—‘and as a proof of it,’ says he, ‘I have had one
gentleman, a patient with your disorder, under the same regimen for the
last sixteen years!’—I have known persons whose minds were entirely
taken up at all times and on all occasions with such questions as the
Abolition of the Slave-Trade, the Restoration of the Jews, or the
progress of Unitarianism. I myself at one period took a pretty strong
turn to inveighing against the doctrine of Divine Right, and am not yet
cured of my prejudice on that subject. How many projectors have gone mad
in good earnest from incessantly harping on one idea, the discovery of
the philosopher’s stone, the finding out the longitude, or paying off
the national debt! The disorder at length comes to a fatal crisis; but
long before this, and while they were walking about and talking as
usual, the derangement of the fancy, the loss of all voluntary power to
control or alienate their ideas from the single subject that occupied
them, was gradually taking place, and overturning the fabric of the
understanding by wrenching it all on one side. Alderman Wood has, I
should suppose, talked of nothing but the Queen in all companies for the
last six months. Happy Alderman Wood! Some persons have got a definition
of the verb, others a system of short-hand, others a cure for typhus
fever, others a method for preventing the counterfeiting of bank notes,
which they think the best possible, and indeed the only one. Others
insist there have been only three great men in the world, leaving you to
add a fourth. A man who has been in Germany will sometimes talk of
nothing but what is German: a Scotchman always leads the discourse to
his own country. Some descant on the Kantean philosophy. There is a
conceited fellow about town who talks always and every where on this
subject. He wears the Categories round his neck like a pearl-chain; he
plays off the names of the primary and transcendental qualities like
rings on his fingers. He talks of the Kantean system while he dances; he
talks of it while he dines, he talks of it to his children, to his
apprentices, to his customers. He called on me to convince me of it, and
said I was only prevented from becoming a complete convert by one or two
prejudices. He knows no more about it than a pike-staff. Why then does
he make so much ridiculous fuss about it? It is not that he has got this
one idea in his head, but that he has got no other. A dunce may talk on
the subject of the Kantean philosophy with great impunity: if he opened
his lips on any other, he might be found out. A French lady, who had
married an Englishman who said little, excused him by saying—‘He is
always thinking of Locke and Newton.’ This is one way of passing muster
by following in the _suite_ of great names!—A friend of mine, whom I met
one day in the street, accosted me with more than usual vivacity, and
said, ‘Well, we’re selling, we’re selling!’ I thought he meant a house.
‘No,’ he said, ‘haven’t you seen the advertisement in the newspapers? I
mean five-and-twenty copies of the Essay.’ This work, a comely,
capacious quarto on the most abstruse metaphysics, had occupied his sole
thoughts for several years, and he concluded that I must be thinking of
what he was. I believe, however, I may say I am nearly the only person
that ever read, certainly that ever pretended to understand it. It is an
original and most ingenious work, nearly as incomprehensible as it is
original, and as quaint as it is ingenious. If the author is taken up
with the ideas in his own head and no others, he has a right: for he has
ideas there, that are to be met with nowhere else, and which
occasionally would not disgrace a Berkeley. A dextrous plagiarist might
get himself an immense reputation by putting them in a popular dress.
Oh! how little do they know, who have never done any thing but repeat
after others by rote, the pangs, the labour, the yearnings, and
misgivings of mind it costs, to get the germ of an original idea—to dig
it out of the hidden recesses of thought and nature, and bring it
half-ashamed, struggling, and deformed into the day—to give words and
intelligible symbols to that which was never imagined or expressed
before! It is as if the dumb should speak for the first time, as if
things should stammer out their own meaning, through the imperfect
organs of mere sense. I wish that some of our fluent, plausible
declaimers, who have such store of words to cover the want of ideas,
could lend their art to this writer. If he, ‘poor, unfledged’ in this
respect, ‘who has scarce winged from view o’ th’ nest,’ could find a
language for his ideas, truth would find a language for some of her
secrets. Mr. Fearn was buried in the woods of Indostan. In his leisure
from business and from tiger-shooting, he took it into his head to look
into his own mind. A whim or two, an odd fancy, like a film before the
eye, now and then crossed it: it struck him as something curious, but
the impression at first disappeared like breath upon glass. He thought
no more of it; yet still the same conscious feelings returned, and what
at first was chance or instinct, became a habit. Several notions had
taken possession of his brain relating to mental processes which he had
never heard alluded to in conversation, but not being well versed in
such matters, he did not know whether they were to be found in learned
authors or not. He took a journey to the capital of the Peninsula on
purpose, bought Locke, Reid, Stewart, and Berkeley, whom he consulted
with eager curiosity when he got home, but did not find what he looked
for. He set to work himself; and in a few weeks sketched out a rough
draught of his thoughts and observations on bamboo paper. The eagerness
of his new pursuit, together with the diseases of the climate, proved
too much for his constitution, and he was forced to return to this
country. He put his metaphysics, his bamboo manuscript, into the boat
with him, and as he floated down the Ganges, said to himself, ‘If I
live, this will live: if I die, it will not be heard of.’ What is fame
to this feeling? The babbling of an idiot! He brought the work home with
him, and twice had it stereotyped. The first sketch he allowed was
obscure, but the improved copy he thought could not fail to strike. It
did not succeed. The world, as Goldsmith said of himself, made a point
of taking no notice of it. Ever since he has had nothing but
disappointment and vexation—the greatest and most heart-breaking of all
others—that of not being able to make yourself understood. Mr. Fearn
tells me there is a sensible writer in the Monthly Review who sees the
thing in its proper light, and says so. But I have heard of no other
instance. There are, notwithstanding, ideas in this work, neglected and
ill-treated as it has been, that lead to more curious and subtle
speculations on some of the most disputed and difficult points of the
philosophy of the human mind (such as _relation_, _abstraction_, &c.)
than have been thrown out in any work for the last sixty years, I mean
since Hume; for since his time, there has been no metaphysician in this
country worth the name. Yet his Treatise on Human Nature, he tells us,
‘fell stillborn from the press.’ So it is that knowledge works its way,
and reputation lingers far behind it. But truth is better than opinion,
I maintain it; and as to the two stereotyped and unsold editions of the
Essay on Consciousness, I say, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_[23]!—My Uncle
Toby had one idea in his head, that of his bowling-green, and another,
that of the Widow Wadman. Oh, spare them both! I will only add one more
anecdote in illustration of this theory of the mind’s being occupied
with one idea, which is most frequently of a man’s self. A celebrated
lyrical writer happened to drop into a small party where they had just
got the novel of Rob Roy, by the author of Waverley. The motto in the
title-page was taken from a poem of his. This was a hint sufficient, a
word to the wise. He instantly went to the book-shelf in the next room,
took down the volume of his own poems, read the whole of that in
question aloud with manifest complacency, replaced it on the shelf, and
walked away; taking no more notice of Rob Roy than if there had been no
such person, nor of the new novel than if it had not been written by its
renowned author. There was no reciprocity in this. But the writer in
question does not admit of any merit, second to his own.[24]
Mr. Owen is a man remarkable for one idea. It is that of himself and the
Lanark cotton-mills. He carries this idea backwards and forwards with
him from Glasgow to London, without allowing any thing for attrition,
and expects to find it in the same state of purity and perfection in the
latter place as at the former. He acquires a wonderful velocity and
impenetrability in his undaunted transit. Resistance to him is vain,
while the whirling motion of the mail-coach remains in his head.
‘Nor Alps nor Apennines can keep him out,
Nor fortified redoubt.’
He even got possession, in the suddenness of his onset, of the
steam-engine of the Times Newspaper, and struck off ten thousand
wood-cuts of the Projected Villages, which afforded an ocular
demonstration to all who saw them of the practicability of Mr. Owen’s
whole scheme. He comes into a room with one of these documents in his
hand, with the air of a schoolmaster and a quack-doctor mixed, asks very
kindly how you do, and on hearing you are still in an indifferent state
of health owing to bad digestion, instantly turns round, and observes,
‘That all that will be remedied in his plan: that indeed he thinks too
much attention has been paid to the mind, and not enough to the body;
that in his system, which he has now perfected, and which will shortly
be generally adopted, he has provided effectually for both: that he has
been long of opinion that the mind depends altogether on the physical
organisation, and where the latter is neglected or disordered, the
former must languish and want its due vigour: that exercise is therefore
a part of his system, with full liberty to develop every faculty of mind
and body: that two objections had been made to his New View of Society,
_viz._ its want of relaxation from labour, and its want of variety; but
the first of these, the too great restraint, he trusted he had already
answered, for where the powers of mind and body were freely exercised
and brought out, surely liberty must be allowed to exist in the highest
degree; and as to the second, the monotony which would be produced by a
regular and general plan of co-operation, he conceived he had proved in
his “New View” and “Addresses to the higher Classes;” that the
co-operation he had recommended was necessarily conducive to the most
extensive improvement of the ideas and faculties, and where this was the
case, there must be the greatest possible variety instead of a want of
it.’ And having said this, this expert and sweeping orator takes up his
hat and walks down stairs after reading his lecture of truisms like a
play-bill or an apothecary’s advertisement; and should you stop him at
the door to say by way of putting in a word in common, that Mr. Southey
seems somewhat favourable to his plan in his late Letter to Mr. William
Smith, he looks at you with a smile of pity at the futility of all
opposition and the idleness of all encouragement. People who thus swell
out some vapid scheme of their own into undue importance, seem to me to
labour under water in the head—to exhibit a huge hydrocephalus! They may
be very worthy people for all that, but they are bad companions and very
indifferent reasoners. Tom Moore says of some one somewhere, ‘That he
puts his hand in his breeches’ pocket like a crocodile.’ The phrase is
hieroglyphical: but Mr. Owen and others might be said to put their foot
in the question of social improvement and reform much in the same
unaccountable manner.
I hate to be surfeited with any thing, however sweet. I do not want to
be always tied to the same question, as if there were no other in the
world. I like a mind more Catholic.
‘I love to talk with mariners,
That come from a far countreé.’
I am not for ‘a collusion’ but ‘an exchange’ of ideas. It is well to
hear what other people have to say on a number of subjects. I do not
wish to be always respiring the same confined atmosphere, but to vary
the scene, and get a little relief and fresh air out of doors. Do all we
can to shake it off, there is always enough pedantry, egotism, and
self-conceit left lurking behind: we need not seal ourselves up
hermetically in these precious qualities; so as to think of nothing but
our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own
voice. Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being _incognito_.
Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller’s shop, or bear to be
five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are.
They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its shell,
and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot
understand this at all. What is the use of a man’s always revolving
round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it
himself, as well as tire other people. A well-known writer says with
much boldness both in the thought and expression, that ‘a Lord is
imprisoned in the Bastille of a _name_, and cannot enlarge himself into
man:’ and I have known men of genius in the same predicament. Why must a
man be for ever mouthing out his own poetry, comparing himself with
Milton, passage by passage, and weighing every line in a balance of
posthumous fame which he holds in his own hands? It argues a want of
imagination as well as common sense. Has he no ideas but what he has put
into verse; or none in common with his hearers? Why should he think it
the only scholar-like thing, the only ‘virtue extant’ to see the merit
of his writings, and that ‘men were brutes without them?’ Why should he
bear a grudge to all art, to all beauty, to all wisdom that does not
spring from his own brain? Or why should he fondly imagine that there is
but one fine thing in the world, namely poetry, and that he is the only
poet in it? It will never do. Poetry is a very fine thing; but there are
other things besides it. Every thing must have its turn. Does a wise man
think to enlarge his comprehension by turning his eyes only on himself,
or hope to conciliate the admiration of others by scouting, proscribing,
and loathing all that they delight in? He must either have a
disproportionate idea of himself, or be ignorant of the world in which
he lives. It is quite enough to have one class of people born to think
the universe made for them!—It seems also to argue a want of repose, of
confidence, and firm faith in a man’s real pretensions to be always
dragging them forward into the foreground, as if the proverb held
here—_Out of sight out of mind_. Does he, for instance, conceive that no
one would ever think of his poetry, unless he forced it upon them by
repeating it himself? Does he believe all competition, all allowance of
another’s merit fatal to him? Must he, like Moody in the Country Girl,
lock up the faculties of his admirers in ignorance of all other fine
things, painting, music, the antique, lest they should play truant to
him? Methinks such a proceeding implies no good opinion of his own
genius or their taste:—it is deficient in dignity and in decorum. Surely
if any one is convinced of the reality of an acquisition, he can bear
not to have it spoken of every minute. If he knows he has an undoubted
superiority in any respect, he will not be uneasy because every one he
meets is not in the secret, nor staggered by the report of rival
excellence. One of the first mathematicians and classical scholars of
the day was mentioning it as a compliment to himself that a cousin of
his, a girl from school, had said of him—‘You know M— is a very plain
good sort of a young man, but he is not any thing at all out of the
common.’ L. H. once said to me—‘I wonder I never heard you speak upon
this subject before, which you seem to have studied a good deal.’ I
answered, ‘Why, we were not reduced to that, that I know of!’—
There are persons, who without being chargeable with the vice here
spoken of, yet ‘stand accountant for as great a sin:’ though not dull
and monotonous, they are vivacious mannerists in their conversation, and
excessive egotists. Though they run over a thousand subjects in mere
gaiety of heart, their delight still flows from one idea, namely,
themselves. Open the book in what page you will, there is a frontispiece
of themselves staring you in the face. They are a sort of _Jacks o’ the
Green_, with a sprig of laurel, a little tinsel, and a little smut, but
still playing antics and keeping in incessant motion, to attract
attention and extort your pittance of approbation. Whether they talk of
the town or the country, poetry or politics, it comes to much the same
thing. If they talk to you of the town, its diversions, ‘its palaces,
its ladies, and its streets,’ they are the delight, the grace, and
ornament of it. If they are describing the charms of the country, they
give no account of any individual spot or object or source of pleasure
but the circumstance of their being there. ‘With them conversing, we
forget all place, all seasons, and their change.’ They perhaps pluck a
leaf or a flower, patronise it, and hand it you to admire, but select no
one feature of beauty or grandeur to dispute the palm of perfection with
their own persons. Their rural descriptions are mere landscape
back-grounds with their own portraits in an engaging attitude in front.
They are not observing or enjoying the scene, but doing the honours as
masters of the ceremonies to nature, and arbiters of elegance to all
humanity. If they tell a love-tale of enamoured princesses, it is plain
they fancy themselves the hero of the piece. If they discuss poetry,
their encomiums still turn on something genial and unsophisticated,
meaning their own style: if they enter into politics, it is understood
that a hint from them to the potentates of Europe is sufficient. In
short, as a lover (talk of what you will) brings in his mistress at
every turn, so these persons contrive to divert your attention to the
same darling object—they are, in fact, in love with themselves; and,
like lovers, should be left to keep their own company.
ESSAY VIII
ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED
‘For the more languages a man can speak,
His talent has but sprung the greater leak:
And, for the industry he has spent upon ‘t,
Must full as much some other way discount.
The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Syriac,
Do, like their letters, set men’s reason back,
And turn their wits that strive to understand it
(Like those that write the characters) left-handed.
Yet he that is but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak the strongest reason in his own,’
BUTLER.
The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are
mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor
write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily
seen with a book in his hand, is (we may be almost sure) equally without
the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him, or
in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about
with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves.
He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out
any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his
eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of
thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and
sits down contented with an endless wearisome succession of words and
half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually
efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common
sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of
as ‘spectacles’ to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its
strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent
dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal
generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected
from the minds of others. Nature _puts him out_. The impressions of real
objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous roundabout
descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their
rapidity exhausts him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and
glare, and whirling motion of the world about him (which he has not an
eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce
to fixed principles,) to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and
the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of
the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. ‘Leave me to my repose,’
is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the
paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without
a miracle, to ‘take up his bed and walk,’ as expect the learned reader
to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his
intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the
horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other
men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of
his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying
our ideas from foreign sources ‘enfeebles all internal strength of
thought,’ as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.
The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom
and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of
thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is
thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over
lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if
they were the characters of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on
vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a
wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day ‘sweats in the eye of
Phœbus, and at night sleeps in Elysium,’ than wear out my life so,
’twixt dreaming and awake. The learned author differs from the learned
student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The
learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original
composition, their heads turn; they don’t know where they are. The
indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of
pictures, who, when they attempt to do any thing of their own, find they
want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright
enough, to trace the living forms of nature.
Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical
education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having
had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys who shine at
school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out
into the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at
school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not
require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties
of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty
called into play, in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in
grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, &c. so that he who has
the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other things,
which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish
attention, will make the most forward school-boy. The jargon containing
the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for casting up an
account, or the inflections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction to
the tyro of ten years old, except as they are imposed as a task upon him
by others, or from his feeling the want of sufficient relish or
amusement in other things. A lad with a sickly constitution, and no very
active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has
neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will
generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the other
hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of
his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his
blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a
breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open
air in his face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path,
or enter with eagerness into all the little conflicts and interests of
his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book,
repeat barbarous distichs after his master, sit so many hours pinioned
to a writing-desk, and receive his reward for the loss of time and
pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Midsummer. There is
indeed a degree of stupidity which prevents children from learning the
usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours. But what
passes for stupidity is much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient
motive to fix the attention, and force a reluctant application to the
dry and unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. The best capacities are
as much above this drudgery, as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of
the greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their
acquirements at school or at the university.
‘Th’ enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever.’
Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition.
Such persons do not think so highly of the advantages, nor can they
submit their imaginations so servilely to the trammels of strict
scholastic discipline. There is a certain kind and degree of intellect
in which words take root, but into which things have not power to
penetrate. A mediocrity of talent, with a certain slenderness of moral
constitution, is the soil that produces the most brilliant specimens of
successful prize-essayists and Greek epigrammatists. It should not be
forgotten, that the least respectable character among modern politicians
was the cleverest boy at Eton.
Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to
others, and which we can only derive at second-hand from books or other
artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is before us, or about
us, which appeals to our experience, passions, and pursuits, to the
bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge
of that which none but the learned know. He is the most learned man who
knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual
observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to
be brought to the test of experience, and that, having been handed down
through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full of
uncertainty, difficulties, and contradictions. It is seeing with the
eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their
understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of
names, and dates, not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing
about his next-door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and
casts of the Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars. He can hardly find his way into
the next street, though he is acquainted with the exact dimensions of
Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his oldest
acquaintance is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous
lecture on all the principal characters in history. He cannot tell
whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a
professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He
knows as much of what he talks about, as a blind man does of colours. He
cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he
ever in the right in any one of his opinions, upon any one matter of
fact that really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an
infallible judge on all those points, of which it is impossible that he
or any other person living should know any thing but by conjecture. He
is expert in all the dead and in most of the living languages; but he
can neither speak his own fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of
this class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook to point out
several solecisms in Milton’s Latin style; and in his own performance
there is hardly a sentence of common English. Such was Dr. —. Such is
Dr. —. Such was not Porson. He was an exception that confirmed the
general rule,—a man that, by uniting talents and knowledge with
learning, made the distinction between them more striking and palpable.
A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of
them. ‘Books do not teach the use of books.’ How should he know any
thing of a work, who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned
pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books,
and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have
parroted others. He can translate the same word into ten different
languages, but he knows nothing of the _thing_ which it means in any one
of them. He stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with
quotations quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his
understanding, and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and
manners of the world; he is to seek in the characters of individuals. He
sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. To him ‘the mighty world
of eye and ear’ is hid; and ‘knowledge,’ except at one entrance, ‘quite
shut out.’ His pride takes part with his ignorance; and his
self-importance rises with the number of things of which he does not
know the value, and which he therefore despises as unworthy of his
notice. He knows nothing of pictures;—‘of the colouring of Titian, the
grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the _corregiescity_ of
Corregio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the
Caracci, or the grand contour of Michael Angelo,’—of all those glories
of the Italian and miracles of the Flemish school, which have filled the
eyes of mankind with delight, and to the study and imitation of which
thousands have in vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they
had never been, a mere dead letter, a bye-word; and no wonder: for he
neither sees nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print of
Rubens’s Watering-place, or Claude’s Enchanted Castle, may be hanging on
the walls of his room for months without his once perceiving them; and
if you point them out to him, he will turn away from them. The language
of nature, or of art (which is another nature), is one that he does not
understand. He repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, because
they are to be found in classic authors, and boasts of their works as
prodigies, because they no longer exist; or, when he sees the finest
remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin marbles, takes
no other interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute, and
(which is the same thing) a quarrel about the meaning of a Greek
particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he ‘knows no touch of it,’
from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the shepherd’s pipe
upon the mountain. His ears are nailed to his books; and deadened with
the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the din and smithery of
school-learning. Does he know any thing more of poetry? He knows the
number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or
spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a
Latin epigram into Greek verse, but whether either is worth the trouble,
he leaves to the critics. Does he understand ‘the act and practique part
of life’ better than ‘the theorique?’ No. He knows no liberal or
mechanic art; no trade or occupation; no game of skill or chance.
Learning ‘has no skill in surgery,’ in agriculture, in building, in
working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour, or
use it when made; it cannot handle the plough or the spade, or the
chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or
shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel-playing,
or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or any thing else. The learned professor
of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to practice,
though he may contribute an account of them to an Encyclopædia. He has
not the use of his hands or of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk,
nor swim; and he considers all those who actually understand and can
exercise any of these arts of body or mind, as vulgar and mechanical
men;—though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long
time and practice, with powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind
particularly devoted to them. It does not require more than this to
enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a doctor’s
degree and a fellowship, and to eat, drink, and sleep, the rest of his
life!
The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a
very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they
have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest
is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use of their
limbs; for they live by their labour or skill. They understand their own
business, and the characters of those they have to deal with; for it is
necessary that they should. They have eloquence to express their
passions, and wit at will to express their contempt and provoke
laughter. Their natural use of speech is not hung up in monumental
mockery, in an obsolete language; nor is their sense of what is
ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to express it, buried
in collections of _Anas_. You will hear more good things on the outside
of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a
twelvemonth with the under-graduates, or heads of colleges, of that
famous university; and more _home_ truths are to be learnt from
listening to a noisy debate in an alehouse, than from attending to a
formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will
often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more
amusing anecdotes taken from the history of what has been said, done,
and gossiped in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best
blue-stocking of the age will be able to glean from that sort of
learning which consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and
satirical poems published in the same period. People in towns, indeed,
are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only
_in the bust_, not as a whole-length. People in the country not only
know all that has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as
they do his features, in their descent through several generations, and
solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed, half
a century ago. The learned know nothing of the matter, either in town or
country. Above all, the mass of society have common sense, which the
learned in all ages want. The vulgar are in the right when they judge
for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to their blind guides.
The celebrated nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned to death
by the good women of Kidderminster, for asserting from the pulpit that
‘hell was paved with infants’ skulls;’ but, by the force of argument,
and of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at
length prevailed over the scruples of his congregation, and over reason
and humanity.
Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers in
this vineyard seem as if it was their object to confound all common
sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means of traditional
maxims, and preconceived notions, taken upon trust, and increasing in
absurdity, with increase of age. They pile hypothesis on hypothesis,
mountain high, till it is impossible to come at the plain truth on any
question. They see things, not as they are, but as they find them in
books; and ‘wink and shut their apprehensions up,’ in order that they
may discover nothing to interfere with their prejudices, or convince
them of their absurdity. It might be supposed that the height of human
wisdom consisted in maintaining contradictions, and rendering nonsense
sacred. There is no dogma, however fierce or foolish, to which these
persons have not set their seals, and tried to impose on the
understandings of their followers, as the will of Heaven, clothed with
all the terrors and sanctions of religion. How little has the human
understanding been directed to find out the true and useful! How much
ingenuity has been thrown away in the defence of creeds and systems! How
much time and talents have been wasted in theological controversy, in
law, in politics, in verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in
finding out the art of making gold! What actual benefit do we reap from
the writings of a Laud or a Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop
Waterland, or Prideaux’ Connections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St.
Augustine, or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal but
equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan, and
Scioppius? How many grains of sense are there in their thousand folio or
quarto volumes? What would the world lose if they were committed to the
flames to-morrow? Or are they not already ‘gone to the vault of all the
Capulets?’ Yet all these were oracles in their time, and would have
scoffed at you or me, at common sense and human nature, for differing
with them. It is our turn to laugh now.
To conclude this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in
society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they
see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things
ought to be. Women have often more of what is called _good sense_ than
men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and
judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on
the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason
wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by
rule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense,
on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence together, they
generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they
write to their friends (not for the booksellers) is better than that of
most authors.—Uneducated people have most exuberance of invention, and
the greatest freedom from prejudice. Shakespear’s was evidently an
uneducated mind, both in the freshness of his imagination, and in the
variety of his views; as Milton’s was scholastic, in the texture both of
his thoughts and feelings. Shakespear had not been accustomed to write
themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To this we owe the
unaffected, but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. If we wish to
know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespear. If we wish to
see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
ESSAY IX
THE INDIAN JUGGLERS
Coming forward and seating himself on the ground in his white dress and
tightened turban, the chief of the Indian Jugglers begins with tossing
up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with
keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to
save our lives, nor if we were to take our whole lives to do it in. Is
it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to
miraculous? It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing
but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest
infancy with incessant, ever-anxious application up to manhood, can
accomplish or make even a slight approach to. Man, thou art a wonderful
animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but
thou turnest them to little account!—To conceive of this effort of
extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration
breathless. Yet it costs nothing to the performer, any more than if it
were a mere mechanical deception with which he had nothing to do but to
watch and laugh at the astonishment of the spectators. A single error of
a hair’s-breadth, of the smallest conceivable portion of time, would be
fatal: the precision of the movements must be like a mathematical truth,
their rapidity is like lightning. To catch four balls in succession in
less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with
seeming consciousness to the hand again, to make them revolve round him
at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them
chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or
meteors, to throw them behind his back and twine them round his neck
like ribbons or like serpents, to do what appears an impossibility, and
to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable, to
laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his
eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had
only to see that they kept time with the music on the stage—there is
something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he
never really admired any thing in the whole course of his life. It is
skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. It seems
as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease
and grace, and as if to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without
an effort. The smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or
self-possession would stop the whole process. It is the work of
witchcraft, and yet sport for children. Some of the other feats are
quite as curious and wonderful, such as the balancing the artificial
tree and shooting a bird from each branch through a quill; though none
of them have the elegance or facility of the keeping up of the brass
balls. You are in pain for the result, and glad when the experiment is
over; they are not accompanied with the same unmixed, unchecked delight
as the former; and I would not give much to be merely astonished without
being pleased at the same time. As to the swallowing of the sword, the
police ought to interfere to prevent it. When I saw the Indian Juggler
do the same things before, his feet were bare, and he had large rings on
the toes, which kept turning round all the time of the performance, as
if they moved of themselves.—The hearing a speech in Parliament, drawled
or stammered out by the Honourable Member or the Noble Lord, the ringing
the changes on their common-places, which any one could repeat after
them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of
myself: but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed of
myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing. What
have I been doing all my life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to
shew for all my labour and pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring
words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then
down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and
looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? Is there no one
thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an
instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The
utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow
can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned
to spell. What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced
transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is
made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. I
endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a
subject, and to express it as nearly as I can. Instead of writing on
four subjects at a time, it is as much as I can manage to keep the
thread of one discourse clear and unentangled. I have also time on my
hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods: but the one I
cannot, and the other I will not do. I am fond of arguing: yet with a
good deal of pains and practice it is often as much as I can do to beat
my man; though he may be a very indifferent hand. A common fencer would
disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a
professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this
effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reasoning.
There is no complete mastery of execution to be shewn there: and you
hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere
clown.[25]
I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of
intellectual compared to mechanical excellence, and it has always made
me somewhat dissatisfied. It is a great many years since I saw Richer,
the famous rope-dancer, perform at Sadler’s Wells. He was matchless in
his art, and added to his extraordinary skill exquisite ease, and
unaffected natural grace. I was at that time employed in copying a
half-length picture of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s; and it put me out of
conceit with it. How ill this part was made out in the drawing! How
heavy, how slovenly this other was painted! I could not help saying to
myself, ‘If the rope-dancer had performed his task in this manner,
leaving so many gaps and botches in his work, he would have broke his
neck long ago; I should never have seen that vigorous elasticity of
nerve and precision of movement!’—Is it then so easy an undertaking
(comparatively) to dance on a tight-rope? Let any one, who thinks so,
get up and try. There is the thing. It is that which at first we cannot
do at all, which in the end is done to such perfection. To account for
this in some degree, I might observe that mechanical dexterity is
confined to doing some one particular thing, which you can repeat as
often as you please, in which you know whether you succeed or fail, and
where the point of perfection consists in succeeding in a given
undertaking.—In mechanical efforts, you improve by perpetual practice,
and you do so infallibly, because the object to be attained is not a
matter of taste or fancy or opinion, but of actual experiment, in which
you must either do the thing or not do it. If a man is put to aim at a
mark with a bow and arrow, he must hit it or miss it, that’s certain. He
cannot deceive himself, and go on shooting wide or falling short, and
still fancy that he is making progress. The distinction between right
and wrong, between true and false, is here palpable; and he must either
correct his aim or persevere in his error with his eyes open, for which
there is neither excuse nor temptation. If a man is learning to dance on
a rope, if he does not mind what he is about, he will break his neck.
After that, it will be in vain for him to argue that he did not make a
false step. His situation is not like that of Goldsmith’s pedagogue.—
‘In argument they own’d his wondrous skill,
And e’en though vanquish’d, he could argue still.’
Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace,
defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no
opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no
being off your guard (or you must take the consequences)—neither is
there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice. If the Indian Juggler
were to play tricks in throwing up the three case-knives, which keep
their positions like the leaves of a crocus in the air, he would cut his
fingers. I can make a very bad antithesis without cutting my fingers.
The tact of style is more ambiguous than that of double-edged
instruments. If the Juggler were told that by flinging himself under the
wheels of the Juggernaut, when the idol issues forth on a gaudy day, he
would immediately be transported into Paradise, he might believe it, and
nobody could disprove it. So the Brahmins may say what they please on
that subject, may build up dogmas and mysteries without end, and not be
detected: but their ingenious countryman cannot persuade the frequenters
of the Olympic Theatre that he performs a number of astonishing feats
without actually giving proofs of what he says.—There is then in this
sort of manual dexterity, first a gradual aptitude acquired to a given
exertion of muscular power, from constant repetition, and in the next
place, an exact knowledge how much is still wanting and necessary to be
supplied. The obvious test is to increase the effort or nicety of the
operation, and still to find it come true. The muscles ply instinctively
to the dictates of habit. Certain movements and impressions of the hand
and eye, having been repeated together an infinite number of times, are
unconsciously but unavoidably cemented into closer and closer union; the
limbs require little more than to be put in motion for them to follow a
regular track with ease and certainty; so that the mere intention of the
will acts mathematically, like touching the spring of a machine, and you
come with Locksley in Ivanhoe, in shooting at a mark, ‘to allow for the
wind.’
Farther, what is meant by perfection in mechanical exercises is the
performing certain feats to a uniform nicety, that is, in fact,
undertaking no more than you can perform. You task yourself, the limit
you fix is optional, and no more than human industry and skill can
attain to: but you have no abstract, independent standard of difficulty
or excellence (other than the extent of your own powers). Thus he who
can keep up four brass balls does this _to perfection_; but he cannot
keep up five at the same instant, and would fail every time he attempted
it. That is, the mechanical performer undertakes to emulate himself, not
to equal another.[26] But the artist undertakes to imitate another, or
to do what nature has done, and this it appears is more difficult,
_viz._ to copy what she has set before us in the face of nature or
‘human face divine,’ entire and without a blemish, than to keep up four
brass balls at the same instant; for the one is done by the power of
human skill and industry, and the other never was nor will be. Upon the
whole, therefore, I have more respect for Reynolds, than I have for
Richer; for, happen how it will, there have been more people in the
world who could dance on a rope like the one than who could paint like
Sir Joshua. The latter was but a bungler in his profession to the other,
it is true; but then he had a harder task-master to obey, whose will was
more wayward and obscure, and whose instructions it was more difficult
to practise. You can put a child apprentice to a tumbler or rope-dancer
with a comfortable prospect of success, if they are but sound of wind
and limb: but you cannot do the same thing in painting. The odds are a
million to one. You may make indeed as many H—s and H—s, as you put into
that sort of machine, but not one Reynolds amongst them all, with his
grace, his grandeur, his blandness of _gusto_, ‘in tones and gestures
hit,’ unless you could make the man over again. To snatch this grace
beyond the reach of art is then the height of art—where fine art begins,
and where mechanical skill ends. The soft suffusion of the soul, the
speechless breathing eloquence, the looks ‘commercing with the skies,’
the ever-shifting forms of an eternal principle, that which is seen but
for a moment, but dwells in the heart always, and is only seized as it
passes by strong and secret sympathy, must be taught by nature and
genius, not by rules or study. It is suggested by feeling, not by
laborious microscopic inspection: in seeking for it without, we lose the
harmonious clue to it within: and in aiming to grasp the substance, we
let the very spirit of art evaporate. In a word, the objects of fine art
are not the objects of sight but as these last are the objects of taste
and imagination, that is, as they appeal to the sense of beauty, of
pleasure, and of power in the human breast, and are explained by that
finer sense, and revealed in their inner structure to the eye in return.
Nature is also a language. Objects, like words, have a meaning; and the
true artist is the interpreter of this language, which he can only do by
knowing its application to a thousand other objects in a thousand other
situations. Thus the eye is too blind a guide of itself to distinguish
between the warm or cold tone of a deep blue sky, but another sense acts
as a monitor to it, and does not err. The colour of the leaves in autumn
would be nothing without the feeling that accompanies it; but it is that
feeling that stamps them on the canvas, faded, seared, blighted,
shrinking from the winter’s flaw, and makes the sight as true as touch—
‘And visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Cling to each leaf and hang on every bough.’
The more ethereal, evanescent, more refined and sublime part of art is
the seeing nature through the medium of sentiment and passion, as each
object is a symbol of the affections and a link in the chain of our
endless being. But the unravelling this mysterious web of thought and
feeling is alone in the Muse’s gift, namely, in the power of that
trembling sensibility which is awake to every change and every
modification of its ever-varying impressions, that,
‘Thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line.’
This power is indifferently called genius, imagination, feeling, taste;
but the manner in which it acts upon the mind can neither be defined by
abstract rules, as is the case in science, nor verified by continual
unvarying experiments, as is the case in mechanical performances. The
mechanical excellence of the Dutch painters in colouring and handling is
that which comes the nearest in fine art to the perfection of certain
manual exhibitions of skill. The truth of the effect and the facility
with which it is produced are equally admirable. Up to a certain point,
every thing is faultless. The hand and eye have done their part. There
is only a want of taste and genius. It is after we enter upon that
enchanted ground that the human mind begins to droop and flag as in a
strange road, or in a thick mist, benighted and making little way with
many attempts and many failures, and that the best of us only escape
with half a triumph. The undefined and the imaginary are the regions
that we must pass like Satan, difficult and doubtful, ‘half flying, half
on foot.’ The object in sense is a positive thing, and execution comes
with practice.
Cleverness is a certain _knack_ or aptitude at doing certain things,
which depend more on a particular adroitness and off-hand readiness than
on force or perseverance, such as making puns, making epigrams, making
extempore verses, mimicking the company, mimicking a style, &c.
Cleverness is either liveliness and smartness, or something answering to
_sleight of hand_, like letting a glass fall sideways off a table, or
else a trick, like knowing the secret spring of a watch. Accomplishments
are certain external graces, which are to be learnt from others, and
which are easily displayed to the admiration of the beholder, _viz._
dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on. These ornamental
acquirements are only proper to those who are at ease in mind and
fortune. I know an individual who if he had been born to an estate of
five thousand a year, would have been the most accomplished gentleman of
the age. He would have been the delight and envy of the circle in which
he moved—would have graced by his manners the liberality flowing from
the openness of his heart, would have laughed with the women, have
argued with the men, have said good things and written agreeable ones,
have taken a hand at piquet or the lead at the harpsichord, and have set
and sung his own verses—_nugæ canoræ_—with tenderness and spirit; a
Rochester without the vice, a modern Surrey! As it is, all these
capabilities of excellence stand in his way. He is too versatile for a
professional man, not dull enough for a political drudge, too gay to be
happy, too thoughtless to be rich. He wants the enthusiasm of the poet,
the severity of the prose-writer, and the application of the man of
business.—Talent is the capacity of doing any thing that depends on
application and industry, such as writing a criticism, making a speech,
studying the law. Talent differs from genius, as voluntary differs from
involuntary power. Ingenuity is genius in trifles, greatness is genius
in undertakings of much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious man is
one who can do any thing well, whether it is worth doing or not: a great
man is one who can do that which when done is of the highest importance.
Themistocles said he could not play on the flute, but that he could make
of a small city a great one. This gives one a pretty good idea of the
distinction in question.
Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that
a man has great power in himself, he must shew it to all the world in a
way that cannot be hid or gainsaid. He must fill up a certain idea in
the public mind. I have no other notion of greatness than this two-fold
definition, great results springing from great inherent energy. The
great in visible objects has relation to that which extends over space:
the great in mental ones has to do with space and time. No man is truly
great, who is great only in his life-time. The test of greatness is the
page of history. Nothing can be said to be great that has a distinct
limit, or that borders on something evidently greater than itself.
Besides, what is short-lived and pampered into mere notoriety, is of a
gross and vulgar quality in itself. A Lord Mayor is hardly a great man.
A city orator or patriot of the day only shew, by reaching the height of
their wishes, the distance they are at from any true ambition.
Popularity is neither fame nor greatness. A king (as such) is not a
great man. He has great power, but it is not his own. He merely wields
the lever of the state, which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do. It
is the office, not the man we gaze at. Any one else in the same
situation would be just as much an object of abject curiosity. We laugh
at the country girl who having seen a king expressed her disappointment
by saying, ‘Why, he is only a man!’ Yet, knowing this, we run to see a
king as if he was something more than a man.—To display the greatest
powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the
character of greatness. To throw a barley-corn through the eye of a
needle, to multiply nine figures by nine in the memory, argues infinite
dexterity of body and capacity of mind, but nothing comes of either.
There is a surprising power at work, but the effects are not
proportionate, or such as take hold of the imagination. To impress the
idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it. It
must be communicated to their understandings in the shape of an increase
of knowledge, or it must subdue and overawe them by subjecting their
wills. Admiration, to be solid and lasting, must be founded on proofs
from which we have no means of escaping; it is neither a slight nor a
voluntary gift. A mathematician who solves a profound problem, a poet
who creates an image of beauty in the mind that was not there before,
imparts knowledge and power to others, in which his greatness and his
fame consists, and on which it reposes. Jedediah Buxton will be
forgotten; but Napier’s bones will live. Lawgivers, philosophers,
founders of religion, conquerors and heroes, inventors and great
geniuses in arts and sciences, are great men; for they are great public
benefactors, or formidable scourges to mankind. Among ourselves,
Shakespear, Newton, Bacon, Milton, Cromwell, were great men; for they
shewed great power by acts and thoughts, which have not yet been
consigned to oblivion. They must needs be men of lofty stature, whose
shadows lengthen out to remote posterity. A great farce-writer may be a
great man; for Moliere was but a great farce-writer. In my mind, the
author of Don Quixote was a great man. So have there been many others. A
great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he
found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will
apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to
the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or
trophy of themselves without them. Is not an actor then a great man,
because ‘he dies and leaves the world no copy?’ I must make an exception
for Mrs. Siddons, or else give up my definition of greatness for her
sake. A man at the top of his profession is not therefore a great man.
He is great in his way, but that is all, unless he shews the marks of a
great moving intellect, so that we trace the master-mind, and can
sympathise with the springs that urge him on. The rest is but a craft or
_mystery_. John Hunter was a great man—_that_ any one might see without
the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He
would set about cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same
greatness of _gusto_ that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of
marble. Lord Nelson was a great naval commander; but for myself, I have
not much opinion of a sea-faring life. Sir Humphry Davy is a great
chemist, but I am not sure that he is a great man. I am not a bit the
wiser for any of his discoveries, nor I never met with any one that was.
But it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as
wave impels wave, circle without circle. It is a contradiction in terms
for a coxcomb to be a great man. A really great man has always an idea
of something greater than himself. I have observed that certain
sectaries and polemical writers have no higher compliment to pay their
most shining lights than to say that ‘Such a one was a considerable man
in his day.’ Some new elucidation of a text sets aside the authority of
the old interpretation, and a ‘great scholar’s memory outlives him half
a century,’ at the utmost. A rich man is not a great man, except to his
dependants and his steward. A lord is a great man in the idea we have of
his ancestry, and probably of himself, if we know nothing of him but his
title. I have heard a story of two bishops, one of whom said (speaking
of St. Peter’s at Rome) that when he first entered it, he was rather
awe-struck, but that as he walked up it, his mind seemed to swell and
dilate with it, and at last to fill the whole building—the other said
that as he saw more of it, he appeared to himself to grow less and less
every step he took, and in the end to dwindle into nothing. This was in
some respects a striking picture of a great and little mind—for
greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into
itself. The one might have become a Wolsey; the other was only fit to
become a Mendicant Friar—or there might have been court-reasons for
making him a bishop. The French have to me a character of littleness in
all about them; but they have produced three great men that belong to
every country, Moliere, Rabelais, and Montaigne.
To return from this digression, and conclude the Essay. A singular
instance of manual dexterity was shewn in the person of the late John
Cavanagh, whom I have several times seen. His death was celebrated at
the time in an article in the Examiner newspaper (Feb. 7, 1819), written
apparently between jest and earnest: but as it is _pat_ to our purpose,
and falls in with my own way of considering such subjects, I shall here
take leave to quote it.
‘Died at his house in Burbage-street, St. Giles’s, John Cavanagh, the
famous hand fives-player. When a person dies, who does any one thing
better than any one else in the world, which so many others are trying
to do well, it leaves a gap in society. It is not likely that any one
will now see the game of fives played in its perfection for many years
to come—for Cavanagh is dead, and has not left his peer behind him. It
may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a
ball against a wall—there are things indeed which make more noise and do
as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and
answering them, making verses and blotting them; making money and
throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has
ever played at it. It is the finest exercise for the body, and the best
relaxation for the mind. The Roman poet said that “Care mounted behind
the horseman and stuck to his skirts.” But this remark would not have
applied to the fives-player. He who takes to playing at fives is twice
young. He feels neither the past nor future “in the instant.” Debts,
taxes, “domestic treason, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further.”
He has no other wish, no other thought, from the moment the game begins,
but that of striking the ball, of placing it, of _making_ it! This
Cavanagh was sure to do. Whenever he touched the ball, there was an end
of the chase. His eye was certain, his hand fatal, his presence of mind
complete. He could do what he pleased, and he always knew exactly what
to do. He saw the whole game, and played it; took instant advantage of
his adversary’s weakness, and recovered balls, as if by a miracle and
from sudden thought, that every one gave for lost. He had equal power
and skill, quickness, and judgment. He could either out-wit his
antagonist by finesse, or beat him by main strength. Sometimes, when he
seemed preparing to send the ball with the full swing of his arm, he
would by a slight turn of his wrist drop it within an inch of the line.
In general, the ball came from his hand, as if from a racket, in a
straight horizontal line; so that it was in vain to attempt to overtake
or stop it. As it was said of a great orator that he never was at a loss
for a word, and for the properest word, so Cavanagh always could tell
the degree of force necessary to be given to a ball, and the precise
direction in which it should be sent. He did his work with the greatest
ease; never took more pains than was necessary; and while others were
fagging themselves to death, was as cool and collected as if he had just
entered the court. His style of play was as remarkable as his power of
execution. He had no affectation, no trifling. He did not throw away the
game to show off an attitude, or try an experiment. He was a fine,
sensible, manly player, who did what he could, but that was more than
any one else could even affect to do. His blows were not undecided and
ineffectual—lumbering like Mr. Wordsworth’s epic poetry, nor wavering
like Mr. Coleridge’s lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr.
Brougham’s speeches, nor wide of it like Mr. Canning’s wit, nor foul
like the _Quarterly_, not _let_ balls like the _Edinburgh Review_.
Cobbett and Junius together would have made a Cavanagh. He was the best
_up-hill_ player in the world; even when his adversary was fourteen, he
would play on the same or better, and as he never flung away the game
through carelessness and conceit, he never gave it up through laziness
or want of heart. The only peculiarity of his play was that he never
_volleyed_, but let the balls hop; but if they rose an inch from the
ground, he never missed having them. There was not only nobody equal,
but nobody second to him. It is supposed that he could give any other
player half the game, or beat him with his left hand. His service was
tremendous. He once played Woodward and Meredith together (two of the
best players in England) in the Fives-court, St. Martin’s-street, and
made seven and twenty aces following by services alone—a thing unheard
of. He another time played Peru, who was considered a first-rate
fives-player, a match of the best out of five games, and in the three
first games, which of course decided the match, Peru got only one ace.
Cavanagh was an Irishman by birth, and a house-painter by profession. He
had once laid aside his working-dress, and walked up, in his smartest
clothes, to the Rosemary Branch to have an afternoon’s pleasure. A
person accosted him, and asked him if he would have a game. So they
agreed to play for half-a-crown a game, and a bottle of cider. The first
game began—it was seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, all. Cavanagh
won it. The next was the same. They played on, and each game was hardly
contested. “There,” said the unconscious fives-player, “there was a
stroke that Cavanagh could not take: I never played better in my life,
and yet I can’t win a game. I don’t know how it is.” However, they
played on, Cavanagh winning every game, and the by-standers drinking the
cider, and laughing all the time. In the twelfth game, when Cavanagh was
only four, and the stranger thirteen, a person came in, and said, “What!
are you here, Cavanagh?” The words were no sooner pronounced than the
astonished player let the ball drop from his hand, and saying, “What!
have I been breaking my heart all this time to beat Cavanagh?” refused
to make another effort. “And yet, I give you my word,” said Cavanagh,
telling the story with some triumph, “I played all the while with my
clenched fist.”—He used frequently to play matches at Copenhagen-house
for wagers and dinners. The wall against which they play is the same
that supports the kitchen-chimney, and when the wall resounded louder
than usual, the cooks exclaimed, “Those are the Irishman’s balls,” and
the joints trembled on the spit!—Goldsmith consoled himself that there
were places where he too was admired: and Cavanagh was the admiration of
all the fives-courts, where he ever played. Mr. Powell, when he played
matches in the Court in St. Martin’s-street, used to fill his gallery at
half a crown a head, with amateurs and admirers of talent in whatever
department it is shown. He could not have shown himself in any ground in
England, but he would have been immediately surrounded with inquisitive
gazers, trying to find out in what part of his frame his unrivalled
skill lay, as politicians wonder to see the balance of Europe suspended
in Lord Castlereagh’s face, and admire the trophies of the British Navy
lurking under Mr. Croker’s hanging brow. Now Cavanagh was as
good-looking a man as the Noble Lord, and much better looking than the
Right Hon. Secretary. He had a clear, open countenance, and did not look
sideways or down, like Mr. Murray the bookseller. He was a young fellow
of sense, humour, and courage. He once had a quarrel with a waterman at
Hungerford-stairs, and, they say, served him out in great style. In a
word, there are hundreds at this day, who cannot mention his name
without admiration, as the best fives-player that perhaps ever lived
(the greatest excellence of which they have any notion)—and the noisy
shout of the ring happily stood him in stead of the unheard voice of
posterity!—The only person who seems to have excelled as much in another
way as Cavanagh did in his, was the late John Davies, the racket-player.
It was remarked of him that he did not seem to follow the ball, but the
ball seemed to follow him. Give him a foot of wall, and he was sure to
make the ball. The four best racket-players of that day were Jack
Spines, Jem. Harding, Armitage, and Church. Davies could give any one of
these two hands a time, that is, half the game, and each of these, at
their best, could give the best player now in London the same odds. Such
are the gradations in all exertions of human skill and art. He once
played four capital players together, and beat them. He was also a
first-rate tennis-player, and an excellent fives-player. In the Fleet or
King’s Bench, he would have stood against Powell, who was reckoned the
best open-ground player of his time. This last-mentioned player is at
present the keeper of the Fives-court, and we might recommend to him for
a motto over his door—“Who enters here, forgets himself, his country,
and his friends.” And the best of it is, that by the calculation of the
odds, none of the three are worth remembering!—Cavanagh died from the
bursting of a blood-vessel, which prevented him from playing for the
last two or three years. This, he was often heard to say, he thought
hard upon him. He was fast recovering, however, when he was suddenly
carried off, to the regret of all who knew him. As Mr. Peel made it a
qualification of the present Speaker, Mr. Manners Sutton, that he was an
excellent moral character, so Jack Cavanagh was a zealous Catholic, and
could not be persuaded to eat meat on a Friday, the day on which he
died. We have paid this willing tribute to his memory.
“Let no rude hand deface it,
And his forlorn ‘_Hic Jacet_.’”’
ESSAY X
ON LIVING TO ONE’S-SELF[27]
‘Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po.’
I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for writing
on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper, my fire
is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I
have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing that
makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good before me, and therefore
I will attempt it. It is as well to do it at once as to have it to do
for a week to come.
If the writing on this subject is no easy task, the thing itself is a
harder one. It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of
others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one’s own
thoughts. As I look from the window at the wide bare heath before me,
and through the misty moonlight air see the woods that wave over the top
of Winterslow,
‘While Heav’n’s chancel-vault is blind with sleet,’
my mind takes its flight through too long a series of years, supported
only by the patience of thought and secret yearnings after truth and
good, for me to be at a loss to understand the feeling I intend to write
about; but I do not know that this will enable me to convey it more
agreeably to the reader.
Lady G. in a letter to Miss Harriet Byron, assures her that ‘her brother
Sir Charles lived to himself:’ and Lady L. soon after (for Richardson
was never tired of a good thing) repeats the same observation; to which
Miss Byron frequently returns in her answers to both sisters—‘For you
know Sir Charles lives to himself,’ till at length it passes into a
proverb among the fair correspondents. This is not, however, an example
of what I understand by _living to one’s-self_, for Sir Charles
Grandison was indeed always thinking of himself; but by this phrase I
mean never thinking at all about one’s-self, any more than if there was
no such person in existence. The character I speak of is as little of an
egotist as possible: Richardson’s great favourite was as much of one as
possible. Some satirical critic has represented him in Elysium ‘bowing
over the _faded_ hand of Lady Grandison’ (Miss Byron that was)—he ought
to have been represented bowing over his own hand, for he never admired
any one but himself, and was the god of his own idolatry. Neither do I
call it living to one’s-self to retire into a desert (like the saints
and martyrs of old) to be devoured by wild beasts, nor to descend into a
cave to be considered as a hermit, nor to get to the top of a pillar or
rock to do fanatic penance and be seen of all men. What I mean by living
to one’s-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it: it is as if
no one knew there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it:
it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an
object of attention or curiosity in it; to take a thoughtful, anxious
interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest
inclination to make or meddle with it. It is such a life as a pure
spirit might be supposed to lead, and such an interest as it might take
in the affairs of men, calm, contemplative, passive, distant, touched
with pity for their sorrows, smiling at their follies without
bitterness, sharing their affections, but not troubled by their
passions, not seeking their notice, nor once dreamt of by them. He who
lives wisely to himself and to his own heart, looks at the busy world
through the loop-holes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the
fray. ‘He hears the tumult, and is still.’ He is not able to mend it,
nor willing to mar it. He sees enough in the universe to interest him
without putting himself forward to try what he can do to fix the eyes of
the universe upon him. Vain the attempt! He reads the clouds, he looks
at the stars, he watches the return of the seasons, the falling leaves
of autumn, the perfumed breath of spring, starts with delight at the
note of a thrush in a copse near him, sits by the fire, listens to the
moaning of the wind, pores upon a book, or discourses the freezing hours
away, or melts down hours to minutes in pleasing thought. All this while
he is taken up with other things, forgetting himself. He relishes an
author’s style, without thinking of turning author. He is fond of
looking at a print from an old picture in the room, without teasing
himself to copy it. He does not fret himself to death with trying to be
what he is not, or to do what he cannot. He hardly knows what he is
capable of, and is not in the least concerned whether he shall ever make
a figure in the world. He feels the truth of the lines—
‘The man whose eye is ever on himself,
Doth look on one, the least of nature’s works;
One who might move the wise man to that scorn
Which wisdom holds unlawful ever’—
he looks out of himself at the wide extended prospect of nature, and
takes an interest beyond his narrow pretensions in general humanity. He
is free as air, and independent as the wind. Woe be to him when he first
begins to think what others say of him. While a man is contented with
himself and his own resources, all is well. When he undertakes to play a
part on the stage, and to persuade the world to think more about him
than they do about themselves, he is got into a track where he will find
nothing but briars and thorns, vexation and disappointment. I can speak
a little to this point. For many years of my life I did nothing but
think. I had nothing else to do but solve some knotty point, or dip in
some abstruse author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled
sea-side—
‘To see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’
I cared for nothing, I wanted nothing. I took my time to consider
whatever occurred to me, and was in no hurry to give a sophistical
answer to a question—there was no printer’s devil waiting for me. I used
to write a page or two perhaps in half a year; and remember laughing
heartily at the celebrated experimentalist Nicholson, who told me that
in twenty years he had written as much as would make three hundred
octavo volumes. If I was not a great author, I could read with ever
fresh delight, ‘never ending, still beginning,’ and had no occasion to
write a criticism when I had done. If I could not paint like Claude, I
could admire ‘the witchery of the soft blue sky’ as I walked out, and
was satisfied with the pleasure it gave me. If I was dull, it gave me
little concern: if I was lively, I indulged my spirits. I wished well to
the world, and believed as favourably of it as I could. I was like a
stranger in a foreign land, at which I looked with wonder, curiosity,
and delight, without expecting to be an object of attention in return. I
had no relations to the state, no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to
others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife or child. I lived in a
world of contemplation, and not of action.
This sort of dreaming existence is the best. He who quits it to go in
search of realities, generally barters repose for repeated
disappointments and vain regrets. His time, thoughts, and feelings are
no longer at his own disposal. From that instant he does not survey the
objects of nature as they are in themselves, but looks asquint at them
to see whether he cannot make them the instruments of his ambition,
interest, or pleasure; for a candid, undesigning, undisguised simplicity
of character, his views become jaundiced, sinister, and double: he takes
no farther interest in the great changes of the world but as he has a
paltry share in producing them: instead of opening his senses, his
understanding, and his heart to the resplendent fabric of the universe,
he holds a crooked mirror before his face, in which he may admire his
own person and pretensions, and just glance his eye aside to see whether
others are not admiring him too. He no more exists in the impression
which ‘the fair variety of things’ makes upon him, softened and subdued
by habitual contemplation, but in the feverish sense of his own upstart
self-importance. By aiming to fix, he is become the slave of opinion. He
is a tool, a part of a machine that never stands still, and is sick and
giddy with the ceaseless motion. He has no satisfaction but in the
reflection of his own image in the public gaze, but in the repetition of
his own name in the public ear. He himself is mixed up with, and spoils
every thing. I wonder Buonaparte was not tired of the N.N.’s stuck all
over the Louvre and throughout France. Goldsmith (as we all know), when
in Holland, went out into a balcony with some handsome Englishwomen, and
on their being applauded by the spectators, turned round, and said
peevishly—‘There are places where I also am admired.’ He could not give
the craving appetite of an author’s vanity one day’s respite. I have
seen a celebrated talker of our own time turn pale and go out of the
room when a showy-looking girl has come into it, who for a moment
divided the attention of his hearers. Infinite are the mortifications of
the bare attempt to emerge from obscurity; numberless the failures; and
greater and more galling still the vicissitudes and tormenting
accompaniments of success—
—‘Whose top to climb
Is certain falling, or so slippery, that
The fear’s as bad as falling.’
‘Would to God,’ exclaimed Oliver Cromwell, when he was at any time
thwarted by the Parliament, ‘that I had remained by my wood-side to tend
a flock of sheep, rather than have been thrust on such a government as
this!’ When Buonaparte got into his carriage to proceed on his Russian
expedition, carelessly twirling his glove, and singing the air—‘Malbrook
to the wars is going’—he did not think of the tumble he has got since,
the shock of which no one could have stood but himself. We see and hear
chiefly of the favourites of Fortune and the Muse, of great generals, of
first-rate actors, of celebrated poets. These are at the head; we are
struck with the glittering eminence on which they stand, and long to set
out on the same tempting career:—not thinking how many discontented
half-pay lieutenants are in vain seeking promotion all their lives, and
obliged to put up with ‘the insolence of office, and the spurns which
patient merit of the unworthy takes;’ how many half-starved
strolling-players are doomed to penury and tattered robes in
country-places, dreaming to the last of a London engagement; how many
wretched daubers shiver and shake in the ague-fit of alternate hopes and
fears, waste and pine away in the atrophy of genius, or else turn
drawing-masters, picture-cleaners, or newspaper critics; how many
hapless poets have sighed out their souls to the Muse in vain, without
ever getting their effusions farther known than the Poet’s-Corner of a
country newspaper, and looked and looked with grudging, wistful eyes at
the envious horizon that bounded their provincial fame! Suppose an
actor, for instance, ‘after the heart-aches and the thousand natural
pangs that flesh is heir to,’ _does_ get at the top of his profession,
he can no longer bear a rival near the throne; to be second or only
equal to another, is to be nothing: he starts at the prospect of a
successor, and retains the mimic sceptre with a convulsive grasp:
perhaps as he is about to seize the first place which he has long had in
his eye, an unsuspected competitor steps in before him, and carries off
the prize, leaving him to commence his irksome toil again: he is in a
state of alarm at every appearance or rumour of the appearance of a new
actor: ‘a mouse that takes up its lodging in a cat’s ear’[28] has a
mansion of peace to him: he dreads every hint of an objection, and least
of all can forgive praise mingled with censure: to doubt is to insult,
to discriminate is to degrade: he dare hardly look into a criticism
unless some one has _tasted_ it for him, to see that there is no offence
in it: if he does not draw crowded houses every night, he can neither
eat nor sleep; or if all these terrible inflictions are removed, and he
can ‘eat his meal in peace,’ he then becomes surfeited with applause and
dissatisfied with his profession: he wants to be something else, to be
distinguished as an author, a collector, a classical scholar, a man of
sense and information, and weighs every word he utters, and half
retracts it before he utters it, lest if he were to make the smallest
slip of the tongue, it should get buzzed abroad that _Mr. — was only
clever as an actor_! If ever there was a man who did not derive more
pain than pleasure from his vanity, that man, says Rousseau, was no
other than a fool. A country-gentleman near Taunton spent his whole life
in making some hundreds of wretched copies of second-rate pictures,
which were bought up at his death by a neighbouring Baronet, to whom
‘Some demon whisper’d, L—, have a taste!’
A little Wilson in an obscure corner escaped the man of _virtù_, and was
carried off by a Bristol picture-dealer for three guineas, while the
muddled copies of the owner of the mansion (with the frames) fetched
thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred ducats a piece. A friend of mine found a
very fine Canaletti in a state of strange disfigurement, with the upper
part of the sky smeared over and fantastically variegated with English
clouds; and on enquiring of the person to whom it belonged whether
something had not been done to it, received for answer ‘that a
gentleman, a great artist in the neighbourhood, had retouched some parts
of it.’ What infatuation! Yet this candidate for the honours of the
pencil might probably have made a jovial fox-hunter or respectable
justice of the peace, if he could only have stuck to what nature and
fortune intended him for. Miss — can by no means be persuaded to quit
the boards of the theatre at —, a little country town in the West of
England. Her salary has been abridged, her person ridiculed, her acting
laughed at; nothing will serve—she is determined to be an actress, and
scorns to return to her former business as a milliner. Shall I go on? An
actor in the same company was visited by the apothecary of the place in
an ague-fit, who, on asking his landlady as to his way of life, was told
that the poor gentleman was very quiet and gave little trouble, that he
generally had a plate of mashed potatoes for his dinner, and lay in bed
most of his time, repeating his part. A young couple, every way amiable
and deserving, were to have been married, and a benefit-play was bespoke
by the officers of the regiment quartered there, to defray the expense
of a license and of the wedding-ring, but the profits of the night did
not amount to the necessary sum, and they have, I fear, ‘virgined it
e’er since!’ Oh for the pencil of Hogarth or Wilkie to give a view of
the comic strength of the company at —, drawn up in battle-array in the
Clandestine Marriage, with a _coup d’œil_ of the pit, boxes, and
gallery, to cure for ever the love of the _ideal_, and the desire to
shine and make holiday in the eyes of others, instead of retiring within
ourselves and keeping our wishes and our thoughts at home!
Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage,
how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of
others! Most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest
enemies, or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance. Old companions are like
meats served up too often that lose their relish and their
wholesomeness. He who looks at beauty to admire, to adore it, who reads
of its wondrous power in novels, in poems, or in plays, is not unwise:
but let no man fall in love, for from that moment he is ‘the baby of a
girl.’ I like very well to repeat such lines as these in the play of
Mirandola—
—‘With what a waving air she goes
Along the corridor. How like a fawn!
Yet statelier. Hark! No sound, however soft,
Nor gentlest echo telleth when she treads,
But every motion of her shape doth seem
Hallowed by silence’—
but however beautiful the description, defend me from meeting with the
original!
‘The fly that sips treacle
Is lost in the sweets;
So he that tastes woman
Ruin meets.’
The song is Gay’s, not mine, and a bitter-sweet it is.—How few out of
the infinite number of those that marry and are given in marriage, wed
with those they would prefer to all the world; nay, how far the greater
proportion are joined together by mere motives of convenience, accident,
recommendation of friends, or indeed not unfrequently by the very fear
of the event, by repugnance and a sort of fatal fascination: yet the tie
is for life, not to be shaken off but with disgrace or death: a man no
longer lives to himself, but is a body (as well as mind) chained to
another, in spite of himself—
‘Like life and death in disproportion met.’
So Milton (perhaps from his own experience) makes Adam exclaim, in the
vehemence of his despair,
‘For either
He never shall find out fit mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him or mistake;
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gain’d
By a far worse; or if she love, withheld
By parents; or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already link’d and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate and shame;
Which infinite calamity shall cause
To human life, and household peace confound.’
If love at first sight were mutual, or to be conciliated by kind
offices; if the fondest affection were not so often repaid and chilled
by indifference and scorn; if so many lovers both before and since the
madman in Don Quixote had not ‘worshipped a statue, hunted the wind,
cried aloud to the desert;’ if friendship were lasting; if merit were
renown, and renown were health, riches, and long life; or if the homage
of the world were paid to conscious worth and the true aspirations after
excellence, instead of its gaudy signs and outward trappings:—then
indeed I might be of opinion that it is better to live to others than
one’s-self: but as the case stands, I incline to the negative side of
the question.[29]—
‘I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee—
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles—nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind which thus itself subdued.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me—
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things—hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful nor weave
Snares for the failing: I would also deem
O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem—
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.’
Sweet verse embalms the spirit of sour misanthropy: but woe betide the
ignoble prose-writer who should thus dare to compare notes with the
world, or tax it roundly with imposture.
If I had sufficient provocation to rail at the public, as Ben Jonson did
at the audience in the Prologues to his plays, I think I should do it in
good set terms, nearly as follows. There is not a more mean, stupid,
dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than
the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
From its unwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition
to it, and shakes like isinglass at the touch of a finger. It starts at
its own shadow, like the man in the Hartz mountains, and trembles at the
mention of its own name. It has a lion’s mouth, the heart of a hare,
with ears erect and sleepless eyes. It stands ‘listening its fears.’ It
is so in awe of its own opinion, that it never dares to form any, but
catches up the first idle rumour, lest it should be behind-hand in its
judgment, and echoes it till it is deafened with the sound of its own
voice. The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from
ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private
judgment, so that in short the public ear is at the mercy of the first
impudent pretender who chooses to fill it with noisy assertions, or
false surmises, or secret whispers. What is said by one is heard by all;
the supposition that a thing is known to all the world makes all the
world believe it, and the hollow repetition of a vague report drowns the
‘still, small voice’ of reason. We may believe or know that what is said
is not true: but we know or fancy that others believe it—we dare not
contradict or are too indolent to dispute with them, and therefore give
up our internal, and, as we think, our solitary conviction to a sound
without substance, without proof, and often without meaning. Nay more,
we may believe and know not only that a thing is false, but that others
believe and know it to be so, that they are quite as much in the secret
of the imposture as we are, that they see the puppets at work, the
nature of the machinery, and yet if any one has the art or power to get
the management of it, he shall keep possession of the public ear by
virtue of a cant-phrase or nickname; and, by dint of effrontery and
perseverance, make all the world believe and repeat what all the world
know to be false. The ear is quicker than the judgment. We know that
certain things are said; by that circumstance alone we know that they
produce a certain effect on the imagination of others, and we conform to
their prejudices by mechanical sympathy, and for want of sufficient
spirit to differ with them. So far then is public opinion from resting
on a broad and solid basis, as the aggregate of thought and feeling in a
community, that it is slight and shallow and variable to the last
degree—the bubble of the moment—so that we may safely say the public is
the dupe of public opinion, not its parent. The public is pusillanimous
and cowardly, because it is weak. It knows itself to be a great dunce,
and that it has no opinions but upon suggestion. Yet it is unwilling to
appear in leading-strings, and would have it thought that its decisions
are as wise as they are weighty. It is hasty in taking up its
favourites, more hasty in laying them aside, lest it should be supposed
deficient in sagacity in either case. It is generally divided into two
strong parties, each of which will allow neither common sense nor common
honesty to the other side. It reads the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews,
and believes them both—or if there is a doubt, malice turns the scale.
Taylor and Hessey told me that they had sold nearly two editions of the
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in about three months, but that after
the Quarterly Review of them came out, they never sold another copy. The
public, enlightened as they are, must have known the meaning of that
attack as well as those who made it. It was not ignorance then but
cowardice that led them to give up their own opinion. A crew of
mischievous critics at Edinburgh having fixed the epithet of the
_Cockney School_ to one or two writers born in the metropolis, all the
people in London became afraid of looking into their works, lest they
too should be convicted of cockneyism. Oh brave public! This epithet
proved too much for one of the writers in question, and stuck like a
barbed arrow in his heart. Poor Keats! What was sport to the town was
death to him. Young, sensitive, delicate, he was like
‘A bud bit by an envious worm,
Ere he could spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun’—
and unable to endure the miscreant cry and idiot laugh, withdrew to sigh
his last breath in foreign climes.—The public is as envious and
ungrateful as it is ignorant, stupid, and pigeon-livered—
‘A huge-sized monster of ingratitudes.’
It reads, it admires, it extols only because it is the fashion, not from
any love of the subject or the man. It cries you up or runs you down out
of mere caprice and levity. If you have pleased it, it is jealous of its
own involuntary acknowledgment of merit, and seizes the first
opportunity, the first shabby pretext, to pick a quarrel with you, and
be quits once more. Every petty caviller is erected into a judge, every
tale-bearer is implicitly believed. Every little low paltry creature
that gaped and wondered only because others did so, is glad to find you
(as he thinks) on a level with himself. An author is not then, after
all, a being of another order. Public admiration is forced, and goes
against the grain. Public obloquy is cordial and sincere: every
individual feels his own importance in it. They give you up bound hand
and foot into the power of your accusers. To attempt to defend yourself
is a high crime and misdemeanour, a contempt of court, an extreme piece
of impertinence. Or, if you prove every charge unfounded, they never
think of retracting their error, or making you amends. It would be a
compromise of their dignity; they consider themselves as the party
injured, and resent your innocence as an imputation on their judgment.
The celebrated Bub Doddington, when out of favour at court, said ‘he
would not _justify_ before his sovereign: it was for Majesty to be
displeased, and for him to believe himself in the wrong!’ The public are
not quite so modest. People already begin to talk of the Scotch Novels
as overrated. How then can common authors be supposed to keep their
heads long above water? As a general rule, all those who live by the
public starve, and are made a bye-word and a standing jest into the
bargain. Posterity is no better (not a bit more enlightened or more
liberal), except that you are no longer in their power, and that the
voice of common fame saves them the trouble of deciding on your claims.
The public now are the posterity of Milton and Shakespear. Our posterity
will be the living public of a future generation. When a man is dead,
they put money in his coffin, erect monuments to his memory, and
celebrate the anniversary of his birthday in set speeches. Would they
take any notice of him if he were living? No!—I was complaining of this
to a Scotchman who had been attending a dinner and a subscription to
raise a monument to Burns. He replied, he would sooner subscribe twenty
pounds to his monument than have given it him while living; so that if
the poet were to come to life again, he would treat him just as he was
treated in fact. This was an honest Scotchman. What _he_ said, the rest
would do.
Enough: my soul, turn from them, and let me try to regain the obscurity
and quiet that I love, ‘far from the madding strife,’ in some
sequestered corner of my own, or in some far-distant land! In the latter
case, I might carry with me as a consolation the passage in
Bolingbroke’s Reflections on Exile, in which he describes in glowing
colours the resources which a man may always find within himself, and of
which the world cannot deprive him.
‘Believe me, the providence of God has established such an order in the
world, that of all which belongs to us, the least valuable parts can
alone fall under the will of others. Whatever is best is safest; lies
out of the reach of human power; can neither be given nor taken away.
Such is this great and beautiful work of nature, the world. Such is the
mind of man, which contemplates and admires the world whereof it makes
the noblest part. These are inseparably ours, and as long as we remain
in one we shall enjoy the other. Let us march therefore intrepidly
wherever we are led by the course of human accidents. Wherever they lead
us, on what coast soever we are thrown by them, we shall not find
ourselves absolutely strangers. We shall feel the same revolution of
seasons, and the same sun and moon[30] will guide the course of our
year. The same azure vault, bespangled with stars, will be every where
spread over our heads. There is no part of the world from whence we may
not admire those planets which roll, like ours, in different orbits
round the same central sun; from whence we may not discover an object
still more stupendous, that army of fixed stars hung up in the immense
space of the universe, innumerable suns whose beams enlighten and
cherish the unknown worlds which roll around them; and whilst I am
ravished by such contemplations as these, whilst my soul is thus raised
up to heaven, imports me little what ground I tread upon.’
ESSAY XI
ON THOUGHT AND ACTION
Those persons who are much accustomed to abstract contemplation are
generally unfitted for active pursuits, and _vice versâ_. I myself am
sufficiently decided and dogmatical in my opinions, and yet in action I
am as imbecile as a woman or a child. I cannot set about the most
indifferent thing without twenty efforts, and had rather write one of
these Essays than have to seal a letter. In trying to throw a hat or a
book upon a table, I miss it; it just reaches the edge and falls back
again, and instead of doing what I mean to perform, I do what I intend
to avoid. Thought depends on the habitual exercise of the speculative
faculties; action on the determination of the will. The one assigns
reasons for things, the other puts causes into act. Abraham Tucker
relates of a friend of his, an old special pleader, that once coming out
of his chambers in the Temple with him to take a walk, he hesitated at
the bottom of the stairs which way to go—proposed different directions,
to Charing Cross, to St. Paul’s,—found some objection to them all, and
at last turned back for want of a casting motive to incline the scale.
Tucker gives this as an instance of professional indecision, or of that
temper of mind which having been long used to weigh the reasons for
things with scrupulous exactness, could not come to any conclusion at
all on the spur of the occasion, or without some grave distinction to
justify its choice. Louvet, in his Narrative, tells us, that when
several of the Brissotin party were collected at the house of Barbaroux
(I think it was) ready to effect their escape from the power of
Robespierre, one of them going to the window and finding a shower of
rain coming on, seriously advised their stopping till the next morning,
for that the emissaries of government would not think of coming in
search of them in such bad weather. Some of them deliberated on this
wise proposal, and were nearly taken. Such is the effeminacy of the
speculative and philosophical temperament, compared with the promptness
and vigour of the practical! It is on such unequal terms that the
refined and romantic speculators on possible good and evil contend with
their strong-nerved, remorseless adversaries, and we see the result.
Reasoners in general are undecided, wavering, and sceptical, or yield at
last to the weakest motive, as most congenial to their feeble habit of
soul.[31]
Some men are mere machines. They are put in a go-cart of business, and
are harnessed to a profession—yoked to fortune’s wheels. They plod on,
and succeed. Their affairs conduct them, not they their affairs. All
they have to do is to let things take their course, and not go out of
the beaten road. A man may carry on the business of farming on the same
spot and principle that his ancestors have done for many generations
before him without any extraordinary share of capacity: the proof is, it
is done every day in every county and parish in the kingdom. All that is
necessary is that he should not pretend to be wiser than his neighbours.
If he has a grain more wit or penetration than they, if his vanity gets
the start of his avarice only half a neck, if he has ever thought or
read any thing upon the subject, it will most probably be the ruin of
him. He will turn theoretical or experimental farmer, and no more need
be said. Mr. Cobbett, who is a sufficiently shrewd and practical man,
with an eye also to the main chance, had got some notions in his head
(from Tull’s Husbandry) about the method of sowing turnips, to which he
would have sacrificed not only his estate at Botley, but his native
county of Hampshire itself, sooner than give up an inch of his argument.
‘Tut! will you baulk a man in the career of his humour?’ Therefore, that
a man may not be ruined by his humours, he should be too dull and
phlegmatic to have any: he must have ‘no figures nor no fantasies which
busy thought draws in the brains of men.’ The fact is, that the
ingenuity or judgment of no one man is equal to that of the world at
large, which is the fruit of the experience and ability of all mankind.
Even where a man is right in a particular notion, he will be apt to
overrate the importance of his discovery, to the detriment of his
affairs. Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your
face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They
cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are
guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them, which they
do not like. There is no doubt that if a person two hundred years ago
had foreseen and attempted to put in practice the most approved and
successful methods of cultivation now in use, it would have been a
death-blow to his credit and fortune. So that though the experiments and
improvements of private individuals from time to time gradually go to
enrich the public stock of information and reform the general practice,
they are mostly the ruin of the person who makes them, because he takes
a part for the whole, and lays more stress upon the single point in
which he has found others in the wrong, than on all the rest in which
they are substantially and prescriptively in the right. The great
requisite, it should appear then, for the prosperous management of
ordinary business, is the want of imagination, or of any ideas but those
of custom and interest on the narrowest scale:—and as the affairs of the
world are necessarily carried on by the common run of its inhabitants,
it seems a wise dispensation of Providence that it should be so. If no
one could rent a piece of glebeland without a genius for mechanical
inventions, or stand behind a counter without a large benevolence of
soul, what would become of the commercial and agricultural interests of
this great (and once flourishing) country? I would not be understood as
saying that there is not what may be called _a genius for business_, an
extraordinary capacity for affairs, quickness and comprehension united,
an insight into character, an acquaintance with a number of particular
circumstances, a variety of expedients, a tact for finding out what will
do: I grant all this (in Liverpool and Manchester they would persuade
you that your merchant and manufacturer is your only gentleman and
scholar)—but still, making every allowance for the difference between
the liberal trader and the sneaking shopkeeper, I doubt whether the most
surprising success is to be accounted for from any such unusual
attainments, or whether a man’s making half a million of money is a
proof of his capacity for thought in general. It is much oftener owing
to views and wishes bounded but constantly directed to one particular
object. To succeed, a man should aim only at success. The child of
Fortune should resign himself into the hands of Fortune. A plotting head
frequently overreaches itself: a mind confident of its resources and
calculating powers enters on critical speculations, which, in a game
depending so much on chance and unforeseen events, and not entirely on
intellectual skill, turn the odds greatly against any one in the long
run. The rule of business is to take what you can get, and keep what you
have got: or an eagerness in seizing every opportunity that offers for
promoting your own interest, and a plodding persevering industry in
making the most of the advantages you have already obtained, are the
most effectual as well as safest ingredients in the composition of the
mercantile character. The world is a book in which the _Chapter of
Accidents_ is none of the least considerable; or it is a machine that
must be left, in a great measure, to turn itself. The most that a
worldly-minded man can do is, to stand at the receipt of custom, and be
constantly on the look-out for windfalls. The true devotee in this way
waits for the revelations of Fortune as the poet waits for the
inspiration of the Muse, and does not rashly anticipate her favours. He
must be neither capricious nor wilful. I have known people untrammelled
in the ways of business, but with so intense an apprehension of their
own interest, that they would grasp at the slightest possibility of gain
as a certainty, and were led into as many mistakes by an over-griping
usurious disposition as they could have been by the most thoughtless
extravagance.—We hear a great outcry about the want of judgment in men
of genius. It is not a want of judgment, but an excess of other things.
They err knowingly, and are wilfully blind. The understanding is out of
the question. The profound judgment which soberer people pique
themselves upon is in truth a want of passion and imagination. Give them
an interest in any thing, a sudden fancy, a bait for their favourite
foible, and who so besotted as they? Stir their feelings, and farewel to
their prudence! The understanding operates as a motive to action only in
the silence of the passions. I have heard people of a sanguine
temperament reproached with betting according to their wishes, instead
of their opinion who should win: and I have seen those who reproached
them do the very same thing the instant their own vanity or prejudices
were concerned. The most mechanical people, once thrown off their
balance, are the most extravagant and fantastical. What passion is there
so unmeaning and irrational as avarice itself? The Dutch went mad for
tulips, and — — for love!—To return to what was said a little way back,
a question might be started, whether, as thought relates to the whole
circumference of things and interests, and business is confined to a
very small part of them, viz. to a knowledge of a man’s own affairs and
the making of his own fortune, whether a talent for the latter will not
generally exist in proportion to the narrowness and grossness of his
ideas, nothing drawing his attention out of his own sphere, or giving
him an interest except in those things which he can realise and bring
home to himself in the most undoubted shape? To the man of business all
the world is a Fable but the Stock-Exchange: to the money-getter nothing
has a real existence that he cannot convert into a tangible feeling,
that he does not recognise as property, that he cannot ‘measure with a
two-foot rule or count upon ten fingers.’ The want of thought, of
imagination, drives the practical man upon immediate realities: to the
poet or philosopher all is real and interesting that is true or
possible, that can reach in its consequences to others, or be made a
subject of curious speculation to himself!
But is it right, then, to judge of action by the quantity of thought
implied in it, any more than it would be to condemn a life of
contemplation for being inactive? Or, has not every thing a source and
principle of its own, to which we should refer it, and not to the
principles of other things? He who succeeds in any pursuit in which
others fail, may be presumed to have qualities of some sort or other
which they are without. If he has not brilliant wit, he may have solid
sense; if he has not subtlety of understanding, he may have energy and
firmness of purpose: if he has only a few advantages, he may have
modesty and prudence to make the most of what he possesses. Propriety is
one great matter in the conduct of life; which, though like a graceful
carriage of the body it is neither definable nor striking at first
sight, is the result of finely balanced feelings, and lends a secret
strength and charm to the whole character.
—_Quicquid agit, quoquo vestigia vertit,
Componit furtim, subsequiturque decor._
There are more ways than one in which the various faculties of the mind
may unfold themselves. Neither words, nor ideas reducible to words,
constitute the utmost limit of human capacity. Man is not a merely
talking nor a merely reasoning animal. Let us then take him as he is,
instead of ‘curtailing him of nature’s fair proportions’ to suit our
previous notions. Doubtless, there are great characters both in active
and contemplative life. There have been heroes as well as sages,
legislators and founders of religion, historians and able statesmen and
generals, inventors of useful arts and instruments, and explorers of
undiscovered countries, as well as writers and readers of books. It will
not do to set all these aside under any fastidious or pedantic
distinction. Comparisons are odious, because they are impertinent, and
lead only to the discovery of defects by making one thing the standard
of another which has no relation to it. If, as some one proposed, we
were to institute an inquiry, ‘Which was the greatest man, Milton or
Cromwell, Buonaparte or Rubens?’—we should have all the authors and
artists on one side, and all the military men and the whole diplomatic
body on the other, who would set to work with all their might to pull in
pieces the idol of the other party, and the longer the dispute
continued, the more would each grow dissatisfied with his favourite,
though determined to allow no merit to any one else. The mind is not
well competent to take in the full impression of more than one style of
excellence or one extraordinary character at once; contradictory claims
puzzle and stupefy it; and however admirable any individual may be in
himself, and unrivalled in his particular way, yet if we try him by
others in a totally opposite class, that is, if we consider not what he
was but what he was not, he will be found to be nothing. We do not
reckon up the excellences on either side, for then these would satisfy
the mind and put an end to the comparison: we have no way of exclusively
setting up our favourite but by running down his supposed rival; and for
the gorgeous hues of Rubens, the lofty conceptions of Milton, the deep
policy and cautious daring of Cromwell, or the dazzling exploits and
fatal ambition of the modern chieftain, the poet is transformed into a
pedant, the artist sinks into a mechanic, the politician turns out no
better than a knave, and the hero is exalted into a madman. It is as
easy to get the start of our antagonist in argument by frivolous and
vexatious objections to one side of the question, as it is difficult to
do full and heaped justice to the other. If I am asked which is the
greatest of those who have been the greatest in different ways, I answer
the one that we happen to be thinking of at the time, for while that is
the case, we can conceive of nothing higher. If there is a propensity in
the vulgar to admire the achievements of personal prowess or instances
of fortunate enterprise too much, it cannot be denied that those who
have to weigh out and dispense the meed of fame in books, have been too
much disposed, by a natural bias, to confine all merit and talent to the
productions of the pen, or at least to those works which, being
artificial or abstract representations of things, are transmitted to
posterity, and cried up as models in their kind. This, though
unavoidable, is hardly just. Actions pass away and are forgotten, or are
only discernible in their effects: conquerors, statesmen, and kings live
but by their names stamped on the page of history. Hume says rightly
that more people think about Virgil and Homer (and that continually)
than ever trouble their heads about Cæsar or Alexander. In fact, poets
are a longer-lived race than heroes: they breathe more of the air of
immortality. They survive more entire in their thoughts and acts. We
have all that Virgil or Homer did, as much as if we had lived at the
same time with them: we can hold their works in our hands, or lay them
on our pillows, or put them to our lips. Scarcely a trace of what the
others did is left upon the earth, so as to be visible to common eyes.
The one, the dead authors, are living men, still breathing and moving in
their writings. The others, the conquerors of the world, are but the
ashes in an urn. The sympathy (so to speak) between thought and thought
is more intimate and vital than that between thought and action. Thought
is linked to thought as flame kindles into flame: the tribute of
admiration to the _manes_ of departed heroism is like burning incense in
a marble monument. Words, ideas, feelings, with the progress of time
harden into substances: things, bodies, actions, moulder away, or melt
into a sound, into thin air! Yet though the Schoolmen in the middle ages
disputed more about the texts of Aristotle than the battle of Arbela,
perhaps Alexander’s Generals in his life-time admired his pupil as much,
and liked him better. For not only a man’s actions are effaced and
vanish with him; his virtues and generous qualities die with him
also:—his intellect only is immortal, and bequeathed unimpaired to
posterity. Words are the only things that last for ever.
If however the empire of words and general knowledge is more durable in
proportion as it is abstracted and attenuated, it is less immediate and
dazzling: if authors are as good after they are dead as when they were
living, while living they might as well be dead: and moreover with
respect to actual ability, to write a book is not the only proof of
taste, sense, or spirit, as pedants would have us suppose. To do any
thing well, to paint a picture, to fight a battle, to make a plough or a
threshing-machine, requires, one would think, as much skill and judgment
as to talk about or write a description of it when done. Words are
universal, intelligible signs, but they are not the only real, existing
things. Did not Julius Cæsar shew himself as much of a man in conducting
his campaigns as in composing his Commentaries? Or was the Retreat of
the Ten Thousand under Xenophon, or his work of that name, the most
consummate performance? Or would not Lovelace, supposing him to have
existed and to have conceived and executed all his fine stratagems on
the spur of the occasion, have been as clever a fellow as Richardson,
who invented them in cold blood? If to conceive and describe an heroic
character is the height of a literary ambition, we can hardly make it
out that to be and to do all that the wit of man can feign, is nothing.
To use means to ends, to set causes in motion, to wield the machine of
society, to subject the wills of others to your own, to manage abler men
than yourself by means of that which is stronger in them than their
wisdom, _viz._ their weakness and their folly, to calculate the
resistance of ignorance and prejudice to your designs, and by obviating
to turn them to account, to foresee a long, obscure, and complicated
train of events, of chances and openings of success, to unwind the web
of others’ policy, and weave your own out of it, to judge of the effects
of things not in the abstract but with reference to all their bearings,
ramifications and impediments, to understand character thoroughly, to
see latent talent or lurking treachery, to know mankind for what they
are, and use them as they deserve, to have a purpose steadily in view
and to effect it after removing every obstacle, to master others and be
true to yourself, asks power and knowledge, both nerves and brain.
Such is the sort of talent that may be shewn, and that has been
possessed by the great leaders on the stage of the world. To accomplish
great things argues, I imagine, great resolution: to design great things
implies no common mind. Ambition is in some sort genius. Though I would
rather wear out my life in arguing a broad speculative question than in
caballing for the election to a wardmote, or canvassing for votes in a
rotten borough, yet I should think that the loftiest Epicurean
philosopher might descend from his punctilio to identify himself with
the support of a great principle, or to prop a falling state. This is
what the legislators and founders of empire did of old; and the
permanence of their institutions shewed the depth of the principles from
which they emanated. A tragic poem is not the worse for acting well: if
it will not bear this test, it savours of effeminacy. Well-digested
schemes will stand the touchstone of experience. Great thoughts reduced
to practice become great acts. Again, great acts grow out of great
occasions, and great occasions spring from great principles, working
changes in society, and tearing it up by the roots. But still I conceive
that a genius for action depends essentially on the strength of the will
rather than on that of the understanding; that the long-headed
calculation of causes and consequences arises from the energy of the
first cause, which is the will, setting others in motion and prepared to
anticipate the results; that its sagacity is activity delighting in
meeting difficulties and adventures more than half way, and its wisdom
courage not to shrink from danger, but to redouble its efforts with
opposition. Its humanity, if it has much, is magnanimity to spare the
vanquished, exulting in power but not prone to mischief, with good sense
enough to be aware of the instability of fortune, and with some regard
to reputation. What may serve as a criterion to try this question by is
the following consideration, that we sometimes find as remarkable a
deficiency of the speculative faculty coupled with great strength of
will and consequent success in active life, as we do a want of voluntary
power and total incapacity for business, frequently joined to the
highest mental qualifications. In some cases it will happen that ‘to be
wise, is to be obstinate.’ If you are deaf to reason but stick to your
own purposes, you will tire others out, and bring them over to your way
of thinking. Self-will and blind prejudice are the best defence of
actual power and exclusive advantages. The forehead of the late king was
not remarkable for the character of intellect, but the lower part of his
face was expressive of strong passions and fixed resolution. Charles Fox
had an animated, intelligent eye, and brilliant, elastic forehead (with
a nose indicating fine taste), but the lower features were weak,
unsettled, fluctuating, and without _purchase_—it was in them the Whigs
were defeated. What a fine iron binding Buonaparte had round his face,
as if it had been cased in steel! What sensibility about the mouth! What
watchful penetration in the eye! What a smooth, unruffled forehead! Mr.
Pitt, with little sunken eyes, had a high, retreating forehead, and a
nose expressing pride and aspiring self-opinion: it was on that (with
submission) that he suspended the decisions of the House of Commons, and
dangled the Opposition as he pleased. Lord Castlereagh is a man rather
deficient than redundant in words and topics. He is not (any more than
St. Augustine was, in the opinion of La Fontaine) so great a wit as
Rabelais, nor is he so great a philosopher as Aristotle: but he has that
in him which is not to be trifled with. He has a noble mask of a face
(not well filled up in the expression, which is relaxed and dormant),
with a fine person and manner. On the strength of these he hazards his
speeches in the House. He has also a knowledge of mankind, and of the
composition of the House. He takes a thrust which he cannot parry on his
shield—is ‘all tranquillity and smiles’ under a volley of abuse, sees
when to pay a compliment to a wavering antagonist, soothes the melting
mood of his hearers, or gets up a speech full of indignation, and knows
how to bestow his attentions on that great public body, whether he
wheedles or bullies, so as to bring it to compliance. With a long reach
of undefined purposes (the result of a temper too indolent for thought,
too violent for repose) he has equal perseverance and pliancy in
bringing his objects to pass. I would rather be Lord Castlereagh, as far
as a sense of power is concerned (principle is out of the question),
than such a man as Mr. Canning, who is a mere fluent sophist, and never
knows the limits of discretion, or the effect which will be produced by
what he says, except as far as florid common-places may be depended on.
Buonaparte is referred by Mr. Coleridge to the class of active rather
than of intellectual characters: and Cowley has left an invidious but
splendid eulogy on Oliver Cromwell, which sets out on much the same
principle. ‘What,’ he says, ‘can be more extraordinary, than that a
person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which
have sometimes, or of mind, which have often raised men to the highest
dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to
succeed in, so improbable a design, as the destruction of one of the
most ancient and most solidly-founded monarchies upon the earth? That he
should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an
open and infamous death; to banish that numerous and strongly-allied
family; to do all this under the name and wages of a Parliament; to
trample upon them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he
grew weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of
their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself
above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress
all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to
serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them
victoriously at last; to over-run each corner of the three nations, and
overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the
poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes,
and adopted a brother to the Gods of the earth; to call together
Parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the
breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned that he would
please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master
of those who had hired him before to be their servant; to have the
estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal, as was the
little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the
spending of them; and lastly, (for there is no end of all the particular
of his glory) to bequeath all this with one word to his posterity; to
die with peace at home, and triumph abroad; to be buried among kings,
and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name behind him, not
to be extinguished but with the whole world; which as it is now too
little for his praises, so might have been too [narrow] for his
conquests, if the short line of his human life could have been stretched
out to the extent of his immortal designs!’
Cromwell was a bad speaker and a worse writer. Milton wrote his
dispatches for him in elegant and erudite Latin: and the pen of the one,
like the sword of the other, was ‘sharp and sweet.’ We have not that
union in modern times of the heroic and literary character which was
common among the ancients. Julius Cæsar and Xenophon recorded their own
acts with equal clearness of style and modesty of temper. The Duke of
Wellington (worse off than Cromwell) is obliged to get Mr. Mudford to
write the History of his Life. Sophocles, Æschylus, and Socrates, were
distinguished for their military prowess among their contemporaries,
though now only remembered for what they did in poetry and philosophy.
Cicero and Demosthenes, the two greatest orators of antiquity, appear to
have been cowards: Nor does Horace seem to give a very favourable
picture of his martial achievements. But in general there was not that
division in the labours of the mind and body among the Greeks and Romans
that has been introduced among us either by the progress of civilisation
or by a greater slowness and inaptitude of parts. The French, for
instance, appear to unite a number of accomplishments, the literary
character and the man of the world, better than we do. Among us, a
scholar is almost another name for a pedant or a clown: it is not so
with them. Their philosophers and wits went into the world, and mingled
in the society of the fair. Of this there needs no other proof than the
spirited print of most of the great names in French literature, to whom
Moliere is reading a comedy in the presence of the celebrated Ninon de
l’Enclos. D’Alembert, one of the first mathematicians of his age, was a
wit, a man of gallantry and letters. With us a learned man is absorbed
in himself and some particular study, and minds nothing else. There is
something ascetic and impracticable in his very constitution, and he
answers to the description of the Monk in Spenser—
‘From every work he challenged essoin
For contemplation’s sake’—
Perhaps the superior importance attached to the institutions of
religion, as well as the more abstracted and visionary nature of its
objects, has led (as a general result) to a wider separation between
thought and action in modern times.—Ambition is of a higher and more
heroic strain than avarice. Its objects are nobler, and the means by
which it attains its ends less mechanical.
‘Better be lord of them that riches have,
Than riches have myself, and be their servile slave.’
The incentive to ambition is the love of power; the spur to avarice is
either the fear of poverty, or a strong desire of self-indulgence. The
amassers of fortunes seem divided into two opposite classes, lean,
penurious-looking mortals, or jolly fellows who are determined to get
possession of, because they want to enjoy, the good things of the world.
The one have famine and a work-house always before their eyes, the
others, in the fulness of their persons and the robustness of their
constitutions, seem to bespeak the reversion of a landed estate, rich
acres, fat beeves, a substantial mansion, costly clothing, a chine and
turkey, choice wines, and all other good things consonant to the wants
and full-fed desires of their bodies. Such men charm fortune by the
sleekness of their aspects and the goodly rotundity of their honest
faces, as the others scare away poverty by their wan, meagre looks. The
last starve themselves into riches by care and carking: the first eat,
drink, and sleep their way into the good things of this life. The
greatest number of _warm_ men in the city are good, jolly fellows. Look
at Sir William — —Callipash and callipee are written in his face: he
rolls about his unwieldy bulk in a sea of turtle-soup. How many haunches
of venison does he carry on his back! He is larded with jobs and
contracts; he is stuffed and swelled out with layers of bank-notes, and
invitations to dinner! His face hangs out a flag of defiance to
mischance: the roguish twinkle in his eye with which he lures half the
city and beats Alderman — hollow, is a smile reflected from heaps of
unsunned gold! Nature and Fortune are not so much at variance as to
differ about this fellow. To enjoy the good the Gods provide us, is to
deserve it. Nature meant him for a Knight, Alderman, and City-Member;
and Fortune laughed to see the goodly person and prospects of the
man![32]—I am not, from certain early prejudices, much given to admire
the ostentatious marks of wealth (there are persons enough to admire
them without me)—but I confess, there is something in the look of the
old banking-houses in Lombard Street, the posterns covered with mud, the
doors opening sullenly and silently, the absence of all pretence, the
darkness and the gloom within, the gleaming of lamps in the day-time,
‘Like a faint shadow of uncertain light,’
that almost realises the poetical conception of the cave of Mammon in
Spenser, where dust and cobwebs concealed the roofs and pillars of solid
gold, and lifts the mind quite off its ordinary hinges. The account of
the manner in which the founder of Guy’s Hospital accumulated his
immense wealth has always to me something romantic in it, from the same
force of contrast. He was a little shopkeeper, and out of his savings
bought Bibles, and purchased seamen’s tickets in Queen Anne’s wars, by
which he left a fortune of two hundred thousand pounds. The story
suggests the idea of a magician; nor is there anything in the Arabian
Nights that looks more like a fiction.
ESSAY XII
ON WILL-MAKING
Few things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the
circumstance of will-making. It is the latest opportunity we have of
exercising the natural perversity of the disposition, and we take care
to make a good use of it. We husband it with jealousy, put it off as
long as we can, and then use every precaution that the world shall be no
gainer by our deaths. This last act of our lives seldom belies the
former tenor of them, for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All
that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts
with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little
good, and to plague and disappoint as many people as possible.
Many persons have a superstition on the subject of making their last
will and testament, and think that when every thing is ready signed and
sealed, there is nothing farther left to delay their departure. I have
heard of an instance of one person who having a feeling of this kind on
his mind, and being teazed into making his will by those about him,
actually fell ill with pure apprehension, and thought he was going to
die in good earnest, but having executed the deed over-night, awoke, to
his great surprise, the next morning, and found himself as well as ever
he was.[33] An elderly gentleman possessed of a good estate and the same
idle notion, and who found himself in a dangerous way, was anxious to do
this piece of justice to those who remained behind him, but when it came
to the point, his heart failed him, and his nervous fancies returned in
full force:—even on his death-bed he still held back and was averse to
sign what he looked upon as his own death-warrant, and just at the last
gasp, amidst the anxious looks and silent upbraidings of friends and
relatives that surrounded him, he summoned resolution to hold out his
feeble hand which was guided by others to trace his name, and he fell
back—a corpse! If there is any pressing reason for it, that is, if any
particular person would be relieved from a state of harassing
uncertainty, or materially benefited by their making a will, the old and
infirm (who do not like to be put out of their way) generally make this
an excuse to themselves for putting it off to the very last moment,
probably till it is too late: or where this is sure to make the greatest
number of blank faces, contrive to give their friends the slip, without
signifying their final determination in their favour. Where some
unfortunate individual has been kept long in suspense, who has been
perhaps sought out for that very purpose, and who may be in a great
measure dependent on this as a last resource, it is nearly a certainty
that there will be no will to be found; no trace, no sign to discover
whether the person dying thus intestate ever had any intention of the
sort, or why they relinquished it. This it is to bespeak the thoughts
and imaginations of others for victims after we are dead, as well as
their persons and expectations for hangers-on while we are living. A
celebrated beauty of the middle of the last century, towards its close
sought out a female relative, the friend and companion of her youth, who
had lived during the forty years of their separation in rather
straitened circumstances, and in a situation which admitted of some
alleviations. Twice they met after that long lapse of time—once her
relation visited her in the splendour of a rich old family-mansion, and
once she crossed the country to become an inmate of the humble dwelling
of her early and only remaining friend. What was this for? Was it to
revive the image of her youth in the pale and careworn face of her
friend? Or was it to display the decay of her charms and recal her
long-forgotten triumphs to the memory of the only person who could bear
witness to them? Was it to show the proud remains of herself to those
who remembered or had often heard what she was—her skin like shrivelled
alabaster, her emaciated features chiseled by nature’s finest hand, her
eyes that when a smile lighted them up, still shone like diamonds, the
vermilion hues that still bloomed among wrinkles? Was it to talk of
bone-lace, of the flounces and brocades of the last century, of
race-balls in the year 62, and of the scores of lovers that had died at
her feet, and to set whole counties in a flame again, only with a dream
of faded beauty? Whether it was for this, or whether she meant to leave
her friend any thing (as was indeed expected, all things considered, not
without reason) nobody knows—for she never breathed a syllable on the
subject herself, and died without a will. The accomplished coquet of
twenty, who had pampered hopes only to kill them, who had kindled
rapture with a look and extinguished it with a breath, could find no
better employment at seventy than to revive the fond recollections and
raise up the drooping hopes of her kinswoman only to let them fall—to
rise no more. Such is the delight we have in trifling with and
tantalising the feelings of others by the exquisite refinements, the
studied sleights of love or friendship!
Where a property is actually bequeathed, supposing the circumstances of
the case and the usages of society to leave a practical discretion to
the testator, it is most frequently in such portions as can be of the
least service. Where there is much already, much is given; where much is
wanted, little or nothing. Poverty invites a sort of pity, a miserable
dole of assistance; necessity neglect and scorn; wealth attracts and
allures to itself more wealth, by natural association of ideas, or by
that innate love of inequality and injustice, which is the favourite
principle of the imagination. Men like to collect money into large heaps
in their life-time: they like to leave it in large heaps after they are
dead. They grasp it into their own hands, not to use it for their own
good, but to hoard, to lock it up, to make an object, an idol, and a
wonder of it. Do you expect them to distribute it so as to do others
good; that they will like those who come after them better than
themselves; that if they were willing to pinch and starve themselves,
they will not deliberately defraud their sworn friends and nearest
kindred of what would be of the utmost use to them? No, they will thrust
their heaps of gold and silver into the hands of others (as their
proxies) to keep for them untouched, still increasing, still of no use
to any one, but to pamper pride and avarice, to glitter in the huge,
watchful, insatiable eye of fancy, to be deposited as a new offering at
the shrine of Mammon, their God—this is with them to put it to its
intelligible and proper use, this is fulfilling a sacred, indispensable
duty, this cheers them in the solitude of the grave, and throws a gleam
of satisfaction across the stony eye of death. But to think of
frittering it down, of sinking it in charity, of throwing it away on the
idle claims of humanity, where it would no longer peer in monumental
pomp over their heads; and that too when on the point of death
themselves, _in articulo mortis_, oh! it would be madness, waste,
extravagance, impiety! Thus worldlings feel and argue without knowing
it; and while they fancy they are studying their own interest or that of
some booby successor, their _alter idem_, are but the dupes and puppets
of a favourite idea, a phantom, a prejudice, that must be kept up
somewhere (no matter where) if it still plays before and haunts their
imagination while they have sense or understanding left—to cling to
their darling follies.
There was a remarkable instance of this tendency _to the heap_, this
desire to cultivate an abstract passion for wealth, in a will of one of
the Thellusons some time back. This will went to keep the greater part
of a large property from the use of the natural heirs and next-of-kin
for a length of time, and to let it accumulate at compound interest in
such a way and so long, that it would at last mount up in value to the
purchase-money of a whole county. The interest accruing from the funded
property or the rent of the lands at certain periods was to be employed
to purchase other estates, other parks and manors in the neighbourhood
or farther off, so that the prospect of the future demesne that was to
devolve at some distant time to the unborn lord of acres, swelled and
enlarged itself, like a sea, circle without circle, vista beyond vista,
till the imagination was staggered, and the mind exhausted. Now here was
a scheme for the accumulation of wealth, and for laying the foundation
of family-aggrandisement purely imaginary, romantic—one might almost say
disinterested. The vagueness, the magnitude, the remoteness of the
object, the resolute sacrifice of all immediate and gross advantages,
clothe it with the privileges of an abstract idea, so that the project
has the air of a fiction or of a story in a novel. It was an instance of
what might be called posthumous avarice, like the love of posthumous
fame. It had little more to do with selfishness than if the testator had
appropriated the same sums in the same way to build a pyramid, to
construct an aqueduct, to endow an hospital, or effect any other
patriotic or merely fantastic purpose. He wished to heap up a pile of
wealth (millions of acres) in the dim horizon of future years, that
could be of no use to him or to those with whom he was connected by
positive and personal ties, but as a crotchet of the brain, a gew-gaw of
the fancy.[34] Yet to enable himself to put this scheme in execution, he
had perhaps toiled and watched all his life, denied himself rest, food,
pleasure, liberty, society, and persevered with the patience and
self-denial of a martyr. I have insisted on this point the more, to shew
how much of the imaginary and speculative there is interfused even in
those passions and purposes which have not the good of others for their
object, and how little reason this honest citizen and builder of castles
in the air would have had to treat those who devoted themselves to the
pursuit of fame, to obloquy and persecution for the sake of truth and
liberty, or who sacrificed their lives for their country in a just
cause, as visionaries and enthusiasts, who did not understand what was
properly due to their own interest and the securing of the main-chance.
Man is not the creature of sense and selfishness, even in those pursuits
which grow up out of that origin, so much as of imagination, custom,
passion, whim, and humour.
I have heard of a singular instance of a will made by a person who was
addicted to a habit of lying. He was so notorious for this propensity
(not out of spite or cunning, but as a gratuitous exercise of
invention), that from a child no one could ever believe a syllable he
uttered. From the want of any dependence to be placed on him, he became
the jest and bye-word of the school where he was brought up. The last
act of his life did not disgrace him. For having gone abroad, and
falling into a dangerous decline, he was advised to return home. He paid
all that he was worth for his passage, went on ship-board, and employed
the few remaining days he had to live in making and executing his will;
in which he bequeathed large estates in different parts of England,
money in the funds, rich jewels, rings, and all kinds of valuables, to
his old friends and acquaintance, who not knowing how far the force of
nature could go, were not for some time convinced that all this fairy
wealth had never had an existence any where but in the idle coinage of
his brain whose whims and projects were no more! The extreme keeping in
this character is only to be accounted for by supposing such an original
constitutional levity as made truth entirely indifferent to him, and the
serious importance attached to it by others an object of perpetual sport
and ridicule!
The art of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of
expectation. I do not so much find fault with this when it is done as a
punishment and oblique satire on servility and selfishness. It is in
that case _Diamond cut Diamond_—a trial of skill between the
legacy-hunter and the legacy-maker, which shall fool the other. The
cringing toad-eater, the officious tale-bearer, is perhaps well paid for
years of obsequious attendance with a bare mention and a mourning-ring;
nor can I think that Gil Blas’ library was not quite as much as the
coxcombry of his pretensions deserved. There are some admirable scenes
in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, shewing the humours of a legacy-hunter, and the
different ways of fobbing him off with excuses and assurances of not
being forgotten. Yet it is hardly right after all, to encourage this
kind of pitiful, barefaced intercourse, without meaning to pay for it;
as the coquette has no right to jilt the lovers she has trifled with.
Flattery and submission are marketable commodities like any other, have
their price, and ought scarcely to be obtained under false pretences. If
we see through and despise the wretched creature that attempts to impose
on our credulity, we can at any time dispense with his services; if we
are soothed by this mockery of respect and friendship, why not pay him
like any other drudge, or as we satisfy the actor who performs a part in
a play by our particular desire? But often these premeditated
disappointments are as unjust as they are cruel, and are marked with
circumstances of indignity, in proportion to the worth of the object.
The suspecting, the taking it for granted that your name is down in the
will, is sufficient provocation to have it struck out: the hinting at an
obligation, the consciousness of it on the part of the testator, will
make him determined to avoid the formal acknowledgment of it, at any
expence. The disinheriting of relations is mostly for venial offences,
not for base actions: we punish out of pique, to revenge some case in
which we have been disappointed of our wills, some act of disobedience
to what had no reasonable ground to go upon; and we are obstinate in
adhering to our resolution, as it was sudden and rash, and doubly bent
on asserting our authority in what we have least right to interfere in.
It is the wound inflicted upon our self-love, not the stain upon the
character of the thoughtless offender, that calls for condign
punishment. Crimes, vices may go unchecked, or unnoticed: but it is the
laughing at our weaknesses, or thwarting our humours, that is never to
be forgotten. It is not the errors of others, but our own
miscalculations, on which we wreak our lasting vengeance. It is
ourselves that we cannot forgive. In the will of Nicholas Gimcrack, the
virtuoso recorded in the Tatler, we learn, among other items, that his
eldest son is cut off with a single cockle-shell for his undutiful
behaviour in laughing at his little sister whom his father kept
preserved in spirits of wine. Another of his relations has a collection
of grasshoppers bequeathed him, as in the testator’s opinion an adequate
reward and acknowledgment due to his merit. The whole will of the said
Nicholas Gimcrack, Esq. is a curious document and exact picture of the
mind of the worthy virtuoso defunct, where his various follies,
littlenesses, and quaint humours are set forth, as orderly and distinct
as his butterflies’ wings and cockle-shells and skeletons of fleas in
glass-cases.[35] We often successfully try in this way to give the
finishing stroke to our pictures, hang up our weaknesses in perpetuity,
and embalm our mistakes in the memories of others.
‘Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.’
I shall not speak here of unwarrantable commands imposed upon survivors,
by which they were to carry into effect the sullen and revengeful
purposes of unprincipled men, after they had breathed their last; but we
meet with continual examples of the desire to keep up the farce (if not
the tragedy) of life, after we, the performers in it, have quitted the
stage, and to have our parts rehearsed by proxy. We thus make a caprice
immortal, a peculiarity proverbial. Hence we see the number of legacies
and fortunes left, on condition that the legatee shall take the name and
style of the testator, by which device we provide for the continuance of
the sounds that formed our names, and endow them with an estate, that
they may be repeated with proper respect. In the Memoirs of an Heiress,
all the difficulties of the plot turn on the necessity imposed by a
clause in her uncle’s will that her future husband should take the
family-name of Beverley. Poor Cecilia! What delicate perplexities she
was thrown into by this improvident provision; and with what minute,
endless, intricate distresses has the fair authoress been enabled to
harrow up the reader on this account! There was a Sir Thomas Dyot in the
reign of Charles II. who left the whole range of property which forms
Dyot-street, in St. Giles’s, and the neighbourhood, on the sole and
express condition that it should be appropriated entirely to that sort
of buildings, and to the reception of that sort of population, which
still keeps undisputed, undivided possession of it. The name was changed
the other day to George-street as a more genteel appellation, which, I
should think, is an indirect forfeiture of the estate. This Sir Thomas
Dyot I should be disposed to put upon the list of old English
worthies—as humane, liberal, and no flincher from what he took in his
head. He was no common-place man in his line. He was the best
commentator on that old-fashioned text—‘The foxes have holes, and the
birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay
his head.’—We find some that are curious in the mode in which they shall
be buried, and others in the place. Lord Camelford had his remains
buried under an ash-tree that grew on one of the mountains in
Switzerland; and Sir Francis Bourgeois had a little mausoleum built for
him in the College at Dulwich, where he once spent a pleasant, jovial
day with the master and wardens[36]. It is, no doubt, proper to attend,
except for strong reasons to the contrary, to these sort of requests;
for by breaking faith with the dead, we loosen the confidence of the
living. Besides, there is a stronger argument; we sympathise with the
dead as well as with the living, and are bound to them by the most
sacred of all ties, our own involuntary fellow-feeling with others!
Thieves, as a last donation, leave advice to their friends, physicians a
nostrum, authors a manuscript work, rakes a confession of their faith in
the virtue of the sex—all, the last dwellings of their egotism and
impertinence. One might suppose that if any thing could, the approach
and contemplation of death might bring men to a sense of reason and
self-knowledge. On the contrary, it seems only to deprive them of the
little wit they had, and to make them even more the sport of their
wilfulness and short-sightedness. Some men think that because they are
going to be hanged, they are fully authorised to declare a future state
of rewards and punishments. All either indulge their caprices or cling
to their prejudices. They make a desperate attempt to escape from
reflection by taking hold of any whim or fancy that crosses their minds,
or by throwing themselves implicitly on old habits and attachments.
An old man is twice a child: the dying man becomes the property of his
family. He has no choice left, and his voluntary power is merged in old
saws and prescriptive usages. The property we have derived from our
kindred reverts tacitly to them: and not to let it take its course, is a
sort of violence done to nature as well as custom. The idea of property,
of something in common, does not mix cordially with friendship, but is
inseparable from near relationship. We owe a return in kind, where we
feel no obligation for a favour; and consign our possessions to our next
of kin as mechanically as we lean our heads on the pillow, and go out of
the world in the same state of stupid amazement that we came into it!...
_Cætera desunt._
Oh! might that heart prove the root from which the tree of Liberty
may spring up and flourish once more, as the basil-tree grew and
grew from the cherished head of Isabella’s lover!
ESSAY XIII
ON CERTAIN INCONSISTENCIES IN SIR JOSHUA REYNOLD’S DISCOURSES
The two chief points which Sir Joshua aims at in his Discourses are to
shew that excellence in the Fine Arts is the result of pains and study,
rather than of genius, and that all beauty, grace, and grandeur are to
be found, not in actual nature, but in an idea existing in the mind. On
both these points he appears to have fallen into considerable
inconsistencies, or very great latitude of expression, so as to make it
difficult to know what conclusion to draw from his various reasonings. I
shall attempt little more in this Essay than to bring together several
passages, that from their contradictory import seem to imply some
radical defect in Sir Joshua’s theory, and a doubt as to the possibility
of placing an implicit reliance on his authority.
To begin with the first of these subjects, the question of original
genius. In the Second Discourse, On the Method of Study, Sir Joshua
observes towards the end,
‘There is one precept, however, in which I shall only be opposed by the
vain, the ignorant, and the idle. I am not afraid that I shall repeat it
too often. _You must have no dependence on your own genius._ If you have
great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate
abilities, industry will supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to
well-directed labour; nothing is to be obtained without it. Not to enter
into metaphysical discussions on the nature or essence of genius, I will
venture to assert, that assiduity unabated by difficulty, and a
disposition eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit, will produce
effects similar to those which some call the result of _natural
powers_.’—Vol. I. p. 44.
The only tendency of the maxim here laid down seems to be to lure those
students on with the hopes of excellence who have no chance of
succeeding, and to deter those who have, from relying on the only prop
and source of real excellence—the strong bent and impulse of their
natural powers. Industry alone can only produce mediocrity; but
mediocrity in art is not worth the trouble of industry. Genius, great
natural powers will give industry and ardour in the pursuit of their
proper object, but not if you divert them from that object into the
trammels of common-place mechanical labour. By this method you
neutralise all distinction of character—make a pedant of the blockhead,
and a drudge of the man of genius. What, for instance, would have been
the effect of persuading Hogarth or Rembrandt to place no dependence on
their own genius, and to apply themselves to the general study of the
different branches of the art and of every sort of excellence, with a
confidence of success proportioned to their misguided efforts, but to
destroy both those great artists? ‘You take my house when you do take
the prop that doth sustain my house!’ You undermine the superstructure
of art when you strike at its main pillar and support, confidence and
faith in nature. We might as well advise a person who had discovered a
silver or lead mine on his estate to close it up, or the common farmer
to plough up every acre he rents in the hope of discovering hidden
treasure, as advise the man of original genius to neglect his particular
vein for the study of rules and the imitation of others, or try to
persuade the man of no strong natural powers that he can supply their
deficiency by laborious application.—Sir Joshua soon after, in the Third
Discourse, alluding to the terms, _inspiration_, _genius_, _gusto_,
applied by critics and orators to painting, proceeds,
‘Such is the warmth with which both the Ancients and Moderns speak of
this divine principle of the art; but, as I have formerly observed,
enthusiastick admiration seldom promotes knowledge. Though a student by
such praise may have his attention roused and a desire excited of
running in this great career; yet it is possible that what has been said
to excite, may only serve to deter him. He examines his own mind, and
perceives there nothing of that divine inspiration, with which, he is
told, so many others have been favoured. He never travelled to heaven to
gather new ideas; and he finds himself possessed of no other
qualifications than what mere common observation and a plain
understanding can confer. Thus he becomes gloomy amidst the splendour of
figurative declamation, and thinks it hopeless to pursue an object which
he supposes out of the reach of human industry.’—Vol. I. p. 56.
Yet presently after he adds,
‘It is not easy to define in what this great style consists; nor to
describe by words the proper means of acquiring it, _if the mind of the
student should be at all capable of such an acquisition_. Could we teach
taste or genius by rules, they would be no longer taste and
genius.’—_Ibid._ p. 57.
Here then Sir Joshua admits that it is a question whether the student is
likely _to be at all capable of such an acquisition_ as the higher
excellences of art, though he had said in the passage just quoted above,
that it is within the reach of constant assiduity, and of a disposition
eagerly directed to the object of its pursuit, to effect all that is
usually considered as the result of natural powers. Is the theory which
our author means to inculcate a mere delusion, a mere arbitrary
assumption? At one moment, Sir Joshua attributes the hopelessness of the
student to attain perfection to the discouraging influence of certain
figurative and overstrained expressions, and in the next doubts his
capacity for such an acquisition under any circumstances. Would he have
him hope against hope, then? If he ‘examines his own mind and finds
nothing there of that divine inspiration, with which he is told so many
others have been favoured,’ but which he has never felt himself; if ‘he
finds himself possessed of no other qualifications’ for the highest
efforts of genius and imagination ‘than what mere common observation and
a plain understanding can confer,’ he may as well desist at once from
‘ascending the brightest heaven of invention:’—if the very idea of the
divinity of art deters instead of animating him, if the enthusiasm with
which others speak of it damps the flame in his own breast, he had
better not enter into a competition where he wants the first principle
of success, the daring to aspire and the hope to excel. He may be
assured he is not the man. Sir Joshua himself was not struck at first by
the sight of the masterpieces of the great style of art, and he seems
unconsciously to have adopted this theory to shew that he might still
have succeeded in it but for want of due application. His hypothesis
goes to this—to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all
that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can
only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry.
This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear
and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.
In speaking of Carlo Maratti, he confesses the inefficiency of this
doctrine in a very remarkable manner:—
‘Carlo Maratti succeeded better than those I have first named, and I
think owes his superiority to the extension of his views: besides his
master Andrea Sacchi, he imitated Raffaelle, Guido, and the Caraccis. It
is true, there is nothing very captivating in Carlo Maratti; but this
proceeded from a want which cannot be completely supplied; that is, want
of strength of parts. _In this certainly men are not equal_; and a man
can bring home wares only in proportion to the capital with which he
goes to market. Carlo, by diligence, made the most of what he had: but
there was undoubtedly a heaviness about him, which extended itself
uniformly to his invention, expression, his drawing, colouring, and the
general effect of his pictures. The truth is, he never equalled any of
his patterns in any one thing, and he added little of his own.’—_Ibid._
p. 172.
Here then Reynolds, we see, fairly gives up the argument. Carlo, after
all, was a heavy hand; nor could all his diligence and his making the
most of what he had, make up for the want of ‘natural powers.’ Sir
Joshua’s good sense pointed out to him the truth in the individual
instance, though he might be led astray by a vague general theory. Such
however is the effect of a false principle that there is an evident bias
in the artist’s mind to make genius lean upon others for support,
instead of trusting to itself, and developing its own incommunicable
resources. So in treating in the Twelfth Discourse of the way in which
great artists are formed, Sir Joshua reverts very nearly to his first
position.
‘The daily food and nourishment of the mind of an Artist is found in the
great works of his predecessors. There is no other way for him to become
great himself. _Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco._
Raffaelle, as appears from what has been said, had carefully studied the
works of Masaccio, and indeed there was no other, if we except Michael
Angelo (whom he likewise imitated)[37] so worthy of his attention: and
though his manner was dry and hard, his compositions formal, and not
enough diversified, according to the custom of Painters in that early
period, yet his works possess that grandeur and simplicity which
accompany, and even sometimes proceed from, regularity and hardness of
manner. We must consider the barbarous state of the arts before his
time, when skill in drawing was so little understood, that the best of
the painters could not even foreshorten the foot, but every figure
appeared to stand upon his toes; and what served for drapery had, from
the hardness and smallness of the folds, too much the appearance of
cords clinging round the body. He first introduced large drapery,
flowing in an easy and natural manner: indeed he appears to be the first
who discovered the path that leads to every excellence to which the art
afterwards arrived, and may therefore be justly considered as one of the
Great Fathers of Modern Art.
‘Though I have been led on to a longer digression respecting this great
painter than I intended, yet I cannot avoid mentioning another
excellence which he possessed in a very eminent degree; he was as much
distinguished among his contemporaries for his diligence and industry,
_as he was for the natural faculties of his mind_. We are told that his
whole attention was absorbed in the pursuit of his art, and that he
acquired the name of Masaccio from his total disregard to his dress, his
person, and all the common concerns of life. He is indeed _a signal
instance of what well-directed diligence_ will do in a short time: he
lived but twenty-seven years; yet in that short space carried the art so
far beyond what it had before reached, that he appears to stand alone as
a model for his successors. Vasari gives a long catalogue of painters
and sculptors who formed their taste and learned their art, by studying
his works; among those, he names Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Pietro Perugino, Raffaelle, Bartolomeo, Andrea del Sarto, Il Rosso, and
Pierino del Vaga.’—Vol. II. p. 95.
Sir Joshua here again halts between two opinions. He tells us the names
of the painters who formed themselves upon Masaccio’s style: he does not
tell us on whom he formed himself. At one time the natural faculties of
his mind were as remarkable as his industry; at another he was only a
signal instance of what well-directed diligence will do in a short time.
Then again ‘he appears to have been the first who discovered the path
that leads to every excellence to which the Art afterwards arrived,’
though he is introduced in an argument to shew that ‘the daily food and
nourishment of the mind of the Artist must be found in the works of his
predecessors.’ There is something surely very wavering and
unsatisfactory in all this.
Sir Joshua, in another part of his work, endeavours to reconcile and
prop up these contradictions by a paradoxical sophism which I think
turns upon himself. He says, ‘I am on the contrary persuaded, that by
imitation only’ (by which he has just explained himself to mean the
study of other masters) ‘variety and even originality of invention is
produced. I will go further; even genius, at least, what is so called,
is the child of imitation. But as this appears to be contrary to the
general opinion, I must explain my position before I enforce it.
‘Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellencies, which are
out of the reach of the rules of art; a power which no precepts can
teach, and which no industry can acquire.
‘This opinion of the impossibility of acquiring those beauties, which
stamp the work with the character of genius, supposes that it is
something more fixed than in reality it is; and that we always do and
ever did agree in opinion, with respect to what should be considered as
the characteristick of genius. But the truth is, that the _degree_ of
excellence which proclaims _Genius_ is different in different times and
different places; and what shows it to be so is, that mankind have often
changed their opinion upon this matter.
‘When the Arts were in their infancy, the power of merely drawing the
likeness of any object, was considered as one of its greatest efforts.
The common people, ignorant of the principles of art, talk the same
language even to this day. But when it was found that every man could be
taught to do this, and a great deal more, merely by the observance of
certain precepts; the name of Genius then shifted its application, and
was given only to him who added the peculiar character of the object he
represented; to him who had invention, expression, grace, or dignity, in
short, those qualities or excellencies, the power of producing which
could not _then_ be taught by any known and promulgated rules.
‘We are very sure that the beauty of form, the expression of the
passions, the art of composition, even the power of giving a general air
of grandeur to a work, is at present very much under the dominion of
rules. These excellencies were heretofore considered merely as the
effects of genius; and justly, if genius is not taken for inspiration,
but as the effect of close observation and experience.’—THE SIXTH
DISCOURSE, Vol. I. p. 153.
Sir Joshua began with undertaking to shew that ‘genius was the child of
the imitation of others; and now it turns out not to be inspiration
indeed, but the effect of close observation and experience.’ The whole
drift of this argument appears to be contrary to what the writer
intended; for the obvious inference is that the essence of genius
consists entirely, both in kind and degree, in the single circumstance
of originality. The very same things are or are not genius, according as
they proceed from invention or from mere imitation. In so far as a thing
is original, as it has never been done before, it acquires and it
deserves the appellation of genius: in so far as it is not original, and
is borrowed from others or taught by rule, it is not, neither is it
called, genius. This does not make much for the supposition that genius
is a traditional and second-hand quality. Because, for example, a man
without much genius can copy a picture of Michael Angelo’s, does it
follow that there was no genius in the original design, or that the
inventor and the copyist are equal? If indeed, as Sir Joshua labours to
prove, mere imitation of existing models and attention to established
rules could produce results exactly similar to those of natural powers,
if the progress of art as a learned profession were a gradual but
continual accumulation of individual excellence, instead of being a
sudden and almost miraculous start to the highest beauty and grandeur
nearly at first, and a regular declension to mediocrity ever after, then
indeed the distinction between genius and imitation would be little
worth contending for; the causes might be different, the effects would
be the same, or rather skill to avail ourselves of external advantages
would be of more importance and efficacy than the most powerful internal
resources. But as the case stands, all the great works of art have been
the offspring of individual genius, either projecting itself before the
general advances of society or striking out a separate path for itself;
all the rest is but labour in vain. For every purpose of emulation or
instruction, we go back to the original inventors, not to those who
imitated, and as it is falsely pretended, improved upon their models: or
if those who followed have at any time attained as high a rank or
surpassed their predecessors, it was not from borrowing their
excellences, but by unfolding new and exquisite powers of their own, of
which the moving principle lay in the individual mind, and not in the
stimulus afforded by previous example and general knowledge. Great
faults, it is true, may be avoided, but great excellences can never be
attained in this way. If Sir Joshua’s hypothesis of progressive
refinement in art was any thing more than a verbal fallacy, why does he
go back to Michael Angelo as the God of his idolatry? Why does he find
fault with Carlo Maratti for being heavy? Or why does he declare as
explicitly as truly, that ‘the judgment, after it has been long passive,
by degrees loses its power of becoming active when exertion is
necessary?’—Once more to point out the fluctuation in Sir Joshua’s
notions on this subject of the advantages of natural genius and
artificial study, he says, when recommending the proper objects of
ambition to the young artist—
‘My advice in a word is this: keep your principal attention fixed upon
the higher excellencies. If you compass them, and compass nothing more,
you are still in the first class. We may regret the innumerable beauties
which you may want; you may be very imperfect; but still you are an
imperfect artist of the highest order.’—Vol. I. p. 116.
This is in the Fifth Discourse. In the Seventh our artist seems to
waver, and fling a doubt on his former decision, whereby ‘it loses some
colour.’
‘Indeed perfection in an inferior style may be reasonably preferred to
mediocrity in the highest walks of art. A landscape of Claude Lorraine
_may_[38] be preferred to a history by Luca Giordano: but hence appears
the necessity of the connoisseur’s knowing in what consists the
excellency of each class, in order to judge how near it approaches to
perfection.’—_Ibid._ p. 217.
As he advances, however, he grows bolder, and altogether discards his
theory of judging of the artist by the class to which he belongs—‘But we
have the sanction of all mankind,’ he says, ‘in preferring genius in a
lower rank of art, to feebleness and insipidity in the highest.’ This is
in speaking of Gainsborough. The whole passage is excellent, and, I
should think, conclusive against the general and factitious style of art
on which he insists so much at other times.
‘On this ground, however unsafe, I will venture to prophesy, that two of
the last distinguished Painters of that country, I mean Pompeio Battoni,
and Raffaelle Mengs, however great their names may at present sound in
our ears,[39] will very soon fall into the rank of Imperiale, Sebastian
Concha, Placido Constanza, Massuccio, and the rest of their immediate
predecessors; whose names, though equally renowned in their life-time,
are now fallen into what is little short of total oblivion. I do not say
that those painters were not superior to the artist I allude to,[40] and
whose loss we lament, in a certain routine of practice, which, to the
eyes of common observers, has the air of a learned composition, and
bears a sort of superficial resemblance to the manner of the great men
who went before them. I know this perfectly well; but I know likewise,
that a man looking for real and lasting reputation must unlearn much of
the common-place method so observable in the works of the artists whom I
have named. For my own part, I confess, I take more interest in and am
more captivated with the powerful impression of nature, which
Gainsborough exhibited in his portraits and in his landscapes, and the
interesting simplicity and elegance of his little ordinary
beggar-children, than with any of the works of that School, since the
time of Andrea Sacchi, or perhaps we may say, Carlo Maratti; two
painters who may truly be said to be ULTIMI ROMANORUM.
‘I am well aware how much I lay myself open to the censure and ridicule
of the Academical professors of other nations, in preferring the humble
attempts of Gainsborough to the works of those regular graduates in the
great historical style. _But we have the sanction of all mankind in
preferring genius in a lower rank of art to feebleness and insipidity in
the highest._’—Vol. II. p. 152.
Yet this excellent artist and critic had said but a few pages before,
when working upon his theory—‘For this reason I shall beg leave to lay
before you a few thoughts on the subject; to throw out some hints that
may lead your minds to an opinion (which I take to be the true one) that
Painting is not only not to be considered as an imitation operating by
deception, but that it is, and ought to be, in many points of view and
strictly speaking, no imitation at all of external nature. Perhaps it
ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation as the
refined civilised state in which we live is removed from a gross state
of nature; and those who have not cultivated their imaginations, which
the majority of mankind certainly have not, may be said, in regard to
arts, to continue in this state of nature. Such men will always prefer
imitation’ (the imitation of nature) ‘to that excellence which is
addressed to another faculty that they do not possess; but these are not
the persons to whom a painter is to look, any more than a judge of
morals and manners ought to refer controverted points upon those
subjects to the opinions of people taken from the banks of the Ohio, or
from New Holland.’—Vol. II. p. 119.
In opposition to the sentiment here expressed, that ‘Painting is and
ought to be, in many points of view and strictly speaking, no imitation
at all of external nature,’ it is emphatically said in another
place—‘Nature is and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible;
and from which all excellencies must originally flow.’—Discourse VI.
Vol. I. p. 162.
I cannot undertake to reconcile so many contradictions, nor do I think
it an easy task for the student to derive any simple or intelligible
clue from these conflicting authorities and broken hints in the
prosecution of his art. Sir Joshua appears to have imbibed from others
(Burke or Johnson) a spurious metaphysical notion that art was to be
preferred to nature, and learning to genius, with which his own good
sense and practical observation were continually at war, but from which
he only emancipates himself for a moment to relapse into the same error
again shortly after.[41] The conclusion of the Twelfth Discourse is, I
think, however, a triumphant and unanswerable denunciation of his own
favourite paradox on the objects and study of art.
‘Those artists,’ (he says with a strain of eloquent truth,) ‘who have
quitted the service of nature, (whose service, when well understood, is
_perfect freedom_,) and have put themselves under the direction of I
know not what capricious fantastical mistress, who fascinates and
overpowers their whole mind, and from whose dominion there are no hopes
of their being ever reclaimed (since they appear perfectly satisfied,
and not at all conscious of their forlorn situation) like the
transformed followers of Comus.
“Not once perceive their foul disfigurement;
But boast themselves more comely than before.”
‘Methinks, such men, who have found out so short a path, have no reason
to complain of the shortness of life and the extent of art; since life
is so much longer than is wanted for their improvement, or is indeed
necessary for the accomplishment of their idea of perfection.[42] On the
contrary, he who recurs to nature, at every recurrence renews his
strength. The rules of art he is never likely to forget: they are few
and simple: but Nature is refined, subtle, and infinitely various,
beyond the power and retention of memory; it is necessary therefore to
have continual recourse to her. In this intercourse, there is no end of
his improvement: the longer he lives, the nearer he approaches to the
true and perfect idea of Art.’—Vol. II. p. 108.
ESSAY XIV
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
The first inquiry which runs through Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses
is, whether the student ought to look at nature with his own eyes or
with the eyes of others, and on the whole, he apparently inclines to the
latter. The second question is, what is to be understood by nature;
whether it is a general and abstract idea, or an aggregate of
particulars; and he strenuously maintains the former of these positions.
Yet it is not easy always to determine how far or with what precise
limitations he does so.
The first germ of his speculations on this subject is to be found in two
papers in the Idler. In the last paragraph of the second of these, he
says,
‘If it has been proved that the Painter, by attending to the invariable
and general ideas of nature, produces beauty, he must, by regarding
minute particularities and accidental discriminations, deviate from the
universal rule, and pollute his canvas with deformity.’—See Works, Vol.
II. p. 242.
In answer to this, I would say that deformity is not the being varied in
the particulars, in which all things differ (for on this principle all
nature, which is made up of individuals, would be a heap of deformity)
but in violating general rules, in which they all or almost all agree.
Thus there are no two noses in the world exactly alike, or without a
great variety of subordinate parts, which may still be handsome, but a
face without any nose at all, or a nose (like that of a mask) without
any particularity in the details, would be a great deformity in art or
nature. Sir Joshua seems to have been led into his notions on this
subject either by an ambiguity of terms, or by taking only one view of
nature. He supposes grandeur, or the general effect of the whole, to
consist in leaving out the particular details, because these details are
sometimes found without any grandeur of effect, and he therefore
conceives the two things to be irreconcileable and the alternatives of
each other. This is very imperfect reasoning. If the mere leaving out
the details constituted grandeur, any one could do this: the greatest
dauber would at that rate be the greatest artist. A house or
sign-painter might instantly enter the lists with Michael Angelo, and
might look down on the little, dry, hard manner of Raphael. But grandeur
depends on a distinct principle of its own, not on a negation of the
parts; and as it does not arise from their omission, so neither is it
incompatible with their insertion or the highest finishing. In fact, an
artist may give the minute particulars of any object one by one, and
with the utmost care, and totally neglect the proportions, arrangement
and general masses, on which the effect of the whole more immediately
depends; or he may give the latter, _viz._ the proportions and
arrangement of the larger parts and the general masses of light and
shade, and leave all the minuter parts of which those parts are composed
a mere blotch, one general smear, like the first crude and hasty getting
in of the ground-work of a picture: he may do either of these, or he may
combine both, that is, finish the parts, but put them in their right
places, and keep them in due subordination to the general effect and
massing of the whole. If the exclusion of the parts were necessary to
the grandeur of the whole composition, if the more entire this
exclusion, if the more like a _tabula rasa_, a vague, undefined, shadowy
and abstracted representation the picture was, the greater the grandeur,
there could be no danger of pushing this principle too far, and going
the full length of Sir Joshua’s theory without any restrictions or
mental reservations. But neither of these suppositions is true. The
greatest grandeur may co-exist with the most perfect, nay with a
microscopic accuracy of detail, as we see it does often in nature: the
greatest looseness and slovenliness of execution may be displayed
without any grandeur at all either in the outline or distribution of the
masses of colour. To explain more particularly what I mean. I have seen
and copied portraits by Titian, in which the eyebrows were marked with a
number of small strokes, like hair-lines (indeed, the hairs of which
they were composed were in a great measure given)—but did this destroy
the grandeur of expression, the truth of outline, arising from the
arrangement of these hair-lines in a given form? The grandeur, the
character, the expression remained, for the general form or arched and
expanded outline remained, just as much as if it had been daubed in with
a blacking-brush: the introduction of the internal parts and texture
only added delicacy and truth to the general and striking effect of the
whole. Surely a number of small dots or lines may be arranged into the
form of a square or a circle indiscriminately; the square or circle,
that is, the larger figure, remains the same, whether the line of which
it consists is broken or continuous; as we may see in prints where the
outlines, features, and masses remain the same in all the varieties of
mezzotinto, dotted and line engraving. If Titian in marking the
appearance of the hairs had deranged the general shape and contour of
the eyebrows, he would have destroyed the look of nature; but as he did
not, but kept both in view, he proportionately improved his copy of it.
So in what regards the masses of light and shade, the variety, the
delicate transparency and broken transitions of the tints is not
inconsistent with the greatest breadth or boldest contrasts. If the
light, for instance, is thrown strongly on one side of a face, and the
other is cast into deep shade, let the individual and various parts of
the surface be finished with the most scrupulous exactness both in the
drawing and in the colours: provided nature is not exceeded, this will
not nor cannot destroy the force and harmony of the composition. One
side of the face will still have that great and leading distinction of
being seen in shadow, and the other of being seen in the light, let the
subordinate differences be as many and as precise as they will. Suppose
a panther is painted in the sun: will it be necessary to leave out the
spots to produce breadth and the great style, or will not this be done
more effectually by painting the spots of one side of his shaggy coat as
they are seen in the light, and those of the other as they really appear
in natural shadow? the two masses are thus preserved completely, and no
offence is done to truth and nature. Otherwise we resolve the
distribution of light and shade into _local colouring_. The masses, the
grandeur exist equally in external nature with the local differences of
different colours. Yet Sir Joshua seems to argue that the grandeur, the
effect of the whole object, is confined to the general idea in the mind,
and that all the littleness and individuality is in nature. This is an
essentially false view of the subject. This grandeur, this general
effect, is indeed always combined with the details, or what our
theoretical reasoner would designate as _littleness_ in nature: and so
it ought to be in art, as far as art can follow nature with prudence and
profit. What is the fault of Denner’s style? It is, that he does _not_
give this combination of properties: that he gives only one view of
nature, that he abstracts the details, the finishing, the curiosities of
natural appearances from the general result, truth and character of the
whole, and in finishing every part with elaborate care, totally loses
sight of the more important and striking appearance of the object as it
presents itself to us in nature. He gives every part of a face; but the
shape, the expression, the light and shade of the whole is wrong, and as
far as can be from what is natural. He gives an infinite variety of
tints, but they are not the tints of the human face, nor are they
subjected to any principle of light and shade. He is different from
Rembrandt or Titian. The English school, formed on Sir Joshua’s theory,
give neither the finishing of the parts nor the effect of the whole, but
an inexplicable dumb mass without distinction or meaning. They do not do
as Denner did, and think that not to do as he did is to do as Titian and
Rembrandt did; I do not know whether they would take it as a compliment
to be supposed to imitate nature. Some few artists, it must be said,
have ‘of late reformed this indifferently among us! Oh! let them reform
it altogether!’ I have no doubt they would if they could; but I have
some doubts whether they can or not.—Before I proceed to consider the
question of beauty and grandeur as it relates to the selection of form,
I will quote a few passages from Sir Joshua with reference to what has
been said on the imitation of particular objects. In the Third Discourse
he observes, ‘I will now add that nature herself is not to be too
closely copied.... A mere copier of nature _can never produce any thing
great; can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of
the spectator_. The wish of the genuine painter must be more extensive:
instead of endeavouring to amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his
imitations, he must endeavour to improve them by the grandeur of his
ideas; instead of seeking praise by deceiving the superficial sense of
the spectator, he must strive for fame by captivating the
imagination.’—Vol. I. p. 53.
From this passage it would surely seem that there was nothing in nature
but minute neatness and superficial effect: nothing great in _her_
style, for an imitator of it can produce nothing great; nothing ‘to
enlarge the conceptions or warm the heart of the spectator.’
‘What word hath passed thy lips, Adam severe?’
All that is truly grand or excellent is a figment of the imagination, a
vapid creation out of nothing, a pure effect of overlooking and scorning
the minute neatness of natural objects. This will not do. Again, Sir
Joshua lays it down without any qualification that
‘The whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists in being able to get
above all singular forms, local customs, peculiarities, and _details_ of
every kind.’—Page 58.
Yet at p. 82 we find him acknowledging a different opinion.
‘I am very ready to allow’ (he says, in speaking of history-painting)
‘that _some_ circumstances of minuteness and particularity _frequently_
tend to give an air of truth to a piece, and _to interest the spectator
in an extraordinary manner_. Such circumstances therefore cannot wholly
be rejected: but if there be any thing in the Art which requires
peculiar nicety of discernment, it is the disposition of these minute
circumstantial parts; which, according to the judgment employed in the
choice, become so useful to truth or so injurious to grandeur.’—Page 82.
That’s true; but the sweeping clause against ‘all particularities and
details of every kind’ is clearly got rid of. The undecided state of Sir
Joshua’s feelings on this subject of the incompatibility between the
whole and the details is strikingly manifested in two short passages
which follow each other in the space of two pages. Speaking of some
pictures of Paul Veronese and Rubens as distinguished by the dexterity
and the unity of style displayed in them, he adds—
‘It is by this and this alone, that the mechanical power is ennobled,
and raised much above its natural rank. And it appears to me, that with
propriety it acquires this character, as an instance of that superiority
with which mind predominates over matter, by contracting into one whole
what nature has made multifarious.’—Vol. II. p. 63.
This would imply that the principle of unity and integrity is only in
the mind, and that nature is a heap of disjointed, disconnected
particulars, a chaos of points and atoms. In the very next page, the
following sentence occurs—
‘As painting is an art, they’ (the ignorant) ‘think they ought to be
pleased in proportion as they see that art ostentatiously displayed;
they will from this supposition prefer neatness, high finishing, and
gaudy colouring, to the truth, simplicity and _unity_ of nature.’
Before, neatness and high finishing were supposed to belong exclusively
to the littleness of nature, but here truth, simplicity and unity are
her characteristics. Soon after, Sir Joshua says, ‘I should be sorry if
what has been said should be understood to have any tendency to
encourage that carelessness which leaves work in an unfinished state. I
commend nothing for the want of exactness; I mean to point out that kind
of exactness which is the best, and which is alone truly to be so
esteemed.’—Vol. II. p. 65. This Sir Joshua has already told us consists
in getting above ‘all particularities and details of every kind.’ Once
more we find it is stated that
‘It is in vain to attend to the variation of tints, if in that attention
the general hue of flesh is lost; or to finish ever so minutely the
parts, if the masses are not observed, or the whole not well put
together.’
Nothing can be truer: but why always suppose the two things at variance
with each other?
‘Titian’s manner was then new to the world, but that unshaken truth on
which it is founded, has fixed it as a model to all succeeding painters;
and those who will examine into the artifice, will find it to consist in
the power of generalising, and in the shortness and simplicity of the
means employed.’—Page 51.
Titian’s real excellence consisted in the power of generalising and of
_individualising_ at the same time: if it were merely the former, it
would be difficult to account for the error immediately after pointed
out by Sir Joshua. He says in the very next paragraph:
‘Many artists, as Vasari likewise observes, have ignorantly imagined
they are imitating the manner of Titian, when they leave their colours
rough, and neglect the detail: but not possessing the principles on
which he wrought, they have produced what he calls _goffe pitture_,
absurd, foolish pictures.’—_Ibid._ p. 54.
Many artists have also imagined they were following the directions of
Sir Joshua when they did the same thing, that is, neglected the detail,
and produced the same results, vapid generalities, absurd, foolish
pictures.
I will only give two short passages more, and have done with this part
of the subject. I am anxious to confront Sir Joshua with his own
authority.
‘The advantage of this method of considering objects (_as a whole_) is
what I wish now more particularly to enforce. At the same time I do not
forget, that a painter must have the power of contracting as well as
dilating his sight; because he that does not at all express particulars,
expresses nothing; yet it is certain that a nice discrimination of
minute circumstances, and a punctilious delineation of them, whatever
excellence it may have (and I do not mean to detract from it), never did
confer on the artist the character of Genius.’—Vol. II. p. 44.
At page 53, we find the following words:
‘Whether it is the human figure, and animal, or even inanimate objects,
there is nothing, however unpromising in appearance, but may be raised
into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a
Painter of genius. What was said of Virgil, that he threw even the dung
about the ground with an air of dignity, may be applied to Titian;
whatever he touched, however naturally mean, and habitually familiar, by
a kind of magic he invested with grandeur and importance.’—No, not by
magic, but by seeking and finding in individual nature, and combined
with details of every kind, that grace and grandeur and unity of effect
which Sir Joshua supposes to be a mere creation of the artist’s brain!
Titian’s practice was, I conceive, to give general appearances with
individual forms and circumstances: Sir Joshua’s theory goes too often,
and, in its prevailing bias, to separate the two things as inconsistent
with each other, and thereby to destroy or bring into question that
union of striking effect with accuracy of resemblance in which the
essence of sound art (as far as relates to imitation) consists.
Farther, as Sir Joshua is inclined to merge the details of individual
objects in general effect, so he is resolved to reduce all beauty or
grandeur in natural objects to a central form or abstract idea of a
certain class, so as to exclude all peculiarities or deviations from
this ideal standard as unfit subjects for the artist’s pencil, and as
polluting his canvas with deformity. As the former principle went to
destroy all exactness and solidity in particular things, this goes to
confound all variety, distinctness, and characteristic force in the
broader scale of nature. There is a principle of conformity in nature or
of something in common between a number of individuals of the same
class, but there is also a principle of contrast, of discrimination and
identity, which is equally essential in the system of the universe and
in the structure of our ideas both of art and nature. Sir Joshua would
hardly neutralise the tints of the rainbow to produce a dingy grey, as a
medium or central colour: why then should he neutralise all features,
forms, &c. to produce an insipid monotony? He does not indeed consider
his theory of beauty as applicable to colour, which he well understood,
but insists upon, and literally enforces it as to form and ideal
conceptions, of which he knew comparatively little, and where his
authority is more questionable. I will not in this place undertake to
shew that his theory of a middle form (as the standard of taste and
beauty) is not true of the outline of the human face and figure or other
organic bodies, though I think that even there it is only one principle
or condition of beauty; but I do say that it has little or nothing to do
with those other capital parts of painting, colour, character,
expression, and grandeur of conception. Sir Joshua himself contends that
‘beauty in creatures of the same species is the medium or centre of all
its various forms;’ and he maintains that grandeur is the same
abstraction of the species in the individual. Therefore beauty and
grandeur must be the same thing, which they are not; so that this
definition must be faulty. Grandeur I should suppose to imply something
that elevates and expands the mind, which is chiefly power or magnitude.
Beauty is that which soothes and melts it, and its source I apprehend is
a certain harmony, softness, and gradation of form, within the limits of
our customary associations, no doubt, or of what we expect of certain
species, but not independent of every other consideration. Our critic
himself confesses of Michael Angelo, whom he regards as the pattern of
the great and sublime style, that ‘his people are a superior order of
beings; there is nothing about them, nothing in the air of their actions
or their attitudes, or the style or cast of their limbs or features,
that reminds us of their belonging to our own species. Rafaelle’s
imagination is not so elevated: his figures are not so much disjoined
from our own diminutive race of beings, though his ideas are chaste,
noble, and of great conformity to their subjects. Michael Angelo’s works
have a strong, peculiar, and marked character: they seem to proceed from
his own mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never
needed or seemed to disdain to look abroad for foreign help. Rafaelle’s
materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his
own.’ FIFTH DISCOURSE. How does all this accord with the same writer’s
favourite theory that all beauty, all grandeur, and all excellence,
consist in an approximation to that central form or habitual idea of
mediocrity, from which every deviation is so much deformity and
littleness? Michael Angelo’s figures are raised above our diminutive
race of beings, yet they are confessedly the standard of sublimity in
what regards the human form. Grandeur then admits of an exaggeration of
our habitual impressions; and ‘the strong, marked, and peculiar
character which Michael Angelo has at the same time given to his works,’
does not take away from it. This is fact against argument. I would take
Sir Joshua’s word for the goodness of a picture, and for its
distinguishing properties, sooner than I would for an abstract
metaphysical theory. Our artist also speaks continually of high and low
subjects. There can be no distinction of this kind upon his principle,
that the standard of taste is the adhering to the central form of each
species, and that every species is in itself equally beautiful. The
painter of flowers, of shells, or of any thing else, is equally elevated
with Raphael or Michael, if he adheres to the generic or established
form of what he paints: the rest, according to this definition, is a
matter of indifference. There must therefore be something besides the
central or customary form to account for the difference of dignity, for
the high and low style in nature or in art. Michael Angelo’s figures, we
are told, are more than ordinarily grand: why, by the same rule, may not
Raphael’s be more than ordinarily beautiful, have more than ordinary
softness, symmetry, and grace?—Character and expression are still less
included in the present theory. All character is a departure from the
common-place form; and Sir Joshua makes no scruple to declare that
expression destroys beauty. Thus he says,
‘If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty _in its most perfect
state_, you cannot express the passions, all of which produce distortion
and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces.’—Vol. I. p.
118.
He goes on—‘Guido, from want of choice in adapting his subject to his
ideas and his powers, or from attempting to preserve beauty where it
could not be preserved, has in this respect succeeded very ill. His
figures are often engaged in subjects that required great expression:
yet his Judith and Holofernes, the daughter of Herodias with the
Baptist’s head, the Andromeda, and some even of the Mothers of the
Innocents, have little more expression than his Venus attired by the
Graces.’—_Ibid._
What a censure is this passed upon Guido, and what a condemnation of his
own theory, which would reduce and level all that is truly great and
praiseworthy in art to this insipid, tasteless standard, by setting
aside as illegitimate all that does not come within the middle, central
form! Yet Sir Joshua judges of Hogarth as he deviates from this
standard, not as he excels in individual character, which he says is
only good or tolerable as it partakes of general nature; and he might
accuse Michael Angelo and Raphael, the one for his grandeur of style,
the other for his expression; for neither are what he sets up as the
goal of perfection.—I will just stop to remark here, that Sir Joshua has
committed himself very strangely in speaking of the character and
expression to be found in the Greek statues. He says in one place—
‘I cannot quit the Apollo, without making one observation on the
character of this figure. He is supposed to have just discharged his
arrow at the Python; and by the head retreating a little towards the
right shoulder, he appears attentive to its effect. What I would remark,
is the difference of this attention from that of the Discobolus, who is
engaged in the same purpose, watching the effect of his Discus. The
graceful, negligent, though animated air of the one, and the vulgar
eagerness of the other, furnish an instance of the judgment of the
ancient Sculptors _in their nice discrimination of character_. They are
both equally true to nature, and equally admirable.’—Vol. II. p. 21.
After a few observations on the limited means of the art of Sculpture,
and the inattention of the ancients to almost every thing but form, we
meet with the following passage:—
‘Those who think Sculpture can express more than we have allowed may
ask, by what means we discover, at the first glance, the character that
is represented in a Bust, a Cameo, or Intaglio? I suspect it will be
found, on close examination, by him who is resolved not to see more than
he really does see, that the figures are distinguished by their
_insignia_ more than by any variety of form or beauty. Take from Apollo
his Lyre, from Bacchus his Thyrsus and Vine-leaves, and Meleager the
Boar’s Head, and there will remain little or no difference in their
characters. In a Juno, Minerva, or Flora, the idea of the artist seems
to have gone no further than representing perfect beauty, and afterwards
adding the proper attributes, with a total indifference to which they
gave them.’
[What then becomes of that ‘nice discrimination of character’ for which
our author has just before celebrated them?]
‘Thus John De Bologna, after he had finished a group of a young man
holding up a young woman in his arms, with an old man at his feet,
called his friends together, to tell him what name he should give it,
and it was agreed to call it The Rape of the Sabines; and this is the
celebrated group which now stands before the old Palace at Florence. The
figures have the same general expression which is to be found in most of
the antique Sculpture; and yet it would be no wonder, if future critics
should find out delicacy of expression which was never intended; and go
so far as to see, in the old man’s countenance, the exact relation which
he bore to the woman who appears to be taken from him.’—_Ibid._ p. 25.
So it is that Sir Joshua’s theory seems to rest on an inclined plane,
and is always glad of an excuse to slide, from the severity of truth and
nature, into the milder and more equable regions of insipidity and
inanity! I am sorry to say so, but so it appears to me.
I confess, it strikes me as a self-evident truth that variety or
contrast is as essential a principle in art and nature as uniformity,
and as necessary to make up the harmony of the universe and the
contentment of the mind. Who would destroy the shifting effects of light
and shade, the sharp, lively opposition of colours in the same or in
different objects, the streaks in a flower, the stains in a piece of
marble, to reduce all to the same neutral, dead colouring, the same
middle tint? Yet it is on this principle that Sir Joshua would get rid
of all variety, character, expression, and picturesque effect in forms,
or at least measure the worth or the spuriousness of all these according
to their reference to or departure from a given or average standard.
Surely, nature is more liberal, art is wider than Sir Joshua’s theory.
Allow (for the sake of argument) that all forms are in themselves
indifferent, and that beauty or the sense of pleasure in forms can
therefore only arise from customary association, or from that middle
impression to which they all tend: yet this cannot by the same rule
apply to other things. Suppose there is no capacity in form to affect
the mind except from its corresponding to previous expectation, the same
thing cannot be said of the idea of power or grandeur. No one can say
that the idea of power does not affect the mind with the sense of awe
and sublimity. That is, power and weakness, grandeur and littleness, are
not indifferent things, the perfection of which consists in a medium
between both. Again, expression is not a thing indifferent in itself,
which derives its value or its interest solely from its conformity to a
neutral standard. Who would neutralise the expression of pleasure and
pain? Or say that the passions of the human mind, pity, love, joy,
sorrow, &c. are only interesting to the imagination and worth the
attention of the artist, as he can reduce them to an equivocal state
which is neither pleasant nor painful, neither one thing nor the other?
Or who would stop short of the utmost refinement, precision, and force
in the delineation of each? Ideal expression is not neutral expression,
but extreme expression. Again, character is a thing of peculiarity, of
striking contrast, of distinction, and not of uniformity. It is
necessarily opposed to Sir Joshua’s exclusive theory, and yet it is
surely a curious and interesting field of speculation for the human
mind. Lively, spirited discrimination of character is one source of
gratification to the lover of nature and art, which it could not be, if
all truth and excellence consisted in rejecting individual traits. Ideal
character is not common-place, but consistent character marked
throughout, which may take place in history or portrait. Historical
truth in a picture is the putting the different features of the face or
muscles of the body into consistent action. The _picturesque_ altogether
depends on particular points or qualities of an object, projecting as it
were beyond the middle line of beauty, and catching the eye of the
spectator. It was less, however, my intention to hazard any speculations
of my own, than to confirm the common-sense feelings on the subject by
Sir Joshua’s own admissions in different places. In the Tenth Discourse,
speaking of some objections to the Apollo, he has these remarkable
words—
‘In regard to the last objection (_viz._ that the lower half of the
figure is longer than just proportion allows) it must be remembered,
that Apollo is here in the exertion of _one of his peculiar powers_,
which is swiftness; he has therefore that proportion which is best
adapted to that character. This is no more incorrectness, than when
there is given to an Hercules an extraordinary swelling and strength of
muscles.’—Vol. II. p. 20.
Strength and activity then do not depend on the middle form; and the
middle form is to be sacrificed to the representation of these positive
qualities. Character is thus allowed not only to be an integrant part of
the antique and classical style of art, but even to take precedence of
and set aside the abstract idea of beauty. Little more would be required
to justify Hogarth in his Gothic resolution, that if he were to make a
figure of Charon, he would give him bandy legs, because watermen are
generally bandy-legged. It is very well to talk of the abstract idea of
a man or of a God, but if you come to any thing like an intelligible
proposition, you must either individualise and define, or destroy the
very idea you contemplate. Sir Joshua goes into this question at
considerable length in the Third Discourse.
‘To the principle I have laid down, that the idea of beauty in each
species of beings is an invariable one, it may be objected,’ he says,
‘that in every particular species there are various central forms, which
are separate and distinct from each other, and yet are undeniably
beautiful; that in the human figure, for instance, the beauty of
Hercules is one, of the Gladiator another, of the Apollo another, which
makes so many different ideas of beauty. It is true, indeed, that these
figures are each perfect in their kind, though of different characters
and proportions; but still none of them is the representation of an
individual, but of a class. And as there is one general form, which, as
I have said, belongs to the human kind at large, so in each of these
classes there is one common idea which is the abstract of the various
individual forms belonging to that class. Thus, though the forms of
childhood and age differ exceedingly, there is a common form in
childhood, and a common form in age, which is the more perfect as it is
remote from all peculiarities. But I must add further, that though the
most perfect forms of each of the general divisions of the human figure
are ideal, and superior to any individual form of that class; yet the
highest perfection of the human figure is not to be found in any of
them. It is not in the Hercules, nor in the Gladiator, nor in the
Apollo; but in that form which is taken from all, and which partakes
equally of the activity of the Gladiator, of the delicacy of the Apollo,
and of the muscular strength of the Hercules. For perfect beauty in any
species must combine all the characters which are beautiful in that
species. It cannot consist in any one to the exclusion of the rest: no
one, therefore, must be predominant, that no one may be deficient.’—Vol.
II. p. 64.
Sir Joshua here supposes the distinctions of classes and character to be
necessarily combined with the general leading idea of a middle form.
This middle form is not to confound age, sex, circumstance, under one
sweeping abstraction: but we must limit the general idea by certain
specific differences and characteristic marks, belonging to the several
subordinate divisions and ramifications of each class. This is enough to
shew that there is a principle of individuality as well as of
abstraction inseparable from works of art as well as nature. We are to
keep the human form distinct from that of other living beings, that of
men from that of women; we are to distinguish between age and infancy,
between thoughtfulness and gaiety, between strength and softness. Where
is this to stop? But Sir Joshua turns round upon himself in this very
passage, and says, ‘No: we are to unite the strength of the Hercules
with the delicacy of the Apollo; for perfect beauty in any species must
combine all the characters which are beautiful in that species.’ Now if
these different characters are beautiful in themselves, why not give
them for their own sakes and in their most striking appearances, instead
of qualifying and softening them down in a neutral form; which must
produce a compromise, not a union of different excellencies. If all
excess of beauty, if all character is deformity, then we must try to
lose it as fast as possible in other qualities. But if strength is an
excellence, if activity is an excellence, if delicacy is an excellence,
then the perfection, _i.e._ the highest degree of each of these
qualities cannot be attained but by remaining satisfied with a less
degree of the rest. But let us hear what Sir Joshua himself advances on
this subject in another part of the Discourses.
‘Some excellencies bear to be united, and are improved by union: others
are of a discordant nature: and the attempt to unite them only produces
a harsh jarring of incongruent principles. The attempt to unite contrary
excellencies (of form, for instance[43]) in a single figure, _can never
escape degenerating into the monstrous but by sinking into the insipid;
by taking away its marked character, and weakening its expression_.
‘Obvious as these remarks appear, there are many writers on our art, who
not being of the profession, and consequently not knowing what can or
cannot be done, have been very liberal of absurd praises in their
description of favourite works. They always find in them what they are
resolved to find. They praise excellencies that can hardly exist
together; and above all things are fond of describing with great
exactness the expression of a mixed passion, which more particularly
appears to me out of the reach of our art.’[44]
‘Such are many disquisitions which I have read on some of the Cartoons
and other pictures of Raffaelle, where the critics have described their
own imaginations; or indeed where the excellent master himself may have
attempted this expression of passions above the powers of the art; and
has, therefore, by an indistinct and imperfect marking, left room for
every imagination with equal probability to find a passion of his own.
What has been, and what can be done in the art, is sufficiently
difficult: we need not be mortified or discouraged at not being able to
execute the conceptions of a romantic imagination. Art has its
boundaries, though imagination has none. We can easily, like the
ancients, suppose a Jupiter to be possessed of all those powers and
perfections which the subordinate Deities were endowed with separately.
Yet when they employed their art to represent him, they confined his
character to majesty alone. Pliny, therefore, though we are under great
obligations to him for the information he has given us in relation to
the works of the ancient artists, is very frequently wrong when he
speaks of them, which he does very often, in the style of many of our
modern connoisseurs. He observes that in a statue of Paris, by
Euphranor, you might discover at the same time three different
characters; the dignity of a Judge of the Goddesses, the Lover of Helen,
and the Conqueror of Achilles. A statue in which you endeavour to unite
stately dignity, youthful elegance, and stern valour, must surely
possess none of these to any eminent degree.
‘From hence it appears, that there is much difficulty as well as danger
in an endeavour to concentrate in a single subject those various powers,
which, rising from various points, naturally move in different
directions.’—Vol. I. p. 120.
What real clue to the art or sound principles of judging the student can
derive from these contradictory statements, or in what manner it is
possible to reconcile them one to the other, I confess I am at a loss to
discover. As it appears to me, all the varieties of nature in the
infinite number of its qualities, combinations, characters, expressions,
incidents, etc. rise from distinct points or centres and must move in
distinct directions, as the forms of different species are to be
referred to a separate standard. It is the object of art to bring them
out in all their force, clearness, and precision, and not to blend them
into a vague, vapid, nondescript _ideal_ conception, which pretends to
unite, but in reality destroys. Sir Joshua’s theory limits nature and
paralyses art. According to him, the middle form or the average of our
various impressions is the source from which all beauty, pleasure,
interest, imagination springs. I contend, on the contrary, that this
very variety is good in itself, nor do I agree with him that the whole
of nature as it exists in fact is stark naught, and that there is
nothing worthy of the contemplation of a wise man but that _ideal
perfection_ which never existed in the world nor even on canvas. There
is something fastidious and sickly in Sir Joshua’s system. His code of
taste consists too much of negations, and not enough of positive,
prominent qualities. It accounts for nothing but the beauty of the
common Antique, and hardly for that. The merit of Hogarth, I grant, is
different from that of the Greek statues; but I deny that Hogarth is to
be measured by this standard, or by Sir Joshua’s middle forms: he has
powers of instruction and amusement that ‘rising from a different point,
naturally move in a different direction,’ and completely attain their
end. It would be just as reasonable to condemn a comedy for not having
the pathos of a tragedy or the stateliness of an epic poem. If Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s theory were true, Dr. Johnson’s Irene would be a
better tragedy than any of Shakespear’s.
The reasoning of the Discourses is, I think then, deficient in the
following particulars:
1. It seems to imply that general effect in a picture is produced by
leaving out the details, whereas the largest masses and the grandest
outline are consistent with the utmost delicacy of finishing in the
parts.
2. It makes no distinction between beauty and grandeur, but refers both
to an _ideal_ or middle form, as the centre of the various forms of the
species, and yet inconsistently attributes the grandeur of Michael
Angelo’s style to the superhuman appearance of his prophets and
apostles.
3. It does not at any time make mention of power or magnitude in an
object as a distinct source of the sublime (though this is acknowledged
unintentionally in the case of Michael Angelo, etc.), nor of softness or
symmetry of form as a distinct source of beauty, independently of,
though still in connection with another source arising from what we are
accustomed to expect from each individual species.
4. Sir Joshua’s theory does not leave room for character, but rejects it
as an anomaly.
5. It does not point out the source of expression, but considers it as
hostile to beauty; and yet, lastly, he allows that the middle form,
carried to the utmost theoretical extent, neither defined by character,
nor impregnated by passion, would produce nothing but vague, insipid,
unmeaning generality.
In a word, I cannot think that the theory here laid down is clear and
satisfactory, that it is consistent with itself, that it accounts for
the various excellences of art from a few simple principles, or that the
method which Sir Joshua has pursued in treating the subject is, as he
himself expresses it, ‘_a plain and honest method_.’ It is, I fear, more
calculated to baffle and perplex the student in his progress, than to
give him clear lights as to the object he should have in view, or to
furnish him with strong motives of emulation to attain it.
ESSAY XV
ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE
I have been sometimes accused of a fondness for paradoxes, but I cannot
in my own mind plead guilty to the charge. I do not indeed swear by an
opinion, because it is old: but neither do I fall in love with every
extravagance at first sight, because it is new. I conceive that a thing
may have been repeated a thousand times, without being a bit more
reasonable than it was the first time: and I also conceive that an
argument or an observation may be very just, though it may so happen
that it was never stated before. But I do not take it for granted that
every prejudice is ill-founded; nor that every paradox is self-evident,
merely because it contradicts the vulgar opinion. Sheridan once said of
some speech in his acute, sarcastic way, that ‘it contained a great deal
both of what was new and what was true: but that unfortunately what was
new was not true, and what was true was not new.’ This appears to me to
express the whole sense of the question. I do not see much use in
dwelling on a common-place, however fashionable or well-established: nor
am I very ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless I
imagine I have reason on my side. Originality implies independence of
opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest
truism. It consists in seeing and thinking for one’s-self: whereas
singularity is only the affectation of saying something to contradict
other people, without having any real opinion of one’s own upon the
matter. Mr. Burke was an original, though an extravagant writer; Mr.
Windham was a regular manufacturer of paradoxes.
The greatest number of minds seem utterly incapable of fixing on any
conclusion, except from the pressure of custom and authority: opposed to
these, there is another class less numerous but pretty formidable, who
in all their opinions are equally under the influence of novelty and
restless vanity. The prejudices of the one are counter-balanced by the
paradoxes of the other; and folly, ‘putting in one scale a weight of
ignorance, in that of pride,’ might be said to ‘smile delighted with the
eternal poise.’ A sincere and manly spirit of inquiry is neither blinded
by example nor dazzled by sudden flashes of light. Nature is always the
same, the store-house of lasting truth, and teeming with inexhaustible
variety; and he who looks at her with steady and well-practised eyes,
will find enough to employ all his sagacity, whether it has or has not
been seen by others before him. Strange as it may seem, to learn what
any object is, the true philosopher looks at the object itself, instead
of turning to others to know what they think or say or have heard of it,
or instead of consulting the dictates of his vanity, petulance, and
ingenuity, to see what can be said against their opinion, and to prove
himself wiser than all the rest of the world. For want of this, the real
powers and resources of the mind are lost and dissipated in a conflict
of opinions and passions, of obstinacy against levity, of bigotry
against self-conceit, of notorious abuses against rash innovations, of
dull, plodding, old-fashioned stupidity against new-fangled folly, of
worldly interest against headstrong egotism, of the incorrigible
prejudices of the old and the unmanageable humours of the young; while
truth lies in the middle, and is overlooked by both parties. Or as
Luther complained long ago, ‘human reason is like a drunken man on
horseback: set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the
other.’—With one sort, example, authority, fashion, ease, interest, rule
all: with the other, singularity, the love of distinction, mere whim,
the throwing off all restraint and showing an heroic disregard of
consequences, an impatient and unsettled turn of mind, the want of
sudden and strong excitement, of some new play-thing for the
imagination, are equally ‘lords of the ascendant,’ and are at every step
getting the start of reason, truth, nature, common sense and feeling.
With one party, whatever is, is right: with their antagonists, whatever
is, is wrong. These swallow every antiquated absurdity: those catch at
every new, unfledged project—and are alike enchanted with the
velocipedes or the French Revolution. One set, wrapped up in
impenetrable forms and technical traditions, are deaf to every thing
that has not been dinned in their ears, and in those of their
forefathers, from time immemorial: their hearing is _thick_ with the
same old saws, the same unmeaning form of words, everlastingly repeated:
the others pique themselves on a jargon of their own, a Babylonish
dialect, crude, unconcocted, harsh, discordant, to which it is
impossible for any one else to attach either meaning or respect. These
last turn away at the mention of all usages, creeds, institutions of
more than a day’s standing as a mass of bigotry, superstition, and
barbarous ignorance, whose leaden touch would petrify and benumb their
quick, mercurial, ‘apprehensive, forgetive’ faculties. The opinion of
to-day supersedes that of yesterday: that of to-morrow supersedes by
anticipation that of to-day. The wisdom of the ancients, the doctrines
of the learned, the laws of nations, the common sentiments of mortality,
are to them like a bundle of old almanacs. As the modern politician
always asks for this day’s paper, the modern sciolist always inquires
after the latest paradox. With him instinct is a dotard, nature a
changeling, and common sense a discarded bye-word. As with the man of
the world, what every body says must be true, the citizen of the world
has a quite different notion of the matter. With the one the majority,
‘the powers that be,’ have always been in the right in all ages and
places, though they have been cutting one another’s throats and turning
the world upside down with their quarrels and disputes from the
beginning of time: with the other, what any two people have ever agreed
in, is an error on the face of it. The credulous bigot shudders at the
idea of altering any thing in ‘time-hallowed’ institutions; and under
this cant-phrase can bring himself to tolerate any knavery, or any
folly, the Inquisition, Holy Oil, the Right Divine, &c. The more refined
sceptic will laugh in your face at the idea of retaining any thing which
has the damning stamp of custom upon it, and is for abating all former
precedents, ‘all trivial, fond records,’ the whole frame and fabric of
society as a nuisance in the lump. Is not this a pair of wiseacres
well-matched? The one stickles through thick and thin for his own
religion and government: the other scouts all religions and all
governments with a smile of ineffable disdain. The one will not move for
any consideration out of the broad and beaten path: the other is
continually turning off at right angles, and losing himself in the
labyrinths of his own ignorance and presumption. The one will not go
along with any party; the other always joins the strongest side. The one
will not conform to any common practice; the other will subscribe to any
thriving system. The one is the slave of habit, the other is the sport
of caprice. The first is like a man obstinately bed-rid: the last is
troubled with St. Vitus’s dance. He cannot stand still, he cannot rest
upon any conclusion. ‘He never is—but always to be _right_.’
The author of the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance of
the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a
maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the
philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced. As
is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a
slenderness of constitutional _stamina_, which renders the flesh no
match for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears to take no
strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but
slides from it like a river—
‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound
Receives no more than can the fluid air.’
The shock of accident, the weight of authority make no impression on his
opinions, which retire like a feather, or rise from the encounter
unhurt, through their own buoyancy. He is clogged by no dull system of
realities, no earth-bound feelings, no rooted prejudices, by nothing
that belongs to the mighty trunk and hard husk of nature and habit, but
is drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation
and fancy, to the sphere of air and fire, where his delighted spirit
floats in ‘seas of pearl and clouds of amber.’ There is no _caput
mortuum_ of worn-out, thread-bare experience to serve as ballast to his
mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to
combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with any thing solid or any
thing lasting. Bubbles are to him the only realities:—touch them, and
they vanish. Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind, and
though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling. Hence he puts every
thing into a metaphysical crucible to judge of it himself and exhibit it
to others as a subject of interesting experiment, without first making
it over to the ordeal of his common sense or trying it on his heart.
This faculty of speculating at random on all questions may in its
overgrown and uninformed state do much mischief without intending it,
like an overgrown child with the power of a man. Mr. Shelley has been
accused of vanity—I think he is chargeable with extreme levity; but this
levity is so great, that I do not believe he is sensible of its
consequences. He strives to overturn all established creeds and systems:
but this is in him an effect of constitution. He runs before the most
extravagant opinions, but this is because he is held back by none of the
merely mechanical checks of sympathy and habit. He tampers with all
sorts of obnoxious subjects, but it is less because he is gratified with
the rankness of the taint, than captivated with the intellectual
phosphoric light they emit. It would seem that he wished not so much to
convince or inform as to shock the public by the tenor of his
productions, but I suspect he is more intent upon startling himself with
his electrical experiments in morals and philosophy; and though they may
scorch other people, they are to him harmless amusements, the
coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that ‘play round the head, but do
not reach the heart.’ Still I could wish that he would put a stop to the
incessant, alarming whirl of his Voltaic battery. With his zeal, his
talent, and his fancy, he would do more good and less harm, if he were
to give up his wilder theories, and if he took less pleasure in feeling
his heart flutter in unison with the panic-struck apprehensions of his
readers. Persons of this class, instead of consolidating useful and
acknowledged truths, and thus advancing the cause of science and virtue,
are never easy but in raising doubtful and disagreeable questions, which
bring the former into disgrace and discredit. They are not contented to
lead the minds of men to an eminence overlooking the prospect of social
amelioration, unless, by forcing them up slippery paths and to the
utmost verge of possibility, they can dash them down the precipice the
instant they reach the promised Pisgah. They think it nothing to hang up
a beacon to guide or warn, if they do not at the same time frighten the
community like a comet. They do not mind making their principles odious,
provided they can make themselves notorious. To win over the public
opinion by fair means is to them an insipid, common-place mode of
popularity: they would either force it by harsh methods, or seduce it by
intoxicating potions. Egotism, petulance, licentiousness, levity of
principle (whatever be the source) is a bad thing in any one, and most
of all, in a philosophical reformer. Their humanity, their wisdom is
always ‘at the horizon.’ Any thing new, any thing remote, any thing
questionable, comes to them in a shape that is sure of a cordial
welcome—a welcome cordial in proportion as the object is new, as it is
apparently impracticable, as it is a doubt whether it is at all
desirable. Just after the final failure, the completion of the last act
of the French Revolution, when the legitimate wits were crying out, ‘The
farce is over, now let us go to supper,’ these provoking reasoners got
up a lively hypothesis about introducing the domestic government of the
Nayrs into this country as a feasible set-off against the success of the
Boroughmongers. The practical is with them always the antipodes of the
ideal; and like other visionaries of a different stamp, they date the
Millennium or New Order of Things from the Restoration of the Bourbons.
Fine words butter no parsnips, says the proverb. ‘While you are talking
of marrying, I am thinking of hanging,’ says Captain Macheath. Of all
people the most tormenting are those who bid you hope in the midst of
despair, who, by never caring about any thing but their own sanguine,
hair-brained Utopian schemes, have at no time any particular cause for
embarrassment and despondency because they have never the least chance
of success, and who by including whatever does not hit their idle fancy,
kings, priests, religion, government, public abuses or private morals,
in the same sweeping clause of ban and anathema, do all they can to
combine all parties in a common cause against them, and to prevent every
one else from advancing one step farther in the career of practical
improvement than they do in that of imaginary and unattainable
perfection.
Besides, all this untoward heat and precocity often argues rottenness
and a falling-off. I myself remember several instances of this sort of
unrestrained licence of opinion and violent effervescence of sentiment
in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the
most furious anarchists have since become the most barefaced
apostates. Among the foremost of these I might mention the present
poet-laureate and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side
of the question, Mr. Godwin, Mr. Bentham, &c. have not turned round in
this extraordinary manner: they seem to have felt their ground
(however mistaken in some points) and have in general adhered to their
first principles. But ‘poets (as it has been said) have _such seething
brains_, that they are disposed to meddle with every thing, and mar
all. They make bad philosophers and worse politicians.[45] They live,
for the most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would
perhaps be as well if they were confined to it. Their flights and
fancies are delightful to themselves and to everybody else: but they
make strange work with matter of fact; and if they were allowed to act
in public affairs, would soon turn the world the wrong side out. They
indulge only their own flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices,
and make idols or bugbears of whatever they please, caring as little
for history or particular facts as for general reasoning. They are
dangerous leaders and treacherous followers. Their inordinate vanity
runs them into all sorts of extravagances; and their habitual
effeminacy gets them out of them at any price. Always pampering their
own appetite for excitement, and wishing to astonish others, their
whole aim is to produce a dramatic effect, one way or other—to shock
or delight the observers; and they are apparently as indifferent to
the consequences of what they write, as if the world were merely a
stage for them to play their fantastic tricks on, and to make their
admirers weep. Not less romantic in their servility than their
independence, and equally importunate candidates for fame or infamy,
they require only to be distinguished, and are not scrupulous as to
the means of distinction. Jacobins or Anti-Jacobins—outrageous
advocates for anarchy and licentiousness, or flaming apostles of
political persecution—always violent and vulgar in their opinions,
they oscillate, with a giddy and sickening motion, from one absurdity
to another, and expiate the follies of youth by the heartless vices of
advancing age. None so ready as they to carry every paradox to its
most revolting and ridiculous excess—none so sure to caricature, in
their own persons, every feature of the prevailing philosophy! In
their days of blissful innovation, indeed, the philosophers crept at
their heels like hounds, while they darted on their distant quarry
like hawks; stooping always to the lowest game; eagerly snuffing up
the most tainted and rankest scents; feeding their vanity with a
notion of the strength of their digestion of poisons, and most
ostentatiously avowing whatever would most effectually startle the
prejudices of others.[46] Preposterously seeking for the stimulus of
novelty in abstract truth, and the eclat of theatrical exhibition in
pure reason, it is no wonder that these persons at last became
disgusted with their own pursuits, and that in consequence of the
violence of the change, the most inveterate prejudices and
uncharitable sentiments have rushed in to fill up the void produced by
the previous annihilation of common sense, wisdom, and humanity!’
I have so far been a little hard on poets and reformers. Lest I should
be thought to have taken a particular spite to them, I will try to make
them the _amende honourable_ by turning to a passage in the writings of
one who neither is nor ever pretended to be a poet or a reformer, but
the antithesis of both, an accomplished man of the world, a courtier,
and a wit, and who has endeavoured to move the previous question on all
schemes of fanciful improvement, and all plans of practical reform, by
the following declaration. It is in itself a finished _common-place_;
and may serve as a test whether that sort of smooth, verbal reasoning
which passes current because it excites no one idea in the mind, is much
freer from inherent absurdity than the wildest paradox.
‘My lot,’ says Mr. Canning in the conclusion of the Liverpool speech,
‘is cast under the British Monarchy. Under that I have lived; under that
I have seen my country flourish;[47] under that I have seen it enjoy as
great a share of prosperity, of happiness, and of glory, as I believe
any modification of human society to be capable of bestowing; and I am
not prepared to sacrifice or to hazard the fruit of centuries of
experience, of centuries of struggles, and of more than one century of
liberty, as perfect as ever blessed any country upon the earth, for
visionary schemes of ideal perfectibility, for doubtful experiments even
of possible improvement.’—_Mr. Canning’s Speech at the Liverpool Dinner,
given in celebration of his Re-election, March 18, 1820. Fourth Edition,
revised and corrected._
Such is Mr. Canning’s common-place; and in giving the following answer
to it, I do not think I can be accused of falling into that extravagant
and unmitigated strain of paradoxical reasoning, with which I have
already found so much fault.
The passage then which the gentleman here throws down as an effectual
bar to all change, to all innovation, to all improvement, contains at
every step a refutation of his favourite creed. He is not ‘prepared to
sacrifice or to hazard the fruit of centuries of experience, of
centuries of struggles, and of one century of liberty, for visionary
schemes of ideal perfectibility.’ So here are centuries of experience
and centuries of struggles to arrive at _one century of liberty_; and
yet according to Mr. Canning’s general advice, we are never to make any
experiments or to engage in any struggles either with a view to future
improvement, or to recover benefits which we have lost. Man (they repeat
it in our ears, line upon line, precept upon precept) is always to turn
his back upon the future, and his face to the past. He is to believe
that nothing is possible or desirable but what he finds already
established to his hands in time worn institutions or inveterate abuses.
His understanding is to be buried in implicit creeds, and he himself is
to be made into a political automaton, a go-cart of superstition and
prejudice, never stirring hand or foot but as he is pulled by the wires
and strings of the state-conjurors, the legitimate managers and
proprietors of the shew. His powers of will, of thought, and action are
to be paralysed in him, and he is to be told and to believe that
whatever is, must be. Perhaps Mr. Canning will say that men were to make
experiments, and to resolve upon struggles formerly, but that now they
are to surrender their understandings and their rights into his keeping.
But at what period of the world was the system of political wisdom
_stereotyped_, like Mr. Cobbett’s ‘Gold against Paper,’ so as to admit
of no further alterations or improvements, or correction of errors of
the press? When did the experience of mankind become stationary or
retrograde, so that we must act from the obsolete inferences of past
periods, not from the living impulse of existing circumstances, and the
consolidated force of the knowledge and reflection of ages up to the
present instant, naturally projecting us forward into the future, and
not driving us back upon the past? Did Mr. Canning never hear, did he
never think, of Lord Bacon’s axiom, ‘That those times are the ancient
times in which we live, and not those which counting backwards from
ourselves, _ordine retrogrado_, we call ancient?’ The latest periods
must necessarily have the advantage of the sum-total of the experience
that has gone before them, and of the sum-total of human reason exerted
upon that experience, or upon the solid foundation of nature and
history, moving on in its majestic course, not fluttering in the empty
air of fanciful speculation, nor leaving a gap of centuries between us
and the long-mouldered grounds on which we are to think and act. Mr.
Canning cannot plead with Mr. Burke that no discoveries, no improvements
have been made in political science and institutions; for he says we
have arrived through centuries of experience and of struggles at one
century of liberty. Is the world then at a stand? Mr. Canning knows well
enough that it is in ceaseless progress and everlasting change, but he
would have it to be the change from liberty to slavery, the progress of
corruption, not of regeneration and reform. Why, no longer ago than the
present year, the two epochs of November and January last presented (he
tells us in this very speech) as great a contrast in the state of the
country as any two periods of its history the most opposite or most
remote. Well then, are our experience and our struggles at an end? No,
he says, ‘the crisis is at hand for every man to take part for, or
against the institutions of the British Monarchy.’ His part is taken:
‘but of this be sure, to do aught good will never be his task!’ He will
guard carefully against all possible improvements, and maintain all
possible abuses sacred, impassive, immortal. He will not give up the
fruit of centuries of experience, of struggles, and of one century at
least of liberty, since the Revolution of 1688, for any doubtful
experiments whatever. We are arrived at the end of our experience, our
struggles, and our liberty—and are to anchor through time and eternity
in the harbour of passive obedience and non-resistance. We (the people
of England) will tell Mr. Canning frankly what we think of his
magnanimous and ulterior resolution. It is our own; and it has been the
resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age, ever
threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present
blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the
knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has
produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements—not (as is
pretended) the chimerical anticipation of possible advantages, but the
intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and
growing abuses. It was the experience of the enormous and disgusting
abuses and corruptions of the Papal power that produced the Reformation.
It was the experience of the vexations and oppressions of the feudal
system that produced its abolition after centuries of sufferings and of
struggles. It was the experience of the caprice and tyranny of the
Monarch that extorted _Magna Charta_ at Runnymede. It was the experience
of the arbitrary and insolent abuse of the prerogative in the reigns of
the Tudors and the first Stuarts that produced the resistance to it in
the reign of Charles I. and the Grand Rebellion. It was the experience
of the incorrigible attachment of the same Stuarts to Popery and
Slavery, with their many acts of cruelty, treachery, and bigotry, that
produced the Revolution, and set the House of Brunswick on the Throne.
It was the conviction of the incurable nature of the abuse, increasing
with time and patience, and overcoming the obstinate attachment to old
habits and prejudices, an attachment not to be rooted out by fancy or
theory, but only by repeated, lasting, and incontrovertible proofs, that
has abated every nuisance that ever was abated, and introduced every
innovation and every example of revolution and reform. It was the
experience of the abuses, licentiousness, and innumerable oppressions of
the old Government in France that produced the French Revolution. It was
the experience of the determination of the British Ministry to harass,
insult, and plunder them, that produced the Revolution of the United
States. Away then with this miserable cant against fanciful theories,
and appeal to acknowledged experience! Men never act against their
prejudices but from the spur of their feelings, the necessity of their
situations—their theories are adapted to their practical convictions and
their varying circumstances. Nature has ordered it so, and Mr. Canning,
by shewing off his rhetorical paces, by his ‘ambling and lisping and
nicknaming God’s creatures,’ cannot invert that order, efface the
history of the past, or arrest the progress of the future.—Public
opinion is the result of public events and public feelings; and
government must be moulded by that opinion, or maintain itself in
opposition to it by the sword. Mr. Canning indeed will not consent that
the social machine should in any case receive a different direction from
what it has had, ‘lest it should be hurried over the precipice and
dashed to pieces.’ These warnings of national ruin and terrific accounts
of political precipices put one in mind of Edgar’s exaggerations to
Gloster: they make one’s hair stand on end in the perusal; but the poor
old man, like poor Old England, could fall no lower than he was. Mr.
Montgomery, the ingenious and amiable poet, after he had been shut up in
solitary confinement for a year and a half for printing the Duke of
Richmond’s Letter on Reform, when he first walked out into the narrow
path of the adjoining field, was seized with an apprehension that he
should fall over it, as if he had trod on the brink of an abrupt
declivity. The author of the loyal Speech at the Liverpool Dinner has
been so long kept in the solitary confinement of his prejudices, and the
dark cells of his interest and vanity, that he is afraid of being dashed
to pieces if he makes a single false step, to the right or the left,
from his dangerous and crooked policy. As to himself, his ears are no
doubt closed to any advice that might here be offered him; and as to his
country, he seems bent on its destruction. If, however, an example of
the futility of all his projects and all his reasonings on a broader
scale, ‘to warn and scare, be wanting,’ let him look at Spain, and take
leisure to recover from his incredulity and his surprise. Spain, as
Ferdinand, as the Monarchy, has fallen from its pernicious height, never
to rise again: Spain, as Spain, as the Spanish people, has risen from
the tomb of liberty, never (it is to be hoped) to sink again under the
yoke of the bigot and the oppressor!
ESSAY XVI
ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION
Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two—vulgarity and
affectation. It may be said of them truly that ‘thin partitions do their
bounds divide.’ There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an
innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking
of being genteel. One must feel a strong tendency to that which one is
always trying to avoid: whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty
contempt for any thing, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves
very nearly on a level with it. Of the two classes of people, I hardly
know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the
genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to
distinguish themselves from the vulgar. These two sets of persons are
always thinking of one another; the lower of the higher with envy, the
more fortunate of their less happy neighbours with contempt. They are
habitually placed in opposition to each other; jostle in their
pretensions at every turn; and the same objects and train of thought
(only reversed by the relative situation of either party) occupy their
whole time and attention. The one are straining every nerve, and
outraging common sense, to be thought genteel; the others have no other
object or idea in their heads than not to be thought vulgar. This is but
poor spite; a very pitiful style of ambition. To be merely not that
which one heartily despises, is a very humble claim to superiority: to
despise what one really is, is still worse. Most of the characters in
Miss Burney’s novels, the Branghtons, the Smiths, the Dubsters, the
Cecilias, the Delvilles, &c. are well met in this respect, and much of a
piece: the one half are trying not to be taken for themselves, and the
other half not to be taken for the first. They neither of them have any
pretensions of their own, or real standard of worth. ‘A feather will
turn the scale of their avoirdupois:’ though the fair authoress was not
aware of the metaphysical identity of her principal and subordinate
characters. Affectation is the master-key to both.
Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity. It
cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up
and revels in the homely pretensions of the mass of mankind. It judges
of the worth of everything by name, fashion, opinion; and hence, from
the conscious absence of real qualities or sincere satisfaction in
itself, it builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the
wretchedness and wants of others. Violent antipathies are always
suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the
‘Great Vulgar and the Small’ is mostly in outward circumstances. The
coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at the
bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the
backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest
resources in themselves, naturally seek the food of their self-love
elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers:
scandal and satire prevail most in country-places; and a propensity to
ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what we
happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common sense and
decency.[48] True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of
others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity,
instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it.
Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a sign-post, nor Homer
hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub-street bard.
Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority;
nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse
and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and
affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen
and affectation;—of affected delight in its own _would-be_
qualifications, and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary
blunders or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat
as its inferiors. Thus a fashionable Miss titters till she is ready to
burst her sides at the uncouth shape of a bonnet, or the abrupt drop of
a courtesy (such as Jeanie Deans would make) in a country-girl who comes
to be hired by her Mamma as a servant:—yet to shew how little foundation
there is for this hysterical expression of her extreme good opinion of
herself and contempt for the untutored rustic, she would herself the
next day be delighted with the very same shaped bonnet if brought her by
a French milliner and told it was all the fashion, and in a week’s time
will become quite familiar with the maid, and chatter with her (upon
equal terms) about caps and ribbons and lace by the hour together. There
is no difference between them but that of situation in the kitchen or in
the parlour: let circumstances bring them together, and they fit like
hand and glove. It is like mistress, like maid. Their talk, their
thoughts, their dreams, their likings and dislikes are the same. The
mistress’s head runs continually on dress and finery, so does the
maid’s: the young lady longs to ride in a coach and six, so does the
maid, if she could: Miss forms a _beau idéal_ of a lover with black eyes
and rosy cheeks, which does not differ from that of her attendant: both
like a smart man, the one the footman and the other his master, for the
same reason: both like handsome furniture and fine houses: both apply
the terms, _shocking_ and _disagreeable_, to the same things and
persons: both have a great notion of balls, plays, treats, song-books
and love-tales: both like a wedding or a christening, and both would
give their little fingers to see a coronation, with this difference,
that the one has a chance of getting a seat at it, and the other is
dying of envy that she has not. Indeed, this last is a ceremony that
delights equally the greatest monarch and the meanest of his
subjects—the vilest of the rabble. Yet this, which is the height of
gentility and the consummation of external distinction and splendour,
is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony. For what degree of refinement, of
capacity, of virtue is required in the individual who is so
distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying this idle and imposing
parade of his person? Is he delighted with the state-coach and gilded
pannels? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at it. Is he struck with
the spirit, the beauty and symmetry of the eight cream-coloured horses?
There is not one of the immense multitude, who flock to see the sight
from town or country, St. Giles’s or Whitechapel, young or old, rich or
poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree to admire the same object. Is
he delighted with the yeomen of the guard, the military escort, the
groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign power, the kingly crown, the
marshal’s truncheon and the judge’s robe, the array that precedes and
follows him, the crowded streets, the windows hung with eager looks? So
are the mob, for they ‘have eyes and see them!’ There is no one faculty
of mind or body, natural or acquired, essential to the principal figure
in this procession, more than is common to the meanest and most despised
attendant on it. A wax-work figure would answer the same purpose: a Lord
Mayor of London has as much tinsel to be proud of. I would rather have a
king do something that no one else has the power or magnanimity to do,
or say something that no one else has the wisdom to say, or look more
handsome, more thoughtful, or benign than any one else in his dominions.
But I see nothing to raise one’s idea of him in his being made a shew
of: if the pageant would do as well without the man, the man would do as
well without the pageant! Kings have been declared to be ‘lovers of low
company:’ and this maxim, besides the reason sometimes assigned for it,
_viz._ that they meet with less opposition to their wills from such
persons, will I suspect be found to turn at last on the consideration I
am here stating, that they also meet with more sympathy in their tastes.
The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the
baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and shew,
which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The
stupidest slave worships the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives
appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior,
and excite the servility of the dependant: whereas a higher reach of
moral and intellectual refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs
of internal worth and inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry,
and not finding the divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation
raised would probably end in mortification on both sides!—There is
little to distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble’s shout—if
he loses that, and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the
suffrages of the wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.—But
enough of this.
‘I like it,’ says Miss Branghton[49] in Evelina (meaning the Opera)
‘because it is not vulgar.’ That is, she likes it, not because there is
any thing to like in it, but because other people are prevented from
liking or knowing any thing about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq. laugheth
to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic
criticisms in the London, for a like exquisite reason. I must therefore
make an example of him _in terrorem_ to all such hypercritics. He finds
fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to Sadler’s Wells
(‘a place he has heard of’—O Lord, Sir!)—because I notice the Miss
Dennets, ‘great favourites with the Whitechapel orders’—praise Miss
Valancy, ‘a bouncing Columbine at Ashley’s and them there places, as his
barber informs him,’ (has he no way of establishing himself in his own
good opinion but by triumphing over his barber’s bad English?)—and
finally, because I recognise the existence of the Cobourg and the Surrey
theatres, at the names of which he cries ‘Faugh’ with great
significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet he
would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a
well-bred critic. _C’est beau ça._ Now this appears to me a very crude,
unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale and vulgar way of thinking. It is
prejudging things in the lump, by names and places and classes, instead
of judging of them by what they are in themselves, by their real
qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or
delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance, and
making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority. It
is exceeding impertinence. It is rank coxcombry. It is nothing in the
world else. To condemn because the multitude admire is as essentially
vulgar as to admire because they admire. There is no exercise of taste
or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense,
and of the two I should prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon
agree with my barber as differ from him: and why should I make a point
of reversing the sentence of the Whitechapel orders? Or how can it
affect my opinion of the merits of an actor at the Cobourg or the Surrey
theatres, that these theatres are in or out of the Bills of Mortality?
This is an easy, short-hand way of judging, as gross as it is
mechanical. It is not a difficult matter to settle questions of taste by
consulting the map of London, or to prove your liberality by
geographical distinctions. Janus jumbles things together strangely. If
he had seen Mr. Kean in a provincial theatre, at Exeter or Taunton, he
would have thought it vulgar to admire him: but when he had been stamped
in London, Janus would no doubt shew his discernment and the subtlety of
his tact for the display of character and passion, by not being behind
the fashion. The Miss Dennetts are ‘little unformed girls,’ for no other
reason than because they danced at one of the Minor Theatres: let them
but come out on the Opera boards, and let the beauty and fashion of the
season greet them with a fairy shower of delighted applause, and they
would outshine Milanie ‘with the foot of fire.’ His gorge rises at the
mention of a certain quarter of the town: whatever passes current in
another, he ‘swallows total grist unsifted, husks and all.’ This is not
taste, but folly. At this rate, the hackney-coachman who drives him, or
his horse Contributor, whom he has introduced as a select personage to
the vulgar reader, knows as much of the matter as he does. In a word,
the answer to all this in the first instance is to say what vulgarity
is. Now its essence, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions,
words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one’s own
feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or
shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement,
together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and
numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to
ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing we
shall secure the suffrages of those we associate with. To affect a
gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large
number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set of
persons very little, if at all, better informed, cry it down to
distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal
vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it is
common. ’Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is
vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not
vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity: but
all these become vulgar when they are affected and shewn off on the
authority of others, or to fall in with _the fashion_ or the company we
keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as
well spurn the clod under our feet, and call it vulgar. Cobbett is
coarse enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd.
Nothing real, nothing original can be vulgar: but I should think an
imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery’s Yorkshireman is vulgar,
because he is a Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning
and low life of a particular district; it has ‘a stamp exclusive and
provincial.’ He might ‘gabble most brutishly’ and yet not fall under the
letter of the definition: but ‘his speech bewrayeth him,’ his dialect
(like the jargon of a Bond-street lounger) is the damning circumstance.
If he were a mere blockhead, it would not signify: but he thinks himself
a _knowing hand_, according to the notions and practices of those with
whom he was brought up, and which he thinks _the go_ every where. In a
word, this character is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad
habits; it is made up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of
_slang_ in it. All slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but
there is nothing vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not
vulgarity; but the looking to affectation of any sort for distinction
is. A cockney is a vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander
beyond the suburbs of the metropolis: so is a fellow who is always
thinking of the High-street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last
character. An opinion is vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the
rabble: nor is it a bit purer or more refined for having passed through
the well cleansed teeth of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in
having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headlong,
gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with
a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and
as indifferent to every thing but their own frivolous and vexatious
pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders, because they
resolve to differ from them. The fashionable have the advantage of the
unfashionable in nothing but the fashion. The true vulgar are the
_servum pecus imitatorum_—the herd of pretenders to what they do not
feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life. To
belong to any class, to move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a
very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. Refinement will in all
classes be the exception, not the rule; and the exception may fall out
in one class as well as another. A king is but an hereditary title. A
nobleman is only one of the House of Peers. To be a knight or alderman
is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king the other day made Sir Walter
Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make
another Author of Waverley. Princes, heroes are often common-place
people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote. To
be an author, to be a painter, is nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade.
‘An author! ’tis a venerable name:
How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim!’
Nay, to be a Member of the Royal Academy, or a Fellow of the Royal
Society, is but a vulgar distinction. But to be a Virgil, a Milton, a
Raphael, a Claude, is what fell to the lot of humanity but once! I do
not think _they_ were vulgar people, though for any thing I know to the
contrary, the first Lord of the Bed-chamber may be a very vulgar man:
for anything I know to the contrary, he may not be so.—Such are pretty
much my notions of gentility and vulgarity.
There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed mob, both which I hate. _Odi
profanum vulgus, et arceo._ The vapid affectation of the one is to me
even more intolerable than the gross insolence and brutality of the
other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to
shew their disregard of the company, a set of fashionable coxcombs are,
to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to shew their thorough
breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coarse and
misguided, which is something: the others consult only appearances,
which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in
his prints has trimmed the balance of pretension between the downright
blackguard and the _soi-disant_ fine gentleman unanswerably. It does not
appear in his moral demonstrations (whatever it may do in the genteel
letter-writing of Lord Chesterfield, or the chivalrous rhapsodies of
Burke) that vice by losing all its grossness loses half its evil. It
becomes more contemptible, not less disgusting. What is there in common,
for instance, between his beaux and belles, his rakes and his coquets,
and the men and women, the true heroic and ideal characters in Raphael?
But his people of fashion and quality are just upon a par with the low,
the selfish, the _unideal_ characters in the contrasted view of human
life, and are often the very same characters, only changing places. If
the lower ranks are actuated by envy and uncharitableness towards the
upper, the latter have scarcely any feelings but of pride, contempt, and
aversion to the lower. If the poor would pull down the rich to get at
their good things, the rich would tread down the poor as in a
vine-press, and squeeze the last shilling out of their pockets, and the
last drop of blood out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will and
unruly turbulence of a common alehouse are shocking, what shall we say
to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the
callous insensibility of the drawing-room and _boudoir_? I would rather
see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom)
expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling
of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth,
cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional
politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other
is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the
contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought
good company, when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy,
gratuitous assumption of superiority to every feeling of humanity,
honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, the mental and moral
_costume_ of the table, and every profession of toleration or favour for
the lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures,
treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated
society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder’s den. Or to put
this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men
in a rude state of nature outraging the human form, than I have with
apes ‘making mops and mows’ at the extravagances they have first
provoked. I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs better
than the inhumanity of courts. The violence of the one rages like a
fire; the insidious policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and
is more fatal and inevitable. The slow poison of despotism is worse than
the convulsive struggles of anarchy. ‘Of all evils,’ says Hume, ‘anarchy
is the shortest lived.’ The one may ‘break out like a wild overthrow;’
but the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and
undermines the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow
cheek, and stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want and agony
and woe. It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated
multitude stung by the sense of wrong, and maddened by sympathy: it is
more appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles,
of the whisper echoed by other assenting whispers, which doom them first
to despair and then to destruction. Popular fury finds its counterpart
in courtly servility. If every outrage is to be apprehended from the
one, every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, without
regard to justice or decency. The word of a king, ‘Go thou and do
likewise,’ makes the stoutest heart dumb: truth and honesty shrink
before it.[50] If there are watch-words for the rabble, have not the
polite and fashionable their hackneyed phrases, their fulsome unmeaning
jargon as well? Both are to me anathema!
To return to the first question, as it regards individual and private
manners. There is a fine illustration of the effects of preposterous and
affected gentility in the character of Gertrude, in the old comedy of
Eastward Hoe, written by Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in
conjunction. This play is supposed to have given rise to Hogarth’s
series of prints of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice; and there is
something exceedingly Hogarthian in the view both of vulgar and of
genteel life here displayed. The character of Gertrude in particular,
the heroine of the piece, is inimitably drawn. The mixture of vanity and
meanness, the internal worthlessness, and external pretence, the rustic
ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and
infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than
anything in real life. Cinderella and her glass-slipper are common-place
to it. She is not, like Millimant (a century afterwards) the
accomplished fine lady, but a pretender to all the foppery and finery of
the character. It is the honey-moon with her ladyship, and her folly is
at the full. To be a wife and the wife of a knight are to her pleasures
‘worn in their newest gloss,’ and nothing can exceed her raptures in the
contemplation of both parts of the dilemma. It is not familiarity but
novelty, that weds her to the court. She rises into the air of gentility
from the ground of a city life, and flutters about there with all the
fantastic delight of a butterfly that has just changed its caterpillar
state. The sound of My Lady intoxicates her with delight, makes her
giddy, and almost turns her brain. On the bare strength of it she is
ready to turn her father and mother out of doors, and treats her brother
and sister with infinite disdain and judicial hardness of heart. With
some speculators the modern philosophy has deadened and distorted all
the natural affections: and before abstract ideas and the mischievous
refinements of literature were introduced, nothing was to be met with in
the primeval state of society but simplicity and pastoral innocence of
manners—
‘And all was conscience and tender heart.’
This historical play gives the lie to the above theory pretty broadly,
yet delicately. Our heroine is as vain as she is ignorant, and as
unprincipled as she is both; and without an idea or wish of any kind but
that of adorning her person in the glass, and being called and thought a
lady, something superior to a citizen’s wife.[51] She is so bent on
finery that she believes in miracles to obtain it, and expects the
fairies to bring it her.[52] She is quite above thinking of a
settlement, jointure, or pin-money. She takes the will for the deed all
through the piece, and is so besotted with this ignorant, vulgar notion
of rank and title as a real thing that cannot be counterfeited, that she
is dupe of her own fine stratagems, and marries a gull, a dolt, a broken
adventurer for an accomplished and brave gentleman. Her meanness is
equal to her folly and her pride (and nothing can be greater), yet she
holds out on the strength of her original pretensions for a long time,
and plays the upstart with decent and imposing consistency. Indeed her
infatuation and caprices are akin to the flighty perversity of a
disordered imagination; and another turn of the wheel of good or evil
fortune would have sent her to keep company with Hogarth’s
_Merveilleuses_ in Bedlam, or with Deckar’s group of coquets in the same
place. The other parts of the play are a dreary lee-shore, like
Cuckold’s Point on the coast of Essex, where the preconcerted shipwreck
takes place that winds up the catastrophe of the piece. But this is also
characteristic of the age, and serves as a contrast to the airy and
factitious character which is the principal figure in the plot. We had
made but little progress from that point till Hogarth’s time, if Hogarth
is to be believed in his description of city manners. How wonderfully we
have distanced it since!
Without going into this at length, there is one circumstance I would
mention in which I think there has been a striking improvement in the
family economy of modern times—and that is in the relation of mistresses
and servants. After visits and finery, a married woman of the old school
had nothing to do but to attend to her housewifery. She had no other
resource, no other sense of power, but to harangue and lord it over her
domestics. Modern book-education supplies the place of the old-fashioned
system of kitchen persecution and eloquence. A well-bred woman now
seldom goes into the kitchen to look after the servants:—formerly what
was called a good manager, an exemplary mistress of a family, did
nothing but hunt them from morning to night, from one year’s end to
another, without leaving them a moment’s rest, peace, or comfort. Now a
servant is left to do her work without this suspicious and tormenting
interference and fault-finding at every step, and she does it all the
better. The proverbs about the mistress’s eye, &c. are no longer held
for current. A woman from this habit, which at last became an
unconquerable passion, would scold her maids for fifty years together,
and nothing could stop her: now the temptation to read the last new poem
or novel, and the necessity of talking of it in the next company she
goes into, prevent her—and the benefit to all parties is incalculable!
ESSAY XVII
ON A LANDSCAPE OF NICOLAS POUSSIN
‘And blind Orion hungry for the morn.’
Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is
called by Homer, ‘a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.’ He was the son
of Neptune; and having lost an eye in some affray between the Gods and
men, was told that if he would go to meet the rising sun, he would
recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his journey, with
men on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana in the
clouds greeting him. He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and
falters in his gait, as if just awaked out of sleep, or uncertain of his
way;—you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise around
him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh
with dews, the ‘grey dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,’ and in the
distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more
finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the morning; its
moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of light to
kindle it into smiles: the whole is, like the principal figure in it, ‘a
forerunner of the dawn.’ The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every
object, the same dull light ‘shadowy sets off’ the face of nature: one
feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the
painter’s canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of
things. This great and learned man might be said to see nature through
the glass of time: he alone has a right to be considered as the painter
of classical antiquity. Sir Joshua has done him justice in this respect.
He could give to the scenery of his heroic fables that unimpaired look
of original nature, full, solid, large, luxuriant, teeming with life and
power; or deck it with all the pomp of art, with temples and towers, and
mythologic groves. His pictures ‘denote a foregone conclusion.’ He
applies nature to his purposes, works out her images according to the
standard of his thoughts, embodies high fictions; and the first
conception being given, all the rest seems to grow out of, and be
assimilated to it, by the unfailing process of a studious imagination.
Like his own Orion, he overlooks the surrounding scene, appears to ‘take
up the isles as a very little thing, and to lay the earth in a balance.’
With a laborious and mighty grasp, he put nature into the mould of the
ideal and antique; and was among painters (more than any one else) what
Milton was among poets. There is in both something of the same pedantry,
the same stiffness, the same elevation, the same grandeur, the same
mixture of art and nature, the same richness of borrowed materials, the
same unity of character. Neither the poet nor the painter lowered the
subjects they treated, but filled up the outline in the fancy, and added
strength and reality to it; and thus not only satisfied, but surpassed
the expectations of the spectator and the reader. This is held for the
triumph and the perfection of works of art. To give us nature, such as
we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such as
we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and
deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked
glory, with the hues of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy
state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of
vanished empire,—who, by his ‘so potent art,’ can recal time past,
transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a
new conquest) to those of reality,—who shows us not only what nature is,
but what she has been, and is capable of,—he who does this, and does it
with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of nature and her
powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!
There is nothing in this ‘more than natural,’ if criticism could be
persuaded to think so. The historic painter does not neglect or
contravene nature, but follows her more closely up into her fantastic
heights, or hidden recesses. He demonstrates what she would be in
conceivable circumstances, and under implied conditions. He ‘gives to
airy nothing a local habitation,’ not ‘a name.’ At his touch, words
start up into images, thoughts become things. He clothes a dream, a
phantom with form and colour and the wholesome attributes of reality.
_His_ art is a second nature; not a different one. There are those,
indeed, who think that not to copy nature, is the rule for attaining
perfection. Because they cannot paint the objects which they have seen,
they fancy themselves qualified to paint the ideas which they have not
seen. But it is possible to fail in this latter and more difficult style
of imitation, as well as in the former humbler one. The detection, it is
true, is not so easy, because the objects are not so nigh at hand to
compare, and therefore there is more room both for false pretension and
for self-deceit. They take an epic motto or subject, and conclude that
the spirit is implied as a thing of course. They paint inferior
portraits, maudlin lifeless faces, without ordinary expression, or one
look, feature, or particle of nature in them, and think that this is to
rise to the truth of history. They vulgarise and degrade whatever is
interesting or sacred to the mind, and suppose that they thus add to the
dignity of their profession. They represent a face that seems as if no
thought or feeling of any kind had ever passed through it, and would
have you believe that this is the very sublime of expression, such as it
would appear in heroes, or demi-gods of old, when rapture or agony was
raised to its height. They show you a landscape that looks as if the sun
never shone upon it, and tell you that it is not modern—that so earth
looked when Titan first kissed it with his rays. This is not the true
_ideal_. It is not to fill the moulds of the imagination, but to deface
and injure them: it is not to come up to, but to fall short of the
poorest conception in the public mind. Such pictures should not be hung
in the same room with that of Orion.[53]
Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of
ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was
capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with
grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to
catch the reader’s fancy. There is a significance, a consciousness in
whatever he does (sometimes a vice, but oftener a virtue) beyond any
other painter. His Giants sitting on the tops of craggy mountains, as
huge themselves, and playing idly on their Pan’s-pipes, seem to have
been seated there these three thousand years, and to know the beginning
and the end of their own story. An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with
his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of
their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human
intellect. His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of
the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven. In his Plague
of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His picture of the
Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You
see a waste of waters, wide, interminable: the sun is labouring, wan and
weary, up the sky; the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the
eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling into one confused mass! His
human figures are sometimes ‘o’er-informed’ with this kind of feeling.
Their actions have too much gesticulation, and the set expression of the
features borders too much on the mechanical and caricatured style. In
this respect, they form a contrast to Raphael’s, whose figures never
appear to be sitting for their pictures, or to be conscious of a
spectator, or to have come from the painter’s hand. In Nicolas Poussin,
on the contrary, every thing seems to have a distinct understanding with
the artist: ‘the very stones prate of their whereabout:’ each object has
its part and place assigned, and is in a sort of compact with the rest
of the picture. It is this conscious keeping, and, as it were,
_internal_ design, that gives their peculiar character to the works of
this artist. There was a picture of Aurora in the British Gallery a year
or two ago. It was a suffusion of golden light. The Goddess wore her
saffron-coloured robes, and appeared just risen from the gloomy bed of
old Tithonus. Her very steeds, milk-white, were tinged with the yellow
dawn. It was a personification of the morning.—Poussin succeeded better
in classic than in sacred subjects. The latter are comparatively heavy,
forced, full of violent contrasts of colour, of red, blue, and black,
and without the true prophetic inspiration of the characters. But in his
Pagan allegories and fables he was quite at home. The native gravity and
native levity of the Frenchman were combined with Italian scenery and an
antique gusto, and gave even to his colouring an air of learned
indifference. He wants, in one respect, grace, form, expression; but he
has every where sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety. His
personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are
strictly versed in the business in hand. His grotesque compositions in
particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far as
style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more
immediately out of fabulous history. Rubens’s Satyrs and Bacchantes have
a more jovial and voluptuous aspect, are more drunk with pleasure, more
full of animal spirits and riotous impulses; they laugh and bound along—
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring:
but those of Poussin have more of the intellectual part of the
character, and seem vicious on reflection, and of set purpose. Rubens’s
are noble specimens of a class; Poussin’s are allegorical abstractions
of the same class, with bodies less pampered, but with minds more
secretly depraved. The Bacchanalian groups of the Flemish painter were,
however, his masterpieces in composition. Witness those prodigies of
colour, character, and expression, at Blenheim. In the more chaste and
refined delineation of classic fable, Poussin was without a rival.
Rubens, who was a match for him in the wild and picturesque, could not
pretend to vie with the elegance and purity of thought in his picture of
Apollo giving a poet a cup of water to drink, nor with the gracefulness
of design in the figure of a nymph squeezing the juice of a bunch of
grapes from her fingers (a rosy wine-press) which falls into the mouth
of a chubby infant below. But, above all, who shall celebrate, in terms
of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going
out in a fine morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this
inscription:—ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI! The eager curiosity of some, the
expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear
breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, ‘the valleys
low, where the mild zephyrs use,’ the distant, uninterrupted, sunny
prospect speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to
come![54]
Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts
passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms
hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind,
to con over the relics of ancient art bound up ‘within the book and
volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!’ A
life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy
noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same
time; for it has all ‘the sober certainty of waking bliss,’ with the
romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are
the bright consummate essences of things, and ‘he who knows of these
delights to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!’—The Orion,
which I have here taken occasion to descant upon, is one of a collection
of excellent pictures, as this collection is itself one of a series from
the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of
the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye. What hues (those of
nature mellowed by time) breathe around, as we enter! What forms are
there, woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks
of the spectator can express! What intellectual stores have been yearly
poured forth from the shrine of ancient art! The works are various, but
the names the same—heaps of Rembrandts frowning from the darkened walls,
Rubens’s glad gorgeous groups, Titians more rich and rare, Claudes
always exquisite, sometimes beyond compare, Guido’s endless cloying
sweetness, the learning of Poussin and the Caracci, and Raphael’s
princely magnificence, crowning all. We read certain letters and
syllables in the catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound, a miracle
of skill and beauty starts to view. One might think that one year’s
prodigal display of such perfection would exhaust the labours of one
man’s life; but the next year, and the next to that, we find another
harvest reaped and gathered in to the great garner of art, by the same
immortal hands—
Old GENIUS the porter of them was;
He letteth in, he letteth out to wend.—
Their works seem endless as their reputation—to be many as they are
complete—to multiply with the desire of the mind to see more and more of
them; as if there were a living power in the breath of Fame, and in the
very names of the great heirs of glory ‘there were propagation too!’ It
is something to have a collection of this sort to count upon once a
year; to have one last, lingering look yet to come. Pictures are
scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain,
earth has yet a little gilding left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured,
and defaced. There are plenty of standard works still to be found in
this country, in the collections at Blenheim, at Burleigh, and in those
belonging to Mr. Angerstein, Lord Grosvenor, the Marquis of Stafford,
and others, to keep up this treat to the lovers of art for many years:
and it is the more desirable to reserve a privileged sanctuary of this
sort, where the eye may dote, and the heart take its fill of such
pictures as Poussin’s Orion, since the Louvre is stripped of its
triumphant spoils, and since he, who collected it, and wore it as a rich
jewel in his Iron Crown, the hunter of greatness and of glory, is
himself a shade!—
ESSAY XVIII
ON MILTON’S SONNETS
The great object of the Sonnet seems to be, to express in musical
numbers, and as it were with undivided breath, some occasional thought
or personal feeling, ‘some fee-grief due to the poet’s breast.’ It is a
sigh uttered from the fulness of the heart, an involuntary aspiration
born and dying in the same moment. I have always been fond of Milton’s
Sonnets for this reason, that they have more of this personal and
internal character than any others; and they acquire a double value when
we consider that they come from the pen of the loftiest of our poets.
Compared with Paradise Lost, they are like tender flowers that adorn the
base of some proud column or stately temple. The author in the one could
work himself up with unabated fortitude ‘to the height of his great
argument;’ but in the other he has shewn that he could condescend to men
of low estate, and after the lightning and the thunder-bolt of his pen,
lets fall some drops of ‘natural pity’ over hapless infirmity, mingling
strains with the nightingale’s, ‘most musical, most melancholy.’ The
immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our breasts, and a tear
falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly hand he presses. The
Sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past achievements, loves, and
friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself to bear up with cheerful
hope and confidence to the last. Some of them are of a more quaint and
humorous character; but I speak of those only, which are intended to be
serious and pathetical.—I do not know indeed but they may be said to be
almost the first effusions of this sort of natural and personal
sentiment in the language. Drummond’s ought perhaps to be excepted, were
they formed less closely on the model of Petrarch’s, so as to be often
little more than translations of the Italian poet. But Milton’s Sonnets
are truly his own in allusion, thought, and versification. Those of Sir
Philip Sidney, who was a great transgressor in this way, turn
sufficiently on himself and his own adventures; but they are elaborately
quaint and intricate, and more like riddles than sonnets. They are ‘very
tolerable and not to be endured.’ Shakespear’s, which some persons
better-informed in such matters than I can pretend to be, profess to cry
up as ‘the divine, the matchless, what you will,’—to say nothing of the
want of point or a leading, prominent idea in most of them, are I think
overcharged and monotonous, and as to their ultimate drift, as for
myself, I can make neither head nor tail of it. Yet some of them, I own,
are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and
graceful and luxuriant like it. Here is one.
‘From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still; and you away,
As with your shadow, I with these did play.’
I am not aware of any writer of Sonnets worth mentioning here till long
after Milton, that is, till the time of Warton and the revival of a
taste for Italian and for our own early literature. During the rage for
French models, the Sonnet had not been much studied. It is a mode of
composition that depends entirely on _expression_; and this the French
and artificial style gladly dispenses with, as it lays no particular
stress on any thing—except vague, general common-places. Warton’s
Sonnets are undoubtedly exquisite, both in style and matter: they are
poetical and philosophical effusions of very delightful sentiment; but
the thoughts, though fine and deeply felt, are not, like Milton’s
subjects, identified completely with the writer, and so far want a more
individual interest. Mr. Wordsworth’s are also finely conceived and
high-sounding Sonnets. They mouth it well, and are said to be sacred to
Liberty. Brutus’s exclamation, ‘Oh Virtue, I thought thee a substance,
but I find thee a shadow,’ was not considered as a compliment, but as a
bitter sarcasm. The beauty of Milton’s Sonnets is their sincerity, the
spirit of poetical patriotism which they breathe. Either Milton’s or the
living bard’s are defective in this respect. There is no Sonnet of
Milton’s on the Restoration of Charles II. There is no Sonnet of Mr.
Wordsworth’s, corresponding to that of ‘the poet blind and bold,’ _On
the late Massacre in Piedmont_. It would be no niggard praise to Mr.
Wordsworth to grant that he was either half the man or half the poet
that Milton was. He has not his high and various imagination, nor his
deep and fixed principle. Milton did not worship the rising sun, nor
turn his back on a losing and fallen cause.
‘Such recantation had no charms for him!’
Mr. Southey has thought proper to put the author of Paradise Lost into
his late Heaven, on the understood condition that he is ‘no longer to
kings and to hierarchs hostile.’ In his life-time, he gave no sign of
such an alteration; and it is rather presumptuous in the poet-laureate
to pursue the deceased antagonist of Salmasius into the other world to
compliment him with his own infirmity of purpose. It is a wonder he did
not add in a note that Milton called him aside to whisper in his ear
that he preferred the new English hexameters to his own blank verse!
Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent
instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power
and fashion; as is the case with painters and musicians—things without
an opinion—and who merely aspire to make up the pageant and shew of the
day. There are persons in common life who have that eager curiosity and
restless admiration of bustle and splendour, that sooner than not be
admitted on great occasions of feasting and luxurious display, they will
go in the character of livery-servants to stand behind the chairs of the
great. There are others who can so little bear to be left for any length
of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly,
that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters
as well as of a change of dress. Milton was not one of these. He had too
much of the _ideal_ faculty in his composition, a lofty contemplative
principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, to be tempted by
such idle baits. We have plenty of chaunting and chiming in among some
modern writers with the triumphs over their own views and principles;
but none of a patient resignation to defeat, sustaining and nourishing
itself with the thought of the justice of their cause, and with
firm-fixed rectitude. I do not pretend to defend the tone of Milton’s
political writings (which was borrowed from the style of controversial
divinity) or to say that he was right in the part he took:—I say that he
was consistent in it, and did not convict himself of error: he was
consistent in it in spite of danger and obloquy, ‘on evil days though
fallen, and evil tongues,’ and therefore his character has the salt of
honesty about it. It does not offend in the nostrils of posterity. He
had taken his part boldly and stood to it manfully, and submitted to the
change of times with pious fortitude, building his consolations on the
resources of his own mind and the recollection of the past, instead of
endeavouring to make himself a retreat for the time to come. As an
instance of this, we may take one of the best and most admired of these
Sonnets, that addressed to Cyriac Skinner, on his own blindness.
‘Cyriac, this three years’ day, these eyes, though clear,
To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of light their seeing have forgot,
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun or moon or star throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heav’n’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, Friend, to have lost them overply’d
In liberty’s defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world’s vain mask,
Content though blind, had I no better guide.’
Nothing can exceed the mild, subdued tone of this Sonnet, nor the
striking grandeur of the concluding thought. It is curious to remark
what seems to be a trait of character in the two first lines. From
Milton’s care to inform the reader that ‘his eyes were still clear to
outward view of spot or blemish,’ it would be thought that he had not
yet given up all regard to personal appearance; a feeling to which his
singular beauty at an earlier age might be supposed naturally enough to
lead.—Of the political or (what may be called) his _State-Sonnets_,
those to Cromwell, to Fairfax, and to the younger Vane, are full of
exalted praise and dignified advice. They are neither familiar nor
servile. The writer knows what is due to power and to fame. He feels the
true, unassumed equality of greatness. He pays the full tribute of
admiration for great acts atchieved, and suggests becoming occasion to
deserve higher praise. That to Cromwell is a proof how completely our
poet maintained the erectness of his understanding and spirit in his
intercourse with men in power. It is such a compliment as a poet might
pay to a conqueror and head of the state, without the possibility of
self-degradation.
‘Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud,
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough’d,
And on the neck of crowned fortune proud
Hast rear’d God’s trophies and his work pursued,
While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud,
And Worcester’s laureat wreath. Yet much remains
To conquer still; peace hath her victories
No less renown’d than war: new foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains;
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.’
The most spirited and impassioned of them all, and the most inspired
with a sort of prophetic fury, is the one, entitled _On the late
Massacre in Piedmont_.
‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp’d stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll’d
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heav’n. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who having learn’d thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.’
In the Nineteenth Sonnet, which is also _On his blindness_, we see the
jealous watchfulness of his mind over the use of his high gifts, and the
beautiful manner in which he satisfies himself that virtuous thoughts
and intentions are not the least acceptable offering to the Almighty.
‘When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,
I fondly ask: But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.’
Those to Mr. Henry Lawes _On his Airs_, and to Mr. Lawrence, can never
be enough admired. They breathe the very soul of music and friendship.
Both have a tender, thoughtful grace; and for their lightness, with a
certain melancholy complaining intermixed, might be stolen from the harp
of Æolus. The last is the picture of a day spent in social retirement
and elegant relaxation from severer studies. We sit with the poet at
table and hear his familiar sentiments from his own lips afterwards.
‘Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sow’d nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well-touch’d, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of these delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.’
In the last, _On his deceased Wife_, the allusion to Alcestis is
beautiful, and shews how the poet’s mind raised and refined his thoughts
by exquisite classical conceptions, and how these again were enriched by
a passionate reference to actual feelings and images. It is this rare
union that gives such voluptuous dignity and touching purity to Milton’s
delineation of the female character.
‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heav’n without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight:
But O as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.’
There could not have been a greater mistake or a more unjust piece of
criticism than to suppose that Milton only shone on great subjects; and
that on ordinary occasions and in familiar life, his mind was unwieldy,
averse to the cultivation of grace and elegance, and unsusceptible of
harmless pleasures. The whole tenour of his smaller compositions
contradicts this opinion, which however they have been cited to confirm.
The notion first got abroad from the bitterness (or vehemence) of his
controversial writings, and has been kept up since with little meaning
and with less truth. His Letters to Donatus and others are not more
remarkable for the display of a scholastic enthusiasm, than for that of
the most amiable dispositions. They are ‘severe in youthful virtue
unreproved.’ There is a passage in his prose-works (the Treatise on
Education) which shews, I think, his extreme openness and proneness to
pleasing outward impressions in a striking point of view. ‘But to return
to our own institute,’ he says, ‘besides these constant exercises at
home, there is another opportunity of gaining experience to be won from
pleasure itself abroad. _In those vernal seasons of the year, when the
air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against
nature, not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing
with Heaven and earth._ I should not therefore be a persuader to them of
studying much then, but to ride out in companies with prudent and well
staid guides, to all quarters of the land,’ &c. Many other passages
might be quoted, in which the poet breaks through the ground-work of
prose, as it were, by natural fecundity and a genial, unrestrained sense
of delight. To suppose that a poet is not easily accessible to pleasure,
or that he does not take an interest in individual objects and feelings,
is to suppose that he is no poet; and proceeds on the false theory,
which has been so often applied to poetry and the Fine Arts, that the
whole is not made up of the particulars. If our author, according to Dr.
Johnson’s account of him, could only have treated epic, high-sounding
subjects, he would not have been what he was, but another Sir Richard
Blackmore.—I may conclude with observing, that I have often wished that
Milton had lived to see the Revolution of 1688. This would have been a
triumph worthy of him, and which he would have earned by faith and hope.
He would then have been old, but would not have lived in vain to see it,
and might have celebrated the event in one more undying strain!
ESSAY XIX
ON GOING A JOURNEY
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I
like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors,
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when
alone.
‘The fields his study, nature was his book.’
I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am
in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for
criticising hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to
forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I
like more elbow-room, and fewer incumbrances. I like solitude, when I
give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
—‘a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet.’
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do
just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all
impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much
more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space
to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation.
‘May plume her feathers and let grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair’d,’
that I absent myself from the town for awhile, without feeling at a loss
the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise or
in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale
topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to
thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I
laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder rolling
cloud, I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the sun-burnt
Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native
shore. Then long-forgotten things, like ‘sunken wrack and sumless
treasuries,’ burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and
be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at
wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart
which alone is perfect eloquence. No one likes puns, alliterations,
antitheses, argument, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes had
rather be without them. ‘Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!’ I have just
now other business in hand, which would seem idle to you, but is with me
‘very stuff of the conscience.’ Is not this wild rose sweet without a
comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat of
emerald? Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so
endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better then keep it
to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from here to yonder craggy
point, and from thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be
but bad company all that way, and therefore prefer being alone. I have
heard it said that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk or ride on
by yourself, and indulge your reveries. But this looks like a breach of
manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the time that you
ought to rejoin your party. ‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship,’ say
I. I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal
of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or
solitary. I was pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett’s, that ‘he
thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time.’ So I cannot
talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively conversation
by fits and starts. ‘Let me have a companion of my way,’ says Sterne,
‘were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.’ It
is beautifully said: but in my opinion, this continual comparing of
notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the
mind, and hurts the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind
of dumb show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a
toil of a pleasure. You cannot read the book of nature, without being
perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of
others. I am for the synthetical method on a journey, in preference to
the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to
examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions
float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have
them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like
to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone,
or in such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a
point with any one for twenty miles of measured road, but not for
pleasure. If you remark the scent of a beanfield crossing the road,
perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a distant
object, perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out his glass to
look at it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the colour of a
cloud which hits your fancy, but the effect of which you are unable to
account for. There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it,
and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end
probably produces ill humour. Now I never quarrel with myself, and take
all my own conclusions for granted till I find it necessary to defend
them against objections. It is not merely that you may not be of accord
on the objects and circumstances that present themselves before
you—these may recal a number of objects, and lead to associations too
delicate and refined to be possibly communicated to others. Yet these I
love to cherish, and sometimes still fondly clutch them, when I can
escape from the throng to do so. To give way to our feelings before
company, seems extravagance or affectation; and on the other hand, to
have to unravel this mystery of our being at every turn, and to make
others take an equal interest in it (otherwise the end is not answered)
is a task to which few are competent. We must ‘give it an understanding,
but no tongue.’ My old friend C—, however, could do both. He could go on
in the most delightful explanatory way over hill and dale, a summer’s
day, and convert a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric ode. ‘He
talked far above singing.’ If I could so clothe my ideas in sounding and
flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have some one with me to admire
the swelling theme; or I could be more content, were it possible for me
still to hear his echoing voice in the woods of All-Foxden. They had
‘that fine madness in them which our first poets had;’ and if they could
have been caught by some rare instrument, would have breathed such
strains as the following.
—‘Here be woods as green
As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
Face of the curled stream, with flow’rs as many
As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
Arbours o’ergrown with woodbine, caves and dells;
Choose where thou wilt, while I sit by and sing,
Or gather rushes to make many a ring
For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love,
How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove,
First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
She took eternal fire that never dies;
How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,
His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light,
To kiss her sweetest.’—
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS.
Had I words and images at command like these, I would attempt to wake
the thoughts that lie slumbering on golden ridges in the evening clouds:
but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it is, droops and closes up
its leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make nothing out on the
spot:—I must have time to collect myself.—
In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door prospects: it should be
reserved for Table-talk. L— is for this reason, I take it, the worst
company in the world out of doors; because he is the best within. I
grant, there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a
journey; and that is, what one shall have for supper when we get to our
inn at night. The open air improves this sort of conversation or
friendly altercation, by setting a keener edge on appetite. Every mile
of the road heightens the flavour of the viands we expect at the end of
it. How fine it is to enter some old town, walled and turreted just at
the approach of night-fall, or to come to some straggling village, with
the lights streaming through the surrounding gloom; and then after
inquiring for the best entertainment that the place affords, to ‘take
one’s ease at one’s inn!’ These eventful moments in our lives’ history
are too precious, too full of solid, heartfelt happiness to be frittered
and dribbled away in imperfect sympathy. I would have them all to
myself, and drain them to the last drop: they will do to talk of or to
write about afterwards. What a delicate speculation it is, after
drinking whole goblets of tea,
‘The cups that cheer, but not inebriate,’
and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we
shall have for supper—eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions,
or an excellent veal-cutlet! Sancho in such a situation once fixed upon
cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be
disparaged. Then in the intervals of pictured scenery and Shandean
contemplation, to catch the preparation and the stir in the
kitchen—_Procul, O procul este profani!_ These hours are sacred to
silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to feed the
source of smiling thoughts hereafter. I would not waste them in idle
talk; or if I must have the integrity of fancy broken in upon, I would
rather it were by a stranger than a friend. A stranger takes his hue and
character from the time and place; he is a part of the furniture and
costume of an inn. If he is a Quaker, or from the West Riding of
Yorkshire, so much the better. I do not even try to sympathise with him,
and he breaks no squares. I associate nothing with my travelling
companion but present objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me
and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself. But a friend reminds one of
other things, rips up old grievances, and destroys the abstraction of
the scene. He comes in ungraciously between us and our imaginary
character. Something is dropped in the course of conversation that gives
a hint of your profession and pursuits; or from having some one with you
that knows the less sublime portions of your history, it seems that
other people do. You are no longer a citizen of the world: but your
‘unhoused free condition is put into circumscription and confine.’ The
_incognito_ of an inn is one of its striking privileges—‘lord of
one’s-self, uncumber’d with a name.’ Oh! it is great to shake off the
trammels of the world and of public opinion—to lose our importunate,
tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and
become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties—to hold to the
universe only by a dish of sweet-breads, and to owe nothing but the
score of the evening—and no longer seeking for applause and meeting with
contempt, to be known by no other title than _the Gentleman in the
parlour_! One may take one’s choice of all characters in this romantic
state of uncertainty as to one’s real pretensions, and become
indefinitely respectable and negatively rightworshipful. We baffle
prejudice and disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin
to be objects of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more
those hackneyed common-places that we appear in the world: an inn
restores us to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I
have certainly spent some enviable hours at inns—sometimes when I have
been left entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical
problem, as once at Witham-common, where I found out the proof that
likeness is not a case of the association of ideas—at other times, when
there have been pictures in the room, as at St. Neot’s, (I think it was)
where I first met with Gribelin’s engravings of the Cartoons, into which
I entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall’s drawings, which I
compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn,
standing up in the boat between me and the twilight—at other times I
might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in this
way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read Paul and Virginia,
which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being drenched in the
rain all day; and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame
D’Arblay’s Camilla. It was on the tenth of April, 1798, that I sat down
to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle
of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St.
Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the
heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as
a _bon bouche_ to crown the evening with. It was my birthday, and I had
for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit this
delightful spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk and
Wrexham; and on passing a certain point, you come all at once upon the
valley, which opens like an amphitheatre, broad, barren hills rising in
majestic state on either side, with ‘green upland swells that echo to
the bleat of flocks’ below, and the river Dee babbling over its stony
bed in the midst of them. The valley at this time ‘glittered green with
sunny showers,’ and a budding ash-tree dipped its tender branches in the
chiding stream. How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road
that overlooks the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have
just quoted from Mr. Coleridge’s poems! But besides the prospect which
opened beneath my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a
heavenly vision, on which were written, in letters large as Hope could
make them, these four words, LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE; which have
since faded into the light of common day, or mock my idle gaze.
‘The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.’
Still I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I
would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that
influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I
could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and
defaced! I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of
years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going
shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not
only I myself have changed; the world, which was then new to me, has
become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O
sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then wert; and thou
shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the
waters of life freely!
There is hardly any thing that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change
of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings. We can by
an effort indeed transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten scenes,
and then the picture of the mind revives again; but we forget those that
we have just left. It seems that we can think but of one place at a
time. The canvas of the fancy is but of a certain extent, and if we
paint one set of objects upon it, they immediately efface every other.
We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we only shift our point of view. The
landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured eye, we take our fill of it,
and seem as if we could form no other image of beauty or grandeur. We
pass on, and think no more of it: the horizon that shuts it from our
sight, also blots it from our memory like a dream. In travelling through
a wild barren country, I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one.
It appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see of
it. In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the
country. ‘Beyond Hyde Park,’ says Sir Fopling Flutter, ‘all is a
desert.’ All that part of the map that we do not see before us is a
blank. The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a
nutshell. It is not one prospect expanded into another, county joined to
county, kingdom to kingdom, lands to seas, making an image voluminous
and vast;—the mind can form no larger idea of space than the eye can
take in at a single glance. The rest is a name written in a map, a
calculation of arithmetic. For instance, what is the true signification
of that immense mass of territory and population, known by the name of
China to us? An inch of paste-board on a wooden globe, of no more
account than a China orange! Things near us are seen of the size of
life: things at a distance are diminished to the size of the
understanding. We measure the universe by ourselves, and even comprehend
the texture of our own being only piece-meal. In this way, however, we
remember an infinity of things and places. The mind is like a mechanical
instrument that plays a great variety of tunes, but it must play them in
succession. One idea recalls another, but it at the same time excludes
all others. In trying to renew old recollections, we cannot as it were
unfold the whole web of our existence; we must pick out the single
threads. So in coming to a place where we have formerly lived and with
which we have intimate associations, every one must have found that the
feeling grows more vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere
anticipation of the actual impression: we remember circumstances,
feelings, persons, faces, names, that we had not thought of for years;
but for the time all the rest of the world is forgotten!—To return to
the question I have quitted above.
I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company
with a friend or a party, but rather the contrary, for the former reason
reversed. They are intelligible matters, and will bear talking about.
The sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable and overt. Salisbury
Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion
antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In setting out on a party
of pleasure, the first consideration always is where we shall go to: in
taking a solitary ramble, the question is what we shall meet with by the
way. ‘The mind is its own place;’ nor are we anxious to arrive at the
end of our journey. I can myself do the honours indifferently well to
works of art and curiosity. I once took a party to Oxford with no mean
_eclat_—shewed them that seat of the Muses at a distance,
‘With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn’d’—
descanted on the learned air that breathes from the grassy quadrangles
and stone walls of halls and colleges—was at home in the Bodleian; and
at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered Ciceroni that attended us, and
that pointed in vain with his wand to common-place beauties in matchless
pictures.—As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not feel
confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without a
companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own
language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishman
to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social
sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this
relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.
A person would almost feel stifled to find himself in the deserts of
Arabia without friends and countrymen: there must be allowed to be
something in the view of Athens or old Rome that claims the utterance of
speech; and I own that the Pyramids are too mighty for any single
contemplation. In such situations, so opposite to all one’s ordinary
train of ideas, one seems a species by one’s-self, a limb torn off from
society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship and support.—Yet I
did not feel this want or craving very pressing once, when I first set
my foot on the laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled with
novelty and delight. The confused, busy murmur of the place was like oil
and wine poured into my ears; nor did the mariners’ hymn, which was sung
from the top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour, as the sun went
down, send an alien sound into my soul. I only breathed the air of
general humanity. I walked over ‘the vine-covered hills and gay regions
of France,’ erect and satisfied; for the image of man was not cast down
and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones: I was at no loss for
language, for that of all the great schools of painting was open to me.
The whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes, glory, freedom,
all are fled: nothing remains but the Bourbons and the French
people!—There is undoubtedly a sensation in travelling into foreign
parts that is to be had nowhere else: but it is more pleasing at the
time than lasting. It is too remote from our habitual associations to be
a common topic of discourse or reference, and, like a dream or another
state of existence, does not piece into our daily modes of life. It is
an animated but a momentary hallucination. It demands an effort to
exchange our actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of our
old transports revive very keenly, we must ‘jump’ all our present
comforts and connexions. Our romantic and itinerant character is not to
be domesticated. Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added to
the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In fact,
the time we have spent there is both delightful and in one sense
instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright
existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but
another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out
of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So
the poet somewhat quaintly sings,
‘Out of my country and myself I go.’
Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves
for a while from the ties and objects that recal them: but we can be
said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I
should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in
travelling abroad, if I could any where borrow another life to spend
afterwards at home!—
ESSAY XX
ON COFFEE-HOUSE POLITICIANS
There is a set of people who fairly come under this denomination. They
spend their time and their breath in coffee-houses and other places of
public resort, hearing or repeating some new thing. They sit with a
paper in their hands in the morning, and with a pipe in their mouths in
the evening, discussing the contents of it. The Times, the Morning
Chronicle, and the Herald are necessary to their existence: in them
‘they live and move and have their being.’ The Evening Paper is
impatiently expected, and called for at a certain critical minute: the
news of the morning become stale and vapid by the dinner-hour. A fresher
interest is required, an appetite for the latest-stirring information is
excited with the return of their meals; and a glass of old port or
humming ale hardly relishes as it ought without the infusion of some
lively topic that had its birth with the day, and perishes before night.
‘Then come in the sweets of the evening:’—the Queen, the coronation, the
last new play, the next fight, the insurrection of the Greeks or
Neapolitans, the price of stocks, or death of kings, keep them on the
alert till bed-time. No question comes amiss to them that is quite
new—none is ever heard of that is at all old.
‘That of an hour’s age doth hiss the speaker.’
The World before the Flood or the Intermediate State of the Soul are
never once thought of—such is the quick succession of subjects, the
suddenness and fugitiveness of the interest taken in them, that the
Two-penny Post-Bag would be at present looked upon as an old-fashioned
publication, and the Battle of Waterloo, like the proverb, is somewhat
musty. It is strange that people should take so much interest at one
time in what they so soon forget:—the truth is, they feel no interest
in it at any time, but it does for something to talk about. Their
ideas are served up to them, like their bill of fare, for the day; and
the whole creation, history, war, politics, morals, poetry,
metaphysics, is to them like a file of antedated newspapers, of no
use, not even for reference, except the one which lies on the
table!—You cannot take any of these persons at a greater disadvantage
than before they are provided with their cue for the day. They ask
with a face of dreary vacuity, ‘Have you any thing new?’—and on
receiving an answer in the negative, have nothing farther to say. Talk
of the Westminster Election, the Bridge-street Association, or Mr.
Cobbett’s Letter to John Cropper of Liverpool, and they are alive
again. Beyond the last twenty-four hours, or the narrow round in which
they move, they are utterly to seek, without ideas, feelings,
interests, apprehensions of any sort; so that if you betray any
knowledge beyond the vulgar routine of SECOND EDITIONS and firsthand
private intelligence, you pass with them for a dull fellow, not
acquainted with what is going forward in the world or with the
practical value of things. I have known a person of this stamp censure
John Cam Hobhouse for referring so often as he does to the affairs of
the Greeks and Romans, as if the affairs of the nation were not
sufficient for his hands: another asks you if a General in modern
times cannot throw a bridge over a river without having studied
Cæsar’s Commentaries; and a third cannot see the use of the learned
languages, as he has observed that the greatest proficients in them
are rather taciturn than otherwise, and hesitate in their speech more
than other people. A dearth of general information is almost necessary
to the thorough-paced coffee-house politician; in the absence of
thought, imagination, sentiment, he is attracted immediately to the
nearest common-place, and floats through the chosen regions of noise
and empty rumours without difficulty and without distraction. Meet
‘any six of these men in buckram,’ and they will accost you with the
same question and the same answer: they have seen it somewhere in
print, or had it from some city-oracle, that morning; and the sooner
they vent their opinions the better, for they will not keep. Like
tickets of admission to the theatre for a particular evening, they
must be used immediately, or they will be worth nothing: and the
object is to find auditors for the one and customers for the other,
neither of which is difficult; since people who have no ideas of their
own are glad to hear what any one else has to say, as those who have
not free admissions to the play will very obligingly take up with an
occasional order.—It sometimes gives one a melancholy but mixed
sensation to see one of the better sort of this class of politicians,
not without talents or learning, absorbed for fifty years together in
the all-engrossing topic of the day: mounting on it for exercise and
recreation of his faculties, like the great horse at a riding-school,
and after his short, improgressive, untired career dismounting just
where he got up; flying abroad in continual consternation on the wings
of all the newspapers; waving his arm like a pump-handle in sign of
constant change, and spouting out torrents of puddled politics from
his mouth; dead to all interests but those of the state; seemingly
neither older nor wiser for age; unaccountably enthusiastic, stupidly
romantic, and actuated by no other motive than the mechanical
operations of the spirit of newsmongering![55]
‘What things,’ exclaims Beaumont in his verses to Ben Jonson, ‘have we
not seen done at the Mermaid!
—Then when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past, wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly!’
I cannot say the same of the S—, though it stands on classic ground,
and is connected by local tradition with the great names of the
Elizabethan age. What a falling-off is here! Our ancestors of that
period seem not only to be older by two hundred years, and
proportionably wiser and wittier than we, but hardly a trace of them
is left, not even the memory of what has been. How should I make my
friend M— stare, if I were to mention the name of my still better
friend, old honest Signor Friscobaldo, the father of Bellafront:—yet
his name was perhaps invented, and the scenes in which he figures
unrivalled might for the first time have been read aloud to thrilling
ears on this very spot! Who reads Deckar now? Or if by chance any one
awakes the strings of that ancient lyre, and starts with delight as
they yield wild, broken music, is he not accused of envy to the living
Muse? What would a linen-draper from Holborn think, if I were to ask
him after the clerk of St. Andrew’s, the immortal, the forgotten
Webster? His name and his works are no more heard of: though _these_
were written with a pen of adamant, ‘within the red-leaved tables of
the heart,’ his fame was ‘writ in water.’ So perishable is genius, so
swift is time, so fluctuating is knowledge, and so far is it from
being true that men perpetually accumulate the means of improvement
and refinement. On the contrary, living knowledge is the tomb of the
dead, and while light and worthless materials float on the surface,
the solid and sterling as often sink to the bottom, and are swallowed
up for ever in weeds and quicksands!—A striking instance of the
short-lived nature of popular reputation occurred one evening at the
S—, when we got into a dispute, the most learned and recondite that
ever took place, on the comparative merits of Lord Byron and Gray. A
country-gentleman happened to drop in, and thinking to show off in
London company, launched into a lofty panegyric on the Bard of Gray as
the sublimest composition in the English language. This assertion
presently appeared to be an anachronism, though it was probably the
opinion in vogue thirty years ago, when the gentleman was last in
town. After a little floundering, one of the party volunteered to
express a more contemporary sentiment, by asking in a tone of mingled
confidence and doubt—‘But you don’t think, Sir, that Gray is to be
mentioned as a poet in the same day with my Lord Byron?’ The
disputants were now at issue: all that resulted was that Gray was set
aside as a poet who would not go down among readers of the present
day, and his patron treated the works of the Noble Bard as mere
ephemeral effusions, and spoke of poets that would be admired thirty
years hence, which was the farthest stretch of his critical
imagination. His antagonist’s did not even reach so far. This was the
most romantic digression we ever had; and the subject was not
afterwards resumed.—No one here (generally speaking) has the slightest
notion of any thing that has happened, that has been said, thought, or
done out of his own recollection. It would be in vain to hearken after
those ‘wit-skirmishes,’ those ‘brave sublunary things,’ which were the
employment and delight of the Beaumonts and Bens of former times: but
we may happily repose on dulness, drift with the tide of nonsense, and
gain an agreeable vertigo by lending an ear to endless controversies.
The confusion, provided you do not mingle in the fray and try to
disentangle it, is amusing and edifying enough. Every species of false
wit and spurious argument may be learnt here by potent examples.
Whatever observations you hear dropt, have been picked up in the same
place or in a kindred atmosphere. There is a kind of conversation made
up entirely of scraps and hearsay, as there are a kind of books made
up entirely of references to other books. This may account for the
frequent contradictions which abound in the discourse of persons
educated and disciplined wholly in coffee-houses. There is nothing
stable or well-grounded in it: it is ‘nothing but vanity, chaotic
vanity.’ They hear a remark at the Globe which they do not know what
to make of; another at the Rainbow in direct opposition to it; and not
having time to reconcile them, vent both at the Mitre. In the course
of half an hour, if they are not more than ordinarily dull, you are
sure to find them on opposite sides of the question. This is the
sickening part of it. People do not seem to talk for the sake of
expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of
talking. We meet neither with modest ignorance nor studious
acquirement. Their knowledge has been taken in too much by snatches to
digest properly. There is neither sincerity nor system in what they
say. They hazard the first crude notion that comes to hand, and then
defend it how they can; which is for the most part but ill. ‘Don’t you
think,’ says M—, ‘that Mr. — is a very sensible, well-informed
man?’—‘Why no,’ I say, ‘he seems to me to have no ideas of his own,
and only to wait to see what others will say in order to set himself
against it. I should not think that is the way to get at the truth. I
do not desire to be driven out of my conclusions (such as they are)
merely to make way for his upstart pretensions.’—‘Then there is —:
what of him?’—‘He might very well express all he has to say in half
the time, and with half the trouble. Why should he beat about the bush
as he does? He appears to be getting up a little speech, and
practising on a smaller scale for a Debating Society—the lowest
ambition a man can have. Besides, by his manner of drawling out his
words, and interlarding his periods with inuendos and formal
reservations, he is evidently making up his mind all the time which
side he shall take. He puts his sentences together as printers set up
types, letter by letter. There is certainly no principle of short-hand
in his mode of elocution. He goes round for a meaning, and the sense
waits for him. It is not conversation, but rehearsing a part. Men of
education and men of the world order this matter better. They know
what they have to say on a subject, and come to the point at once.
Your coffee-house politician balances between what he heard last and
what he shall say next; and not seeing his way clearly, puts you off
with circumstantial phrases, and tries to gain time for fear of making
a false step. This gentleman has heard some one admired for precision
and copiousness of language; and goes away, congratulating himself
that he has not made a blunder in grammar or in rhetoric the whole
evening. He is a theoretical _Quidnunc_—is tenacious in argument,
though wary; carries his point thus and thus, bandies objections and
answers with uneasy pleasantry, and when he has the worst of the
dispute, puns very emphatically on his adversary’s name, if it admits
of that kind of misconstruction.’ G— is admired by the waiter, who is
a sleek hand[56] for his temper in managing an argument. Any one else
would perceive that the latent cause is not patience with his
antagonist, but satisfaction with himself. I think this unmoved
self-complacency, this cavalier smooth simpering indifference is more
annoying than the extremest violence or irritability. The one shews
that your opponent does care something about you, and may be put out
of his way by your remarks; the other seems to announce that nothing
you say can shake his opinion a jot, that he has considered the whole
of what you have to offer beforehand, and that he is in all respects
much wiser and more accomplished than you. Such persons talk to grown
people with the same air of patronage and condescension that they do
to children. ‘They will explain’—is a familiar expression with them,
thinking you can only differ from them in consequence of misconceiving
what they say. Or if you detect them in any error in point of fact (as
to acknowledged deficiency in wit or argument, they would smile at the
idea) they add some correction to your correction, and thus have the
whip-hand of you again, being more correct than you who corrected
them. If you hint some obvious oversight, they know what you are going
to say, and were aware of the objection before you uttered it:—‘So
shall their anticipation prevent your discovery.’ By being in the
right you gain no advantage: by being in the wrong you are entitled to
the benefit of their pity or scorn! It is sometimes curious to see a
select group of our little Gotham getting about a knotty point that
will bear a wager, as whether Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary was originally
published in quarto or folio. The confident assertions, the cautious
overtures, the length of time demanded to ascertain the fact, the
precise terms of the forfeit, the provisos for getting out of paying
it at last, lead to a long and inextricable discussion. G— was however
so convinced in his own mind that the Mourning Bride was written by
Shakespear, that he ran headlong into the snare: the bet was decided,
and the punch was drank. He has skill in numbers, and seldom exceeds
his sevenpence.—He had a brother once, no Michael Cassio, no great
arithmetician: R— was a rare fellow, of the driest humour, and the
nicest tact, of infinite sleights and evasions, of a picked
phraseology, and the very soul of mimicry. I fancy I have some insight
into physiognomy myself, but he could often expound to me at a single
glance the characters of those of my acquaintance that I had been most
at fault about. The account as it was cast up and balanced between us
was not always very favourable. How finely, how truly, how gaily he
took off the company at the S—! Poor and faint are my sketches
compared to his! It was like looking into a _camera obscura_—you saw
faces shining and speaking—the smoke curled, the lights dazzled, the
oak wainscoting took a higher polish—there was old S—, tall and gaunt,
with his couplet from Pope and case at Nisi Prius, M— eyeing the
ventilator and lying _perdu_ for a moral, and H— and A— taking another
friendly finishing glass!—These and many more windfalls of character
he gave us in thought, word, and action. I remember his once
describing three different persons together to myself and M— B—, viz.
the manager of a country theatre, a tragic and a comic performer, till
we were ready to tumble on the floor with laughing at the oddity of
their humours, and at R—’s extraordinary powers of ventriloquism,
bodily and mental; and B— said (such was the vividness of the scene)
that when he awoke the next morning, he wondered what three amusing
characters he had been in company with the evening before. Oh! it was
a rich treat to see him describe M—df—rd, him of the Courier, the
Contemplative Man, who wrote an answer to Cœlebs, coming into a room,
folding up his great coat, taking out a little pocket volume, laying
it down to think, rubbing the calf of his leg with grave
self-complacency, and starting out of his reverie when spoken to with
an inimitable vapid exclamation of ‘Eh!’ M—df—rd is like a man made of
fleecy hosiery: R— was lank and lean ‘as is the ribbed sea-sand.’ Yet
he seemed the very man he represented, as fat, pert, and dull as it
was possible to be. I have not seen him of late:—
‘For Kais is fled, and our tents are forlorn.’
But I thought of him the other day when the news of the death of
Buonaparte came, whom we both loved for precisely contrary reasons, he
for putting down the rabble of the people, and I because he had put down
the rabble of kings. Perhaps this event may rouse him from his
lurking-place, where he lies like Reynard, with head declined, in
feigned slumbers![57]—
I had almost forgotten the S— Tavern. We for some time took C— for a
lawyer, from a certain arguteness of voice and slenderness of neck, and
from his having a quibble and a laugh at himself always ready. On
inquiry, however, he was found to be a patent-medicine seller, and
having leisure in his apprenticeship, and a forwardness of parts, he had
taken to study Blackstone and the Statutes at Large. On appealing to M—
for his opinion on this matter, he observed pithily, ‘I don’t like so
much law: the gentlemen here seem fond of law, but I have law enough at
chambers.’ One sees a great deal of the humours and tempers of men in a
place of this sort, and may almost gather their opinions from their
characters. There is E—, a fellow that is always in the wrong—who puts
might for right on all occasions—a Tory in grain—who has no one idea but
what has been instilled into him by custom and authority—an everlasting
babbler on the stronger side of the question—querulous and dictatorial,
and with a peevish whine in his voice like a beaten school-boy. He is a
great advocate for the Bourbons, and for the National Debt. The former
he affirms to be the choice of the French people, and the latter he
insists is necessary to the salvation of these kingdoms. This last point
a little inoffensive gentleman among us, of a saturnine aspect but
simple conceptions, cannot comprehend. ‘I will tell you, Sir—I will make
my proposition so clear that you will be convinced of the truth of my
observation in a moment. Consider, Sir, the number of trades that would
be thrown out of employ, if it were done away with: what would become of
the porcelain manufacture without it?’ Any stranger to overhear one of
these debates would swear that the English as a nation are bad
logicians. Mood and figure are unknown to them. They do not argue by the
book. They arrive at conclusions through the force of prejudice, and on
the principles of contradiction. Mr. E— having thus triumphed in
argument, offers a flower to the notice of the company as a specimen of
his flower-garden, a curious exotic, nothing like it to be found in this
kingdom, talks of his carnations, of his countryhouse, and old English
hospitality, but never invites any of his friends to come down and take
their Sunday’s dinner with him. He is mean and ostentatious at the same
time, insolent and servile, does not know whether to treat those he
converses with as if they were his porters or his customers: the
prentice-boy is not yet wiped out of him, and his imagination still
hovers between his mansion at —, and the work-house. Opposed to him and
to every one else, is K—, a radical reformer and logician, who makes
clear work of the taxes and national debt, reconstructs the Government
from the first principles of things, shatters the Holy Alliance at a
blow, grinds out the future prospects of society with a machine, and is
setting out afresh with the commencement of the French Revolution five
and twenty years ago, as if on an untried experiment. He minds nothing
but the formal agreement of his premises and his conclusions, and does
not stick at obstacles in the way nor consequences in the end. If there
was but one side of a question, he would be always in the right. He
casts up one column of the account to admiration, but totally forgets
and rejects the other. His ideas lie like square pieces of wood in his
brain, and may be said to be piled up on a stiff architectural
principle, perpendicularly, and at right angles. There is no inflection,
no modification, no graceful embellishment, no Corinthian capitals. I
never heard him agree to two propositions together, or to more than half
a one at a time. His rigid love of truth bends to nothing but his
habitual love of disputation. He puts one in mind of one of those
long-headed politicians and frequenters of coffee-houses mentioned in
Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher, who would make nothing of such
old-fashioned fellows as Plato and Aristotle. He has the new light
strong upon him, and he knocks other people down with its solid beams.
He denies that he has got certain views out of Cobbett, though he allows
that there are excellent ideas occasionally to be met with in that
writer. It is a pity that this enthusiastic and unqualified regard to
truth should be accompanied with an equal exactness of expenditure and
unrelenting eye to the main-chance. He brings a bunch of radishes with
him for cheapness, and gives a band of musicians at the door a penny,
observing that he likes their performance better than all the
Opera-squalling. This brings the severity of his political principles
into question, if not into contempt. He would abolish the National Debt
from motives of personal economy, and objects to Mr. Canning’s pension
because it perhaps takes a farthing a year out of his own pocket. A
great deal of radical reasoning has its source in this feeling.—He
bestows no small quantity of his tediousness upon M—, on whose mind all
these formulas and diagrams fall like seed on stony ground: ‘while the
manna is descending,’ he shakes his ears, and in the intervals of the
debate, insinuates an objection, and calls for another half-pint. I have
sometimes said to him—‘Any one to come in here without knowing you,
would take you for the most disputatious man alive, for you are always
engaged in an argument with somebody or other.’ The truth is, that M— is
a good-natured, gentlemanly man, who notwithstanding, if appealed to,
will not let an absurd or unjust proposition pass without expressing his
dissent; and therefore he is a sort of mark for all those (and we have
several of that stamp) who like to teaze other people’s understandings,
as wool-combers teaze wool. He is certainly the flower of the flock. He
is the oldest frequenter of the place, the latest sitter-up,
well-informed, inobtrusive, and that sturdy old English character, a
lover of truth and justice. I never knew M— approve of any thing unfair
or illiberal. There is a candour and uprightness about his mind which
can neither be wheedled nor browbeat into unjustifiable complaisance. He
looks strait-forward as he sits with his glass in his hand, turning
neither to the right nor the left, and I will venture to say that he has
never had a sinister object in view through life. Mrs. Battle (it is
recorded in her Opinions on Whist) could not make up her mind to use the
word ‘_Go_.’ M— from long practice has got over this difficulty, and
uses it incessantly. It is no matter what adjunct follows in the train
of this despised monosyllable:—whatever liquid comes after this prefix
is welcome. M— without being the most communicative is the most
conversible man I know. The social principle is inseparable from his
person. If he has nothing to say, he drinks your health; and when you
cannot from the rapidity and carelessness of his utterance catch what he
says, you assent to it with equal confidence: you know his meaning is
good. His favourite phrase is ‘We have all of us something of the
coxcomb;’ and yet he has none of it himself. Before I had exchanged half
a dozen sentences with M—, I found that he knew several of my old
acquaintance (an immediate introduction of itself, for the discussing
the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetener and
cement of friendship)—and had been intimate with most of the wits and
men about town for the last twenty years. He knew Tobin, Wordsworth,
Porson, Wilson, Paley, Erskine, and many others. He speaks of Paley’s
pleasantry and unassuming manners, and describes Porson’s long potations
and long quotations formerly at the Cider-Cellar in a very lively way.
He has doubts, however, as to that sort of learning. On my saying that I
had never seen the Greek Professor but once, at the Library of the
London Institution, when he was dressed in an old rusty black coat, with
cobwebs hanging to the skirts of it, and with a large patch of coarse
brown paper covering the whole length of his nose, looking for all the
world like a drunken carpenter, and talking to one of the Proprietors
with an air of suavity, approaching to condescension, M— could not help
expressing some little uneasiness for the credit of classical
literature. ‘I submit, Sir, whether common sense is not the principal
thing? What is the advantage of genius and learning if they are of no
use in the conduct of life?’—M— is one who loves the hours that usher in
the morn, when a select few are left in twos and threes like stars
before the break of day, and when the discourse and the ale are ‘aye
growing better and better.’ W—, M—, and myself were all that remained
one evening. We had sat together several hours without being tired of
one another’s company. The conversation turned on the Beauties of
Charles the Second’s Court at Windsor, and from thence to Count
Grammont, their gallant and gay historian. We took our favourite
passages in turn—one preferring that of Killigrew’s country-cousin, who
having been resolutely refused by Miss Warminster (one of the Maids of
Honour) when he found she had been unexpectedly brought to bed, fell on
his knees and thanked God that now she might take compassion on
him—another insisting that the Chevalier Hamilton’s assignation with
Lady Chesterfield, when she kept him all night shivering in an old
out-house, was better. Jacob Hall’s prowess was not forgotten, nor the
story of Miss Stuart’s garters. I was getting on in my way with that
delicate _endroit_, in which Miss Churchill is first introduced at court
and is besieged (as a matter of course) by the Duke of York, who was
gallant as well as bigoted on system. His assiduities however soon
slackened, owing (it is said) to her having a pale, thin face; till one
day, as they were riding out hunting together, she fell from her horse,
and was taken up almost lifeless. The whole assembled court were thrown
by this event into admiration that such a body should belong to such a
face[58] (so transcendant a pattern was she of the female form) and the
Duke was fixed. This I contended was striking, affecting, and grand, the
sublime of amorous biography, and said I could conceive of nothing finer
than the idea of a young person in her situation, who was the object of
indifference or scorn from outward appearance, with the proud suppressed
consciousness of a Goddess-like symmetry, locked up by ‘fear and
niceness, the hand-maids of all women,’ from the wonder and worship of
mankind. I said so then, and I think so now: my tongue grew wanton in
the praise of this passage, and I believe it bore the bell from its
competitors. W— then spoke of Lucius Apuleius and his Golden Ass, which
contains the story of Cupid and Psyche, with other matter rich and rare,
and went on to the romance of Heliodorus, Theagenes and Chariclea. This,
as he affirmed, opens with a pastoral landscape equal to Claude, and in
it the presiding deities of Love and Wine appear in all their pristine
strength, youth and grace, crowned and worshipped as of yore. The night
waned, but our glasses brightened, enriched with the pearls of Grecian
story. Our cup-bearer slept in a corner of the room, like another
Endymion, in the pale ray of an half-extinguished lamp, and starting up
at a fresh summons for a farther supply, he swore it was too late, and
was inexorable to entreaty. M— sat with his hat on and with a hectic
flush in his face while any hope remained, but as soon as we rose to go,
he darted out of the room as quick as lightning, determined not to be
the last that went.—I said some time after to the waiter, that ‘Mr. M—
was no flincher.’—‘Oh! Sir,’ says he, ‘you should have known him
formerly, when Mr. H— and Mr. A— used to be here. Now he is quite
another man: he seldom stays later than one or two.’—‘Why, did they keep
it up much later then?’—Oh! yes; and used to sing catches and all
sorts.’—‘What, did Mr. M— sing catches?’—‘He joined chorus, Sir, and was
as merry as the best of them. He was always a pleasant gentleman!’—This
H— and A— succumbed in the fight. A— was a dry Scotchman, H— a
good-natured, hearty Englishman. I do not mean that the same character
applies to all Scotchmen or to all Englishmen. H— was of the Pipe-Office
(not unfitly appointed), and in his cheerfuller cups would delight to
speak of a widow and a bowling-green, that ran in his head to the last.
‘What is the good of talking of those things now?’ said the man of
utility. ‘I don’t know,’ replied the other, quaffing another glass of
sparkling ale, and with a lambent fire playing in his eye and round his
bald forehead—(he had a head that Sir Joshua would have made something
bland and genial of)—‘I don’t know, but they were delightful to me at
the time, and are still pleasant to talk and think of.’—_Such a one_, in
Touchstone’s phrase, _is a natural philosopher_; and in nine cases out
of ten that sort of philosophy is the best! I could enlarge this sketch,
such as it is; but to prose on to the end of the chapter might prove
less profitable than tedious.—
I like very well to sit in a room where there are people talking on
subjects I know nothing of, if I am only allowed to sit silent and as a
spectator. But I do not much like to join in the conversation, except
with people and on subjects to my taste. Sympathy is necessary to
society. To look on, a variety of faces, humours, and opinions is
sufficient: to mix with others, agreement as well as variety is
indispensable. What makes good society? I answer, in one word, real
fellowship. Without a similitude of tastes, acquirements, and pursuits
(whatever may be the difference of tempers and characters) there can be
no intimacy or even casual intercourse, worth the having. What makes the
most agreeable party? A number of people with a number of ideas in
common, ‘yet so as with a difference;’ that is, who can put one or more
subjects which they have all studied in the greatest variety of
entertaining or useful lights. Or in other words, a succession of good
things said with good humour, and addressed to the understandings of
those who hear them, make the most desirable conversation. Ladies,
lovers, beaux, wits, philosophers, the fashionable or the vulgar, are
the fittest company for one another. The discourse at Randall’s is the
best for boxers: that at Long’s for lords and loungers. I prefer H—’s
conversation almost to any other person’s, because, with a familiar
range of subjects, he colours with a totally new and sparkling light,
reflected from his own character. Elia, the grave and witty, says things
not to be surpassed in essence: but the manner is more painful and less
a relief to my own thoughts. Some one conceived he could not be an
excellent companion, because he was seen walking down the side of the
Thames, _passibus iniquis_, after dining at Richmond. The objection was
not valid. I will however admit that the said Elia is the worst company
in the world in bad company, if it be granted me that in good company he
is nearly the best that can be. He is one of those of whom it may be
said, _Tell me your company, and I’ll tell you your manners_. He is the
creature of sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to
entertain of him. He cannot outgo the apprehensions of the circle; and
invariably acts up or down to the point of refinement or vulgarity at
which they pitch him. He appears to take a pleasure in exaggerating the
prejudices of strangers against him; a pride in confirming the
prepossessions of friends. In whatever scale of intellect he is placed,
he is as lively or as stupid as the rest can be for their lives. If you
think him odd and ridiculous, he becomes more and more so every minute,
_à la folie_, till he is a wonder gazed by all—set him against a good
wit and a ready apprehension, and he brightens more and more—
‘Or like a gate of steel
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
Its figure and its heat.’
We had a pleasant party one evening at B— C—’s. A young literary
bookseller who was present went away delighted with the elegance of the
repast, and spoke in raptures of a servant in green livery and a
patent-lamp. I thought myself that the charm of the evening consisted in
some talk about Beaumont and Fletcher and the old poets, in which every
one took part or interest, and in a consciousness that we could not pay
our host a better compliment than in thus alluding to studies in which
he excelled, and in praising authors whom he had imitated with feeling
and sweetness!—I should think it may be also laid down as a rule on this
subject, that to constitute good company a certain proportion of hearers
and speakers is requisite. Coleridge makes good company for this reason.
He immediately establishes the principle of the division of labour in
this respect, wherever he comes. He takes his cue as speaker, and the
rest of the party theirs as listeners—a ‘Circean herd’—without any
previous arrangement having been gone through. I will just add that
there can be no good society without perfect freedom from affectation
and constraint. If the unreserved communication of feeling or opinion
leads to offensive familiarity, it is not well. But it is no better
where the absence of offensive remarks arises only from formality and an
assumed respectfulness of manner.
I do not think there is any thing deserving the name of society to be
found out of London: and that for the two following reasons. First,
there is _neighbourhood_ elsewhere, accidental or unavoidable
acquaintance: people are thrown together by chance or grow together like
trees; but you can pick your society nowhere but in London. The very
persons that of all others you would wish to associate with in almost
every line of life, (or at least of intellectual pursuit,) are to be met
with there. It is hard if out of a million of people you cannot find
half a dozen to your liking. Individuals may seem lost and hid in the
size of the place: but in fact from this very circumstance you are
within two or three miles’ reach of persons that without it you would be
some hundreds apart from. Secondly, London is the only place in which
each individual in company is treated according to his value in company,
and to that only. In every other part of the kingdom he carries another
character about with him, which supersedes the intellectual or social
one. It is known in Manchester or Liverpool what every man in the room
is worth in land or money; what are his connexions and prospects in
life—and this gives a character of servility or arrogance, of
mercenariness or impertinence to the whole of provincial intercourse.
You laugh not in proportion to a man’s wit, but his wealth: you have to
consider not what, but whom you contradict. You speak by the pound, and
are heard by the rood. In the metropolis there is neither time nor
inclination for these remote calculations. Every man depends on the
quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the
reception he meets with in it. A member of parliament soon finds his
level as a commoner: the merchant and manufacturer cannot bring his
goods to market here: the great landed proprietor shrinks from being the
lord of acres into a pleasant companion or a dull fellow. When a visitor
enters or leaves a room, it is not inquired whether he is rich or poor,
whether he lives in a garret or a palace, or comes in his own or a
hackney-coach, but whether he has a good expression of countenance, with
an unaffected manner, and whether he is a man of understanding or a
blockhead. These are the circumstances by which you make a favourable
impression on the company, and by which they estimate you in the
abstract. In the country, they consider whether you have a vote at the
next election, or a place in your gift; and measure the capacity of
others to instruct or entertain them by the strength of their pockets
and their credit with their banker. Personal merit is at a prodigious
discount in the provinces. I like the country very well, if I want to
enjoy my own company: but London is the only place for equal society, or
where a man can say a good thing or express an honest opinion without
subjecting himself to being insulted, unless he first lays his purse on
the table to back his pretensions to talent or independence of spirit. I
speak from experience.[59]
ESSAY XXI
ON THE ARISTOCRACY OF LETTERS
‘Ha! here’s three of us are sophisticated:—off, you lendings.’—
There is such a thing as an aristocracy or privileged order in letters,
which has sometimes excited my wonder, and sometimes my spleen. We meet
with authors who have never done any thing, but who have a vast
reputation for what they could have done. Their names stand high, and
are in every body’s mouth, but their works are never heard of, or had
better remain undiscovered for the sake of their admirers.—_Stat nominis
umbra_—their pretensions are lofty and unlimited, as they have nothing
to rest upon, or because it is impossible to confront them with the
proofs of their deficiency. If you inquire farther, and insist upon some
act of authorship to establish the claims of these Epicurean votaries of
the Muses, you find that they had a great reputation at Cambridge, that
they were senior wranglers or successful prize-essayists, that they
visit at — House, and to support that honour, must be supposed of course
to occupy the first rank in the world of letters.[60] It is possible,
however, that they have some manuscript work in hand, which is of too
much importance (and the writer has too much at stake in publishing it)
hastily to see the light: or perhaps they once had an article in the
Edinburgh Review, which was much admired at the time, and is kept by
them ever since as a kind of diploma and unquestionable testimonial of
merit. They are not like Grub-street authors, who write for bread, and
are paid by the sheet. Like misers who hoard their wealth, they are
supposed to be masters of all the wit and sense they do not impart to
the public. ‘Continents have most of what they contain,’ says a
considerable philosopher; and these persons, it must be confessed, have
a prodigious command over themselves in the expenditure of light and
learning. The Oriental curse—‘O that mine enemy had written a
book’—hangs suspended over them. By never committing themselves, they
neither give a handle to the malice of the world, nor excite the
jealousy of friends; and keep all the reputation they have got, not by
discreetly blotting, but by never writing a line. Some one told
Sheridan, who was always busy about some new work and never advancing
any farther in it, that he would not write because he was afraid of the
Author of the School for Scandal. So these idle pretenders are afraid of
undergoing a comparison with themselves in something they have never
done, but have had credit for doing. They do not acquire celebrity, they
assume it; and escape detection by never venturing out of their imposing
and mysterious _incognito_. They do not let themselves down by every-day
work: for them to appear in print is a work of supererogation as much as
in lords or kings, and like gentlemen with a large landed estate, they
live on their established character, and do nothing (or as little as
possible) to increase or lose it. There is not a more deliberate piece
of grave imposture going. I know a person of this description who has
been employed many years (by implication) on a translation of
Thucydides, of which no one ever saw a word, but it does not answer the
purpose of bolstering up a factitious reputation the less on that
account. The longer it is delayed and kept sacred from the vulgar gaze,
the more it swells into imaginary consequence; the labour and care
required for a work of this kind being immense:—and then there are no
faults in an unexecuted translation. The only impeccable writers are
those who never wrote. Another is an oracle on subjects of taste and
classical erudition, because (he says at least) he reads Cicero once a
year to keep up the purity of his Latinity. A third makes the indecency
pass for the depth of his researches and for a high gusto in _virtù_,
till from his seeing nothing in the finest remains of ancient art, the
world by the merest accident find out that there is nothing in him.
There is scarcely any thing that a grave face with an impenetrable
manner will not accomplish, and whoever is weak enough to impose upon
himself, will have wit enough to impose upon the public—particularly if
he can make it their interest to be deceived by shallow boasting, and
contrives not to hurt their self-love by sterling acquirements. Do you
suppose that the understood translation of Thucydides costs its supposed
author nothing? A select party of friends and admirers dine with him
once a week at a magnificent town-mansion, or a more elegant and
picturesque retreat in the country. They broach their Horace and their
old hock, and sometimes allude with a considerable degree of candour to
the defects of works which are brought out by contemporary writers—the
ephemeral offspring of haste and necessity!
Among other things, the learned languages are a ready passport to this
sort of unmeaning, unanalysed reputation. They presently lift a man up
among the celestial constellations, the signs of the Zodiac (as it were)
and third heaven of inspiration, from whence he looks down on those who
are toiling on in this lower sphere, and earning their bread by the
sweat of their brain, at leisure and in scorn. If the graduates in this
way condescend to express their thoughts in English, it is understood to
be _infra dignitatem_—such light and unaccustomed essays do not fit the
ponderous gravity of their pen—they only draw to advantage and with full
justice to themselves in the bow of the ancients. Their native-tongue is
to them strange, inelegant, unapt, and crude. They ‘cannot command it to
any utterance of harmony. They have not the skill.’ This is true enough;
but you must not say so, under a heavy penalty—the displeasure of
pedants and blockheads. It would be sacrilege against the privileged
classes, the Aristocracy of Letters. What! will you affirm that a
profound Latin scholar, a perfect Grecian, cannot write a page of common
sense or grammar? Is it not to be presumed, by all the charters of the
Universities and the foundations of grammar-schools, that he who can
speak a dead language must be _a fortiori_ conversant with his own?
Surely, the greater implies the less. He who knows every science and
every art cannot be ignorant of the most familiar forms of speech. Or if
this plea is found not to hold water, then our scholastic bungler is
said to be above this vulgar trial of skill, ‘something must be excused
to want of practice—but did you not observe the elegance of the
Latinity, how well that period would become a classical and studied
dress?’ Thus defects are ‘monster’d’ into excellences, and they screen
their idol, and require you, at your peril, to pay prescriptive homage
to false concords and inconsequential criticisms, because the writer of
them has the character of the first or second Greek or Latin scholar in
the kingdom. If you do not swear to the truth of these spurious
credentials, you are ignorant and malicious, a quack and a
scribbler—_flagranti delicto_! Thus the man who can merely read and
construe some old author is of a class superior to any living one, and,
by parity of reasoning, to those old authors themselves: the poet or
prose-writer of true and original genius, by the courtesy of custom,
‘ducks to the learned fool:’ or as the author of Hudibras has so well
stated the same thing,
—‘He that is but able to express
No sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak the strongest reason in his own.’
These preposterous and unfounded claims of mere scholars to precedence
in the commonwealth of letters, which they set up so formally themselves
and which others so readily bow to, are partly owing to traditional
prejudice:—there was a time when learning was the only distinction from
ignorance, and when there was no such thing as popular English
literature. Again, there is something more palpable and positive in this
kind of acquired knowledge, like acquired wealth, which the vulgar
easily recognise. That others know the meaning of signs which they are
confessedly and altogether ignorant of, is to them both a matter of fact
and a subject of endless wonder. The languages are worn like a dress by
a man, and distinguish him sooner than his natural figure; and we are,
from motives of self-love, inclined to give others credit for the ideas
they have borrowed or have come into indirect possession of, rather than
for those that originally belong to them and are exclusively their own.
The merit in them and the implied inferiority in ourselves is less.
Learning is a kind of external appendage or transferable property—
‘’Twas mine, ’tis his, and may be any man’s’—
Genius and understanding are a man’s self, an integrant part of his
personal identity; and the title to these last, as it is the most
difficult to be ascertained, is also the most grudgingly acknowledged.
Few persons would pretend to deny that Porson had more Greek than they.
It was a question of fact which might be put to the immediate proof, and
could not be gainsaid. But the meanest frequenter of the Cider-cellar or
the Hole in the Wall would be inclined, in his own conceit, to dispute
the palm of wit or sense with him; and indemnify his self-complacency
for the admiration paid to living learning by significant hints to
friends and casual droppers-in, that the greatest men, when you came to
know them, were not without their weak sides as well as others.—Pedants,
I will add here, talk to the vulgar as pedagogues talk to school-boys,
on an understood principle of condescension and superiority, and
therefore make little progress in the knowledge of men or things. While
they fancy they are accommodating themselves to, or else assuming airs
of importance over, inferior capacities, these inferior capacities are
really laughing at them. There can be no true superiority but what
arises out of the presupposed ground of equality: there can be no
improvement but from the free communication and comparing of ideas.
Kings and nobles, for this reason, receive little benefit from
society—where all is submission on one side, and condescension on the
other. The mind strikes out truth by collision, as steel strikes fire
from the flint!
There are whole families who are born classical, and are entered in the
heralds’ college of reputation by the right of consanguinity.
Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood. There is the B— family.
There is no end of it or its pretensions. It produces wits, scholars,
novelists, musicians, artists in ‘numbers numberless.’ The name is alone
a passport to the Temple of Fame. Those who bear it are free of
Parnassus by birth-right. The founder of it was himself an historian and
a musician, but more of a courtier and man of the world than either. The
secret of his success may perhaps be discovered in the following
passage, where, in alluding to three eminent performers on different
instruments, he says, ‘These three illustrious personages were
introduced at the Emperour’s court,’ &c.; speaking of them as if they
were foreign ambassadours or princes of the blood, and thus magnifying
himself and his profession. This overshadowing manner carries nearly
every thing before it, and mystifies a great many. There is nothing like
putting the best face upon things, and leaving others to find out the
difference. He who could call three musicians ‘personages,’ would
himself play a personage through life, and succeed in his leading
object. Sir Joshua Reynolds, remarking on this passage, said, ‘No one
had a greater respect than he had for his profession, but that he should
never think of applying to it epithets that were appropriated merely to
external rank and distinction.’ Madame D—, it must be owned, had
cleverness enough to stock a whole family, and to set up her
cousin-germans, male and female, for wits and virtuosos to the third and
fourth generation. The rest have done nothing, that I know of, but keep
up the name.
The most celebrated author in modern times has written without a name,
and has been knighted for anonymous productions. Lord Byron complains
that Horace Walpole was not properly appreciated, ‘first, because he was
a gentleman, and secondly, because he was a nobleman.’ His Lordship
stands in one, at least, of the predicaments here mentioned, and yet he
has had justice, or somewhat more, done him. He towers above his fellows
by all the height of the peerage. If the poet lends a grace to the
nobleman, the nobleman pays it back to the poet with interest. What a
fine addition is ten thousand a year and a title to the flaunting
pretensions of a modern rhapsodist! His name so accompanied becomes the
mouth well: it is repeated thousands of times, instead of hundreds,
because the reader in being familiar with the Poet’s works seems to
claim acquaintance with the Lord,
‘Let but a lord once own the happy lines:
How the wit brightens, and the style refines!’
He smiles at the high-flown praise or petty cavils of little men. Does
he make a slip in decorum, which Milton declares to be the principal
thing? His proud crest and armorial bearings support him:—no
bend-sinister slurs his poetical escutcheon! Is he dull, or does he put
off some trashy production on the public? It is not charged to his
account, as a deficiency which he must make good at the peril of his
admirers. His Lordship is not answerable for the negligence or
extravagances of his Muse. He ‘bears a charmed reputation, which must
not yield’ like one of vulgar birth. The Noble Bard is for this reason
scarcely vulnerable to the critics. The double barrier of his
pretensions baffles their puny, timid efforts. Strip off some of his
tarnished laurels, and the coronet appears glittering beneath: restore
them, and it still shines through with keener lustre. In fact, his
Lordship’s blaze of reputation culminates from his rank and place in
society. He sustains two lofty and imposing characters; and in order to
simplify the process of our admiration, and ‘leave no rubs or botches in
the way,’ we equalise his pretensions, and take it for granted that he
must be as superior to other men in genius as he is in birth. Or, to
give a more familiar solution of the enigma, the Poet and the Peer agree
to honour each other’s acceptances on the bank of Fame, and sometimes
cozen the town to some tune between them.—Really, however, and with all
his privileges, Lord Byron might as well not have written that strange
letter about Pope. I could not afford it, poor as I am. Why does he
pronounce, _ex cathedrâ_ and robed, that Cowper is no poet? Cowper was a
gentleman and of noble family like his critic. He was a teacher of
morality as well as a describer of nature, which is more than his
Lordship is. His John Gilpin will last as long as Beppo, and his verses
to Mary are not less touching than the Farewell. If I had ventured upon
such an assertion as this, it would have been worse for me than finding
out a borrowed line in the Pleasures of Hope.—
There is not a more helpless or more despised animal than a mere author,
without any extrinsic advantages of birth, breeding, or fortune to set
him off. The real ore of talents or learning must be stamped before it
will pass current. To be at all looked upon as an author, a man must be
something more or less than an author—a rich merchant, a banker, a lord,
or a ploughman. He is admired for something foreign to himself, that
acts as a bribe to the servility or a set-off to the envy of the
community. ‘What should such fellows as we do, crawling betwixt heaven
and earth;’—‘coining our hearts for drachmas;’ now scorched in the sun,
now shivering in the breeze, now coming out in our newest gloss and best
attire, like swallows in the spring, now ‘sent back like hallowmas or
shortest day?’ The best wits, like the handsomest faces _upon the town_,
lead a harassing, precarious life—are taken up for the bud and promise
of talent, which they no sooner fulfil than they are thrown aside like
an old fashion—are caressed without reason, and insulted with
impunity—are subject to all the caprice, the malice, and fulsome
advances of that great keeper, the Public—and in the end come to no
good, like all those who lavish their favours on mankind at large and
look to the gratitude of the world for their reward. Instead of this set
of Grub-street authors, the mere _canaille_ of letters, this corporation
of Mendicity, this ragged regiment of genius suing at the corners of
streets, _in forma pauperis_, give me the gentleman and scholar, with a
good house over his head and a handsome table ‘with wine of Attic taste’
to ask his friends to, and where want and sorrow never come. Fill up the
sparkling bowl, heap high the dessert with roses crowned, bring out the
hot-pressed poem, the vellum manuscripts, the medals, the portfolios,
the intaglios—this is the true model of the life of a man of taste and
_virtù_—the possessors, not the inventors of these things, are the true
benefactors of mankind and ornaments of letters. Look in, and there,
amidst silver services and shining chandeliers, you will see the man of
genius at his proper post, picking his teeth and mincing an opinion,
sheltered by rank, bowing to wealth—a poet framed, glazed, and hung in a
striking light: not a straggling weed, torn and trampled on; not a poor
_Kit-run-the-street_, but a powdered beau, a sycophant plant, an exotic
reared in a glass-case, hermetically sealed,
‘Free from the Sirian star and the dread thunder-stroke’—
whose mealy coat no moth can corrupt nor blight can wither. The poet
Keats had not this sort of protection for his person—he lay bare to
weather—the serpent stung him, and the poison-tree dropped upon this
little western flower:—when the mercenary servile crew approached him,
he had no pedigree to show them, no rent-roll to hold out in reversion
for their praise: he was not in any great man’s train, nor the butt and
puppet of a lord—he could only offer them ‘the fairest flowers of the
season, carnations and streaked gilliflowers,’—‘rue for remembrance and
pansies for thoughts’—they recked not of his gift, but tore him with
hideous shouts and laughter,
‘Nor could the Muse protect her son!’
Unless an author has an establishment of his own, or is entered on that
of some other person, he will hardly be allowed to write English or to
spell his own name. To be well-spoken of, he must enlist under some
standard; he must belong to some _coterie_. He must get the _esprit de
corps_ on his side: he must have literary bail in readiness. Thus they
prop one another’s ricketty heads at M—’s shop, and a spurious
reputation, like false argument, runs in a circle. Cr—k—r affirms that
G—ff—rd is sprightly, and G—ff—rd that Cr—k—r is genteel: D’I— that
J—c—b is wise, and J—c—b that D’I— is good-natured. A member of
Parliament must be answerable that you are not dangerous or dull before
you can be of the _entrée_. You must commence toad-eater to have your
observations attended to; if you are independent, unconnected, you will
be regarded as a poor creature. Your opinion is honest, you will say:
then ten to one, it is not profitable. It is at any rate your own. So
much the worse; for then it is not the world’s. T— is a very tolerable
barometer in this respect. He knows nothing, hears every thing, and
repeats just what he hears; so that you may guess pretty well from this
round-faced echo what is said by others! Almost every thing goes by
presumption and appearances. ‘Did you not think Mr. B—’s language very
elegant?’—I thought he bowed very low. ‘Did you not think him remarkably
well-behaved?’—He was unexceptionably dressed. ‘But were not Mr. C—’s
manners quite insinuating?’—He said nothing. ‘You will at least allow
his friend to be a well-informed man?’—He talked upon all subjects
alike. Such would be a pretty faithful interpretation of the tone of
what is called _good society_. The surface is every thing: we do not
pierce to the core. The setting is more valuable than the jewel. Is it
not so in other things as well as letters? Is not an R.A. by the
supposition a greater man in his profession than any one who is not so
blazoned? Compared with that unrivalled list, Raphael had been
illegitimate, Claude not classical, and Michael Angelo admitted by
special favour. What is a physician without a diploma? An alderman
without being knighted? An actor whose name does not appear in great
letters? All others are counterfeits—men ‘of no mark or likelihood.’
This was what made the Jackalls of the North so eager to prove that I
had been turned out of the Edinburgh Review. It was not the merit of the
articles which excited their spleen—but their being there. Of the style
they knew nothing; for the thought they cared nothing:—all that they
knew was that I wrote in that powerful journal, and therefore they
asserted that I did not!
We find a class of persons who labour under an obvious natural
inaptitude for whatever they aspire to. Their manner of setting about
it is a virtual disqualification. The simple affirmation—‘What this
man has said, I will do,’—is not always considered as the proper test
of capacity. On the contrary, there are people whose bare pretensions
are as good or better than the actual performance of others. What I
myself have done, for instance, I never find admitted as proof of what
I shall be able to do: whereas I observe others who bring as proof of
their competence to any task (and are taken at their word) what they
have never done, and who gravely assure those who are inclined to
trust them that their talents are exactly fitted for some post because
they are just the reverse of what they have ever shown them to be. One
man has the air of an Editor as much as another has that of a butler
or porter in a gentleman’s family. —— is the model of this character,
with a prodigious look of business, an air of suspicion which passes
for sagacity, and an air of deliberation which passes for judgment. If
his own talents are no ways prominent, it is inferred he will be more
impartial and in earnest in making use of those of others. There
is ——, the responsible conductor of several works of taste and
erudition, yet (God knows) without an idea in his head relating to any
one of them. He is learned by proxy, and successful from sheer
imbecility. If he were to get the smallest smattering of the
departments which are under his controul, he would betray himself from
his desire to shine; but as it is, he leaves others to do all the
drudgery for him. He signs his name in the title-page or at the bottom
of a vignette, and nobody suspects any mistake. This contractor for
useful and ornamental literature once offered me Two Guineas for a
Life and Character of Shakespear, with an admission to his
_conversationis_. I went once. There was a collection of learned
lumber, of antiquaries, lexicographers, and other Illustrious Obscure,
and I had given up the day for lost, when in dropped Jack T. of the
Sun—(Who would dare to deny that he was ‘the Sun of our table?’)—and I
had nothing now to do but hear and laugh. Mr. T—— knows most of the
good things that have been said in the metropolis for the last thirty
years, and is in particular an excellent retailer of the humours and
extravagances of his old friend, Peter Pindar. He had recounted a
series of them, each rising above the other in a sort of magnificent
burlesque and want of literal preciseness, to a medley of laughing and
sour faces, when on his proceeding to state a joke of a practical
nature by the said Peter, a Mr. ——, (I forget the name) objected to
the moral of the story, and to the whole texture of Mr. T——’s
_facetiæ_—upon which our host, who had till now supposed that all was
going on swimmingly, thought it time to interfere and give a turn to
the conversation by saying—‘Why yes, Gentlemen, what we have hitherto
heard fall from the lips of our friend has been no doubt entertaining
and highly agreeable in its way: but perhaps we have had enough of
what is altogether delightful and pleasant and light and laughable in
conduct. Suppose, therefore, we were to shift the subject, and talk of
what is serious and moral and industrious and laudable in
character—Let us talk of Mr. Tomkins, the Penman!’—This staggered the
gravest of us, broke up our dinner-party, and we went up stairs to
tea. So much for the didactic vein of one of our principal guides in
the embellished walks of modern taste, and master-manufacturers of
letters. He had found that gravity had been a never-failing resource
when taken at a pinch—for once the joke miscarried—and Mr. Tomkins the
Penman figures to this day nowhere but in Sir Joshua’s picture of him!
To complete the natural Aristocracy of Letters, we only want a Royal
Society of Authors!
ESSAY XXII
ON CRITICISM
Criticism is an art that undergoes a great variety of changes, and aims
at different objects at different times.
At first, it is generally satisfied to give an opinion whether a work is
good or bad, and to quote a passage or two in support of this opinion:
afterwards, it is bound to assign the reasons of its decision and to
analyse supposed beauties or defects with microscopic minuteness. A
critic does nothing now-a-days who does not try to torture the most
obvious expression into a thousand meanings, and enter into a circuitous
explanation of all that can be urged for or against its being in the
best or worst style possible. His object indeed is not to do justice to
his author, whom he treats with very little ceremony, but to do himself
homage, and to show his acquaintance with all the topics and resources
of criticism. If he recurs to the stipulated subject in the end, it is
not till after he has exhausted his budget of general knowledge; and he
establishes his own claims first in an elaborate inaugural dissertation
_de omni scibile et quibusdam aliis_, before he deigns to bring forward
the pretensions of the original candidate for praise, who is only the
second figure in the piece. We may sometimes see articles of this sort,
in which no allusion whatever is made to the work under sentence of
death, after the first announcement of the title-page; and I apprehend
it would be a clear improvement on this species of nominal criticism, to
give stated periodical accounts of works that had never appeared at all,
which would save the hapless author the mortification of writing, and
his reviewer the trouble of reading them. If the real author is made of
so little account by the modern critic, he is scarcely more an object of
regard to the modern reader; and it must be confessed that after a dozen
close-packed pages of subtle metaphysical distinction or solemn didactic
declamation, in which the disembodied principles of all arts and
sciences float before the imagination in undefined profusion, the eye
turns with impatience and indifference to the imperfect embryo specimens
of them, and the hopeless attempts to realise this splendid jargon in
one poor work by one poor author, which is given up to summary execution
with as little justice as pity. ‘As when a well-graced actor leaves the
stage, men’s eyes are idly bent on him that enters next’—so it is
here.—Whether this state of the press is not a serious abuse and a
violent encroachment in the republic of letters, is more than I shall
pretend to determine. The truth is, that in the quantity of works that
issue from the press, it is utterly impossible they should all be read
by all sorts of people. There must be _tasters_ for the public, who must
have a discretionary power vested in them, for which it is difficult to
make them properly accountable. Authors in proportion to their numbers
become not formidable, but despicable. They would not be heard of or
severed from the crowd without the critic’s aid, and all complaints of
ill-treatment are vain. He considers them as pensioners on his bounty
for any pittance of praise, and in general sets them up as butts for his
wit and spleen, or uses them as a stalking-horse to convey his own
favourite notions and opinions, which he can do by this means without
the possibility of censure or appeal. He looks upon his literary
_protegé_ (much as Peter Pounce looked upon Parson Adams) as a kind of
humble companion or unnecessary interloper in the vehicle of fame, whom
he has taken up purely to oblige him, and whom he may treat with neglect
or insult, or set down in the common foot-path, whenever it suits his
humour or convenience. He naturally grows arbitrary with the exercise of
power. He by degrees wants to have a clear stage to himself, and would
be thought to have purchased a monopoly of wit, learning, and wisdom—
‘Assumes the rod, affects the God,
And seems to shake the spheres.’
Besides, something of this overbearing manner goes a great way with the
public. They cannot exactly tell whether you are right or wrong; and if
you state your difficulties or pay much deference to the sentiments of
others, they will think you a very silly fellow or a mere pretender. A
sweeping, unqualified assertion ends all controversy, and sets opinion
at rest. A sharp, sententious, cavalier, dogmatical tone is therefore
necessary, even in self-defence, to the office of a reviewer. If you do
not deliver your oracles without hesitation, how are the world to
receive them on trust and without inquiry? People read to have something
to talk about, and ‘to seem to know that which they do not.’
Consequently, there cannot be too much dialectics and debateable matter,
too much pomp and paradox in a review. _To elevate and surprise_ is the
great rule for producing a dramatic or a critical effect. The more you
startle the reader, the more he will be able to startle others with a
succession of smart intellectual shocks. The most admired of our Reviews
is saturated with this sort of electrical matter, which is regularly
played off so as to produce a good deal of astonishment and a strong
sensation in the public mind. The intrinsic merits of an author are a
question of very subordinate consideration to the keeping up the
character of the work and supplying the town with a sufficient number of
grave or brilliant topics for the consumption of the next three months!
This decided and paramount tone in criticism is the growth of the
present century, and was not at all the fashion in that calm peaceable
period when the Monthly Review bore ‘sole sovereign sway and masterdom’
over all literary productions. Though nothing can be said against the
respectability or usefulness of that publication during its long and
almost exclusive enjoyment of the public favour, yet the style of
criticism adopted in it is such as to appear slight and unsatisfactory
to a modern reader. The writers, instead of ‘outdoing termagant or
out-Heroding Herod,’ were somewhat precise and prudish, gentle almost to
a fault, full of candour and modesty,
‘And of their port as meek as is a maid!’[61]
There was none of that Drawcansir work going on then that there is now;
no scalping of authors, no hacking and hewing of their Lives and
Opinions, except that they used those of Tristram Shandy, GENT. rather
scurvily; which was to be expected. All, however, had a show of courtesy
and good-manners. The satire was covert and artfully insinuated; the
praise was short and sweet. We meet with no oracular theories; no
profound analysis of principles; no unsparing exposure of the least
discernible deviation from them. It was deemed sufficient to recommend
the work in general terms, ‘This is an agreeable volume,’ or ‘This is a
work of great learning and research,’ to set forth the title and table
of contents, and proceed without farther preface to some appropriate
extracts, for the most part concurring in opinion with the author’s
text, but now and then interposing an objection to maintain appearances
and assert the jurisdiction of the court. This cursory manner of hinting
approbation or dissent would make but a lame figure at present. We must
have not only an announcement that ‘this is an agreeable or able work,’
but we must have it explained at full length, and so as to silence all
cavillers, in what the agreeableness or ability of the work consists:
the author must be reduced to a class, all the living or defunct
examples of which must be characteristically and pointedly _differenced_
from one another; the value of this class of writing must be developed
and ascertained in comparison with others; the principles of taste, the
elements of our sensations, the structure of the human faculties, all
must undergo a strict scrutiny and revision. The modern or metaphysical
system of criticism, in short, supposes the question, _Why?_ to be
repeated at the end of every decision; and the answer gives birth to
interminable arguments and discussion. The former laconic mode was well
adapted to guide those who merely wanted to be informed of the character
and subject of a work in order to read it: the present is more useful to
those whose object is less to read the work than to dispute upon its
merits, and go into company clad in the whole defensive and offensive
armour of criticism.—
Neither are we less removed at present from the dry and meagre mode of
dissecting the skeletons of works, instead of transfusing their living
principles, which prevailed in Dryden’s Prefaces,[62] and in the
criticisms written on the model of the French school about a century
ago. A genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the
light and shade, the soul and body of a work:—here we have nothing but
its superficial plan and elevation, as if a poem were a piece of formal
architecture. We are told something of the plot or fable, of the moral,
and of the observance or violation of the three unities of time, place,
and action; and perhaps a word or two is added on the dignity of the
persons or the baldness of the style: but we no more know, after reading
one of these complacent _tirades_, what the essence of the work is, what
passion has been touched, or how skilfully, what tone and movement the
author’s mind imparts to his subject or receives from it, than if we had
been reading a homily or a gazette. That is, we are left quite in the
dark as to the feelings of pleasure or pain to be derived from the
genius of the performance or the manner in which it appeals to the
imagination: we know to a nicety how it squares with the thread-bare
rules of composition, not in the least how it affects the principles of
taste. We know every thing about the work, and nothing of it. The critic
takes good care not to baulk the reader’s fancy by anticipating the
effect which the author has aimed at producing. To be sure, the works so
handled were often worthy of their commentators: they had the form of
imagination without the life or power; and when any one had gone
regularly through the number of acts into which they were divided, the
measure in which they were written, or the story on which they were
founded, there was little else to be said about them. It is curious to
observe the effect which the Paradise Lost had on this class of critics,
like throwing a tub to a whale: they could make nothing of it. ‘It was
out of all plumb—not one of the angles at the four corners was a right
angle!’ They did not seek for, nor would they much relish the marrow of
poetry it contained. Like polemics in religion, they had discarded the
essentials of fine writing for the outward form and points of
controversy. They were at issue with Genius and Nature by what route and
in what garb they should enter the Temple of the Muses. Accordingly we
find that Dryden had no other way of satisfying himself of the
pretensions of Milton in the epic style but by translating his anomalous
work into rhyme and dramatic dialogue.[63]—So there are connoisseurs who
give you the subject, the grouping, the perspective, and all the
mechanical circumstances of a picture; but never say a word about the
expression. The reason is, they see the former, but not the latter.
There are persons, however, who cannot employ themselves better than in
taking an inventory of works of art (they want a faculty for higher
studies,) as there are works of art, so called, which seem to have been
composed expressly with an eye to such a class of connoisseurs. In them
are to be found no recondite nameless beauties thrown away upon the
stupid vulgar gaze; no ‘graces snatched beyond the reach of art;’
nothing but what the merest pretender may note down in good set terms in
his common-place book, just as it is before him. Place one of these
half-informed, imperfectly organised spectators before a tall canvas
with groups on groups of figures, of the size of life, and engaged in a
complicated action, of which they know the name and all the particulars,
and there are no bounds to their burst of involuntary enthusiasm. They
mount on the stilts of the subject and ascend the highest Heaven of
Invention, from whence they see sights and hear revelations which they
communicate with all the fervour of plenary explanation to those who may
be disposed to attend to their raptures. They float with wings expanded
in lofty circles, they stalk over the canvas at large strides, never
condescending to pause at any thing of less magnitude than a group or a
colossal figure. The face forms no part of their collective inquiries;
or so that it occupies only a sixth or an eighth proportion to the whole
body, all is according to the received rules of composition. Point to a
divine portrait of Titian, to an angelic head of Guido, close by—they
see and heed it not. What are the ‘looks commercing with the skies,’ the
soul speaking in the face, to them? It asks another and an inner sense
to comprehend them; but for the trigonometry of painting, nature has
constituted them indifferently well. They take a stand on the
distinction between portrait and history, and there they are
spell-bound. Tell them that there can be no fine history without
portraiture, that the painter must proceed from that ground to the one
above it, and that a hundred bad heads cannot make one good historical
picture, and they will not believe you, though the thing is obvious to
any gross capacity. Their ideas always fly to the circumference, and
never fix at the centre. Art must be on a grand scale; according to
them, the whole is greater than a part, and the greater necessarily
implies the less. The outline is in this view of the matter the same
thing as the filling-up, and ‘the limbs and flourishes of a discourse’
the substance. Again, the same persons make an absolute distinction,
without knowing why, between high and low subjects. Say that you would
as soon have Murillo’s _Two Beggar-Boys_ at the Dulwich Gallery as
almost any picture in the world, that is, that it would be one you would
chuse out of ten (had you the choice), and they reiterate upon you, that
surely a low subject cannot be of equal value with a high one. It is in
vain that you turn to the picture: they keep to the class. They have
eyes, but see not; and upon their principles of refined taste, would be
just as good judges of the merit of the picture without seeing it as
with that supposed advantage. They know what the subject is _from the
catalogue_!—Yet it is not true, as Lord Byron asserts, that execution is
every thing, and the class or subject nothing. The highest subjects,
equally well-executed (which, however, rarely happens) are the best. But
the power of execution, the manner of seeing nature, is one thing, and
may be so superlative (if you are only able to judge of it) as to
countervail every disadvantage of subject. Raphael’s storks in the
Miraculous Draught of Fishes, exulting in the event, are finer than the
head of Christ would have been in almost any other hands. The cant of
criticism is on the other side of the question; because execution
depends on various degrees of power in the artist, and a knowledge of it
on various degrees of feeling and discrimination in you: but to commence
artist or connoisseur in the grand style at once, without any
distinction of qualification whatever, it is only necessary for the
first to chuse his subject, and for the last to pin his faith on the
sublimity of the performance, for both to look down with ineffable
contempt on the painters and admirers of subjects of low life. I
remember a young Scotchman once trying to prove to me that Mrs. Dickons
was a superior singer to Miss Stephens, because the former excelled in
sacred music, and the latter did not. At that rate, that is, if it is
the singing sacred music that gives the preference, Miss Stephens would
only have to sing sacred music to surpass herself and vie with her
pretended rival; for this theory implies that all sacred music is
equally good, and therefore better than any other. I grant that Madame
Catalani’s singing of sacred music is superior to Miss Stephens’s
ballad-strains, because her singing is better altogether, and an ocean
of sound more wonderful than a simple stream of dulcet harmonies. In
singing the last verse of ‘God save the King’ not long ago, her voice
towered above the whole confused noise of the orchestra, like an eagle
piercing the clouds, and poured ‘such sweet thunder’ through the ear, as
excited equal astonishment and rapture!
Some kinds of criticism are as much too insipid as others are too
pragmatical. It is not easy to combine point with solidity, spirit with
moderation and candour. Many persons see nothing but beauties in a work,
others nothing but defects. Those cloy you with sweets, and are ‘the
very milk of human kindness,’ flowing on in a stream of luscious
panegyrics; these take delight in poisoning the sources of your
satisfaction, and putting you out of conceit with nearly every author
that comes in their way. The first are frequently actuated by personal
friendship, the last by all the virulence of party-spirit. Under the
latter head would fall what may be termed _political criticism_. The
basis of this style of writing is a _caput mortuum_ of impotent spite
and dulness, till it is varnished over with the slime of servility, and
thrown into a state of unnatural activity by the venom of the most
rancorous bigotry. The eminent professors in this groveling department
are at first merely out of sorts with themselves, and vent their spleen
in little interjections and contortions of phrase:—cry _Pish_ at a lucky
hit, and _Hem_ at a fault, are smart on personal defects, and sneer at
‘Beauty out of favour and on crutches’—are thrown into an ague-fit by
hearing the name of a rival, start back with horror at any approach to
their morbid pretensions like Justice Woodcock with his gouty
limbs—rifle the flowers of the Della Cruscan school, and give you in
their stead, as models of a pleasing pastoral style, Verses upon
Anna—which you may see in the notes to the Baviad and Mæviad. All this
is like the fable of the _Kitten and the Leaves_. But when they get
their brass collar on and shake their bells of office, they set up their
backs like the Great Cat Rodilardus, and pounce upon men and things. Woe
to any little heedless reptile of an author that ventures across their
path without a safe-conduct from the Board of Controul. They snap him up
at a mouthful, and sit licking their lips, stroking their whiskers, and
rattling their bells over the imaginary fragments of their devoted prey,
to the alarm and astonishment of the whole breed of literary,
philosophical, and revolutionary vermin, that were naturalised in this
country by a Prince of Orange and an Elector of Hanover a hundred years
ago.[64] When one of these pampered, sleek, ‘demure-looking,
spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed’ critics makes his King and
Country parties to this sort of sport literary, you have not much chance
of escaping out of his clutches in a whole skin. Treachery becomes a
principle with them, and mischief a conscience, that is, a livelihood.
They not only _damn_ the work in the lump, but vilify and traduce the
author, and substitute lying abuse and sheer malignity for sense and
satire. To have written a popular work is as much as a man’s character
is worth, and sometimes his life, if he does not happen to be on the
right side of the question. The way in which they set about
_stultifying_ an adversary is not to accuse you of faults, or to
exaggerate those which you may really have, but they deny that you have
any merits at all, least of all, those that the world have given you
credit for; bless themselves from understanding a single sentence in a
whole volume; and unless you are ready to subscribe to all their
articles of peace, will not allow you to be qualified to write your own
name. It is not a question of literary discussion, but of political
proscription. It is a mark of loyalty and patriotism to extend no
quarter to those of the opposite party. Instead of replying to your
arguments, they call you names, put words and opinions into your mouth
which you have never uttered, and consider it a species of misprision of
treason to admit that a Whig author knows any thing of common sense or
English. The only chance of putting a stop to this unfair mode of
dealing would perhaps be to make a few reprisals by way of example. The
Court-party boast some writers who have a reputation to lose, and who
would not like to have their names dragged through the kennel of dirty
abuse and vulgar obloquy. What silenced the masked battery of
Blackwood’s Magazine was the implication of the name of Sir Walter Scott
in some remarks upon it—(an honour of which it seems that extraordinary
person was not ambitious)—to be ‘pilloried on infamy’s high stage’ was a
distinction and an amusement to the other gentlemen concerned in that
praiseworthy publication. I was complaining not long ago of this
prostitution of literary criticism as peculiar to our own times, when I
was told that it was just as bad in the time of Pope and Dryden, and
indeed worse, inasmuch as we have no Popes or Drydens now on the
obnoxious side to be nicknamed, metamorphosed into scarecrows, and
impaled alive by bigots and dunces. I shall not pretend to say how far
this remark may be true. The English (it must be owned) are rather a
foul-mouthed nation.
Besides temporary or accidental biases of this kind, there seem to be
sects and parties in taste and criticism (with a set of appropriate
watch-words) coeval with the arts of composition, and that will last as
long as the difference with which men’s minds are originally
constituted. There are some who are all for the elegance of an author’s
style, and some who are equally delighted with simplicity. The last
refer you to Swift as a model of English prose—thinking all other
writers sophisticated and naught—the former prefer the more ornamented
and sparkling periods of Junius or Gibbon. It is to no purpose to think
of bringing about an understanding between these opposite factions. It
is a natural difference of temperament and constitution of mind. The one
will never relish the antithetical point and perpetual glitter of the
artificial prose-style; as the plain unperverted English idiom will
always appear trite and insipid to the others. A toleration, not an
uniformity of opinion is as much as can be expected in this case: and
both sides may acknowledge, without imputation on their taste or
consistency, that these different writers excelled each in their way. I
might remark here that the epithet _elegant_ is very sparingly used in
modern criticism. It has probably gone out of fashion with the
appearance of the _Lake School_, who, I apprehend, have no such phrase
in their vocabulary. Mr. Rogers was, I think, almost the last poet to
whom it was applied as a characteristic compliment. At present it would
be considered as a sort of diminutive of the title of poet, like the
terms _pretty_ or _fanciful_, and is banished from the _haut ton_ of
letters. It may perhaps come into request at some future period.—Again,
the dispute between the admirers of Homer and Virgil has never been
settled, and never will: for there will always be minds to whom the
excellences of Virgil will be more congenial, and therefore more objects
of admiration and delight than those of Homer, and _vice versâ_. Both
are right in preferring what suits them best, the delicacy and
selectness of the one, or the fulness and majestic flow of the other.
There is the same difference in their taste that there was in the genius
of their two favourites. Neither can the disagreement between the French
and English school of tragedy ever be reconciled, till the French become
English, or the English French.[65] Both are right in what they admire,
both are wrong in condemning the others for what they admire. We see the
defects of Racine, they see the faults of Shakespear probably in an
exaggerated point of view. But we may be sure of this, that when we see
nothing but grossness and barbarism, or insipidity and verbiage in a
writer that is the God of a nation’s idolatry, it is we and not they who
want true taste and feeling. The controversy about Pope and the opposite
school in our own poetry comes to much the same thing. Pope’s
correctness, smoothness, &c. are very good things and much to be
commended in him. But it is not to be expected or even desired that
others should have these qualities in the same paramount degree, to the
exclusion of every thing else. If you like correctness and smoothness of
all things in the world, there they are for you in Pope. If you like
other things better, such as strength and sublimity, you know where to
go for them. Why trouble Pope or any other author for what they have
not, and do not profess to give? Those who seem to imply that Pope
possessed, besides his own peculiar, exquisite merits, all that is to be
found in Shakespear or Milton, are I should hardly think in good
earnest. But I do not therefore see that, because this was not the case,
Pope was no poet. We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the
qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a
union by all the intolerance in the world. We may pull Pope in pieces as
long as we please, for not being Shakespear or Milton, as we may carp at
them for not being Pope: but this will not make a poet equal to all
three. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may
keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic
in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread
abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several
growth of men’s minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.
Those who would proscribe whatever falls short of a given standard of
imaginary perfection, do so not from a higher capacity of taste or range
of intellect than others, but to destroy, to ‘crib and cabin in,’ all
enjoyments and opinions but their own.
We find people of a decided and original, and others of a more general
and versatile taste. I have sometimes thought that the most acute and
original-minded men made bad critics. They see every thing too much
through a particular medium. What does not fall in with their own bias
and mode of composition, strikes them as common-place and factitious.
What does not come into the direct line of their vision, they regard
idly, with vacant, ‘lack-lustre eye.’ The extreme force of their
original impressions compared with the feebleness of those they receive
at second hand from others, oversets the balance and just proportion of
their minds. Men who have fewer native resources, and are obliged to
apply oftener to the general stock, acquire by habit a greater aptitude
in appreciating what they owe to others. Their taste is not made a
sacrifice to their egotism and vanity, and they enrich the soil of their
minds with continual accessions of borrowed strength and beauty. I might
take this opportunity of observing, that the person of the most refined
and least contracted taste I ever knew was the late Joseph Fawcett, the
friend of my youth. He was almost the first literary acquaintance I ever
made, and I think the most candid and unsophisticated. He had a masterly
perception of all styles and of every kind and degree of excellence,
sublime or beautiful, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Shenstone’s
Pastoral Ballad, from Butler’s Analogy down to Humphry Clinker. If you
had a favourite author, he had read him too, and knew all the best
morsels, the subtle _traits_, the capital touches. ‘Do you like
Sterne?’—‘Yes, to be sure,’ he would say, ‘I should deserve to be
hanged, if I didn’t!’ His repeating some parts of Comus with his fine,
deep, mellow-toned voice, particularly the lines, ‘I have heard my
mother Circe with the Sirens three,’ &c.—and the enthusiastic comments
he made afterwards were a feast to the ear and to the soul. He read the
poetry of Milton with the same fervour and spirit of devotion that I
have since heard others read their own. ‘That is the most delicious
feeling of all,’ I have heard him exclaim, ‘to like what is excellent,
no matter whose it is.’ In this respect he practised what he preached.
He was incapable of harbouring a sinister motive, and judged only from
what he felt. There was no flaw or mist in the clear mirror of his mind.
He was as open to impressions as he was strenuous in maintaining them.
He did not care a rush whether a writer was old or new, in prose or in
verse—‘What he wanted,’ he said, ‘was something to make him think.’ Most
men’s minds are to me like musical instruments out of tune. Touch a
particular key, and it jars and makes harsh discord with your own. They
like Gil Blas, but can see nothing to laugh at in Don Quixote: they
adore Richardson, but are disgusted with Fielding. Fawcett had a taste
accommodated to all these. He was not exceptious. He gave a cordial
welcome to all sorts, provided they were the best in their kind. He was
not fond of counterfeits or duplicates. His own style was laboured and
artificial to a fault, while his character was frank and ingenuous in
the extreme. He was not the only individual whom I have known to
counteract their natural disposition in coming before the public, and by
avoiding what they perhaps thought an inherent infirmity, debar
themselves of their real strength and advantages. A heartier friend or
honester critic I never coped withal. He has made me feel (by contrast)
the want of genuine sincerity and generous sentiment in some that I have
listened to since, and convinced me (if practical proof were wanting) of
the truth of that text of Scripture—‘That had I all knowledge and could
speak with the tongues of angels, yet without charity I were nothing!’ I
would rather be a man of disinterested taste and liberal feeling, to see
and acknowledge truth and beauty wherever I found it, than a man of
greater and more original genius, to hate, envy, and deny all excellence
but my own—but that poor scanty pittance of it (compared with the whole)
which I had myself produced!
There is another race of critics who might be designated as the _Occult
School_—_verè adepti_. They discern no beauties but what are concealed
from superficial eyes, and overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar
part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy
alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They
see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly
unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their
delight, his mysteries are their study. They prefer Sir Thomas Brown to
the Rambler by Dr. Johnson, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to all
the writers of the Georgian Age. They judge of works of genius as misers
do of hid treasure—it is of no value unless they have it all to
themselves. They will no more share a book than a mistress with a
friend. If they suspected their favourite volumes of delighting any eyes
but their own, they would immediately discard them from the list. Theirs
are superannuated beauties that every one else has left off intriguing
with, bed-ridden hags, a ‘stud of night-mares.’ This is not envy or
affectation, but a natural proneness to singularity, a love of what is
odd and out of the way. They must come at their pleasures with
difficulty, and support admiration by an uneasy sense of ridicule and
opposition. They despise those qualities in a work which are cheap and
obvious. They like a monopoly of taste, and are shocked at the
prostitution of intellect implied in popular productions. In like
manner, they would chuse a friend or recommend a mistress for gross
defects; and tolerate the sweetness of an actress’s voice only for the
ugliness of her face. Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and
insipid—
‘An ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet!’
Nothing goes down with them but what is _caviare_ to the multitude. They
are eaters of olives and readers of black-letter. Yet they smack of
genius, and would be worth any money, were it only for the rarity of the
thing!
The last sort I shall mention are _verbal critics_—mere word-catchers,
fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume,
and tell you it is wrong.[66] These erudite persons constantly find out
by anticipation that you are deficient in the smallest things—that you
cannot spell certain words or join the nominative case and the verb
together, because to do this is the height of their own ambition, and of
course they must set you down lower than their opinion of themselves.
They degrade by reducing you to their own standard of merit; for the
qualifications they deny you, or the faults they object are so very
insignificant, that to prove yourself possessed of the one or free from
the other, is to make yourself doubly ridiculous. Littleness is their
element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch.
They creep, buzz, and fly-blow. It is much easier to crush than to catch
these troublesome insects; and when they are in your power, your
self-respect spares them. The race is almost extinct:—one or two of them
are sometimes seen crawling over the pages of the Quarterly Review!
ESSAY XXIII
ON GREAT AND LITTLE THINGS
‘These little things are great to little man.’
GOLDSMITH.
The great and the little have, no doubt, a real existence in the nature
of things: but they both find pretty much the same level in the mind of
man. It is a common measure, which does not always accommodate itself to
the size and importance of the objects it represents. It has a certain
interest to spare for certain things (and no more) according to its
humour and capacity; and neither likes to be stinted in its allowance,
nor to muster up an unusual share of sympathy, just as the occasion may
require. Perhaps if we could recollect distinctly, we should discover
that the two things that have affected us most in the course of our
lives have been, one of them of the greatest, and the other of the
smallest possible consequence. To let that pass as too fine a
speculation, we know well enough that very trifling circumstances do
give us great and daily annoyance, and as often prove too much for our
philosophy and forbearance, as matters of the highest moment. A lump of
soot spoiling a man’s dinner, a plate of toast falling in the ashes, the
being disappointed of a ribbon to a cap or a ticket for a ball, have led
to serious and almost tragical consequences. Friends not unfrequently
fall out and never meet again for some idle misunderstanding, ‘some
trick not worth an egg,’ who have stood the shock of serious differences
of opinion and clashing interests in life; and there is an excellent
paper in the TATLER, to prove that if a married couple do not quarrel
about some point in the first instance not worth contesting, they will
seldom find an opportunity afterwards to quarrel about a question of
real importance. Grave divines, great statesmen, and deep philosophers
are put out of their way by very little things: nay, discreet, worthy
people, without any pretensions but to good-nature and common sense,
readily surrender the happiness of their whole lives sooner than give up
an opinion to which they have committed themselves, though in all
likelihood it was the mere turn of a feather which side they should take
in the argument. It is the being baulked or thwarted in any thing that
constitutes the grievance, the unpardonable affront, not the value of
the thing to which we had made up our minds. Is it that we despise
little things; that we are not prepared for them; that they take us in
our careless, unguarded moments, and tease us out of our ordinary
patience by their petty, incessant, insect warfare, buzzing about us and
stinging us like gnats; so that we can neither get rid of nor grapple
with them, whereas we collect all our fortitude and resolution to meet
evils of greater magnitude? Or is it that there is a certain stream of
irritability that is continually fretting upon the wheels of life, which
finds sufficient food to play with in straws and feathers, while great
objects are too much for it, either choke it up, or divert its course
into serious and thoughtful interest? Some attempt might be made to
explain this in the following manner.
One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole
or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it. This is no
doubt in part or chiefly because the prospect of success irritates the
subsequent disappointment. But people have been known to pine and fall
sick from holding the next number to the twenty thousand pound prize in
the lottery. Now this could only arise from their being so near winning
in fancy, from there seeming to be so thin a partition between them and
success. When they were within one of the right number, why could they
not have taken the next—it was so easy: this haunts their minds and will
not let them rest, notwithstanding the absurdity of the reasoning. It is
that the will here has a slight imaginary obstacle to surmount to attain
its end: it should appear it had only an exceedingly trifling effort to
make for this purpose, that it was absolutely in its power (had it
known) to seize the envied prize, and it is continually harassing itself
by making the obvious transition from one number to the other, when it
is too late. That is to say, the will acts in proportion to its fancied
power, to its superiority over immediate obstacles. Now in little or
indifferent matters there seems no reason why it should not have its own
way, and therefore a disappointment vexes it the more. It grows angry
according to the insignificance of the occasion, and frets itself to
death about an object, merely because from its very futility there can
be supposed to be no real difficulty in the way of its attainment, nor
any thing more required for this purpose than a determination of the
will. The being baulked of this throws the mind off its balance, or puts
it into what is called _a passion_; and as nothing but an act of
voluntary power still seems necessary to get rid of every impediment, we
indulge our violence more and more, and heighten our impatience by
degrees into a sort of frenzy. The object is the same as it was, but we
are no longer as we were. The blood is heated, the muscles are strained.
The feelings are wound up to a pitch of agony with the vain strife. The
temper is tried to the utmost it will bear. The more contemptible the
object or the obstructions in the way to it, the more are we provoked at
being hindered by them. It looks like witchcraft. We fancy there is a
spell upon us, so that we are hampered by straws and entangled in
cobwebs. We believe that there is a fatality about our affairs. It is
evidently done on purpose to plague us. A demon is at our elbow to
torment and defeat us in every thing, even in the smallest things. We
see him sitting and mocking us, and we rave and gnash our teeth at him
in return. It is particularly hard that we cannot succeed in any one
point, however trifling, that we set our hearts on. We are the sport of
imbecility and mischance. We make another desperate effort, and fly out
into all the extravagance of impotent rage once more. Our anger runs
away with our reason, because, as there is little to give it birth,
there is nothing to check it or recal us to our senses in the prospect
of consequences. We take up and rend in pieces the mere toys of humour,
as the gusts of wind take up and whirl about chaff and stubble. Passion
plays the tyrant, in a grand tragic-comic style, over the Lilliputian
difficulties and petty disappointments it has to encounter, gives way to
all the fretfulness of grief and all the turbulence of resentment, makes
a fuss about nothing because there is nothing to make a fuss about—when
an impending calamity, an irretrievable loss, would instantly bring it
to its recollection, and tame it in its preposterous career. A man may
be in a great passion and give himself strange airs at so simple a thing
as a game at ball, for instance; may rage like a wild beast, and be
ready to dash his head against the wall about nothing, or about that
which he will laugh at the next minute, and think no more of ten minutes
after, at the same time that a good smart blow from the ball, the
effects of which he might feel as a serious inconvenience for a month,
would calm him directly—
‘Anon as patient as the female dove,
His silence will sit drooping.’
The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great
ones as well as we can. We can afford to dally and play tricks with the
one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the
wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol, or
the insolence of King Cambyses’ vein. To great evils we submit, we
resent little provocations. I have before now been disappointed of a
hundred pound job and lost half a crown at rackets on the same day, and
been more mortified at the latter than the former. That which is lasting
we share with the future, we defer the consideration of till to-morrow:
that which belongs to the moment we drink up in all its bitterness,
before the spirit evaporates. We probe minute mischiefs to the quick; we
lacerate, tear, and mangle our bosoms with misfortune’s finest,
brittlest point, and wreak our vengeance on ourselves and it for good
and all. Small pains are more manageable, more within our reach; we can
fret and worry ourselves about them, can turn them into any shape, can
twist and torture them how we please:—a grain of sand in the eye, a
thorn in the flesh only irritates the part, and leaves us strength
enough to quarrel and get out of all patience with it:—a heavy blow
stuns and takes away all power of sense as well as of resistance. The
great and mighty reverses of fortune, like the revolutions of nature,
may be said to carry their own weight and reason along with them: they
seem unavoidable and remediless, and we submit to them without murmuring
as to a fatal necessity. The magnitude of the events, in which we may
happen to be concerned, fills the mind, and carries it out of itself, as
it were, into the page of history. Our thoughts are expanded with the
scene on which we have to act, and lend us strength to disregard our own
personal share in it. Some men are indifferent to the stroke of fate, as
before and after earthquakes there is a calm in the air. From the
commanding situation whence they have been accustomed to view things,
they look down at themselves as only a part of the whole, and can
abstract their minds from the pressure of misfortune, by the aid of its
very violence. They are projected, in the explosion of events, into a
different sphere, far from their former thoughts, purposes, and
passions. The greatness of the change anticipates the slow effects of
time and reflection:—they at once contemplate themselves from an immense
distance, and look up with speculative wonder at the height on which
they stood. Had the downfall been less complete, it would have been more
galling and borne with less resignation, because there might still be a
chance of remedying it by farther efforts and farther endurance—but
_past cure, past hope_. It is chiefly this cause (together with
something of constitutional character) which has enabled the greatest
man in modern history to bear his reverses of fortune with gay
magnanimity, and to submit to the loss of the empire of the world with
as little discomposure as if he had been playing a game at chess.[67]
This does not prove by our theory that he did not use to fly into
violent passions with Talleyrand for plaguing him with bad news when
things went wrong. He was mad at uncertain forebodings of disaster, but
resigned to its consummation. A man may dislike impertinence, yet have
no quarrel with necessity!
There is another consideration that may take off our wonder at the
firmness with which the principals in great vicissitudes of fortune bear
their fate, which is, that they are in the secret of its operations, and
know that what to others appears chance-medley was unavoidable. The
clearness of their perception of all the circumstances converts the
uneasiness of doubt into certainty: they have not the qualms of
conscience which their admirers have, who cannot tell how much of the
event is to be attributed to the leaders, and how much to unforeseen
accidents: they are aware either that the result was not to be helped,
or that they did all they could to prevent it.
—‘Si Pergama dextra
Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.’
It is the mist and obscurity through which we view objects that makes us
fancy they might have been, or might still be otherwise. The precise
knowledge of antecedents and consequents makes men practical as well as
philosophical Necessarians.—It is the want of this knowledge which is
the principle and soul of gambling, and of all games of chance or
partial skill. The supposition is, that the issue is uncertain, and that
there is no positive means of ascertaining it. It is dependent on the
turn of a die, on the tossing up of a halfpenny: to be fair, it must be
a lottery; there is no knowing but by the event; and it is this which
keeps the interest alive, and works up the passion little short of
madness. There is all the agitation of suspense, all the alternation of
hope and fear, of good and bad success, all the eagerness of desire,
without the possibility of reducing this to calculation, that is, of
subjecting the increased action of the will to a known rule, or
restraining the excesses of passion within the bounds of reason. We see
no cause beforehand why the run of the cards should not be in our
favour:—we will hear of none afterwards why it should not have been so.
As in the absence of all _data_ to judge by, we wantonly fill up the
blank with the most extravagant expectations, so, when all is over, we
obstinately recur to the chance we had previously. There is nothing to
tame us down to the event, nothing to reconcile us to our hard luck, for
so we think it. We see no reason why we failed (and there was none, any
more than why we should succeed)—we think that, reason apart, our will
is the next best thing; we still try to have it our own way, and fret,
torment, and harrow ourselves up with vain imaginations to effect
impossibilities.[68] We play the game over again: we wonder how it was
possible for us to fail. We turn our brain with straining at
contradictions, and striving to make things what they are not, or in
other words, to subject the course of nature to our fantastical wishes.
‘_If it had been so—if we had done such and such a thing_’—we try it in
a thousand different ways, and are just as far off the mark as ever. We
appealed to chance in the first instance, and yet, when it has decided
against us, we will not give in, and sit down contented with our loss,
but refuse to submit to any thing but reason, which has nothing to do
with the matter. In drawing two straws, for example, to see which is the
longest, there was no apparent necessity we should fix upon the wrong
one, it was so easy to have fixed upon the other, nay, at one time we
were going to do it—if we had—the mind thus runs back to what was so
possible and feasible at one time, while the thing was pending, and
would fain give a bias to causes so slender and insignificant, as the
skittle-player bends his body to give a bias to the bowl he has already
delivered from his hand, not considering that what is once determined,
be the causes ever so trivial or evanescent, is in the individual
instance unalterable. Indeed, to be a great philosopher, in the
practical and most important sense of the term, little more seems
necessary than to be convinced of the truth of the maxim, which the wise
man repeated to the daughter of King Cophetua, _That if a thing is, it
is_, and there is an end of it!
We often make life unhappy in wishing things to have turned out
otherwise than they did, merely because that is possible to the
imagination which is impossible in fact. I remember when L—’s farce was
damned (for damned it was, that’s certain) I used to dream every night
for a month after (and then I vowed I would plague myself no more about
it) that it was revived at one of the Minor or provincial theatres with
great success, that such and such retrenchments and alterations had been
made in it, and that it was thought _it might do at the other House_. I
had heard indeed (this was told in confidence to L—) that _Gentleman_
Lewis was present on the night of its performance, and said, that if he
had had it, he would have made it, by a few judicious curtailments, ‘the
most popular little thing that had been brought out for some time.’ How
often did I conjure up in recollection the full diapason of applause at
the end of the _Prologue_, and hear my ingenious friend in the first row
of the pit roar with laughter at his own wit! Then I dwelt with forced
complacency on some part in which it had been doing well: then we would
consider (in concert) whether the long, tedious opera of the
_Travellers_, which preceded it, had not tired people beforehand, so
that they had not spirits left for the quaint and sparkling ‘wit
skirmishes’ of the dialogue, and we all agreed it might have gone down
after a Tragedy, except L— himself, who swore he had no hopes of it from
the beginning, and that he knew the name of the hero when it came to be
discovered could not be got over.—Mr. H—, thou wert damned! Bright shone
the morning on the play-bills that announced thy appearance, and the
streets were filled with the buzz of persons asking one another if they
would go to see Mr. H—, and answering that they would certainly: but
before night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his friends and the
town was eclipsed, for thou wert damned! Hadst thou been anonymous, thou
haply mightst have lived. But thou didst come to an untimely end for thy
tricks, and for want of a better name to pass them off!
In this manner we go back to the critical minutes on which the turn of
our fate, or that of any one else in whom we are interested, depended;
try them over again with new knowledge and sharpened sensibility; and
thus think to alter what is irrevocable, and ease for a moment the pang
of lasting regret. So in a game at rackets[69] (to compare small things
with great) I think if at such a point I had followed up my success, if
I had not been too secure or over-anxious in another part, if I had
played for such an opening, in short, if I had done any thing but what I
did and what has proved unfortunate in the result, the chances were all
in my favour. But it is merely because I do not know what would have
happened in the other case, that I interpret it so readily to my own
advantage. I have sometimes lain awake a whole night, trying to serve
out the last ball of an interesting game in a particular corner of the
court, which I had missed from a nervous feeling. Rackets (I might
observe for the sake of the uninformed reader) is, like any other
athletic game, very much a thing of skill and practice: but it is also a
thing of opinion, ‘subject to all the skyey influences.’ If you think
you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory. If you hesitate
in striking at the ball, it is ten to one but you miss it. If you are
apprehensive of committing some particular error (such as striking the
ball _foul_) you will be nearly sure to do it. While thinking of that
which you are so earnestly bent upon avoiding, your hand mechanically
follows the strongest idea, and obeys the imagination rather than the
intention of the striker. A run of luck is a forerunner of success, and
courage is as much wanted as skill. No one is however free from nervous
sensations at times. A good player may not be able to strike a single
stroke if another comes into the court that he has a particular dread
of; and it frequently so happens that a player cannot beat another even,
though he can give half the game to an equal player, because he has some
associations of jealousy or personal pique against the first which he
has not towards the last. _Sed hæc hactenus._ Chess is a game I do not
understand, and have not comprehension enough to play at. But I believe,
though it is so much less a thing of chance than science or skill, eager
players pass whole nights in marching and countermarching their men and
check-mating a successful adversary, supposing that at a certain point
of the game, they had determined upon making a particular move instead
of the one which they actually did make. I have heard a story of two
persons playing at back-gammon, one of whom was so enraged at losing his
match at a particular point of the game, that he took the board and
threw it out of the window. It fell upon the head of one of the
passengers in the street, who came up to demand instant satisfaction for
the affront and injury he had sustained. The losing gamester only asked
him if he understood back-gammon, and finding that he did, said, that if
upon seeing the state of the game he did not excuse the extravagance of
his conduct, he would give him any other satisfaction he wished for. The
tables were accordingly brought, and the situation of the two contending
parties being explained, the gentleman put up his sword, and went away
perfectly satisfied.—To return from this, which to some will seem a
digression, and to others will serve as a confirmation of the doctrine I
am insisting on.
It is not then the value of the object, but the time and pains bestowed
upon it, that determines the sense and degree of our loss. Many men set
their minds only on trifles, and have not a compass of soul to take an
interest in any thing truly great and important beyond forms and
_minutiæ_. Such persons are really men of little minds, or may be
complimented with the title of great children,
‘Pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw.’
Larger objects elude their grasp, while they fasten eagerly on the light
and insignificant. They fidget themselves and others to death with
incessant anxiety about nothing. A part of their dress that is awry
keeps them in a fever of restlessness and impatience; they sit picking
their teeth, or paring their nails, or stirring the fire, or brushing a
speck of dirt off their coats, while the house or the world tumbling
about their ears would not rouse them from their morbid insensibility.
They cannot sit still on their chairs for their lives, though, if there
were any thing for them to do, they would become immoveable. Their
nerves are as irritable as their imaginations are callous and inert.
They are addicted to an inveterate habit of littleness and perversity,
which rejects every other motive to action or object of contemplation
but the daily, teazing, contemptible, familiar, favourite sources of
uneasiness and dissatisfaction. When they are of a sanguine instead of a
morbid temperament, they become _quidnuncs_ and virtuosos—collectors of
caterpillars and odd volumes, makers of fishing-rods and curious in
watch-chains. Will Wimble dabbled in this way, to his immortal honour.
But many others have been less successful. There are those who build
their fame on epigrams or epitaphs, and others who devote their lives to
writing the Lord’s Prayer in little. Some poets compose and sing their
own verses. Which character would they have us think most highly of—the
poet or the musician? The Great is One. Some there are who feel more
pride in sealing a letter with a head of Homer than ever that old blind
bard did in reciting his Iliad. These raise a huge opinion of themselves
out of nothing, as there are those who shrink from their own merits into
the shade of unconquerable humility. I know one person at least, who
would rather be the author of an unsuccessful farce than of a successful
tragedy. Repeated mortification has produced an inverted ambition in his
mind, and made failure the bitter test of desert. He cannot lift his
drooping head to gaze on the gaudy crown of popularity placed within his
reach, but casts a pensive, rivetted look downwards to the modest
flowers which the multitude trample under their feet. If he had a piece
likely to succeed, coming out under all advantages, he would damn it by
some ill-timed, wilful jest, and lose the favour of the public, to
preserve the sense of his personal identity. ‘Misfortune,’ Shakespear
says, ‘brings a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows:’ and it makes
our thoughts traitors to ourselves.—It is a maxim with many—‘_Take care
of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves._’ Those only
put it in practice successfully who think more of the pence than of the
pounds. To such, a large sum is less than a small one. Great
speculations, great returns are to them extravagant or imaginary: a few
hundreds a year are something _snug_ and comfortable. Persons who have
been used to a petty, huckstering way of life cannot enlarge their
apprehensions to a notion of any thing better. Instead of launching out
into greater expense and liberality with the tide of fortune, they draw
back with a fear of consequences, and think to succeed on a broader
scale by dint of meanness and parsimony. My uncle Toby frequently caught
Trim standing up behind his chair, when he had told him to be seated.
What the corporal did out of respect, others would do out of servility.
The menial character does not wear out in three or four generations. You
cannot keep some people out of the kitchen, merely because their
grandfathers or grandmothers came out of it. A poor man and his wife
walking along in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, he said to her
peevishly, ‘What is the use of walking along these fine streets and
squares? Let us turn down some alley!’ He felt he should be more at home
there. L— said of an old acquaintance of his, that when he was young, he
wanted to be a tailor, but had not spirit! This is the misery of unequal
matches. The woman cannot easily forget, or think that others forget,
her origin; and with perhaps superior sense and beauty, keeps painfully
in the back-ground. It is worse when she braves this conscious feeling,
and displays all the insolence of the upstart and affected fine-lady.
But shouldst thou ever, my Infelice, grace my home with thy loved
presence, as thou hast cheered my hopes with thy smile, thou wilt
conquer all hearts with thy prevailing gentleness, and I will shew the
world what Shakespear’s women were!—Some gallants set their hearts on
princesses; others descend in imagination to women of quality; others
are mad after opera-singers. For my part, I am shy even of actresses,
and should not think of leaving my card with Madame V—. I am for none of
these _bonnes fortunes_; but for a list of humble beauties,
servant-maids and shepherd-girls, with their red elbows, hard hands,
black stockings and mob-caps, I could furnish out a gallery equal to
Cowley’s, and paint them half as well. Oh! might I but attempt a
description of some of them in poetic prose, Don Juan would forget his
Julia, and Mr. Davison might both print and publish this volume. I agree
so far with Horace, and differ with Montaigne. I admire the Clementinas
and Clarissas at a distance: the Pamelas and Fannys of Richardson and
Fielding make my blood tingle. I have written love-letters to such in my
time, _d’un pathétique à faire fendre les rochers_, and with about as
much effect as if they had been addressed to stone. The simpletons only
laughed, and said, that ‘those were not the sort of things to gain the
affections.’ I wish I had kept copies in my own justification. What is
worse, I have an utter aversion to _blue-stockings_. I do not care a fig
for any woman that knows even what _an author_ means. If I know that she
has read any thing I have written, I cut her acquaintance immediately.
This sort of literary intercourse with me passes for nothing. Her
critical and scientific acquirements are _carrying coals to Newcastle_.
I do not want to be told that I have published such or such a work. I
knew all this before. It makes no addition to my sense of power. I do
not wish the affair to be brought about in that way. I would have her
read my soul: she should understand the language of the heart: she
should know what I am, as if she were another self! She should love me
for myself alone. I like myself without any reason:—I would have her do
so too. This is not very reasonable. I abstract from my temptations to
admire all the circumstances of dress, birth, breeding, fortune; and I
would not willingly put forward my own pretensions, whatever they may
be. The image of some fair creature is engraven on my inmost soul; it is
on that I build my claim to her regard, and expect her to see into my
heart, as I see her form always before me. Wherever she treads, pale
primroses, like her face, vernal hyacinths, like her brow, spring up
beneath her feet, and music hangs on every bough: but all is cold,
barren, and desolate without her. Thus I feel and thus I think. But have
I ever told her so? No. Or if I did, would she understand it? No. I
‘hunt the wind, I worship a statue, cry aloud to the desert.’ To see
beauty is not to be beautiful, to pine in love is not to be loved
again.—I always was inclined to raise and magnify the power of Love. I
thought that his sweet power should only be exerted to join together the
loveliest forms and fondest hearts; that none but those in whom his
Godhead shone outwardly, and was inly felt, should ever partake of his
triumphs; and I stood and gazed at a distance, as unworthy to mingle in
so bright a throng, and did not (even for a moment) wish to tarnish the
glory of so fair a vision by being myself admitted into it. I say this
was my notion once, but God knows it was one of the errors of my youth.
For coming nearer to look, I saw the maimed, the blind, and the halt
enter in, the crooked and the dwarf, the ugly, the old and impotent, the
man of pleasure and the man of the world, the dapper and the pert, the
vain and shallow boaster, the fool and the pedant, the ignorant and
brutal, and all that is farthest removed from earth’s fairest-born, and
the pride of human life. Seeing all these enter the courts of Love, and
thinking that I also might venture in under favour of the crowd, but
finding myself rejected, I fancied (I might be wrong) that it was not so
much because I was below, as above the common standard. I did feel, but
I was ashamed to feel, mortified at my repulse, when I saw the meanest
of mankind, the very scum and refuse, all creeping things and every
obscene creature, enter in before me. I seemed a species by myself. I
took a pride even in my disgrace: and concluded I had elsewhere my
inheritance! The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing
the _Essay on the Principles of Human Action_—a work that no woman ever
read, or would ever comprehend the meaning of. But if I do not build my
claim to regard on the pretensions I have, how can I build it on those I
am totally without? Or why do I complain and expect to gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? Thought has in me cancelled pleasure; and
this dark forehead, bent upon truth, is the rock on which all affection
has split. And thus I waste my life in one long sigh; nor ever (till too
late) beheld a gentle face turned gently upon mine!... But no! not too
late, if that face, pure, modest, downcast, tender, with angel
sweetness, not only gladdens the prospect of the future, but sheds its
radiance on the past, smiling in tears. A purple light hovers round my
head. The air of love is in the room. As I look at my long-neglected
copy of the Death of Clorinda, golden gleams play upon the canvas, as
they used when I painted it. The flowers of Hope and Joy springing up in
my mind, recal the time when they first bloomed there. The years that
are fled knock at the door and enter. I am in the Louvre once more. The
sun of Austerlitz has not set. It still shines here—in my heart; and he,
the son of glory, is not dead, nor ever shall, to me. I am as when my
life began. The rainbow is in the sky again. I see the skirts of the
departed years. All that I have thought and felt has not been in vain. I
am not utterly worthless, unregarded; nor shall I die and wither of pure
scorn. Now could I sit on the tomb of Liberty, and write a Hymn to Love.
Oh! if I am deceived, let me be deceived still. Let me live in the
Elysium of those soft looks; poison me with kisses, kill me with smiles;
but still mock me with thy love![70]
Poets chuse mistresses who have the fewest charms, that they may make
something out of nothing. They succeed best in fiction, and they apply
this rule to love. They make a Goddess of any dowdy. As Don Quixote
said, in answer to the matter of fact remonstrances of Sancho, that
Dulcinea del Toboso answered the purpose of signalising his valour just
as well as the ‘fairest princess under sky,’ so any of the fair sex will
serve them to write about just as well as another. They take some
awkward thing and dress her up in fine words, as children dress up a
wooden doll in fine clothes. Perhaps, a fine head of hair, a taper
waist, or some other circumstance strikes them, and they make the rest
out according to their fancies. They have a wonderful knack of supplying
deficiencies in the subjects of their idolatry out of the store-house of
their imaginations. They presently translate their favourites to the
skies, where they figure with Berenice’s locks and Ariadne’s crown. This
predilection for the unprepossessing and insignificant, I take to arise
not merely from a desire in poets to have some subject to exercise their
inventive talents upon, but from their jealousy of any pretensions (even
those of beauty in the other sex) that might interfere with the
continual incense offered to their personal vanity.
Cardinal Mazarine never thought any thing of Cardinal de Retz, after he
told him that he had written for the last thirty years of his life with
the same pen. Some Italian poet going to present a copy of verses to the
Pope, and finding, as he was looking them over in the coach as he went,
a mistake of a single letter in the printing, broke his heart of
vexation and chagrin. A still more remarkable case of literary
disappointment occurs in the history of a countryman of his, which I
cannot refrain from giving here, as I find it related. ‘Anthony Codrus
Urceus, a most learned and unfortunate Italian, born near Modena, 1446,
was a striking instance,’ says his biographer, ‘of the miseries men
bring upon themselves by setting their affections unreasonably on
trifles. This learned man lived at Forli, and had an apartment in the
palace. His room was so very dark, that he was forced to use a candle in
the day-time; and one day, going abroad without putting it out, his
library was set on fire, and some papers which he had prepared for the
press were burned. The instant he was informed of this ill news, he was
affected even to madness. He ran furiously to the palace, and stopping
at the door of his apartment, he cried aloud, “Christ Jesus! what mighty
crime have I committed! whom of your followers have I ever injured, that
you thus rage with inexpiable hatred against me?” Then turning himself
to an image of the Virgin Mary near at hand, “Virgin (says he) hear what
I have to say, for I speak in earnest, and with a composed spirit: if I
shall happen to address you in my dying moments, I humbly intreat you
not to hear me, nor receive me into Heaven, for I am determined to spend
all eternity in Hell!” Those who heard these blasphemous expressions
endeavoured to comfort him; but all to no purpose: for, the society of
mankind being no longer supportable to him, he left the city, and
retired, like a savage, to the deep solitude of a wood. Some say that he
was murdered there by ruffians: others, that he died at Bologna in 1500,
after much contrition and penitence.’
Perhaps the censure passed at the outset of the anecdote on this
unfortunate person is unfounded and severe, when it is said that he
brought his miseries on himself ‘by having set his affections
unreasonably on trifles.’ To others it might appear so: but to himself
the labour of a whole life was hardly a trifle. His passion was not a
causeless one, though carried to such frantic excess. The story of Sir
Isaac Newton presents a strong contrast to the last-mentioned one, who
on going into his study and finding that his dog Tray had thrown down a
candle on the table, and burnt some papers of great value, contented
himself with exclaiming, ‘Ah! Tray, you don’t know the mischief you have
done!’ Many persons would not forgive the overturning of a cup of
chocolate so soon.
I remember hearing an instance some years ago of a man of character and
property, who through unexpected losses had been condemned to a long and
heart-breaking imprisonment, which he bore with exemplary fortitude. At
the end of four years, by the interest and exertions of friends, he
obtained his discharge with every prospect of beginning the world
afresh, and had made his arrangements for leaving his irksome abode, and
meeting his wife and family at a distance of two hundred miles by a
certain day. Owing to the miscarriage of a letter, some signature
necessary to the completion of the business did not arrive in time, and
on account of the informality which had thus arisen, he could not set
out home till the return of the post, which was four days longer. His
spirit could not brook the delay. He had wound himself up to the last
pitch of expectation; he had, as it were, calculated his patience to
hold out to a certain point, and then to throw down his load for ever,
and he could not find resolution to resume it for a few hours beyond
this. He put an end to the intolerable conflict of hope and
disappointment in a fit of excruciating anguish. Woes that we have time
to foresee and leisure to contemplate break their force by being spread
over a larger surface, and borne at intervals; but those that come upon
us suddenly, for however short a time, seem to insult us by their
unnecessary and uncalled-for intrusion; and the very prospect of relief,
when held out and then withdrawn from us, to however small a distance,
only frets impatience into agony by tantalising our hopes and wishes;
and to rend asunder the thin partition that separates us from our
favourite object, we are ready to burst even the fetters of life itself!
I am not aware that any one has demonstrated how it is that a stronger
capacity is required for the conduct of great affairs than of small
ones. The organs of the mind, like the pupil of the eye, may be
contracted or dilated to view a broader or a narrower surface, and yet
find sufficient variety to occupy its attention in each. The material
universe is infinitely divisible, and so is the texture of human
affairs. We take things in the gross or in the detail, according to the
occasion. I think I could as soon get up the budget of Ways and Means
for the current year, as be sure of making both ends meet, and paying my
rent at quarter-day in a paltry huckster’s shop. Great objects move on
by their own weight and impulse: great power turns aside petty
obstacles; and he, who wields it, is often but the puppet of
circumstances, like the fly on the wheel that said, ‘What a dust we
raise!’ It is easier to ruin a kingdom and aggrandise one’s own pride
and prejudices than to set up a green-grocer’s stall. An idiot or a
madman may do this at any time, whose word is law, and whose nod is
fate. Nay, he whose look is obedience, and who understands the silent
wishes of the great, may easily trample on the necks and tread out the
liberties of a mighty nation, deriding their strength, and hating it the
more from a consciousness of his own meanness. Power is not wisdom, it
is true; but it equally ensures its own objects. It does not exact, but
dispenses with talent. When a man creates this power, or new-moulds the
state by sage counsels and bold enterprises, it is a different thing
from overturning it with the levers that are put into his baby hands. In
general, however, it may be argued that great transactions and
complicated concerns ask more genius to conduct them than smaller ones,
for this reason, _viz._ that the mind must be able either to embrace a
greater variety of details in a more extensive range of objects, or must
have a greater faculty of generalising, or a greater depth of insight
into ruling principles, and so come at true results in that way.
Buonaparte knew everything, even to the names of our cadets in the
East-India service; but he failed in this, that he did not calculate the
resistance which barbarism makes to refinement. He thought that the
Russians could not burn Moscow, because the Parisians could not burn
Paris. The French think every thing must be French. The Cossacks, alas!
do not conform to etiquette: the rudeness of the seasons knows no rules
of politeness!—Some artists think it a test of genius to paint a large
picture, and I grant the truth of this position, if the large picture
contains more than a small one. It is not the size of the canvas, but
the quantity of truth and nature put into it, that settles the point. It
is a mistake, common enough on this subject, to suppose that a miniature
is more finished than an oil-picture. The miniature is inferior to the
oil-picture only because it is less finished, because it cannot follow
nature into so many individual and exact particulars. The proof of which
is, that the copy of a good portrait will always make a highly finished
miniature (see for example Mr. Bone’s enamels), whereas the copy of a
good miniature, if enlarged to the size of life, will make but a very
sorry portrait. Several of our best artists, who are fond of painting
large figures, invert this reasoning. They make the whole figure
gigantic, not that they may have room for nature, but for the motion of
their brush (as if they were painting the side of a house), regarding
the extent of canvas they have to cover as an excuse for their slovenly
and hasty manner of getting over it; and thus, in fact, leave their
pictures nothing at last but overgrown miniatures, but huge caricatures.
It is not necessary in any case (either in a larger or a smaller
compass) to go into details, so as to lose sight of the effect, and
decompound the face into porous and transparent molecules, in the manner
of Denner, who painted what he saw through a magnifying glass. The
painter’s eye need not be a microscope, but I contend that it should be
a looking-glass, bright, clear, lucid. The _little_ in art begins with
insignificant parts, with what does not tell in connection with other
parts. The true artist will paint not material points, but _moral
quantities_. In a word, wherever there is feeling or expression in a
muscle or a vein, there is grandeur and refinement too.—I will conclude
these remarks with an account of the manner in which the ancient
sculptors combined great and little things in such matters. ‘That the
name of Phidias,’ says Pliny, ‘is illustrious among all the nations that
have heard of the fame of the Olympian Jupiter, no one doubts; but in
order that those may know that he is deservedly praised who have not
even seen his works, we shall offer a few arguments, and those of his
genius only: nor to this purpose shall we insist on the beauty of the
Olympian Jupiter, nor on the magnitude of the Minerva at Athens, though
it is twenty-six cubits in height (about thirty-five feet), and is made
of ivory and gold: but we shall refer to the shield, on which the battle
of the Amazons is carved on the outer side: on the inside of the same is
the fight of the Gods and Giants; and on the sandals, that between the
Centaurs and Lapithæ; so well did every part of that work display the
powers of the art. Again, the sculptures on the pedestal he called the
birth of Pandora: there are to be seen in number thirty Gods, the figure
of Victory being particularly admirable: the learned also admire the
figures of the serpent and the brazen sphinx, writhing under the spear.
These things are mentioned, in passing, of an artist never enough to be
commended, that it may be seen that he shewed the same magnificence even
in small things.’—_Pliny’s Natural History_, Book 36.
ESSAY XXIV
ON FAMILIAR STYLE
It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a
familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without
affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing
that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of
expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not
only all unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose,
unconnected, _slipshod_ allusions. It is not to take the first word
that offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw words
together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail
ourselves of the true idiom of the language. To write a genuine
familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in
common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words,
or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting
aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. Or to give another
illustration, to write naturally is the same thing in regard to common
conversation, as to read naturally is in regard to common speech. It
does not follow that it is an easy thing to give the true accent and
inflection to the words you utter, because you do not attempt to rise
above the level of ordinary life and colloquial speaking. You do not
assume indeed the solemnity of the pulpit, or the tone of
stage-declamation: neither are you at liberty to gabble on at a
venture, without emphasis or discretion, or to resort to vulgar
dialect or clownish pronunciation. You must steer a middle course. You
are tied down to a given and appropriate articulation, which is
determined by the habitual associations between sense and sound, and
which you can only hit by entering into the author’s meaning, as you
must find the proper words and style to express yourself by fixing
your thoughts on the subject you have to write about. Any one may
mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to
tell his thoughts: but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity
is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style,
to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express: it is not
so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it. Out of eight
or ten words equally common, equally intelligible, with nearly equal
pretensions, it is a matter of some nicety and discrimination to pick
out the very one, the preferableness of which is scarcely perceptible,
but decisive. The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson’s style is, that
there is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses
none but ‘tall, opaque words,’ taken from the ‘first row of the
rubric:’—words with the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases
with merely English terminations. If a fine style depended on this
sort of arbitrary pretension, it would be fair to judge of an author’s
elegance by the measurement of his words, and the substitution of
foreign circumlocutions (with no precise associations) for the
mother-tongue.[71] How simple it is to be dignified without ease, to
be pompous without meaning! Surely, it is but a mechanical rule for
avoiding what is low to be always pedantic and affected. It is clear
you cannot use a vulgar English word, if you never use a common
English word at all. A fine tact is shewn in adhering to those which
are perfectly common, and yet never falling into any expressions which
are debased by disgusting circumstances, or which owe their
signification and point to technical or professional allusions. A
truly natural or familiar style can never be quaint or vulgar, for
this reason, that it is of universal force and applicability, and that
quaintness and vulgarity arise out of the immediate connection of
certain words with coarse and disagreeable, or with confined ideas.
The last form what we understand by _cant_ or _slang_ phrases.—To give
an example of what is not very clear in the general statement. I
should say that the phrase _To cut with a knife_, or _To cut a piece
of wood_, is perfectly free from vulgarity, because it is perfectly
common: but to _cut an acquaintance_ is not quite unexceptionable,
because it is not perfectly common or intelligible, and has hardly yet
escaped out of the limits of slang phraseology. I should hardly
therefore use the word in this sense without putting it in italics as
a license of expression, to be received _cum grano salis_. All
provincial or bye-phrases come under the same mark of reprobation—all
such as the writer transfers to the page from his fire-side or a
particular _coterie_, or that he invents for his own sole use and
convenience. I conceive that words are like money, not the worse for
being common, but that it is the stamp of custom alone that gives them
circulation or value. I am fastidious in this respect, and would
almost as soon coin the currency of the realm as counterfeit the
King’s English. I never invented or gave a new and unauthorised
meaning to any word but one single one (the term _impersonal_ applied
to feelings) and that was in an abstruse metaphysical discussion to
express a very difficult distinction. I have been (I know) loudly
accused of revelling in vulgarisms and broken English. I cannot speak
to that point: but so far I plead guilty to the determined use of
acknowledged idioms and common elliptical expressions. I am not sure
that the critics in question know the one from the other, that is, can
distinguish any medium between formal pedantry and the most barbarous
solecism. As an author, I endeavour to employ plain words and popular
modes of construction, as were I a chapman and dealer, I should common
weights and measures.
The proper force of words lies not in the words themselves, but in their
application. A word may be a fine-sounding word, of an unusual length,
and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the
connection in which it is introduced, may be quite pointless and
irrelevant. It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the
expression to the idea that clenches a writer’s meaning:—as it is not
the size or glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to
its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are
as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and
more so than the mere shewy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate any thing
that occupies more space that it is worth. I hate to see a load of
band-boxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words
without any thing in them. A person who does not deliberately dispose of
all his thoughts alike in cumbrous draperies and flimsy disguises, may
strike out twenty varieties of familiar every-day language, each coming
somewhat nearer to the feeling he wants to convey, and at last not hit
upon that particular and only one, which may be said to be identical
with the exact impression in his mind. This would seem to shew that Mr.
Cobbett is hardly right in saying that the first word that occurs is
always the best. It may be a very good one; and yet a better may present
itself on reflection or from time to time. It should be suggested
naturally, however, and spontaneously, from a fresh and lively
conception of the subject. We seldom succeed by trying at improvement,
or by merely substituting one word for another that we are not satisfied
with, as we cannot recollect the name of a place or person by merely
plaguing ourselves about it. We wander farther from the point by
persisting in a wrong scent; but it starts up accidentally in the memory
when we least expected it, by touching some link in the chain of
previous association.
There are those who hoard up and make a cautious display of nothing but
rich and rare phraseology;—ancient medals, obscure coins, and Spanish
pieces of eight. They are very curious to inspect; but I myself would
neither offer nor take them in the course of exchange. A sprinkling of
archaisms is not amiss; but a tissue of obsolete expressions is more fit
_for keep than wear_. I do not say I would not use any phrase that had
been brought into fashion before the middle or the end of the last
century; but I should be shy of using any that had not been employed by
any approved author during the whole of that time. Words, like clothes,
get old-fashioned, or mean and ridiculous, when they have been for some
time laid aside. Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I
can read with pleasure; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit
of his authors, that the idea of imitation is almost done away. There is
an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and feeling, an
intuition, deep and lively, of his subject, that carries off any
quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress.
The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps
his ideas are altogether so marked and individual, as to require their
point and pungency to be neutralised by the affectation of a singular
but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing
costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way. The
old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Brown, are a
kind of mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical
modern, reconciling us to his peculiarities. I do not however know how
far this is the case or not, till he condescends to write like one of
us. I must confess that what I like best of his papers under the
signature of Elia (still I do not presume, amidst such excellence, to
decide what is most excellent) is the account of _Mrs. Battle’s Opinions
on Whist_, which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns
of expression—
‘A well of native English undefiled.’
To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these Essays of the
ingenious and highly gifted author have the same sort of charm and
relish, that Erasmus’s Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin have
to the classical scholar. Certainly, I do not know any borrowed pencil
that has more power or felicity of execution than the one of which I
have here been speaking.
It is as easy to write a gaudy style without ideas, as it is to spread a
pallet of shewy colours, or to smear in a flaunting transparency. ‘What
do you read?’—‘Words, words, words.’—‘What is the matter?’—‘_Nothing_,’
it might be answered. The florid style is the reverse of the familiar.
The last is employed as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first
is resorted to as a spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When
there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them
fine. Look through the dictionary, and cull out a _florilegium_, rival
the _tulippomania_. _Rouge_ high enough, and never mind the natural
complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look
of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable, who regard only
appearances, will be delighted with the imposition. Keep to your
sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well.
Swell out an unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of style. A thought,
a distinction is the rock on which all this brittle cargo of verbiage
splits at once. Such writers have merely _verbal_ imaginations, that
retain nothing but words. Or their puny thoughts have dragon-wings, all
green and gold. They soar far above the vulgar failing of the _Sermo
humi obrepens_—their most ordinary speech is never short of an
hyperbole, splendid, imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a
cento of sounding common-places. If some of us, whose ‘ambition is more
lowly,’ pry a little too narrowly into nooks and corners to pick up a
number of ‘unconsidered trifles,’ they never once direct their eyes or
lift their hands to seize on any but the most gorgeous, tarnished,
thread-bare patch-work set of phrases, the left-off finery of poetic
extravagance, transmitted down through successive generations of barren
pretenders. If they criticise actors and actresses, a huddled
phantasmagoria of feathers, spangles, floods of light, and oceans of
sound float before their morbid sense, which they paint in the style of
Ancient Pistol. Not a glimpse can you get of the merits or defects of
the performers: they are hidden in a profusion of barbarous epithets and
wilful rhodomontade. Our hypercritics are not thinking of these little
fantoccini beings—
‘That strut and fret their hour upon the stage’—
but of tall phantoms of words, abstractions, _genera_ and _species_,
sweeping clauses, periods that unite the Poles, forced alliterations,
astounding antitheses—
‘And on their pens _Fustian_ sits plumed.’
If they describe kings and queens, it is an Eastern pageant. The
Coronation at either House is nothing to it. We get at four repeated
images—a curtain, a throne, a sceptre, and a foot-stool. These are with
them the wardrobe of a lofty imagination; and they turn their servile
strains to servile uses. Do we read a description of pictures? It is not
a reflection of tones and hues which ‘nature’s own sweet and cunning
hand laid on,’ but piles of precious stones, rubies, pearls, emeralds,
Golconda’s mines, and all the blazonry of art. Such persons are in fact
besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the glittering,
but empty and sterile phantoms of things. Personifications, capital
letters, seas of sunbeams, visions of glory, shining inscriptions, the
figures of a transparency, Britannia with her shield, or Hope leaning on
an anchor, make up their stock in trade. They may be considered as
_hieroglyphical_ writers. Images stand out in their minds isolated and
important merely in themselves, without any ground-work of feeling—there
is no context in their imaginations. Words affect them in the same way,
by the mere sound, that is, by their possible, not by their actual
application to the subject in hand. They are fascinated by first
appearances, and have no sense of consequences. Nothing more is meant by
them than meets the ear: they understand or feel nothing more than meets
their eye. The web and texture of the universe, and of the heart of man,
is a mystery to them: they have no faculty that strikes a chord in
unison with it. They cannot get beyond the daubings of fancy, the
varnish of sentiment. Objects are not linked to feelings, words to
things, but images revolve in splendid mockery, words represent
themselves in their strange rhapsodies. The categories of such a mind
are pride and ignorance—pride in outside show, to which they sacrifice
every thing, and ignorance of the true worth and hidden structure both
of words and things. With a sovereign contempt for what is familiar and
natural, they are the slaves of vulgar affectation—of a routine of
high-flown phrases. Scorning to imitate realities, they are unable to
invent any thing, to strike out one original idea. They are not copyists
of nature, it is true: but they are the poorest of all plagiarists, the
plagiarists of words. All is far-fetched, dear-bought, artificial,
oriental in subject and allusion: all is mechanical, conventional,
vapid, formal, pedantic in style and execution. They startle and
confound the understanding of the reader, by the remoteness and
obscurity of their illustrations: they soothe the ear by the monotony of
the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the
_mock-school_ in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian
in expression, and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but
never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a
shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper’s
description of the Empress of Russia’s palace of ice, as ‘worthless as
in shew ’twas glittering’—
‘It smiled, and it was cold!’
ESSAY XXV
ON EFFEMINACY OF CHARACTER
Effeminacy of character arises from a prevalence of the sensibility over
the will: or it consists in a want of fortitude to bear pain or to
undergo fatigue, however urgent the occasion. We meet with instances of
people who cannot lift up a little finger to save themselves from ruin,
nor give up the smallest indulgence for the sake of any other person.
They cannot put themselves out of their way on any account. No one makes
a greater outcry when the day of reckoning comes, or affects greater
compassion for the mischiefs they have occasioned; but till the time
comes, they feel nothing, they care for nothing. They live in the
present moment, are the creatures of the present impulse (whatever it
may be)—and beyond that, the universe is nothing to them. The slightest
toy countervails the empire of the world; they will not forego the
smallest inclination they feel, for any object that can be proposed to
them, or any reasons that can be urged for it. You might as well ask of
the gossamer not to wanton in the idle summer air, or of the moth not to
play with the flame that scorches it, as ask of these persons to put off
any enjoyment for a single instant, or to gird themselves up to any
enterprise of pith or moment. They have been so used to a studied
succession of agreeable sensations, that the shortest pause is a
privation which they can by no means endure—it is like tearing them from
their very existence—they have been so inured to ease and indolence,
that the most trifling effort is like one of the tasks of Hercules, a
thing of impossibility, at which they shudder. They lie on beds of
roses, and spread their gauze wings to the sun and summer gale, and
cannot bear to put their tender feet to the ground, much less to
encounter the thorns and briers of the world. Life for them
—‘rolls o’er Elysian flowers its amber stream’—
and they have no fancy for fishing in troubled waters. The ordinary
state of existence they regard as something importunate and vain, and
out of nature. What must they think of its trials and sharp
vicissitudes? Instead of voluntarily embracing pain, or labour, or
danger, or death, every sensation must be wound up to the highest pitch
of voluptuous refinement, every motion must be grace and elegance; they
live in a luxurious, endless dream, or
‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain!’
Siren sounds must float around them; smiling forms must every where meet
their sight; they must tread a soft measure on painted carpets or
smooth-shaven lawns; books, arts, jests, laughter, occupy every thought
and hour—what have they to do with the drudgery, the struggles, the
poverty, the disease or anguish, which are the common lot of humanity!
These things are intolerable to them, even in imagination. They disturb
the enchantment in which they are lapt. They cause a wrinkle in the
clear and polished surface of their existence. They exclaim with
impatience and in agony, ‘Oh, leave me to my repose!’ How ‘they shall
discourse the freezing hours away, when wind and rain beat dark December
down,’ or ‘bide the pelting of the pitiless storm,’ gives them no
concern, it never once enters their heads. They close the shutters, draw
the curtains, and enjoy or shut out the whistling of the approaching
tempest. ‘They take no thought for the morrow,’ not they. They do not
anticipate evils. Let them come when they will come, they will not run
to meet them. Nay more, they will not move one step to prevent them, nor
let any one else. The mention of such things is shocking; the very
supposition is a nuisance that must not be tolerated. The idea of the
trouble, the precautions, the negotiations necessary to obviate
disagreeable consequences oppresses them to death, is an exertion too
great for their enervated imaginations. They are not like Master
Barnardine in Measure for Measure, who would not ‘get up to be
hanged’—they would not get up to avoid being hanged. They are completely
wrapped up in themselves; but then all their self-love is concentrated
in the present minute. They have worked up their effeminate and
fastidious appetite of enjoyment to such a pitch, that the whole of
their existence, every moment of it, must be made up of these exquisite
indulgences; or they will fling it all away, with indifference and
scorn. They stake their entire welfare on the gratification of the
passing instant. Their senses, their vanity, their thoughtless gaiety
have been pampered till they ache at the smallest suspension of their
perpetual dose of excitement, and they will purchase the hollow
happiness of the next five minutes, by a mortgage on the independence
and comfort of years. They must have their will in every thing, or they
grow sullen and peevish like spoiled children. Whatever they set their
eyes on, or make up their minds to, they must have that instant. They
may pay for it hereafter. But that is no matter. They snatch a joy
beyond the reach of fate, and consider the present time sacred,
inviolable, unaccountable to that hard, churlish, niggard, inexorable
task-master, the future. Now or never is their motto. They are madly
devoted to the play-thing, the ruling passion of the moment. What is to
happen to them a week hence is as if it were to happen to them a
thousand years hence. They put off the consideration for another day,
and their heedless unconcern laughs at it as a fable. Their life is ‘a
cell of ignorance, travelling a-bed;’ their existence is ephemeral;
their thoughts are insect-winged, their identity expires with the whim,
the folly, the passion of the hour.
Nothing but a miracle can rouse such people from their lethargy. It is
not to be expected, nor is it even possible in the natural course of
things. Pope’s striking exclamation,
‘Oh! blindness to the future kindly given,
That each may fill the circuit mark’d by Heaven!’
hardly applies here; namely, to evils that stare us in the face, and
that might be averted with the least prudence or resolution. But nothing
can be done. How should it? A slight evil, a distant danger will not
move them; and a more imminent one only makes them turn away from it in
greater precipitation and alarm. The more desperate their affairs grow,
the more averse they are to look into them; and the greater the effort
required to retrieve them, the more incapable they are of it. At first,
they will not do any thing; and afterwards, it is too late. The very
motives that imperiously urge them to self-reflection and amendment,
combine with their natural disposition to prevent it. This amounts
pretty nearly to a mathematical demonstration. Ease, vanity, pleasure,
are the ruling passions in such cases. How will you conquer these, or
wean their infatuated votaries from them? By the dread of hardship,
disgrace, pain? They turn from them and you who point them out as the
alternative, with sickly disgust; and instead of a stronger effort of
courage or self-denial to avert the crisis, hasten it by a wilful
determination to pamper the disease in every way, and arm themselves,
not with fortitude to bear or to repel the consequences, but with
judicial blindness to their approach. Will you rouse the indolent
procrastinator to an irksome but necessary effort, by shewing him how
much he has to do? He will only draw back the more for all your
intreaties and representations. If of a sanguine turn, he will make a
slight attempt at a new plan of life, be satisfied with the first
appearance of reform, and relapse into indolence again. If timid and
undecided, the hopelessness of the undertaking will put him out of heart
with it, and he will stand still in despair. Will you save a vain man
from ruin, by pointing out the obloquy and ridicule that await him in
his present career? He smiles at your forebodings as fantastical; or the
more they are realised around him, the more he is impelled to keep out
the galling conviction, and the more fondly he clings to flattery and
death. He will not make a bold and resolute attempt to recover his
reputation, because that would imply that it was capable of being soiled
or injured; or he no sooner meditates some desultory project, than he
takes credit to himself for the execution, and is delighted to wear his
unearned laurels while the thing is barely talked of. The chance of
success relieves the uneasiness of his apprehensions; so that he makes
use of the interval only to flatter his favourite infirmity again. Would
you wean a man from sensual excesses by the inevitable consequences to
which they lead?—What holds more antipathy to pleasure than pain? The
mind given up to self-indulgence, revolts at suffering; and throws it
from it as an unaccountable anomaly, as a piece of injustice when it
comes. Much less will it acknowledge any affinity with or subjection to
it as a mere threat. If the prediction does not immediately come true,
we laugh at the prophet of ill: if it is verified, we hate our adviser
proportionably, hug our vices the closer, and hold them dearer and more
precious, the more they cost us. We resent wholesome counsel as an
impertinence, and consider those who warn us of impending mischief, as
if they had brought it on our heads. We cry out with the poetical
enthusiast—
‘And let us nurse the fond deceit;
And what if we must die in sorrow?
Who would not cherish dreams so sweet,
Though grief and pain should come to-morrow?’
But oh thou! who didst lend me speech when I was dumb, to whom I owe it
that I have not crept on my belly all the days of my life like the
serpent, but sometimes lift my forked crest or tread the empyrean, wake
thou out of thy mid-day slumbers! Shake off the heavy honey-dew of thy
soul, no longer lulled with that Circean cup, drinking thy own thoughts
with thy own ears, but start up in thy promised likeness, and shake the
pillared rottenness of the world! Leave not thy sounding words in air,
write them in marble, and teach the coming age heroic truths! Up, and
wake the echoes of Time! Rich in deepest lore, die not the bed-rid churl
of knowledge, leaving the survivors unblest! Set, set as thou didst rise
in pomp and gladness! Dart like the sun-flower one broad, golden flash
of light; and ere thou ascendest thy native sky, shew us the steps by
which thou didst scale the Heaven of philosophy, with Truth and Fancy
for thy equal guides, that we may catch thy mantle, rainbow-dipped, and
still read thy words dear to Memory, dearer to Fame!
There is another branch of this character, which is the trifling or
dilatory character. Such persons are always creating difficulties, and
unable or unwilling to remove them. They cannot brush aside a cobweb,
and are stopped by an insect’s wing. Their character is imbecility,
rather than effeminacy. The want of energy and resolution in the persons
last described, arises from the habitual and inveterate predominance of
other feelings and motives; in these it is a mere want of energy and
resolution, that is, an inherent natural defect of vigour of nerve and
voluntary power. There is a specific levity about such persons, so that
you cannot propel them to any object, or give them a decided _momentum_
in any direction or pursuit. They turn back, as it were, on the occasion
that should project them forward with manly force and vehemence. They
shrink from intrepidity of purpose, and are alarmed at the idea of
attaining their end too soon. They will not act with steadiness or
spirit, either for themselves or you. If you chalk out a line of conduct
for them, or commission them to execute a certain task, they are sure to
conjure up some insignificant objection or fanciful impediment in the
way, and are withheld from striking an effectual blow by mere feebleness
of character. They may be officious, good-natured, friendly, generous in
disposition, but they are of no use to any one. They will put themselves
to twice the trouble you desire, not to carry your point, but to defeat
it; and in obviating needless objections, neglect the main business. If
they do what you want, it is neither at the time nor in the manner that
you wish. This timidity amounts to treachery; for by always anticipating
some misfortune or disgrace, they realise their unmeaning apprehensions.
The little bears sway in their minds over the great: a small
inconvenience outweighs a solid and indispensable advantage; and their
strongest bias is uniformly derived from the weakest motive. They
hesitate about the best way of beginning a thing till the opportunity
for action is lost, and are less anxious about its being done than the
precise manner of doing it. They will destroy a passage sooner than let
an objectionable word pass; and are much less concerned about the truth
or the beauty of an image, than about the reception it will meet with
from the critics. They alter what they write, not because it is, but
because it may possibly be wrong; and in their tremulous solicitude to
avoid imaginary blunders, run into real ones. What is curious enough is,
that with all this caution and delicacy, they are continually liable to
extraordinary oversights. They are in fact so full of all sorts of idle
apprehensions, that they do not know how to distinguish real from
imaginary grounds of apprehension; and they often give some
unaccountable offence either from assuming a sudden boldness half in
sport, or while they are secretly pluming themselves on their dexterity
in avoiding every thing exceptionable; and the same distraction of
motive and short-sightedness which gets them into scrapes, hinders them
from seeing their way out of them. Such persons (often of ingenious and
susceptible minds) are constantly at cross-purposes with themselves and
others; will neither do things nor let others do them; and whether they
succeed or fail, never feel confident or at their ease. They spoil the
freshness and originality of their own thoughts by asking contradictory
advice; and in befriending others while they are _about it and about
it_, you might have done the thing yourself a dozen times over.
There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision
of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it;
who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it.
He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes
the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends, or
to accomplish a useful object. If he can serve you, he will do so; if he
cannot, he will say so without keeping you in needless suspense, or
laying you under pretended obligations. The applying to him in any
laudable undertaking is not like stirring ‘a dish of skimmed milk.’
There is stuff in him, and it is of the right practicable sort. He is
not all his life at hawk and buzzard whether he shall be a Whig or a
Tory, a friend or a foe, a knave or a fool; but thinks that life is
short, and that there is no time to play fantastic tricks in it, to
tamper with principles, or trifle with individual feelings. If he gives
you a character, he does not add a damning clause to it: he does not
pick holes in you lest others should, or anticipate objections lest he
should be thought to be blinded by a childish partiality. His object is
to serve you; and not to play the game into your enemies’ hands.
‘A generous friendship no cold medium knows,
Burns with one love, with one resentment glows.’
I should be sorry for any one to say what he did not think of me; but I
should not be pleased to see him slink out of his acknowledged opinion,
lest it should not be confirmed by malice or stupidity. He who is well
acquainted and well inclined to you, ought to give the tone, not to
receive it from others, and may set it to what key he pleases in certain
cases.
There are those of whom it has been said, that to them an obligation is
a reason for not doing any thing, and there are others who are
invariably led to do the reverse of what they should. The last are
perverse, the first impracticable people. Opposed to the effeminate in
disposition and manners are the coarse and brutal. As those were all
softness and smoothness, these affect or are naturally attracted to
whatever is vulgar and violent, harsh and repulsive in tone, in modes of
speech, in forms of address, in gesture and behaviour. Thus there are
some who ape the lisping of the fine lady, the drawling of the fine
gentleman, and others who all their lives delight in and catch the
uncouth dialect, the manners and expressions of clowns and hoydens. The
last are governed by an instinct of the disagreeable, by an appetite and
headlong rage for violating decorum, and hurting other people’s
feelings, their own being excited and enlivened by the shock. They deal
in home truths, unpleasant reflections, and unwelcome matters of fact;
as the others are all compliment and complaisance, insincerity and
insipidity.
We may observe an effeminacy of style, in some degree corresponding to
effeminacy of character. Writers of this stamp are great interliners of
what they indite, alterers of indifferent phrases, and the plague of
printers’ devils. By an effeminate style I would be understood to mean
one that is all florid, all fine; that cloys by its sweetness, and tires
by its sameness. Such are what Dryden calls ‘calm, peaceable writers.’
They only aim to please, and never offend by truth or disturb by
singularity. Every thought must be beautiful _per se_, every expression
equally fine. They do not delight in vulgarisms, but in common places,
and dress out unmeaning forms in all the colours of the rainbow. They do
not go out of their way to think—that would startle the indolence of the
reader: they cannot express a trite thought in common words—that would
be a sacrifice of their own vanity. They are not sparing of tinsel, for
it costs nothing. Their works should be printed, as they generally are,
on hot-pressed paper, with vignette margins. The Della Cruscan school
comes under this description, but is now nearly exploded. Lord Byron is
a pampered and aristocratic writer, but he is not effeminate, or we
should not have his works with only the printer’s name to them! I cannot
help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats’s poems was a deficiency in
masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an
uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. His
Endymion is a very delightful description of the illusions of a youthful
imagination, given up to airy dreams—we have flowers, clouds, rainbows,
moonlight, all sweet sounds and smells, and Oreads and Dryads flitting
by—but there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable—we
have none of the hardy spirit or rigid forms of antiquity. He painted
his own thoughts and character; and did not transport himself into the
fabulous and heroic ages. There is a want of action, of character, and
so far, of imagination, but there is exquisite fancy. All is soft and
fleshy, without bone or muscle. We see in him the youth, without the
manhood of poetry. His genius breathed ‘vernal delight and joy.’—‘Like
Maia’s son he stood and shook his plumes,’ with fragrance filled. His
mind was redolent of spring. He had not the fierceness of summer, nor
the richness of autumn, and winter he seemed not to have known, till he
felt the icy hand of death!
ESSAY XXVI
WHY DISTANT OBJECTS PLEASE
Distant objects please, because, in the first place, they imply an idea
of space and magnitude, and because, not being obtruded too close upon
the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy.
In looking at the misty mountain-tops that bound the horison, the mind
is as it were conscious of all the conceivable objects and interests
that lie between; we imagine all sorts of adventures in the interim;
strain our hopes and wishes to reach the air-drawn circle, or to ‘descry
new lands, rivers, and mountains,’ stretching far beyond it: our
feelings carried out of themselves lose their grossness and their husk,
are rarefied, expanded, melt into softness and brighten into beauty,
turning to ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. We drink the air before us,
and borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink
of nothing. Where the landscape fades from the dull sight, we fill the
thin, viewless space with shapes of unknown good, and tinge the hazy
prospect with hopes and wishes and more charming fears.
‘But thou, oh Hope! with eyes so fair,
What was thy delighted measure?
Still it whisper’d promised pleasure,
And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail!’
Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is
imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but
the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own,
and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of
itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please
because they border on its confines, and are moulded by its touch. When
I was a boy, I lived within sight of a range of lofty hills, whose blue
tops blending with the setting sun had often tempted my longing eyes and
wandering feet. At last I put my project in execution, and on a nearer
approach, instead of glimmering air woven into fantastic shapes, found
them huge lumpish heaps of discoloured earth. I learnt from this (in
part) to leave ‘Yarrow unvisited,’ and not idly to disturb a dream of
good!
Distance of time has much the same effect as distance of place. It is
not surprising that fancy colours the prospect of the future as it
thinks good, when it even effaces the forms of memory. Time takes out
the sting of pain; our sorrows after a certain period have been so often
steeped in a medium of thought and passion, that they ‘unmould their
essence;’ and all that remains of our original impressions is what we
would wish them to have been. Not only the untried steep ascent before
us, but the rude, unsightly masses of our past experience presently
resume their power of deception over the eye: the golden cloud soon
rests upon their heads, and the purple light of fancy clothes their
barren sides! Thus we pass on, while both ends of our existence touch
upon Heaven!—There is (so to speak) ‘a mighty stream of tendency’ to
good in the human mind, upon which all objects float and are
imperceptibly borne along: and though in the voyage of life we meet with
strong rebuffs, with rocks and quicksands, yet there is ‘a tide in the
affairs of men,’ a heaving and a restless aspiration of the soul, by
means of which, ‘with sails and tackle torn,’ the wreck and scattered
fragments of our entire being drift into the port and haven of our
desires! In all that relates to the affections, we put the will for the
deed:—so that the instant the pressure of unwelcome circumstances is
removed, the mind recoils from their hold, recovers its elasticity, and
re-unites itself to that image of good, which is but a reflection and
configuration of its own nature. Seen in the distance, in the long
perspective of waning years, the meanest incidents, enlarged and
enriched by countless recollections, become interesting; the most
painful, broken and softened by time, soothe. How any object, that
unexpectedly brings back to us old scenes and associations, startles the
mind! What a yearning it creates within us; what a longing to leap the
intermediate space! How fondly we cling to, and try to revive the
impression of all that we then were!
‘Such tricks hath strong imagination!’
In truth, we impose upon ourselves, and know not what we wish. It is a
cunning artifice, a quaint delusion, by which, in pretending to be what
we were at a particular moment of time, we would fain be all that we
have since been, and have our lives to come over again. It is not the
little, glimmering, almost annihilated speck in the distance, that
rivets our attention and ‘hangs upon the beatings of our hearts:’ it is
the interval that separates us from it, and of which it is the trembling
boundary, that excites all this coil and mighty pudder in the breast.
Into that great gap in our being ‘come thronging soft desires’ and
infinite regrets. It is the contrast, the change from what we then were,
that arms the half-extinguished recollection with its giant-strength,
and lifts the fabric of the affections from its shadowy base. In
contemplating its utmost verge, we overlook the map of our existence,
and re-tread, in apprehension, the journey of life. So it is that in
early youth we strain our eager sight after the pursuits of manhood;
and, as we are sliding off the stage, strive to gather up the toys and
flowers that pleased our thoughtless childhood.
When I was quite a boy, my father used to take me to the Montpelier
Tea-gardens at Walworth. Do I go there now? No; the place is deserted,
and its borders and its beds o’erturned. Is there, then, nothing that
can
‘Bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower?’
Oh! yes. I unlock the casket of memory, and draw back the warders of the
brain; and there this scene of my infant wanderings still lives unfaded,
or with fresher dyes. A new sense comes upon me, as in a dream; a richer
perfume, brighter colours start out; my eyes dazzle; my heart heaves
with its new load of bliss, and I am a child again. My sensations are
all glossy, spruce, voluptuous, and fine: they wear a candied coat, and
are in holiday trim. I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes; tall
holy-oaks, red and yellow; the broad sun-flowers, caked in gold, with
bees buzzing round them; wildernesses of pinks, and hot-glowing pionies;
poppies run to seed; the sugared lily, and faint mignionette, all ranged
in order, and as thick as they can grow; the box-tree borders; the
gravel-walks, the painted alcove, the confectionary, the clotted
cream:—I think I see them now with sparkling looks; or have they
vanished while I have been writing this description of them? No matter;
they will return again when I least think of them. All that I have
observed since, of flowers and plants, and grass-plots, and of suburb
delights, seems, to me, borrowed from ‘that first garden of my
innocence’—to be slips and scions stolen from that bed of memory. In
this manner the darlings of our childhood burnish out in the eye of
after-years, and derive their sweetest perfume from the first heartfelt
sigh of pleasure breathed upon them,
—‘like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!’
If I have pleasure in a flower-garden, I have in a kitchen-garden too,
and for the same reason. If I see a row of cabbage-plants or of peas or
beans coming up, I immediately think of those which I used so carefully
to water of an evening at W—m, when my day’s tasks were done, and of the
pain with which I saw them droop and hang down their leaves in the
morning’s sun. Again, I never see a child’s kite in the air, but it
seems to pull at my heart. It is to me a ‘thing of life.’ I feel the
twinge at my elbow, the flutter and palpitation, with which I used to
let go the string of my own, as it rose in the air and towered among the
clouds. My little cargo of hopes and fears ascended with it; and as it
made a part of my own consciousness then, it does so still, and appears
‘like some gay creature of the element,’ my playmate when life was
young, and twin-born with my earliest recollections. I could enlarge on
this subject of childish amusements, but Mr. Leigh Hunt has treated it
so well, in a paper in the _Indicator_, on the productions of the
toy-shops of the metropolis, that if I were to insist more on it, I
should only pass for an imitator of that ingenious and agreeable writer,
_and for an indifferent one into the bargain_.
Sounds, smells, and sometimes tastes, are remembered longer than visible
objects, and serve, perhaps, better for links in the chain of
association. The reason seems to be this: they are in their nature
intermittent, and comparatively rare; whereas objects of sight are
always before us, and, by their continuous succession, drive one another
out. The eye is always open; and between any given impression and its
recurrence a second time, fifty thousand other impressions have, in all
likelihood, been stamped upon the sense and on the brain. The other
senses are not so active or vigilant. They are but seldom called into
play. The ear, for example, is oftener courted by silence than noise;
and the sounds that break that silence sink deeper and more durably into
the mind. I have a more present and lively recollection of certain
scents, tastes, and sounds, for this reason, than I have of mere visible
images, because they are more original, and less worn by frequent
repetition. Where there is nothing interposed between any two
impressions, whatever the distance of time that parts them, they
naturally seem to touch; and the renewed impression recals the former
one in full force, without distraction or competitor. The taste of
barberries, which have hung out in the snow during the severity of a
North American winter, I have in my mouth still, after an interval of
thirty years; for I have met with no other taste, in all that time, at
all like it. It remains by itself, almost like the impression of a sixth
sense. But the colour is mixed up indiscriminately with the colours of
many other berries, nor should I be able to distinguish it among them.
The smell of a brick-kiln carries the evidence of its own identity with
it: neither is it to me (from peculiar associations) unpleasant. The
colour of brick-dust, on the contrary, is more common, and easily
confounded with other colours. Raphael did not keep it quite distinct
from his flesh-colour. I will not say that we have a more perfect
recollection of the human voice than of that complex picture the human
face, but I think the sudden hearing of a well-known voice has something
in it more affecting and striking than the sudden meeting with the face:
perhaps, indeed, this may be because we have a more familiar remembrance
of the one than the other, and the voice takes us more by surprise on
that account. I am by no means certain (generally speaking) that we have
the ideas of the other senses so accurate and well-made out as those of
visible form: what I chiefly mean is, that the feelings belonging to the
sensations of our other organs, when accidentally recalled, are kept
more separate and pure. Musical sounds, probably, owe a good deal of
their interest and romantic effect to the principle here spoken of. Were
they constant, they would become indifferent, as we may find with
respect to disagreeable noises, which we do not hear after a time. I
know no situation more pitiable than that of a blind fiddler, who has
but one sense left (if we except the sense of snuff-taking[72]) and who
has that stunned or deafened by his own villanous noises. Shakespear
says,
‘How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night!’
It has been observed, in explanation of this passage, that it is because
in the day-time lovers are occupied with one another’s faces, but that
at night they can only distinguish the sound of each other’s voices. I
know not how this may be: but I have, ere now, heard a voice break so
upon the silence,
‘To angels’ ’twas most like,’
and charm the moonlight air with its balmy essence, that the budding
leaves trembled to its accents. Would I might have heard it once more
whisper peace and hope (as erst when it was mingled with the breath of
spring), and with its soft pulsations lift winged fancy to heaven! But
it has ceased, or turned where I no more shall hear it!—Hence, also, we
see what is the charm of the shepherd’s pastoral reed; and why we hear
him, as it were, piping to his flock, even in a picture. Our ears are
fancy-stung! I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream,
skirted with willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low sheltered
valleys on Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted
chapels and built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish-church near,
but tall elms and quivering alders hid it from my sight, when, all of a
sudden, I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the
ear, accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village-maids
and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled
perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its
softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the
heart like the calm beauty of death: fancy caught the sound, and faith
mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still
poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and
wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!
There is a curious and interesting discussion, on the comparative
distinctness of our visual and other external impressions, in Mr.
Fearn’s Essay on Consciousness, with which I shall try to descend from
this rhapsody to the ground of common sense and plain reasoning again.
After observing, a little before, that ‘nothing is more untrue than that
sensations of vision do necessarily leave more vivid and durable ideas
than those of grosser senses,’ he proceeds to give a number of
illustrations in support of this position. ‘Notwithstanding,’ he says,
‘the advantages here enumerated in favour of sight, I think there is no
doubt that a man will come to forget acquaintance, and many other
visible objects, noticed in mature age, before he will in the least
forget tastes and smells, of only moderate interest, encountered either
in his childhood, or at any time since.
‘In the course of voyaging to various distant regions, it has several
times happened that I have eaten once or twice of different things that
never came in my way before nor since. Some of these have been pleasant,
and some scarce better than insipid; but I have no reason to think I
have forgot, or much altered the ideas left by those single impulses of
taste; though here the memory of them certainly has not been preserved
by repetition. It is clear I must have seen, as well as tasted those
things; and I am decided that I remember the tastes with more precision
than I do the visual sensations.
‘I remember having once, and only once, eat Kangaroo in New Holland; and
having once smelled a baker’s shop, having a peculiar odour, in the city
of Bassorah. Now both these gross ideas remain with me quite as vivid as
any visual ideas of those places; and this could not be from repetition,
but really from interest in the sensation.
‘Twenty-eight years ago, in the island of Jamaica, I partook (perhaps
twice) of a certain fruit, of the taste of which I have now a very fresh
idea; and I could add other instances of that period.
‘I have had repeated proofs of having lost retention of visual objects,
at various distances of time, though they had once been familiar. I have
not, during thirty years, forgot the delicate, and in itself most
trifling sensation, that the palm of my hand used to convey, when I was
a boy, trying the different effects of what boys call _light_ and
_heavy_ tops; but I cannot remember within several shades of the brown
coat which I left off a week ago. If any man thinks he can do better,
let him take an ideal survey of his wardrobe, and then actually refer to
it for proof.
‘After retention of such ideas, it certainly would be very difficult to
persuade me that feeling, taste, and smell can scarce be said to leave
ideas, unless indistinct and obscure ones....
‘Shew a Londoner correct models of twenty London churches, and, at the
same time, a model of each, which differs, in several considerable
features, from the truth, and I venture to say he shall not tell you, in
any instance, which is the correct one, except by mere chance.
‘If he is an architect, he may be much more correct than any ordinary
person: and this obviously is, because he has felt an interest in
viewing these structures, which an ordinary person does not feel: and
here interest is the sole reason of his remembering more correctly than
his neighbour.
‘I once heard a person quaintly ask another, How many trees there are in
St. Paul’s churchyard? The question itself indicates that many cannot
answer it; and this is found to be the case with those who have passed
the church an hundred times: whilst the cause is, that every individual
in the busy stream which glides past St. Paul’s is engrossed in various
other interests.
‘How often does it happen that we enter a well-known apartment, or meet
a well-known friend, and receive some vague idea of visible difference,
but cannot possibly find out _what_ it is; until at length we come to
perceive (or perhaps must be told) that some ornament or furniture is
removed, altered, or added in the apartment; or that our friend has cut
his hair, taken a wig, or has made any of twenty considerable
alterations in his appearance. At other times, we have no perception of
alteration whatever, though the like has taken place.
‘It is, however, certain, that sight, apposited with interest, can
retain tolerably exact copies of sensations, especially if not too
complex; such as of the human countenance and figure. Yet the voice will
convince us, when the countenance will not; and he is reckoned an
excellent painter, and no ordinary genius, who can make a tolerable
likeness from memory. Nay, more, it is a conspicuous proof of the
inaccuracy of visual ideas, that it is an effort of consummate art,
attained by many years’ practice, to take a strict likeness of the human
countenance, even when the object is present; and among those cases,
where the wilful cheat of flattery has been avoided, we still find in
how very few instances the best painters produce a likeness up to the
life, though practice and interest join in the attempt.
‘I imagine an ordinary person would find it very difficult, supposing he
had some knowledge of drawing, to afford, from memory, a tolerable
sketch of such a familiar object as his curtain, his carpet, or his
dressing-gown, if the pattern of either be at all various or irregular;
yet he will instantly tell, with precision, either if his snuff or his
wine has not the same character it had yesterday, though both these are
compounds.
‘Beyond all this I may observe, that a draper, who is in the daily habit
of such comparisons, cannot carry in his mind the particular shade of a
colour during a second of time; and has no certainty of tolerably
matching two simple colours, except by placing the patterns in
contact.’—_Essay on Consciousness_, p. 303
I will conclude the subject of this Essay with observing, that (as it
appears to me) a nearer and more familiar acquaintance with persons has
a different and more favourable effect than that with places or things.
The latter improve (as an almost universal rule) by being removed to a
distance: the former, generally at least, gain by being brought nearer
and more home to us. Report or imagination seldom raises any individual
so high in our estimation as to disappoint us greatly when we are
introduced to him: prejudice and malice constantly exaggerate defects
beyond the reality. Ignorance alone makes monsters or bugbears: our
actual acquaintances are all very common-place people. The thing is,
that as a matter of hearsay or conjecture, we make abstractions of
particular vices, and irritate ourselves against some particular quality
or action of the person we dislike:—whereas, individuals are concrete
existences, not arbitrary denominations or nicknames; and have
innumerable other qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, besides the
damning feature with which we fill up the portrait or caricature, in our
previous fancies. We can scarcely hate any one that we know. An acute
observer complained, that if there was any one to whom he had a
particular spite, and a wish to let him see it, the moment he came to
sit down with him, his enmity was disarmed by some unforeseen
circumstance. If it was a Quarterly Reviewer, he was in other respects
like any other man. Suppose, again, your adversary turns out a very ugly
man, or wants an eye, you are balked in that way:—he is not what you
expected, the object of your abstract hatred and implacable disgust. He
may be a very disagreeable person, but he is no longer the same. If you
come into a room where a man is, you find, in general, that he has a
nose upon his face. ‘There’s sympathy!’ This alone is a diversion to
your unqualified contempt. He is stupid, and says nothing, but he seems
to have something in him when he laughs. You had conceived of him as a
rank Whig or Tory—yet he talks upon other subjects. You knew that he was
a virulent party-writer; but you find that the man himself is a tame
sort of animal enough. He does not bite. That’s something. In short, you
can make nothing of it. Even opposite vices balance one another. A man
may be pert in company, but he is also dull; so that you cannot, though
you try, hate him cordially, merely for the wish to be offensive. He is
a knave. Granted. You learn, on a nearer acquaintance, what you did not
know before—that he is a fool as well; so you forgive him. On the other
hand, he may be a profligate public character, and may make no secret of
it; but he gives you a hearty shake by the hand, speaks kindly to
servants, and supports an aged father and mother. Politics apart, he is
a very honest fellow. You are told that a person has carbuncles on his
face; but you have ocular proofs that he is sallow, and pale as a ghost.
This does not much mend the matter; but it blunts the edge of the
ridicule, and turns your indignation against the inventor of the lie;
but he is —, the editor of a Scotch magazine; so you are just where you
were. I am not very fond of anonymous criticism; I want to know who the
author can be: but the moment I learn this, I am satisfied. Even — would
do well to come out of his disguise. It is the mask only that we dread
and hate: the man may have something human about him! The notions, in
short, which we entertain of people at a distance, or from partial
representations, or from guess-work, are simple, uncompounded ideas,
which answer to nothing in reality: those which we derive from
experience are mixed modes, the only true, and, in general, the most
favourable ones. Instead of naked deformity, or abstract perfection—
‘Those faultless monsters which the world ne’er saw,’—
‘the web of our lives is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our
virtues would be proud, if our faults whipt them not; and our vices
would despair, if they were not encouraged by our virtues.’ This was
truly and finely said long ago, by one who knew the strong and weak
points of human nature: but it is what sects, and parties, and those
philosophers whose pride and boast it is to classify by nicknames, have
yet to learn the meaning of!
ESSAY XXVII
ON CORPORATE BODIES
‘Corporate bodies have no soul.’
Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals,
because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to
disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor
good-will. The principle of private or natural conscience is
extinguished in each individual (we have no moral sense in the breasts
of others), and nothing is considered but how the united efforts of the
whole (released from idle scruples) may be best directed to the
obtaining of political advantages and privileges to be shared as common
spoil. Each member reaps the benefit, and lays the blame, if there is
any, upon the rest. The _esprit de corps_ becomes the ruling passion of
every corporate body, compared with which the motives of delicacy or
decorum towards others are looked upon as being both impertinent and
improper. If any person sets up a plea of this sort in opposition to the
rest, he is over-ruled, he gets ill-blood, and does no good: he is
regarded as an interloper, a _black sheep_ in the flock, and is either
_sent to Coventry_, or obliged to acquiesce in the notions and wishes of
those he associates and is expected to co-operate with. The refinements
of private judgment are referred to and negatived in a committee of the
whole body, while the projects and interests of the Corporation meet
with a secret but powerful support in the self-love of the different
members. Remonstrance—opposition, is fruitless, troublesome, invidious:
it answers no one end: and a conformity to the sense of the company is
found to be no less necessary to a reputation for good-fellowship than
to a quiet life. ‘Self-love and social’ here look like the same; and in
consulting the interests of a particular class, which are also your own,
there is even a show of public virtue. He who is a captious,
impracticable, dissatisfied member of his little club or _coterie_, is
immediately set down as a bad member of the community in general, as no
friend to regularity and order, ‘a pestilent fellow,’ and one who is
incapable of sympathy, attachment, or cordial co-operation in any
department or undertaking. Thus the most refractory novice in such
matters becomes weaned from his obligations to the larger society, which
only breed him inconvenience without any adequate recompense, and wedded
to a nearer and dearer one, where he finds every kind of comfort and
consolation. He contracts the vague and unmeaning character of Man into
the more emphatic title of Freeman and Alderman. The claims of an
undefined humanity sit looser and looser upon him, at the same time that
he draws the bands of his new engagements closer and tighter about him.
He loses sight, by degrees, of all common sense and feeling in the petty
squabbles, intrigues, feuds, and airs, of affected importance to which
he has made himself an accessary. He is quite an altered man. ‘Really
the society were under considerable obligation to him in that last
business;’ that is to say, in some paltry job or under-hand attempt to
encroach upon the rights, or dictate to the understandings of the
neighbourhood. In the mean time, they eat, drink, and carouse together.
They wash down all minor animosities and unavoidable differences of
opinion in pint-bumpers; and the complaints of the multitude are lost in
the clatter of plates and the roaring of loyal catches at every
quarter’s meeting or mayor’s feast. The town-hall reels with an unwieldy
sense of self-importance: ‘the very stones prate’ of processions: the
common pump creaks in concert with the uncorking of bottles and tapping
of beer-barrels: the market-cross looks big with authority. Every thing
has an ambiguous, upstart, repulsive air. Circle within circle is
formed, an _imperium in imperio_: and the business is to exclude from
the first circle all the notions, opinions, ideas, interests, and
pretensions, of the second. Hence there arises not only an antipathy to
common sense and decency in those things where there is a real
opposition of interest or clashing of prejudice, but it becomes a habit
and a favourite amusement in those who are ‘dressed in a little brief
authority,’ to thwart, annoy, insult, and harass others on all occasions
where the least opportunity or pretext for it occurs. Spite, bickerings,
backbiting, insinuations, lies, jealousies, nicknames, are the order of
the day, and nobody knows what it’s all about. One would think that the
mayor, aldermen, and liverymen, were a higher and more select species of
animals than their townsmen; though there is no difference whatever but
in their gowns and staff of office! This is the essence of the _esprit
de corps_. It is certainly not a very delectable source of contemplation
or subject to treat of.
Public bodies are so far worse than the individuals composing them,
because the _official_ takes place of the _moral sense_. The nerves that
in themselves were soft and pliable enough, and responded naturally to
the touch of pity, when fastened into a machine of that sort, become
callous and rigid, and throw off every extraneous application that can
be made to them with perfect apathy. An appeal is made to the ties of
individual friendship: the body in general know nothing of them. A case
has occurred which strongly called forth the compassion of the person
who was witness of it: but the body (or any special deputation of them)
were not present when it happened. These little weaknesses and
‘compunctious visitings of nature’ are effectually guarded against,
indeed, by the very rules and regulations of the society, as well as by
its spirit. The individual is the creature of his feelings of all sorts,
the sport of his vices and his virtues—like the fool in Shakespear,
‘motley’s his proper wear:’—corporate bodies are dressed in a moral
uniform; mixed motives do not operate there, frailty is made into a
system, ‘diseases are turned into commodities.’ Only so much of any
one’s natural or genuine impulses can influence him in his artificial
capacity as formally comes home to the aggregate conscience of those
with whom he acts, or bears upon the interests (real or pretended), the
importance, respectability, and professed objects of the society. Beyond
that point the nerve is bound up, the conscience is seared, and the
torpedo-touch of so much inert matter operates to deaden the best
feelings and harden the heart. Laughter and tears are said to be the
characteristic signs of humanity. Laughter is common enough in such
places as a set-off to the mock-gravity: but who ever saw a public body
in tears? Nothing but a job or some knavery can keep them serious for
ten minutes together.[73]
Such are the qualifications and the apprenticeship necessary to make a
man tolerated, to enable him to pass as a cypher, or be admitted as a
mere numerical unit, in any corporate body: to be a leader and dictator,
he must be diplomatic in impertinence, and officious in every dirty
work. He must not merely conform to established prejudices; he must
flatter them. He must not merely be insensible to the demands of
moderation and equity; he must be loud against them. He must not simply
fall in with all sorts of contemptible cabals and intrigues; he must be
indefatigable in fomenting them, and setting every body together by the
ears. He must not only repeat, but invent lies. He must make speeches
and write hand-bills; he must be devoted to the wishes and objects of
the society, its creature, its jackall, its busy-body, its mouthpiece,
its prompter; he must deal in law-cases, in demurrers, in charters, in
traditions, in common-places, in logic and rhetoric—in every thing but
common sense and honesty. He must (in Mr. Burke’s phrase) ‘disembowel
himself of his natural entrails, and be stuffed with paltry, blurred
sheets of parchment about the rights’ of the privileged few. He must be
a concentrated essence, a varnished, powdered, representative of the
vices, absurdities, hypocrisy, jealousy, pride, and pragmaticalness of
his party. Such a one by bustle and self-importance and puffing, by
flattering one to his face, and abusing another behind his back, by
lending himself to the weaknesses of some, and pampering the mischievous
propensities of others, will pass for a great man in a little society.
Age does not improve the morality of public bodies. They grow more and
more tenacious of their idle privileges and senseless self-consequence.
They get weak and obstinate at the same time. Those, who belong to them,
have all the upstart pride and pettifogging spirit of their present
character ingrafted on the venerableness and superstitious sanctity of
ancient institutions. They are naturally at issue, first with their
neighbours, and next with their contemporaries, on all matters of common
propriety and judgment. They become more attached to forms, the more
obsolete they are; and the defence of every absurd and invidious
distinction is a debt which (by implication) they owe to the dead as
well as the living. What might once have been of serious practical
utility they turn to farce, by retaining the letter when the spirit is
gone: and they do this the more, the more glaring the inconsistency and
want of sound reasoning; for they think they thus give proof of their
zeal and attachment to the abstract principle on which old
establishments exist, the ground of prescription and authority. _The
greater the ‘wrong, the greater the right_, in all such cases. The
_esprit de corps_ does not take much merit to itself for upholding what
is justifiable in any system, or the proceedings of any party, but for
adhering to what is palpably injurious. You may exact the first from an
enemy: the last is the province of a friend. It has been made a subject
of complaint, that the champions of the Church, for example, who are
advanced to dignities and honours, are hardly ever those who defend the
common principles of Christianity, but those who volunteer to man the
out-works, and set up ingenious excuses for the questionable points, the
ticklish places in the established form of worship, that is, for those
which are attacked from without, and are supposed in danger of being
undermined by stratagem, or carried by assault!
The great resorts and seats of learning often outlive in this way the
intention of the founders, as the world outgrows them. They may be said
to resemble antiquated coquets of the last age, who think every thing
ridiculous and intolerable but what was in fashion when they were young,
and yet are standing proofs of the progress of taste, and the vanity of
human pretensions. Our universities are, in a great measure, become
cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge. The age has the
start of them; that is, other sources of knowledge have been opened
since their formation, to which the world have had access, and have
drunk plentifully at those living fountains, but from which they are
debarred by the tenor of their charter, and as a matter of dignity and
privilege. They have grown poor, like the old grandees in some
countries, by subsisting on the inheritance of learning, while the
people have grown rich by trade. They are too much in the nature of
_fixtures_ in intellect: they stop the way in the road to truth; or at
any rate (for they do not themselves advance) they can only be of
service as a check-weight on the too hasty and rapid career of
innovation. All that has been invented or thought in the last two
hundred years they take no cognisance of, or as little as possible; they
are above it; they stand upon the ancient landmarks, and will not budge;
whatever was not known when they were first endowed, they are still in
profound and lofty ignorance of. Yet in that period how much has been
done in literature, arts, and science, of which (with the exception of
mathematical knowledge, the hardest to gainsay or subject to the
trammels of prejudice and barbarous _ipse dixits_) scarce any trace is
to be found in the authentic modes of study, and legitimate inquiry,
which prevail at either of our Universities! The unavoidable aim of all
corporate bodies of learning is not to grow wise, or teach others
wisdom, but to prevent any one else from being or seeming wiser than
themselves; in other words, their infallible tendency is in the end to
suppress inquiry and darken knowledge, by setting limits to the mind of
man, and saying to his proud spirit, _Hitherto shalt thou come, and no
farther!_ It would not be an unedifying experiment to make a collection
of the titles of works published in the course of the year by Members of
the Universities. If any attempt is to be made to patch up an idle
system in policy or legislation, or church-government, it is by a Member
of the University: if any hashed-up speculation on an old exploded
argument is to be brought forward ‘in spite of _shame_, in erring
reason’s spite,’ it is by a Member of the University: if a paltry
project is ushered into the world for combining ancient prejudices with
modern time-serving, it is by a Member of the University. Thus we get at
a stated supply of annual Defences of the Sinking Fund, Thoughts on the
Evils of Education, Treatises on Predestination, and Eulogies on Mr.
Malthus, all from the same source, and through the same vent. If they
came from any other quarter nobody would look at them; but they have an
_Imprimatur_ from dulness and authority: we know that there is no
offence in them; and they are stuck in the shop-windows, and read (in
the intervals of Lord Byron’s works, or the Scotch novels) in cathedral
towns and close boroughs!
It is, I understand and believe, pretty much the same in more modern
institutions for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. The end is lost in
the means: rules take place of nature and genius; cabal and bustle, and
struggles for rank and precedence, supersede the study and the love of
art. A Royal Academy is a kind of hospital and infirmary for the
obliquities of taste and ingenuity—a receptacle where enthusiasm and
originality stop and stagnate, and spread their influence no farther,
instead of being a school founded for genius, or a temple built to fame.
The generality of those who wriggle, or fawn, or beg their way to a seat
there, live on their certificate of merit to a good old age, and are
seldom heard of afterwards. If a man of sterling capacity gets among
them, and minds his own business, he is nobody; he makes no figure in
council, in voting, in resolutions or speeches. If he comes forward with
plans and views for the good of the Academy and the advancement of art,
he is immediately set upon as a visionary, a fanatic, with notions
hostile to the interest and credit of the existing members of the
society. If he directs the ambition of the scholars to the study of
History, this strikes at once at the emoluments of the profession, who
are most of them (by God’s will) portrait painters. If he eulogises the
Antique, and speaks highly of the Old Masters, he is supposed to be
actuated by envy to living painters and native talent. If, again, he
insists on a knowledge of anatomy as essential to correct drawing, this
would seem to imply a want of it in our most eminent designers. Every
plan, suggestion, argument, that has the general purposes and principles
of art for its object, is thwarted, scouted, ridiculed, slandered, as
having a malignant aspect towards the profits and pretensions of the
great mass of flourishing and respectable artists in the country. This
leads to irritation and ill-will on all sides. The obstinacy of the
constituted authorities keeps pace with the violence and extravagance
opposed to it; and they lay all the blame on the folly and mistakes they
have themselves occasioned or increased. It is considered as a personal
quarrel, not a public question; by which means the dignity of the body
is implicated in resenting the slips and inadvertencies of its members,
not in promoting their common and declared objects. In this sort of
wretched _tracasserie_ the Barrys and H—s stand no chance with the
Catons, the Tubbs, and the F—s. Sir Joshua even was obliged to hold
himself aloof from them, and Fuseli passes as a kind of nondescript, or
one of his own grotesques. The air of an academy, in short, is not the
air of genius and immortality; it is too close and heated, and
impregnated with the notions of the common sort. A man steeped in a
corrupt atmosphere of this description is no longer open to the genial
impulses of nature and truth, nor sees visions of ideal beauty, nor
dreams of antique grace and grandeur, nor has the finest works of art
continually hovering and floating through his uplifted fancy; but the
images that haunt it are rules of the academy, charters, inaugural
speeches, resolutions passed or rescinded, cards of invitation to a
council-meeting, or the annual dinner, prize-medals, and the king’s
diploma, constituting him a gentleman and esquire. He ‘wipes out all
trivial, fond records;’ all romantic aspirations; ‘the Raphael grace,
the Guido air;’ and the commands of the academy alone ‘must live within
the book and volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter.’ It may be
doubted whether any work of lasting reputation and universal interest
can spring up in this soil, or ever has done in that of any academy. The
last question is a matter of fact and history, not of mere opinion or
prejudice; and may be ascertained as such accordingly. The mighty names
of former times rose before the existence of academies; and the three
greatest painters, undoubtedly, that this country has produced,
Reynolds, Wilson, and Hogarth, were not ‘dandled and swaddled’ into
artists in any institution for the fine arts. I do not apprehend that
the names of Chantry or Wilkie, (great as one, and considerable as the
other of them is,) can be made use of in any way to impugn the jet of
this argument. We may find a considerable improvement in some of our
artists, when they get out of the vortex for a time. Sir Thomas Lawrence
is all the better for having been abstracted for a year or two from
Somerset-House; and Mr. Dawe, they say, has been doing wonders in the
North. When will he return, and once more ‘bid Britannia rival Greece?’
Mr. Canning somewhere lays it down as a rule, that corporate bodies are
necessarily correct and pure in their conduct, from the knowledge which
the individuals composing them have of one another, and the jealous
vigilance they exercise over each other’s motives and characters;
whereas, people collected into mobs are disorderly and unprincipled from
being utterly unknown and unaccountable to each other. This is a curious
_pass_ of wit. I differ with him in both parts of the dilemma. To begin
with the first, and to handle it somewhat cavalierly, according to the
model before us: we know, for instance, there is said to be honour among
thieves, but very little honesty towards others. Their honour consists
in the division of the booty, not in the mode of acquiring it: they do
not (often) betray one another, but they will waylay a stranger, or
knock out a traveller’s brains: they may be depended on in giving the
alarm when any of their posts are in danger of being surprised; and they
will stand together for their ill-gotten gains to the last drop of their
blood. Yet they form a distinct society, and are strictly responsible
for their behaviour to one another and to their leader. They are not a
mob, but a _gang_, completely in one another’s power and secrets. Their
familiarity, however, with the proceedings of the _corps_, does not lead
them to expect or to exact from it a very high standard of moral
honesty; that is out of the question; but they are sure to gain the good
opinion of their fellows by committing all sorts of depredations, fraud,
and violence against the community at large. So (not to speak it
profanely) some of Mr. C—’s friends may be very respectable people in
their way—‘all honourable men’—but their respectability is confined
within party-limits; every one does not sympathise in the integrity of
their views; the understanding between them and the public is not
well-defined or reciprocal. Or, suppose a gang of pickpockets hustle a
passenger in the street, and the mob set upon them, and proceed to
execute summary justice upon such as they can lay hands on, am I to
conclude that the rogues are in the right, because theirs is a system of
well-organised knavery, which they settled in the morning, with their
eyes one upon the other, and which they regularly review at night, with
a due estimate of each other’s motives, character, and conduct in the
business; and that the honest men are in the wrong, because they are a
casual collection of unprejudiced, disinterested individuals, taken at a
venture from the mass of the people, acting without concert or
responsibility, on the spur of the occasion, and giving way to their
instantaneous impulses and honest anger? Mobs, in fact, then, are almost
always right in their feelings, and often in their judgments, on this
very account—that being utterly unknown to and disconnected with each
other, they have no point of union or principle of co-operation between
them, but the natural sense of justice recognised by all persons in
common. They appeal, at the first meeting, not to certain symbols and
watch-words privately agreed upon, like Free-Masons, but to the maxims
and instincts proper to all the world. They have no other clew to guide
them to their object but either the dictates of the heart, or the
universally understood sentiments of society, neither of which are
likely to be in the wrong. The flame, which bursts out and blazes from
popular sympathy, is made of honest, but homely materials. It is not
kindled by sparks of wit or sophistry, nor damped by the cold
calculations of self-interest. The multitude may be wantonly set on by
others, as is too often the case, or be carried too far in the impulse
of rage and disappointment; but their resentment, when they are left to
themselves, is almost uniformly, in the first instance, excited by some
evident abuse and wrong; and the excesses into which they run arise from
that very want of foresight and regular system, which is a pledge of the
uprightness and heartiness of their intentions. In short, the only class
of persons to whom the above courtly charge of sinister and corrupt
motives is not applicable, is that body of individuals which usually
goes by the name of the _People_!
ESSAY XXVIII
WHETHER ACTORS OUGHT TO SIT IN THE BOXES?
I think not; and that for the following reasons, as well as I can give
them:—
Actors belong to the public: their persons are not their own property.
They exhibit themselves on the stage: that is enough, without displaying
themselves in the boxes of the theatre. I conceive that an actor, on
account of the very circumstances of his profession, ought to keep
himself as much _incognito_ as possible. He plays a number of parts
disguised, transformed into them as much as he can ‘by his so potent
art,’ and he should not disturb this borrowed impression by unmasking
before company, more than he can help. Let him go into the pit, if he
pleases, to see—not into the first circle, to be seen. He is seen enough
without that: he is the centre of an illusion that he is bound to
support, both, as it appears to me, by a certain self-respect which
should repel idle curiosity, and by a certain deference to the public,
in whom he has inspired certain prejudices which he is covenanted not to
break. He represents the majesty of successive kings; he takes the
responsibility of heroes and lovers on himself; the mantle of genius and
nature falls on his shoulders; we ‘pile millions’ of associations on
him, under which he should be ‘buried quick,’ and not perk out an
inauspicious face upon us, with a plain-cut coat, to say—‘What fools you
all were!—I am not Hamlet the Dane!’
It is very well and in strict propriety for Mr. Matthews, in his At
Home, after he has been imitating his inimitable Scotchwoman, to slip
out as quick as lightning, and appear in the side-box shaking hands with
our old friend Jack Bannister. It adds to our surprise at the
versatility of his changes of place and appearance, and he had been
before us in his own person during a great part of the evening. There
was no harm done—no imaginary spell broken—no discontinuity of thought
or sentiment. Mr. Matthews is himself (without offence be it spoken)
both a cleverer and more respectable man than many of the characters he
represents. Not so when
‘O’er the stage the Ghost of Hamlet stalks,
Othello rages, Desdemona mourns,
And poor Monimia pours her soul in love.’
A different feeling then prevails:—close, close the scene upon them, and
never break that fine phantasmagoria of the brain. Or if it must be done
at all, let us chuse some other time and place for it: let no one
wantonly dash the Circean cup from our lips, or dissolve the spirit of
enchantment in the very palace of enchantment. Go, Mr. —, and sit
somewhere else! What a thing it is, for instance, for any part of an
actor’s dress to come off unexpectedly while he is playing! What a _cut_
it is upon himself and the audience! What an effort he has to recover
himself, and struggle through this exposure of the naked truth! It has
been considered as one of the triumphs of Garrick’s tragic power, that
once, when he was playing Lear, his crown of straw came off, and nobody
laughed or took the least notice, so much had he identified himself with
the character. Was he, after this, to pay so little respect to the
feelings he had inspired, as to tear off his tattered robes, and take
the old, crazed king with him to play the fool in the boxes?
‘No; let him pass. Vex not his parting spirit,
Nor on the rack of this rough world
Stretch him out farther!’
Some lady is said to have fallen in love with Garrick from being present
when he played the part of Romeo, on which he observed, that he would
undertake to cure her of her folly if she would only come and see him in
Abel Drugger. So the modern tragedian and fine gentleman, by appearing
to advantage, and conspicuously, in _propria personâ_, may easily cure
us of our predilection for all the principal characters he shines in.
‘Sir! do you think Alexander looked o’ this fashion in his life-time, or
was perfumed so? Had Julius Cæsar such a nose? or wore his frill as you
do? You have slain I don’t know how many heroes “with a bare bodkin,”
the gold pin in your shirt, and spoiled all the fine love speeches you
will ever make by picking your teeth with that inimitable air!’
An actor, after having performed his part well, instead of courting
farther distinction, should affect obscurity, and ‘steal most
guilty-like away,’ conscious of admiration that he can support nowhere
but in his proper sphere, and jealous of his own and others’ good
opinion of him, in proportion as he is a darling in the public eye. He
cannot avoid attracting disproportionate attention: why should he wish
to fix it on himself in a perfectly flat and insignificant part, viz.
his own character? It was a bad custom to bring authors on the stage to
crown them. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico est._ Even professed critics, I
think, should be shy of putting themselves forward to applaud loudly:
any one in a crowd has ‘a voice potential’ as the press: it is either
committing their pretensions a little indiscreetly, or confirming their
own judgment by a clapping of hands. If you only go and give the cue
lustily, the house seems in wonderful accord with your opinions. An
actor, like a king, should only appear on state occasions. He loses
popularity by too much publicity; or, according to the proverb,
_familiarity breeds contempt_. Both characters personate a certain
abstract idea, are seen in a fictitious costume, and when they have
‘shuffled off this more than mortal coil,’ they had better keep out of
the way—the acts and sentiments emanating from themselves will not carry
on the illusion of our prepossessions. Ordinary transactions do not give
scope to grace and dignity like romantic situations, or prepared
pageants, and the _little_ is apt to prevail over the _great_, if we
come to count the instances.
The motto of a great actor should be _aut Cæsar aut nihil_. I do not see
how with his crown, or plume of feathers, he can get through those
little box-doors without stooping and squeezing his artificial
importance to tatters. The entrance of the stage is arched so high ‘that
_players_ may jet through, and keep their gorgeous turbans on, without
good-morrow to the gods!’
The top-tragedian of the day has too large and splendid a train
following him to have room for them in one of the dress-boxes. When he
appears there, it should be enlarged express for the occasion: for at
his heels march the figures, in full costume, of Cato, and Brutus, and
Cassius, and of him with the falcon eye, and Othello, and Lear, and
crook-backed Richard, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and numbers more,
and demand entrance along with him, shadows to which he alone lends
bodily substance! ‘The graves yawn and render up their dead to push us
from our stools.’ There is a mighty bustle at the door, a gibbering and
squeaking in the lobbies. An actor’s retinue is imperial, it presses
upon the imagination too much, and he should therefore slide unnoticed
into the pit. Authors, who are in a manner his makers and masters, sit
there contented—why should not he? ‘He is used to shew himself.’ That
then is the very reason he should conceal his person at other times. A
habit of ostentation should not be reduced to a principle. If I had seen
the late Gentleman Lewis fluttering in a prominent situation in the
boxes, I should have been puzzled whether to think of him as the Copper
Captain, or as Bobadil, or Ranger, or young Rapid, or Lord Foppington,
or fifty other whimsical characters: then I should have got Munden and
Quick, and a parcel more of them in my head, till ‘my brain would have
been like a smoke-jack:’ I should not have known what to make of it; but
if I had seen him in the pit, I should merely have eyed him with
respectful curiosity, and have told every one _that_ that was Gentleman
Lewis. We should have concluded from the circumstance that he was a
modest, sensible man: we all knew beforehand that he could show off
whenever he pleased!
There is one class of performers that I think is quite exempt from the
foregoing reasoning, I mean _retired actors_. Come when they will and
where they will, they are welcome to their old friends. They have as
good a right to sit in the boxes as children at the holidays. But they
do not, somehow, come often. It is but a melancholy recollection with
them:—
—‘Then sweet,
Now sad to think on!’
Mrs. Garrick still goes often, and hears the applause of her husband
over again in the shouts of the pit. Had Mrs. Pritchard or Mrs. Clive
been living, I am afraid we should have seen little of them—it would
have been too _home_ a feeling with them. Mrs. Siddons seldom if ever
goes, and yet she is almost the only thing left worth seeing there. She
need not stay away on account of any theory that I can form. She is out
of the pale of all theories, and annihilates all rules. Wherever she
sits there is grace and grandeur, there is tragedy personified. Her seat
is the undivided throne of the Tragic Muse. She had no need of the
robes, the sweeping train, the ornaments of the stage; in herself she is
as great as any being she ever represented in the ripeness and plenitude
of her power! I should not, I confess, have had the same paramount
abstracted feeling at seeing John Kemble there, whom I venerate at a
distance, and should not have known whether he was playing off the great
man or the great actor:—
‘A little more than kin, and less than kind.’
I know it may be said in answer to all this pretext of keeping the
character of the player inviolate—‘What is there more common, in fact,
than for the hero of a tragedy to speak the prologue, or than for the
heroine, who has been stabbed or poisoned, to revive, and come forward
laughing in the epilogue?’ As to the epilogue, it is spoken to get rid
of the idea of the tragedy altogether, and to ward off the fury of the
pit, who may be bent on its damnation. The greatest incongruity you can
hit upon is, therefore, the most proper for this purpose. But I deny
that the hero of a tragedy, or the principal character in it, is ever
pitched upon to deliver the prologue. It is always, by prescription,
some walking-shadow, some poor player, who cannot even spoil a part of
any consequence. Is there not Mr. C— always at hand for this purpose,
whom the late king pronounced three times to be ‘a bad actor?’[74] What
is there in common between that accustomed wave of the hand, and the
cocked hat under the arm, and any passion or person that can be brought
forward on the stage? It is not that we can be said to acquire a
prejudice against so harmless an actor as Mr. C—; we are born with a
prejudice against a speaker of prologues. It is an innate idea: a
natural instinct: there is a particular organ in the brain provided for
it. Do we not all hate a manager? It is not because he is insolent or
impertinent, or fond of making ridiculous speeches, or a notorious
puffer, or ignorant, or mean, or vain, but it is because we see him in a
coat, waistcoat, and breeches. The stage is the world of fantasy: it is
Queen Mab that has invited us to her revels there, and all that have to
do with it should wear motley!
Lastly, there are some actors by profession, whose faces we like to see
in the boxes or any where else; but it is because they are no actors,
but rather gentlemen and scholars, and in their proper places in the
boxes, or wherever they are. Does not an actor himself, I would ask,
feel conscious and awkward in the boxes, if he thinks that he is known?
And does he not sit there in spite of this uneasy feeling, and run the
gauntlet of impertinent looks and whispers, only to get a little
by—admiration, as he thinks? It is hardly to be supposed that he comes
to see the play, the show. He must have enough of plays and finery. But
he wants to see a favourite (perhaps a rival) actor in a striking part.
Then the place for him to do this is the pit. Painters, I know, always
get as close up to a picture they want to copy as they can; and I should
imagine actors would want to do the same, in order to look into the
texture and mechanism of their art. Even theatrical critics can make
nothing of a part that they see from the boxes. If you sit in the
stage-box, your attention is drawn off by the company and other
circumstances. If you get to a distance (so as to be out of the reach of
notice) you can neither hear nor see well. For myself, I would as soon
take a seat on the top of the Monument to give an account of a first
appearance, as go into the second or third tier of boxes to do it. I
went, but the other day, with a boxticket, to see Miss Fanny Brunton
come out in Juliet, and Mr. Macready make a first appearance in Romeo;
and though I was told (by a tolerable judge) that the new Juliet was the
most elegant figure on the stage, and that Mr. Macready’s Romeo was
quite beautiful, I vow to God I knew nothing of it. So little could I
tell of the matter, that at one time I mistook Mr. Horrebow for Mr.
Abbott. I have seen Mr. Kean play Sir Giles Overreach one night from the
front of the pit, and a few nights after from the front boxes, facing
the stage. It was another thing altogether. That which had been so
lately nothing but flesh and blood, a living fibre, ‘instinct with fire’
and spirit, was no better than a little fantoccini figure, darting
backwards and forwards on the stage, starting, screaming, and playing a
number of fantastic tricks before the audience. I could account, in the
latter instance, for the little approbation of the performance
manifested around me, and also for the general scepticism with respect
to Mr. Kean’s acting, which has been said to prevail among those who
cannot condescend to go into the pit, and have not interest in the
orchestra—to see him act. They may then stay away altogether. His face
is the running comment on his acting, which reconciles the audience to
it. Without that index to his mind, you are not prepared for the
vehemence and suddenness of his gestures; his pauses are long, abrupt,
and unaccountable, if not filled up by the expression; it is in the
working of his face that you see the writhing and coiling up of the
passions before they make their serpent-spring; the lightning of his eye
precedes the hoarse burst of thunder from his voice.
One may go into the boxes, indeed, and criticise acting and actors with
Sterne’s stop-watch, but no otherwise—‘“And between the nominative case
and the verb (which, as your lordship knows, should agree together in
number, person etc.) there was a full pause of a second and two thirds.”
“But was the eye silent—did the look say nothing?”—“I looked only at the
stop-watch, my lord.” “Excellent critic!”’—If any other actor, indeed,
goes to see Mr. Kean act, with a view _to avoid imitation_, this may be
the place, or rather it is the way to run into it, for you see only his
extravagances and defects, which are the most easily carried away. Mr.
Matthews may translate him into an AT HOME even from the
_slips!_—Distinguished actors then ought, I conceive, to set the example
of going into the pit, were it only for their own sakes. I remember a
trifling circumstance, which I worked up at the time into a confirmation
of this theory of mine, engrafted on old prejudice and tradition.[75] I
had got into the middle of the pit, at considerable risk of broken
bones, to see Mr. Kean in one of his early parts, when I perceived two
young men seated a little behind me, with a certain space left round
them. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, in light
drab-coloured great coats, and with their shirt-sleeves drawn down over
their hands, at a time when this was not so common as it has since
become. I took them for younger sons of some old family at least. One of
them, that was very good-looking, I thought might be Lord Byron, and his
companion might be Mr. Hobhouse. They seemed to have wandered from
another sphere of this our planet to witness a masterly performance to
the utmost advantage. This stamped the thing. They were, undoubtedly,
young men of rank and fashion; but their taste was greater than their
regard for appearances. The pit was, after all, the true resort of
thorough-bred critics and amateurs. When there was any thing worth
seeing, this was the place; and I began to feel a sort of reflected
importance in the consciousness that I also was a critic. Nobody sat
near them—it would have seemed like an intrusion. Not a syllable was
uttered.—They were two clerks in the Victualling Office!
What I would insist on, then, is this—that for Mr. Kean, or Mr. Young,
or Mr. Macready, or any of those that are ‘cried out upon in the top of
the compass’ to obtrude themselves voluntarily or ostentatiously upon
our notice, when they are _out of character_, is a solecism in
theatricals. For them to thrust themselves forward before the scenes, is
to drag us behind them against our will, than which nothing can be more
fatal to a true passion for the stage, and which is a privilege that
should be kept sacred for impertinent curiosity. Oh! while I live, let
me not be admitted (under special favour) to an actor’s dressing-room.
Let me not see how Cato painted, or how Cæsar combed! Let me not meet
the prompt-boys in the passage, nor see the half-lighted candles stuck
against the bare walls, nor hear the creaking of machines, or the
fiddlers laughing; nor see a Columbine practising a pirouette in sober
sadness, nor Mr. Grimaldi’s face drop from mirth to sudden melancholy as
he passes the side-scene, as if a shadow crossed it, nor witness the
long-chinned generation of the pantomime sit twirling their thumbs, nor
overlook the fellow who holds the candle for the moon in the scene
between Lorenzo and Jessica! Spare me this insight into secrets I am not
bound to know. The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress.
Why should we look behind the glass of fashion? Why should we prick the
bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water?
Trust a little to first appearances—leave something to fancy. I observe
that the great puppets of the real stage, who themselves play a grand
part, like to get into the boxes over the stage; where they see nothing
from the proper point of view, but peep and pry into what is going on
like a magpie looking into a marrow-bone. This is just like them. So
they look down upon human life, of which they are ignorant. They see the
exits and entrances of the players, something that they suspect is meant
to be kept from them (for they think they are always liable to be
imposed upon): the petty pageant of an hour ends with each scene long
before the catastrophe, and the tragedy of life is turned to farce under
their eyes. These people laugh loud at a pantomime, and are delighted
with clowns and pantaloons. They pay no attention to any thing else. The
stage-boxes exist in contempt of the stage and common sense. The private
boxes, on the contrary, should be reserved as the receptacle for the
officers of state and great diplomatic characters, who wish to avoid,
rather than court popular notice!
ESSAY XXIX
ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY
The chief disadvantage of knowing more and seeing farther than others,
is not to be generally understood. A man is, in consequence of this,
liable to start paradoxes, which immediately transport him beyond the
reach of the common-place reader. A person speaking once in a slighting
manner of a very original-minded man, received for answer—‘He strides on
so far before you, that he dwindles in the distance!’
Petrarch complains, that ‘Nature had made him different from other
people’—_singular’ d’altra genti_. The great happiness of life is, to be
neither better nor worse than the general run of those you meet with. If
you are beneath them, you are trampled upon; if you are above them, you
soon find a mortifying level in their indifference to what you
particularly pique yourself upon. What is the use of being moral in a
night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam? ‘To be honest, as this world goes, is
to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’ So says Shakespear; and the
commentators have not added that, under these circumstances, a man is
more likely to become the butt of slander than the mark of admiration
for being so. ‘How now, thou particular fellow[76]?’ is the common
answer to all such out-of-the-way pretensions. By not doing as those at
Rome do, we cut ourselves off from good-fellowship and society. We speak
another language, have notions of our own, and are treated as of a
different species. Nothing can be more awkward than to intrude with any
such far-fetched ideas among the common herd, who will be sure to
—‘Stand all astonied, like a sort of steers,
’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race
Unwares is chanced, far straying from his peers:
So will their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.’
Ignorance of another’s meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear
produces hatred: hence the suspicion and rancour entertained against all
those who set up for greater refinement and wisdom than their
neighbours. It is in vain to think of softening down this spirit of
hostility by simplicity of manners, or by condescending to persons of
low estate. The more you condescend, the more they will presume upon it;
they will fear you less, but hate you more; and will be the more
determined to take their revenge on you for a superiority as to which
they are entirely in the dark, and of which you yourself seem to
entertain considerable doubts. All the humility in the world will only
pass for weakness and folly. They have no notion of such a thing. They
always put their best foot forward; and argue that you would do the same
if you had any such wonderful talents as people say. You had better,
therefore, play off the great man at once—hector, swagger, talk big, and
ride the high horse over them: you may by this means extort outward
respect or common civility; but you will get nothing (with low people)
by forbearance and good-nature but open insult or silent contempt. C—
always talks to people about what they don’t understand: I, for one,
endeavour to talk to them about what they do understand, and find I only
get the more ill-will by it. They conceive I do not think them capable
of any thing better; that I do not think it worth while, as the vulgar
saying is, to _throw a word to a dog_. I once complained of this to C—,
thinking it hard I should be sent to Coventry for not making a
prodigious display. He said, ‘As you assume a certain character, you
ought to produce your credentials. It is a tax upon people’s good-nature
to admit superiority of any kind, even where there is the most evident
proof of it: but it is too hard a task for the imagination to admit it
without any apparent ground at all.’
There is not a greater error than to suppose that you avoid the envy,
malice, and uncharitableness, so common in the world, by going among
people without pretensions. There are no people who have no pretensions;
or the fewer their pretensions, the less they can afford to acknowledge
yours without some sort of value received. The more information
individuals possess, or the more they have refined upon any subject, the
more readily can they conceive and admit the same kind of superiority to
themselves that they feel over others. But from the low, dull, level
sink of ignorance and vulgarity, no idea or love of excellence can
arise. You think you are doing mighty well with them; that you are
laying aside the buckram of pedantry and pretence, and getting the
character of a plain, unassuming, good sort of fellow. It will not do.
All the while that you are making these familiar advances, and wanting
to be at your ease, they are trying to recover the wind of you. You may
forget that you are an author, an artist, or what not—they do not forget
that they are nothing, nor bate one jot of their desire to prove you in
the same predicament. They take hold of some circumstance in your dress;
your manner of entering a room is different from that of other people;
you do not eat vegetables—that’s odd; you have a particular phrase,
which they repeat, and this becomes a sort of standing joke; you look
grave, or ill; you talk, or are more silent than usual; you are in or
out of pocket: all these petty, inconsiderable circumstances, in which
you resemble, or are unlike other people, form so many counts in the
indictment which is going on in their imaginations against you, and are
so many contradictions in your character. In any one else they would
pass unnoticed, but in a person of whom they had heard so much, they
cannot make them out at all. Meanwhile, those things in which you may
really excel, go for nothing, because they cannot judge of them. They
speak highly of some book which you do not like, and therefore you make
no answer. You recommend them to go and see some picture, in which they
do not find much to admire. How are you to convince them that you are
right? Can you make them perceive that the fault is in them, and not in
the picture, unless you could give them your knowledge? They hardly
distinguish the difference between a Correggio and a common daub. Does
this bring you any nearer to an understanding? The more you know of the
difference, the more deeply you feel it, or the more earnestly you wish
to convey it, the farther do you find yourself removed to an
immeasurable distance from the possibility of making them enter into
views and feelings of which they have not even the first rudiments. You
cannot make them see with your eyes, and they must judge for themselves.
Intellectual is not like bodily strength. You have no hold of the
understanding of others but by their sympathy. Your knowing, in fact, so
much more about a subject does not give you a superiority, that is, a
power over them, but only renders it the more impossible for you to make
the least impression on them. Is it then an advantage to you? It may be,
as it relates to your own private satisfaction, but it places a greater
gulf between you and society. It throws stumbling blocks in your way at
every turn. All that you take most pride and pleasure in is lost upon
the vulgar eye. What they are pleased with is a matter of indifference
or of distaste to you. In seeing a number of persons turn over a
portfolio of prints from different masters, what a trial it is to the
patience, how it jars the nerves to hear them fall into raptures at some
common-place flimsy thing, and pass over some divine expression of
countenance without notice, or with a remark that it is very
singular-looking? How useless is it in such cases to fret or argue, or
remonstrate? Is it not quite as well to be without all this
hypercritical, fastidious knowledge, and to be pleased or displeased as
it happens, or struck with the first fault or beauty that is pointed out
by others? I would be glad almost to change my acquaintance with
pictures, with books, and, certainly, what I know of mankind, for any
body’s ignorance of them!
It is recorded in the life of some worthy (whose name I forget) that he
was one of those ‘who loved hospitality and respect:’ and I profess to
belong to the same classification of mankind. Civility is with me a
jewel. I like a little comfortable cheer, and careless, indolent, chat.
I hate to be always wise, or aiming at wisdom. I have enough to do with
literary cabals, questions, critics, actors, essay-writing, without
taking them out with me for recreation, and into all companies. I wish
at these times to pass for a good-humoured fellow; and good-will is all
I ask in return to make good company. I do not desire to be always
posing myself or others with the questions of fate, free-will,
fore-knowledge absolute, &c. I must unbend sometimes. I must
occasionally lie fallow. The kind of conversation that I affect most is
what sort of a day it is, and whether it is likely to rain or hold up
fine for to-morrow. This I consider as enjoying the _otium cum
dignitate_, as the end and privilege of a life of study. I would resign
myself to this state of easy indifference, but I find I cannot. I must
maintain a certain pretension, which is far enough from my wish. I must
be put on my defence, I must take up the gauntlet continually, or I find
I lose ground. ‘I am nothing, if not critical.’ While I am thinking what
o’clock it is, or how I came to blunder in quoting a well-known passage,
as if I had done it on purpose, others are thinking whether I am not
really as dull a fellow as I am sometimes said to be. If a drizzling
shower patters against the windows, it puts me in mind of a mild spring
rain, from which I retired twenty years ago, into a little public house
near Wem in Shropshire, and while I saw the plants and shrubs before the
door imbibe the dewy moisture, quaffed a glass of sparkling ale, and
walked home in the dusk of evening, brighter to me than noon-day suns at
present are! Would I indulge this feeling? In vain. They ask me what
news there is, and stare if I say I don’t know. If a new actress has
come out, why must I have seen her? If a new novel has appeared, why
must I have read it? I, at one time, used to go and take a hand at
cribbage with a friend, and afterwards discuss a cold sirloin of beef,
and throw out a few lack-a-daisical remarks, in a way to please myself,
but it would not do long. I set up little pretension, and therefore the
little that I did set up was taken from me. As I said nothing on that
subject myself, it was continually thrown in my teeth that I was _an
author_. From having me at this disadvantage, my friend wanted to peg on
a hole or two in the game, and was displeased if I would not let him. If
I won of him, it was hard he should be beat by an author. If he won, it
would be strange if he did not understand the game better than I did. If
I mentioned my favourite game of rackets, there was a general silence,
as if this was my weak point. If I complained of being ill, it was asked
why I made myself so? If I said such an actor had played a part well,
the answer was, there was a different account in one of the newspapers.
If any allusion was made to men of letters, there was a suppressed
smile. If I told a humorous story, it was difficult to say whether the
laugh was at me or at the narrative. The wife hated me for my ugly face:
the servants because I could not always get them tickets for the play,
and because they could not tell exactly what an author meant. If a
paragraph appeared against any thing I had written, I found it was ready
there before me, and I was to undergo a regular _roasting_. I submitted
to all this till I was tired, and then I gave it up.
One of the miseries of intellectual pretensions is, that nine-tenths of
those you come in contact with do not know whether you are an impostor
or not. I dread that certain anonymous criticisms should get into the
hands of servants where I go, or that my hatter or shoemaker should
happen to read them, who cannot possibly tell whether they are well or
ill founded. The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its
malice. There are people whose good opinion or good will you want,
setting aside all literary pretensions; and it is hard to lose by an ill
report (which you have no means of rectifying) what you cannot gain by a
good one. After a _diatribe_ in the —, (which is taken in by a gentleman
who occupies my old apartments on the first floor) my landlord brings me
up his bill (of some standing), and on my offering to give him so much
in money, and a note of hand for the rest, shakes his head, and says, he
is afraid he could make no use of it. Soon after, the daughter comes in,
and on my mentioning the circumstance carelessly to her, replies
gravely, ‘that indeed her father has been almost ruined by bills.’ _This
is the unkindest cut of all._ It is in vain for me to endeavour to
explain that the publication in which I am abused is a mere government
engine—an organ of a political faction. They know nothing about that.
They only know such and such imputations are thrown out; and the more I
try to remove them, the more they think there is some truth in them.
Perhaps the people of the house are strong Tories—government-agents of
some sort. Is it for me to enlighten their ignorance? If I say, I once
wrote a thing called Prince Maurice’s Parrot, and an Essay on the Regal
Character, in the former of which allusion is made to a noble marquis,
and in the latter to a great personage (so at least, I am told, it has
been construed), and that Mr. Croker has peremptory instructions to
retaliate; they cannot conceive what connection there can be between me
and such distinguished characters. I can get no farther. Such is the
misery of pretensions beyond your situation, and which are not backed by
any external symbols of wealth or rank, intelligible to all mankind!
The impertinence of admiration is scarcely more tolerable than the
demonstrations of contempt. I have known a person, whom I had never seen
before, besiege me all dinner-time with asking, what articles I had
written in the Edinburgh Review? I was at last ashamed to answer to my
splendid sins in that way. Others will pick out something not yours, and
say, they are sure no one else could write it. By the first sentence
they can always tell your style. Now I hate my style to be known; as I
hate all _idiosyncrasy_. These obsequious flatterers could not pay me a
worse compliment. Then there are those who make a point of reading every
thing you write (which is fulsome); while others, more provoking,
regularly lend your works to a friend as soon as they receive them. They
pretty well know your notions on the different subjects, from having
heard you talk about them. Besides, they have a greater value for your
personal character than they have for your writings. You explain things
better in a common way, when you are not aiming at effect. Others tell
you of the faults they have heard found with your last book, and that
they defend your style in general from a charge of obscurity. A friend
once told me of a quarrel he had had with a near relation, who denied
that I knew how to spell the commonest words. These are comfortable
confidential communications, to which authors, who have their friends
and excusers, are subject. A gentleman told me, that a lady had objected
to my use of the word _learneder_, as bad grammar. He said, that he
thought it a pity that I did not take more care, but that the lady was
perhaps prejudiced, as her husband held a government-office. I looked
for the word, and found it in a motto from Butler. I was piqued, and
desired him to tell the fair critic, that the fault was not in me, but
in one who had far more wit, more learning, and loyalty than I could
pretend to. Then, again, some will pick out the flattest thing of yours
they can find, to load it with panegyrics; and others tell you (by way
of letting you see how high they rank your capacity), that your best
passages are failures. L— has a knack of tasting (or as he would say,
_palating_) the insipid: L. H. has a trick of turning away from the
relishing morsels you put on his plate. There is no getting the start of
some people. Do what you will, they can do it better; meet with what
success you may, their own good opinion stands them in better stead, and
runs before the applause of the world. I once shewed a person of this
over-weening turn (with no small triumph I confess) a letter of a very
flattering description I had received from the celebrated Count
Stendhal, dated Rome. He returned it with a smile of indifference, and
said, he had had a letter from Rome himself the day before, from his
friend S—! I did not think this ‘germane to the matter.’ G—dw—n pretends
I never wrote any thing worth a farthing but my answers to Vetus, and
that I fail altogether when I attempt to write an essay, or any thing in
a short compass.
What can one do in such cases? Shall I confess a weakness? The only
set-off I know to these rebuffs and mortifications, is sometimes in an
accidental notice or involuntary mark of distinction from a stranger. I
feel the force of Horace’s _digito monstrari_—I like to be pointed out
in the street, or to hear people ask in Mr. Powell’s court, _which is
Mr. H—?_ This is to me a pleasing extension of one’s personal identity.
Your name so repeated leaves an echo like music on the ear: is stirs the
blood like the sound of a trumpet. It shews that other people are
curious to see you: that they think of you, and feel an interest in you
without your knowing it. This is a bolster to lean upon; a lining to
your poor, shivering, thread-bare opinion of yourself. You want some
such cordial to exhausted spirits, and relief to the dreariness of
abstract speculation. You are something; and, from occupying a place in
the thoughts of others, think less contemptuously of yourself. You are
the better able to run the gauntlet of prejudice and vulgar abuse. It is
pleasant in this way to have your opinion quoted against yourself, and
your own sayings repeated to you as good things. I was once talking with
an intelligent man in the pit, and criticising Mr. Knight’s performance
of Filch. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘little Simmons was the fellow to play that
character.’ He added, ‘There was a most excellent remark made upon his
acting it in the EXAMINER (I think it was)—_That he looked as if he had
the gallows in one eye and a pretty girl in the other._’ I said nothing,
but was in remarkably good humour the rest of the evening. I have seldom
been in a company where fives-playing has been talked of, but some one
has asked, in the course of it, ‘Pray did any one ever see an account of
one Cavanagh, that appeared some time back in most of the papers? Is it
known who wrote it?’ These are trying moments. I had a triumph over a
person, whose name I will not mention, on the following occasion. I
happened to be saying something about Burke, and was expressing my
opinion of his talents in no measured terms, when this gentleman
interrupted me by saying, he thought, for his part, that Burke had been
greatly overrated, and then added, in a careless way, ‘Pray did you read
a character of him in the last number of the — —?’ ‘I wrote it!’—I could
not resist the antithesis, but was afterwards ashamed of my momentary
petulance. Yet no one, that I find, ever spares me.
Some persons seek out and obtrude themselves on public characters, in
order, as it might seem, to pick out their failings, and afterwards
betray them. Appearances are for it, but truth and a better knowledge of
nature are against this interpretation of the matter. Sycophants and
flatterers are undesignedly treacherous and fickle. They are prone to
admire inordinately at first, and not finding a constant supply of food
for this kind of sickly appetite, take a distaste to the object of their
idolatry. To be even with themselves for their credulity, they sharpen
their wits to spy out faults, and are delighted to find that this
answers better than their first employment. It is a course of study,
‘lively, audible, and full of vent.’ They have the organ of wonder and
the organ of fear in a prominent degree. The first requires new objects
of admiration to satisfy its uneasy cravings: the second makes them
crouch to power wherever its shifting standard appears, and willing to
curry favour with all parties, and ready to betray any out of sheer
weakness and servility. I do not think they mean any harm. At least, I
can look at this obliquity with indifference in my own particular case.
I have been more disposed to resent it as I have seen it practised upon
others, where I have been better able to judge of the extent of the
mischief, and the heartlessness and idiot folly it discovered.
I do not think great intellectual attainments are any recommendation to
the women. They puzzle them, and are a diversion to the main question.
If scholars talk to ladies of what they understand, their hearers are
none the wiser: if they talk of other things, they only prove themselves
fools. The conversation between Angelica and Foresight, in Love for
Love, is a receipt in full for all such overstrained nonsense: while he
is wandering among the signs of the zodiac, she is standing a tip-toe on
the earth. It has been remarked that poets do not choose mistresses very
wisely. I believe it is not choice, but necessity. If they could throw
the handkerchief like the Grand Turk, I imagine we should see scarce
mortals, but rather goddesses, surrounding their steps, and each
exclaiming, with Lord Byron’s own Ionian maid—
‘So shalt thou find me ever at thy side,
Here and hereafter, if the last may be!’
Ah! no, these are bespoke, carried off by men of mortal, not ethereal
mould, and thenceforth the poet, from whose mind the ideas of love and
beauty are inseparable as dreams from sleep, goes on the forlorn hope of
the passion, and dresses up the first Dulcinea that will take compassion
on him, in all the colours of fancy. What boots it to complain if the
delusion lasts for life, and the rainbow still paints its form in the
cloud?
There is one mistake I would wish, if possible, to correct. Men of
letters, artists, and others, not succeeding with women in a certain
rank of life, think the objection is to their want of fortune, and that
they shall stand a better chance by descending lower, where only their
good qualities or talents will be thought of. Oh! worse and worse. The
objection is to themselves, not to their fortune—to their abstraction,
to their absence of mind, to their unintelligible and romantic notions.
Women of education may have a glimpse of their meaning, may get a clue
to their character, but to all others they are thick darkness. If the
mistress smiles at their _ideal_ advances, the maid will laugh outright;
she will throw water over you, get her little sister to listen, send her
sweetheart to ask you what you mean, will set the village or the house
upon your back; it will be a farce, a comedy, a standing jest for a
year, and then the murder will out. Scholars should be sworn at
Highgate. They are no match for chamber maids, or wenches at
lodging-houses. They had better try their hands on heiresses or ladies
of quality. These last have high notions of themselves that may fit some
of your epithets! They are above mortality, so are your thoughts! But
with low life, trick, ignorance, and cunning, you have nothing in
common. Whoever you are, that think you can make a compromise or a
conquest there by good nature, or good sense, be warned by a friendly
voice, and retreat in time from the unequal contest.
If, as I have said above, scholars are no match for chambermaids, on the
other hand, gentlemen are no match for blackguards. The former are on
their honour, act on the square; the latter take all advantages, and
have no idea of any other principle. It is astonishing how soon a fellow
without education will learn to cheat. He is impervious to any ray of
liberal knowledge; his understanding is
‘Not pierceable by power of any star’—
but it is porous to all sorts of tricks, chicanery, stratagems, and
knavery, by which any thing is to be got. Mrs. Peachum, indeed, says,
that ‘to succeed at the gaming-table, the candidate should have the
education of a nobleman.’ I do not know how far this example contradicts
my theory. I think it is a rule that men in business should not be
taught other things. Any one will be almost sure to make money who has
no other idea in his head. A college-education, or intense study of
abstract truth, will not enable a man to drive a bargain, to over-reach
another, or even to guard himself from being over-reached. As Shakespear
says, that ‘to have a good face is the effect of study, but reading and
writing come by nature:’ so it might be argued, that to be a knave is
the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary
to be a learned man. The best politicians are not those who are deeply
grounded in mathematical or in ethical science. Rules stand in the way
of expediency. Many a man has been hindered from pushing his fortune in
the world by an early cultivation of his moral sense, and has repented
of it at leisure during the rest of his life. A shrewd man said of my
father, that he would not send a son of his to school to him on any
account, for that by teaching him to speak the truth, he would
disqualify him from getting his living in the world!
It is hardly necessary to add any illustration to prove that the most
original and profound thinkers are not always the most successful or
popular writers. This is not merely a temporary disadvantage; but many
great philosophers have not only been scouted while they were living,
but forgotten as soon as they were dead. The name of Hobbes is perhaps
sufficient to explain this assertion. But I do not wish to go farther
into this part of the subject, which is obvious in itself. I have said,
I believe, enough to take off the air of paradox which hangs over the
title of this Essay.
ESSAY XXX
ON PATRONAGE AND PUFFING
‘A gentle husher, Vanity by name.’—SPENSER.
A lady was complaining to a friend of mine of the credulity of people in
attending to quack advertisements, and wondering who could be taken in
by them—‘for that she had never bought but one half-guinea bottle of Dr.
——’s Elixir of Life, and it had done her no sort of good!’ This anecdote
seemed to explain pretty well what made it worth the doctor’s while to
advertise his wares in every newspaper in the kingdom. He would no doubt
be satisfied if every delicate, sceptical invalid, in his majesty’s
dominions, gave his Elixir one trial, merely to show the absurdity of
the thing. We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in
nostrums, but are willing to see ourselves whether there is any truth in
them.
There is a strong tendency in the human mind to flatter itself with
secret hopes, with some lucky reservation in our own favour, though
reason may point out the grossness of the trick in general; and,
besides, there is a wonderful power in words, formed into regular
propositions, and printed in capital letters, to draw the assent after
them, till we have proof of their fallacy. The ignorant and idle believe
what they read, as Scotch philosophers demonstrate the existence of a
material world, and other learned propositions, from the evidence of
their senses. The ocular proof is all that is wanting in either case. As
hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of
lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth. We can
hardly _believe_ a thing to be a lie, though we _know_ it to be so. The
‘puff direct,’ even as it stands in the columns of the Times newspaper,
branded with the title of Advertisement before it, claims some sort of
attention and respect for the merits that it discloses, though we think
the candidate for public favour and support has hit upon (perhaps) an
injudicious way of laying them before the world. Still there may be
something in them; and even the outrageous improbability and
extravagance of the statement on the very face of it, stagger us, leave
a hankering to inquire farther into it, because we think the advertiser
would hardly have the impudence to hazard such barefaced absurdities
without some foundation. Such is the strength of the association between
words and things in the mind—so much oftener must our credulity have
been justified by the event than imposed upon. If every second story we
heard was an invention, we should lose our mechanical disposition to
trust to the meaning of sounds, just as when we have met with a number
of counterfeit pieces of coin, we suspect good ones; but our implicit
assent to what we hear is a proof how much more sincerity and good faith
there is in the sum total of our dealings with one another, than
artifice and imposture.
‘To elevate and surprise’ is the great art of quackery and puffing; to
raise a lively and exaggerated image in the mind, and take it by
surprise before it can recover breath, as it were; so that by having
been caught in the trap, it is unwilling to retract entirely—has a
secret desire to find itself in the right, and a determination to see
whether it is or not. Describe a picture as _lofty_, _imposing_, and
_grand_, these words excite certain ideas in the mind like the sound of
a trumpet, which are not to be quelled, except by seeing the picture
itself, nor even then if it is viewed by the help of a catalogue,
written expressly for the occasion by the artist himself. It is not to
be supposed that _he_ would say such things of his picture, unless they
were allowed by all the world; and he repeats them, on this gentle
understanding, till all the world allows them.[77] So reputation runs in
a vicious circle, and merit limps behind it, mortified and abashed at
its own insignificance. It has been said that the test of fame or
popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by
others, or is brought to their recollection in the course of a year. At
this rate, a man has his reputation in his own hands, and by the help of
puffing and the press, may forestall the voice of posterity, and stun
the ‘groundling’ ear of his contemporaries. A name let off in your
hearing continually, with some bouncing epithet affixed to it, startles
you like the report of a pistol close at your ear: you cannot help the
effect upon the imagination, though you know it is perfectly
harmless—_vox et præterea nihil_. So, if you see the same name staring
you in the face in great letters, at the corner of every street, you
involuntarily think the owner of it must be a great man to occupy so
large a space in the eye of the town. The appeal is made, in the first
instance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind.
There are some, indeed, who publish their own disgrace, and make their
names a common by-word and nuisance, notoriety being all that they want.
A quack gets himself surreptitiously dubbed Doctor or Knight; and though
you may laugh in his face, it pays expenses. Parolles and his drum
typify many a modern adventurer, and court-candidate, for unearned
laurels and unblushing honours. Of all puffs, lottery-puffs are the most
ingenious and most innocent. A collection of them would make an amusing
_Vade mecum_. They are still various and the same, with that infinite
_ruse_ with which they lull the reader at the outset out of all
suspicion, the insinuating turn in the middle, the home-thrust at the
ruling passion at last, by which your spare cash is conjured clean out
of the pocket in spite of resolution, by the same stale, well-known,
thousandth-time repeated, artifice of _All prizes_ and _No blanks_—a
self-evident imposition! Nothing, however, can be a stronger proof of
the power of fascinating the public judgment through the eye alone. I
know a gentleman who amassed a considerable fortune (so as to be able to
keep his carriage) by printing nothing but lottery placards and
hand-bills of a colossal size. Another friend of mine (of no mean
talents) was applied to (as a snug thing in the way of business) to
write regular lottery-puffs for a large house in the city, and on having
a parcel of samples returned on his hands as done in too severe and
terse a style, complained quaintly enough, ‘_That modest merit never
could succeed!_’ Even Lord Byron, as he tells us, has been accused of
writing lottery-puffs. There are various ways of playing one’s self off
before the public, and keeping one’s name alive. The newspapers, the
lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the
blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one. I have
heard of a man of literary celebrity sitting in his study writing
letters of remonstrance to himself, on the gross defects of a plan of
education he had just published, and which remained unsold on the
bookseller’s counter. Another feigned himself dead in order to see what
would be said of him in the newspapers, and to excite a sensation in
this way. A flashy pamphlet has been run to a five-and-thirtieth
edition, and thus ensured the writer a ‘deathless date’ among political
charlatans, by regularly striking off a new title-page to every fifty or
a hundred copies that were sold. This is a vile practice. It is an
erroneous idea got abroad (and which I will contradict here) that
paragraphs are paid for in the leading Journals. It is quite out of the
question. A favourable notice of an author, an actress, &c. may be
inserted through interest or to oblige a friend, but it must invariably
be done for _love_, not _money_!
When I formerly had to do with these sort of critical verdicts, I was
generally sent out of the way when any _debutant_ had a friend at court,
and was to be tenderly handled. For the rest, or those of robust
constitutions, I had _carte blanche_ given me. Sometimes I ran out of
the course, to be sure. Poor Perry! what bitter complaints he used to
make, that by _running-a-muck_ at lords and Scotchmen I should not leave
him a place to dine out at! The expression of his face at these moments,
as if he should shortly be without a friend in the world, was truly
pitiable. What squabbles we used to have about Kean and Miss Stephens,
the only theatrical favourites I ever had! Mrs. Billington had got some
notion that Miss Stephens would never make a singer, and it was the
torment of Perry’s life (as he told me in confidence) that he could not
get any two people to be of the same opinion on any one point. I shall
not easily forget bringing him my account of her first appearance in the
Beggar’s Opera. I have reason to remember that article: it was almost
the last I ever wrote with any pleasure to myself. I had been down on a
visit to my friends near Chertsey, and, on my return, had stopped at an
inn at Kingston-upon-Thames, where I had got the Beggar’s Opera, and had
read it over-night. The next day I walked cheerfully to town. It was a
fine sunny morning, in the end of autumn, and as I repeated the
beautiful song, ‘Life knows no return of spring,’ I meditated my next
day’s criticism, trying to do all the justice I could to so inviting a
subject. I was not a little proud of it by anticipation. I had just then
begun to stammer out my sentiments on paper, and was in a kind of
honey-moon of authorship. But soon after, my final hopes of happiness,
and of human liberty, were blighted nearly at the same time; and since
then I have had no pleasure in any thing:—
‘And Love himself can flatter me no more.’
It was not so ten years since (ten short years since.—Ah! how fast those
years run that hurry us away from our last fond dream of bliss!) when I
loitered along thy green retreats, oh! Twickenham, and conned over (with
enthusiastic delight) the chequered view, which one of thy favourites
drew of human life! I deposited my account of the play at the Morning
Chronicle Office in the afternoon, and went to see Miss Stephens as
Polly. Those were happy times, in which she first came out in this
character, in Mandane, where she sang the delicious air, ‘If o’er the
cruel tyrant, Love,’ (so as it can never be sung again), in Love in a
Village, where the scene opened with her and Miss Matthews in a painted
garden of roses and honeysuckles, and ‘Hope, thou nurse of young
Desire,’ thrilled from two sweet voices in turn. Oh! may my ears
sometimes still drink the same sweet sounds, embalmed with the spirit of
youth, of health, and joy, but in the thoughts of an instant, but in a
dream of fancy, and I shall hardly need to complain! When I got back,
after the play, Perry called out, with his cordial, grating voice,
‘Well, how did she do?’ and on my speaking in high terms, answered, that
‘he had been to dine with his friend the Duke, that some conversation
had passed on the subject, he was afraid it was not the thing, it was
not the true _sostenuto_ style; but as I had written the article’
(holding my peroration on the Beggar’s Opera carelessly in his hand) ‘it
might pass!’ I could perceive that the rogue licked his lips at it, and
had already in imagination ‘bought golden opinions of all sorts of
people’ by this very criticism, and I had the satisfaction the next day
to meet Miss Stephens coming out of the Editor’s room, who had been to
thank him for his very flattering account of her.
I was sent to see Kean the first night of his performance in Shylock,
when there were about a hundred people in the pit, but from his masterly
and spirited delivery of the first striking speech, ‘On such a day you
called me dog,’ &c. I perceived it was a hollow thing. So it was given
out in the Chronicle, but Perry was continually at me as other people
were at him, and was afraid it would not last. It was to no purpose I
said _it would last_: yet I am in the right hitherto. It has been said,
ridiculously, that Mr. Kean was written up in the Chronicle. I beg leave
to state my opinion that no actor can be written up or down by a paper.
An author may be puffed into notice, or damned by criticism, because his
book may not have been read. An artist may be overrated, or undeservedly
decried, because the public is not much accustomed to see or judge of
pictures. But an actor is judged by his peers, the play-going public,
and must stand or fall by his own merits or defects. The critic may give
the tone or have a casting voice where popular opinion is divided; but
he can no more _force_ that opinion either way, or wrest it from its
base in common-sense and feeling, than he can move Stonehenge. Mr. Kean
had, however, physical disadvantages and strong prejudices to encounter,
and so far the _liberal_ and _independent_ part of the press might have
been of service in helping him to his seat in the public favour. May he
long keep it with dignity and firmness![78]
It was pretended by the Covent-garden people, and some others at the
time, that Mr. Kean’s popularity was a mere effect of love of novelty, a
nine days’ wonder, like the rage after Master Betty’s acting, and would
be as soon over. The comparison did not hold. Master Betty’s acting was
so far wonderful, and drew crowds to see it as a mere singularity,
because he was a boy. Mr. Kean was a grown man, and there was no rule or
precedent established in the ordinary course of nature why some other
man should not appear in tragedy as great as John Kemble. Farther,
Master Betty’s acting was a singular phenomenon, but it was also as
beautiful as it was singular. I saw him in the part of Douglas, and he
seemed almost like ‘some gay creature of the element,’ moving about
gracefully, with all the flexibility of youth, and murmuring Æolian
sounds with plaintive tenderness. I shall never forget the way in which
he repeated the line in which Young Norval says, speaking of the fate of
two brothers:
‘And in my mind happy was he that died!’
The tones fell and seemed to linger prophetic on my ear. Perhaps the
wonder was made greater than it was. Boys at that age can often read
remarkably well, and certainly are not without natural grace and
sweetness of voice. The Westminster school-boys are a better company of
comedians than we find at most of our theatres. As to the understanding
a part like Douglas, at least, I see no difficulty on that score. I
myself used to recite the speech in Enfield’s Speaker with good emphasis
and discretion when at school, and entered, about the same age, into the
wild sweetness of the sentiments in Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romance of the
Forest, I am sure, quite as much as I should do now. Yet the same
experiment has been often tried since, and has uniformly failed.[79]
It was soon after this that Coleridge returned from Italy, and he got
one day into a long _tirade_ to explain what a ridiculous farce the
whole was, and how all the people abroad were shocked at the
_gullibility_ of the English nation, who on this and every other
occasion were open to the artifices of all sorts of quacks, wondering
how any persons with the smallest pretensions to common sense could for
a moment suppose that a boy could act the characters of men without any
of their knowledge, their experience, or their passions. We made some
faint resistance, but in vain. The discourse then took a turn, and
Coleridge began a laboured eulogy on some promising youth, the son of an
English artist, whom he had met in Italy, and who had wandered all over
the Campagna with him, whose talents, he assured us, were the admiration
of all Rome, and whose early designs had almost all the grace and purity
of Raphael’s. At last, some one interrupted the endless theme by saying
a little impatiently, ‘Why just now you would not let us believe our own
eyes and ears about young Betty, because you have a theory against
premature talents, and now you start a boy phenomenon, that nobody knows
any thing about but yourself—a young artist that, you tell us, is to
rival Raphael!’ The truth is, we like to have something to admire
ourselves, as well as to make other people gape and stare at; but then
it must be a discovery of our own, an idol of our own making and setting
up:—if others stumble on the discovery before us, or join in crying it
up to the skies, we then set to work to prove that this is a vulgar
delusion, and show our sagacity and freedom from prejudice by pulling it
in pieces with all the coolness imaginable. Whether we blow the bubble
or crush it in our hands, vanity and the desire of empty distinction are
equally at the bottom of our sanguine credulity or fastidious
scepticism. There are some who always fall in with the fashionable
prejudice as others affect singularity of opinion on all such points,
according as they think they have more or less wit to judge for
themselves.
If a little varnishing and daubing, a little puffing and quacking, and
giving yourself a good name, and getting a friend to speak a word for
you, is excusable in any profession, it is, I think, in that of
painting. Painting is an occult science, and requires a little
ostentation and mock-gravity in the professor. A man may here rival
Katterfelto, ‘with his hair on end at his own wonders, wondering for his
bread;’ for, if he does not, he may in the end go without it. He may
ride on a high trotting horse, in green spectacles, and attract notice
to his person any how he can, if he only works hard at his profession.
If ‘it only is when he is _out_ he is acting,’ let him make the fools
stare, but give others something worth looking at. Good Mr. Carver and
Gilder, good Mr. Printer’s Devil, good Mr. Bill-sticker, ‘do me your
offices’ unmolested! Painting is a plain ground, and requires a great
many heraldic quarterings and facings to set it off. Lay on, and do not
spare. No man’s merit can be fairly judged of, if he is not known; and
how can he be known, if he keeps entirely in the back ground?[80] A
great name in art goes but a little way, is chilled as it creeps along
the surface of the world, without something to revive and make it blaze
out with fresh splendor. Fame is here almost obscurity. It is long
before your name affixed to a sterling design will be spelt out by an
undiscerning, regardless public. Have it proclaimed, therefore, as a
necessary precaution, by sound of trumpet at the corners of the street,
let it be stuck as a label in your mouth, carry it on a placard at your
back. Otherwise, the world will never trouble themselves about you, or
will very soon forget you. A celebrated artist of the present day, whose
name is engraved at the bottom of some of the most touching specimens of
English art, once had a frame-maker call on him, who, on entering his
room, exclaimed with some surprise, ‘What, are you a painter, sir?’ The
other made answer, a little startled in his turn, ‘Why, didn’t you know
that? Did you never see my name at the bottom of prints?’ He could not
recollect that he had. ‘And yet you sell picture-frames and prints?’
‘Yes.’ ‘What painters’ names then did he recollect: Did he know West’s?’
‘Oh! yes.’ ‘And Opie’s?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And Fuseli’s?’ ‘Oh! yes.’ ‘But you
never heard of me?’ ‘I cannot say that I ever did!’ It was plain, from
this conversation, that Mr. N— had not kept company enough with
picture-dealers and newspaper critics. On another occasion, a
country-gentleman, who was sitting to him for his portrait, asked him if
he had any pictures in the Exhibition at Somerset-house, and on his
replying in the affirmative, desired to know what they were. He
mentioned among others, ‘The Marriage of Two Children;’ on which the
gentleman expressed great surprise, and said that was the very picture
his wife was always teasing him to go and have another look at, though
he had never noticed the painter’s name. When the public are so eager to
be amused, and care so little who it is that amuses them, it is not
amiss to remind them of it now and then; or even to have a starling
taught to repeat the name, to which they owe such misprized obligations,
in their drowsy ears. On any other principle, I cannot conceive how
painters (not without genius or industry) can fling themselves at the
head of the public in the manner they do, having lives written of
themselves, busts made of themselves, prints stuck in the shop-windows
of themselves, and their names placed in ‘the first row of the rubric,’
with those of Rubens, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, swearing by
themselves or their proxies that these glorified spirits would do well
to leave the abodes of the blest in order to stand in mute wonder and
with uplifted hands before some production of theirs, which is yet
hardly dry! Oh! whatever you do, leave that string untouched. It will
jar the rash and unhallowed hand that meddles with it. Profane not the
mighty dead by mixing them up with the uncanonized living. Leave
yourself a reversion in immortality, beyond the noisy clamour of the
day. Do not quite lose your respect for public opinion by making it in
all cases a palpable cheat, the echo of your own lungs that are hoarse
with calling on the world to admire. Do not think to bully posterity, or
to cozen your contemporaries. Be not always anticipating the effect of
your picture on the town—think more about deserving success than
commanding it. In issuing so many promissory notes upon the bank of
fame, do not forget you have to pay in sterling gold. Believe that there
is something in the pursuit of high art, beyond the manufacture of a
paragraph or the collection of receipts at the door of an exhibition.
Venerate art as art. Study the works of others, and inquire into those
of nature. Gaze at beauty. Become great by great efforts, and not by
pompous pretensions. Do not think the world was blind to merit before
your time, nor make the reputation of great geniuses the stalking horse
to your vanity. You have done enough to insure yourself attention: you
have now only to do something to deserve it, and to make good all that
you have aspired to do!
There is a silent and systematic assumption of superiority which is as
barefaced and unprincipled an imposture as the most impudent puffing.
You may, by a tacit or avowed censure on all other arts, on all works of
art, on all other pretensions, tastes, talents, but your own, produce a
complete ostracism in the world of intellect, and leave yourself and
your own performances alone standing, a mighty monument in an universal
waste and wreck of genius. By cutting away the rude block and removing
the rubbish from around it, the idol may be effectually exposed to view,
placed on its pedestal of pride, without any other assistance. This
method is more inexcusable than the other. For there is no egotism or
vanity so hateful as that which strikes at our satisfaction in every
thing else, and derives its nourishment from preying, like the vampyre,
on the carcase of others’ reputation. I would rather, in a word, that a
man should talk for ever of himself with vapid senseless assurance, than
preserve a malignant, heartless silence, when the merit of a rival is
mentioned. I have seen instances of both, and can judge pretty well
between them.
There is no great harm in putting forward one’s own pretensions (of
whatever kind) if this does not bear a sour, malignant aspect towards
others. Every one sets himself off to the best advantage he can, and
tries to steal a march upon public opinion. In this sense, too, ‘all the
world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ Life itself
is a piece of harmless quackery. A great house over your head is of no
use but to announce the great man within. Dress, equipage, title,
livery-servants, are only so many quack advertisements and assumptions
of the question of merit. The star that glitters at the breast would be
worth nothing but as a badge of personal distinction; and the crown
itself is but a symbol of the virtues, which the possessor inherits from
a long line of illustrious ancestors! How much honour and honesty have
been forfeited to be graced with a title or a ribbon; how much genius
and worth have sunk to the grave, without an escutcheon and without an
epitaph!
As men of rank and fortune keep lacqueys to reinforce their claims to
self-respect, so men of genius sometimes surround themselves with a
_coterie_ of admirers to increase their reputation with the public.
These _proneurs_, or satellites, repeat all their good things, laugh
loud at all their jokes, and remember all their oracular decrees. They
are their shadows and echoes. They talk of them in all companies, and
bring back word of all that has been said about them. They hawk the good
qualities of their patrons, as shopmen and _barkers_ tease you to buy
goods. I have no notion of this vanity at second-hand; nor can I see how
this servile testimony from inferiors (‘some followers of mine own’) can
be a proof of merit. It may soothe the ear; but that it should impose on
the understanding, I own surprises me: yet there are persons who cannot
exist without a _cortege_ of this kind about them, in which they smiling
read the opinion of the world, in the midst of all sorts of rancorous
abuse and hostility, as Otho called for his mirror in the Illyrian
field. One good thing is, that this evil, in some degree, cures itself;
and when a man has been nearly ruined by a herd of these sycophants, he
finds them leaving him, like thriftless dependents for some more
eligible situation, carrying away with them all the tattle they can pick
up, and some left-off suit of finery. The same proneness to adulation
which made them lick the dust before one idol, makes them bow as low to
the rising Sun; they are as lavish of detraction as they were prurient
with praise; and the _protegé_ and admirer of the editor of the —
figures in Blackwood’s train. The man is a lacquey, and it is of little
consequence whose livery he wears!
I would advise those who volunteer the office of puffing, to go the
whole length of it. No half-measures will do. Lay it on thick and
three-fold, or not at all. If you are once harnessed into that vehicle,
it will be in vain for you to think of stopping. You must drive to the
devil at once. The mighty Tamburlaine, to whose car you are yoked, cries
out,
‘Holloa, you pamper’d jades of Asia,
Can you not drive but twenty miles a day?’
He has you on the hip, for you have pledged your taste and judgment to
his genius. Never fear but he will drive this wedge. If you are once
screwed into such a machine, you must extricate yourself by main force.
No hyperboles are too much: any drawback, any admiration on this side
idolatry, is high treason. It is an unpardonable offence to say that the
last production of your patron is not so good as the one before it; or
that a performer shines more in one character than another. I remember
once hearing a player declare that he never looked into any newspapers
or magazines on account of the abuse that was always levelled at himself
in them, though there were not less than three persons in company, who
made it their business through these conduit pipes of fame to ‘cry him
up to the top of the compass.’ This sort of expectation is a little
_exigeante_!
One fashionable mode of acquiring reputation is by patronising it. This
may be from various motives, real good nature, good taste, vanity, or
pride. I shall only speak of the spurious ones in this place. The quack
and the _would-be_ patron are well met. The house of the latter is a
sort of curiosity-shop or _menagerie_, where all sort of intellectual
pretenders and grotesques, musical children, arithmetical prodigies,
occult philosophers, lecturers, _accoucheurs_, apes, chemists, fiddlers,
and buffoons are to be seen for the asking, and are shown to the company
for nothing. The folding-doors are thrown open, and display a collection
that the world cannot parallel again. There may be a few persons of
common sense and established reputation, _rari nantes in gurgite vasto_,
otherwise it is a mere scramble or lottery. The professed encourager of
_virtù_ and letters, being disappointed of the great names, sends out
into the highways for the halt, the lame, and the blind, for all who
pretend to distinction, defects, and obliquities, for all the disposable
vanity or affectation floating on the town, in hopes that, among so many
oddities, chance may bring some jewel or treasure to his door, which he
may have the good fortune to appropriate in some way to his own use, or
the credit of displaying to others. The art is to encourage rising
genius—to bring forward doubtful and unnoticed merit. You thus get a set
of novices and raw pretenders about you, whose actual productions do not
interfere with your self-love, and whose future efforts may reflect
credit on your singular sagacity and faculty for finding out talent in
the germ; and in the next place, by having them completely in your
power, you are at liberty to dismiss them whenever you will, and to
supply the deficiency by a new set of wondering, unwashed faces, in a
rapid succession; an ‘aiery of children,’ embryo actors, artists, poets,
or philosophers. Like unfledged birds they are hatched, nursed, and fed
by hand; this gives room for a vast deal of management, meddling, care,
and condescending solicitude, but the instant the callow brood are
fledged, they are driven from the nest, and forced to shift for
themselves in the wide world. One sterling production decides the
question between them and their patrons, and from that time they become
the property of the public. Thus a succession of importunate, hungry,
idle, over-weening candidates for fame, are encouraged by these fickle
keepers, only to be betrayed, and left to starve or beg, or pine in
obscurity, while the man of merit and respectability is neglected,
discountenanced, and stigmatised, because he will not lend himself as a
tool to this system of splendid imposition, or pamper the luxury and
weaknesses of the Vulgar Great. When a young artist is too independent
to subscribe to the dogmas of his superiors, or fulfils their
predictions and prognostics of wonderful contingent talent too soon, so
as to get out of leading strings, and lean on public opinion for partial
support, exceptions are taken to his dress, dialect, or manners, and he
is expelled the circle with a character for ingratitude and treachery.
None can procure toleration long but those who do not contradict the
opinions, or excite the jealousy of their betters. One independent step
is an appeal from them to the public, their natural and hated rivals,
and annuls the contract between them, which implies ostentatious
countenance on the one part, and servile submission on the other. But
enough of this.
The patronage of men of talent, even when it proceeds from vanity, is
often carried on with a spirit of generosity and magnificence, as long
as these are in difficulties and a state of dependence: but as the
principle of action in this case is a love of power, the complacency in
the object of friendly regard ceases with the opportunity or necessity
for the same manifest display of power; and when the unfortunate
_protegé_ is just coming to land, and expects a last helping hand, he
is, to his surprise, pushed back, in order that he may be saved from
drowning once more. You are not hailed ashore, as you had supposed, by
these kind friends, as a mutual triumph after all your struggles and
their exertions in your behalf. It is a piece of presumption in you to
be seen walking on _terra-firma_: you are required, at the risk of their
friendship, to be always swimming in troubled waters, that they may have
the credit of throwing out ropes, and sending out life-boats to you,
without ever bringing you ashore. Your successes, your reputation, which
you think would please them, as justifying their good opinion, are
coldly received, and looked at askance, because they remove your
dependence on them: if you are under a cloud, they do all they can to
keep you there by their good-will: they are so sensible of your
gratitude that they wish your obligations never to cease, and take care
you shall owe no one else a good turn; and provided you are compelled or
contented to remain always in poverty, obscurity, and disgrace, they
will continue your very good friends and humble servants to command, to
the end of the chapter. The tenure of these indentures is hard. Such
persons will wilfully forfeit the gratitude created by years of
friendship, by refusing to perform the last act of kindness that is
likely ever to be demanded of them: will lend you money, if you have no
chance of repaying them; will give you their good word, if nobody will
believe it; and the only thing they do not forgive is an attempt or
probability on your part, of being able to repay your obligations. There
is something disinterested in all this: at least, it does not show a
cowardly or mercenary disposition, but it savours too much of arrogance
and arbitrary pretension. It throws a damning light on this question to
consider who are mostly the subjects of the patronage of the great, and
in the habit of receiving cards of invitation to splendid dinners. I
confess, for one, I am not on the list; at which I do not grieve much,
nor wonder at all. Authors, in general, are not in much request. Dr.
Johnson was asked why he was not more frequently invited out; and he
said, ‘Because great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths
stopped.’ Garrick was not in this predicament: he could amuse the
company in the drawing-room by imitating the great moralist and
lexicographer, and make the negro boy, in the court-yard, die with
laughing to see him take off the swelling airs and strut of the
turkey-cock. This was clever and amusing, but it did not involve an
opinion, it did not lead to a difference of sentiment, in which the
owner of the house might be found in the wrong. Players, singers,
dancers, are hand and glove with the great. They embellish, and have an
_eclat_ in their names, but do not come into collision. Eminent
portrait-painters, again, are tolerated, because they come into personal
contact with the great: and sculptors hold equality with lords when they
have a certain quantity of solid marble in their workshops to answer for
the solidity of their pretensions. People of fashion and property must
have something to show for their patronage, something visible or
tangible. A sentiment is a visionary thing; an argument may lead to
dangerous consequences, and those who are likely to broach either one or
the other, are not, therefore, fit for good company in general. Poets,
and men of genius, who find their way there, soon find their way out.
They are not of _that ilk_, with some exceptions. Painters who come in
contact with majesty get on by servility or buffoonery, by letting
themselves down in some way. Sir Joshua was never a favourite at court.
He kept too much at a distance. Beechey gained a vast deal of favour by
familiarity, and lost it by taking too great freedoms.[81] West
ingratiated himself in the same quarter by means of practices as little
creditable to himself as his august employer, namely, by playing the
hypocrite, and professing sentiments the reverse of those he naturally
felt. Kings (I know not how justly) have been said to be lovers of low
company, and low conversation. They are also said to be fond of dirty
practical jokes. If the fact is so, the reason is as follows. From the
elevation of their rank, aided by pride and flattery, they look down on
the rest of mankind, and would not be thought to have all their
advantages for nothing. They wish to maintain the same precedence in
private life that belongs to them as a matter of outward ceremony. This
pretension they cannot keep up by fair means; for in wit or argument
they are not superior to the common run of men. They therefore answer a
repartee by a practical joke, which turns the laugh against others, and
cannot be retaliated with safety. This is, they avail themselves of the
privilege of their situation to take liberties, and degrade those about
them, as they can only keep up the idea of their own dignity by
proportionably lowering their company.
ESSAY XXXI
ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER
It is astonishing, with all our opportunities and practice, how little
we know of this subject. For myself, I feel that the more I learn, the
less I understand it.
I remember, several years ago, a conversation in the _Diligence_ coming
from Paris, in which, on its being mentioned that a man had married his
wife after thirteen years’ courtship, a fellow-countryman of mine
observed, that ‘then, at least, he would be acquainted with her
character;’ when a Monsieur P—, inventor and proprietor of the
_Invisible Girl_, made answer, ‘No, not at all; for that the very next
day she might turn out the very reverse of the character that she had
appeared in during all the preceding time.’[82] I could not help
admiring the superior sagacity of the French juggler, and it struck me
then that we could never be sure when we had got at the bottom of this
riddle.
There are various ways of getting at a knowledge of character—by looks,
words, actions. The first of these, which seems the most superficial, is
perhaps the safest, and least liable to deceive: nay, it is that which
mankind, in spite of their pretending to the contrary, most generally go
by. Professions pass for nothing, and actions may be counterfeited: but
a man cannot help his looks. ‘Speech,’ said a celebrated wit, ‘was given
to man to conceal his thoughts.’ Yet I do not know that the greatest
hypocrites are the least silent. The mouth of Cromwell is pursed up in
the portraits of him, as if he was afraid to trust himself with words.
Lord Chesterfield advises us, if we wish to know the real sentiments of
the person we are conversing with, to look in his face, for he can more
easily command his words than his features. A man’s whole life may be a
lie to himself and others: and yet a picture painted of him by a great
artist would probably stamp his true character on the canvas, and betray
the secret to posterity. Men’s opinions were divided, in their
life-times, about such prominent personages as Charles V. and Ignatius
Loyola, partly, no doubt, from passion and interest, but partly from
contradictory evidence in their ostensible conduct: the spectator, who
has ever seen their pictures by Titian, judges of them at once, and
truly. I had rather leave a good portrait of myself behind me than have
a fine epitaph. The face, for the most part, tells what we have thought
and felt—the rest is nothing. I have a higher idea of Donne from a rude,
half-effaced outline of him prefixed to his poems than from any thing he
ever wrote. Cæsar’s Commentaries would not have redeemed him in my
opinion, if the bust of him had resembled the Duke of —. My old friend,
Fawcett, used to say, that if Sir Isaac Newton himself had lisped, he
could not have thought any thing of him. So I cannot persuade myself
that any one is a great man, who looks like a fool. In this I may be
wrong.
First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to
our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible
professions or actions. A man’s look is the work of years, it is stamped
on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the
hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily. There is, as it
has been remarked repeatedly, something in a person’s appearance at
first sight which we do not like, and that gives us an odd twinge, but
which is overlooked in a multiplicity of other circumstances, till the
mask is taken off, and we see this lurking character verified in the
plainest manner in the sequel. We are struck at first, and by chance,
with what is peculiar and characteristic; also with permanent _traits_
and general effect: this afterwards goes off in a set of unmeaning,
common-place details. This sort of _prima facie_ evidence then, shows
what a man is, better than what he says or does; for it shows us the
habit of his mind, which is the same under all circumstances and
disguises. You will say, on the other hand, that there is no judging by
appearances, as a general rule. No one, for instance, would take such a
person for a very clever man, without knowing who he was. Then, ten to
one, he is not; he may have got the reputation, but it is a mistake. You
say, there is Mr. —, undoubtedly a person of great genius: yet, except
when excited by something extraordinary, he seems half dead. He has wit
at will, yet wants life and spirit. He is capable of the most generous
acts, yet meanness seems to cling to every motion. He looks like a poor
creature—and in truth he is one! The first impression he gives you of
him answers nearly to the feeling he has of his personal identity; and
this image of himself, rising from his thoughts, and shrouding his
faculties, is that which sits with him in the house, walks out with him
into the street, and haunts his bed-side. The best part of his existence
is dull, cloudy, leaden: the flashes of light that proceed from it, or
streak it here and there, may dazzle others, but do not deceive himself.
Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the
deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly
undervalued by others. Whatever good properties he may possess are, in
fact, neutralised by a ‘cold rheum’ running through his veins, and
taking away the zest of his pretensions, the pith and marrow of his
performances. What is it to me that I can write these TABLE-TALKS? It is
true I can, by a reluctant effort, rake up a parcel of half-forgotten
observations, but they do not float on the surface of my mind, nor stir
it with any sense of pleasure, nor even of pride. Others have more
property in them than I have: _they_ may reap the benefit, _I_ have only
had the pain. Otherwise, they are to me as if they had never existed:
nor should I know that I had ever thought at all, but that I am reminded
of it by the strangeness of my appearance, and my unfitness for every
thing else. Look in C—’s face while he is talking. His words are such as
might ‘create a soul under the ribs of death.’ His face is a blank.
Which are we to consider as the true index of his mind? Pain, languor,
shadowy remembrances, are the uneasy inmates there: his lips move
mechanically!
There are people that we do not like, though we may have known them
long, and have no fault to find with them, ‘their appearance, as we say,
is so much against them.’ That is not all, if we could find it out.
There is, generally, a reason for this prejudice; for nature is true to
itself. They may be very good sort of people, too, in their way, but
still something is the matter. There is a coldness, a selfishness, a
levity, an insincerity, which we cannot fix upon any particular phrase
or action, but we see it in their whole persons and deportment. One
reason that we do not see it in any other way may be, that they are all
the time trying to conceal this defect by every means in their power.
There is, luckily, a sort of _second sight_ in morals: we discern the
lurking indications of temper and habit a long while before their
palpable effects appear. I once used to meet with a person at an
ordinary, a very civil, good-looking man in other respects, but with an
odd look about his eyes, which I could not explain, as if he saw you
under their fringed lids, and you could not see him again: this man was
a common sharper. The greatest hypocrite I ever knew was a little,
demure, pretty, modest-looking girl, with eyes timidly cast upon the
ground, and an air soft as enchantment; the only circumstance that could
lead to a suspicion of her true character was a cold, sullen, watery,
glazed look about the eyes, which she bent on vacancy, as if determined
to avoid all explanation with yours. I might have spied in their
glittering, motionless surface, the rocks and quicksands that awaited me
below! We do not feel quite at ease in the company or friendship of
those who have any natural obliquity or imperfection of person. The
reason is, they are not on the best terms with themselves, and are
sometimes apt to play off on others the tricks that nature has played
them. This, however, is a remark that, perhaps, ought not to have been
made. I know a person to whom it has been objected as a disqualification
for friendship, that he never shakes you cordially by the hand. I own
this is a damper to sanguine and florid temperaments, who abound in
these practical demonstrations and ‘compliments extern.’ The same
person, who testifies the least pleasure at meeting you, is the last to
quit his seat in your company, grapples with a subject in conversation
right earnestly, and is, I take it, backward to give up a cause or a
friend. Cold and distant in appearance, he piques himself on being the
king of _good haters_, and a no less zealous partisan. The most
phlegmatic constitutions often contain the most inflammable spirits—as
fire is struck from the hardest flints.
And this is another reason that makes it difficult to judge of
character. Extremes meet; and qualities display themselves by the most
contradictory appearances. Any inclination, in consequence of being
generally suppressed, vents itself the more violently when an
opportunity presents itself: the greatest grossness sometimes
accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief, one to the
other; and we find the most reserved and indifferent tempers at the
beginning of an entertainment, or an acquaintance, turn out the most
communicative and cordial at the end of it. Some spirits exhaust
themselves at first: others gain strength by progression. Some minds
have a greater facility of throwing off impressions, are, as it were,
more transparent or porous than others. Thus the French present a marked
contrast to the English in this respect. A Frenchman addresses you at
once with a sort of lively indifference: an Englishman is more on his
guard, feels his way, and is either exceedingly reserved, or lets you
into his whole confidence, which he cannot so well impart to an entire
stranger. Again, a Frenchman is naturally humane: an Englishman is, I
should say, only friendly by habit. His virtues and his vices cost him
more than they do his more gay and volatile neighbours. An Englishman is
said to speak his mind more plainly than others:—yes, if it will give
you pain to hear it. He does not care whom he offends by his discourse:
a foreigner generally strives to oblige in what he says. The French are
accused of promising more than they perform. That may be, and yet they
may perform as many good-natured acts as the English, if the latter are
as averse to perform as they are to promise. Even the professions of the
French may be sincere at the time, or arise out of the impulse of the
moment; though their desire to serve you may be neither very violent nor
very lasting. I cannot think, notwithstanding, that the French are not a
serious people; nay, that they are not a more reflecting people than the
common run of the English. Let those who think them merely light and
mercurial, explain that enigma, their everlasting prosing tragedy. The
English are considered as comparatively a slow, plodding people. If the
French are quicker, they are also more plodding. See, for example, how
highly finished and elaborate their works of art are! How systematic and
correct they aim at being in all their productions of a graver cast! ‘If
the French have a fault,’ as Yorick said, ‘it is that they are too
grave.’ With wit, sense, cheerfulness, patience, good-nature and
refinement of manners, all they want is imagination and sturdiness of
moral principle! Such are some of the contradictions in the character of
the two nations, and so little does the character of either appear to
have been understood! Nothing can be more ridiculous indeed than the way
in which we exaggerate each other’s vices and extenuate our own. The
whole is an affair of prejudice on one side of the question, and of
partiality on the other. Travellers who set out to carry back a true
report of the case appear to lose not only the use of their
understandings, but of their senses, the instant they set foot in a
foreign land. The commonest facts and appearances are distorted, and
discoloured. They go abroad with certain preconceived notions on the
subject, and they make every thing answer, in reason’s spite, to their
favourite theory. In addition to the difficulty of explaining customs
and manners foreign to our own, there are all the obstacles of wilful
prepossession thrown in the way. It is not, therefore, much to be
wondered at that nations have arrived at so little knowledge of one
another’s characters; and that, where the object has been to widen the
breach between them, any slight differences that occur are easily blown
into a blaze of fury by repeated misrepresentations, and all the
exaggerations that malice or folly can invent!
This ignorance of character is not confined to foreign nations: we are
ignorant of that of our own countrymen in a class a little below or
above ourselves. We shall hardly pretend to pronounce magisterially on
the good or bad qualities of strangers; and, at the same time, we are
ignorant of those of our friends, of our kindred, and of our own. We are
in all these cases either too near or too far off the object to judge of
it properly.
Persons, for instance, in a higher or middle rank of life know little or
nothing of the characters of those below them, as servants, country
people, &c. I would lay it down in the first place as a general rule on
this subject, that all uneducated people are hypocrites. Their sole
business is to deceive. They conceive themselves in a state of hostility
with others, and stratagems are fair in war. The inmates of the kitchen
and the parlour are always (as far as respects their feeling and
intentions towards each other) in Hobbes’s ‘state of nature.’ Servants
and others in that line of life have nothing to exercise their spare
talents for invention upon but those about them. Their superfluous
electrical particles of wit and fancy are not carried off by those
established and fashionable conductors, novels and romances. Their
faculties are not buried in books, but all alive and stirring, erect and
bristling like a cat’s back. Their coarse conversation sparkles with
‘wild wit, invention ever new.’ Their betters try all they can to set
themselves up above them, and they try all they can to pull them down to
their own level. They do this by getting up a little comic interlude, a
daily, domestic, homely drama out of the odds and ends of the family
failings, of which there is in general a pretty plentiful supply, or
make up the deficiency of materials out of their own heads. They turn
the qualities of their masters and mistresses inside out, and any real
kindness or condescension only sets them the more against you. They are
not to be taken in in that way—they will not be baulked in the spite
they have to you. They only set to work with redoubled alacrity, to
lessen the favour or to blacken your character. They feel themselves
like a degraded _caste_, and cannot understand how the obligations can
be all on one side, and the advantages all on the other. You cannot come
to equal terms with them—they reject all such overtures as insidious and
hollow—nor can you ever calculate upon their gratitude or good-will, any
more than if they were so many strolling Gipsies or wild Indians. They
have no fellow-feeling, they keep no faith with the more privileged
classes. They are in your power, and they endeavour to be even with you
by trick and cunning, by lying and chicanery. In this they have nothing
to restrain them. Their whole life is a succession of shifts, excuses,
and expedients. The love of truth is a principle with those only who
have made it their study, who have applied themselves to the pursuit of
some art or science, where the intellect is severely tasked, and learns
by habit to take a pride in, and to set a just value on, the correctness
of its conclusions. To have a disinterested regard to truth, the mind
must have contemplated it in abstract and remote questions; whereas the
ignorant and vulgar are only conversant with those things in which their
own interest is concerned. All their notions are local, personal, and
consequently gross and selfish. They say whatever comes uppermost—turn
whatever happens to their own account—and invent any story, or give any
answer that suits their purposes. Instead of being bigoted to general
principles, they trump up any lie for the occasion, and the more of a
_thumper_ it is, the better they like it; the more unlooked-for it is,
why, so much the more of a _God-send_! They have no conscience about the
matter; and if you find them out in any of their manœuvres, are not
ashamed of themselves, but angry with you. If you remonstrate with them,
they laugh in your face. The only hold you have of them is their
interest—you can but dismiss them from your employment; and _service is
no inheritance_. If they affect any thing like decent remorse, and hope
you will pass it over, all the while they are probably trying to recover
the wind of you. Persons of liberal knowledge or sentiments have no kind
of chance in this sort of mixed intercourse with these barbarians in
civilised life. You cannot tell, by any signs or principles, what is
passing in their minds. There is no common point of view between you.
You have not the same topics to refer to, the same language to express
yourself. Your interests, your feelings are quite distinct. You take
certain things for granted as rules of action: they take nothing for
granted but their own ends, pick up all their knowledge out of their own
occasions, are on the watch only for what they can catch—are
‘Subtle as the fox for prey:
Like warlike as the wolf, for what they eat.’
They have indeed a regard to their character, as this last may affect
their livelihood or advancement, none as it is connected with a sense of
propriety; and this sets their mother-wit and native talents at work
upon a double file of expedients, to bilk their consciences, and salve
their reputation. In short, you never know where to have them, any more
than if they were of a different species of animals; and in trusting to
them, you are sure to be betrayed and over-reached. You have other
things to mind, they are thinking only of you, and how to turn you to
advantage. _Give and take_ is no maxim here. You can build nothing on
your own moderation or on their false delicacy. After a familiar
conversation with a waiter at a tavern, you overhear him calling you by
some provoking nickname. If you make a present to the daughter of the
house where you lodge, the mother is sure to recollect some addition to
her bill. It is a running fight. In fact, there is a principle in human
nature not willingly to endure the idea of a superior, a sour
jacobinical disposition to wipe out the score of obligation, or efface
the tinsel of external advantages—and where others have the opportunity
of coming in contact with us, they generally find the means to establish
a sufficiently marked degree of degrading equality. No man is a hero to
his valet-de-chambre, is an old maxim. A new illustration of this
principle occurred the other day. While Mrs. Siddons was giving her
readings of Shakespear to a brilliant and admiring drawing-room, one of
the servants in the hall below was saying, ‘What, I find the old lady is
making as much noise as ever!’ So little is there in common between the
different classes of society, and so impossible is it ever to unite the
diversities of custom and knowledge which separate them.
Women, according to Mrs. Peachum, are ‘bitter bad judges’ of the
characters of men; and men are not much better of theirs, if we can form
any guess from their choice in marriage. Love is proverbially blind. The
whole is an affair of whim and fancy. Certain it is, that the greatest
favourites with the other sex are not those who are most liked or
respected among their own. I never knew but one clever man who was what
is called a _lady’s man_; and he (unfortunately for the argument)
happened to be a considerable coxcomb. It was by this irresistible
quality, and not by the force of his genius, that he vanquished. Women
seem to doubt their own judgments in love, and to take the opinion which
a man entertains of his own prowess and accomplishments for granted. The
wives of poets are (for the most part) mere pieces of furniture in the
room. If you speak to them of their husbands’ talents or reputation in
the world, it is as if you made mention of some office that they held.
It can hardly be otherwise, when the instant any subject is started or
conversation arises, in which men are interested, or try one another’s
strength, the women leave the room, or attend to something else. The
qualities then in which men are ambitious to excel, and which ensure the
applause of the world, eloquence, genius, learning, integrity, are not
those which gain the favour of the fair. I must not deny, however, that
wit and courage have this effect. Neither is youth or beauty the sole
passport to their affections.
‘The way of woman’s will is hard to find,
Harder to hit.’
Yet there is some clue to this mystery, some determining cause; for we
find that the same men are universal favourites with women, as others
are uniformly disliked by them. Is not the loadstone that attracts so
powerfully, and in all circumstances, a strong and undisguised bias
towards them, a marked attention, a conscious preference of them to
every other passing object or topic? I am not sure, but I incline to
think so. The successful lover is the _cavalier servente_ of all
nations. The man of gallantry behaves as if he had made an assignation
with every woman he addresses. An argument immediately draws off my
attention from the prettiest woman in the room. I accordingly succeed
better in argument—than in love!—I do not think that what is called
_Love at first sight_ is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes
imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of
person we should like, grave or gay, black, brown, or fair; with golden
tresses or with raven locks;—and when we meet with a complete example of
the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck. We have never seen
any thing to come up to our newly discovered goddess before, but she is
what we have been all our lives looking for. The idol we fall down and
worship is an image familiar to our minds. It has been present to our
waking thoughts, it has haunted us in our dreams, like some fairy
vision. Oh! thou, who, the first time I ever beheld thee, didst draw my
soul into the circle of thy heavenly looks, and wave enchantment round
me, do not think thy conquest less complete because it was
instantaneous; for in that gentle form (as if another Imogen had
entered) I saw all that I had ever loved of female grace, modesty, and
sweetness!
I shall not say much of friendship as giving an insight into character,
because it is often founded on mutual infirmities and prejudices.
Friendships are frequently taken up on some sudden sympathy, and we see
only as much as we please of one another’s characters afterwards.
Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than
professed enemies. They cool, indeed, in time, part, and retain only a
rankling grudge at past errors and oversights. Their testimony in the
latter case is not quite free from suspicion.
One would think that near relations, who live constantly together, and
always have done so, must be pretty well acquainted with one another’s
characters. They are nearly in the dark about it. Familiarity confounds
all traits of distinction: interest and prejudice take away the power of
judging. We have no opinion on the subject, any more than of one
another’s faces. The Penates, the household-gods, are veiled. We do not
see the features of those we love, nor do we clearly distinguish their
virtues or their vices. We take them as they are found in the lump:—by
weight, and not by measure. We know all about the individuals, their
sentiments, history, manners, words, actions, every thing: but we know
all these too much as facts, as inveterate, habitual impressions, as
clothed with too many associations, as sanctified with too many
affections, as woven too much into the web of our hearts, to be able to
pick out the different threads, to cast up the items of the debtor and
creditor account, or to refer them to any general standard of right and
wrong. Our impressions with respect to them are too strong, too real,
too much _sui generis_, to be capable of a comparison with any thing but
themselves. We hardly inquire whether those for whom we are thus
interested, and to whom we are thus knit, are _better_ or _worse_ than
others—the question is a kind of profanation—all we know is, they are
_more_ to us than any one else can be. Our sentiments of this kind are
rooted and grow in us, and we cannot eradicate them by voluntary means.
Besides, our judgments are bespoke, our interests take part with our
blood. If any doubt arises, if the veil of our implicit confidence is
drawn aside by any accident for a moment, the shock is too great, like
that of a dislocated limb, and we recoil on our habitual impressions
again. Let not that veil ever be rent entirely asunder, so that those
images may be left bare of reverential awe, and lose their religion: for
nothing can ever support the desolation of the heart afterwards.
The greatest misfortune that can happen among relations is a different
way of bringing up, so as to set one another’s opinions and characters
in an entirely new point of view. This often lets in an unwelcome
day-light on the subject, and breeds schisms, coldness, and incurable
heart-burnings in families. I have sometimes thought whether the
progress of society and march of knowledge does not do more harm in this
respect, by loosening the ties of domestic attachment, and preventing
those who are most interested in, and anxious to think well of one
another, from feeling a cordial sympathy and approbation of each other’s
sentiments, manners, views, &c. than it does good by any real advantage
to the community at large. The son, for instance, is brought up to the
church, and nothing can exceed the pride and pleasure the father takes
in him, while all goes on well in this favourite direction. His notions
change, and he imbibes a taste for the Fine Arts. From this moment there
is an end of any thing like the same unreserved communication between
them. The young man may talk with enthusiasm of his ‘Rembrandts,
Correggios, and stuff:’ it is all _Hebrew_ to the elder; and whatever
satisfaction he may feel in hearing of his son’s progress, or good
wishes for his success, he is never reconciled to the new pursuit, he
still hankers after the first object that he had set his mind upon.
Again, the grandfather is a Calvinist, who never gets the better of his
disappointment at his son’s going over to the Unitarian side of the
question. The matter rests here, till the grandson, some years after, in
the fashion of the day and ‘infinite agitation of men’s wit,’ comes to
doubt certain points in the creed in which he has been brought up, and
the affair is all abroad again. Here are three generations made
uncomfortable and in a manner set at variance, by a veering point of
theology, and the officious meddling biblical critics! Nothing, on the
other hand, can be more wretched or common than that upstart pride and
insolent good fortune which is ashamed of its origin; nor are there many
things more awkward than the situation of rich and poor relations.
Happy, much happier, are those tribes and people who are confined to the
same _caste_ and way of life from sire to son, where prejudices are
transmitted like instincts, and where the same unvarying standard of
opinion and refinement blends countless generations in its
improgressive, everlasting mould!
Not only is there a wilful and habitual blindness in near kindred to
each other’s defects, but an incapacity to judge from the quantity of
materials, from the contradictoriness of the evidence. The chain of
particulars is too long and massy for us to lift it or put it into the
most approved ethical scales. The concrete result does not answer to any
abstract theory, to any logical definition. There is black, and white,
and grey, square and round—there are too many anomalies, too many
redeeming points, in poor human nature, such as it actually is, for us
to arrive at a smart, summary decision on it. We know too much to come
to any hasty or partial conclusion. We do not pronounce upon the present
act, because a hundred others rise up to contradict it. We suspend our
judgments altogether, because in effect one thing unconsciously balances
another; and perhaps this obstinate, pertinacious indecision would be
the truest philosophy in other cases, where we dispose of the question
of character easily, because we have only the smallest part of the
evidence to decide upon. Real character is not one thing, but a thousand
things; actual qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in
the mind, but rest upon their own truth and nature. The dull stupor
under which we labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest
opportunities of inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before
we give extreme and uncharitable verdicts against those whom we only see
in passing, or at a distance. If we knew them better, we should be
disposed to say less about them.
In the truth of things, there are none utterly worthless, none without
some drawback on their pretensions, or some alloy of imperfection. It
has been observed that a familiarity with the worst characters lessens
our abhorrence of them; and a wonder is often expressed that the
greatest criminals look like other men. The reason is that _they are
like other men in many respects_. If a particular individual was merely
the wretch we read of, or conceive in the abstract, that is, if he was
the mere personified idea of the criminal brought to the bar, he would
not disappoint the spectator, but would look like what he would be—a
monster! But he has other qualities, ideas, feelings, nay, probably
virtues, mixed up with the most profligate habits or desperate acts.
This need not lessen our abhorrence of the crime, though it does of the
criminal; for it has the latter effect only by showing him to us in
different points of view, in which he appears a common mortal, and not
the caricature of vice we took him for, or spotted all over with infamy.
I do not at the same time think this a lax or dangerous, though it is a
charitable view of the subject. In my opinion, no man ever answered in
his own mind (except in the agonies of conscience or of repentance, in
which latter case he throws the imputation from himself in another way)
to the abstract idea of a _murderer_. He may have killed a man in
self-defence, or ‘in the trade of war,’ or to save himself from
starving, or in revenge for an injury, but always ‘so as with a
difference,’ or from mixed and questionable motives. The individual, in
reckoning with himself, always takes into the account the considerations
of time, place, and circumstance, and never makes out a case of
unmitigated, unprovoked villany, of ‘pure defecated evil’ against
himself. There are degrees in real crimes: we reason and moralise only
by names and in classes. I should be loth, indeed, to say, that
‘whatever is, is right:’ but almost every actual choice inclines to it,
with some sort of imperfect, unconscious bias. This is the reason,
besides the ends of secresy, of the invention of _slang_ terms for
different acts of profligacy committed by thieves, pickpockets, &c. The
common names suggest associations of disgust in the minds of others,
which those who live by them do not willingly recognise, and which they
wish to sink in a technical phraseology. So there is a story of a fellow
who, as he was writing down his confession of a murder, stopped to ask
how the word _murder_ was spelt; this, if true, was partly because his
imagination was staggered by the recollection of the thing, and partly
because he shrunk from the verbal admission of it. ‘_Amen_ stuck in his
throat!’ The defence made by Eugene Aram of himself against a charge of
murder, some years before, shows that he in imagination completely flung
from himself the _nominal_ crime imputed to him: he might, indeed, have
staggered an old man with a blow, and buried his body in a cave, and
lived ever since upon the money he found upon him, but there was ‘no
malice in the case, none at all,’ as Peachum says. The very coolness,
subtlety, and circumspection of his defence (as masterly a legal
document as there is upon record) prove that he was guilty of the act,
as much as they prove that he was unconscious of the _crime_.[83] In the
same spirit, and I conceive with great metaphysical truth, Mr.
Coleridge, in his tragedy of _Remorse_, makes Ordonio (his chief
character) wave the acknowledgment of his meditated guilt to his own
mind, by putting into his mouth that striking soliloquy:
Say, I had lay’d a body in the sun!
Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse
A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings
In place of that one man. Say I had _kill’d_ him!
Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all
Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy
As that one life, which being push’d aside,
Made room for these unnumber’d.—ACT II. SC. II.
I am not sure, indeed, that I have not got this whole train of
speculation from him; but I should not think the worse of it on that
account. That gentleman, I recollect, once asked me whether I thought
that the different members of a family really liked one another so well,
or had so much attachment as was generally supposed: and I said that I
conceived the regard they had towards each other was expressed by the
word _interest_, rather than by any other; which he said was the true
answer. I do not know that I could mend it now. Natural affection is not
pleasure in one another’s company, nor admiration of one another’s
qualities; but it is an intimate and deep knowledge of the things that
affect those, to whom we are bound by the nearest ties, with pleasure or
pain; it is an anxious, uneasy, fellow-feeling with them, a jealous
watchfulness over their good name, a tender and unconquerable yearning
for their good. The love, in short, we bear them, is the nearest to that
we bear ourselves. _Home_, according to the old saying, _is home, be it
never so homely_. We love ourselves, not according to our deserts, but
our cravings after good: so we love our immediate relations in the next
degree (if not, even sometimes a higher one) because we know best what
they have suffered and what sits nearest to their hearts. We are
implicated, in fact, in their welfare, by habit and sympathy, as we are
in our own.
If our devotion to our own interests is much the same as to theirs, we
are ignorant of our own characters for the same reason. We are parties
too much concerned to return a fair verdict, and are too much in the
secret of our own motives or situation not to be able to give a
favourable turn to our actions. We exercise a liberal criticism upon
ourselves, and put off the final decision to a late day. The field is
large and open. Hamlet exclaims, with a noble magnanimity, ‘I count
myself indifferent honest, and yet I could accuse me of such things!’ If
you could prove to a man that he is a knave, it would not make much
difference in his opinion, his self-love is stronger than his love of
virtue. Hypocrisy is generally used as a mask to deceive the world, not
to impose on ourselves: for once detect the delinquent in his knavery,
and he laughs in your face or glories in his iniquity. This at least
happens except where there is a contradiction in the character, and our
vices are involuntary, and at variance with our convictions. One great
difficulty is to distinguish ostensible motives, or such as we
acknowledge to ourselves, from tacit or secret springs of action. A man
changes his opinion readily, he thinks it candour: it is levity of mind.
For the most part, we are stunned and stupid in judging of ourselves. We
are callous by custom to our defects or excellencies, unless where
vanity steps in to exaggerate or extenuate them. I cannot conceive how
it is that people are in love with their own persons, or astonished at
their own performances, which are but a nine days’ wonder to every one
else. In general it may be laid down that we are liable to this two-fold
mistake in judging of our own talents: we, in the first place, nurse the
rickety bantling, we think much of that which has cost us much pains and
labour, and comes against the grain; and we also set little store by
what we do with most ease to ourselves, and therefore best. The works of
the greatest genius are produced almost unconsciously, with an ignorance
on the part of the persons themselves that they have done any thing
extraordinary. Nature has done it for them. How little Shakespear seems
to have thought of himself or of his fame! Yet, if ‘to know another
well, were to know one’s self,’ he must have been acquainted with his
own pretensions and character, ‘who knew all qualities with a learned
spirit.’ His eye seems never to have been bent upon himself, but
outwards upon nature. A man, who thinks highly of himself, may almost
set it down that it is without reason. Milton, notwithstanding, appears
to have had a high opinion of himself, and to have made it good. He was
conscious of his powers, and great by design. Perhaps his tenaciousness,
on the score of his own merit, might arise from an early habit of
polemical writing, in which his pretensions were continually called to
the bar of prejudice and party-spirit, and he had to plead not guilty to
the indictment. Some men have died unconscious of immortality, as others
have almost exhausted the sense of it in their life-times. Correggio
might be mentioned as an instance of the one, Voltaire of the other.
There is nothing that helps a man in his conduct through life more than
a knowledge of his own characteristic weaknesses (which, guarded
against, become his strength), as there is nothing that tends more to
the success of a man’s talents than his knowing the limits of his
faculties, which are thus concentrated on some practicable object. One
man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing. Or, as
Butler has it, too much wit requires
‘As much again to govern it.’
There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge,
strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it. We find
many who succeed in certain departments, and are yet melancholy and
dissatisfied, because they failed in the one to which they first devoted
themselves, like discarded lovers, who pine after their scornful
mistress. I will conclude with observing, that authors in general
overrate the extent and value of posthumous fame: for what (as it has
been asked) is the amount even of Shakespear’s fame? That in that very
country which boasts his genius and his birth, perhaps, scarce one
person in ten has ever heard of his name, or read a syllable of his
writings!
ESSAY XXXII
ON THE PICTURESQUE AND IDEAL
A FRAGMENT
The natural in visible objects is whatever is ordinarily presented to
the senses: the picturesque is that which stands out, and catches the
attention by some striking peculiarity: the _ideal_ is that which
answers to the preconceived imagination and appetite in the mind for
love and beauty. The picturesque depends chiefly on the principle of
discrimination or contrast; the _ideal_ on harmony and continuity of
effect: the one surprises, the other satisfies the mind; the one starts
off from a given point, the other reposes on itself; the one is
determined by an excess of form, the other by a concentration of
feeling.
The picturesque may be considered as something like an excrescence on
the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and
grotesque. Fairies and satyrs are picturesque; but they are scarcely
_ideal_. They are an extreme and unique conception of a certain thing,
but not of what the mind delights in, or broods fondly over. The image
created by the artist’s hand is not moulded and fashioned by the love of
good and yearning after grace and beauty, but rather the contrary: that
is, they are idea deformity, not ideal beauty. Rubens was perhaps the
most picturesque of painters; but he was almost the least _ideal_. So
Rembrandt was (out of sight) the most picturesque of colourists; as
Correggio was the most _ideal_. In other words, his composition of light
and shade is more a whole, more in unison, more blended into the same
harmonious feeling than Rembrandt’s, who staggers by contrast, but does
not soothe by gradation. Correggio’s forms, indeed, had a picturesque
air; for they often incline (even when most beautiful) to the quaintness
of caricature. Vandyke, I think, was at once the least picturesque and
least _ideal_ of all the great painters. He was purely natural, and
neither selected from outward forms nor added any thing from his own
mind. He owes every thing to perfect truth, clearness, and transparency;
and though his productions certainly arrest the eye, and strike in a
room full of pictures, it is from the contrast they present to other
pictures, and from being stripped quite naked of all artificial
advantages. They strike almost as a piece of white paper would, hung up
in the same situation.—I began with saying that whatever stands out from
a given line, and as it were projects upon the eye, is picturesque; and
this holds true (comparatively) in form and colour. A rough terrier-dog,
with the hair bristled and matted together, is picturesque. As we say,
there is a decided character in it, a marked determination to an extreme
point. A shock-dog is odd and disagreeable, but there is nothing
picturesque in its appearance: it is a mere mass of flimsy confusion. A
goat with projecting horns and pendent beard is a picturesque animal: a
sheep is not. A horse is only picturesque from opposition of colour; as
in Mr. Northcote’s study of Gadshill, where the white horse’s head
coming against the dark scowling face of the man makes as fine a
contrast as can be imagined. An old stump of a tree with rugged bark,
and one or two straggling branches, a little stunted hedge-row line,
marking the boundary of the horizon, a stubble-field, a winding path, a
rock seen against the sky, are picturesque, because they have all of
them prominence and a distinctive character of their own. They are not
objects (to borrow Shakespear’s phrase) ‘of no mark or likelihood.’ A
country may be beautiful, romantic, or sublime, without being
picturesque. The Lakes in the North of England are not picturesque,
though certainly the most interesting sight in this country. To be a
subject for painting, a prospect must present sharp striking points of
view or singular forms, or one object must relieve and set off another.
There must be distinct stages and salient points for the eye to rest
upon or start from, in its progress over the expanse before it. The
distance of a landscape will oftentimes look flat or heavy, that the
trunk of a tree or a ruin in the foreground would immediately throw into
perspective and turn to air. Rembrandt’s landscapes are the least
picturesque in the world, except from the strait lines and sharp angles,
the deep incision and dragging of his pencil, like a harrow over the
ground, and the broad contrast of earth and sky. Earth, in his copies,
is rough and hairy; and Pan has struck his hoof against it!—A camel is a
picturesque ornament in a landscape or history-piece. This is not merely
from its romantic and oriental character; for an elephant has not the
same effect, and if introduced as a necessary appendage, is also an
unwieldy incumbrance. A negro’s head in a group is picturesque from
contrast: so are the spots on a panther’s hide. This was the principle
that Paul Veronese went upon, who said the rule for composition was
_black upon white, and white upon black_. He was a pretty good judge.
His celebrated picture of the Marriage of Cana is in all likelihood the
completest piece of workmanship extant in the art. When I saw it, it
nearly covered one side of a large room in the Louvre (being itself
forty feet by twenty)—and it seemed as if that side of the apartment was
thrown open, and you looked out at the open sky, at buildings, marble
pillars, galleries with people in them, emperors, female slaves, Turks,
negroes, musicians, all the famous painters of the time, the tables
loaded with viands, goblets, and dogs under them—a sparkling,
overwhelming confusion, a bright, unexpected reality—the only fault you
could find was that no miracle was going on in the faces of the
spectators: the only miracle there was the picture itself! A French
gentleman, who showed me this ‘triumph of painting’ (as it has been
called), perceiving I was struck with it, observed, ‘My wife admires it
exceedingly for the facility of the execution.’ I took this proof of
sympathy for a compliment. It is said that when Humboldt, the celebrated
traveller and naturalist, was introduced to Buonaparte, the Emperor
addressed him in these words—‘_Vous aimez, la botanique, Monsieur_’—and
on the other’s replying in the affirmative, added—‘_Et ma femme aussi!_’
This has been found fault with as a piece of brutality and insolence in
the great man by bigoted critics, who do not know what a thing it is to
get a Frenchwoman to agree with them in any point. For my part, I took
the observation as it was meant, and it did not put me out of conceit
with myself or the picture that Madame M— liked it as well as _Monsieur
l’Anglois_. Certainly, there could be no harm in that. By the side of it
happened to be hung two allegorical pictures of Rubens (and in such
matters he too was ‘no baby[84]’)—I don’t remember what the figures
were, but the texture seemed of wool or cotton. The texture of the Paul
Veronese was not wool or cotton, but stuff, jewels, flesh, marble, air,
whatever composed the essence of the varied subjects, in endless relief
and truth of handling. If the Fleming had seen his two allegories
hanging where they did, he would, without a question, have wished them
far enough.
I imagine that Rubens’s landscapes are picturesque: Claude’s are
_ideal_. Rubens is always in extremes: Claude in the middle. Rubens
carries some one peculiar quality or feature of nature to the utmost
verge of probability: Claude balances and harmonises different forms and
masses with laboured delicacy, so that nothing falls short, no one thing
overpowers another. Rainbows, showers, partial gleams of sunshine,
moonlight, are the means with which Rubens produces his most gorgeous
and enchanting effects: there are neither rainbows, nor showers, nor
sudden bursts of sunshine, nor glittering moon-beams in Claude. He is
all softness and proportion; the other is all spirit and brilliant
excess. The two sides (for example) of one of Claude’s landscapes
balance one another, as in a scale of beauty: in Rubens the several
objects are grouped and thrown together with capricious wantonness.
Claude has more repose: Rubens more gaiety and extravagance. And here it
might be asked, Is a rainbow a picturesque or an _ideal_ object? It
seems to me to be both. It is an accident in nature; but it is an inmate
of the fancy. It startles and surprises the sense, but it soothes and
tranquillises the spirit. It makes the eye glisten to behold it, but the
mind turns to it long after it has faded from its place in the sky. It
has both properties then of giving an extraordinary impulse to the mind
by the singularity of its appearance, and of riveting the imagination by
its intense beauty. I may just notice here in passing, that I think the
effect of moonlight is treated in an _ideal_ manner in the well-known
line in Shakespear—
‘See how the moonlight _sleeps_ upon yon bank!’
The image is heightened by the exquisiteness of the expression beyond
its natural beauty, and it seems as if there could be no end to the
delight taken in it.—A number of sheep coming to a pool of water to
drink, with shady trees in the back-ground, the rest of the flock
following them, and the shepherd and his dog left carelessly behind, is
surely the _ideal_ in landscape-composition, if the _ideal_ has its
source in the interest excited by a subject, in its power of drawing the
affections after it linked in a golden chain, and in the desire of the
mind to dwell on it for ever. The _ideal_, in a word, is the height of
the pleasing, that which satisfies and accords with the inmost longing
of the soul: the picturesque is merely a sharper and bolder impression
of reality. A morning mist drawing a slender veil over all objects is at
once picturesque and _ideal_: for it in the first place excites
immediate surprise and admiration, and in the next a wish for it to
continue, and a fear lest it should be too soon dissipated. Is the Cupid
riding on a lion in the ceiling at Whitehall, and urging him with a
spear over a precipice, with only clouds and sky beyond, most
picturesque or _ideal_? It has every effect of startling contrast and
situation, and yet inspires breathless expectation and wonder for the
event. Rembrandt’s Jacob’s Dream, again, is both—fearful to the eye, but
realising that loftiest vision of the soul. Take two faces in Leonardo
da Vinci’s Last Supper, the Judas and the St. John; the one is all
strength, repulsive character, the other is all divine grace and mild
sensibility. The individual, the characteristic in painting, is that
_which is_ in a marked manner—the _ideal_ is that which we wish any
thing to be, and to contemplate without measure and without end. The
first is truth, the last is good. The one appeals to the sense and
understanding, the other to the will and the affections. The truly
beautiful and grand attracts the mind to it by instinctive harmony, is
absorbed in it, and nothing can ever part them afterwards. Look at a
Madonna of Raphael’s: what gives the _ideal_ character to the
expression,—the insatiable purpose of the soul, or its measureless
content in the object of its contemplation? A portrait of Vandyke’s is
mere indifference and still-life in the comparison: it has not in it the
principle of growing and still unsatisfied desire. In the _ideal_ there
is no fixed stint or limit but the limit of possibility: it is the
infinite with respect to human capacities and wishes. Love is for this
reason an _ideal_ passion. We give to it our all of hope, of fear, of
present enjoyment, and stake our last chance of happiness wilfully and
desperately upon it. A good authority puts into the mouth of one of his
heroines—
‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep!’—
How many fair catechumens will there be found in all ages to repeat as
much after Shakespear’s Juliet!
ESSAY XXXIII
ON THE FEAR OF DEATH
‘And our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has
a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this
gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come
when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred
years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret and lay it
so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence, in the
reign of I cannot tell whom?
When Bickerstaff wrote his Essays, I knew nothing of the subjects of
them: nay, much later, and but the other day, as it were, in the
beginning of the reign of George III. when Goldsmith, Johnson, Burke,
used to meet at the Globe, when Garrick was in his glory, and Reynolds
was over head and ears with his portraits, and Sterne brought out the
volumes of Tristram Shandy year by year, it was without consulting me: I
had not the slightest intimation of what was going on: the debates in
the House of Commons on the American war, or the firing at Bunker’s
hill, disturbed not me: yet I thought this no evil—I neither ate, drank,
nor was merry, yet I did not complain: I had not then looked out into
this breathing world, yet I was well; and the world did quite as well
without me as I did without it! Why then should I make all this outcry
about parting with it, and being no worse off than I was before? There
is nothing in the recollection that at a certain time we were not come
into the world, that ‘the gorge rises at’—why should we revolt at the
idea that we must one day go out of it? To die is only to be as we were
before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or
repugnance, in contemplating this last idea. It is rather a relief and
disburthening of the mind: it seems to have been holiday-time with us
then: we were not called to appear upon the stage of life, to wear robes
or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooted or applauded; we had lain
_perdus_ all this while, snug, out of harm’s way; and had slept out our
thousands of centuries without wanting to be waked up; at peace and free
from care, in a long nonage, in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of
infancy, wrapped in the softest and finest dust. And the worst that we
dread is, after a short, fretful, feverish being, after vain hopes, and
idle fears, to sink to final repose again, and forget the troubled dream
of life!... Ye armed men, knights templars, that sleep in the stone
aisles of that old Temple church, where all is silent above, and where a
deeper silence reigns below (not broken by the pealing organ), are ye
not contented where ye lie? Or would you come out of your long homes to
go to the Holy War? Or do ye complain that pain no longer visits you,
that sickness has done its worst, that you have paid the last debt to
nature, that you hear no more of the thickening phalanx of the foe, or
your lady’s waning love; and that while this ball of earth rolls its
eternal round, no sound shall ever pierce through to disturb your
lasting repose, fixed as the marble over your tombs, breathless as the
grave that holds you! And thou, oh! thou, to whom my heart turns, and
will turn while it has feeling left, who didst love in vain, and whose
first was thy last sigh, wilt not thou too rest in peace (or wilt thou
cry to me complaining from thy clay-cold bed) when that sad heart is no
longer sad, and that sorrow is dead which thou wert only called into the
world to feel!
It is certain that there is nothing in the idea of a pre-existent state
that excites our longing like the prospect of a posthumous existence. We
are satisfied to have begun life when we did; we have no ambition to
have set out on our journey sooner; and feel that we have had quite
enough to do to battle our way through since. We cannot say,
‘The wars we well remember of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’
Neither have we any wish: we are contented to read of them in story, and
to stand and gaze at the vast sea of time that separates us from them.
It was early days then: the world was not _well-aired_ enough for us: we
have no inclination to have been up and stirring. We do not consider the
six thousand years of the world before we were born as so much time lost
to us: we are perfectly indifferent about the matter. We do not grieve
and lament that we did not happen to be in time to see the grand mask
and pageant of human life going on in all that period; though we are
mortified at being obliged to quit our stand before the rest of the
procession passes.
It may be suggested in explanation of this difference, that we know from
various records and traditions what happened in the time of Queen Anne,
or even in the reigns of the Assyrian monarchs: but that we have no
means of ascertaining what is to happen hereafter but by awaiting the
event, and that our eagerness and curiosity are sharpened in proportion
as we are in the dark about it. This is not at all the case; for at that
rate we should be constantly wishing to make a voyage of discovery to
Greenland or to the Moon, neither of which we have, in general, the
least desire to do. Neither, in truth, have we any particular solicitude
to pry into the secrets of futurity, but as a pretext for prolonging our
own existence. It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or a
thousand years hence, any more than to have been alive a hundred or a
thousand years ago: but the thing lies here, that we would all of us
wish the present moment to last for ever. We would be as we are, and
would have the world remain just as it is, to please us.
‘The present eye catches the present object’—
to have and to hold while it may; and abhors, on any terms, to have it
torn from us, and nothing left in its room. It is the pang of parting,
the unloosing our grasp, the breaking asunder some strong tie, the
leaving some cherished purpose unfulfilled, that creates the repugnance
to go, and ‘makes calamity of so long life,’ as it often is.
—‘Oh! thou strong heart!
There’s such a covenant ’twixt the world and thee,
They’re loth to break!’
The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract
principle. Simply _to be_ does not ‘content man’s natural desire:’ we
long to be in a certain time, place, and circumstance. We would much
rather be now, ‘on this bank and shoal of time,’ than have our choice of
any future period, than take a slice of fifty or sixty years out of the
Millennium, for instance. This shows that our attachment is not confined
either to _being_ or to _well-being_; but that we have an inveterate
prejudice in favour of our immediate existence, such as it is. The
mountaineer will not leave his rock, nor the savage his hut; neither are
we willing to give up our present mode of life, with all its advantages
and disadvantages, for any other that could be substituted for it. No
man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however
fortunate. We had as lief _not be_, as _not be ourselves_. There are
some persons of that reach of soul that they would like to live two
hundred and fifty years hence, to see to what height of empire America
will have grown up in that period, or whether the English constitution
will last so long. These are points beyond me. But I confess I should
like to live to see the downfall of the Bourbons. That is a vital
question with me; and I shall like it the better, the sooner it happens!
No young man ever thinks he shall die. He may believe that others will,
or assent to the doctrine that ‘all men are mortal’ as an abstract
proposition, but he is far enough from bringing it home to himself
individually.[85] Youth, buoyant activity, and animal spirits, hold
absolute antipathy with old age as well as with death; nor have we, in
the hey-day of life, any more than in the thoughtlessness of childhood,
the remotest conception how
‘This sensible warm motion can become
A kneaded clod’—
nor how sanguine, florid health and vigour, shall ‘turn to withered,
weak, and grey.’ Or if in a moment of idle speculation we indulge in
this notion of the close of life as a theory, it is amazing at what a
distance it seems; what a long, leisurely interval there is between;
what a contrast its slow and solemn approach affords to our present gay
dreams of existence! We eye the farthest verge of the horizon, and think
what a way we shall have to look back upon, ere we arrive at our
journey’s end; and without our in the least suspecting it, the mists are
at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. The two divisions of
our lives have melted into each other: the extreme points close and meet
with none of that romantic interval stretching out between them, that we
had reckoned upon; and for the rich, melancholy, solemn hues of age,
‘the sear, the yellow leaf,’ the deepening shadows of an autumnal
evening, we only feel a dank, cold mist, encircling all objects, after
the spirit of youth is fled. There is no inducement to look forward; and
what is worse, little interest in looking back to what has become so
trite and common. The pleasures of our existence have worn themselves
out, are ‘gone into the wastes of time,’ or have turned their
indifferent side to us: the pains by their repeated blows have worn us
out, and have left us neither spirit nor inclination to encounter them
again in retrospect. We do not want to rip up old grievances, nor to
renew our youth like the phœnix, nor to live our lives twice over. Once
is enough. As the tree falls, so let it lie. Shut up the book and close
the account once for all!
It has been thought by some that life is like the exploring of a passage
that grows narrower and darker the farther we advance, without a
possibility of ever turning back, and where we are stifled for want of
breath at last. For myself, I do not complain of the greater thickness
of the atmosphere as I approach the narrow house. I felt it more,
formerly,[86] when the idea alone seemed to suppress a thousand rising
hopes, and weighed upon the pulses of the blood. At present I rather
feel a thinness and want of support, I stretch out my hand to some
object and find none, I am too much in a world of abstraction; the naked
map of life is spread out before me, and in the emptiness and desolation
I see Death coming to meet me. In my youth I could not behold him for
the crowd of objects and feelings, and Hope stood always between us,
saying—‘Never mind that old fellow!’ If I had lived indeed, I should not
care to die. But I do not like a contract of pleasure broken off
unfulfilled, a marriage with joy unconsummated, a promise of happiness
rescinded. My public and private hopes have been left a ruin, or remain
only to mock me. I would wish them to be re-edified. I should like to
see some prospect of good to mankind, such as my life began with. I
should like to leave some sterling work behind me. I should like to have
some friendly hand to consign me to the grave. On these conditions I am
ready, if not willing, to depart. I shall then write on my tomb—GRATEFUL
AND CONTENTED! But I have thought and suffered too much to be willing to
have thought and suffered in vain.—In looking back, it sometimes appears
to me as if I had in a manner slept out my life in a dream or shadow on
the side of the hill of knowledge, where I have fed on books, on
thoughts, on pictures, and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of
busy feet, or the noises of the throng below. Waked out of this dim,
twilight existence, and startled with the passing scene, I have felt a
wish to descend to the world of realities, and join in the chase. But I
fear too late, and that I had better return to my bookish chimeras and
indolence once more! _Zanetto, lascia le donne, et studia la
matematica._ I will think of it.
It is not wonderful that the contemplation and fear of death become more
familiar to us as we approach nearer to it: that life seems to ebb with
the decay of blood and youthful spirits; and that as we find every thing
about us subject to chance and change, as our strength and beauty die,
as our hopes and passions, our friends and our affections leave us, we
begin by degrees to feel ourselves mortal!
I have never seen death but once, and that was in an infant. It is years
ago. The look was calm and placid, and the face was fair and firm. It
was as if a waxen image had been laid out in the coffin, and strewed
with innocent flowers. It was not like death, but more like an image of
life! No breath moved the lips, no pulse stirred, no sight or sound
would enter those eyes or ears more. While I looked at it, I saw no pain
was there; it seemed to smile at the short pang of life which was over:
but I could not bear the coffin-lid to be closed—it seemed to stifle me;
and still as the nettles wave in a corner of the churchyard over his
little grave, the welcome breeze helps to refresh me, and ease the
tightness at my breast!
An ivory or marble image, like Chantry’s monument of the two children,
is contemplated with pure delight. Why do we not grieve and fret that
the marble is not alive, or fancy that it has a shortness of breath? It
never was alive; and it is the difficulty of making the transition from
life to death, the struggle between the two in our imagination, that
confounds their properties painfully together, and makes us conceive
that the infant that is but just dead, still wants to breathe, to enjoy,
and look about it, and is prevented by the icy hand of death, locking up
its faculties and benumbing its senses; so that, if it could, it would
complain of its own hard state. Perhaps religious considerations
reconcile the mind to this change sooner than any others, by
representing the spirit as fled to another sphere, and leaving the body
behind it. So in reflecting on death generally, we mix up the idea of
life with it, and thus make it the ghastly monster it is. We think how
we should feel, not how the dead feel.
‘Still from the tomb the voice of nature cries;
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires!’
There is an admirable passage on this subject in TUCKER’S _Light of
Nature Pursued_, which I shall transcribe, as by much the best
illustration I can offer of it.
‘The melancholy appearance of a lifeless body, the mansion provided for
it to inhabit, dark, cold, close and solitary, are shocking to the
imagination; but it is to the imagination only, not the understanding;
for whoever consults this faculty will see at first glance, that there
is nothing dismal in all these circumstances: if the corpse were kept
wrapped up in a warm bed, with a roasting fire in the chamber, it would
feel no comfortable warmth therefrom; were store of tapers lighted up as
soon as day shuts in, it would see no objects to divert it; were it left
at large it would have no liberty, nor if surrounded with company would
be cheered thereby; neither are the distorted features expressions of
pain, uneasiness, or distress. This every one knows, and will readily
allow upon being suggested, yet still cannot behold, nor even cast a
thought upon those objects without shuddering; for knowing that a living
person must suffer grievously under such appearances, they become
habitually formidable to the mind, and strike a mechanical horror, which
is increased by the customs of the world around us.’
There is usually one pang added voluntarily and unnecessarily to the
fear of death, by our affecting to compassionate the loss which others
will have in us. If that were all, we might reasonably set our minds at
rest. The pathetic exhortation on country tombstones, ‘Grieve not for
me, my wife and children dear,’ &c. is for the most part speedily
followed to the letter. We do not leave so great a void in society as we
are inclined to imagine, partly to magnify our own importance, and
partly to console ourselves by sympathy. Even in the same family the gap
is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect. Nay,
_our room_ is not unfrequently thought better than _our company_. People
walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before,
and the crowd is not diminished. While we were living, the world seemed
in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because
it contributed to them. But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as
usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our life-time. The
million are devoid of sentiment, and care as little for you or me as if
we belonged to the moon. We live the week over in the Sunday’s paper, or
are decently interred in some obituary at the month’s end! It is not
surprising that we are forgotten so soon after we quit this mortal
stage: we are scarcely noticed, while we are on it. It is not merely
that our names are not known in China—they have hardly been heard of in
the next street. We are hand and glove with the universe, and think the
obligation is mutual. This is an evident fallacy. If this, however, does
not trouble us now, it will not hereafter. A handful of dust can have no
quarrel to pick with its neighbours, or complaint to make against
Providence, and might well exclaim, if it had but an understanding and a
tongue, ‘Go thy ways, old world, swing round in blue ether, voluble to
every age, you and I shall no more jostle!’
It is amazing how soon the rich and titled, and even some of those who
have wielded great political power, are forgotten.
‘A little rule, a little sway,
Is all the great and mighty have
Betwixt the cradle and the grave’—
and, after its short date, they hardly leave a name behind them. ‘A
great man’s memory may, at the common rate, survive him half a year.’
His heirs and successors take his titles, his power, and his wealth—all
that made him considerable or courted by others; and he has left nothing
else behind him either to delight or benefit the world. Posterity are
not by any means so disinterested as they are supposed to be. They give
their gratitude and admiration only in return for benefits conferred.
They cherish the memory of those to whom they are indebted for
instruction and delight; and they cherish it just in proportion to the
instruction and delight they are conscious they receive. The sentiment
of admiration springs immediately from this ground; and cannot be
otherwise than well founded.[87]
The effeminate clinging to life as such, as a general or abstract idea,
is the effect of a highly civilised and artificial state of society. Men
formerly plunged into all the vicissitudes and dangers of war, or staked
their all upon a single die, or some one passion, which if they could
not have gratified, life became a burthen to them—now our strongest
passion is to think, our chief amusement is to read new plays, new
poems, new novels, and this we may do at our leisure, in perfect
security, _ad infinitum_. If we look into the old histories and
romances, before the _belles-lettres_ neutralised human affairs and
reduced passion to a state of mental equivocation, we find the heroes
and heroines not setting their lives ‘at a pin’s fee,’ but rather
courting opportunities of throwing them away in very wantonness of
spirit. They raise their fondness for some favourite pursuit to its
height, to a pitch of madness, and think no price too dear to pay for
its full gratification. Every thing else is dross. They go to death as
to a bridal bed, and sacrifice themselves or others without remorse at
the shrine of love, of honour, of religion, or any other prevailing
feeling. Romeo runs his ‘sea-sick, weary bark upon the rocks’ of death,
the instant he finds himself deprived of his Juliet; and she clasps his
neck in their last agonies, and follows him to the same fatal shore. One
strong idea takes possession of the mind and overrules every other; and
even life itself, joyless without that, becomes an object of
indifference or loathing. There is at least more of imagination in such
a state of things, more vigour of feeling and promptitude to act than in
our lingering, languid, protracted attachment to life for its own poor
sake. It is, perhaps, also better, as well as more heroical, to strike
at some daring or darling object, and if we fail in that, to take the
consequences manfully, than to renew the lease of a tedious, spiritless,
charmless existence, merely (as Pierre says) ‘to lose it afterwards in
some vile brawl’ for some worthless object. Was there not a spirit of
martyrdom as well as a spice of the reckless energy of barbarism in this
bold defiance of death? Had not religion something to do with it; the
implicit belief in a future life, which rendered this of less value, and
embodied something beyond it to the imagination; so that the rough
soldier, the infatuated lover, the valorous knight, &c. could afford to
throw away the present venture, and take a leap into the arms of
futurity, which the modern sceptic shrinks back from, with all his
boasted reason and vain philosophy, weaker than a woman! I cannot help
thinking so myself; but I have endeavoured to explain this point before,
and will not enlarge farther on it here.
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only
gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the
precarious tenure on which we hold our present being. Sedentary and
studious men are the most apprehensive on this score. Dr. Johnson was an
instance in point. A few years seemed to him soon over, compared with
those sweeping contemplations on time and infinity with which he had
been used to pose himself. In the _still-life_ of a man of letters,
there was no obvious reason for a change. He might sit in an arm-chair
and pour out cups of tea to all eternity. Would it had been possible for
him to do so! The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear
of death is to set a just value on life. If we merely wish to continue
on the scene to indulge our headstrong humours and tormenting passions,
we had better begone at once: and if we only cherish a fondness for
existence according to the good we derive from it, the pang we feel at
parting with it will not be very severe!
End of TABLE-TALK
MR. NORTHCOTE’S CONVERSATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The _Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A._, were published in
the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1826 and 1827, entitled ‘Boswell
Redivivus.’ Revised and added to, they were published in volume form (8
× 5 inches) by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street,
London, in 1830, with a portrait of ‘James Northcote, Esq., R.A. in his
82nd Year. Engraved by T. Wright after a drawing by A. Wivell,’ and the
following motto on the title-page:—
‘The precepts here of a divine old man
I could recite.
ARMSTRONG.’
The volume was printed by C. Whiting, Beaufort House, Strand, and its
text is that of the present issue.
CONVERSATION THE FIRST
Called on Mr. Northcote; had, as usual, an interesting conversation.
Spoke of some account of Lord Byron in a newspaper, which he thought
must be like. ‘The writer says, he did not wish to be thought merely a
great poet. My sister asked, “What then did he wish to be thought?” Why,
I’ll tell you; he wished to be something different from every body else.
As to nobility, there were many others before him, so that he could not
rely upon that; and then, as to poetry, there are so many wretched
creatures that pretend to the name, that he looked at it with disgust:
he thought himself as distinct from them as the stars in the firmament.
It comes to what Sir Joshua used to say, that a man who is at the head
of his profession is above it. I remember being at Cosway’s, where they
were recommending some charitable institution for the relief of decayed
artists; and I said I would not be of it, for it was holding out a
temptation to idleness, and bringing those into the profession who were
not fit for it. Some one who wanted to flatter me observed, “I wonder
you should talk in this manner, who are under such obligations to the
art!” I answered immediately, “If I am to take your compliment as I
believe it is meant, I might answer, that it is the art that is under
obligations to me, not I to it. Do you suppose that Rubens, Titian, and
others were under obligations to the art—they who raised it from
obscurity and made it all that it is? What would the art be without
these?” The world in general, as Miss Reynolds used to say, with
reference to her brother, think no more of a painter than they do of a
fiddler or a dancing-master or a piano-forte-maker. And so of a poet. I
have always said of that dispute about burying Lord Byron in Poet’s
Corner, that he would have resisted it violently if he could have known
of it. Not but there were many very eminent names there, with whom he
would like to be associated; but then there were others that he would
look down upon. If they had laid him there, he would have got up again.
No; I’ll tell you where they should have laid him—if they had buried him
with the kings in Henry VII. Chapel, he would have had no objection to
that! One cannot alter the names of things, or the prejudices of the
world respecting them, to suit one’s convenience. I once went with
Hoppner to the hustings to vote for Horne Tooke; and when they asked me
what I was, I said, a painter. At this Hoppner was very mad all the way
home, and said I should have called myself a portrait-painter. I
replied, the world had no time to trouble their heads about such
distinctions. I afterwards asked Kemble, who agreed I was right, that he
always called himself a player,’ &c.
I then observed, I had been to the play with G. and his daughter, from
the last of whom I had learnt something about Lord Byron’s conversation.
‘What!’ he said, ‘the beauty-daughter?’ I said, ‘Do you think her a
beauty, then?’—‘Why no, she rather thinks herself one, and yet there is
something about her that would pass for such. Girls generally find out
where to place themselves. She’s clever too; isn’t she?’—‘Oh!
yes.’—‘What did she tell you about Lord Byron? because I am curious to
know all about him.’—‘I asked her if it was true that Lord Byron was so
poor a creature as H— represented him? She at first misunderstood me,
and said, nothing could be meaner than he was, and gave some instances
of it. I said, that was not what I meant; that I could believe any thing
of that kind of him; that whatever he took in his head he would carry to
extremes, regardless of every thing but the feeling of the moment; but
that I could not conceive him to be in conversation, or in any other
way, a flat and _common-place_ person.[88] “Oh! no,” she said, “he was
not. H— was hardly a fair judge. The other had not behaved well to him,
and whenever they met, H— always began some kind of argument, and as
Lord Byron could not argue, they made but a bad piece of business of it,
and it ended unsatisfactorily for all parties.” I said, H— was too apt
to put people to their trumps, or to force them upon doing not what
_they_ could do, but what he thought _he_ could do. He, however, not
only gave his own opinion, but said, Mr. S— could only just endure Lord
Byron’s company. This seemed to me odd; for though he might be neither
orator nor philosopher, yet any thing he might say or only stammer out
in broken sentences, must be interesting: a glance, a gesture would be
full of meaning; or he would make one look about one like the tree in
Virgil, that expressed itself by groans. To this she assented, and
observed—“At least S— and myself found it so; for we generally sat with
him till morning. He was perhaps a little moody and reserved at first;
but by touching on certain strings, he began to unbend, and gave the
most extraordinary accounts of his own feelings and adventures that
could be imagined. Besides, he was very handsome, and it was some
satisfaction to look at a head at once so beautiful and expressive!” I
repeated what H— told me, that when he and Lord Byron met in Italy, they
did not know one another; he himself from having grown so thin, and
Byron from having grown so fat, like a great chubby school-boy—a
circumstance which shocked his lordship so much, that he took to
drinking vinegar at a great rate, that he might recover the figure of
the stripling God. I mentioned some things that H— had reported of Lord
Byron; such as his saying, “He never cared for any thing above a
day,”—which might be merely in a fit of spleen, or from the spirit of
contradiction, or to avoid an imputation of _sentimentality_.’—‘Oh!’
said Northcote, ‘that will never do, to take things literally that are
uttered in a moment of irritation. You do not express your own opinion,
but one as opposite as possible to that of the person that has provoked
you. You get as far from a person you have taken a pique against as you
can, just as you turn off the pavement to get out of the way of a
chimney-sweeper; but it is not to be supposed you prefer walking in the
mud, for all that! I have often been ashamed myself of speeches I have
made in that way, which have been repeated to me as _good things_, when
all I meant was that I would say any thing sooner than agree to the
nonsense or affectation I heard. You then set yourself against what you
think a wrong bias in another, and are not like a wall but a buttress—as
far from the right line as your antagonist; and the more absurd he is,
the more so do you become. Before you attend to what any one says, you
should ask, Was he talking to a fool or a wise man? No; H— would make
Lord Byron tributary to him, or would make him out to be nothing. I
wonder you admire him as you do, and compare him to the wits of Charles
II. It isn’t writing verses or painting a picture—that, as Sir Joshua
used to say, is what every body can do: but it is the doing something
more than any body else can do that entitles the poet or the artist to
distinction, or makes the work live. But these people shut themselves up
in a little circle of their own, and fancy all the world are looking at
them.’ I said, H— had been spoiled by flattery when he was young. ‘Oh!
no,’ he said, ‘it was not that. Sir Joshua was not spoiled by flattery,
and yet he had as much of it as any body need have; but he was looking
out to see what the world said of him, or thinking what figure he should
make by the side of Correggio or Vandyke, not pluming himself on being a
better painter than some one in the next street, or being surprised that
the people at his own table spoke in praise of his pictures. It is a
little mind that is taken up with the nearest object, or puffed up with
immediate notice: to do any thing great, we must look out of ourselves
and see things upon a broader scale.’
I told Northcote I had promised H— I would bring him to see him; and
then, said I, you would think as favourably of him as I do, and every
body else that knows him. ‘But you didn’t say any thing in my praise to
induce him to come?’—‘Oh! yes; I exerted all my eloquence.’—‘That wasn’t
the way. You should have said I was a poor creature, perhaps amusing for
half an hour or so, or curious to see like a little dried mummy in a
museum: but he would not hear of your having two idols! Depend upon it,
he’ll not come. Such characters only want to be surrounded with
satellites or echoes: and that is one reason they never improve. True
genius, as well as wisdom, is ever docile, humble, vigilant, and ready
to acknowledge the merit it seeks to appropriate from every quarter.
That was Fuseli’s mistake. Nothing was good enough for him, that was not
a repetition of himself. So once when I told him of a very fine Vandyke,
he made answer—“And what is it? A little bit of colour. I wouldn’t go
across the way to see it.” On my telling this to Sir Joshua, he
said—“Ay, he’ll repent it, he’ll repent it!” W— is another of those who
would narrow the universe to their own standard. It is droll to see how
hard you labour to prop him up too, and seem to fancy he’ll live.’—‘I
think he stands a better chance than Lord Byron. He has added one
original feature to our poetry, which the other has not; and this, you
know, Sir, by your own rule, gives him the best title.’—‘Yes; but the
little bit that he has added is not enough. None but great objects can
be seen at a distance. If posterity looked at it with your eyes, they
might think his poetry curious and pretty. But consider how many Sir
Walter Scotts, how many Lord Byrons, how many Dr. Johnsons there will be
in the next hundred years; how many reputations will rise and sink in
that time; and do you imagine, amid these conflicting and important
claims, such trifles as descriptions of daisies and idiot-boys (however
well they may be done) will not be swept away in the tide of time, like
straws and weeds by the torrent? No; the world can only keep in view the
principal and most perfect productions of human ingenuity; such works as
Dryden’s, Pope’s, and a few others, that from their unity, their
completeness, their polish have the stamp of immortality upon them, and
seem indestructible like an element of nature. There are few of these: I
fear your friend W— is not one.’
I said, I thought one circumstance against him was the want of
popularity in his life-time. Few people made much noise after their
deaths who did not do so while they were living. Posterity could not be
supposed to rake into the records of past times for the Illustrious
Obscure; and only ratified or annulled the lists of great names handed
down to them by the voice of common fame. Few people recovered from the
neglect or obloquy of their contemporaries. The public would hardly be
at the pains to try the same cause twice over, or did not like to
reverse its own sentence, at least when on the unfavourable side. There
was Hobbes, for instance: he had a bad name while living, and it was of
no use to think at this time of day of doing him justice. While the
priests and politicians were tearing him in pieces for his atheism and
arbitrary principles, Mr. Locke stole his philosophy from him; and I
would fain see any one restore it to the right owner. Quote the passages
one by one, show that every principle of the modern metaphysical system
was contained in Hobbes, and that all that succeeding writers have done
was to deduce from Mr. Locke’s imperfect concessions the very
consequences, ‘armed all in proof,’ that already existed in an entire
and unmutilated state in his predecessor; and you shall the next day
hear Mr. Locke spoken of as the father of English philosophy as
currently and confidently as if not the shadow of a doubt had ever been
started on the subject. Mr. Hobbes, by the boldness and
comprehensiveness of his views, had shocked the prejudices and drawn
down upon his head the enmity of his contemporaries: Mr. Locke, by going
more cautiously to work, and only admitting as much at a time as the
public mind would bear, prepared the way for the rest of Mr. Hobbes’s
philosophy, and for a vast reputation for himself, which nothing can
impugn. Stat nominis umbra. The world are too far off to distinguish
names from things; and call Mr. Locke the first of English philosophers,
as they call a star by a particular name, because others call it so.
They also dislike to have their confidence in a great name destroyed,
and fear, that by displacing one of their favoured idols from its niche
in the Temple of Fame, they may endanger the whole building.
NORTHCOTE—‘Why, I thought Hobbes stood as high as any body. I have
always heard him spoken of in that light. It is not his capacity that
people dispute, but they object to his character. The world will not
encourage vice, for their own sakes; and they give a casting-vote in
favour of virtue. Mr. Locke was a modest, conscientious enquirer after
truth, and the world had the sagacity to see this and to be willing to
give him a hearing; the other, I conceive, was a bully, and a bad man
into the bargain, and they did not want to be bullied into truth or to
sanction licentiousness. This is unavoidable; for the desire of
knowledge is but one principle of the mind. It was the same with Tom
Paine. Nobody can deny that he was a very fine writer and a very
sensible man; but he flew in the face of a whole generation, and no
wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name is become a
bye-word with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not
care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most
inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be
kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with
impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves,
they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the pink of
wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up
your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an
unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward
(which showed self-conceit and want of feeling) that subjected him to
obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man: it falls under the
article of moral virtue. There are some reputations that are great,
merely because they are amiable. There is Dr. Watts: look at the
encomiums passed on him by Dr. Johnson; and yet to what, according to
his statement, does his merit amount? Why only to this, that he did that
best which none can do well, and employed his talents uniformly for the
welfare of mankind. He was a good man, and the voice of the public has
given him credit for being a great one. The world may be forced to do
homage to great talents, but they only bow willingly to these when they
are joined with benevolence and modesty; nor will they put weapons into
the hands of the bold and unprincipled sophist to be turned against
their own interests and wishes.’ I said, there was a great deal in the
manner of bringing truth forward to influence its reception with the
reader; for not only did we resent unwelcome novelties advanced with an
insolent and dogmatical air; but we were even ready to give up our
favourite notions, when we saw them advocated in a harsh and intolerant
manner by those of our own party, sooner than submit to the pretensions
of blindfold presumption. If any thing could make me a bigot, it would
be the arrogance of the free-thinker; if any thing could make me a
slave, it would be the sordid sneering fopperies and sweeping clauses of
the liberal party. Renegadoes are generally made so, not by the
overtures of their adversaries, but by disgust at the want of candour
and moderation in their friends. Northcote replied—‘To be sure, there
was nothing more painful than to have one’s own opinions disfigured or
thrust down one’s throat by impertinence and folly; and that once when a
pedantic coxcomb was crying up Raphael to the skies, he could not help
saying—“If there was nothing in Raphael but what _you_ see in him, we
should not now have been talking of him!”’
CONVERSATION THE SECOND
When I called, I found Mr. Northcote painting a portrait of himself.
Another stood on an easel. He asked me, which I thought most like? I
said, the one he was about was the best, but not good enough. It looks
like a physician or a member of parliament, but it ought to look like
something more—a Cardinal or a Spanish Inquisitor! I do not think you
ought to proceed in painting your own face as you do with some
others—that is, by trying to improve upon it: you have only to make it
like; for the more like it is, the better it will be as a picture. ‘Oh!
he tried to make it like.’ I found I had got upon a wrong scent. Mr.
Northcote, as an artist, was not bound to have a fine head, but he was
bound to paint one. I am always a very bad courtier; and think of what
strikes me, and not of the effect upon others. So I once tried to
compliment a very handsome _brunette_, by telling her how much I admired
dark beauties. ‘Oh!’ said Northcote, ‘you should have told her she was
fair. She did not like _black_, though you did!’ After all, there is a
kind of selfishness in this plain-speaking. In the present case, it set
us wrong the whole morning, and I had to stay longer than usual to
recover the old track. I was continually in danger of oversetting a
stand with a small looking-glass, which Northcote particularly cautioned
me not to touch; and every now and then he was prying into the glass by
stealth, to see if the portrait was like. He had on a green velvet-cap,
and looked very like Titian.
Northcote then turning round, said, ‘I wanted to ask you about a speech
you made the other day: you said you thought you could have made
something of portrait, but that you never could have painted history.
What did you mean by that?’—‘Oh! all I meant was, that sometimes when I
see a fine Titian or Rembrandt, I feel as if I could have done something
of the same kind with the proper pains, but I have never the same
feeling with respect to Raphael. My admiration is there utterly unmixed
with emulation or regret. In fact, I see what is before me, but I have
no invention.’
NORTHCOTE—‘You do not know till you try. There is not so much difference
as you imagine. Portrait often runs into history, and history into
portrait, without our knowing it. Expression is common to both, and that
is the chief difficulty. The greatest history-painters have always been
able portrait-painters. How should a man paint a thing in motion, if he
cannot paint it still? But the great point is to catch the prevailing
look and character: if you are master of this, you can make almost what
use of it you please. If a portrait has force, it will do for history;
and if history is well painted, it will do for portrait. This is what
gave dignity to Sir Joshua: his portraits had always that determined air
and character that you know what to think of them as if you had seen
them engaged in the most decided action. So Fuseli said of Titian’s
picture of Paul III. and his two nephews, “That is true history!” Many
of the groups in the Vatican, by Raphael, are only collections of fine
portraits. That is why West, Barry, and others pretended to despise
portrait, because they could not do it, and it would only expose their
want of truth and nature. No! if you can give the _look_, you need not
fear painting history. Yet how difficult that is, and on what slight
causes it depends! It is not enough that it is seen, unless it is at the
same time felt. How odd it seems, that often while you are looking at a
face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you
find they have undergone a total alteration of expression! What a fine
hand then is required to trace what the eye can scarcely be said to
distinguish! So I used to contend against Sir Joshua that Raphael had
triumphed over this difficulty in the Miracle of Bolsena, where he has
given the internal blush of the unbelieving priest at seeing the wafer
turned into blood—the colour to be sure assists, but the look of
stupefaction and shame is also there in the most marked degree. Sir
Joshua said it was my fancy, but I am as convinced of it as I am of my
existence; and the proof is that otherwise he has done nothing. There is
no story without it; but he has trusted to the expression to tell the
story, instead of leaving the expression to be made out from the story.
I have often observed the same thing in myself, when I have blamed any
one as mildly as I could, not using any violence of language, nor indeed
intending to hurt; and I have afterwards wondered at the effect; my
sister has said, “You should have seen your look,” but I did not know of
it myself.—I said, ‘If you had, it would have been less felt by others.’
An instance of this made me laugh not long ago. I was offended at a
waiter for very ill behaviour at an inn at Calais; and while he was out
of the room, I was putting on as angry a look as I could, but I found
this sort of previous rehearsal to no purpose. The instant he returned
into the room, I gave him a look that I felt made it unnecessary to tell
him what I thought.’—‘To be sure, he would see it immediately.’—‘And
don’t you think, Sir,’ I said, ‘that this explains the difficulty of
fine acting, and the difference between good acting and bad—that is,
between face-making or mouthing and genuine passion? To give the last,
an actor must possess the highest truth of imagination, and must undergo
an entire revolution of feeling. Is it wonderful that so many prefer an
artificial to a natural actor, the mask to the man, the pompous
pretension to the simple expression? Not at all; the wonder rather is
that people in general judge so right as they do, when they have such
doubtful grounds to go upon; and they would not, but they trust less to
rules or reasoning than to their feelings.’
NORTHCOTE—‘You must come to that at last. The common sense of mankind
(whether a good or a bad one) is the best criterion you have to appeal
to. You necessarily impose upon yourself in judging of your own works.
Whenever I am trying at an expression, I hang up the picture in the room
and ask people what it means, and if they guess right, I think I have
succeeded. You yourself see the thing as you wish it, or according to
what you have been endeavouring to make it. When I was doing the figures
of Argyll in prison and of his enemy who comes and finds him asleep, I
had a great difficulty to encounter in conveying the expression of the
last—indeed I did it from myself—I wanted to give a look of mingled
remorse and admiration; and when I found that others saw this look in
the sketch I had made, I left off. By going on, I might lose it again.
There is a point of felicity which, whether you fall short of or have
gone beyond it, can only be determined by the effect on the unprejudiced
observer. You cannot be always with your picture to explain it to
others: it must be left to speak for itself. Those who stand before
their pictures and make fine speeches about them, do themselves a world
of harm: a painter should cut out his tongue, if he wishes to succeed.
His language addresses itself not to the ear, but the eye. He should
stick to that as much as possible. Sometimes you hit off an effect
without knowing it. Indeed the happiest results are frequently the most
unconscious. Boaden was here the other day. You don’t remember
Henderson, I suppose?’—‘No.’—‘He says his reading was the most perfect
he ever knew. He thought himself a pretty good reader and a tolerable
mimic; that he succeeded tolerably well in imitating Kemble, Mrs.
Siddons, and others, but that there was something in Henderson’s reading
so superior to all the rest, that he never could come any thing near it.
I told him, You don’t know that: if you were to hear him now, you might
think him even worse than your own imitation of him. We deceive
ourselves as much with respect to the excellences of others as we do
with respect to our own, by dwelling on a favourite idea. In order to
judge, you should ask some one else who remembered him. I spoke to him
about Kemble, whose life he has been lately writing. I said, when he sat
to me for the Richard III. meeting the children, he lent me no
assistance whatever in the expression I wished to give, but remained
quite immoveable, as if he were sitting for an ordinary portrait. Boaden
said, This was his way: he never put himself to any exertion, except in
his professional character. If any one wanted to know his idea of a part
or of a particular passage, his reply always was, “You must come and see
me do it.”’
Northcote then spoke of the boy, as he always calls him (Master Betty).
He asked if I had ever seen him act, and I said, Yes, and was one of his
admirers. He answered, ‘Oh! yes, it was such a beautiful effusion of
natural sensibility; and then that graceful play of the limbs in youth
gave such an advantage over every one about him. Humphreys (the artist)
said, “He had never seen the little Apollo off the pedestal before.” You
see the same thing in the boys at Westminster-School. But no one was
equal to him.’ Mr. Northcote alluded with pleasure to his unaffected
manners when a boy, and mentioned as an instance of his simplicity, his
saying one day, ‘If they admire me so much, what would they say to Mr.
Harley?’ (a tragedian in the same strolling company with himself.) We
then spoke of his acting since he was grown up. Northcote said, ‘He went
to see him one night with Fuseli, in _Alexander the Great_, and that he
observed coming out, they could get nobody to do it better.’—‘Nor so
well,’ said Fuseli. A question being put, ‘Why then could he not succeed
at present?’—‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘the world will never admire
twice. The first surprise was excited by his being a boy; and when that
was over, nothing could bring them back again to the same point, not
though he had turned out a second Roscius. They had taken a surfeit of
their idol, and wanted something new. Nothing he could do could astonish
them so much the second time, as the youthful prodigy had done the first
time; and therefore he must always appear as a foil to himself, and seem
comparatively flat and insipid. Garrick kept up the fever of public
admiration as long as any body; but when he returned to the stage after
a short absence, no one went to see him. It was the same with Sir
Joshua: latterly Romney drew all his sitters from him. So they say the
Exhibition is worse every year, though it is just the same, there are
the same subjects and the same painters. Admiration is a forced tribute,
and to extort it from mankind (envious and ignorant as they are) they
must be taken unawares.’ I remarked—‘It was the same in books; if an
author was only equal to himself, he was always said to fall off. The
blow to make the same impression must be doubled, because we are
prepared for it. We give him the whole credit of his first successful
production, because it was altogether unexpected; but if he does not
rise as much above himself in the second instance, as the first was
above nothing, we are disappointed and say he has fallen off, for our
feelings are not equally excited.’—‘Just,’ said Northcote, ‘as in
painting a portrait: people are surprised at the first sitting, and
wonder to see how you have got on: but I tell them they will never see
so much done again; for at first there was nothing but a blank canvas to
work upon, but afterwards you have to improve upon your own design, and
this at every step becomes more and more difficult. It puts me in mind
of an observation of Opie’s, that it was wrong to suppose that people
went on improving to the last in any art or profession: on the contrary,
they put their best ideas into their first works (which they have been
qualifying themselves to undertake all their lives before); and what
they gain afterwards in correctness and refinement, they lose in
originality and vigour.’ I assented to this as a very striking and (as I
thought) sound remark. He said, ‘I wish you had known Opie: he was a
very original-minded man. Mrs. Siddons used to say—“I like to meet Mr.
Opie; for then I always hear something I did not know before.” I do not
say that he was always right; but he always put your thoughts into a new
track, that was worth following. I was very fond of Opie’s conversation;
and I remember once when I was expressing my surprise at his having so
little of the Cornish dialect; “Why,” he said, “the reason is, I never
spoke at all till I knew you and Wolcott.” He was a true genius. Mr. —
is a person of great judgment; but I do not learn so much from him. I
think this is the difference between sense and genius;—a man of genius
judges for himself, and you hear nothing but what is original from him:
but a man of sense or with a knowledge of the world, judges as others
do; and he is on this account the safest guide to follow, though not,
perhaps, the most instructive companion. I recollect Miss Reynolds
making nearly the same observation. She said—“I don’t know how it is; I
don’t think Miss C— a very clever woman, and yet, whenever I am at a
loss about any thing, I always go to consult her, and her advice is
almost sure to be right.” The reason was, that this lady, instead of
taking her own view of the subject (as a person of superior capacity
might have been tempted to do) considered only what light others would
view it in, and pronounced her decision according to the prevailing
rules and maxims of the world. When old Dr. — married his housemaid,
Sterne, on hearing of it, exclaimed, “Ay, I always thought him a genius,
and now I’m sure of it!” The truth was (and this was what Sterne meant),
that Dr. — saw a thousand virtues in this woman which nobody else did,
and could give a thousand reasons for his choice, that no one about him
had the wit to answer: but nature took its usual course, and the event
turned out as he had been forewarned, according to the former experience
of the world in such matters. His being in the wrong did not prove him
to be less a genius, though it might impeach his judgment or prudence.
He was, in fact, wiser, and saw more of the matter than any one of his
neighbours, who might advise him to the contrary; but he was not so wise
as the collective experience or common sense of mankind on the subject,
which his more cautious friends merely echoed. It is only the man of
genius who has any right or temptation to make a fool of himself, by
setting up his own unsupported decision against that of the majority. He
feels himself superior to any individual in the crowd, and therefore
rashly undertakes to act in defiance of the whole mass of prejudice and
opinion opposed to him. It is safe and easy to travel in a stage-coach
from London to Salisbury: but it would require great strength, boldness,
and sagacity to go in a straight line across the country.’
CONVERSATION THE THIRD
Northcote began by saying, ‘You don’t much like Sir Joshua, I know; but
I think that is one of your prejudices. If I was to compare him with
Vandyke and Titian, I should say that Vandyke’s portraits are like
pictures (very perfect ones, no doubt), Sir Joshua’s like the reflection
in a looking-glass, and Titian’s like the real people. There is an
atmosphere of light and shade about Sir Joshua’s, which neither of the
others have in the same degree, together with a vagueness that gives
them a visionary and romantic character, and makes them seem like dreams
or vivid recollections of persons we have seen. I never could mistake
Vandyke’s for any thing but pictures, and I go up to them to examine
them as such: when I see a fine Sir Joshua, I can neither suppose it to
be a mere picture nor a man; and I almost involuntarily turn back to
ascertain if it is not some one behind me reflected in the glass: when I
see a Titian, I am riveted to it, and I can no more take my eye off from
it, than if it were the very individual in the room. That,’ he said,
‘is, I think, peculiar to Titian, that you feel on your good behaviour
in the presence of his keen-looking heads, as if you were before
company.’ I mentioned that I thought Sir Joshua more like Rembrandt than
like either Titian or Vandyke: he enveloped objects in the same
brilliant haze of a previous mental conception.—‘Yes,’ he said; ‘but
though Sir Joshua borrowed a great deal, he drew largely from himself:
or rather, it was a strong and peculiar feeling of nature working in him
and forcing its way out in spite of all impediments, and that made
whatever he touched his own. In spite of his deficiency in drawing, and
his want of academic rules and a proper education, you see this breaking
out like a devil in all his works. It is this that has stamped him.
There is a charm in his portraits, a mingled softness and force, a
grasping at the end with nothing harsh or unpleasant in the means, that
you will find nowhere else. He may go out of fashion for a time: but you
must come back to him again, while a thousand imitators and academic
triflers are forgotten. This proves him to have been a real genius. The
same thing, however, made him a very bad master. He knew nothing of
rules which are alone to be taught; and he could not communicate his
instinctive feeling of beauty or character to others. I learnt nothing
from him while I was with him: and none of his scholars (if I may except
myself) ever made any figure at all. He only gave us his pictures to
copy. Sir Joshua undoubtedly got his first ideas of the art from Gandy,
though he lost them under Hudson; but he easily recovered them
afterwards. That is a picture of Gandy’s there (pointing to a portrait
of a little girl). If you look into it, you will find the same broken
surface and varying outline, that was so marked a characteristic of Sir
Joshua. There was nothing he hated so much as a distinct outline, as you
see it in Mengs and the French school. Indeed, he ran into the opposite
extreme; but it is one of the great beauties of art to show it waving
and retiring, now losing and then recovering itself again, as it always
does in nature, without any of that stiff, edgy appearance, which only
pedants affect or admire. Gandy was never out of Devonshire: but his
portraits are common there. His father was patronized by the Duke of
Ormond, and one reason why the son never came out of his native county
was, that when the Duke of Ormond was implicated in the rebellion to
restore the Pretender in 1715, he affected to be thought too deep in his
Grace’s confidence and a person of too much consequence to venture up to
London, so that he chose to remain in a voluntary exile.’ I asked
Northcote if he remembered the name of Stringer at the Academy, when he
first came up to town. He said he did, and that he drew very well, and
once put the figure for him in a better position to catch the
foreshortening. He inquired if I knew any thing about him, and I said I
had once vainly tried to copy a head of a youth by him admirably drawn
and coloured, and in which he had attempted to give the effect of double
vision by a second outline accompanying the contour of the face and
features. Though the design might not be in good taste, it was executed
in a way that made it next to impossible to imitate. I called on him
afterwards at his house at Knutsford, where I saw some spirited comic
sketches in an unfinished state,[89] and a capital female figure by
Cignani. All his skill and love of art had, I found, been sacrificed to
his delight in Cheshire ale and the company of country-squires. Tom
Kershaw, of Manchester, used to say, that he would rather have been Dan
Stringer than Sir Joshua Reynolds at twenty years of age. Kershaw, like
other North-country critics, thought more of the executive power than of
the _æsthetical_ faculty; forgetting that it signifies comparatively
little how well you execute a thing, if it is not worth executing.—In
consequence of something that was said of the egotism of artists, he
observed, ‘I am sometimes thought cold and cynical myself; but I hope it
is not from any such over-weening opinion of myself. I remember once
going with Wilkie to Angerstein’s, and because I stood looking and said
nothing, he seemed dissatisfied, and said, “I suppose you are too much
occupied with admiring, to give me your opinion?” And I answered
hastily, “No, indeed! I was saying to myself, ‘And is this all that the
art can do?’” But this was not, I am sure, an expression of triumph, but
of mortification at the defects which I could not help observing even in
the most accomplished works. I knew they were the best, but I could have
wished them to be a hundred times better than they were.’
Northcote mentioned a conceited painter of the name of Edwards, who went
with Romney to Rome; and when they got into the Sistine Chapel, turning
round to him, said, ‘’Egad! George, we’re bit!’—He then spoke of his own
journey to Rome, of the beauty of the climate, of the manners of the
people, of the imposing effect of the Roman Catholic religion, of its
favourableness to the fine arts, of the churches full of pictures, of
the manner in which he passed his time, studying and looking into all
the rooms in the Vatican: he had no fault to find with Italy, and no
wish to leave it. ‘Gracious and sweet was all he saw in her!’ As he
talked, he looked as if he saw the different objects pass before him,
and his eye glittered with familiar recollections. He said, Raphael did
not scorn to look out of himself or to be beholden to others. He took
whole figures from Masaccio to enrich his designs, because all he wanted
was to advance the art and ennoble human nature. After he saw Michael
Angelo, he improved in freedom and breadth; and if he had lived to see
Titian, he would have done all he could to avail himself of his
colouring. All his works are an effusion of the sweetness and dignity of
his own character. He did not know how to make a picture; but for the
conduct of the fable and the development of passion and feeling (noble
but full of tenderness) there is nobody like him. This is why Hogarth
can never come into the lists. He does not lift us above ourselves: our
curiosity may be gratified by seeing what men are, but our pride must be
soothed by seeing them made better. Why else is Milton preferred to
Hudibras, but because the one aggrandises our notions of human nature,
and the other degrades it? Who will make any comparison between a Madona
of Raphael and a drunken prostitute by Hogarth? Do we not feel more
respect for an inspired Apostle than for a blackguard in the streets?
Raphael points out the highest perfection of which the human form and
faculties are capable, and Hogarth their lowest degradation or most
wretched perversion. Look at his attempts to paint the good or
beautiful, and you see how faint the impressions of these were in his
mind. Yet these are what every one must wish to cherish in his own
bosom, and must feel most thankful for to those who lend him the
powerful assistance of their unrivalled conceptions of true grandeur and
beauty. Sir Joshua strove to do this in his portraits, and this it was
that raised him in public estimation; for we all wish to get rid of
defects and peculiarities as much as we can. He then said of Michael
Angelo, he did not wonder at the fame he had acquired. You are to
consider the state of the art before his time, and that he burst through
the mean and little manner even of such men as Leonardo da Vinci and
Pietro Perugino and through the trammels that confined them, and gave
all at once a gigantic breadth and expansion that had never been seen
before, so that the world were struck with it as with a display of
almost supernatural power, and have never ceased to admire since. We are
not to compare it with the examples of art that have followed since, and
that would never have existed but for him, but with those that preceded
it. He found fault with the figure of the flying monk in the St. Peter
Martyr, as _fluttering_ and theatrical, but agreed with me in admiring
this picture and in my fondness for Titian in general. He mentioned his
going with Prince Hoare and Day to take leave of some fine portraits of
Titian’s that hung in a dark corner of a Gallery at Naples; and as Day
looked at them for the last time with tears in his eyes, he said ‘Ah! he
was a fine old _mouser_!’—I said, I had repeated this expression (which
I had heard him allude to before) somewhere in writing, and was
surprised that people did not know what to make of it. Northcote said,
‘Why, that is exactly what I should have thought. There is the
difference between writing and speaking. In writing, you address the
average quantity of sense or information in the world; in speaking, you
pick your audience, or at least know what they are prepared for, or else
previously explain what you think necessary. _You_ understand the
epithet because you have seen a great number of Titian’s pictures, and
know that cat-like, watchful, penetrating look he gives to all his
faces, which nothing else expresses, perhaps, so well as the phrase Day
made use of: but the world in general know nothing of this; all they
know or believe is, that Titian is a great painter like Raphael or any
other famous person. Suppose any one was to tell you, Raphael was a fine
old mouser: would you not laugh at this as absurd? And yet the other is
equally nonsense or incomprehensible to them. No, there is a limit, a
conversational licence which you cannot carry into writing. This is one
difficulty I have in writing: I do not know the point of familiarity at
which I am to stop; and yet I believe I have ideas, and you say I know
how to express myself in talking.’
I inquired if he remembered much of Johnson, Burke, and that set of
persons? He said, Yes, a good deal, as he had often seen them. Burke
came into Sir Joshua’s painting-room one day, when Northcote, who was
then a young man, was sitting for one of the children in Count Ugolino.
(It is the one in profile with the hand to the face.) He was introduced
as a pupil of Sir Joshua’s, and, on his looking up, Mr. Burke said,
‘Then I see that Mr. Northcote is not only an artist, but has a head
that would do for Titian to paint.’—Goldsmith and Burke had often
violent disputes about politics; the one being a staunch Tory, and the
other at that time a Whig and outrageous anti-courtier. One day he came
into the room, when Goldsmith was there, full of ire and abuse against
the late king, and went on in such a torrent of the most unqualified
invective that Goldsmith threatened to leave the room. The other,
however, persisted; and Goldsmith went out, unable to bear it any
longer. So much for Mr. Burke’s pretended consistency and uniform
loyalty! When Northcote first came to Sir Joshua, he wished very much to
see Goldsmith; and one day Sir Joshua, on introducing him, asked why he
had been so anxious to see him? ‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘he is a
_notable_[90] man.’ This expression, _notable_, in its ordinary sense,
was so contrary to Goldsmith’s character, that they both burst out
a-laughing very heartily. Goldsmith was two thousand pounds in debt at
the time of his death, which was hastened by his chagrin and distressed
circumstances: and when ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was performed, he was so
choked all dinner-time that he could not swallow a mouthful. A party
went from Sir Joshua’s to support it. The present title was not fixed
upon till that morning. Northcote went with Ralph, Sir Joshua’s man,
into the gallery, to see how it went off; and after the second act,
there was no doubt of its success. Northcote says, people had a great
notion of the literary parties at Sir Joshua’s. He once asked Lord B— to
dine with Dr. Johnson and the rest; but though a man of rank and also of
good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had
tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-’Change. Northcote
remarked that he thought people of talents had their full share of
admiration. He had seen young ladies of quality, Lady Marys and Lady
Dorothys, peeping into a room where Mrs. Siddons was sitting, with all
the same timidity and curiosity as if it were some preternatural
being—he was sure more than if it had been the Queen. He then made some
observations on the respect paid to rank, and said, ‘However ridiculous
it might seem, it was no more than the natural expression of the highest
respect in other cases. For instance, as to that of bowing out of the
King’s presence backwards, would you not do the same if you were
introduced to Dr. Johnson for the first time? You would contrive not to
turn your back upon him, till you were out of the room.’ He said, ‘You
violent politicians make more rout about royalty than it is worth: it is
only the highest place, and somebody must fill it, no matter who:
neither do the persons themselves think so much of it as you imagine.
They are glad to get into privacy as much as they can. Nor is it a
sinecure. The late King (I have been told) used often to have to sign
his name to papers, and do nothing else for three hours together, till
his fingers fairly ached, and then he would take a walk in the garden,
and come back to repeat the same drudgery for three hours more. So, when
they told Louis XV. that if he went on with his extravagance, he would
bring about a Revolution and be sent over to England with a pension, he
merely asked, “Do you think the pension would be a pretty good one?”’ He
noticed the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, and praised them for their
extreme vivacity and great insight into human nature. Once when the mob
had besieged the palace, and the Cardinal was obliged to go and appease
them, a brick-bat was flung at him and knocked him down, and one of the
assailants presenting a bayonet at his throat, he suddenly called out,
‘Oh, you wretch! if your father could have seen you in this barbarous
action, what would he have said?’ The man immediately withdrew, though,
says the Cardinal, ‘I knew no more of his father than the babe unborn.’
Northcote then adverted to the talent of players for drollery and sudden
shifts and expedients, and said that by living in an element of comic
invention, they imbibed a portion of it. He repeated that jest of F.
Reynolds, who filled up the blank in a militia paper that was sent him
with the description, ‘Old, lame, and a coward;’ and another story told
of Matthews, the comedian, who being left in the room with an old
gentleman and a little child, and the former putting the question to it,
‘Well, my dear, which do you like best, the dog or the cat?’ by
exercising his powers of ventriloquism, made the child seem to answer,
‘I don’t care a d—mn for either,’—to the utter confusion of the old
gentleman, who immediately took the father to task for bringing up his
son in such profaneness and total want of common humanity.
He then returned to the question of the inconsistent and unreasonable
expectations of mankind as to their success in different pursuits, and
answered the common complaint, ‘What a shame it was that Milton only got
thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence for “Paradise Lost.”’ He
said, ‘Not at all; he did not write it to get money, he had gained what
he had proposed by writing it, not thirteen pounds nine shillings and
sixpence, but an immortal reputation. When Dr. Johnson was asked why he
was not invited out to dine as Garrick was, he answered, as if it was a
triumph to him, “Because great lords and ladies don’t like to have their
mouths stopped!” But who _does_ like to have their mouths stopped? Did
he, more than others? People like to be amused in general; but they did
not give him the less credit for wisdom and a capacity to instruct them
by his writings. In like manner, it has been said, that the King only
sought one interview with Dr. Johnson; whereas, if he had been a buffoon
or a sycophant, he would have asked for more. No, there was nothing to
complain of: it was a compliment paid by rank to letters, and once was
enough. The King was more afraid of this interview than Dr. Johnson was;
and went to it as a school-boy to his task. But he did not want to have
this trial repeated every day, nor was it necessary. The very jealousy
of his self-love marked his respect: and if he had thought less of Dr.
Johnson, he would have been more willing to risk the encounter. They had
each their place to fill, and would best preserve their self-respect,
and perhaps their respect for each other, by remaining in their proper
sphere. So they make an outcry about the Prince leaving Sheridan to die
in absolute want. He had left him long before: was he to send every day
to know if he was dying? These things cannot be helped, without exacting
too much of human nature.’ I agreed to this view of the subject, and
said,—I did not see why literary people should repine if they met with
their deserts in their own way, without expecting to get rich; but that
they often got nothing for their pains but unmerited abuse and party
obloquy.—‘Oh, it is not party-spite,’ said he, ‘but the envy of human
nature. Do you think to distinguish yourself with impunity? Do you
imagine that your superiority will be delightful to others? Or that they
will not strive all they can, and to the last moment, to pull you down?
I remember myself once saying to Opie, how hard it was upon the poor
author or player to be hunted down for not succeeding in an innocent and
laudable attempt, just as if they had committed some heinous crime! And
he answered, “They _have_ committed the greatest crime in the eyes of
mankind, that of pretending to a superiority over them!” Do you think
that party abuse, and the running down particular authors is any thing
new? Look at the manner in which Pope and Dryden were assailed by a set
of reptiles. Do you believe the modern periodicals had not their
prototypes in the party-publications of that day? Depend upon it, what
you take for political cabal and hostility is (nine parts in ten)
private pique and malice oozing out through those authorized channels.’
We now got into a dispute about nicknames; and H—me coming in and
sitting down at my elbow, my old pugnacious habit seemed to return upon
me. Northcote contended, that they had always an appropriate meaning:
and I said,—‘Their whole force consisted in their having absolutely none
but the most vague and general.’—‘Why,’ said Northcote, ‘did my father
give me the name of “Fat Jack,” but because I was lean?’ He gave an
instance which I thought made against himself, of a man at Plymouth, a
baker by profession, who had got the name of _Tiddydoll_—he could not
tell how. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘it was a name without any sense or
meaning.’—‘Be that as it may,’ said Northcote, ‘it almost drove him mad.
The boys called after him in the street, besieged his shop-windows; even
the soldiers took it up, and marched to parade, beating time with their
feet, and repeating, _Tiddydoll, Tiddydoll_, as they passed by his door.
He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable fury, and was
knocked down and rolled in the kennel, and got up in an agony of rage
and shame, his white clothes covered all over with mud. A gentleman, a
physician in the neighbourhood, one day called him in and remonstrated
with him on the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his
persecutors. “What,” he said, “does it signify? Suppose they were to
call me _Tiddydoll_?”—“There,” said the man, “you called me so yourself;
you only sent for me in to insult me!” and, after heaping every epithet
of abuse upon him, flew out of the house in a most ungovernable
passion.’ I told Northcote this was just the thing I meant. Even if a
name had confessedly no meaning, by applying it constantly and by way of
excellence to another, it seemed as if he must be an abstraction of
insignificance: whereas, if it pointed to any positive defect or
specific charge, it was at least limited to the one, and you stood a
chance of repelling the other. The virtue of a nickname consisted in its
being indefinable and baffling all proof or reply. When H—me was gone,
Northcote extolled his proficiency in Hebrew, which astonished me not a
little, as I had never heard of it. I said, he was a very excellent man,
and a good specimen of the character of the old Presbyterians, who had
more of the idea of an attachment to principle, and less of an obedience
to fashion or convenience, from their education and tenets, than any
other class of people. Northcote assented to this statement, and
concluded by saying, that H—me was certainly a very good man, and had no
fault but that of not being fat.
CONVERSATION THE FOURTH
Northcote said, he had been reading Kelly’s ‘Reminiscences.’ I asked
what he thought of them? He said, they were the work of a well meaning
man, who fancied all those about him good people, and every thing they
uttered clever. I said, I recollected his singing formerly with Mrs.
Crouch, and that he used to give great effect to some things of
sentiment, such as ‘Oh! had I been by fate decreed,’ &c. in _Love in a
Village_. Northcote said, he did not much like him: there was a jerk, a
kind of _brogue_ in his singing; though he had, no doubt, considerable
advantages in being brought up with all the great singers and having
performed on all the first stages in Italy. I said, there was no echo of
all that now. ‘No,’ said Northcote, ‘nor in my time, though I was there
just after him. He asked me once, many years ago, if I had heard of him
in Italy, and I said no, though I excused myself by stating that I had
only been at Rome, where the stage was less an object, the Pope there
performing the chief part himself.’ I answered, that I meant there was
no echo of the fine singing at present in Italy, music being there dead
as well as painting, or reduced to mere screaming, noise and rant. ‘It
is odd,’ he said, ‘how their genius seems to have left them. Every thing
of that sort appears to be at present no better than it is with us in a
country-town: or rather it wants the simplicity and rustic innocence,
and is more like the draggle-tailed finery of a lady’s waiting-maid.
They have nothing of their own: all is at second-hand. Did you see
Thorwaldsen’s things while you were there? A young artist brought me all
his designs the other day, as miracles that I was to wonder at and be
delighted with. But I could find nothing in them but repetitions of the
Antique, over and over, till I was surfeited.’ ‘He would be pleased at
this.’ ‘Why, no! that is not enough: it is easy to imitate the
Antique:—if you want to last, you must invent something. The other is
only pouring liquors from one vessel into another, that become staler
and staler every time. We are tired of the Antique; yet, at any rate, it
is better than the vapid imitation of it. The world wants something new,
and will have it. No matter whether it is better or worse, if there is
but an infusion of new life and spirit, it will go down to posterity;
otherwise, you are soon forgotten. Canova, too, is nothing for the same
reason—he is only a feeble copy of the Antique; or a mixture of two
things the most incompatible, that and opera-dancing. But there is
Bernini; he is full of faults; he has too much of that florid,
redundant, fluttering style, that was objected to Rubens; but then he
has given an appearance of flesh that was never given before. The
Antique always looks like marble, you never for a moment can divest
yourself of the idea; but go up to a statue of Bernini’s, and it seems
as if it must yield to your touch. This excellence he was the first to
give, and therefore it must always remain with him. It is true, it is
also in the Elgin marbles; but they were not known in his time; so that
he indisputably was a genius. Then there is Michael Angelo; how utterly
different from the Antique, and in some things how superior! For
instance, there is his statue of Cosmo de Medici, leaning on his hand,
in the chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence; I declare it has that look of
reality in it, that it almost terrifies you to be near it. It has
something of the same effect as the mixture of life and death that is
perceivable in wax-work; though that is a bad illustration, as this last
is disagreeable and mechanical, and the other is produced by a powerful
and masterly conception. It was the same with Handel too: he made music
speak a new language, with a pathos and a power that had never been
dreamt of till his time. Is it not the same with Titian, Correggio,
Raphael? These painters did not imitate one another, but were as unlike
as possible, and yet were all excellent. If excellence were one thing,
they must have been all wrong. Still, originality is not caprice or
affectation; it is an excellence that is always to be found in nature,
but has never had a place in art before. So Romney said of Sir Joshua,
that there was that in his pictures which we had not been used to see in
other painters, but we had seen it often enough in nature. Give this in
your works, and nothing can ever rob you of the credit of it.
‘I was looking into Mandeville since I saw you (I thought I had lost it,
but I found it among a parcel of old books). You may judge by that of
the hold that any thing like originality takes of the world: for though
there is a great deal that is questionable and liable to very strong
objection, yet they will not give it up, because it is the very reverse
of common-place; and they must go to that source to learn what can be
said on that side of the question. Even if you receive a shock, you feel
your faculties roused by it and set on the alert. Mankind do not choose
to go to sleep.’—I replied, that I thought this was true, yet at the
same time the world seemed to have a wonderful propensity to admire the
trite and traditional. I could only account for this from a reflection
of our self-love. We could few of us invent, but most of us could
imitate and repeat by rote; and as we thought we could get up and ride
in the same jog-trot machine of learning, we affected to look up to this
elevation as the post of honour. Northcote said, ‘You are to consider
that learning is of great use to society; and though it may not add to
the stock, is a necessary vehicle to transmit it to others. Learned men
are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountain-heads. They are only
wrong in often claiming respect on a false ground, and mistaking their
own province. They are so accustomed to ring the changes on words and
received notions, that they lose their perception of things. I remember
being struck with this at the time of the Ireland controversy:—only to
think of a man like Dr. Parr going down on his knees and kissing the
pretended Manuscript! It was not that he knew or cared any thing about
Shakspeare (or he would not have been so imposed upon); he merely
worshipped a name, as a Catholic priest worships the shrine that
contains some favourite relic.’ I said, the passages in Ireland’s play
that were brought forward to prove the identity, were the very thing
that proved the contrary; for they were obvious parodies of celebrated
passages in Shakspeare, such as that on death in _Richard II._—‘And
there the antic sits,’ &c. Now, Shakspeare never parodied himself; but
these learned critics were only struck with the verbal coincidence, and
never thought of the general character or spirit of the writer. ‘Or
without that,’ said Northcote, ‘who that attended to the common sense of
the question would not perceive that Shakspeare was a person who would
be glad to dispose of his plays as soon as he wrote them? If it had been
such a man as Sir Philip Sidney, indeed, he might have written a play at
his leisure, and locked it up in some private drawer at Penshurst, where
it might have been found two hundred years after: but Shakspeare had no
opportunity to leave such precious hoards behind him, nor place to
deposit them in. Tresham made me very mad one day at Cosway’s, by saying
they had found a lock of his hair and a picture; and Caleb Whitefoord,
who ought to have known better, asked me if I did not think Sheridan a
judge, and that _he_ believed in the authenticity of the Ireland papers?
I said, “Do you bring him as a fair witness? He wants to fill his
theatre, and would write a play himself, and swear it was Shakspeare’s.
He knows better than to cry _stale fish_.”’
I observed, this was what made me dislike the conversation of learned or
literary men. I got nothing from them but what I already knew, and
hardly that: they poured the same ideas and phrases and cant of
knowledge out of books into my ears, as apothecaries’ apprentices made
prescriptions out of the same bottles; but there were no new drugs or
simples in their _materia medica_. Go to a Scotch professor, and he
bores you to death by an eternal rhapsody about rent and taxes, gold and
paper-currency, population and capital, and the Teutonic Races—all which
you have heard a thousand times before: go to a linen-draper in the
city, without education but with common sense and shrewdness, and you
pick up something new, because nature is inexhaustible, and he sees it
from his own point of view, when not cramped and hood-winked by pedantic
prejudices. A person of this character said to me the other day, in
speaking of the morals of foreign nations—‘It’s all a mistake to suppose
there can be such a difference, Sir: the world are, and must be moral;
for when people grow up and get married, they teach their children to be
_moral_. No man wishes to have them turn out profligate.’ I said I had
never heard this before, and it seemed to me to be putting society on
new rollers. Northcote agreed, it was an excellent observation. I added,
this self-taught shrewdness had its weak sides too. This same person was
arguing that mankind remained much the same, and always would do so.
Cows and horses did not change: and why then should men? He had forgot
that cows and horses do not learn to read and write.—‘Ay, that was very
well too,’ said Northcote; ‘I don’t know but I agree with him rather
than with you. I was thinking of the same thing the other day in looking
over an old Magazine, in which there was a long debate on an Act of
Parliament to license gin-drinking. The effect was quite droll. There
was one person who made a most eloquent speech to point out all the
dreadful consequences of allowing this practice. It would debauch the
morals, ruin the health, and dissolve all the bonds of society, and
leave a poor, puny, miserable, Lilliputian race, equally unfit for peace
or war. You would suppose that the world was going to be at an end. Why,
no! the answer would have been, the world will go on much the same as
before. You attribute too much power to an Act of Parliament. Providence
has not taken its measure so ill as to leave it to an Act of Parliament
to continue or discontinue the species. If it depended on our wisdom and
contrivances whether it should last or not, it would be at an end before
twenty years! People are wrong about this; some say the world is getting
better, others complain it is getting worse, when, in fact, it is just
the same, and neither better nor worse.’—What a lesson, I said to
myself, for our pragmatical legislators and idle projectors!
I said, I had lately been led to think of the little real progress that
was made by the human mind, and how the same errors and vices revived
under a different shape at different periods, from observing just the
same humour in our Ultra-reformers at present, and in their predecessors
in the time of John Knox. Our modern _wiseacres_ were for banishing all
the fine arts and finer affections, whatever was pleasurable and
ornamental, from the Commonwealth, on the score of utility, exactly as
the others did on the score of religion. The real motive in either case
was nothing but a sour, envious, malignant disposition, incapable of
enjoyment in itself, and averse to every appearance or tendency to it in
others. Our peccant humours broke out and formed into what Milton called
‘a crust of formality’ on the surface; and while we fancied we were
doing God or man good service, we were only indulging our spleen,
self-opinion, and self-will, according to the fashion of the day. The
existing race of free-thinkers and sophists would be mortified to find
themselves the counterpart of the monks and ascetics of old; but so it
was. The dislike of the Westminster Reviewers to polite literature was
only the old exploded Puritanic objection to human learning. Names and
modes of opinion changed, but human nature was much the same.—‘I know
nothing of the persons you speak of,’ said Northcote; ‘but they must be
fools if they expect to get rid of the showy and superficial, and let
only the solid and useful remain. The surface is a part of nature, and
will always continue so. Besides, how many useful inventions owe their
existence to ornamental contrivances! If the ingenuity and industry of
man were not tasked to produce luxuries, we should soon be without
necessaries. We must go back to the savage state. I myself am as little
prejudiced in favour of poetry as almost any one can be; but surely
there are things in poetry that the world cannot afford to do without.
What is of absolute necessity is only a part; and the next question is,
how to occupy the remainder of our time and thoughts (not so employed)
agreeably and innocently. Works of fiction and poetry are of
incalculable use in this respect. If people did not read the Scotch
novels, they would not read Mr. Bentham’s philosophy. There is nothing
to me more disagreeable than the abstract idea of a Quaker, which falls
under the same article. They object to colours; and why do they object
to colours? Do we not see that Nature delights in them? Do we not see
the same purpose of prodigal and ostentatious display run through all
her works? Do we not find the most beautiful and dazzling colours
bestowed on plants and flowers, on the plumage of birds, on fishes and
shells, even to the very bottom of the sea? All this profusion of
ornament, we may be sure, is not in vain. To judge otherwise is to fly
in the face of Nature, and substitute an exclusive and intolerant spirit
in the place of philosophy, which includes the greatest variety of man’s
wants and tastes, and makes all the favourable allowances it can. The
Quaker will not wear coloured clothes; though he would not have a coat
to his back if men had never studied any thing but the mortification of
their appetites and desires. But he takes care of his personal
convenience by wearing a piece of good broad-cloth, and gratifies his
vanity, not by finery, but by having it of a different cut from every
body else, so that he may seem better and wiser than they. Yet this
humour, too, is not without its advantages: it serves to correct the
contrary absurdity. I look upon the Quaker and the fop as two sentinels
placed by Nature at the two extremes of vanity and selfishness, and to
guard, as it were, all the common-sense and virtue that lie between.’ I
observed that these contemptible narrow-minded prejudices made me feel
irritable and impatient. ‘You should not suffer that,’ said Northcote;
‘for then you will run into the contrary mistake, and lay yourself open
to your antagonist. The monks, for instance, have been too hardly dealt
with—not that I would defend many abuses and instances of oppression in
them—but is it not as well to have bodies of men shut up in cells and
monasteries, as to let them loose to make soldiers of them and to cut
one another’s throats? And out of that lazy ignorance and leisure, what
benefits have not sprung? It is to them we owe those beautiful specimens
of Gothic architecture which can never be surpassed; many of the
discoveries in medicine and in mechanics are also theirs; and, I
believe, the restoration of classical learning is owing to them. Not
that I would be understood to say that all or a great deal of this could
not have been done without them; but their leisure, their independence,
and the want of some employment to exercise their minds were the actual
cause of many advantages we now enjoy; and what I mean is, that Nature
is satisfied with imperfect instruments. Instead of snarling at every
thing that differs from us we had better take Shakspeare’s advice, and
try to find
“Tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”’
It was at this time that Mr. Northcote read to me the following letter,
addressed by him to a very young lady, who earnestly desired him to
write a letter to her:—
‘MY DEAR MISS K—,
‘What in the world can make you desire a letter from me? Indeed, if
I was a fine Dandy of one-and-twenty, with a pair of stays properly
padded and also an iron busk, and whiskers under my nose, with my
hair standing upright on my head, all in the present fashion, then
it might be accounted for, as I might write you a fine answer in
poetry about Cupids and burning hearts, and sighs and angels and
darts, such a letter as Mr. —, the poet, might write. But it is long
past the time for me to sing love-songs under your window, with a
guitar, and catch my death in some cold night, and so die in your
service.
‘But what has a poor gray-headed old man of eighty got to say to a
blooming young lady of eighteen, but to relate to her his illness
and pains, and tell her that past life is little better than a
dream, and that he finds that all he has been doing is only vanity.
Indeed, I may console myself with the pleasure of having gained the
flattering attention of a young lady of such amiable qualities as
yourself, and have the honour to assure you, that I am your grateful
friend and most obliged humble servant,
‘JAMES NORTHCOTE.’
‘_Argyll Place, 1826._’
I said, the hardest lesson seemed to be to look beyond ourselves. ‘Yes,’
said Northcote, ‘I remember when we were young and were making remarks
upon the neighbours, an old maiden aunt of ours used to say, “I wish to
God you could see yourselves!” And yet, perhaps, after all, this was not
very desirable. Many people pass their whole lives in a very comfortable
dream, who, if they could see themselves in the glass, would start back
with affright. I remember once being at the Academy, when Sir Joshua
wished to propose a monument to Dr. Johnson in St. Paul’s, and West got
up and said, that the King, he knew, was averse to any thing of the
kind, for he had been proposing a similar monument in Westminster Abbey
for a man of the greatest genius and celebrity—one whose works were in
all the cabinets of the curious throughout Europe—one whose name they
would all hear with the greatest respect—and then it came out, after a
long preamble, that he meant Woollett, who had engraved his Death of
Wolfe. I was provoked, and I could not help exclaiming—“My God! what, do
you put him upon a footing with such a man as Dr. Johnson—one of the
greatest philosophers and moralists that ever lived? We have thousands
of engravers at any time!”—and there was such a burst of laughter at
this—Dance, who was a grave gentlemanly man, laughed till the tears ran
down his cheeks; and Farington used afterwards to say to me, “Why don’t
you speak in the Academy, and begin with ‘My God!’ as you do
sometimes?”’ I said, I had seen in a certain painter something of this
humour, who once very good-naturedly showed me a Rubens he had, and
observed with great _nonchalance_, ‘What a pity that this man wanted
expression!’ I imagined Rubens to have looked round his gallery. ‘Yet,’
he continued, ‘it is the consciousness of defect, too, that often
stimulates the utmost exertions. If Pope had been a fine, handsome man,
would he have left those masterpieces that he has? But he knew and felt
his own deformity, and therefore was determined to leave nothing undone
to extend that corner of power that he possessed. He said to himself,
They shall have no fault to find there. I have often thought when very
good-looking young men have come here intending to draw, “What! are you
going to bury yourselves in a garret?” And it has generally happened
that they have given up the art before long, and married or otherwise
disposed of themselves.’ I had heard an anecdote of Nelson, that, when
appointed post-captain, and on going to take possession of his ship at
Yarmouth, the crowd on the quay almost jostled him, and exclaimed—‘What!
have they made that little insignificant fellow a captain? He will do
much, to be sure!’ I thought this might have urged him to dare as he
did, in order to get the better of their prejudices and his own sense of
mortification. ‘No doubt,’ said Northcote, ‘personal defects or disgrace
operate in this way. I knew an admiral who had got the nickname of
“Dirty Dick” among the sailors, and, on his being congratulated on
obtaining some desperate victory, all he said was, “I hope they’ll call
me Dirty Dick no more!”—There was a Sir John Grenville or Greenfield
formerly, who was appointed to convoy a fleet of merchant-ships, and had
to defend them against a Spanish man-of-war, and did so with the utmost
bravery and resolution, so that the convoy got safe off; but after that,
he would not yield till he was struck senseless by a ball, and then the
crew delivered up the vessel to the enemy, who, on coming on board and
entering the cabin where he lay, were astonished to find a mere puny
shrivelled spider of a man, instead of the Devil they had expected to
see. He was taken on shore in Spain, and died of his wounds there; and
the Spanish women afterwards used to frighten their children, by telling
them “Don John of the Greenfield was coming!”’
CONVERSATION THE FIFTH
Northcote mentioned the death of poor —, who had been with him a few
days before, laughing and in great spirits; and the next thing he heard
was that he had put an end to himself. I asked if there was any
particular reason? He said ‘No; that he had left a note upon the table,
saying that his friends had forsaken him, that he knew no cause, and
that he was tired of life. His patron, C—, of the Admiralty, had, it
seems, set him to paint a picture of Louis the Eighteenth receiving the
Order of the Garter. He had probably been teazed about that. These
insipid court-subjects were destined to be fatal to artists. Poor Bird
had been employed to paint a picture of Louis the Eighteenth landing at
Calais, and had died of chagrin and disappointment at his failure. Who
could make any thing of such a figure and such a subject? There was
nothing to be done; and yet if the artist added any thing of his own, he
was called to order by his would-be patrons, as falsifying what appeared
to them an important event in history. It was only a person like Rubens
who could succeed in such subjects by taking what licences he thought
proper, and having authority enough to dictate to his advisers.’ A
gentleman came in, who asked if — was likely to have succeeded in his
art? Northcote answered, ‘There were several things against it. He was
good-looking, good-natured, and a wit. He was accordingly asked out to
dine, and caressed by those who knew him; and a young man after
receiving these flattering marks of attention and enjoying the height of
luxury and splendour, was not inclined to return to his painting-room,
to brood over a design that would cost him infinite trouble, and the
success of which was at last doubtful. Few young men of agreeable
persons or conversation turned out great artists. It was easier to look
in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and,
as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his
mouth. It was only the love of distinction that produced eminence; and
if a man was admired for one thing, that was enough. We only work out
our way to excellence by being imprisoned in defects. It requires a long
apprenticeship, great pains, and prodigious self-denial, which no man
will submit to, except from necessity, or as the only chance he has of
escaping from obscurity. I remember when Mr. Locke (of Norbury Park)
first came over from Italy; and old Dr. Moore, who had a high opinion of
him, was crying up his drawings and asked me, if I did not think he
would make a great painter? I said, ‘No, never!’—‘Why not?’—‘Because he
has six thousand a year.’ No one would throw away all the advantages and
indulgences this ensured him, to shut himself up in a garret to pore
over that which after all may expose him to contempt and ridicule.
Artists, to be sure, have gone on painting after they have got rich,
such as Rubens and Titian, and indeed Sir Joshua; but then it had by
this time become a habit and a source of pleasure instead of a toil to
them, and the honours and distinction they had acquired by it
counter-balanced every other consideration. Their love of the art had
become greater than their love of riches or of idleness: but at first
this is not the case, and the repugnance to labour is only mastered by
the absolute necessity for it. People apply to study only when they
cannot help it. No one was ever known to succeed without this stimulus.’
I ventured to say that, generally speaking, no one, I believed, ever
succeeded in a profession without great application; but that where
there was a strong turn for any thing, a man in this sense could not
help himself, and the application followed of course, and was, in fact,
comparatively easy. Northcote turned short round upon me, and said,
‘Then you admit original genius? I cannot agree with you there.’ I said,
‘Waiving that, and not inquiring how the inclination comes, but early in
life a fondness, a passion for a certain pursuit is imbibed; the mind is
haunted by this object, it cannot rest without it (any more than the
body without food), it becomes the strongest feeling we have, and then,
I think, the most intense application follows naturally, just as in the
case of a love of money or any other passion—the most unremitting
application without this is forced and of no use; and where this
original bias exists, no other motive is required.’—‘Oh! but,’ said
Northcote, ‘if you had to labour on by yourself without competitors or
admirers, you would soon lay down your pencil or your pen in disgust. It
is the hope of shining, or the fear of being eclipsed, that urges you
on. Do you think if nobody took any notice of what you did, this would
not damp your ardour?’—‘Yes; after I had done anything that I thought
worth notice, it might considerably: but how many minds (almost all the
great ones) were formed in secresy and solitude, without knowing whether
they should ever make a figure or not! All they knew was, that they
liked what they were about, and gave their whole souls to it. There was
Hogarth, there was Correggio: what enabled these artists to arrive at
the perfection in their several ways, which afterwards gained them the
attention of the world? Not the premature applause of the by-standers,
but the vivid tingling delight with which the one seized upon a
grotesque incident or expression—“the wrapt soul sitting in the eyes,”
of the other, as he drew a saint or angel from the skies. If they had
been brought forward very early, before they had served this thorough
apprenticeship to their own minds (the opinion of the world apart), it
might have damped or made coxcombs of them. It was the love and
perception of excellence (or the favouring smile of the Muse) that in my
view produced excellence and formed the man of genius. Some, like
Milton, had gone on with a great work all their lives with little
encouragement but the hope of posthumous fame.’—‘It is not that,’ said
Northcote; ‘you cannot see so far. It is not those who have gone before
you or those who are to come after you, but those who are by your side,
running the same race, that make you look about you. What made Titian
jealous of Tintoret? Because he stood immediately in his way, and their
works were compared together. If there had been a hundred Tintorets a
thousand miles off, he would not have cared about them. That is what
takes off the edge and stimulus of exertion in old age: those who were
our competitors in early life, whom we wished to excel or whose good
opinion we were most anxious about, are gone, and have left us in a
manner by ourselves, in a sort of new world, where we know and are as
little known as on entering a strange country. Our ambition is cold with
the ashes of those whom we feared or loved. I remember old Alderman
Boydell using an expression which explained this. Once when I was in the
coach with him, in reply to some compliment of mine on his success in
life, he said, “Ah! there was one who would have been pleased at it; but
_her_ I have lost!” The fine coach and all the city-trappings were
nothing to him without his wife, who remembered what he was and the
gradations and anxious cares by which he rose to his present affluence,
and was a kind of monitor to remind him of his former self and of the
different vicissitudes of his fortune.’
Northcote then spoke of old Alderman Boydell with great regret, and
said, ‘He was a man of sense and liberality, and a true patron of the
art. His nephew, who came after him, had not the same capacity, and
wanted to dictate to the artists what they were to do. N. mentioned some
instance of his wanting him to paint a picture on a subject for which he
was totally unfit, and figures of a size which he had never been
accustomed to, and he told him “he must get somebody else to do it.”’ I
said, ‘Booksellers and editors had the same infirmity, and always wanted
you to express their ideas, not your own. Sir R. P— had once gone up to
Coleridge, after hearing him talk in a large party, and offered him
“nine guineas a sheet for his conversation!” He calculated that the
“nine guineas a sheet” would be at least as strong a stimulus to his
imagination as the wasting his words in a room full of company.’
NORTHCOTE: ‘Ay, he came to me once, and wished me to do a work which was
to contain a history of art in all countries and from the beginning of
the world. I said it would be an invaluable work if it could be done;
but that there was no one alive who could do it.’
Northcote afterwards, by some transition, spoke of the characters of
women, and asked my opinion. I said, ‘All my metaphysics leaned to the
vulgar side of these questions: I thought there was a difference of
original genius, a difference in the character of the sexes, &c. Women
appeared to me to do some things better than men; and therefore I
concluded they must do other things worse.’ Northcote mentioned Annibal
Caracci, and said, ‘How odd it was, that in looking at any work of his,
you could swear it was done by a man! Ludovico Caracci had a finer and
more intellectual expression, but not the same bold and workmanlike
character. There was Michael Angelo again—what woman would ever have
thought of painting the figures in the Sistine chapel? There was Dryden
too, what a thorough manly character there was in his style! And
Pope’—[I interrupted, ‘seemed to me between a man and a woman.’]—‘It was
not,’ he continued, ‘that women were not often very clever (cleverer
than many men), but there was a point of excellence which they never
reached. Yet the greatest pains had been taken with several. Angelica
Kauffmann had been brought up from a child to the art, and had been
taken by her father (in boy’s clothes) to the Academy to learn to draw;
but there was an effeminate and feeble look in all her works, though not
without merit. There was not the man’s hand, or what Fuseli used to call
a “fist” in them; that is, something coarse and clumsy enough, perhaps,
but still with strength and muscle. Even in common things, you would see
a carpenter drive a nail in a way that a women never would; or if you
had a suit of clothes made by a woman, they would hang quite loose about
you and seem ready to fall off. Yet it is extraordinary too, said
Northcote, that in what has sometimes been thought the peculiar province
of men, courage and heroism, there have been women fully upon a par with
any men, such as Joan of Arc and many others, who have never been
surpassed as leaders in battle.’ I observed that of all the women I had
ever seen or known any thing of, Mrs. Siddons struck me as the grandest.
He said,—‘Oh! it is her outward form, which stamps her so completely for
tragedy, no less than the mental part. Both she and her brother were cut
out by Nature for a tragedy-king and queen. It is what Mrs. Hannah More
has said of her, “_Her’s is the afflicted!_”’ I replied, that she seemed
to me equally great in anger or in contempt or in any stately part as
she was in grief, witness her Lady Macbeth. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that, to be
sure, was a masterpiece.’ I asked what he thought of Mrs. Inchbald? He
said, ‘Oh! very highly: there was no affectation in her. I once took up
her _Simple Story_ (which my sister had borrowed from the circulating
library) and looking into it, I said, “My God! what have you got here?”
and I never moved from the chair till I had finished it. Her _Nature and
Art_ is equally fine—the very marrow of genius.’ She seems to me, I
added, like Venus writing books. ‘Yes, women have certainly been
successful in writing novels; and in plays too. I think Mrs. Centlivre’s
are better than Congreve’s. Their letters, too, are admirable: it is
only when they put on the breeches and try to write like men, that they
become pedantic and tiresome. In giving advice, too, I have often found
that they excelled; and when I have been irritated by any trifling
circumstance and have laid more stress upon it than it was worth, they
have seen the thing in a right point of view and tamed down my
asperities.’ On this I remarked, that I thought, in general, it might be
said that the faculties of women were of a passive character. They
judged by the simple effect upon their feelings, without inquiring into
causes. Men had to act; women had the coolness and the advantages of
by-standers, and were neither implicated in the theories nor passions of
men. While we were proving a thing to be wrong, they would feel it to be
ridiculous. I said, I thought they had more of common sense, though less
of acquired capacity than men. They were freer from the absurdities of
creeds and dogmas, from the virulence of party in religion and politics
(by which we strove to show our sense and superiority), nor were their
heads so much filled with the lumber of learned folios. I mentioned as
an illustration, that when old Baxter (the celebrated casuist and
nonconformist divine) first went to Kidderminster to preach, he was
almost pelted by the women for maintaining from the pulpit the then
fashionable and orthodox doctrine, that ‘Hell was paved with infants’
skulls.’ The theory, which the learned divine had piled up on arguments
and authorities, is now exploded: the common-sense feeling on the
subject, which the women of that day took up in opposition to it as a
dictate of humanity, would be now thought the philosophical one. ‘Yes,’
said Northcote, ‘but this exploded doctrine was knocked down by some
man, as it had been set up by one: the women would let things remain as
they are, without making any progress in error or wisdom. We do best
together: our strength and our weakness mutually correct each other.’
Northcote then read me from a manuscript volume lying by him, a
character drawn of his deceased wife by a Dissenting Minister (a Mr.
Fox, of Plymouth) which is so beautiful that I shall transcribe it here.
‘Written by Mr. John Fox, on the death of his wife, who was the daughter
of the Rev. Mr. Isaac Gelling.
‘My dear wife died to my unspeakable grief, Dec. 19th, 1762. With
the loss of my dear companion died all the pleasure of my life; and
no wonder: I had lived with her forty years, in which time nothing
happened to abate the strictness of our Friendship, or to create a
coolness or indifference so common and even unregarded by many in
the world. I thank God I enjoyed my full liberty, my health, such
pleasures and diversions as I liked, perfect peace and competence
during the time; which were all seasoned and heightened every day
more or less by constant marks of friendship, most inviolable
affection, and a most cheerful endeavour to make my life agreeable.
Nothing disturbed me but her many and constant disorders; under all
which I could see how her faithful heart was strongly attached to
me. And who could stand the shock of seeing the attacks of Death
upon and then her final dissolution? The consequences to me were
fatal. Old age rushed upon me like an armed man: my appetite failed,
my strength was gone, every amusement became flat and dull; my
countenance fell, and I have nothing to do but to drag on a heavy
chain for the rest of my life; which I hope a good God will enable
me to do without murmuring, and in conclusion, to say with all my
soul—
TE DEUM LAUDAMUS.
‘This was written on a paper blotted by tears, and stuck with wafers
into the first page of the family Bible.
‘Mr. John Fox died 22d of October, 1763. He was born May 10th,
1693.’
CONVERSATION THE SIXTH
Northcote alluded to a printed story of his having hung an early picture
of H—’s out of sight, and of Fuseli’s observing on the occasion—‘By G—d,
you are sending him to heaven before his time!’ He said there was not
the least foundation for this story; nor could there be, he not having
been _hanger_ that year. He read out of the same publication a letter
from Burke to a young artist of the name of Barrow, full of excellent
sense, advising him by no means to give up his profession as an engraver
till he was sure he could succeed as a painter, out of idle ambition and
an unfounded contempt for the humbler and more laborious walks of life.
‘I could not have thought it of him,’ said Northcote; ‘I confess he
never appeared to me so great a man.’ I asked what kind of looking man
he was? Northcote answered, ‘You have seen the picture? There was
something I did not like; a thinness in the features, and an expression
of _hauteur_, though mixed with condescension and the manners of a
gentleman. I can’t help thinking he had a hand in the Discourses; that
he gave some of the fine, graceful turns; for Sir Joshua paid a greater
deference to him than to any body else, and put up with freedoms that he
would only have submitted to from some peculiar obligation. Indeed, Miss
Reynolds used to complain that whenever any of Burke’s poor Irish
relations came over, they were all poured in upon them to dinner; but
Sir Joshua never took any notice, but bore it all with the greatest
patience and tranquillity. To be sure, there was another reason: he
expected Burke to write his Life, and for this he would have paid almost
any price. This was what made him submit to the intrusions of Boswell,
to the insipidity of Malone, and to the magisterial dictation of Burke:
he made sure that out of these three one would certainly write his Life,
and ensure him immortality that way. He thought no more of the person
who actually did write it afterwards than he would have suspected his
dog of writing it. Indeed, I wish he could have known; for it would have
been of some advantage to me, and he might have left me something not to
dwell on his defects; though he was as free from them as any man; but
you can make any one ridiculous with whom you live on terms of intimacy.
‘I remember an instance of this that happened with respect to old Mr. M—
whom you must have heard me speak of, and who was esteemed an idol by
Burke, Dr. Johnson, and many others. Sir Joshua wanted to reprint his
Sermons and prefix a Life to them, and asked me to get together any
particulars I could learn of him. So I gave him a manuscript account of
Mr. M—, written by an old school-fellow of his (Mr. Fox, a dissenting
minister in the West of England); after which I heard no more of the
Life. Mr. M— was in fact a man of extraordinary talents and great
eloquence; and by representing in a manner the High-Church notions both
of Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua (for both were inclined the same way) they
came to consider him as a sort of miracle of virtue and wisdom. There
was, however, something in Mr. Fox’s plain account that would strike Sir
Joshua, for he had an eye for nature; and he would at once perceive it
was nearer the truth than Dr. Johnson’s pompous character of him, which
was proper only for a tombstone—it was like one of Kneller’s
portraits,—it would do for any body! That,’ said Northcote, ‘is old Mr.
M—’s definition of beauty, which Sir Joshua has adopted in the
Discourses—that it is the _medium of form_. For what is a handsome nose?
A long nose is not a handsome nose; neither is a short nose a handsome
one: it must then be one that is neither long nor short, but in the
middle between both. Even Burke bowed to his authority; and Sir Joshua
thought him the wisest man he ever knew. Once when Sir Joshua was
expressing his impatience of some innovation, and I said, “At that rate,
the Christian Religion could never have been established.” “Oh!” he
said, “Mr. M— has answered that!” which seemed to satisfy him.’
I made some remark that I wondered he did not come up to London, though
the same feeling seemed to belong to other clever men born in Devonshire
(as Gandy) whose ambition was confined to their native county, so that
there must be some charm in the place. ‘You are to consider,’ he
replied, ‘it is almost a peninsula, so that there is no thorough-fare,
and people are therefore more stationary in one spot. It is for this
reason they necessarily intermarry among themselves, and you can trace
the genealogies of families for centuries back; whereas in other places,
and particularly here in London, where every thing of that kind is
jumbled together, you never know who any man’s grandfather was. There
are country-squires and plain gentry down in that part of the world, who
have occupied the same estates long before the Conquest (as the
Suckbitches in particular,—not a very sounding name) and who look down
upon the Courtneys and others as upstarts. Certainly, Devonshire for its
extent has produced a number of eminent men, Sir Joshua, the Mudges,
Dunning, Gay, Lord Chancellor King, Raleigh, Drake, and Sir Richard
Granville in Queen Elizabeth’s time, who made that gallant defence in an
engagement with the Spanish fleet, and was the ancestor of Pope’s Lord
Lansdowne, “What Muse for Granville will refuse to sing, &c.” Foster,
the celebrated preacher, was also, I believe, from the West of England.
He first became popular from the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke stopping in
the porch of his chapel in the Old Jewry, out of a shower of rain; and
thinking he might as well hear what was going on, he went in, and was so
well pleased that he sent all the great folks to hear him, and he was
run after as much as Irving has been in our time. An old fellow-student
from the country, going to wait on him at his house in London, found a
Shakspeare on the window-seat; and remarking the circumstance with some
surprise as out of the usual course of clerical studies, the other
apologised by saying that he wished to know something of the world, that
his situation and habits precluded him from the common opportunities,
and that he found no way of supplying the deficiency so agreeable or
effectual as looking into a volume of Shakspeare. Pope has immortalised
him in the well-known lines:—
‘Let modest Foster, if he will, excel
Ten Metropolitans in preaching well!’
Dr. Mudge, the son of Mr. Zachary Mudge, who was a physician, was an
intimate friend of my father’s, and I remember him perfectly well. He
was one of the most delightful persons I ever knew. Every one was
enchanted with his society. It was not wit that he possessed, but such
perfect cheerfulness and good-humour, that it was like health coming
into the room. He was a most agreeable companion, quite natural and
unaffected. His reading was the most beautiful I have ever heard. I
remember his once reading Moore’s fable of the _Female Seducers_ with
such feeling and sweetness that every one was delighted, and Dr. Mudge
himself was so much affected that he burst into tears in the middle of
it. The family are still respectable, but derive their chief lustre from
the first two founders, like clouds that reflect the sun’s rays, after
he has sunk below the horizon, but in time turn grey and are lost in
obscurity!’
I asked Northcote if he had ever happened to meet with a letter of
Warburton’s in answer to one of Dr. Doddridge’s, complimenting the
author of the _Divine Legation of Moses_ on the evident zeal and
earnestness with which he wrote—to which the latter candidly replied,
that he wrote with great haste and unwillingness; that he never sat down
to compose till the printer’s boy was waiting at the door for the
manuscript, and that he should never write at all but as a relief to a
morbid lowness of spirits, and to drive away uneasy thoughts that often
assailed him.[91] ‘That indeed,’ observed Northcote, ‘gives a different
turn to the statement; I thought at first it was only the common
coquetry both of authors and artists, to be supposed to do what excites
the admiration of others with the greatest ease and indifference, and
almost without knowing what they are about. If what surprises _you_
costs them nothing, the wonder is so much increased. When Michael Angelo
proposed to fortify his native city, Florence, and he was desired to
keep to his painting and sculpture, he answered, that those were his
recreations, but what he really understood was architecture. That is
what Sir Joshua considers as the praise of Rubens, that he seemed to
make a play-thing of the art. In fact, the work is never complete unless
it has this appearance: and therefore Sir Joshua has laid himself open
to criticism, in saying that ‘a picture must not only be done well, it
must seem to have been done easily.’ It cannot be said to be done well,
unless it has this look. That is the fault of those laboured and timid
productions of the modern French and Italian schools; they are the
result of such a tedious, petty, mechanical process, that it is as
difficult for you to admire as it has been for the artist to execute
them. Whereas, when a work seems stamped on the canvas by a blow, you
are taken by surprise; and your admiration is as instantaneous and
electrical as the impulse of genius which has caused it. I have seen a
whole-length portrait by Velasquez, that seemed done while the colours
were yet wet; every thing was touched in, as it were, by a wish; there
was such a power that it thrilled through your whole frame, and you felt
as if you could take up the brush and do any thing. It is this sense of
power and freedom which delights and communicates its own inspiration,
just as the opposite drudgery and attention to details is painful and
disheartening. There was a little picture of one of the Infants of Spain
on horseback, also by Velasquez, which Mr. Agar had,[92] and with which
Gainsborough was so transported, that he said in a fit of bravado to the
servant who showed it, “Tell your master I will give him a thousand
pounds for that picture.” Mr. Agar began to consider what pictures he
could purchase with the money if he parted with this, and at last,
having made up his mind, sent Gainsborough word he might have the
picture; who not at all expecting this result, was a good deal confused,
and declared, however he might admire it, he could not afford to give so
large a sum for it.’
CONVERSATION THE SEVENTH
Northcote complained of being unwell, though he said he could hardly
expect it to be otherwise at his age. He must think of making up the
accounts of his life, such as it had been, though he added (checking
himself) that he ought not to say that, for he had had his share of good
as well as others. He had been reading in Boccaccio, where it was
frequently observed, that ‘such a one departed this _wretched_ life at
such a time;’—so that in Boccaccio’s time they complained of the
wretchedness of life as much as we do. He alluded to an expression of
Coleridge’s, which he had seen quoted in a newspaper, and which he
thought very fine, ‘That an old Gothic cathedral always seemed to him
like a petrified religion!’ Some one asked, Why does he not go and turn
Black Monk? Because, I said, he never does anything that he should do.
‘There are some things,’ said N., ‘with respect to which I am in the
same state that a blind man is as to colours. Homer is one of these. I
am utterly in the dark about it. I can make nothing of his heroes or his
Gods. Whether this is owing to my not knowing the language or to a
change of manners, I cannot say.’ He was here interrupted by the
entrance of the beautiful Mrs. G—, beautiful even in years. She said she
had brought him a book to look at. She could not stop, for she had a
lady waiting for her below, but she would call in some morning and have
a long chat. After she was gone, I remarked how handsome she still was;
and he said, ‘I don’t know why she is so kind as to come, except that I
am the last link in the chain that connects her with all those she most
esteemed when she was young, Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith—and remind her
of the most delightful period of her life.’ I said, Not only so, but you
remember what she was at twenty; and you thus bring back to her the
triumphs of her youth—that pride of beauty which must be the more fondly
cherished as it has no external vouchers, and lives chiefly in the bosom
of its once lovely possessor. In her, however, the Graces had triumphed
over time; she was one of Ninon de l’Enclos’ people, of the list of the
Immortals. I could almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room,
looking round with complacency. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘that is what Sir
Joshua used to mention as the severest test of beauty—it was not then
_skin-deep_ only. She had gone through all the stages, and had lent a
grace to each. There are beauties that are old in a year. Take away the
bloom and freshness of youth, and there is no trace of what they were.
Their beauty is not grounded in first principles. Good temper is one of
the great preservers of the features.’ I observed, it was the same in
the mind as in the body. There were persons of premature ability who
soon ran to seed, and others who made no figure till they were advanced
in life. I had known several who were very clever at seventeen or
eighteen, but who had turned out nothing afterwards. ‘That is what my
father used to say, that at that time of life the effervescence and
intoxication of youth did a great deal, but that we must wait till the
gaiety and dance of the animal spirits had subsided to see what people
really were. It is wonderful’ (said Northcote, reverting to the former
subject) ‘what a charm there is in those early associations, in whatever
recals that first dawn and outset of life. _Jack-the-Giant-Killer_ is
the first book I ever read, and I cannot describe the pleasure it gives
me even now. I cannot look into it without my eyes filling with tears. I
do not know what it is (whether good or bad), but it is to me, from
early impressions, the most heroic of performances. I remember once not
having money to buy it, and I transcribed it all out with my own hand.
This is what I was going to say about Homer. I cannot help thinking that
one cause of the high admiration in which it is held is its being the
first book that is put into the hands of young people at school: it is
the first spell which opens to them the enchantments of the unreal
world. Had I been bred a scholar, I dare say Homer would have been my
Jack-the-Giant-Killer!—There is an innocence and simplicity in that
early age which makes every thing relating to it delightful. It seems to
me that it is the absence of all affectation or even of _consciousness_,
that constitutes the perfection of nature or art. That is what makes it
so interesting to see girls and boys dancing at school—there is such
natural gaiety and freedom, such unaffected, unpretending, unknown
grace. That is the true dancing, and not what you see at the Opera. And
again, in the most ordinary actions of children, what an ease, what a
playfulness, what flames of beauty do they throw out without being in
the smallest degree aware of it! I have sometimes thought it a pity
there should be such a precious essence, and that those who possess it
should be quite ignorant of it: yet if they knew it, that alone would
kill it! The whole depends on the utter absence of all egotism, of the
remotest reflection upon self. It is the same in works of art—the
simplest are the best. That is what makes me hate those _stuffed_
characters that are so full of themselves that I think they cannot have
much else in them. A man who admires himself prevents me from admiring
him, just as by praising himself he stops my mouth; though the vulgar
take their cue from a man’s opinion of himself, and admire none but
coxcombs and pedants. This is the best excuse for impudence and
quackery, that the world will not be gained without it. The true
favourites of Nature, however, have their eyes turned towards the
Goddess, instead of looking at themselves in the glass. There is no
pretence or assumption about them. It seems difficult indeed for any one
who is the object of attention to others not to be thinking of himself:
but the greatest men have always been the most free from this bias, the
weakest have been the soonest puffed up by self-conceit. If you had
asked Correggio why he painted as he did, he would have answered,
“Because he could not help it.” Look at Dryden’s verses, which he wrote
just like a school-boy who brings up his task without knowing whether he
shall be rewarded or flogged for it. Do you suppose he wrote the
description of Cymon for any other reason than because he could not help
it, or that he had any more power to stop himself in his headlong career
than the mountain-torrent? Or turn to Shakspeare, who evidently does not
know the value, the _dreadful_ value (as I may say) of the expressions
he uses. Genius gathers up its beauties, like the child, without knowing
whether they are weeds or flowers: those productions that are destined
to give forth an everlasting odour, grow up without labour or design.’
Mr. P— came in, and complimenting Northcote on a large picture he was
about, the latter said, It was his last great work: he was getting too
old for such extensive undertakings. His friend replied, that Titian
went on painting till near a hundred. ‘Aye,’ said Northcote, ‘but he had
the Devil to help him, and I have never been able to retain him in my
service. It is a dreadful thing to see an immense blank canvas spread
out before you to commit sins upon.’ Something was said of the Academy,
and P— made answer, ‘I know your admiration of corporate bodies.’ N.
said, ‘They were no worse than others; they all began well and ended
ill. When the Academy first began, one would suppose that the Members
were so many angels sent from heaven to fill the different situations,
and that was the reason why it began: now the difficulty was to find any
body fit for them, and the deficiency was supplied by interest,
intrigue, and cabal. Not that I object to the individuals neither. As
Swift said, I like Jack, Tom, and Harry very well by themselves; but
altogether, they are not to be endured. We see the effect of people
acting in concert in animals (for men are only a more vicious sort of
animals): a single dog will let you kick and cuff him as you please, and
will submit to any treatment; but if you meet a pack of hounds, they
will set upon you and tear you to pieces with the greatest impudence.’
P.: ‘The same complaint was made of the Academy in Barry’s time, which
is now thirty or forty years ago.’[93] NORTHCOTE: ‘Oh! yes, they very
soon degenerated. It is the same in all human institutions. The thing
is, there has been no way found yet to keep the Devil out. It will be a
curious thing to see whether that experiment of the American Government
will last. If it does, it will be the first instance of the kind.’ P.:
‘I should think not. There is something very complicated and mysterious
in the mode of their Elections, which I am given to understand are
managed in an under-hand manner by the leaders of parties; and besides,
in all governments the great _desideratum_ is to combine activity with a
freedom from selfish passions. But it unfortunately happens that in
human life, the selfish passions are the strongest and most active; and
on this rock society seems to split. There is a certain period in a
man’s life when he is at his best (when he combines the activity of
youth with the experience of manhood), after which he declines; and
perhaps it may be the same with states. Things are not best in the
beginning or at the end, but in the middle, which is but a point.’
NORTHCOTE: ‘Nothing stands still; it therefore either grows better or
worse. When a thing has reached its utmost perfection, it then borders
on excess; and excess leads to ruin and decay.’
Lord G. had bought a picture of Northcote’s: an allusion was made to his
enormous and increasing wealth. Northcote said he could be little the
better for it. After a certain point, it became a mere nominal
distinction. He only thought of that which passed through his hands and
fell under his immediate notice. He knew no more of the rest than you or
I did: he was merely perplexed by it. This was what often made persons
in his situation tenacious of the most trifling sums, for this was the
only positive or tangible wealth they had: the remote contingency was
like a thing in the clouds, or mountains of silver and gold seen in the
distant horizon. It was the same with Nollekens: he died worth £200,000:
but the money he had accumulated at his banker’s was out of his reach
and contemplation—_out of sight, out of mind_—he was only muddling about
with what he had in his hands, and lived like a beggar in actual fear of
want. P. said, he was an odd little man, but he believed clever in his
profession. Northcote assented, and observed ‘he was an instance of what
might be done by concentrating the attention on a single object. If you
collect the rays of the sun in a focus, you could set any object on
fire. Great talents were often dissipated to no purpose: but time and
patience conquered every thing. Without them, you could do nothing. So
Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the
fiddle, answered—“Twelve hours a-day for twenty years together.” A few
great geniuses may trifle with the arts, like Rubens; but in general
nothing can be more fatal than to suppose one’s-self a great genius.’ P.
observed, that in common business those who gave up their whole time and
thoughts to any pursuit generally succeeded in it, though far from
bright men: and we often found those who had acquired a name for some
one excellence, people of moderate capacity in other respects. After Mr.
P. was gone, Northcote said he was one of the persons of the soundest
judgment he had ever known, and like Mr. P. H. the least liable to be
imposed upon by appearances. Northcote made the remark that he thought
it improper in any one to refuse lending a favourite picture for public
exhibition, as it seemed not exclusively to belong to one person. A
jewel of this value belongs rather to the public than to the individual.
Consider the multitudes you deprive of an advantage they cannot receive
again: the idle of amusement, the studious of instruction and
improvement. I said, this kind of indifference to the wishes of the
public was _sending the world to Coventry_! We then spoke of a
celebrated courtier, of whom I said I was willing to believe every thing
that was amiable, though I had some difficulty, while thinking of him,
to keep the _valet_ out of my head. NORTHCOTE: ‘He has certainly
endeavoured to behave well; but there is no altering character. I myself
might have been a courtier if I could have cringed and held my tongue;
but I could no more exist in that element than a fish out of water. At
one time I knew Lord R. and Lord H. S—, who were intimate with the
Prince and recommended my pictures to him. Sir Joshua once asked me,
“What do you know of the Prince of —, that he so often speaks to me
about you?” I remember I made him laugh by my answer, for I said, “Oh!
he knows nothing of me, nor I of him—it’s only his _bragging_!”—“Well,”
said he, “that is spoken like a King!”‘... It was to-day I asked leave
to write down one or two of these Conversations: he said ‘I might, if I
thought it worth while; but I do assure you that you overrate them. You
have not lived enough in society to be a judge. What is new to you, you
think will seem so to others. To be sure, there is one thing, I have had
the advantage of having lived in good society myself. I not only passed
a great deal of my younger days in the company of Reynolds, Johnson, and
that circle, but I was brought up among the Mudges, of whom Sir Joshua
(who was certainly used to the most brilliant society of the metropolis)
thought so highly, that he had them at his house for weeks, and even
sometimes gave up his own bed-room to receive them. Yet they were not
thought superior to several other persons at Plymouth, who were
distinguished, some for their satirical wit, others for their delightful
fancy, others for their information or sound sense, and with all of whom
my father was familiar when I was a boy. Really after what I recollect
of these, some of the present people appear to me mere wretched
pretenders, muttering out their own emptiness.’ I said, We had a
specimen of Lord Byron’s _Conversations_. NORTHCOTE.—‘Yes; but he was a
tyrant, and a person of that disposition never learns any thing, because
he will only associate with inferiors. If, however, you think you can
make any thing of it and can keep clear of personalities, I have no
objection to your trying; only I think after the first attempt, you will
give it up as turning out quite differently from what you expected.’
CONVERSATION THE EIGHTH
Northcote spoke again of Sir Joshua, and said, he was in some degree
ignorant of what might be called the _grammatical_ part of the art, or
scholarship of academic skill; but he made up for it by an eye for
nature, or rather by a feeling of harmony and beauty. Dance (he that was
afterwards Sir Nathaniel Holland) drew the figure well, gave a strong
likeness and a certain studied air to his portraits; yet they were so
stiff and forced that they seemed as if put into a _vice_. Sir Joshua,
with the defect of proportion and drawing, threw his figures into such
natural and graceful attitudes, that they might be taken for the very
people sitting or standing there. An arm might be too long or too short,
but from the apparent ease of the position he had chosen, it looked like
a real arm and neither too long nor too short. The mechanical
measurements might be wrong: the general conception of nature and
character was right; and this, which he felt most strongly himself, he
conveyed in a corresponding degree to the spectator. Nature is not one
thing, but a variety of things, considered under different points of
view; and he who seizes forcibly and happily on any one of these, does
enough for fame. He will be the most popular artist, who gives that view
with which the world in general sympathise. A merely professional
reputation is not very extensive, nor will it last long. W—, who prided
himself on his drawing, had no idea of any thing but a certain rigid
_outline_, never considering the use of the limbs in moving, the effects
of light and shade, &c. so that his figures, even the best of them, look
as if cut out of wood. Therefore no one now goes to see them: while Sir
Joshua’s are as much sought after as ever, from their answering to a
feeling in the mind, though deficient as literal representations of
external nature. Speaking of artists who were said, in the cant of
connoisseurship, to be jealous of their outline, he said, ‘Rembrandt was
not one of these. He took good care to lose it as fast as he could.’
Northcote then spoke of the breadth of Titian, and observed, that though
particularly in his early pictures, he had finished highly and copied
every thing from nature, this never interfered with the general effect,
there was no confusion or littleness: he threw such a broad light on the
objects, that every thing was seen in connection with the masses and in
its place. He then mentioned some pictures of his own, some of them
painted forty years ago, that had lately sold very well at a sale at
Plymouth: he was much gratified at this, and said it was almost like
looking out of the grave to see how one’s reputation got on.
Northcote told an anecdote of Sir George B—, to show the credulity of
mankind. When a young man, he put an advertisement in the papers to say
that a Mynheer —, just come over from Germany, had found out a method of
taking a likeness much superior to any other by the person’s looking
into a mirror and having the glass heated so as to bake the impression.
He stated this wonderful artist to live at a perfumer’s shop in
Bond-street, opposite to an hotel where he lodged, and amused himself
the next day to see the numbers of people who flocked to have their
likenesses taken in this surprising manner. At last, he went over
himself to ask for Monsieur —, and was driven out of the shop by the
perfumer in a rage, who said there was no Monsieur — nor Monsieur
_Devil_ lived there. At another time Sir G. was going in a coach to a
tavern with a party of gay young men. The waiter came to the coach-door
with a light, and as he was holding this up to the others, those who had
already got out went round, and getting in at the opposite coach-door
came out again, so that there seemed to be no end of the procession, and
the waiter ran into the house, frightened out of his wits. The same
story is told of Swift and four clergymen dressed in canonicals.
Speaking of titles, Northcote said, ‘It was strange what blunders were
often made in this way. R—, (the engraver) had stuck Lord John Boringdon
under his print after Sir Joshua—it should be John Lord Boringdon—and he
calls the Earl of Carlisle Lord Carlisle—Lord Carlisle denotes only a
Baron. I was once dining at Sir John Leicester’s, and a gentleman who
was there was expressing his wonder what connection a Prince of Denmark
and a Duke of Gloucester could have with Queen Anne, that prints of them
should be inserted in a history that he had just purchased of her reign.
No other, I said, than that one of them was her son, and the other her
husband. The boy died when he was eleven years old of a fever caught at
a ball dancing, or he would have succeeded to the throne. He was a very
promising youth, though that indeed is what is said of all princes.
Queen Anne took his death greatly to heart, and that was the reason why
she never would appoint a successor. She wished her brother to come in,
rather than the present family. That makes me wonder, after thrones have
been overturned and kingdoms torn asunder to keep the Catholics out, to
see the pains that are now taken to bring them in. It was this that made
the late King say it was inconsistent with his Coronation-oath. Not that
I object to tolerate any religion (even the Jewish), but they are the
only one that will not tolerate any other. They are such devils (what
with their cunning, their numbers, and their zeal), that if they once
get a footing, they will never rest till they get the whole power into
their hands. It was but the other day that the Jesuits nearly overturned
the empire of China; and if they were obliged to make laws and take the
utmost precautions against their crafty encroachments, shall we open a
door to them, who have only just escaped out of their hands?’ I said, I
had thrown a radical reformer into a violent passion lately by
maintaining that the Pope and Cardinals of Rome were a set of as
good-looking men as so many Protestant Bishops or Methodist parsons, and
that the Italians were the only people who seemed to have any faith in
their religion as an object of imagination or feeling. My opponent grew
almost black in the face, while inveighing against the enormous
absurdity of transubstantiation; it was in vain I pleaded the beauty,
innocence, and cheerfulness of the peasant-girls near Rome, who believed
in this dreadful superstition, and who thought me _damned_ and would
probably have been glad to see me burnt at a stake as a heretic. At
length I said, that I thought reason and truth very excellent things in
themselves; and that when I saw the rest of the world grow as fond of
them as they were of absurdity and superstition, I should be entirely of
his way of thinking; but I liked an interest in something (a wafer or a
crucifix) better than an interest in nothing. What have philosophers
gained by unloosing their hold of the _ideal_ world, but to be hooted at
and pelted by the rabble, and envied and vilified by one another for
want of a common bond of union and interest between them? I just now met
the son of an old literary friend in the street, who seemed disposed to
_cut_ me for some hereditary pique, jealousy, or mistrust. Suppose his
father and I had been Catholic priests (saving the _bar-sinister_) how
different would have been my reception! He is short-sighted indeed; but
had I been a Cardinal, he would have seen me fast enough: the costume
alone would have assisted him. Where there is no frame-work of
respectability founded on the _esprit de corps_ and on public opinion
cemented into a prejudice, the jarring pretensions of individuals fall
into a chaos of elementary particles, neutralising each other by mutual
antipathy, and soon become the sport and laughter of the multitude.
Where the whole is referred to intrinsic, real merit, this creates a
standard of conceit, egotism, and envy in every one’s own mind, lowering
the class, not raising the individual. A Catholic priest walking along
the street is looked up to as a link in the chain let down from heaven:
a poet or philosopher is looked down upon as a poor creature, deprived
of certain advantages, and with very questionable pretensions in other
respects. Abstract intellect requires the weight of the other world to
be thrown into the scale, to make it a match for the prejudices,
vulgarity, ignorance, and selfishness of this! ‘You are right,’ said
Northcote. ‘It was Archimedes who said he could move the earth if he had
a place to fix his levers on: the priests have always found this
_purchase_ in the skies. After all, we have not much reason to complain,
if they give us so splendid a reversion to look forward to. That is what
I said to G— when he had been trying to unsettle the opinions of a young
artist whom I knew. Why should you wish to turn him out of one house,
till you have provided another for him? Besides, what do you know of the
matter more than he does? His nonsense is as good as your nonsense, when
both are equally in the dark. As to what your friend said of the follies
of the Catholics, I do not think that the Protestants can pretend to be
quite free from them. So when a chaplain of Lord Bath’s was teazing a
Popish clergyman to know how he could make up his mind to admit that
absurdity of Transubstantiation, the other made answer, “Why, I’ll tell
you: when I was young, I was taught to swallow Adam’s Apple; and since
that, I have found no difficulty with any thing else!” We may say what
we will of the Catholic religion; but it is more easy to abuse than to
overturn it. I have for myself no objection to it but its insatiable
ambition, and its being such a dreadful engine of power. It is its very
perfection as a system of profound policy and moral influence, that
renders it so formidable. Indeed, I have been sometimes suspected of a
leaning to it myself; and when Godwin wrote his _Life of Chaucer_, he
was said to have turned Papist from his making use of something I had
said to him about confession. I don’t know but unfair advantages may be
taken of it for state-purposes; but I cannot help thinking it is of
signal benefit in the regulation of private life. If servants have
cheated or lied or done any thing wrong, they are obliged to tell it to
the priest, which makes them bear it in mind, and then a certain penance
is assigned which they must go through, though they do not like it. All
this acts as a timely check, which is better than letting them go on
till their vices get head, and then hanging them! The Great indeed may
buy themselves off (as where are they not privileged?) but this
certainly does not apply to the community at large. I remember our
saying to that old man (a Dominican friar) whose picture you see there,
that we wished he could be made a Royal Confessor; to which he replied,
that he would not for the world be Confessor to a King, because it would
prevent him from the conscientious discharge of his duty. In former
times, in truth, the traffic in indulgences was carried to great
lengths; and this it was that broke up the system and gave a handle to
the Protestants. The excellence of the scheme produced the power, and
then the power led to the abuse of it. Infidel Popes went the farthest
in extending the privileges of the Church; and being held back by no
scruples of faith or conscience, nearly ruined it. When some pious
ecclesiastic was insisting to Leo X. on the necessity of reforming
certain scandalous abuses, he pointed to a crucifix and said, “Behold
the fate of a reformer! The system, as it is, is good enough for us!”
They have taken the morality of the Gospel and engrafted upon it a
system of superstition and priestcraft; but still perhaps the former
prevails over the latter. Even that duty of humanity to animals is
beautifully provided for; for on St. Antony’s day, the patron of
animals, the horses, &c. pass under a certain arch, and the priest
sprinkles the Holy Water over them, so that they are virtually taken
under the protection of the church. We think we have a right to treat
them any how, because they have no souls. The Roman Catholic is not a
barbarous religion; and it is also much milder than it was. This is a
necessary consequence of the state of things. When three Englishmen were
presented to Benedict XIV. (Lambertini) who was a man of wit and
letters, he observed to them smiling, “I know that you must look upon
our religion as false and spurious, but I suppose you will have no
objection to receive the blessing of an old man!” When Fuseli and I were
there, an Englishman of the name of Brown had taken the pains to convert
a Roman artist: the Englishman was sent from Rome, and the student was
taken to the Inquisition, where he was shown the hooks in the wall and
the instruments of torture used in former times, reprimanded, and soon
after dismissed.’ I asked Northcote whereabouts the Inquisition was? He
said, ‘In a street behind the Vatican.’ He and Mr. Prince Hoare once
took shelter in the portico out of a violent shower of rain, and
considered it a great piece of inhumanity to be turned out into the
street. He then noticed a curious mistake in Mrs. Radcliffe’s ITALIAN,
where some one is brought from Naples to the Inquisition, and made to
enter Rome through the Porta di Popolo, and then the other streets on
the English side of Rome are described with great formality, which is as
if any one was described as coming by the coach from Exeter, and after
entering at Whitechapel, proceeding through Cheapside and the Strand to
Charing Cross. Northcote related a story told him by Nollekens of a
singular instance of the effects of passion that he saw in the
Trastevere, the oldest and most disorderly part of Rome.[94] Two women
were quarrelling, when having used the most opprobrious language, one of
them drew a knife from her bosom, and tried to plunge it into her
rival’s breast, but missing her blow and the other retiring to a short
distance and laughing at her, in a fit of impotent rage she struck it
into her own bosom. Her passion had been worked up to an uncontrolable
pitch, and being disappointed of its first object, must find vent
somewhere. I remarked it was what we did every day of our lives in a
less degree, according to the vulgar proverb of _cutting off one’s nose
to spite one’s face_!
Northcote then returned to the subject of the sale of his pictures. He
said it was a satisfaction, though a melancholy one, to think that one’s
works might fetch more after one’s death than during one’s life-time. He
had once shewn Farington a landscape of Wilson’s, for which a gentleman
had given three hundred guineas at the first word; and Farington said he
remembered Wilson’s painting it, and how delighted he was when he got
thirty pounds for it. Barrett rode in his coach, while Wilson nearly
starved and was obliged to borrow ten pounds to go and die in Wales: yet
he used to say that his pictures would be admired, when the name of
Barrett was forgotten. Northcote said he also thought it a great
hardship upon authors, that copyright should be restricted to a few
years, instead of being continued for the benefit of the family, as in
the case of Hudibras, Paradise Lost, and other works, by which
booksellers made fortunes every year, though the descendants of the
authors were still living in obscurity and distress. I said that in
France a successful drama brought something to the author or his heirs
every time it was acted. Northcote seemed to approve of this, and
remarked that he always thought it very hard upon Richardson, just at
the time he had brought out his Pamela or Clarissa, to have it pirated
by an Irish bookseller through a treacherous servant whom he kept in his
shop, and thus to lose all the profits of his immortal labours.
CONVERSATION THE NINTH
Northcote remarked to-day that artists were more particular than authors
as to character—the latter did not seem to care whom they associated
with. He, N—, was disposed to attribute this to greater refinement of
moral perception in his own profession. I said I thought it was owing to
authors being more upon the town than painters, who were dependent upon
particular individuals and in a manner accountable to them for the
persons they might be seen in company with or might occasionally bring
into contact with them. For instance, I said I thought H— was wrong in
asking me to his _Private Day_, where I might meet with Lord M—, who was
so loyal a man that he affected not to know that such a person as
Admiral Blake had ever existed. On the same principle this Noble Critic
was blind to the merit of Milton, in whom he could see nothing, though
Mr. Pitt had been at the pains to repeat several fine passages to him.
N— said, ‘It’s extraordinary how particular the world sometimes are, and
what prejudices they take up against people, even where there is no
objection to character, merely on the score of opinion. There is G—, who
is a very good man; yet when Mr. H— and myself wished to introduce him
at the house of a lady who lives in a round of society, and has a strong
tinge of the _blue-stocking_, she would not hear of it. The sound of the
name seemed to terrify her. It was his _writings_ she was afraid of.
Even Cosway made a difficulty too.’
I replied—‘I should not have expected this of him, who was as great a
visionary and as violent a politician as any body could be.’
NORTHCOTE—‘It passed off in Cosway as whim. He was one of those
butterfly characters that nobody minded: so that his opinion went for
nothing: but it would not do to bring any one else there, whose opinion
might be more regarded and equally unpalatable. G—’s case is
particularly hard in this respect: he is a profligate in theory, and a
bigot in conduct. He does not seem at all to practise what he preaches,
though this does not appear to avail him any thing.’—‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he
writes, against himself. He has written against matrimony, and has been
twice married. He has scouted all the common-place duties, and yet is a
good husband and a kind father. He is a strange composition of contrary
qualities. He is a cold formalist, and full of ardour and enthusiasm of
mind; dealing in magnificent projects and petty cavils; naturally dull,
and brilliant by dint of study; pedantic and playful; a dry logician and
a writer of romances.’
‘You describe him,’ said N—, ‘as I remember Baretti once did Sir Joshua
Reynolds at his own table, saying to him, “You are extravagant and mean,
generous and selfish, envious and candid, proud and humble, a genius and
a mere ordinary mortal at the same time.” I may not remember his exact
words, but that was their effect. The fact was, Sir Joshua was a mixed
character, like the rest of mankind in that respect; but knew his own
failings, and was on his guard to keep them back as much as possible,
though the defects would break out sometimes.’ ‘G—, on the contrary,’ I
said, ‘is aiming to let his out and to magnify them into virtues in a
kind of hot-bed of speculation. He is shocking on paper and tame in
reality.’
‘How is that?’ said Northcote.
‘Why, I think it is easy enough to be accounted for; he is naturally a
cold speculative character, and indulges in certain metaphysical
extravagances as an agreeable exercise for the imagination, which alarm
persons of a grosser temperament, but to which he attaches no practical
consequences whatever. So it has been asked how some very immoral or
irreligious writers, such as Helveticus and others, have been remarked
to be men of good moral character? and I think the answer is the same.
Persons of a studious, phlegmatic disposition can with impunity give a
license to their thoughts, which they are under no temptation to reduce
into practice. The sting is taken out of evil by their constitutional
indifference, and they look on virtue and vice as little more than words
without meaning or the black and white pieces of the chess-board, in
combining which the same skill and ingenuity may be shewn. More depraved
and combustible temperaments are warned of the danger of any latitude of
opinion by their very proneness to mischief, and are forced by a secret
consciousness to impose the utmost restraint both upon themselves and
others. The greatest prudes are not always supposed to be the greatest
enemies to pleasure. Besides, authors are very much confined by habit to
a life of study and speculation, sow their wild oats in their books, and
unless where their passions are very strong indeed, take their swing in
theory and conform in practice to the ordinary rules and examples of the
world.’
Northcote said, ‘Certainly people are tenacious of appearances in
proportion to the depravity of manners, as we may see in the simplicity
of country-places. To be sure, a rake like Hodge in _Love in a Village_
gets amongst them now and then; but in general they do many gross things
without the least notion of impropriety, as if vice were a thing they
had no more to do with than children.’ He then mentioned an instance of
some young country-people who had to sleep on the floor in the same room
and they parted the men from the women by some sacks of corn, which
served for a line of demarcation and an inviolable partition between
them. I told N— a story of a countrywoman who coming to an inn in the
West of England wanted a bed; and being told they had none to spare,
still persisted till the landlady said in a joke, ‘I tell you, good
woman, I have none, unless you can prevail with the ostler to give you
half of his.’—‘Well,’ said she, ‘if he is a sober, prudent man, I should
not mind.’
Something was then said of the manners of people abroad, who sometimes
managed to unite an absence of _mauvaise honte_ with what could hardly
be construed into an ignorance of vice. The Princess Borghese
(Buonaparte’s sister) who was no saint, sat to Canova for a model, and
being asked, ‘If she did not feel a little uncomfortable,’ answered,
‘No, there was a fire in the room.’
‘Custom,’ said N—, ‘makes a wonderful difference in taking off the
sharpness of the first inflammable impression. People for instance were
mightily shocked when they first heard that the boys at the Academy drew
from a living model. But the effect almost immediately wears off with
them. It is exactly like copying from a statue. The stillness, the
artificial light, the attention to what they are about, the publicity
even, draws off any idle thoughts, and they regard the figure and point
out its defects or beauties, precisely as if it were of clay or marble.’
I said I had perceived this effect myself, that the anxiety to copy the
object before one deadened every other feeling; but as this drew to a
close, the figure seemed almost like something coming to life again, and
that this was a very critical minute. He said, he found the students
sometimes watched the women out, though they were not of a very
attractive appearance, as none but those who were past their prime would
sit in this way: they looked upon it as an additional disgrace to what
their profession imposed upon them, and as something unnatural. One in
particular (he remembered) always came in a mask. Several of the young
men in his time had however been lured into a course of dissipation and
ruined by such connexions; one in particular, a young fellow of great
promise but affected, and who thought that profligacy was a part of
genius. I said, It was the easiest part. This was an advantage foreign
art had over ours. A battered courtesan sat for Sir Joshua’s Iphigene;
innocent girls sat for Canova’s Graces, as I had been informed.
Northcote asked, if I had sent my son to school? I said, I thought of
the Charter-House, if I could compass it. I liked those old established
places where learning grew for hundreds of years, better than any
new-fangled experiments or modern seminaries. He inquired if I had ever
thought of putting him to school on the Continent; to which I answered,
No, for I wished him to have an idea of home, before I took him abroad;
by beginning in the contrary method, I thought I deprived him both of
the habitual attachment to the one and of the romantic pleasure in the
other. N— observed there were very fine schools at Rome in his time, one
was an Italian, and another a Spanish College, at the last of which they
acted plays of Voltaire’s, such as Zara, Mahomet, &c. at some of which
he had been present. The hall that served for the theatre was
beautifully decorated; and just as the curtain was about to draw up, a
hatch-way was opened and showered down play-bills on their heads with
the names of the actors; such a part being by a Spanish Grandee of the
first class, another by a Spanish Grandee of the second class, and they
were covered with jewels of the highest value. Several Cardinals were
also present (who did not attend the public theatres) and it was easy to
gain admittance from the attention always shewn to strangers. N— then
spoke of the courtesy and decorum of the Roman clergy in terms of warm
praise, and said he thought it in a great measure owing to the conclave
being composed of dignitaries of all nations, Spanish, German, Italian,
which merged individual asperities and national prejudices in a spirit
of general philanthropy and mutual forbearance. I said I had never met
with a look from a Catholic priest (from the highest to the lowest) that
seemed to reproach me with being a _tramontane_. This absence of all
impertinence was to me the first of virtues. He repeated, I have no
fault to find with Italy. There may be vice in Rome, as in all great
capitals (though I did not see it)—but in Parma and the remoter towns,
they seem all like one great and exemplary family. Their kindness to
strangers was remarkable. He said he had himself travelled all the way
from Lyons to Genoa, and from Genoa to Rome without speaking a word of
the language and in the power of a single person without meeting with
the smallest indignity; and everywhere, both at the inns and on the
road, every attention was paid to his feelings, and pains taken to
alleviate the uncomfortableness of his situation. Set a Frenchman down
in England to go from London to York in the same circumstances, and see
what treatment he will be exposed to. He recollected a person of the
name of Gogain who had been educated in France and could not speak
English—on landing, he held out half-a-guinea to pay the boatman who had
rowed him only about twenty yards from the vessel, which the fellow put
in his pocket and left him without a single farthing. Abroad, he would
have been had before the magistrate for such a thing, and probably sent
to the galleys. There is a qualifying property in nature that makes most
things equal. In England they cannot drag you out of your bed to a
scaffold, or take an estate from you without some reason assigned: but
as the law prevents any flagrant acts of injustice, so it makes it more
difficult to obtain redress. ‘We pay,’ continued Northcote, ‘for every
advantage we possess by the loss of some other. Poor Goblet, the other
day, after making himself a drudge to Nollekens all his life, with
difficulty recovered eight hundred pounds compensation; and though he
was clearly entitled, by the will, to the models which the sculptor left
behind him, he was afraid to risk the law expenses, and gave it up.’
Some person had been remarking, that every one had a right to leave his
property to whom he pleased. ‘Not,’ said N—, ‘when he has promised it to
another.’ I asked if Mr. — was not the same person I had once seen come
into his painting-room, in a rusty black coat and brown worsted
stockings, very much with the air of a man who carries a pistol in an
inside pocket? He said, ‘It might be: he was a dull man, but a great
scholar—one of those described in the epigram:—
Oh! ho, quoth Time to Thomas Heame,
Whatever I forget, you learn.’
We then alluded to an attack of Cobbett’s on some spruce legacy-hunter,
quoted in the last Sunday’s Examiner; and N— spoke in raptures of the
power in Cobbett’s writings, and asked me if I had ever seen him. I
said, I had for a short time; that he called _rogue_ and _scoundrel_ at
every second word in the coolest way imaginable, and went on just the
same in a room as on paper.
I returned to what N— lately said of his travels in Italy, and asked if
there were fine Titians at Genoa or Naples. ‘Oh, yes!’ he said, ‘heaps
at the latter place. Titian had painted them for one of the Farnese
family; and when the second son succeeded the eldest as King of Spain,
the youngest, who was Prince of Parma, went to Naples, and took them
with him. There is that fine one (which you have heard me speak of) of
Paul III. and his two natural sons or nephews, as they were called. My
God! what a look it has! The old man is sitting in his chair, and
looking up to one of the sons, with his hands grasping the arm-chair,
and his long spider fingers, and seems to say (as plain as words can
speak), “You wretch! what do you want now?”—while the young fellow is
advancing with an humble hypocritical air. It is true history, as Fuseli
said, and indeed it turned out so; for the son (or nephew) was
afterwards thrown out of the palace-windows by the mob, and torn to
pieces by them.’ In speaking of the different degrees of information
abroad, he remarked, ‘One of the persons where I lodged at Rome did not
even know the family name of the reigning Pope, and only spoke of him as
the _Papa_; another person, who was also my landlady, knew all their
history, and could tell me the names of the Cardinals from my describing
their coats of arms to her.’
N— related an anecdote of Mr. Moore (brother of the general), who was on
board an English frigate in the American war, and coming in sight of
another vessel which did not answer their signals, they expected an
action, when the Captain called his men together, and addressed them in
the following manner:—‘You dirty, ill-looking blackguards! do you
suppose I can agree to deliver up such a set of scarecrows as you as
prisoners to that smart, frippery Frenchman? I can’t think of such a
thing. No! by G—d, you must fight till not a man of you is left, for I
should be ashamed of owning such a ragamuffin crew!’ This was received
with loud shouts and assurances of victory, but the vessel turned out to
be an English one.
I asked if he had seen the American novels, in one of which (the Pilot)
there was an excellent description of an American privateer expecting
the approach of an English man-of-war in a thick fog, when some one saw
what appeared to be a bright cloud rising over the fog, but it proved to
be the topsail of a seventy-four. N— thought this was striking, but had
not seen the book. ‘Was it one of I—’s?’ Oh! no, he is a mere trifler—a
_filigree_ man—an English _littérateur_ at second-hand; but the _Pilot_
gave a true and unvarnished picture of American character and manners.
The storm, the fight, the whole account of the ship’s crew, and in
particular of an old boatswain, were done to the life—every thing
Suffered a sea-change
Into something new and strange.
On land he did not do so well. The fault of American literature (when
not a mere vapid imitation of ours) was, that it ran too much into dry,
minute, literal description; or if it made an effort to rise above this
ground of matter-of-fact, it was forced and exaggerated, ‘horrors
accumulating on horror’s head.’ They had _no natural imagination_. This
was likely to be the case in a new country like America, where there
were no dim traces of the past—no venerable monuments—no romantic
associations; where all (except the physical) remained to be created,
and where fiction, if they attempted it, would take as preposterous and
extravagant a shape as their local descriptions were jejune and servile.
Cooper’s novels and Brown’s romances (something on the model of
Godwin’s) were the two extremes.
Some remark was made on the failure of a great bookseller, and on the
supposition that now we should find out the author of the Scotch novels.
‘Aye,’ said N—, ‘we shall find more than one.’ I said, I thought not; to
say nothing of the beauties, the peculiarities of style and grammar in
every page proved them to be by the same hand. Nobody else could write
so well—or so ill, in point of mere negligence. N— said, ‘It was a pity
he should fling away a fortune twice. There were some people who could
not keep money when they had got it. It was a kind of incontinence of
the purse. Zoffani did the same thing. He made a fortune in England by
his pictures, which he soon got rid of, and another in India, which went
the same way.’
We somehow got from Sir Walter to the Queen’s trial, and the scenes at
Brandenburg House. I said they were a strong illustration of that
instinct of servility—that _hankering_ after rank and power, which
appeared to me to be the base part of human nature. Here were all the
patriots and Jacobins of London and Westminster, who scorned and hated
the King, going to pay their homage to the Queen, and ready to worship
the very rags of royalty. The wives and daughters of popular
caricaturists and of forgotten demagogues were ready to pull caps in the
presence-chamber for precedence, till they were parted by Mr. Alderman
Wood. Every fool must go to kiss hands; ‘our maid’s aunt of Brentford’
must sip loyalty from the Queen’s hand! That was the true court to which
_they_ were admitted: the instant there was the smallest opening, all
must rush in, _tag-rag and bobtail_. All the fierceness of independence
and all the bristling prejudices of popular jealousy were smoothed down
in a moment by the velvet touch of the Queen’s hand! No matter what else
she was (whether her cause were right or wrong)—it was the mock-equality
with sovereign rank, the acting in a farce of state, that was the secret
charm. That was what drove them mad. The world must have something to
admire; and the more worthless and stupid their idol is, the better,
provided it is fine: for it equally flatters their appetite for wonder,
and hurts their self-love less. This is the reason why people formerly
were so fond of idols: they fell down and worshipped them, and made
others do the same, for theatrical effect; while, all the while, they
knew they were but wood and stone painted over. We in modern times have
got from the _dead_ to the _living_ idol, and bow to hereditary
imbecility. The less of genius and virtue, the greater our
self-complacency. We do not care how high the elevation, so that it is
wholly undeserved. True greatness excites our envy; mere rank, our
unqualified respect. That is the reason of our antipathy to new-made
dynasties, and of our acquiescence in old-established despotism. We
think _we_ could sit upon a throne, if we had had the good luck to be
born to one; but we feel that we have neither talent nor courage to
raise ourselves to one. If any one does, he seems to have got the start
of us; and we are glad to pull him back again. I remember Mr. R—, of
Liverpool (a very excellent man, and a good patriot,) saying, many years
ago, in reference to Buonaparte and George III., that ‘the superiority
of rank was quite enough for him, without the intellectual superiority.’
That is what has made so many renegadoes and furious Anti-Buonapartists
among our poets and politicians, because he got before them in the race
of power. N— ‘And the same thing made _you_ stick to him, because you
thought he was your fellow! It is wonderful how much of our virtues, as
well as of our vices, is referable to self. Did you ever read
Rochefoucault?’—Yes. ‘And don’t you think he is right?’ In a great
measure: but I like Mandeville better. He goes more into his subject.
‘Oh! he is a devil. There is a description of a clergyman’s hand he has
given, which I have always had in my eye whenever I have had to paint a
fine gentleman’s hand. I thought him too metaphysical, but it is long
since I read him. His book was burnt by the common hangman; was it not?’
Yes; but he did not at all like this circumstance, and is always
recurring to it.—‘No one can like this kind of condemnation, because
every sensible man knows he is not a judge in his own cause; and
besides, is conscious, if the verdict were on the other side, how ready
he would be to catch at it as decisive in his favour.’ I said, it was
amusing to see the way in which he fell upon Steele, Shaftesbury, and
other amiable writers, and the terror you were in for your favourites,
just as when a hawk is hovering over and going to pounce upon some of
the more harmless feathered tribe. He added, ‘It was surprising how
Swift had escaped with so little censure; but the _Gulliver’s Travels_
passed off as a story-book, and you might say in verse what you would be
pelted for in plain prose.—The same thing you have observed in politics
may be observed in religion too. You see the anxiety to divide and bring
nearer to our own level. The Creator of the universe is too high an
object for us to approach; the Catholics therefore have introduced the
Virgin Mary and a host of saints, with whom their votaries feel more at
their ease and on a par. The real object of worship is kept almost out
of sight. Dignum the singer (who is a Catholic) was arguing on this
subject with some one, who wanted to convert him, and he replied in his
own defence—“If you had a favour to ask of some great person, would you
not first apply to a common friend to intercede for you?”’ In some part
of the foregoing conversation, N— remarked that ‘West used to say, you
could always tell the highest nobility at court, from their profound
humility to the King: the others kept at a distance, and did not seem to
care about it. The more the former raised the highest person, the more
they raised themselves who were next in point of rank. They had a
greater interest in the question; and the King would have a greater
jealousy of them than of others. When B— was painting the Queen, with
whom he used to be quite familiar, he was one day surprised, when the
Prince-Regent came into the room, to see the profound homage and
dignified respect with which he approached her. “Good God!” said he to
himself, “here is the second person in the kingdom comes into the room
in this manner, while I have been using the greatest freedoms!” To be
sure! that was the very reason: the second person in the kingdom wished
to invest the first with all possible respect, so much of which was
naturally reflected back upon himself. B— had nothing to lose or gain in
this game of royal ceremony, and was accordingly treated as a cypher.’
CONVERSATION THE TENTH
Northcote shewed me a printed circular from the Academy, with blanks to
be filled up by Academicians, recommending young students to draw. One
of these related to an assurance as to the moral character of the
candidate; Northcote said, ‘What can I know about that? This zeal for
morality begins with inviting me to tell a lie. I know whether he can
draw or not, because he brings me specimens of his drawings; but what am
I to know of the moral character of a person I have never seen before?
Or what business have the Academy to inquire into it? I suppose they are
not afraid he will steal the Farnese Hercules; and as to idleness and
debauchery, he will not be cured of these by cutting him off from the
pursuit of a study on which he has set his mind, and in which he has a
fair chance to succeed. I told one of them, with as grave a face as I
could, that, as to his moral character, he must go to his god-fathers
and god-mothers for that. He answered very simply, that they were a
great way off, and that he had nobody to appeal to but his apothecary!
The Academy is not an institution for the suppression of vice, but for
the encouragement of the Fine Arts. Why then go out of their way to
meddle with what was provided for by other means—the law and the pulpit?
It would not have happened in Sir Joshua’s time,’ continued Northcote,
‘nor even in Fuseli’s: but the present men are “dressed in a little
brief authority,” and they wish to make the most of it, without
perceiving the limits. No good can possibly come of this _busy-body_
spirit. The dragging morality into every thing, in season and out of
season, is only giving a handle to hypocrisy, and turning virtue into a
bye-word for impertinence!’
Here Northcote stopped suddenly, to ask if there was not such a word as
_rivulet_ in the language? I said it was as much a word in the language
as it was a thing in itself. He replied, it was not to be found in
Johnson; the word was _riveret_ there. I thought this must be in some of
the new editions; Dr. Johnson would have knocked any body down, who had
used the word _riveret_. It put me in mind of a story of Y— the actor,
who being asked how he was, made answer that he had been indisposed for
some days with a _feveret_. The same person, speaking of the
impossibility of escaping from too great publicity, related an anecdote
of his being once in a remote part of the Highlands, and seeing an old
gentleman fishing, he went up to inquire some particulars as to the mode
of catching the salmon at what are called ‘salmon-leaps.’—The old
gentleman began his reply—‘Why, Mr. Y—,’ at which the actor started back
in great surprise. ‘Good God!’ said Northcote, ‘did he consider this as
a matter of wonder, that, after shewing himself on a stage for a number
of years, people should know his face? If an artist or an author were
recognised in that manner, it might be a proof of celebrity, because it
would shew that they had been sought for; but an actor is so much seen
in public, that it is no wonder he is known by all the world. I once
went with Opie in the stage-coach to Exeter; and when we parted; he to
go on to Cornwall and I to Plymouth, there was a young gentleman in the
coach who asked me, “Who it was that I had been conversing with?” I said
it was Mr. Opie, the painter; at which he expressed the greatest
surprise, and was exceedingly concerned to think he had not known it
before. I did not tell him who I was, to see if my name would electrify
him in the same manner. That brings to my mind the story I perhaps may
have told you before, of a Mr. A— and Dr. Pennick of the Museum. They
got into some quarrel at the theatre; and the former presenting his
card, said with great pomposity, “My name is A—, Sir;” to which the
other answered, “I hear it, Sir, and am not terrified!”’ I asked if this
was the A— who fought the duel with F—. He said he could not tell, but
he was our ambassador to some of the petty German States.
A country-gentleman came in, who complimented Northcote on his pictures
of animals and birds, which I knew he would not like. He muttered
something when he was gone, in allusion to the proverb of _giving snuff
to a cat_. Afterwards, a miniature-painter brought some copies he had
made of a portrait of a young lady by Northcote. They were really very
well, and we learned he was to have five guineas for the larger size,
and two for the smaller ones. I could now account for the humility and
shabby appearance of the artist. He paid his court better than his
rustic predecessor; for being asked by Northcote if the portrait of the
young lady was approved? he said the mother had told him, before she
engaged him to copy it, that ‘it was one of the _loveliest_ pictures
(that was her expression) that had ever been seen!’ This praise was
better relished than that of his dogs and parrots.
I took notice to Northcote that the man had a very good head; but that
he put me in mind of the state and pretensions of the art before artists
wrote _Esquire_ after their names. He said, Yes, he was like Andrew
Taffi, or some of those in Vasari. I observed how little he was paid for
what he really did so well; to which Northcote merely replied, ‘In all
things that are not necessary, those in the second class must always be
miserably paid. Copying pictures is like plain-work among women, it is
what any body can do, and, therefore, nothing but a bare living is to be
got by it.’ He added, that the young lady, whose portrait her family was
so anxious to have copied, was dead, and this was a kind of diversion to
their grief. It was a very natural mode of softening it down; it was
still recurring to the object of their regret, and yet dwelling on it in
an agreeable point of view. ‘The wife of General H—, (he continued) many
years ago, came to me to do a picture of her son, a lieutenant in the
navy, who was killed in battle, but whom I had never seen. There was no
picture of him to go by, but she insisted on my doing one under her
direction. I attempted a profile as the easiest; and she sat behind me
and sang in a soft manner to herself, and told me what I was to do. It
was a wretched business, as you may suppose, being made out from
description; but she would have it to be a great likeness, and brought
all the family and even the servants to see it, who probably did not
dare to be of a different opinion. I said to her, “What a pity it was
Sir Joshua had not done a portrait of him in his life-time!” At this she
expressed great contempt, and declared she would not give two-pence for
all Sir Joshua’s pictures; indeed, she had one which I was very welcome
to have if I chose to come for it. I lost no time in going to her house,
and when I came there, she led me up into an old garret which was used
as a lumber-room, and taking it carefully out of a shabby frame not
worth a groat, said “There, take it, I am not sorry to get it out of the
house.” I asked what it was that made her so indifferent about this
picture? and she answered, “It was a likeness of a young gentleman who
had been kind enough to die, by which means the estate came to the
General.” She spoke in this unfeeling manner, though her own son had
just died in the same circumstances; and she had had a monument made for
him, and strewed flowers upon it, and made such a _fuss_ about his
death, that she would hardly have known what to do if he had come to
life again!’ I asked what was her reason for disliking Reynolds’s
pictures? ‘Oh! that was her ignorance, she did not know why!’
Northcote said, ‘G— called here with his daughter. I asked her about
Lord Byron; she said his temper was so bad that nobody could live with
him. The only way to pass the day tolerably well with him was to
contradict him the first thing in the morning. I have known tempers of
that kind myself; you must quarrel with them in order to be friends. If
you did not conquer them, they would conquer you.’ Something was
observed about Byron and Tom Paine, as to their attacks upon religion;
and I said that sceptics and philosophical unbelievers appeared to me to
have just as little liberality or enlargement of view as the most
bigoted fanatic. They could not bear to make the least concession to the
opposite side. They denied the argument that because the Scriptures were
fine they were therefore of divine origin, and yet they virtually
admitted it; for, not believing their truth, they thought themselves
bound to maintain that they were good for nothing. I had once, I said,
given great offence to a knot of persons of this description, by
contending that Jacob’s Dream was finer than any thing in Shakspeare;
and that Hamlet would bear no comparison with, at least, one character
in the New Testament. A young poet had said on this occasion, he did not
like the Bible, because there was nothing about flowers in it; and I
asked him if he had forgot that passage, ‘Behold the lilies of the
field,’ &c.? ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘and in the Psalms and in the book
of Job, there are passages of unrivalled beauty. In the latter there is
the description of the war-horse, that has been so often referred to,
and of the days of Job’s prosperity; and in the Psalms, I think there is
that passage, “He openeth his hands, and the earth is filled with
plenteousness; he turneth away his face, and we are troubled; he hideth
himself, and we are left in darkness;” or, again, how fine is that
expression, “All the beasts of the forests are mine, and so are the
cattle upon a thousand hills!” What an expanse, and what a grasp of the
subject! Every thing is done upon so large a scale, and yet with such
ease, as if seen from the highest point of view. It has mightily a look
of inspiration or of being dictated by a superior intelligence. They say
mere English readers cannot understand Homer, because it is a
translation; but why will it not bear a translation as well as the book
of Job, if it is as fine? In Shakspeare, undoubtedly, there is a
prodigious variety and force of human character and passion, but he does
not take us out of ourselves; he has a wonderful, almost a miraculous
fellow-feeling with human nature in every possible way, but that is all.
Macbeth is full of sublimity, but the sublimity is that of the earth, it
does not reach to heaven. It is a still stronger objection that is made
to Hogarth; he, too, gave the incidents and characters of human life
with infinite truth and ability; but then it was in the lowest forms of
all, and he could not rise even to common dignity or beauty. There is a
faculty that enlarges and beautifies objects, even beyond nature. It is
for this reason that we must, reluctantly perhaps, give the preference
to Milton over Shakspeare; for his Paradise (to go no further) is
certainly a scene of greater beauty and happiness, than was ever found
on earth, though so vividly described that we easily make the
transition, and transport ourselves there. It is the same difference
that there is between Raphael and Michael Angelo, though Raphael, too,
in many of his works merited the epithet of _divine_.’—I mentioned some
lines from Shakspeare I had seen quoted in a translation of a French
work, and applied to those who adhered to Buonaparte in his misfortunes:
—He that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place i’ the story.
I said I was struck to see how finely they came in. ‘Oh!’ replied
Northcote, ‘if they were Shakspeare’s, they were sure to be fine. What a
power there always is in any _bit_ brought in from him or Milton among
other things! How it shines like a jewel! I think Milton reads best in
this way; he is too fine for a continuance. Don’t you think Shakspeare
and the writers of that day had a prodigious advantage in using phrases
and combinations of style, which could not be admitted now that the
language is reduced to a more precise and uniform standard, but which
yet have a peculiar force and felicity when they can be justified by the
privilege of age?’ He said, he had been struck with this idea lately, in
reading an old translation of Boccacio (about the time of Queen
Elizabeth) in which the language, though quaint, had often a beauty that
could not well be conveyed in any modern translation.
He spoke of Lord Byron’s notions about Shakspeare. I said I did not care
much about his opinions. Northcote replied, they were evidently
capricious, and taken up in the spirit of contradiction. I said, not
only so (as far as I can judge), but without any better founded ones in
his own mind. They appear to me conclusions without premises or any
previous process of thought or inquiry. I like old opinions with new
reasons, not new opinions without any—not mere _ipse dixits_. He was too
arrogant to assign a reason to others or to need one for himself. It was
quite enough that he subscribed to any assertion, to make it clear to
the world, as well as binding on his valet!
Northcote said, there were people who could not argue. Fuseli was one of
these. He could throw out very brilliant and striking things; but if you
at all questioned him, he could no more give an answer than a child of
three years old. He had no resources, nor any _corps de reserve_ of
argument beyond his first line of battle. That was imposing and
glittering enough. Neither was Lord Byron a philosopher, with all his
sententiousness and force of expression. Probably one ought not to
expect the two things together; for to produce a startling and immediate
effect, one must keep pretty much upon the surface; and the search after
truth is a very slow and obscure process.
CONVERSATION THE ELEVENTH
As soon as I went in to-day, Northcote asked me if that was _my_
character of Shakspeare, which had been quoted in a newspaper the day
before? It was so like what he had thought a thousand times that he
could almost swear he had written it himself. I said no; it was from
Kendall’s Letters on Ireland; though I believed I had expressed nearly
the same idea in print. I had seen the passage myself, and hardly knew
at first whether to be pleased or vexed at it. It was provoking to have
one’s words taken out of one’s mouth as it were by another; and yet it
seemed also an encouragement to reflect, that if one only threw one’s
bread upon the waters, one was sure to find it again after many days.
The world, if they do not listen to an observation the first time, will
listen to it at second-hand from those who have a more agreeable method
of insinuating it, or who do not tell them too many truths at once. N—
said, he thought the account undoubtedly just, to whomever it
belonged.[95] The greatest genius (such as that of Shakspeare) implied
the greatest power, and this implied the greatest ease and
unconsciousness of effort, or of any thing extraordinary effected. As
this writer stated—‘He would as soon think of being vain of putting one
foot before another, as of writing _Macbeth_ or _Hamlet_.’ Or as
Hudibras has expressed it, poetry was to him
—a thing no more difficile
Than to a blackbird ’tis to whistle.
‘This (said he) is what I have always said of Correggio’s style, that he
could not help it: it was his nature. Besides, use familiarizes us to
every thing. How could Shakspeare be expected to be astonished at what
he did every day? No; he was thinking either merely of the subject
before him, or of gaining his bread. It is only upstarts or pretenders,
who do not know what to make of their good fortune or undeserved
reputation. It comes to the same thing that I have heard my brother
remark with respect to my father and old Mr. Tolcher, whose picture you
see there. He had a great friendship for my father and a great opinion
of his integrity; and whenever he came to see him, always began with
saying, “Well, honest Mr. Samuel Northcote, how do you?” This he
repeated so often, and they were so used to it, that my brother said
they became like words of course, and conveyed no more impression of any
thing peculiar than if he had merely said, “Well, good Mr. Northcote,
_et cetera_,” or used any common expression. So Shakspeare was
accustomed to write his fine speeches till he ceased to wonder at them
himself, and would have been surprised to find that you did.’
The conversation now turned on an answer in a newspaper to Canning’s
assertion, that ‘Slavery was not inconsistent with the spirit of
Christianity, inasmuch as it was the beauty of Christianity to
accommodate itself to all conditions and circumstances.’ Did Canning
mean to say, because Christianity accommodated itself to, or made the
best of all situations, it did not therefore give the preference to any?
Because it recommended mildness and fortitude under sufferings, did it
not therefore condemn the infliction of them? Or did it not forbid
injustice and cruelty in the strongest terms? This were indeed a daring
calumny on its founder: it were an insolent irony. Don Quixote would not
have said so. It was like the Italian banditti, who when they have cut
off the ears of their victims, make them go down on their knees, and
return thanks to an image of the Virgin Mary for the favour they have
done them. It was because such things do exist, that Christ came to set
his face against them, and to establish the maxim, ‘Do unto others as
you would that they should do unto you.’ If Mr. Canning will say that
the masters would like to be treated as they treat their slaves, then he
may say that slavery is consistent with the spirit of Christianity. No;
the meaning of those maxims of forbearance and submission, which the
Quakers have taken too literally, is, that you are not to drive out one
devil by another; it aims at discouraging a resort to violence and
anger, for if the temper it inculcates could become universal, there
would be no injuries to resent. It objects against the power of the
sword, but it is to substitute a power ten thousand times stronger than
the sword—that which subdues and conquers the affections, and strikes at
the very root and thought of evil. All that is meant by such sayings, as
that if a person ‘smites us on one cheek, we are to turn to him the
other,’ is, that we are to keep as clear as possible of a disposition to
retaliate and exasperate injuries; or there is a Spanish proverb which
explains this, that says, ‘_It is he who gives the second blow that
begins the quarrel._’
On my referring to what had been sometimes asserted of the inefficacy of
pictures in Protestant churches, Northcote said he might be allowed to
observe in favour of his own art, that though they might not strike at
first from a difference in our own belief, yet they would gain upon the
spectator by the force of habit. The practice of image-worship was
probably an after-thought of the Papists themselves, from seeing the
effects produced on the minds of the rude and ignorant by visible
representations of saints and martyrs. The rulers of the church at first
only thought to amuse and attract the people by pictures and statues (as
they did by music and rich dresses, from which no inference was to be
drawn); but when these representations of sacred subjects were once
placed before the senses of an uninstructed but imaginative people, they
looked at them with wonder and eagerness, till they began to think they
saw them move; and then miracles were worked; and as this became a
source of wealth and great resort to the several shrines and churches,
every means were used to encourage the superstition and a belief in the
supernatural virtues of the objects by the clergy and government. So he
thought that if pictures were set up in our churches, they would by
degrees inspire the mind with all the feelings of awe or interest that
were necessary or proper. It was less difficult to excite enthusiasm
than to keep it under due restraint. So in Italy, the higher powers did
not much relish those processions of naked figures, taken from
scriptural stories (such as Adam and Eve) on particular holidays, for
they led to scandal and abuse; but they fell in with the humour of the
rabble, and were lucrative to the lower orders of priests and friars,
and the Pope could not expressly discountenance them. He said we were in
little danger (either from our religion or temperament) of running into
those disgraceful and fanciful extremes; but should rather do every
thing in our power to avoid the opposite error of a dry and repulsive
asceticism. We _could not_ give too much encouragement to the fine arts.
Our talk of to-day concluded by his saying, that he often blamed himself
for uttering what might be thought harsh things; and that on mentioning
this once to Kemble, and saying it sometimes kept him from sleep after
he had been out in company, Kemble had replied, ‘Oh! you need not
trouble yourself so much about them: others never think of them
afterwards!’
CONVERSATION THE TWELFTH
Northcote was painting from a little girl when I went in. B— was there.
Something was said of a portrait of Dunning by Sir Joshua (an unfinished
head), and B— observed, ‘Ah! my good friend, if you and I had known at
that time what those things would fetch, we might have made our fortunes
now. By laying out a few pounds on the loose sketches and sweepings of
the lumber-room, we might have made as many hundreds.’ ‘Yes,’ said
Northcote, ‘it was thought they would soon be forgot, and they went for
nothing on that account: but they are more sought after than ever,
because those imperfect hints and studies seem to bring one more in
contact with the artist, and explain the process of his mind in the
several stages. A finished work is, in a manner, detached from and
independent of its author, like a child that can go alone: in the other
case, it seems to be still in progress, and to await his hand to finish
it; or we supply the absence of well-known excellences out of our own
imagination, so that we have a two-fold property in it.’
Northcote read something out of a newspaper about the Suffolk-street
Exhibition, in which his own name was mentioned, and M—’s, the
landscape-painter. B— said, his pictures were a trick—a streak of red,
and then a streak of blue. But, said Northcote, there is some merit in
finding out a new trick. I ventured to hint, that the receipt for his
was, clouds upon mountains, and mountains upon clouds—that there was
number and quantity, but neither form nor colour. He appeared to me an
instance of a total want of imagination; he mistook the character of the
feelings associated with every thing, and I mentioned as an instance his
Adam and Eve, which had been much admired, but which was a panoramic
view of the map of Asia, instead of a representation of our first
parents in Paradise.
After B— was gone, we spoke of X—. I regretted his want of delicacy
towards the public as well as towards his private friends. I did not
think he had failed so much from want of capacity, as from attempting to
bully the public into a premature or overstrained admiration of him,
instead of gaining ground upon them by improving on himself; and he now
felt the ill effects of the re-action of this injudicious proceeding. He
had no real love of his art, and therefore did not apply or give his
whole mind sedulously to it; and was more bent on bespeaking notoriety
beforehand by puffs and announcements of his works, than on giving them
that degree of perfection which would ensure lasting reputation. No one
would ever attain the highest excellence, who had so little nervous
sensibility as to take credit for it (either with himself or others)
without being at the trouble of producing it. It was securing the reward
in the first instance; and afterwards, it would be too much to expect
the necessary exertion or sacrifices. Unlimited credit was as dangerous
to success in art as in business. ‘And yet he still finds dupes,’ said
Northcote; to which I replied, it was impossible to resist him, as long
as you kept on terms with him: any difference of opinion or reluctance
on your part made no impression on him, and unless you quarrelled with
him downright, you must do as he wished you.—‘And how then,’ said
Northcote, ‘do you think it possible for a person of this hard
unyielding disposition to be a painter, where every thing depends on
seizing the nicest inflections of feeling and the most evanescent shades
of beauty?
‘No, I’ll tell you why he cannot be a painter. He has not virtue enough.
No one can give out to others what he has not in himself, and there is
nothing in his mind to delight or captivate the world. I will not deny
the mechanical dexterity, but he fails in the mental part. There was Sir
Peter Lely: he is full of defects; but he was the fine gentleman of his
age, and you see this character stamped on every one of his works;—even
his errors prove it; and this is one of those things that the world
receive with gratitude. Sir Joshua again was not without his faults: he
had not grandeur, but he was a man of a mild, bland, amiable character;
and this predominant feeling appears so strongly in his works, that you
cannot mistake it; and this is what makes them so delightful to look at,
and constitutes their charm to others, even without their being
conscious of it. There was such a look of nature too. I remember once
going through a suite of rooms where they were shewing me several fine
Vandykes; and we came to one where there were some children, by Sir
Joshua, seen through a door—it was like looking at the reality, they
were so full of life—the branches of the trees waved over their heads,
and the fresh air seemed to play on their cheeks—I soon forgot Vandyke!
‘So, in the famous St. Jerome of Correggio, Garrick used to say, that
the Saint resembled a Satyr, and that the child was like a monkey; but
then there is such a look of life in the last, it dazzles you with
spirit and vivacity; you can hardly believe but it will move or
fly;—indeed, Sir Joshua took his Puck from it, only a little varied in
the attitude.’ I said I had seen it not long ago, and that it had
remarkably the look of a spirit or a faery or preternatural being,
though neither beautiful nor dignified. I remarked to Northcote, that I
had never sufficiently relished Correggio; that I had tried several
times to work myself up to the proper degree of admiration, but that I
always fell back again into my former state of lukewarmness and
scepticism; though I could not help allowing, that what he did, he
appeared to me to do with more feeling than any body else; that I could
conceive Raphael or even Titian to have represented objects from mere
natural capacity (as we see them in a looking-glass) without being
absolutely wound up in them, but that I could fancy Correggio’s pencil
to thrill with sensibility: he brooded over the idea of grace or beauty
in his mind till the sense grew faint with it; and like a lover or a
devotee, he carried his enthusiasm to the brink of extravagance and
affectation, so enamoured was he of his art! Northcote assented to this
as a just criticism, and said, ‘That is why his works must live: but X—
is a hardened egotist, devoted to nothing but himself!’ Northcote then
asked about —, and if she was handsome? I said she might sit for the
portrait of Rebecca in Ivanhoe!
He then turned the conversation to Brambletye-House. He thought the
writer had failed in Charles II. and Rochester. Indeed, it was a daring
attempt to make _bons mots_ for two such characters. The wit must be
sharp and fine indeed, that would do to put into their mouths: even Sir
Walter might tremble to undertake it! He had made Milton speak too: this
was almost as dangerous an attempt as for Milton to put words into the
mouth of the Deity. The great difficulty was to know where to stop, and
not to trespass on forbidden ground. Cervantes was one of the boldest
and most original inventors; yet he had never ventured beyond his depth.
He had in the person of his hero really represented the maxims of
benevolence and generosity inculcated by the Christian religion: that
was a law to him; and by his fine conception of the subject, he had
miraculously succeeded. Shakspeare alone could be said in his grotesque
creations to be above all law. Richardson had succeeded admirably in
Clarissa, because he had a certain rule to go by or certain things to
avoid, for a perfect woman was a negative character; but he had failed
in Sir Charles Grandison, and made him a lump of odious affectation,
because a perfect man is not a negative, but a positive character; and
in aiming at faultlessness, he had produced only the most vapid
effeminacy. After all, Brambletye-House was about as good as the
_Rejected Addresses_. There was very little difference between a parody
and an imitation. The defects and peculiarities are equally seized upon
in either case.
He did not know how Sir Walter would take it. To have imitators seemed
at first a compliment, yet no one liked it. You could not put Fuseli in
a greater passion than by calling Maria Cosway an imitator of his.
Nothing made Sir Joshua so mad, as Miss Reynolds’s portraits, which were
an exact imitation of all his defects. Indeed, she was obliged to keep
them out of his way. He said, ‘They made every body else laugh, and
himself cry.’ It is that which makes every one dread a mimic. Your
self-love is alarmed, without being so easily reassured. You know there
is a difference, but it is not great enough to make you feel quite at
ease. The line of demarcation between the true and the spurious is not
sufficiently broad and palpable. The copy you see is vile or
indifferent; and the original, you suspect (but for your partiality to
yourself) is not perhaps much better.
This is what I have often felt in looking at the drawings of the
students at the Academy, or when young artists have brought their first
crude attempts for my opinion. The glaring defects, the abortive efforts
have almost disgusted me with the profession. Good G—d! I have said, is
this what the art is made up of? How do I know that my own productions
may not appear in the same light to others? Whereas the seeing the
finest specimens of art, instead of disheartening, gives me courage to
proceed: one cannot be wrong in treading in the same footsteps, and to
fall short of them is no disgrace, while the faintest reflection of
their excellence is glorious. It was this that made Correggio cry out on
seeing Raphael’s works, ‘I also am a painter’: he felt a kindred spirit
in his own breast.—I said, I recollected when I was formerly trying to
paint, nothing gave me the horrors so much as passing the old battered
portraits at the doors of brokers’ shops, with the morning-sun flaring
full upon them. I was generally inclined to prolong my walk, and put off
painting for that day; but the sight of a fine picture had a contrary
effect, and I went back and set to work with redoubled ardour.
Northcote happened to speak of a gentleman married to one of the —, of
whom a friend had said, laughing, ‘There’s a man that’s in love with his
own wife!’ He mentioned the beautiful Lady F— P—, and said her hair,
which was in great quantities and very fine, was remarkable for having a
single lock different from all the rest, which he supposed she cherished
as a beauty. I told him I had not long ago seen the hair of Lucretia
Borgia, of Milton, Buonaparte, and Dr. Johnson, all folded up in the
same paper. It had belonged to Lord Byron. Northcote replied, one could
not be sure of that; it was easy to get a lock of hair, and call it by
any name one pleased. In some cases, however, one might rely on its
being the same. Mrs. G— had certainly a lock of Goldsmith’s hair, for
she and her sister (Miss Horneck) had wished to have some remembrance of
him after his death; and though the coffin was nailed up, it was opened
again at their request (such was the regard Goldsmith was known to have
for them!), and a lock of his hair was cut off, which Mrs. G— still has.
Northcote said, Goldsmith’s death was the severest blow Sir Joshua ever
received—he did not paint all that day! It was proposed to make a grand
funeral for him, but Reynolds objected to this, as it would be over in a
day, and said it would be better to lay by the money to erect a monument
to him in Westminster Abbey; and he went himself and chose the spot.
Goldsmith had begun another novel, of which he read the first chapter to
the Miss Hornecks a little before his death. Northcote asked, what I
thought of the Vicar of Wakefield? And I answered, What every body else
did. He said there was that mixture of the ludicrous and the pathetic
running through it, which particularly delighted him: it gave a stronger
resemblance to nature. He thought this justified Shakspeare in mingling
up farce and tragedy together: life itself was a tragi-comedy. Instead
of being pure, every thing was chequered. If you went to an execution,
you would perhaps see an apple-woman in the greatest distress, because
her stall was overturned, at which you could not help smiling. We then
spoke of ‘Retaliation,’ and praised the character of Burke in particular
as a masterpiece. Nothing that he had ever said or done but what was
foretold in it; nor was he painted as the principal figure in the
foreground with the partiality of a friend, or as the great man of the
day, but with a back-ground of history, showing both what he was and
what he might have been. Northcote repeated some lines from the
‘Traveller,’ which were distinguished by a beautiful transparency, by
simplicity and originality. He confirmed Boswell’s account of Goldsmith,
as being about the middle height, rather clumsy, and tawdry in his
dress.
A gentleman came in who had just shown his good taste in purchasing
three pictures of Northcote, one a head of Sir Joshua by himself, and
the other two by Northcote, a whole-length portrait of an Italian girl,
and a copy of Omai, the South-Sea Chief. I could hear the artist in the
outer room expressing some scruples as to the consistency of his parting
with one of them which he had brought from abroad, according to the
strict letter of his Custom-House oath—an objection which the purchaser,
a Member of Parliament, over-ruled by assuring him that ‘the peculiar
case could not be contemplated by the spirit of the act.’ Northcote also
expressed some regret at the separation from pictures that had become
old friends. He however comforted himself that they would now find a
respectable asylum, which was better than being knocked about in garrets
and auction-rooms, as they would inevitably be at his death. ‘You may at
least depend upon it,’ said Mr. — ‘that they will not be sold again for
many generations!’ This view into futurity brought back to my mind the
time when I had first known these pictures: since then, my life was
flown, and with it the hope of fame as an artist (with which I had once
regarded them), and I felt a momentary pang. Northcote took me out into
the other room, when his friend was gone, to look at them; and on my
expressing my admiration of the portrait of the Italian lady, he said
she was the mother of Madame Bellochi, and was still living; that he had
painted it at Rome about the year 1780; that her family was originally
Greek, and that he had known her, her daughter, her mother, and
grandmother. She and a sister who was with her, were at that time full
of the most charming gaiety and innocence. The old woman used to sit
upon the ground without moving or speaking, with her arm over her head,
and exactly like a bundle of old clothes. Alas! thought I, what are we
but a heap of clay resting upon the earth, and ready to crumble again
into dust and ashes!
CONVERSATION THE THIRTEENTH
Northcote spoke about the failure of some print-sellers. He said, ‘He
did not wonder at it; it was a just punishment of their presumption and
ignorance. They went into an Exhibition, looked round them, fixed upon
some contemptible performance, and without knowing any thing about the
matter or consulting any body, ordered two or three thousand pounds’
worth of prints from it, merely out of purse-proud insolence, and
because the money _burnt in their pockets_. Such people fancied that the
more money they laid out, the more they must get; so that extravagance
became (by the turn their vanity gave to it) another name for thrift.’
Having spoken of a living artist’s pictures as mere portraits that were
interesting to no one except the people who sat for them, he remarked,
‘There was always something in the meanest face that a great artist
could take advantage of. That was the merit of Sir Joshua, who contrived
to throw a certain air and character even over ugliness and folly, that
disarmed criticism and made you wonder how he did it. This, at least, is
the case with his portraits; for though he made his beggars look like
heroes, he sometimes, in attempting history, made his heroes look like
beggars. Grandi, the Italian colour-grinder, sat to him for King Henry
VI. in the _Death of Cardinal Beaufort_, and he looks not much better
than a train-bearer or one in a low and mean station: if he had sat to
him for his portrait, he would have made him look like a king! That was
what made Fuseli observe in joke that “Grandi never held up his head
after Sir Joshua painted him in his Cardinal Beaufort!” But the pictures
I speak of are poor dry _fac-similes_ (in a little timid manner and with
an attempt at drapery) of imbecile creatures, whose appearance is a
satire on themselves and mankind. Neither can I conceive why L— should
be sent over to paint Charles X. A French artist said to me on that
occasion, ‘We have very fine portrait-painters in Paris, Sir!’... The
poor engraver would be the greatest sufferer by these expensive prints.
Tradespeople now-a-days did not look at the thing with an eye to
business, but ruined themselves and others by setting up for _would-be_
patrons and judges of the art.
‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’
I said I thought L—’s pictures might do very well as mirrors for
personal vanity to contemplate itself in (as you looked in the glass to
see how you were dressed), but that it was a mistake to suppose they
would interest any one else or were addressed to the world at large.
They were private, not public property. They never caught the eye in a
shop window; but were (as it appeared to me) a kind of _lithographic_
painting, or thin, meagre outlines without the depth and richness of the
art. I mentioned to Northcote the pleasure I had formerly taken in a
little print of _Gadshill_ from a sketch of his own, which I used at one
time to pass a certain shop-window on purpose to look at. He said, ‘It
was impossible to tell beforehand what would hit the public. You might
as well pretend to say what ticket would turn up a prize in the lottery.
It was not chance neither, but some unforeseen coincidence between the
subject and the prevailing taste, that you could not possibly be a judge
of. I had once painted two pictures; one of a Fortune-teller (a boy with
a monkey), and another called ‘The Visit to the Grandmother;’ and
Raphael Smith came to me and wanted to engrave them, being willing to
give a handsome sum for the first, but only to do the last as an
experiment. He sold ten times as many of the last as of the first, and
told me that there were not less than five different impressions done of
it in Paris; and once when I went to his house to get one to complete a
set of engravings after my designs, they asked me six guineas for a
proof-impression! This was too much, but I was delighted that I could
not afford to pay for my own work, from the value that was set upon
it!’—I said, people were much alarmed at the late failures, and thought
there would be a ‘blow-up,’ in the vulgar phrase.—‘Surely you can’t
suppose so? A blow-up! Yes, of adventurers and upstarts, but not of the
country, if they mean that. This is like the man who thought that
gin-drinking would put an end to the world. Oh! no—the country will go
on just as before, bating the distress to individuals. You may form an
idea on the subject if you ever go to look at the effects of a fire the
day after: you see nothing but smoke and ruins and bare walls, and think
the damage can never be repaired; but if you pass by the same way a week
after, you will find the houses all built up just as they were before or
even better than ever! No, there is the same wealth, the same industry
and ingenuity in the country as there was before; and till you destroy
that, you cannot destroy the country. These temporary distresses are
only like disorders in the body, that carry off its bad and superfluous
humours.
‘My neighbour Mr. Rowe, the bookseller, informed me the other day that
Signora Cecilia Davies frequently came to his shop, and always inquired
after me. Did you ever hear of her?’ No never! ‘She must be very old
now. Fifty years ago, in the time of Garrick, she made a vast sensation.
All England rang with her name. I do assure you, that in this respect
Madame Catalani was not more talked of. Afterwards she had retired to
Florence, and was the _Prima Donna_ there, when Storace first came out.
This was at the time when Mr. Hoare and myself were in Italy; and I
remember we went to call upon her. She had then in a great measure
fallen off, but she was still very much admired. What a strange thing a
reputation of this kind is, that the person herself survives, and sees
the meteors of fashion rise and fall one after another, while she
remains totally disregarded as if there had been no such person, yet
thinking all the while that she was better than any of them! I have
hardly heard her name mentioned in the last thirty years, though in her
time she was quite as famous as any one since.’ I said, an
_Opera_-reputation was after all but a kind of _Private Theatricals_ and
confined to a small circle, compared with that of the regular stage,
which all the world were judges of and took an interest in. It was but
the echo of a sound, or like the blaze of phosphorus that did not
communicate to the surrounding objects. It belonged to a fashionable
_coterie_, rather than to the public, and might easily die away at the
end of the season. I then observed I was more affected by the fate of
players than by that of any other class of people. They seemed to me
more to be pitied than any body—the contrast was so great between the
glare, the noise, and intoxication of their first success, and the
mortifications and neglect of their declining years. They were made
drunk with popular applause; and when this stimulus was withdrawn, must
feel the insignificance of ordinary life particularly vapid and
distressing. There were no sots like the _sots of vanity_. There were no
traces left of what they had been, any more than of a forgotten dream;
and they had no consolation but in their own conceit, which, when it was
without other vouchers, was a very uneasy comforter. I had seen some
actors who had been favourites in my youth and ‘cried up in the top of
the compass,’ treated, from having grown old and infirm, with the utmost
indignity and almost hooted from the stage. I had seen poor — come
forward under these circumstances to stammer out an apology with the
tears in his eyes (which almost brought them into mine) to a set of
apprentice-boys and box-lobby loungers, who neither knew nor cared what
a fine performer and a fine gentleman he was thought twenty years ago.
Players were so far particularly unfortunate. The theatrical public have
a very short memory. Every four or five years there is a new audience,
who know nothing but of what they have before their eyes, and who
pronounce summarily upon this, without any regard to past obligations or
past services, and with whom the veterans of the stage stand a bad
chance indeed, as their former triumphs are entirely forgotten, while
they appear as living vouchers against themselves. ‘Do you remember,’
said Northcote, ‘Sheridan’s beautiful lines on the subject in his
_Monody on Garrick_?’ I said, I did; and that it was probably the
reading them early that had impressed this feeling so strongly on my
mind. Northcote then remarked, ‘I think a great beauty is most to be
pitied. She completely outlives herself. She has been used to the most
bewitching homage, to have the highest court paid and the most
flattering things said to her by all those who approach her, and to be
received with looks of delight and surprise wherever she comes; and she
afterwards not only finds herself deprived of all this and reduced to a
cypher, but sees it all transferred to another, who has become the
reigning toast and beauty of the day in her stead. It must be a most
violent shock. It is like a king who is dethroned and reduced to serve
as a page in his own palace. I remember once being struck with seeing
the Duchess of —, the same that Sir Joshua painted, and who was a
miracle of beauty when she was young, and followed by crowds wherever
she went—I was coming out of Mrs. W—’s; and on the landing-place, there
was she standing by herself, and calling over the bannister for her
servant to come to her. If she had been as she once was, a thousand
admirers would have flown to her assistance; but her face was painted
over like a mask, and there was hardly any appearance of life left but
the restless motion of her eyes. I was really hurt.’ I answered, the
late Queen had much the same painful look that he described—her face
highly _rouged_, and her eyes rolling in her head like an automaton, but
she had not the mortification of having ever been a great beauty. ‘There
was a Miss —, too,’ Northcote added, ‘who was a celebrated beauty when
she was a girl, and who also sat to Sir Joshua. I saw her not long ago
and she was grown as coarse and vulgar as possible; she was like an
apple-woman or would do to keep the _Three Tuns_. The change must be
very mortifying. To be sure, there is one thing, it comes on by degrees.
The ravages of the small-pox must formerly have been a dreadful blow!’
He said, literary men or men of talent in general were the best off in
this respect. The reputation they acquired was not only lasting, but
gradually grew stronger, if it was deserved. I agreed they were seldom
spoiled by flattery, and had no reason to complain _after they were
dead_. ‘Nor while they are living,’ said N—, ‘if it is not their own
fault.’ He mentioned an instance of a trial about an engraving where he,
West, and others had to appear, and of the respect that was shown them.
Erskine after flourishing away, made an attempt to puzzle Stothard by
drawing two angles on a piece of paper, an acute and an obtuse one, and
asking, ‘Do you mean to say these two are alike?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ was the
answer. ‘I see,’ said Erskine, turning round, ‘there is nothing to be
got by _angling_ here!’ West was then called upon to give his evidence,
and there was immediately a lane made for him to come forward, and a
stillness that you could hear a pin drop. The Judge (Lord Kenyon) then
addressed him, ‘Sir Benjamin, we shall be glad to hear your opinion!’
Mr. West answered, ‘He had never received the honour of a title from his
Majesty;’ and proceeded to explain the difference between the two
engravings which were charged with being copies the one of the other,
with such clearness and knowledge of the art, though in general he was a
bad speaker, that Lord Kenyon said when he had done, ‘I suppose,
gentlemen, you are perfectly satisfied—I perceive there is much more in
this than I had any idea of, and am sorry I did not make it more my
study when I was young!’ I remarked that I believed corporations of art
or letters might meet with a certain attention; but it was the
stragglers and candidates that were knocked about with very little
ceremony. Talent or merit only wanted a frame of some sort or other to
set it off to advantage. Those of my way of thinking were ‘bitter bad
judges’ on this point. A Tory scribe who treated mankind as rabble and
_canaille_, was regarded by them in return as a fine gentleman: a
reformer like myself, who stood up for liberty and equality, was taken
at his word by the very journeymen that set up his paragraphs, and could
not get a civil answer from the meanest shop-boy in the employ of those
on his own side of the question. N— laughed and said, I irritated myself
too much about such things. He said it was one of Sir Joshua’s maxims
that the art of life consisted in not being overset by trifles. We
should look at the bottom of the account, not at each individual item in
it, and see how the balance stands at the end of the year. We should be
satisfied if the path of life is clear before us, and not fret at the
straws or pebbles that lie in our way. What you have to look to is
whether you can get what you write printed, and whether the public will
read it, and not to busy yourself with the remarks of shop-boys or
printers’ devils. They can do you neither harm nor good. The
impertinence of mankind is a thing that no one can guard against.
CONVERSATION THE FOURTEENTH
Northcote shewed me a poem with engravings of Dartmoor, which were too
fine by half. I said I supposed Dartmoor would look more gay and smiling
after having been thus illustrated, like a dull author who has been
praised by a Reviewer. I had once been nearly benighted there and was
delighted to get to the inn at Ashburton. ‘That,’ said N—, ‘is the only
good of such places that you are glad to escape from them, and look back
to them with a pleasing horror ever after. Commend me to the Valdarno or
Vallambrosa, where you are never weary of new charms, and which you quit
with a sigh of regret. I have, however, told my young friend who sent me
the poem, that he has shown his genius in creating beauties where there
were none, and extracting enthusiasm from rocks and quagmires. After
that, he may write a very interesting poem on Kamschatka!’ He then spoke
of the Panorama of the North Pole which had been lately exhibited, of
the ice-bergs, the seals lying asleep on the shore, and the strange
twilight as well worth seeing. He said, it would be curious to know the
effect, if they could get to the Pole itself, though it must be
impossible: the veins, he should suppose, would burst, and the vessel
itself go to pieces from the extreme cold. I asked if he had ever read
an account of twelve men who had been left all the winter in Greenland,
and of the dreadful shifts to which they were reduced? He said, he had
not.—They were obliged to build two booths of wood one within the other;
and if they had to go into the outer one during the severity of the
weather, unless they used great precaution, their hands were blistered
by whatever they took hold of as if it had been red-hot iron. The most
interesting part was the account of their waiting for the return of
light at the approach of spring, and the delight with which they first
saw the sun shining on the tops of the frozen mountains. N— said, ‘This
is the great advantage of descriptions of extraordinary situations by
uninformed men: Nature as it were holds the pen for them; they give you
what is most striking in the circumstances, and there is nothing to draw
off the attention from the strong and actual impression, so that it is
the next thing to the reality. G— was here the other day, and I showed
him the note from my bookseller about the _Fables_, with which you were
so much pleased, but he saw nothing in it. I then said G— is not one of
those who look attentively at nature or draw much from that source. Yet
the rest is but like building castles in the air, if it is not founded
in observation and experience. Or it is like the enchanted money in the
_Arabian Nights_, which turned to dry leaves when you came to make use
of it. It is ingenious and amusing, and so far it is well to be amused
when you can; but you learn nothing from the fine hypothesis you have
been reading, which is only a better sort of dream, bright and vague and
utterly inapplicable to the purposes of common life. G— does not appeal
to nature, but to art and execution. There is another thing (which it
seems harsh and presumptuous to say, but) he appears to me not always to
perceive the difference between right and wrong. There are many others
in the same predicament, though not such splendid examples of it. He is
satisfied to make out a plausible case, to give the _pros_ and _cons_
like a lawyer; but he has no instinctive bias or feeling one way or
other, except as he can give a studied reason for it. Common sense is
out of the question: such people despise common sense, and the quarrel
between them is a mutual one. Caleb Williams, notwithstanding, is a
decidedly original work: the rest are the sweepings of his study. That
is but one thing, to be sure; but no one does more than one thing.
Northcote said that Sir Joshua used to say that no one produced more
than six original things. I always said it was wrong to fix upon this
number—five out of the six would be found upon examination to be
repetitions of the first. A man can no more produce six original works
than he can be six individuals at once. Whatever is the strong and
prevailing bent of his genius, he will stamp upon some master-work; and
what he does else, will be only the same thing over again, a little
better or a little worse; or if he goes out of his way in search of
variety and to avoid himself, he will merely become a common-place man
or an imitator of others. You see this plainly enough in Cervantes—that
he has exhausted himself in the Don Quixote. He has put his whole
strength into it: his other works are no better than what other people
could write. If there is any exception, it is Shakspeare: he seems to
have had the faculty of dividing himself into a number of persons. His
writings stand out from every thing else, and from one another. Othello,
Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff are striking and original characters; but they
die a natural death at the end of the fifth act, and no more come to
life again than the people themselves would. He is not reduced to repeat
himself or revive former inventions under feigned names. This is
peculiar to him; still it is to be considered that plays are short works
and only allow room for the expression of a part. But in a work of the
extent of Don Quixote, the writer had scope to bring in all he wanted;
and indeed there is no point of excellence which he has not touched from
the highest courtly grace and most romantic enthusiasm down to the
lowest ribaldry and rustic ignorance, yet carried off with such an air
that you wish nothing away, and do not see what can be added to it.
Every bit is perfect; and the author has evidently given his whole mind
to it. That is why I believe that the _Scotch Novels_ are the production
of several hands. Some parts are careless, others straggling: it is only
where there is an opening for effect that the master-hand comes in, and
in general he leaves his work for others to get on with it. But in Don
Quixote there is not a single line that you may not swear belongs to
Cervantes.’—I inquired if he had read WOODSTOCK? He answered, No, he had
not been able to get it. I said, I had been obliged to pay five
shillings for the loan of it at a regular bookseller’s shop (I could not
procure it at the circulating libraries), and that from the understood
feeling about Sir Walter no objection was made to this proposal, which
would in ordinary cases have been construed into an affront. I had well
nigh repented my bargain, but there were one or two scenes that repaid
me (though none equal to his best,) and in general it was very
indifferent. The plot turned chiefly on English Ghost-scenes, a very
mechanical sort of phantoms who dealt in practical jokes and personal
annoyances, turning beds upside down and sousing you all over with
water, instead of supernatural and visionary horrors. It was very bad
indeed, but might be intended to contrast the literal, matter-of-fact
imagination of the _Southron_ with the loftier impulses of Highland
superstition. Charles II. was not spared, and was brought in admirably
(when in disguise) as a raw, awkward Scotch lad, Master Kerneguy.
Cromwell was made a fine, bluff, overbearing blackguard, who exercised a
personal superiority wherever he came, but was put in situations which I
thought wholly out of character, and for which I apprehended there was
no warrant in the history of the times. They were therefore so far
improper. A romance-writer might take an incident and work it out
according to his fancy or might build an imaginary superstructure on the
ground of history, but he had no right to transpose the facts. For
instance, he had made Cromwell act as his own tip-staff and go to
Woodstock to take Charles II. in person. To be sure, he had made him
display considerable firmness and courage in the execution of this
errand (as Lavender might in being the first to enter a window to secure
a desperate robber)—but the plan itself, to say nothing of the immediate
danger, was contrary to Cromwell’s dignity as well as policy. Instead of
wishing to seize Charles with his own hand, he would naturally keep as
far aloof from such a scene as he could, and be desirous to have it
understood that he was anxious to shed as little more blood as possible.
Besides, he had higher objects in view, and would, I should think, care
not much more about Charles than about Master Kerneguy. He would be glad
to let him get away. In another place, he had made Cromwell start back
in the utmost terror at seeing a picture of Charles I. and act all the
phrenzy of Macbeth over again at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. This I
should also suppose to be quite out of character in a person of
Cromwell’s prosaic, determined habits _to fear a painted devil_. ‘No,’
said N—, ‘that is not the way he would look at it; it is seeing only a
part: but Cromwell was a greater philosopher than to act so. The other
story is more probable of his visiting the dead body of Charles in a
mask, and exclaiming in great agitation as he left the room, _Cruel
necessity_! Yet even this is not sufficiently authenticated. No; he knew
that it was come to this, that it was gone too far for either party to
turn back, and that it must be final with one of them. The only question
was whether he should give himself up as the victim, and so render all
that had been done useless, or exact the penalty from what he thought
the offending party. It was like a battle which must end fatally either
way, and no one thought of lamenting, because he was not on the losing
side. In a great public quarrel there was no room for these domestic and
personal regards: all you had to do was to consider well the justice of
the cause, before you appealed to the sword. Would Charles I. if he had
been victorious, have started at the sight of a picture of Cromwell? Yet
Cromwell was as much of a man as he, and as firm as the other was
obstinate.’ Northcote said, he wished he could remember the subject of a
dispute he had with G— to see if I did not think he had the best of it.
I replied, I should be more curious to hear something in which G— was
right, for he generally made it a rule to be in the wrong when speaking
of any thing. I mentioned having once had a very smart debate with him
about a young lady, of whom I had been speaking as very much like her
aunt, a celebrated authoress, and as what the latter, I conceived, might
have been at her time of life. G— said, when Miss — did any thing like
Evelina or Cecilia, he should then believe she was as clever as Madame
d’Arblay. I asked him whether he did not think Miss Burney was as clever
before she wrote those novels as she was after; or whether in general an
author wrote a successful work for being clever, or was clever because
he had written a successful work! Northcote laughed and said, ‘That was
so like G—.’ I observed that it arose out of his bigoted admiration of
literature, so that he could see no merit in any thing else; nor trust
to any evidence of talent but what was printed. It was much the same
fallacy that had sometimes struck me in the divines, who deduced
original sin from Adam’s eating the apple, and not his eating the apple
from original sin or a previous inclination to do something, that he
should not. Northcote remarked, that speaking of Evelina put him in mind
of what Opie had once told him, that when Dr. Johnson sat to him for his
picture, on his first coming to town, he asked him if it was true that
he had sat up all night to read Miss Burney’s new novel, as it had been
reported? And he made answer, ‘I never read it through at all, though I
don’t wish this to be known.’ Sir Joshua also pretended to have read it
through at a sitting, though it appeared to him (Northcote) affectation
in them both, who were thorough-paced men of the world, and hackneyed in
literature, to pretend to be so delighted with the performance of a
girl, in which they could find neither instruction nor any great
amusement, except from the partiality of friendship. So Johnson cried up
Savage, because they had slept on bulks when they were young; and lest
he should be degraded into a vagabond by the association, had elevated
the other into a genius. Such prevarication or tampering with his own
convictions was not consistent with the strict and formal tone of
morality which he assumed on other and sometimes very trifling
occasions, such as correcting Mrs. Thrale for saying that a bird flew in
at the door, instead of the window. I said, Savage, in my mind, was one
of those writers (like Chatterton) whose vices and misfortunes the world
made a _set-off_ to their genius, because glad to connect these ideas
together. They were only severe upon those who attacked their prejudices
or their consequence. Northcote replied, ‘Savage the architect was here
the other day, and asked me why I had abused his name-sake, and called
him an impostor. I answered, I had heard that character of him from a
person in an obscure rank of life, who had known him a little before his
death.’ Northcote proceeded: ‘People in that class are better judges
than poets and moralists, who explain away every thing by fine words and
doubtful theories. The mob are generally right in their summary
judgments upon offenders. A man is seldom ducked or pumped upon or
roughly handled by them, unless he has deserved it. You see that in the
galleries at the play-house. They never let any thing pass that is
immoral; and they are even fastidious judges of wit. I remember there
was some gross expression in Goldsmith’s comedy the first night it came
out; and there was a great uproar in the gallery, and it was obliged to
be suppressed. Though rude and vulgar themselves, they do not like
vulgarity on the stage; they come there to be taught manners.’ I said,
they paid more attention than any body else; and after the curtain drew
up (though somewhat noisy before) were the best-behaved part of the
audience, unless something went wrong. As the common people sought for
refinement as a _treat_, people in high life were fond of grossness and
ribaldry as a relief to their overstrained affectation of gentility. I
could account in no other way for their being amused with the wretched
_slang_ in certain magazines and newspapers. I asked Northcote if he had
seen the third series of —? He had not. I said they were like the
composition of a footman, and I believed greatly admired in the upper
circles, who were glad to see an author arrange a side-board for them
over again with servile alacrity. He said, ‘They delight in low, coarse
buffoonery, because it sets off their own superiority: whereas the
rabble resent it when obtruded upon them, because they think it is meant
against themselves. They require the utmost elegance and propriety for
their money: as the showman says in Goldsmith’s comedy—“My bear dances
to none but the genteelest of tunes, _Water parted from the Sea_, or the
minuet in _Ariadne_!”’
Northcote then alluded to a new novel he had been reading. He said he
never read a book so full of words; which seemed ridiculous enough to
say, for a book was necessarily composed of words, but here there was
nothing else but words, to a degree that was surprising. Yet he believed
it was sought after, and indeed he could not get it at the common
library. ‘You are to consider, there must be books for all tastes and
all ages. You may despise it, but the world do not. There are books for
children till the time they are six years of age, such as
Jack-the-Giant-Killer, the Seven Champions of Christendom, Guy of
Warwick and others.[96] From that to twelve they like to read the
Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and then Fielding’s Novels and
Don Quixote: from twenty to thirty books of poetry, Milton, Pope,
Shakspeare: and from thirty history and philosophy—what suits us then
will serve us for the rest of our lives. For boarding-school girls
_Thomson’s Seasons_ has an immense attraction, though I never could read
it. Some people cannot get beyond a newspaper or a geographical
dictionary. What I mean to infer is that we ought not to condemn too
hastily, for a work may be approved by the public, though it does not
exactly hit our taste; nay, those may seem beauties to others which seem
faults to us. Why else do we pride ourselves on the superiority of our
judgment, if we are not more advanced in this respect than the majority
of readers? But our very fastidiousness should teach us toleration. You
have said very well of this novel, that it is a mixture of genteel and
romantic affectation. One objection to the excessive rhodomontade which
abounds in it is that you can learn nothing from such extravagant
fictions:—they are like nothing in the known world. I remember once
speaking to Richardson (Sheridan’s friend) about Shakspeare’s want of
morality, and he replied—“What! Shakspeare not moral? He is the most
moral of all writers, because he is the most natural!” And in this he
was right: for though Shakspeare did not intend to be moral, yet he
could not be otherwise as long as he adhered to the path of nature.
Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences
of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us
faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and
punishing the bad. So far truth and virtue are one. But that kind of
poetry which has not its foundation in nature, and is only calculated to
shock and surprise, tends to unhinge our notions of morality and of
every thing else in the ordinary course of Providence.’
Something being said of an artist who had attempted to revive the great
style in our times, and the question being put, whether Michael Angelo
and Raphael, had they lived now, would not have accommodated themselves
to the modern practice, I said, it appeared to me that (whether this was
the case or not) they could not have done what they did without the aid
of circumstances; that for an artist to raise himself above all
surrounding opinions, customs, and institutions by a mere effort of the
will, was affectation and folly, like attempting to fly in the air; and
that, though great genius might exist without the opportunities
favourable to its development, yet it must draw its nourishment from
circumstances, and suck in inspiration from its native air. There was
Hogarth—he was surely a genius; still the manners of his age were
necessary to him: teeming as his works were with life, character, and
spirit, they would have been poor and vapid without the night-cellars of
St. Giles’s, the drawing-rooms of St. James’s! Would he in any
circumstances have been a Raphael or a Phidias? I think not. But had he
been twenty times a Raphael or a Phidias, I am quite sure it would never
have appeared in the circumstances in which he was placed. Two things
are necessary to all great works and great excellence, the mind of the
individual and the mind of the age or country co-operating with his own
genius. The last brings out the first, but the first does not imply or
supersede the last. Pictures for Protestant churches are a contradiction
in terms, where they are not objects of worship but of idle
curiosity:—where there is not the adoration, the enthusiasm in the
spectator, how can it exist in the artist? The spark of genius is only
kindled into a flame by sympathy.—Northcote spoke highly of Vanbrugh and
of the calm superiority with which he bore the attacks of Swift, Pope,
and that set who made a point of decrying all who did not belong to
their party. He said Burke and Sir Joshua thought his architecture far
from contemptible; and his comedies were certainly first-rate. Richards
(the scene-painter) had told him, the players thought the Provoked
Husband the best acting play on the stage; and Godwin said the
City-Wives’ Confederacy (taken from an indifferent French play) was the
best written one. I ventured to add, that the Trip to Scarborough
(altered but not improved by Sheridan) was not inferior to either of the
others. I should doubt whether the direction given at Sir Tunbelly’s
castle on the arrival of Young Fashion—‘Let loose the grey-hound, and
lock up Miss Hoyden!’—would be in Sheridan’s version, who, like most of
his countrymen, had a prodigious ambition of elegance. Northcote
observed, that talking of this put him in mind of a droll speech that
was made when the officers got up a play on board the vessel that went
lately to find out the North-West passage:—one of the sailors, who was
admiring the performance, and saying how clever it was, was interrupted
by the boatswain, who exclaimed—‘Clever! did you say? I call it
_philosophy_, by G—d!’ He asked, if he had ever mentioned to me that
anecdote of Lord Mansfield, who, when an old woman was brought before
him as a witch, and was charged, among other improbable things, with
walking through the air, attended coolly to the evidence, and then
dismissed the complaint by saying, ‘My opinion is that this good woman
be suffered to return home, and whether she shall do this, walking on
the ground or riding through the air, must be left entirely to her own
pleasure, for there is nothing contrary to the laws of England in
either!’ I mentioned a very fine dancer at the Opera (Mademoiselle
Brocard) with whom I was much delighted; and Northcote observed that
where there was grace and beauty accompanying the bodily movements, it
was very hard to deny the mental refinement or the merit of this art. He
could not see why that which was so difficult to do, and which gave so
much pleasure to others, was to be despised. He remembered seeing some
young people at Parma (though merely in a country-dance) exhibit a
degree of perfection in their movements that seemed to be inspired by
the very genius of grace and gaiety. Miss Reynolds used to say that
perfection was much the same in everything—nobody could assign the
limits. I said authors alone were privileged to suppose that all
excellence was confined to words. Till I was twenty I thought there was
nothing in the world but books: when I began to paint I found there were
two things, both difficult to do and worth doing; and I concluded from
that time there might be fifty. At least I was willing to allow every
one his own choice. I recollect a certain poet saying ‘he should like to
_ham-string_ those fellows at the Opera’—I suppose because the Great
would rather see them dance than read _Kehama_. Whatever can be done in
such a manner that you can fancy a God to do it, must have something in
its nature divine. The ancients had assigned Gods to dancing as well as
to music and poetry, to the different attributes and perfections both of
body and mind; and perhaps the plurality of the heathen deities was
favourable to a liberality of taste and opinion. NORTHCOTE: ‘The most
wretched scribbler looks down upon the greatest painter as a mere
mechanic: but who would compare Lord Byron with Titian?’
CONVERSATION THE FIFTEENTH
I went to Northcote in the evening to consult about his _Fables_. He was
downstairs in the parlour, and talked much as usual: but the difference
of the accompaniments, the sitting down, the preparations for tea, the
carpet and furniture, and a little fat lap-dog interfered with old
associations and took something from the charm of his conversation. He
spoke of a Mr. Laird who had been employed to see his _Life of Sir
Joshua_ through the press, and whom he went to call upon in an upper
story in Peterborough-Court, Fleet-street, where he was surrounded by
his books, his implements of writing, a hand-organ, and his coffee-pots;
and he said he envied him this retreat more than any palace he had ever
happened to enter. Northcote was not very well, and repeated his
complaints. I said I thought the air (now summer was coming on) would do
him more good than physic. His apothecary had been describing the
dissection of the elephant, which had just been killed at Exeter
‘Change. It appeared that instead of the oil which usually is found in
the joints of animals, the interstices were in this case filled up with
a substance resembling a kind of white paint. This Northcote considered
as a curious instance of the wise contrivance of nature in the
adaptation of means to ends; for even in pieces of artificial mechanism,
though they use oil to lubricate the springs and wheels of clocks and
other common-sized instruments, yet in very large and heavy ones, such
as steam-engines, &c. they are obliged to use grease, pitch, and other
more solid substances, to prevent the friction. If they could dissect a
flea, what a fine, evanescent fluid would be found to lubricate its
slender joints and assist its light movements! Northcote said the
bookseller wished to keep the original copy of the _Fables_ to bind up
as a literary curiosity. I objected to this proceeding as unfair. There
were several slips of the pen and slovenlinesses of style (for which I
did not think him at all accountable, since an artist wrote with his
left hand, and painted with his right) and I did not see why these
accidental inadvertences, arising from diffidence and want of practice,
should be as it were enshrined and brought against him. He said, ‘Mr. P—
H— tasked me the hardest in what I wrote in the _Artist_. He pointed out
where I was wrong, and sent it back to me to correct it. After all, what
I did there was thought the best!’ I said Mr. H— was too fastidious, and
spoiled what he did from a wish to have it perfect. He dreaded that a
shadow of objection should be brought against any thing he advanced, so
that his opinions at last amounted to a kind of genteel truisms. One
must risk something in order to do any thing. I observed that this was
remarkable in so clever a man; but it seemed as if there were some
fatality by which the most lively and whimsical writers, if they went
out of their own eccentric path and attempted to be serious, became
exceedingly grave and even insipid. His farces were certainly very
spirited and original: NO SONG NO SUPPER was the first play I had ever
seen, and I felt grateful to him for this. Northcote agreed that it was
very delightful; and said there was a volume of it when he first read it
to them one night at Mrs. Rundle’s, and that the players cut it down a
good deal and supplied a number of things. There was a great piece of
work to alter the songs for Madame Storace, who played in it and who
could not pronounce half the English terminations. MY GRANDMOTHER, too,
was a laughable idea, very ingeniously executed; and some of the songs
in this had an equal portion of elegance and drollery, such as that in
particular—
For alas! long before I was born,
My fair one had died of old age!
Still some of his warmest admirers were hurt at their being farces—if
they had been comedies, they would have been satisfied, for nothing
could be greater than their success. They were the next to O’Keefe’s,
who in that line was the English Moliere.
Northcote asked if I remembered the bringing out of any of O’Keefe’s? I
answered, No. He said ‘It had the oddest effect imaginable—at one moment
they seemed on the point of being damned, and the next moment you were
convulsed with laughter. Edwin was inimitable in some of them. He was
one of those actors, it is true, who carried a great deal off the stage
with him, that he would willingly have left behind, and so far could not
help himself. But his awkward, shambling figure in Bowkitt the
dancing-master, was enough to make one die with laughing. He was also
unrivalled in _Lingo_, where he was admirably supported by Mrs. Wells in
Cowslip, when she prefers “a roast duck” to all the birds in the Heathen
Mythology—and in _Peeping Tom_, where he merely puts his head out, the
faces that he made threw the audience into a roar.’ I said, I remembered
no further back than B—, who used to delight me excessively in
_Lenitive_ in the Prize, when I was a boy. Northcote said, he was an
imitator of Edwin, but at a considerable distance. He was a
good-natured, agreeable man; and the audience were delighted with him,
because he was evidently delighted with them. In some respects he was a
caricaturist: for instance, in Lenitive he stuck his pigtail on end,
which he had no right to do, for no one had ever done it but himself. I
said Liston appeared to me to have more comic humour than any one in my
time, though he was not properly an actor. Northcote asked if he was not
low-spirited; and told the story (I suspect an old one) of his
consulting a physician on the state of his health, who recommended him
to go and see Liston. I said he was grave and prosing, but I did not
know there was any thing the matter with him, though I had seen him
walking along the street the other day with his face as fixed as if had
a lock-jaw, a book in his hand, looking neither to the right nor the
left, and very much like his own Lord Duberly. I did not see why he and
Matthews should both of them be so _hipped_, except from their having
_the player’s melancholy_, arising from their not seeing six hundred
faces on the broad grin before them at all other times as well as when
they were acting. He was, however, exceedingly unaffected, and
remarkably candid in judging of other actors. He always spoke in the
highest terms of Munden, whom I considered as overdoing his parts.[97]
Northcote said, ‘Munden was excellent but an artificial actor. You
should have seen Weston,’ he continued. ‘It was impossible, from looking
at him, for any one to say that he was acting. You would suppose they
had gone out and found the actual character they wanted, and brought him
upon the stage without his knowing it. Even when they interrupted him
with peals of laughter and applause, he looked about him as if he was
not at all conscious of having any thing to do with it, and then went on
as before. In Scrub, Dr. Last, and other parts of that kind, he was
perfection itself. Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after him.
There was something peculiar in his face; for I knew an old
school-fellow of his who told me he used to produce the same effect when
a boy, and when the master asked what was the matter, his companions
would make answer—‘Weston looked _at me_, Sir!’ Yet he came out in
tragedy, as indeed they all did! Northcote inquired if I had seen
Garrick? I answered, ‘No—I could not very well, as he died the same year
I was born!’ I mentioned having lately met with a striking instance of
genealogical taste in a family, the grandfather of which thought nothing
of Garrick, the father thought nothing of Mrs. Siddons, and the daughter
could make nothing of the Scotch Novels, but admired Mr. Theodore Hook’s
‘SAYINGS AND DOINGS!’
Northcote then returned to the subject of his book and said, ‘Sir
Richard Phillips once wished me to do a very magnificent work indeed on
the subject of art. He was like Curil, who had a number of fine
title-pages, if any one could have written books to answer them. He came
here once with Godwin to shew me a picture which they had just
discovered of Chaucer, and which was to embellish Godwin’s _Life_ of
him. I told them it was certainly no picture of Chaucer, nor was any
such picture painted at that time.’ I said, Godwin had got a portrait
about a year ago which he wished me to suppose was a likeness of
President Bradshaw: I saw no reason for his thinking so, but that in
that case it would be worth a hundred pounds to him! Northcote expressed
a curiosity to have seen it, as he knew the descendants of the family at
Plymouth. He remembered one of them, an old lady of the name of Wilcox,
who used to walk about in Gibson’s-Field near the town, so prim and
starched, holding up her fan spread out like a peacock’s tail with such
an air, on account of her supposed relationship to one of the Regicides!
They paid, however (in the vulgar opinion) for this distinction; for
others of them bled to death at the nose, or died of the bursting of a
blood-vessel, which their wise neighbours did not fail to consider as a
judgment upon them.
Speaking of Dr. M—, he said, he had such a feeling of beauty in his
heart, that it made angels of every one around him. To check a person
who was running on against another, he once said, ‘You should not speak
in that manner, for you lead me to suppose you have the bad qualities
you are so prone to dwell upon in others.’—A transition was here made to
Lord Byron, who used to tell a story of a little red-haired girl, who,
when countesses and ladies of fashion were leaving the room where he was
in crowds (to _cut_ him after his quarrel with his wife) stopped short
near a table against which he was leaning, gave him a familiar nod, and
said, ‘You should have married me, and then this would not have happened
to you!’ A question being started whether Dr. M— was handsome, Northcote
answered, ‘I could see no beauty in him as to his outward person, but
there was an angelic sweetness of disposition that spread its influence
over his whole conversation and manner. He had not wit, but a fine
romantic enthusiasm which deceived himself and enchanted others. I
remember once his describing a picture by Rosa de Tivoli (at Saltram) of
_Two Bulls fighting_, and he gave such an account of their rage and
manner of tearing up the ground that I could not rest till we went over
to see it—when we came there, it was nothing but a coarse daub like what
might be expected from the painter: but he had made the rest out of a
vivid imagination. So my father told him a story of a bull-bait he had
seen in which the bull had run so furiously at the dog that he broke the
chain and pitched upon his head and was killed. Soon after, he came and
told us the same story as an incident he himself had witnessed. He did
not mean to deceive, but the image had made such an impression on his
fancy, that he believed it to be one that he had himself been an
eye-witness of.’ I was much amused with this account and I offered to
get him a copy of a whimsical production, of which a new edition had
been printed. I also recommended to him the _Spanish Rogue_, as a fine
mixture of drollery and grave moralizing. He spoke of _Lazarillo de
Tormes_ and of the _Cheats of Scapin_, the last of which he rated rather
low. The work was written by Scarron, whose widow, the famous Madame de
Maintenon, afterwards became mistress to Louis XIV.
PART THE SECOND
CONVERSATION THE SIXTEENTH
N.—That is your diffidence, which I can’t help thinking you carry too
far. For any one of real strength, you are the humblest person I ever
knew.
H.—It is owing to pride.
N.—You deny you have invention too. But it is want of practice. Your
ideas run on before your executive power. It is a common case. There was
Ramsay, of whom Sir Joshua used to say that he was the most sensible
among all the painters of his time; but he has left little to show it.
His manner was dry and timid. He stopped short in the middle of his
work, because he knew exactly how much it wanted. Now and then we find
hints and sketches which show what he might have been, if his hand had
been equal to his conceptions. I have seen a picture of his of the
Queen, soon after she was married—a profile, and slightly done; but it
was a paragon of elegance. She had a fan in her hand: Lord! how she held
that fan! It was weak in execution and ordinary in features—all I can
say of it is, that it was the farthest possible removed from everything
like vulgarity. A professor might despise it; but in the mental part, I
have never seen any thing of Vandyke’s equal to it. I could have looked
at it forever. I showed it to J—n; and he, I believe, came into my
opinion of it. I don’t know where it is now; but I saw in it enough to
convince me that Sir Joshua was right in what he said of Ramsay’s great
superiority. His own picture of the King, which is at the Academy, is a
finer composition and shows greater boldness and mastery of hand; but I
should find it difficult to produce any thing of Sir Joshua’s that
conveys an idea of more grace and delicacy than the one I have
mentioned. Reynolds would have finished it better: the other was afraid
of spoiling what he had done, and so left it a mere outline. He was
frightened before he was hurt.
H.—Taste and even genius is but a misfortune, without a correspondent
degree of manual dexterity or power of language to make it manifest.
N.—W— was here the other day. I believe you met him going out. He came,
he said, to ask me about the famous people of the last age, Johnson,
Burke, &c. (as I was almost the only person left who remembered them),
and was curious to know what figure Sir Walter Scott would have made
among them.
H.—That is so like a North-Briton—‘to make assurance doubly sure,’ and
to procure a signature to an acknowledged reputation as if it were a
receipt for the delivery of a bale of goods.
N.—I told him it was not for me to pronounce upon such men as Sir Walter
Scott: they came before another tribunal. They were of that height that
they were seen by all the world, and must stand or fall by the verdict
of posterity. It signified little what any individual thought in such
cases, it being equally an impertinence to set one’s self against or to
add one’s testimony to the public voice; but as far as I could judge, I
told him, that Sir Walter would have stood his ground in any company:
neither Burke nor Johnson nor any of their admirers would have been
disposed or able to set aside his pretensions. These men were not looked
upon in their day as they are at present: Johnson had his _Lexiphanes_,
and Goldsmith was laughed at—their merits were to the full as much
called in question, nay, more so, than those of the Author of _Waverley_
have ever been, who has been singularly fortunate in himself or in
lighting upon a barren age: but because their names have since become
established, and as it were sacred, we think they were always so; and W—
wanted me, as a competent witness and as having seen both parties, to
affix the same seal to his countryman’s reputation, which it is not in
the power of the whole of the present generation to do, much less of any
single person in it. No, we must wait for this! Time alone can give the
final stamp: no living reputation can ever be of the same value or
quality as posthumous fame. We must throw lofty objects to a distance in
order to judge of them: if we are standing close under the Monument, it
looks higher than St. Paul’s. Posterity has this advantage over us-not
that they are really wiser, but they see the proportions better from
being placed further off. For instance, I liked Sir Walter, because he
had an easy, unaffected manner, and was ready to converse on all
subjects alike. He was not like your friends, the L— poets, who talk
about nothing but their own poetry. If, on the contrary, he had been
stiff and pedantic, I should, perhaps, have been inclined to think less
highly of the author from not liking the man; so that we can never judge
fairly of men’s abilities till we are no longer liable to come in
contact with their persons. Friends are as little to be trusted as
enemies: favour or prejudice makes the votes in either case more or less
suspected; though ‘the vital signs that a name shall live’ are in some
instances so strong, that we can hardly refuse to put faith in them, and
I think this is one. I was much pleased with Sir Walter, and I believe
he expressed a favourable opinion of me. I said to him, ‘I admire the
way in which you begin your novels. You set out so abruptly, that you
quite surprise me. I can’t at all tell what’s coming.’—‘No!’ says Sir
Walter, ‘nor I neither.’ I then told him, that when I first read
_Waverley_, I said it was no novel: nobody could invent like that.
Either he had heard the story related by one of the surviving parties,
or he had found the materials in a manuscript concealed in some old
chest: to which he replied, ‘You’re not so far out of the way in
thinking so.’ You don’t know him, do you? He’d be a pattern to you. Oh!
he has a very fine manner. You would learn to rub off some of your
asperities. But you admire him, I believe.
H.—Yes; on this side of idolatry and Toryism.
N.—That is your prejudice.
H.—Nay, it rather shows my liberality, if I am a devoted enthusiast,
notwithstanding. There are two things I admire in Sir Walter, his
capacity and his simplicity; which indeed I am apt to think are much the
same. The more ideas a man has of other things, the less he is taken up
with the idea of himself. Every one gives the same account of the author
of _Waverley_ in this respect. When he was in Paris, and went to
Galignani’s, he sat down in an outer room to look at some book he wanted
to see: none of the clerks had the least suspicion who it was: when it
was found out, the place was in a commotion. Cooper, the American, was
in Paris at the same time: his looks and manners seemed to announce a
much greater man. He strutted through the streets with a very
consequential air; and in company held up his head, screwed up his
features, and placed himself on a sort of pedestal to be observed and
admired, as if he never relaxed in the assumption nor wished it to be
forgotten by others, that he was the American Sir Walter Scott. The real
one never troubled himself about the matter. Why should he? He might
safely leave that question to others. Indeed, by what I am told, he
carries his indifference too far: it amounts to an implied contempt for
the public, and _misprision of treason_ against the commonwealth of
letters. He thinks nothing of his works, although ‘all Europe rings with
them from side to side.’—If so, he has been severely punished for his
infirmity.
N.—Though you do not know Sir Walter Scott, I think I have heard you say
you have seen him.
H.—Yes, he put me in mind of Cobbett, with his florid face and scarlet
gown, which were just like the other’s red face and scarlet waistcoat.
The one is like an English farmer, the other like a Scotch _laird_. Both
are large, robust men, with great strength and composure of features;
but I saw nothing of the _ideal_ character in the romance-writer, any
more than I looked for it in the politician.
N.—Indeed! But you have a vast opinion of Cobbett too, haven’t you? Oh!
he’s a giant! He has such prodigious strength; he tears up a subject by
the roots. Did you ever read his Grammar? Or see his attack on Mrs. —?
It was like a hawk pouncing on a wren. I should be terribly afraid to
get into his hands. And then his homely, familiar way of writing—it is
not from necessity or vulgarity, but to show his contempt for
aristocratic pride and arrogance. He only has a kitchen-garden; he could
have a flower-garden too if he chose. Peter Pindar said his style was
like the Horse-Guards, only one story above the ground, while Junius’s
had all the airy elegance of Whitehall: but he could raise his style
just as high as he pleased; though he does not want to sacrifice
strength to elegance. He knows better what he is about.
H.—I don’t think he’ll set up for a fine gentleman in a hurry, though he
has for a Member of Parliament; and I fancy he would make no better
figure in the one than the other. He appeared to me, when I once saw
him, exactly what I expected: in Sir Walter I looked in vain for a
million of fine things! I could only explain it to myself in this way,
that there was a degree of capacity in that huge double forehead of his,
that superseded all effort, made every thing come intuitively and almost
mechanically, as if it were merely transcribing what was already
written, and by the very facility with which the highest beauty and
excellence was produced, left few traces of it in the expression of the
countenance, and hardly any sense of it in the mind of the author.
Expression only comes into the face as we are at a loss for words, or
have a difficulty in bringing forward our ideas; but we may repeat the
finest things by rote without any change of look or manner. It is only
when the powers are tasked, when the moulds of thought are full, that
the effect or the _wear-and-tear_ of the mind appears on the surface.
So, in general, writers of the greatest imagination and range of ideas,
and who might be said to have all nature obedient to their call, seem to
have been most careless of their fame and regardless of their works.
They treat their productions not as children, but as ‘bastards of their
art;’ whereas those who are more confined in their scope of intellect
and wedded to some one theory or predominant fancy, have been found to
feel a proportionable fondness for the offspring of their brain, and
have thus excited a deeper interest in it in the minds of others. We set
a value on things as they have cost us dear: the very limitation of our
faculties or exclusiveness of our feelings compels us to concentrate all
our enthusiasm on a favourite subject; and strange as it may sound, in
order to inspire a perfect sympathy in others or to form a school, men
must themselves be _egotists_! Milton has had fewer readers and
admirers, but I suspect more devoted and bigotted ones, than ever
Shakspeare had: Sir Walter Scott has attracted more universal attention
than any writer of our time, but you may speak against him with less
danger of making personal enemies than if you attack Lord Byron. Even
Wordsworth has half a dozen followers, who set him up above everybody
else from a _common idiosyncrasy_ of feeling and the singleness of the
elements of which his excellence is composed. Before we can take an
author entirely to our bosoms, he must be another self; and he cannot be
this, if he is ‘not one, but all mankind’s epitome.’ It was this which
gave such an effect to Rousseau’s writings, that he stamped his own
character and the image of his self-love on the public mind—_there_ it
is, and there it will remain in spite of every thing. Had he possessed
more comprehension of thought or feeling, it would have only have
diverted him from his object. But it was the excess of his egotism and
his utter blindness to every thing else, that found a corresponding
sympathy in the conscious feelings of every human breast, and shattered
to pieces the pride of rank and circumstance by the pride of internal
worth or upstart pretension. When Rousseau stood behind the chair of the
master of the _château_ of —, and smiled to hear the company dispute
about the meaning of the motto of the arms of the family, which he alone
knew, and stumbled as he handed the glass of wine to his young mistress,
and fancied she coloured at being waited upon by so learned a young
footman—then was first kindled that spark which can never be quenched,
then was formed the germ of that strong conviction of the disparity
between the badge on his shoulder and the aspirations of his soul—the
determination, in short, that external situation and advantages are but
the mask, and that the mind is the man—armed with which, impenetrable,
incorrigible, he went forth conquering and to conquer, and overthrew the
monarchy of France and the hierarchies of the earth. Till then, birth
and wealth and power were all in all, though but the frame-work or crust
that envelopes the man; and what there was in the man himself was never
asked, or was scorned and forgot. And while all was dark and grovelling
within, while knowledge either did not exist or was confined to a few,
while material power and advantages were every thing, this was naturally
to be expected. But with the increase and diffusion of knowledge, this
state of things must sooner or later cease; and Rousseau was the first
who held the torch (lighted at the never-dying fire in his own bosom) to
the hidden chambers of the mind of man—like another Prometheus, breathed
into his nostrils the breath of a new and intellectual life, enraging
the Gods of the earth, and made him feel what is due to himself and his
fellows. Before, physical force was every thing: henceforward, mind,
thought, feeling was a new element—a fourth estate in society. What!
shall a man have read Dante and Ariosto, and be none the better for it?
Shall he be still judged of only by his coat, the number of his servants
in livery, the house over his head? While poverty meant ignorance, that
was necessarily the case; but the world of books overturns the world of
things, and establishes a new balance of power and scale of estimation.
Shall we think only rank and pedigree divine, when we have music,
poetry, and painting within us? Tut! we have read _Old Mortality_; and
shall it be asked whether we have done so in a garret or a palace, in a
carriage or on foot? Or knowing them, shall we not revere the mighty
heirs of fame, and respect ourselves for knowing and honouring them?
This is the true march of intellect, and not the erection of _Mechanics’
Institutions_, or the printing of _two-penny trash_, according to my
notion of the matter, though I have nothing to say against them neither.
N.—I thought you never would have done; however, you have come to the
ground at last. After this rhapsody, I must inform you that Rousseau is
a character more detestable to me than I have power of language to
express:—an aristocrat filled with all their worst vices, pride,
ambition, conceit and gross affectation: and though endowed with some
ability, yet not sufficient ever to make him know right from wrong:
witness his novel of _Eloisa_. His name brings to my mind all the gloomy
horrors of a mob-government, which attempted from their ignorance to
banish truth and justice from the world. I see you place Sir Walter
above Lord Byron. The question is not which keeps longest on the wing,
but which soars highest: and I cannot help thinking there are essences
in Lord Byron that are not to be surpassed. He is on a par with Dryden.
All the other modern poets appear to me vulgar in the comparison. As a
lady who comes here said, there is such an air of nobility in what he
writes. Then there is such a power in the style, expressions almost like
Shakspeare—‘And looked round on them with their _wolfish_ eyes.’
H.—The expression is in Shakspeare, somewhere in _Lear_.
N.—The line I repeated is in _Don Juan_. I do not mean to vindicate the
immorality or misanthropy in that poem—perhaps his lameness was to blame
for this defect—but surely no one can deny the force, the spirit of it;
and there is such a fund of drollery mixed up with the serious part.
Nobody understood the tragi-comedy of poetry so well. People find fault
with this mixture in general, because it is not well managed; there is a
comic story and a tragic story going on at the same time, without their
having any thing to do with one another. But in Lord Byron they are
brought together, just as they are in nature. In like manner, if you go
to an execution at the very moment when the criminal is going to be
turned off, and all eyes are fixed upon him, an old apple-woman and her
stall are overturned, and all the spectators fall a-laughing. In real
life the most ludicrous incidents border on the most affecting and
shocking. How fine that is of the cask of butter in the storm! Some
critics have objected to it as turning the whole into burlesque; on the
contrary, it is that which stamps the character of the scene more than
any thing else. What did the people in the boat care about the rainbow,
which he has described in such vivid colours; or even about their
fellow-passengers who were thrown overboard, when they only wanted to
eat them? No, it was the loss of the firkin of butter that affected them
more than all the rest; and it is the mention of this circumstance that
adds a hardened levity and a sort of ghastly horror to the scene. It
shows the master-hand—there is such a boldness and sagacity and
superiority to ordinary rules in it! I agree, however, in your
admiration of the Waverley Novels: they are very fine. As I told the
author, he and Cervantes have raised the idea of human nature, not as
Richardson has attempted, by affectation and a false varnish, but by
bringing out what there is really fine in it under a cloud of
disadvantages. Have you seen the last?
H.—No.
N.—There is a character of a common smith or armourer in it, which, in
spite of a number of weaknesses and in the most ludicrous situations, is
made quite heroical by the tenderness and humanity it displays. It is
his best, but I had not read it when I saw him. No; all that can be said
against Sir Walter is, that he has never made a _whole_. There is an
infinite number of delightful incidents and characters, but they are
disjointed and scattered. This is one of Fielding’s merits: his novels
are regular compositions, with what the ancients called a _beginning_, a
_middle_, and an _end_: every circumstance is foreseen and provided for,
and the conclusion of the story turns round as it were to meet the
beginning. _Gil Blas_ is very clever, but it is only a succession of
chapters. _Tom Jones_ is a masterpiece, as far as regards the conduct of
the fable.
H.—Do you know the reason? Fielding had a hooked nose, the long chin. It
is that introverted physiognomy that binds and concentrates.
N.—But Sir Walter has not a hooked nose, but one that denotes kindness
and ingenuity. Mrs. Abington had the pug-nose, who was the perfection of
comic archness and vivacity: a hooked nose is my aversion.
CONVERSATION THE SEVENTEENTH
N.—I sometimes get into scrapes that way by contradicting people before
I have well considered the subject, and I often wonder how I get out of
them so well as I do. I remember once meeting with Sir — —, who was
talking about Milton; and as I have a natural aversion to a coxcomb, I
differed from what he said, without being at all prepared with any
arguments in support of my opinion.
H.—But you had time enough to think of them afterwards.
N.—I got through with it somehow or other. It is the very risk you run
in such cases that puts you on the alert and gives you spirit to
extricate yourself from it. If you had full leisure to deliberate and to
make out your defence beforehand, you perhaps could not do it so well as
on the spur of the occasion. The surprise and flutter of the animal
spirits gives the alarm to any little wit we possess, and puts it into a
state of immediate requisition.
H.—Besides, it is always easiest to defend a paradox or an opinion you
don’t care seriously about. I would sooner (as a matter of choice) take
the wrong side than the right in any argument. If you have a thorough
conviction on any point and good grounds for it, you have studied it
long, and the real reasons have sunk into the mind; so that what you can
recal of them at a sudden _pinch_, seems unsatisfactory and
disproportionate to the confidence of your belief and to the magisterial
tone you are disposed to assume. Even truth is a matter of habit and
professorship. Reason and knowledge, when at their height, return into a
kind of instinct. We understand the grammar of a foreign language best,
though we do not speak it so well. But if you take up an opinion at a
venture, then you lay hold of whatever excuse comes within your reach,
instead of searching about for and bewildering yourself with the true
reasons; and the odds are that the arguments thus got up are as good as
those opposed to them. In fact, the more sophistical and superficial an
objection to a received or well-considered opinion is, the more we are
staggered and teazed by it; and the next thing is to lose our temper,
when we become an easy prey to a cool and disingenuous adversary. I
would much rather (as the safest side) insist on Milton’s pedantry than
on his sublimity, supposing I were not in the company of very good
judges. A single stiff or obscure line would outweigh a whole book of
solemn grandeur in the mere flippant encounter of the wits, and, in
general, the truth and justice of the cause you espouse is rather an
incumbrance than an assistance; or it is like heavy armour which few
have strength to wield. Any thing short of complete triumph on the right
side is defeat: any hole picked or flaw detected in an argument which we
are holding earnestly and conscientiously, is sufficient to raise the
laugh against us. This is the greatest advantage which folly and knavery
have. We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be
quite wrong; and as all the world would be thought to have some reason
on their side, they are glad of any loop-hole or pretext to escape from
the dogmatism and tyranny we would set up over them. Absolute submission
requires absolute proofs. Without some such drawback, the world might
become too wise and too good, at least according to every man’s private
prescription. In this sense _ridicule is the test of truth_; that is,
the levity and indifference on one side balances the formality and
presumption on the other.
N.—Horne Tooke used to play with his antagonists in the way you speak
of. He constantly threw Fuseli into a rage and made him a
laughing-stock, by asking him to explain the commonest things, and often
what Fuseli understood much better than he did. But in general, I think
it is less an indifference to truth than the fear of finding yourself in
the wrong, that carries you through when you take up any opinion from
caprice or the spirit of contradiction. Danger almost always produces
courage and presence of mind. The faculties are called forth with the
occasion. You see men of very ordinary characters, placed in
extraordinary circumstances, act like men of capacity. The late King of
France was thought weak and imbecile, till he was thrown into the most
trying situations; and then he shewed sense and even eloquence which no
one had ever suspected. Events supplied the want of genius and energy;
the external impressions were so strong, that the dullest or most
indolent must have been roused by them. Indeed the wise man is perhaps
more liable to err in such extreme cases by setting up his own
preconceptions and self-will against circumstances, than the
_common-place_ character who yields to necessity and is passive under
existing exigencies. It is this which makes kings and ministers equal to
their situations. They may be very poor creatures in themselves; but the
importance of the part they have to act and the magnitude of their
responsibility inspire them with a factitious and _official_ elevation
of view. Few people are found totally unfit for high station, and it is
lucky that it is so. Perhaps men of genius and imagination are the least
adapted to get into the state go-cart; Buonaparte, we see, with all his
talent, only drove to the devil. When Richard II. was quite a youth, and
he went to suppress the rebellion of Wat Tyler in Smithfield, and the
latter was killed, his followers drew their bows and were about to take
vengeance on the young king, when he stepped forward and said that ‘now
as their leader was dead, he would be their leader.’ This instantly
disarmed their rage, and they received him with acclamations. He had no
other course left; the peril he was in made him see his place of safety.
Courage has a wonderful effect: this makes mad people so terrible, that
they have no fear. Even wild beasts or a mob (which is much the same
thing) will hardly dare to attack you if you show no fear of them. I
have heard Lord Exmouth (Sir Edward Pellew) say that once when he was
out with his ship at sea and there was a mutiny on board and no chance
of escape, he learned (from a spy he had among them) the moment when the
ring-leaders were assembled and about to execute their design of putting
the captain and all the officers to death, when taking a pistol in each
hand, he went down into the cock-pit into the midst of them; and
threatening to shoot the first man that stirred, took them every one
prisoners. If he had betrayed the least fear or any of them had raised a
hand, he must have been instantly sacrificed. But he was bolder than any
individual in the group, and by this circumstance had the ascendancy
over the whole put together. A similar act of courage is related of
Peter the Great, who singly entered the haunt of some conspirators, and
striking down the leader with a blow on the face, spread consternation
amongst the assassins, who were terrified by his fearlessness.
(_A book of prints was brought in, containing Views of Edinburgh._)
N.—It is curious to what perfection these things are brought, and how
cheap they are. It is that which makes them sell and ensures the fortune
of those who publish them. Great fortunes are made out of small profits,
which allow all the world to become purchasers. That is the reason the
Colosseum will hardly answer. There never was an example of an
exhibition in England answering at a crown a-piece. People look twice at
their money before they will part with it, if it be more than they are
accustomed to pay. It becomes a question, and perhaps a few stragglers
go; whereas they ought to go in a stream and as a matter of course. If
people have to pay a little more than usual, though a mere trifle, they
consider it in the light of an imposition, and resent it as such; if the
price be a little under the mark, they think they have saved so much
money, and snap at it as a bargain. The publishers of the work on
Edinburgh are the same who brought out the _Views of London_; and it is
said, the success of that undertaking enabled them to buy up
Lackington’s business. E— the architect, I am told, suggested the plan,
but declined a share that was offered him in it, because he said nothing
that he had been engaged in had ever succeeded. The event would not
belie the notion of his own ill-luck. It is singular on what slight
turns good or ill fortune depends. Lackington (I understood from the
person who brought the _Edinburgh Views_ here) died worth near half a
million: nobody could tell how he had made it. At thirty he was not
worth a shilling. The great difficulty is in the first hundred pounds.
H.—It is sympathy with the mass of mankind, and finding out from
yourself what is they want and must have.
N.—It seems a good deal owing to the most minute circumstances. A
difference of sixpence in the price will make all the difference in the
sale of a book. Sometimes a work lies on the shelf for a time, and then
runs like wild-fire. There was _Drelincourt on Death_, which is a
fortune in itself; it hung on hand; _nobody_ read it, till Defoe put a
ghost-story into it, and it has been a stock-book ever since. It is the
same in prints. A catching subject or name will make one thing an
universal favourite, while another of ten times the merit is never
noticed. I have known this happen to myself in more than one instance.
This is the provoking part in W—l and some other painters, who, taking
advantage of the externals and accidents of their art, have run away
with nearly all the popularity of their time. Jack T— was here the other
day to say that W— and his friends complained bitterly of the things I
said about him. I replied that I had only spoken of him as an artist,
which I was at liberty to do; and that if he were offended, I would
recommend to him to read the story of Charles II. and the Duchess of
Cleveland, who came to the king with a complaint, that whenever she met
Nell Gwyn in the street, the latter put her head out of the coach and
made mouths at her. ‘Well then,’says Charles II. ‘the next time you meet
Nelly and she repeats the offence, do you make mouths at her again!’ So
if Mr. W—l is hurt at my saying things of him, all he has to do is to
say things of me in return.
H.—I confess, I never liked W—1. It was one of the errors of my youth
that I did not think him equal to Raphael and Rubens united, as Payne
Knight contended: and I have fought many a battle with numbers (if not
odds) against me on that point.
N.—Then you must have the satisfaction of seeing a change of opinion at
present.
H.—Pardon me, I have not that satisfaction; I have only a double
annoyance from it. It is no consolation to me that an individual was
overrated by the folly of the public formerly, and that he suffers from
their injustice and fickleness at present. It is no satisfaction to me
that poor I—g is reduced to his primitive congregation, and that the
stream of coronet-coaches no longer rolls down Holborn or Oxford-street
to his chapel. They ought never to have done so, or they ought to
continue to do so. The world (whatever in their petulance and profligacy
they may think) have no right to intoxicate poor human nature with the
full tide of popular applause, and then to drive it to despair for the
want of it. There are no words to express the cruelty, the weakness, the
shamelessness of such conduct, which resembles that of the little girl
who dresses up her doll in the most extravagant finery, and then in mere
wantonness strips it naked to its wool and bits of wood again—with this
difference that the doll has no feeling, whereas the world’s idols are
wholly sensitive.
(_Of some one who preferred appearances to realities._)
N.—I can understand the character, because it is exactly the reverse of
what I should do and feel. It is like dressing out of one’s sphere, or
any other species of affectation and imposture. I cannot bear to be
taken for any thing but what I am. It is like what the country-people
call ‘having _a halfpenny head and a farthing tail_.’ That is what makes
me mad when people sometimes come and pay their court to me by
saying—‘Bless me! how sagacious you look! What a penetrating
countenance! ‘No, I say, that is but the title-page—what is there in the
book? Your dwelling so much on the exterior seems to imply that the
inside does not correspond to it. Don’t let me look wise and be foolish,
but let me be wise though I am taken for a fool! Any thing else is
quackery: it is as if there was no real excellence in the world, but in
opinion. I used to blame Sir Joshua for this: he sometimes wanted to get
_Collins’s earth_, but did not like to have it known. Then there were
certain oils that he made a great _fuss_ and mystery about. I have said
to myself, surely there is something deeper and nobler in the art that
does not depend on all this trick and handicraft. Give Titian and a
common painter the same materials and tools to work with, and then see
the difference between them. This is all that is worth contending for.
If Sir Joshua had had no other advantage than the using _Collins’s
earth_ and some particular sort of _megilp_, we should not now have been
talking about him. When W— was here the other day, he asked about Mengs
and his school; and when I told him what I thought, he said, ‘Is that
your own opinion, or did you take it from Sir Joshua?’ I answered, that
if I admired Sir Joshua, it was because there was something congenial in
our tastes, and not because I was his pupil. I saw his faults, and
differed with him often enough. If I have any bias, it is the other way,
to take fancies into my head and run into singularity and cavils. In
what I said to you about Ramsay’s picture of the Queen, for instance, I
don’t know that any one ever thought so before, or that any one else
would agree with me. It might be set down as mere whim and caprice; but
I can’t help it, if it is so. All I know is, that such is my feeling
about it, which I can no more part with than I can part with my own
existence. It is the same in other things, as in music. There was an
awkward composer at the Opera many years ago, of the name of Boccarelli;
what he did was stupid enough in general, but I remember he sung an air
one day at Cosway’s, which they said Shield had transferred into the
_Flitch of Bacon_. I cannot describe the effect it had upon me—it seemed
as if it wound into my very soul—I would give any thing to hear it sung
again. So I could have listened to Dignum’s singing the lines out of
Shakspeare—‘Come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands’—a hundred
times over. But I am not sure that others would be affected in the same
manner by it: there may be some quaint association of ideas in the case.
But at least, if I am wrong, the folly is my own.
H.—There is no danger of the sort, except from affectation, which I am
sure is not your case. All the real taste and feeling in the world is
made up of what people _take in their heads_ in this manner. Even if you
were right only once in five times in these hazardous experiments and
shrewd guesses, that would be a fifth part of the truth; whereas, if you
merely repeated after others by rote or waited to have all the world on
your side, there could be absolutely nothing gained at all. If any one
had come in and had expressed the same idea of Ramsay’s portrait of the
Queen, this would doubtless be a confirmation of your opinion, like two
persons finding out a likeness; but suppose W— had gone away with your
opinion in his pocket, and had spread it about everywhere what a fine
painter Ramsay was, I do not see how this would have strengthened your
conclusion; nay, perhaps the people whom he got as converts would
entirely mistake the meaning, and come to you with the very reverse of
what you had said as a prodigious discovery. This is the way in which
these unanimous verdicts are commonly obtained. You might say that
Ramsay was not a fine painter, but a man of real genius. The world, not
comprehending the distinction, would merely come to the gross
conclusion, that he was both one and the other. Thus even truth is
vulgarly debased into _common-place_ and nonsense. So that it is not
simply as Mr. Locke observed—‘That there are not so many wrong opinions
in the world as is generally imagined, for most people have no opinion
at all, but take up with those of others or with mere hearsay and
echoes;’ but these echoes are often false ones and no more like the
original idea than the rhyming echoes in Hudibras or than Slender’s Mum
and Budget.
N.—But don’t you think the contrary extreme would be just as bad, if
every one set up to judge for himself and every question was split into
an endless variety of opinions?
H.—I do not see that this would follow. If persons who are sincere and
free to inquire differ widely on any subject, it is because it is beyond
their reach, and there is no satisfactory evidence one way or the other.
Supposing a thing to be doubtful, why should it not be left so? But
men’s passions and interests, when brought into play, are most tenacious
on these points where their understandings afford them least light.
Those doctrines are _established_ which need propping up, as men place
beams against falling houses. It does not require an act of parliament
to persuade mathematicians to agree with Euclid, or painters to admire
Raphael.
N.—And don’t you think this the best rule for the rest of the world to
go by?
H.—Yes; but not if the doctors themselves differed: then it would be
necessary to _clench the nail_ with a few smart strokes of bigotry and
intolerance. What admits of proof, men agree in, if they have no
interest to the contrary; what they differ about in spite of all that
can be said, is matter of taste or conjecture.
CONVERSATION THE EIGHTEENTH
N.—Opie, I remember, used to argue, that there were as many different
sorts of taste as genius. He said, ‘If I am engaged in a picture, and
endeavour to do it according to the suggestions of my employers, I do
not understand exactly what they want, nor they what I can do, and I
please no one: but if I do it according to my own notions, I belong to a
class, and if I am able to satisfy myself, I please that class.’ You did
not know Opie? You would have admired him greatly. I do not speak of him
as an artist, but as a man of sense and observation. He paid me the
compliment of saying, ‘that we should have been the best friends in the
world, if we had not been rivals.’ I think he had more of this feeling
than I had; perhaps, because I had most vanity. We sometimes got into
foolish altercations. I recollect once in particular, at a banker’s in
the city, we took up the whole of dinner-time with a ridiculous
controversy about Milton and Shakspeare; I am sure we neither of us had
the least notion which was right—and when I was heartily ashamed of it,
a foolish citizen who was present, added to my confusion by
saying—‘Lord! What would I give to hear two such men as you talk every
day!’ This quite humbled me: I was ready to sink with vexation: I could
have resolved never to open my mouth again. But I can’t help thinking W—
was wrong in supposing I borrow every thing from others. It is not my
character. I never could learn my lesson at school. My copy was hardly
legible; but if there was a prize to be obtained or my father was to see
it, then I could write a very fine hand with all the usual flourishes.
What I know of history (and something about heraldry) has been gathered
up when I had to enquire into the subject for a picture: if it had been
set me as a task, I should have forgotten it immediately. In the same
way, when Boydell came and proposed a subject for a picture to me, and
pointed out the capabilities, I always said I could make nothing of it:
but as soon as he was gone and I was left to myself, the whole then
seemed to unfold itself naturally. I never could study the rules of
composition or make sketches and drawings beforehand; in this, probably
running into the opposite error to that of the modern Italian painters,
whom Fuseli reproaches with spending their whole lives in preparation. I
must begin at once or I can do nothing. When I set about the ‘Wat
Tyler,’ I was frightened at it: it was the largest work I had ever
undertaken: there were to be horses and armour and buildings and several
groups in it: when I looked at it, the canvas seemed ready to fall upon
me. But I had committed myself and could not escape; disgrace was behind
me—and every step I made in advance, was so much positively gained. If I
had staid to make a number of designs and try different experiments, I
never should have had the courage to go on. Half the things that people
do not succeed in, are through fear of making the attempt. Like the
recruit in Farquhar’s comedy, you grow wondrous bold, when you have once
taken ‘list-money.’ When you _must_ do a thing, you feel in some measure
that you _can_ do it. You have only to commit yourself beyond retreat.
It is like the soldier going into battle or a player first appearing on
the stage—the worst is over when they arrive upon the scene of action.
H.—I found nearly the same thing that you describe when I first began to
write for the newspapers. I had not till then been in the habit of
writing at all, or had been a long time about it; but I perceived that
with the necessity, the fluency came. Something I did, _took_; and I was
called upon to do a number of things all at once. I was in the middle of
the stream, and must sink or swim. I had, for instance, often a
theatrical criticism to write after midnight, which appeared the next
morning. There was no fault found with it—at least, it was as good as if
I had had to do it for a weekly paper. I only did it at once, and
recollected all I had to say on the spot, because I could not put it off
for three days, when perhaps I should have forgotten the best part of
it. Besides, when one is pressed for time, one saves it. I might set
down nearly all I had to say in my mind, while the play was going on. I
know I did not feel at a loss for matter—the difficulty was to compress
and write it out fast enough. When you are tied to time, you can come to
time. I conceive in like manner more wonder is expressed at _extempore_
speaking, than it is entitled to. Not to mention that the same
well-known topics continually recur, and that the speakers may con their
_extempore_ speeches over beforehand and merely watch their opportunity
to slide them in dexterously into the grand procession of the debate: a
man when once on his legs _must say something_, and this is the utmost
that a public speaker generally says. If he has any thing good to say,
he can recollect it just as well at once as in a week’s literary
leisure, as well standing up as sitting down, except from habit. We are
not surprised at a man’s telling us his thoughts across a table: why
should we be so at his doing the same thing, when mounted on one? But he
excites more attention: _that_ gives him a double motive. A man’s
getting up to make a speech in public will not give him a command of
words or thoughts if he is without them; but he may be delivered of all
the brilliancy or wisdom he actually possesses, in a longer or a shorter
space, according to the occasion. The circumstance of the time is
optional; necessity, if it be not the mother of invention, supplies us
with the memory of all we know.
N.—(_after a pause_)—There is no end of the bigotry and prejudice in the
world; one can only shrug one’s shoulders and submit to it. Have you
seen the copies they have got down at the club-house in Pall-mall of the
groups of horses from the Elgin marbles? Lord! how inferior they are to
Rubens’s! So stiff, and poor, and dry, compared to his magnificent
spirit and bold luxuriance! I should not know them to be horses; they
are as much like any thing else. I was at Somerset-house the other day.
They talk of the Dutch painters; why, there are pictures there of
interiors and other subjects of familiar life, that throw all the
boasted _chef-d’œuvres_ of the Dutch school to an immeasurable distance.
I do not speak of history, which has not been fairly tried; but in all
for which there has been encouragement, no nation can go beyond us. We
have resources and a richness of capacity equal to any undertaking.
H.—Do you recollect any in particular that you admired at the
Exhibition?
N.—No, I do not remember the names; but it was a general sense of
excellence and truth of imitation of natural objects. As to lofty
history, our religion scarcely allows it. The Italians had no more
genius for painting nor a greater love of pictures than we; but the
_church_ was the foster-mother of the fine arts; being the most politic
and powerful establishment in the world, they laid their hands on all
that could allure and impress the minds of the people—music, painting,
architecture, ceremonies; and this produced a succession of great
artists and noble works, till the churches were filled, and then they
ceased. The genius of Italian art was nothing but the genius of Popery.
God forbid we should purchase success at the same price! Every thing at
Rome is like a picture—is calculated for show. I remember walking
through one of the bye-streets near the Vatican, where I met some
procession in which the Pope was; and all at once I saw a number of the
most beautiful Arabian horses curvetting and throwing out their long
tails, like a vision or a part of a romance. We should here get one or
two at most. All our holiday pageants, even the Coronation, are low
Bartlemy-fair exhibitions compared with what you see at Rome. And then
to see the Pope give the benediction at St. Peter’s, raising himself up
and spreading out his hands in the form of a cross, with an energy and
dignity as if he was giving a blessing to the whole world! No, it is not
enough to _see_ Popery in order to hate it—it must be felt too. A poor
man going through one of the narrow streets where a similar procession
was passing, was fiercely attacked by a soldier of the Swiss Guards, and
ordered to stand back. The man said he could retire no further, for he
was close against the wall. ‘Get back, you and the wall too!’ was the
answer of haughty servility and mild despotism. It is this spirit
peeping out that makes one dread the fairest outside appearances; and
with this spirit, and the power and determination it implies to delude
and lead the multitude blindfold with every lure to their imagination
and their senses, I will answer for the production of finer historical
and scripture-pieces in this country (let us be as far north as we will)
than we have yet seen.
H.—You do not think, then, that we are naturally a dry, sour, Protestant
set? Is not the air of Ireland Popish, and that of Scotland
Presbyterian?
N.—No: though you may have it so if you please. K— has been wanting my
two copies of —, though I do not think he will bid high enough to induce
me to part with them. I am in this respect like Opie, who had an
original by Sir Joshua that he much valued, and he used to say, ‘I don’t
know what I should do in that case, but I hope to G—d nobody will offer
me 500_l._ for it!’ It is curious, this very picture sold for 500l. the
other day. So it is that real merit creeps on, and is sure to find its
level. The ‘Holy Family’ sold among Lord Gwydir’s pictures for 1,900_l._
H.—Is that fine?
N.—Oh yes! it’s certainly fine. It wants the air of history, but it has
a rich colour and great simplicity and innocence. It is not equal to the
‘Snake in the Grass,’ which Mr. Peel gave 1,600 guineas for. That was
his _forte_: nothing is wanting there.
_A Stranger._—I thought Sir Joshua’s colours did not stand?
N.—That is true of some of them: he tried experiments, and had no
knowledge of chemistry, and bought colours of Jews: but I speak of them
as they came from the easel. As he left them and intended them to be, no
pictures in the world would stand by the side of them. Colour seemed to
exist substantively in his mind. You see this still in those that have
not faded—in his latter works especially, which were also his best; and
this, with character and a certain sweetness, must always make his works
invaluable. You come to this at last—what you find in any one that you
can get nowhere else. If you have this about you, you need not be afraid
of time. Gainsborough had the saving grace of originality; and you
cannot put him down for that reason. With all their faults, and the
evident want of an early study and knowledge of the art, his pictures
fetch more every time they are brought to the hammer. I don’t know what
it was that his ‘View of the Mall in St. James’s Park’ sold for not long
ago. I remember Mr. P. H. coming to me, and saying what an exquisite
picture Gainsborough had painted of the Park. You would suppose it would
be stiff and formal with the straight rows of trees and people sitting
on benches—it is all in motion, and in a flutter like a lady’s fan.
Watteau is not half so airy. His picture of young lord — was a
masterpiece—there was such a look of natural gentility. You must
recollect his ‘Girl feeding pigs:’ the expression and truth of nature
were never surpassed. Sir Joshua was struck with it, though he said he
ought to have made her a beauty.
H.—Perhaps it was as well to make sure of one thing at a time. I
remember being once driven by a shower of rain for shelter into a
picture dealer’s shop in Oxford-street, where there stood on the floor a
copy of Gainsborough’s ‘Shepherd-boy’ with the thunder-storm coming on.
What a truth and beauty was there! He stands with his hands clasped,
looking up with a mixture of timidity and resignation, eying a magpie
chattering over his head, while the wind is rustling in the branches. It
was like a vision breathed on the canvas. I have been fond of
Gainsborough ever since.
N.—Oh! that was an essence: but it was only a copy you saw? The picture
was finer than his ‘Woodman,’ which has a little false glitter and
attempt at theatrical effect; but the other is innocence itself.
Gainsborough was a natural gentleman; and with all his simplicity he had
wit too. An eminent counsellor once attempted to puzzle him on some
trial about the originality of a picture by saying, ‘I observe you lay
great stress on the phrase, the _painter’s eye_; what do you mean by
that?’ ‘The painter’s eye,’ answered Gainsborough, ‘is to him what the
lawyer’s tongue is to you.’ Sir Joshua was not fond of Wilson, and said
at one of the Academy dinners, ‘Yes, Gainsborough is certainly the best
landscape-painter of the day.’ ‘No,’ replied Wilson, who overheard him,
‘but he is the best portrait-painter.’ This was a sufficient testimony
in Gainsborough’s favour.
H.—He did not make himself agreeable at Buckingham-house, any more than
Sir Joshua, who kept a certain distance and wished to appear as a
gentleman; they wanted a _buffoon_ whom they might be familiar with at
first, and insult the moment he overstepped the mark, or as soon as they
grew tired of him. Their favourites must be like _pet_ lap-dogs or
monkeys.
N.—C— went to court the other day after a long absence. He was very
graciously received, notwithstanding. The K— held out his hand for him
to kiss; he recollected himself in time to perceive the object. He was
struck with the manner in which the great people looked towards the
King, and the utter insignificance of every thing else; ‘and then,’ said
C—, ‘as soon as they are out of the palace, they get into their
carriages, and ride over you with all the fierceness and insolence
imaginable.’ West used to say you could tell the highest nobility at
court by their being the most abject. This was policy, for the most
powerful would be most apt to excite jealousy in the sovereign; and by
showing an extreme respect, they thought to prevent the possibility of
encroachment or insult. Garrick complained that when he went to read
before the court, not a look or a murmur testified approbation; there
was a profound stillness—every one only watched to see what the King
thought. It was like reading to a set of wax-work figures: he who had
been accustomed to the applause of thousands, could not bear this
assembly of mutes. Marchant went to the late King about a cameo, who was
offended at his saying the face must be done in full and not as a
profile; ‘then,’ said the patron, ‘I’ll get somebody else to do it.’
Coming out at the door, one of the pages asked the artist, ‘Why do you
contradict the K—? He is not used to be contradicted!’ This is
intelligible in an absolute despotism, where the will of the sovereign
is law, and where he can cut off your head if he pleases; but is it not
strange in a free country?
H.—It is placing an ordinary mortal on the top of a pyramid, and
kneeling at the bottom of it to the ‘highest and mightiest.’ It is a
trick of human reason surpassing the grossness of the brute.
CONVERSATION THE NINETEENTH
H.—Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being
overtaken by it. It is a sign the two things are not very far asunder.
N.—Yes; Mr. — used to say, that just before the women in his time left
off hoops, they looked like bats. Going on from one affectation to
another, they at last wore them close under their arms, so that they
resembled wings growing out from their shoulders; and having reached the
top of the absurdity, they then threw them aside all at once. If long
waists are the fashion one season, they are exploded the next; as soon
as the court adopts any particular mode, the city follows the example,
and as soon as the city takes it up, the court lays it down. The whole
is caricature and masquerade. _Nature only is left out_; for that is
either common, or what is fine in it would not always be found on the
fashionable side of the question. It may be the fashion to paint or not
to paint; but if it were the fashion to have a fine complexion, many
fashionable people must go without one, and many unfashionable ones
would be at the height of it. Deformity is as often the fashion as
beauty, yet the world in general see no other beauty than fashion, and
their vanity or interest or complaisance bribes their understanding to
disbelieve even their senses. If cleanliness is the fashion, then
cleanliness is admired; if dirt, hair-powder, and pomatum are the
fashion, then dirt, hair-powder, and pomatum are admired just as much,
if not more, from their being disagreeable.
H.—The secret is, that fashion is imitating in certain things that are
in our power and that are nearly indifferent in themselves, those who
possess certain other advantages that are not in our power, and which
the possessors are as little disposed to part with as they are eager to
obtrude them upon the notice of others by every external symbol at their
immediate controul. We think the cut of a coat fine, because it is worn
by a man with ten thousand a-year, with a fine house, and a fine
carriage: as we cannot get the ten thousand a-year, the house, or the
carriage, we get what we can—the cut of the fine gentleman’s coat, and
thus are in the fashion. But as we get it, he gets rid of it, which
shows that he cares nothing about it; but he keeps his ten thousand
a-year, his fine house, and his fine carriage. A rich man wears
gold-buckles to show that he is rich: a coxcomb gets gilt ones to look
like the rich man, and as soon as the gold ones prove nothing, the rich
man leaves them off. So it is with all the real advantages that
fashionable people possess. Say that they have more grace, good manners,
and refinement than the rabble; but these do not change every moment at
the nod of fashion. Speaking correctly is not proper to one class more
than another: if the fashionable, to distinguish themselves from the
vulgar, affect a peculiar tone or set of phrases, this is mere _slang_.
The difference between grace and awkwardness is the same one year after
another. This is the meaning of _natural politeness_. It is a perception
of and attention to the feelings of others, which is the same thing,
whether it is neglected by the Great or practised by the vulgar. The
barrier between refinement and grossness cannot be arbitrarily effaced.
Nothing changes but what depends on the shallow affectation and
assumption of superiority: real excellence can never become vulgar. So
Pope says in his elegant way—
Virtue may choose the high or low degree,
’Tis just the same to virtue and to me;
Dwell in a monk or light upon a king,
She’s still the same belov’d, contented thing.
Vice is undone if she forgets her birth,
And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.
Pope’s verse is not admired, because it was once the fashion: it will be
admired, let the fashion change how it will.
N.—When Sir Joshua Reynolds wanted to learn what real grace was, he
studied it in the attitudes of children, not in the school of the
dancing-master, or in the empty strut or mawkish languor of fashion. A
young painter asked me the other day whether I thought that Guido was
not chargeable with affectation? I told him that I thought _not_, or in
a very trifling degree. I could not deny that Guido sometimes bordered
on and reminded me of it; or that there was that which in any body else
might be really so, but that in him it seemed only an extreme natural
gentility. He puts his figures into attitudes that are a little too
courtly and studied, but he probably could not help it.
H.—It was rather the excess of a quality or feeling in his mind, than
the aiming to supply the defect of one.
N.—Yes; there is no suspicion of what he is doing. The odious part of
affectation is when there is an evident design to impose on you with
counterfeit pretensions. So in another point that might be objected to
him, the impropriety of his naked figures, no mortal can steer clearer
of it than he does. They may be strictly said to be clothed with their
own delicacy and beauty. There is the ‘Venus attired by the Graces:’
what other painter durst attempt it? They are to be all beauties, all
naked; yet he has escaped as if by miracle—none but the most vicious can
find fault with it—the very beauty, elegance, and grace keep down
instead of exciting improper ideas. And then again, the ‘Andromeda
chained to the rock’—both are, I believe, in the drawing-room at
Windsor: but there is no possible offence to be taken at them, nothing
to shock the most timid or innocent, because there was no particle of
grossness in the painter’s mind. I have seen pictures by others muffled
up to the chin, that had twenty times as much vice in them. It is
wonderful how the cause is seen in the effect. So we find it in
Richardson. _Clarissa_ is a story in the midst of temptation; but he
comes clear and triumphant out of that ordeal, because his own
imagination is not contaminated by it. If there had been the least hint
of an immoral tendency, the slightest indication of a wish to inflame
the passions, it would have been all over with him. The intention always
will peep out—you do not communicate a disease if you are not infected
with it yourself. Albano’s nymphs and goddesses seem waiting for
admirers: Guido’s are protected with a veil of innocence and modesty.
Titian would have given them an air of Venetian courtesans: Raphael
would have made them look something more than mortal: neither would have
done what Guido has effected, who has conquered the difficulty by the
pure force of feminine softness and delicacy.
H.—I am glad to hear you speak so of Guido. I was beginning, before I
went abroad, to have a ‘sneaking contempt’ for him as insipid and
monotonous, from seeing the same everlasting repetitions of Cleopatras
and Madonnas: but I returned a convert to his merits. I saw many
indifferent pictures attributed to great masters; but wherever I saw a
Guido, I found elegance and beauty that answered to the ‘silver’ sound
of his name. The mind lives on a round of names; and it is a great point
gained not to have one of these snatched from us by a sight of their
works. As to the display of the naked figure in works of art, the case
to me seems clear: it is only when there is nothing but the naked figure
that it is offensive. In proportion as the beauty or perfection of the
imitation rises, the indecency vanishes. You look at it then with an eye
to art, just as the anatomist examines the human figure with a view to
science. Other ideas are introduced. J. —, of Edinburgh, had a large,
sprawling Danae hanging over the chimney-piece of his office, where he
received Scotch parsons and their wives on law-business: he thought it a
triumph over Presbyterian prudery and prejudice, and a sort of
chivalrous answer to the imputed barbarism of the North. It was
certainly a paradox in taste, a breach of manners. He asked me if I
objected to it because it was naked? ‘No,’ I said, ‘but because it is
ugly: you can only have put it there because it is naked, and that alone
shows a felonious intent. Had there been either beauty or expression, it
would have _conducted off_ the objectionable part. As it is, I don’t see
how you can answer it to the kirk-sessions.’
N.—I remember Sir W. W— employed Sir Joshua and Dance, who was a very
eminent designer, to ornament a music-room which he had built. Sir
Joshua on this occasion painted his St. Cecilia, which he made very fine
at first, but afterwards spoiled it; and Dance chose the subject of
Orpheus. When I asked Miss Reynolds what she thought of it, she said she
had no doubt of its being clever and well done, but that it looked ‘like
a naked man.’ This answer was conclusive against it; for if the
inspiration of the character had been given, you would have overlooked
the want of clothes. The nakedness only strikes and offends the eye in
the barrenness of other matter. It is the same in the drama. Mere
grossness or ribaldry is intolerable; but you often find in the old
comedy that the wit and ingenuity (as well as custom) carry off what
otherwise could not be borne. The laughter prevents the blush. So an
expression seems gross in one person’s mouth, which in another passes
off with perfect innocence. The reason is, there is something in the
manner that gives a quite different construction to what is said. Have
you seen the _Alcides_, the two foreigners who perform such prodigious
feats of strength at the theatre, but with very little clothing on? They
say the people hardly know what to make of it. They should not be too
sure that this is any proof of their taste or virtue.
H.—I recollect a remark of Coleridge’s on the conclusion of the story of
_Paul and Virginia_ by Bernardin St. Pierre. Just before the shipwreck,
and when nothing else can save the heroine from perishing, an athletic
figure comes forward stripped, but with perfect respect, and offers to
swim with her to the shore; but instead of accepting his proposal, she
turns away with affected alarm. This, Coleridge said, was a proof of the
prevailing tone of French depravity, and not of virgin innocence. A
really modest girl in such circumstances would not have thought of any
scruple.
N.—It is the want of imagination or of an insight into nature in
ordinary writers; they do not know how to place themselves in the
situations they describe. Whatever feeling or passion is uppermost,
fills the mind and drives out every other. If you were confined in a
vault, and thought you saw a ghost, you would rush out, though a lion
was at the entrance. On the other hand, if you were pursued by a lion,
you would take refuge in a charnel-house, though it was full of spirits,
and would disregard the dead bones and putrid relics about you. Both
passions may be equally strong; the question is, which is roused first.
But it is few who can get to the fountain-head, the secret springs of
Nature. Shakspeare did it always; and Sir Walter Scott frequently. G—
says he always was pleased with my conversation, before you broached
that opinion; but I do not see how that can be, for he always
contradicts and thwarts me. When two people are constantly crossing one
another on the road, they cannot be very good company. You agree to what
I say, and often explain or add to it, which encourages me to go on.
H.—I believe G— is sincere in what he says, for he has frequently
expressed the same opinion to me.
N.—That might be so, though he took great care not to let me know it.
People would often more willingly speak well of you behind your back
than to your face; they are afraid either of shocking your modesty or
gratifying your vanity. That was the case with —. If he ever was struck
with any thing I did, he made a point not to let me see it: he treated
it lightly, and said it was very well.
H.—I do not think G—’s differing with you was any proof of his opinion.
Like most authors, he has something of the schoolmaster about him, and
wishes to keep up an air of authority. What you say may be very well for
a learner; but he is the oracle. You must not set up for yourself; and
to keep you in due subordination, he catechises and contradicts from
mere habit.
N.—Human nature is always the same. It was so with Johnson and
Goldsmith. They would allow no one to have any merit but themselves. The
very attempt was a piece of presumption, and a trespass upon their
privileged rights. I remember a poem that came out, and that was sent to
Sir Joshua: his servant, Ralph, had instructions to bring it in just
after dinner. Goldsmith presently got hold of it, and seemed thrown into
a rage before he had read a line of it. He then said, ‘What wretched
stuff is here! what c—rsed nonsense that is!’ and kept all the while
marking the passages with his thumb-nail, as if he would cut them in
pieces. At last, Sir Joshua, who was provoked, interfered, and said,
‘Nay, don’t spoil my book, however.’ Dr. Johnson looked down on the rest
of the world as pigmies; he smiled at the very idea that any one should
set up for a fine writer but himself. They never admitted C— as one of
the set; Sir Joshua did not invite him to dinner. If he had been in the
room, Goldsmith would have flown out of it as if a dragon had been
there. I remember Garrick once saying, ‘D—n his _dishclout_ face; his
plays would never do if it were not for my patching them up and acting
in them.’ Another time, he took a poem of C—’s, and read it backwards to
turn it into ridicule. Yet some of his pieces keep possession of the
stage, so that there must be something in them.
H.—Perhaps he was later than they, and they considered him as an
interloper on that account.
N.—No; there was a prejudice against him: he did not somehow fall into
the train. It was the same with Vanbrugh in Pope’s time. They made a
jest of him, and endeavoured to annoy him in every possible way; he was
a _black sheep_ for no reason in the world, except that he was cleverer
than they; that is, could build houses and write verses at the same
time. They laughed at his architecture; yet it is certain that it is
quite original, and at least a question whether it is not beautiful as
well as new. He was the first who sunk the window-frames within the
walls of houses—they projected before: he did it as a beauty, but it has
been since adopted by act of parliament to prevent fire. Some gentleman
was asking me about the imposing style of architecture with which
Vanbrugh had decorated the top of Blenheim-house; he had mistaken the
chimneys for an order of architecture, so that what is an eye-sore in
all other buildings, Vanbrugh has had the art to convert into an
ornament. And then his wit! Think what a comedy is the _Provoked
Husband_! What a scope and comprehension in the display of manners from
the highest to the lowest! It was easier to write an epigram on _Brother
Van_ than such a play as this. I once asked Richards, the scene-painter,
who was perfectly used to the stage, and acquainted with all the actors,
what he considered as the best play in the language? And he answered,
without hesitation, _The Journey to London_.
H.—_Lord Foppington_ is also his, if he wanted _supporters_. He was in
the same situation as Rousseau with respect to the wits of his time, who
traces all his misfortunes and the jealousy that pursued him through
life to the success of the _Devin du Village_. He said Diderot and the
rest could have forgiven his popularity as an author, but they could not
bear his writing an opera.
N.—If you belong to a set, you must either lead or follow; you cannot
maintain your independence. Beattie did very well with the great folks
in my time, because he looked up to them, and he excited no uneasy sense
of competition. Indeed, he managed so well that Sir Joshua flattered him
and his book in return in the most effectual manner. In his allegorical
portrait of the doctor, he introduced the angel of truth chasing away
the demons of falsehood and impiety, who bore an obvious resemblance to
Hume and Voltaire. This brought out Goldsmith’s fine reproof of his
friend, who said that ‘Sir Joshua might be ashamed of debasing a genius
like Voltaire before a man like Beattie, whose works would be forgotten
in a few years, while Voltaire’s fame would last for ever!’ Sir J. R.
took the design of this picture from one of a similar subject by
Tintoret, now in the Royal Collection in Kensington Palace. He said he
had no intention of the sort: Hume was a broad-backed clumsy figure, not
very like; but I know he meant Voltaire, for I saw a French medal of him
lying about in the room. Mrs. Beattie also came up with her husband to
London. I recollect her asking for ‘a little _paurter_’ in her broad
Scotch way. It is like Cibber’s seeing Queen Anne at Nottingham when he
was a boy, and all he could remember about her was her asking him to
give her ‘a glass of wine and water.’ She was an ordinary character, and
belonged to the class of good sort of people. So the Margravine of
Bareuth describes the Duchess of Kendal, who was mistress to George I.
to be a quiet inoffensive character, who would do neither good nor harm
to any body. Did you ever read her _Memoirs_? Lord! what an account she
gives of the state of manners at the old court of Prussia, and of the
brutal despotism and cruelty of the king! She was his daughter, and he
used to strike her, and drag her by the hair of her head, and leave her
with her face bleeding, and often senseless, on the floor for the
smallest trifles; and he treated her brother, afterwards Frederic II.
(and to whom she was much attached) no better. That might in part
account for the hardness of his character at a later period.
H.—I suppose Prussia was at that time a mere petty state or sort of
bye-court, so that what they did was pretty much done in a corner, and
they were not afraid of being talked of by the rest of Europe.
N.—No; it was quite an absolute monarchy with all the pomp and
pretensions of sovereignty. Frederick (the father) was going, on some
occasion when he was displeased with him, to strike our ambassador; but
this conduct was resented and put a stop to. The Queen (sister to George
II. and who was imprisoned so long on a suspicion of conjugal
infidelity) appears to have been a violent-spirited woman, and also
weak. George I. could never learn to speak English, and his successor,
George II., spoke it badly, and neither ever felt themselves at home in
this country; and they were always going over to Hanover, where they
found themselves lords and masters, while here, though they had been
raised so much higher, their dignity never sat easy upon them. They did
not know what to make of their new situation.
[Northcote here read me a letter I had heard him speak of relative to a
distinguished character mentioned in a former Conversation.]
‘_A Letter to Mr. Northcote in London from his Brother at
Plymouth, giving an account of a Shipwreck._
‘Plymouth, Jan. 28, 1796.
‘We have had a terrible succession of stormy weather of late.
Tuesday, immediately after dinner, I went to the Hoe to see the
Dutton East Indiaman, full of troops, upon the rocks, directly under
the flag-staff of the citadel. She had been out seven weeks on her
passage to the West Indies as a transport, with 400 troops on board,
besides women and the ship’s-crew; and had been just driven back by
distress of weather, with a great number of sick on board. You
cannot conceive any thing so horrible as the appearance of things
altogether, which I beheld when I first arrived on the spot. The
ship was stuck on sunken rocks, somewhat inclining to one side, and
without a mast or the bowsprit standing; and her decks covered with
the soldiers as thick as they could possibly stand by one another,
with the sea breaking in a most horrible manner all around them; and
what still added to the melancholy grandeur of the scene was the
distress-guns which were fired now and then directly over our head
from the Citadel.
‘When I first came to the spot, I found that they had by some means
got a rope with one end of it fixed to the ship, and the other was
held by the people on shore, by which means they could yield as the
ship swung. Upon this rope they had got a ring, which they could by
means of two smaller ropes draw forwards and backwards from the ship
to the shore: to this ring they had fixed a loop, which each man put
under his arm; and by this means, and holding by the ring with his
hands, he supported himself, hanging to the ring, while he was drawn
to the shore by the people there; and in this manner I saw a great
many drawn on shore. But this proved a tedious work; and though I
looked at them for a long time, yet the numbers on the deck were not
apparently diminished; besides, from the motion which the ship had
by rolling on the rocks, it was not possible to keep the rope
equally stretched, and from this cause, as well as from the sudden
rising of the waves, you would at one moment see a poor wretch
hanging ten or twenty feet above the water, and the next you would
lose sight of him in the foam of a wave, though some escaped better.
‘But this was not a scheme which the women and many of the sick
could avail themselves of.
‘I observed with some admiration the behaviour of a Captain of a
man-of-war, who seemed interested in the highest degree for the
safety of these poor wretches. He exerted himself uncommonly, and
directed others what to do on shore, and endeavoured in vain with a
large speaking-trumpet to make himself heard by those on board: but
finding that nothing could be heard but the roaring of the wind and
sea, he offered any body five guineas instantly who would suffer
himself to be drawn on board with instructions to them what to do.
And when he found that nobody would accept his offer, he gave an
instance of the highest heroism: for he fixed the rope about himself
and gave the signal to be drawn on board. He had his uniform coat on
and his sword hanging at his side. I have not room to describe the
particulars; but there was something grand and interesting in the
thing: for as soon as they had pulled him into the wreck, he was
received with three vast shouts by the people on board; and these
were immediately echoed by those who lined the shore, the
garrison-walls and lower batteries. The first thing he did was to
rig out two other ropes like the first: which I saw him most active
in doing with his own hands. This quickened the matter a good deal,
and by this time two large open row-boats were arrived from the
Dock-yard, and a sloop had with difficulty worked out from
Plymouth-pool. He then became active in getting out the women and
the sick, who were with difficulty got into the open boats, and by
them carried off to the sloop, which kept off for fear of being
stove against the ship or thrown upon the rocks. He suffered but one
boat to approach the ship at a time, and stood with his drawn sword
to prevent too many rushing into the boat. After he had seen all the
people out of the ship to about ten or fifteen, he fixed himself to
the rope as before and was drawn ashore, where he was again received
with shouts. Upon my enquiry who this gallant officer was, I was
informed that it was Sir Edward Pellew, whom I had heard the highest
character of before, both for bravery and mercy.
‘The soldiers were falling into disorder when Sir Edward went on
board. Many of them were drunk, having broke into the cabin and got
at the liquor. I saw him beating one with the flat of his
broad-sword, in order to make him give up a bundle he had made up of
plunder. They had but just time to save the men, before the ship was
nearly under water. I observed a poor goat and a dog amongst the
crowd, when the people were somewhat thinned away. I saw the goat
marching about with much unconcern; but the dog showed evident
anxiety, for I saw him stretching himself out at one of the
port-holes, standing partly upon the port and partly upon a gun, and
looking earnestly towards the shore, where I suppose he knew his
master was. All these perished soon after, as the ship was washed
all over as the sea rose—she is now in pieces.’
CONVERSATION THE TWENTIETH
N.—Have you seen the _Life of Sir Joshua_ just published?
H.—No.
N.—It is all, or nearly all, taken from my account, and yet the author
misrepresents or contradicts every thing I say, I suppose to show that
he is under no obligation to me. I cannot understand the drift of his
work; nor who it is he means to please. He finds fault with Sir Joshua,
among a number of other things, for not noticing Hogarth. Why, it was
not his business to notice Hogarth any more than it was to notice
Fielding. Both of them were great wits and describers of manners in
common life, but neither of them came under the article of painting.
What Hogarth had was his own, and nobody will ever have it again in the
same degree. But all that did not depend on his own genius was
detestable, both as to his subjects and his execution. Was Sir Joshua to
recommend these as models to the student? No, we are to imitate only
what is best, and that in which even failure is honourable; not that
where only originality and the highest point of success can at all
excuse the attempt. Cunningham (the writer of the _Life_), pretends to
cry up Hogarth as a painter; but this is not true. He moulded little
figures and placed them to see how the lights fell and how the drapery
came in, which gave a certain look of reality and relief; but this was
not enough to give breadth or grace, and his figures look like puppets
after all, or like dolls dressed up. Who would compare any of these
little, miserable, deformed caricatures of men and women, to the figure
of St. Paul preaching at Athens? What we justly admire and emulate is
that which raises human nature, not that which degrades and holds it up
to scorn. We may laugh to see a person rolled in the kennel, but we are
ashamed of ourselves for doing so. We are amused with _Tom Jones_; but
we rise from the perusal of _Clarissa_ with higher feelings and better
resolutions than we had before. St. Giles’s is not the only school of
art. It is nature, to be sure; but we must select nature. Ask the
meanest person in the gallery at a play-house which he likes best, the
tragedy or the farce? And he will tell you, without hesitation, the
tragedy—and will prefer Mrs. Siddons to the most exquisite buffoon. He
feels an ambition to be placed in the situations, and to be associated
with the characters, described in tragedy, and none to be connected with
those in a farce; because he feels a greater sense of power and dignity
in contemplating the one, and only sees his own weakness and littleness
reflected and ridiculed in the other. Even the poetry, the blank verse,
pleases the most illiterate, which it would not do if it were not
natural. The world do not receive monsters. This was what I used to
contest with Sir Joshua. He insisted that the blank verse in tragedy was
purely artificial—a thing got up for the occasion. But surely every one
must feel that he delivers an important piece of information, or asks a
common question in a different tone of voice. If it were not for this,
the audience would laugh at the measured speech or step of a tragic
actor as burlesque, just as they are inclined to do at an Opera. Old Mr.
Tolcher used to say of the famous Pulteney—‘My Lord Bath always speaks
in blank verse!’ The stately march of his ideas, no doubt, made it
natural to him. Mr. Cunningham will never persuade the world that
Hogarth is superior to Raphael or Reynolds. Common sense is against it.
I don’t know where he picked up the notion.
H.—Probably from Mr. Lamb, who endeavours to set up Hogarth as a great
tragic as well as comic genius, not inferior in either respect to
Shakspeare.
N.—I can’t tell where he got such an opinion; but I know it is great
nonsense. Cunningham gives a wrong account of an anecdote which he has
taken from me. Dr. Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, had said at a meeting of
the Society of Arts, that ‘a pin-maker was a more important member of
society than Raphael.’ Sir Joshua had written some remark on this
assertion in an old copy-book which fell into my hands and which nobody
probably ever saw but myself. Cunningham states that Sir Joshua was
present when Dean Tucker made the speech at the Society, and that he
immediately rose up, and with great irritation answered him on the spot,
which is contrary both to the fact and to Sir Joshua’s character. He
would never have thought of rising to contradict any one in a public
assembly for not agreeing with him on the importance of his own
profession. In one part of the new _Life_, it is said that Sir Joshua,
seeing the ill-effects that Hogarth’s honesty and bluntness had had upon
his prospects as a portrait-painter, had learnt the art to make himself
agreeable to his sitters, and to mix up the oil of flattery with his
discourse as assiduously as with his colours. This is far from the
truth. Sir Joshua’s manners were indeed affable and obliging, but he
flattered nobody; and instead of gossiping or making it his study to
amuse his sitters, minded only his own business. I remember being in the
next room the first time the Duchess of Cumberland came to sit, and I
can vouch that scarce a word was spoken for near two hours. Another
thing remarkable to show how little Sir Joshua crouched to the Great is,
that he never even gave them their proper titles. I never heard the
words ‘_your lordship or your ladyship_,’ come from his mouth; nor did
he ever say _Sir_ in speaking to any one but Dr. Johnson: and when he
did not hear distinctly what the latter said (which often happened) he
would then say ‘Sir?’ that he might repeat it. He was in this respect
like a Quaker, not from any scruples or affectation of independence, but
possibly from some awkwardness and confusion in addressing the variety
of characters he met with, or at his first entrance on his profession.
His biographer is also unjust to Sir Joshua in stating that his table
was scantily supplied out of penuriousness. The truth is, Sir Joshua
would ask a certain number and order a dinner to be provided; and then
in the course of the morning, two or three other persons would drop in,
and he would say, ‘I have got so and so to dinner, will you join us?’
which they being always ready to do, there were sometimes more guests
than seats, but nobody complained of this or was unwilling to come
again. If Sir Joshua had really grudged his guests, they would not have
repeated their visits twice, and there would have been plenty of room
and of provisions the next time. Sir Joshua never gave the smallest
attention to such matters; all he cared about was his painting in the
morning, and the conversation at his table, to which last he sacrificed
his interest; for his associating with men like Burke, who was at that
time a great oppositionist, did him no good at court. Sir Joshua was
equally free from meanness or ostentation and encroachment on others; no
one knew himself better or more uniformly kept his place in society.
H.—It is a pity to mar the idea of Sir Joshua’s dinner-parties, which
are one of the pleasantest instances on record of a cordial intercourse
between persons of distinguished pretensions of all sorts. But some
people do not care what they spoil, so that they can tell disagreeable
truth.
N.—In the present case there is not even that excuse. The statement
answers no good end, while it throws a very unfounded slur on Sir
Joshua’s hospitality and love of good cheer. It is insinuated that he
was sparing of his wine, which is not true. Again, I am blamed for not
approving of Dr. Johnson’s speech to Sir Joshua at the Miss Cottrells’,
when the Duchess of Argyll came in, and he thought himself
neglected—‘How much do you think you and I could earn in a week, if we
were to work as hard as we could?’ This was a rude and unmerited insult.
The Miss Cottrells were the daughters of an Admiral and people of
fashion, as well as the Duchess of Argyll; and they naturally enough
fell into conversation about persons and things that they knew, though
Dr. Johnson had not been used to hear of them. He therefore thought it
affectation and insolence, whereas the vulgarity and insolence were on
his own side. If I had any fault to find with Sir Joshua, it would be
that he was a very bad master in the art. Of all his pupils, I am the
only one who ever did any thing at all. He was like the boy teaching the
other to swim. ‘How do you do when you want to turn?’—‘How must you do
when you turn? Why, you must look that way!’ Sir Joshua’s instructions
amounted to little more. People talk of the instinct of animals as if a
_blind reason_ were an absurdity: whereas whatever men can do best, they
understand and can explain least. Your son was looking at that picture
of the lap-dog the other evening. There is a curious story about that.
The dog was walking out with me one day, and was set upon and bit by a
strange dog, for all dogs know and hate a favourite. He was a long time
in recovering from the wound; and one day when Mr. P. H. called, he ran
up to him, leaped up quite over-joyed, then lay down, began to whine,
patted the place where he had been hurt with his paws, and went through
the whole history of his misfortune. It was a perfect pantomime. I will
not tell the story to G—, for the philosopher would be jealous of the
sagacity of the cur.
H.—There was Jack Spines, the racket-player: he excelled in what is
called the _half-volley_. Some amateurs of the game were one day
disputing what this term of art meant. Spines was appealed to. ‘Why,
gentlemen,’ says he, ‘I really can’t say exactly; but I should think,
the half-volley is something between the volley and the half-volley.’
This definition was not quite the thing. The celebrated John Davies, the
finest player in the world, could give no account of his proficiency
that way. It is a game which no one thinks of playing without putting on
a flannel jacket; and after you have been engaged in it for ten minutes,
you are just as if you had been dipped in a mill-pond. John Davies never
pulled off his coat; and merely buttoning it that it might not be in his
way, would go down into the Fives-court and play two of the best players
of the day, and at the end of the match you could not perceive that a
hair of his head was wet. Powell, the keeper of the court (why does not
Sir B. Nash, among so many innovations, rebuild it?) said he never
seemed to follow the ball, but that it came to him—he did every thing
with such ease.
N.—Then every motion of that man was perfect grace: there was not a
muscle in his body that did not contribute its share to the game. So,
when they begin to learn the piano-forte, at first they use only the
fingers, and are soon tired to death: then the muscles of the arm come
into play, which relieves them a little; and at last the whole frame is
called into action, so as to produce the effect with entire ease and
gracefulness. It is the same in every thing: and he is indeed a poor
creature who cannot do more, from habit or natural genius, than he can
give any rational account of.
(_Some remarks having been made on the foregoing conversation, Mr.
Northcote, the next time I saw him, took up the subject nearly as
follows._)
N.—The newspaper critic asks with an air of triumph as if he had found
_a mare’s nest_—‘What! are _Sophia Western_ and _Allworthy_, St.
Giles’s?’ Why, they are the very ones: they are _Tower-stamp_! _Blifil_,
and _Black George_, and _Square_ are not—they have some sense and spirit
in them and are so far redeemed, for Fielding put his own cleverness and
ingenuity into them; but as to his refined characters, they are an
essence of vulgarity and insipidity. _Sophia_ is a poor doll; and as to
_Allworthy_ he has not the soul of a goose: and how does he behave to
the young man that he has brought up and pampered with the expectations
of a fortune and of being a fine gentleman? Does he not turn him out to
starve or rob on the highway without the shadow of an excuse, on a mere
maudlin sermonizing pretext of morality, and with as little generosity
as principle? No, Fielding did not know what virtue or refinement meant.
As Richardson said, he should have thought his books were written by an
ostler; or Sir John Hawkins has expressed it still better, that the
virtues of his heroes are the virtues of dogs and horses—he does not go
beyond that—nor indeed so far, for his _Tom Jones_ is not so good as
Lord Byron’s Newfoundland dog. I have known Newfoundland dogs with
twenty times his understanding and good-nature. That is where Richardson
has the advantage over Fielding—the virtues of _his_ characters are not
the virtues of animals—_Clarissa_ holds her head in the skies, a ‘bright
particular star;’ for whatever may be said, we have such _ideas_—and
thanks to those who sustain and nourish them, and woe to those critics
who would confound them with the dirt under our feet and Grub-street
jargon! No, that is what we want—to have the line made as black and as
broad as possible that separates what we have in common with the animals
from what we _pretend_ (at least) to have above them. That is where the
newspaper critic is wrong in saying that the blackguard in the play is
equal to Mrs. Siddons. No, he is not equal to Mrs. Siddons, any more
than a baited bull or an over-drove ox is equal to Mrs. Siddons. There
is the same animal fury in _Tyke_ that there is in the maddened brute,
with the same want of any ideas beyond himself and his own mechanical
and coarse impulses—it is the lowest stage of human capacity and feeling
violently acted upon by circumstances. _Lady Macbeth_, if she is the
demon, is not the brute; she has the intellectual part, and is hurried
away no less by the violence of her will than by a wide scope of
imagination and a lofty ambition. Take away all dignity and grandeur
from poetry and art, and you make Emery equal to Mrs. Siddons, and
Hogarth to Raphael, but not else. Emery’s _Tyke_, in his extremity,
calls for brandy—Mrs. Siddons does not, like _Queen Dollalolla_, call
for a glass of gin. Why not? Gin is as natural a drink as poison; but if
Capella Bianca, instead of swallowing the poison herself, when she found
it was not given to her enemy, had merely got drunk for spite, in the
manner of Hogarth’s heroines, she would not have been recorded in
history. There is then a foundation for the distinction between the
heroic and the natural, which I am not bound to explain any more than I
am to account why black is not white.
H.—If Emery is equal to Mrs. Siddons, Morton is equal to Shakspeare;
though it would be difficult to bring such persons to that conclusion.
N.—I ‘ll tell you why Emery in not equal to Mrs. Siddons; there are a
thousand Emerys to one Mrs. Siddons; the stage is always full of six or
seven comic actors at a time, so that you cannot tell which is best,
Emery, Fawcett, Munden, Lewis—but in my time I have seen but Garrick and
Mrs. Siddons, who have left a gap behind them that I shall not live to
see filled up. Emery is the first blackguard or stage-coach driver you
see in a _row_ in the street; but if you had not seen Mrs. Siddons, you
could have no idea of her; nor can you convey it to any one who has not.
She was like a preternatural being descended to the earth. I cannot say
Sir Joshua has done her justice. I regret Mrs. Abington too—she was the
Grosvenor-Square of comedy, if you please. I am glad that Hogarth did
not paint her; it would have been a thing to spit upon. If the
correspondent of the newspaper wants to know where my Grosvenor-Square
of art is, he’ll find it in the _Provoked Husband_, in _Lord_ and _Lady
Townly_, not in the _History of a Foundling_, or in the pompous,
swag-bellied peer, with his dangling pedigree, or his gawky son-in-law,
or his dawdling _malkin_ of a wife from the city, playing with the ring
like an idiot, in the _Marriage à la Mode_! There may be vice and folly
enough in Vanbrugh’s scenes; but it is not the vice of St. Giles’s, it
does not savour of the kennel. Not that I would have my interrogator
suppose that I think all is vice in St. Giles’s. On the contrary, I
could find at this moment instances of more virtue, refinement, sense,
and beauty there, than there are in his _Sophy_. No, nature is the same
everywhere; there are as many handsome children born in St. Giles’s as
in Grosvener-Square; but the same care is not taken of them; and in
general they grow up greater beauties in the one than the other. A child
in St. Giles’s is left to run wild; it thrusts its fingers into its
mouth or pulls its nose about; but if a child of people of fashion play
any tricks of this kind, it is told immediately, ‘You must not do this,
unless you would have your mouth reach from ear to ear; you must not say
that; you must not sit in such a manner, or you’ll grow double.’ This
seems like art; but it is only giving nature fair play. No one was
allowed to touch the Princess Charlotte when a child. She was taken care
of like something precious. The sister of the Duke of — had her nose
broke when a child in a quarrel with her sister, who flung a tea-basin
at her; but all the doctors were immediately called in, and every remedy
was applied, so that when she grew up, there was no appearance of the
accident left. If the same thing had happened to a poor child, she would
have carried the marks of it to her grave. So you see a number of
crooked people and twisted legs among the lower classes. This was what
made Lord Byron so mad—that he had mis-shapen feet. Don’t you think so?
H.—Yes; T. M. told a person I know that that was the cause of all his
misanthropy—he wanted to be an _Adonis_, and could not.
N.—Aye, and of his genius too; it made him write verses in revenge.
There is no knowing the effect of such sort of things, of defects we
wish to balance. Do you suppose we owe nothing to Pope’s deformity? He
said to himself, ‘If my person be crooked, my verses shall be strait.’ I
myself have felt this in passing along the street, when I have heard
rude remarks made on my personal appearance. I then go home and paint:
but I should not do this, if I thought all that there is in art was
contained in Hogarth—I should then feel neither pride nor consolation in
it. But if I thought, instead of his doll-like figures cut in two with
their insipid, dough-baked faces, I should do something like Sir
Joshua’s _Iphigene_, with all that delights the sense in richness of
colour and luxuriance of form; or instead of the women spouting the
liquor in one another’s faces, in the _Rake’s Progress_, I could give
the purity, and grace, and real elegance (appearing under all the
incumbrance of the fashionable dresses of the day) of Lady Sarah Bunbury
or of the Miss Hornecks, sacrificing to the Graces, or of Lady Essex,
with her long waist and ruffles, but looking a pattern of the female
character in all its relations, and breathing dignity and virtue, then I
should think this an object worth living for; or (as you have expressed
it very properly) should even be proud of having failed. This is the
opinion the world have always entertained of the matter. Sir Joshua’s
name is repeated with more respect than Hogarth’s. It is not for his
talents, but for his taste and the direction of them. In meeting Sir
Joshua (merely from a knowledge of his works) you would expect to meet a
gentleman—not so of Hogarth. And yet Sir Joshua’s claims and possessions
in art were not of the highest order.
H.—But he was decent, and did not profess the arts and accomplishments
of a Merry-Andrew.
N.—I assure you, it was not for want for [of] ability either. When he
was young, he did a number of caricatures of different persons, and
could have got any price for them. But he found it necessary to give up
the practice. Leonardo da Vinci, a mighty man, and who had titles
manifold, had a great turn for drawing laughable and grotesque
likenesses of his acquaintances; but he threw them all in the fire. It
was to him a kind of profanation of the art. Sir Joshua would almost as
soon have forged as he would have set his name to a caricature. Gilray
(whom you speak of) was eminent in this way; but he had other talents as
well. In the _Embassy to China_, he has drawn the Emperor of China a
complete Eastern voluptuary, fat and supine, with all the effects of
climate and situation evident upon his person, and Lord Macartney is an
elegant youth, a real _Apollo_; then, indeed, come Punch and the
puppet-show after him, to throw the whole into ridicule. In the
_Revolutionists’ Jolly-boat_, after the Opposition were defeated, he has
placed Fox, and Sheridan, and the rest escaping from the wreck: Dante
could not have described them as looking more sullen and gloomy. He was
a great man in his way. Why does not Mr. Lamb write an essay on the
_Two-penny Whist_? Yet it was against his conscience, for he had been on
the other side, and was bought over. The minister sent to ask him to do
_them_ half a dozen at a certain price, which he agreed to, and took
them to the treasury; but there being some demur about the payment, he
took them back with some saucy reply. He had not been long at home,
before a messenger was sent after him with the money.
CONVERSATION THE TWENTY-FIRST
N.—G. and I had a dispute lately about the capacity of animals. He
appeared to consider them as little better than machines. He made it the
distinguishing mark of superiority in man that he is the only animal
that can transmit his thoughts to future generations. ‘Yes,’ I said,
‘for future generations to take no sort of notice of them.’ I allowed
that there were a few extraordinary geniuses that every one must look up
to—and I mentioned the names of Shakspeare and Dryden. But he would not
hear of Dryden, and began to pull him in pieces immediately. ‘Why then,’
I answered, ‘if you cannot agree among yourselves even with respect to
four or five of the most eminent, how can there be the vast and
overwhelming superiority you pretend to?’ I observed that instinct in
animals answered very much to what we call genius. I spoke of the
wonderful powers of smell, and the sagacity of dogs, and the memory
shown by horses in finding a road that they have once travelled; but I
made no way with G—; he still went back to _Lear_ and _Othello_.
H.—I think he was so far right; for as this is what he understands best
and has to imitate, it is fit he should admire and dwell upon it most.
He cannot acquire the smell of the dog or the sagacity of the horse, and
therefore it is of no use to think about them; but he may, by dint of
study and emulation, become a better poet or philosopher. The question
is not merely what is best in itself (of that we are hardly judges) but
what sort of excellence we understand best and can make our own; for
otherwise, in affecting to admire we know not what, we may admire a
nonentity or a deformity. Abraham Tucker has remarked very well on this
subject, that a swine wallowing in the mire may, for what he can tell,
be as happy as a philosopher in writing an essay, but that is no reason
why he (the philosopher) should exchange occupations or tastes with the
brute, unless he could first exchange _natures_. We may suspend our
judgments in such cases as a matter of speculation or conjecture, but
that is different from the habitual or practical feeling. So I remember
W— being nettled at D— (who affected a fashionable taste) for saying, on
coming out of the Marquis of Stafford’s gallery, ‘A very noble art, very
superior to poetry!’ If it were so, W— observed, he could know nothing
about it, who had never seen any fine pictures before. It was like an
European adventurer saying to an African chieftain, ‘A very fine boy,
Sir, your black son—very superior to my white one!’ This is mere
affectation; we might as well pretend to be thrown into rapture by a
poem written in a language we are not acquainted with. We may
notwithstanding believe that it is very fine, and have no wish to hang
up the writer, because he is not an Englishman. A spider may be a
greater mechanic than Watt or Arkwright; but the effects are not brought
home to us in the same manner, and we cannot help estimating the cause
by the effect. A friend of mine teazes me with questions, ‘Which was the
greatest man, Sir Isaac Newton or a first-rate chess-player?’ It refers
itself to the head of the _Illustrious Obscure_. A club of chess-players
might give it in favour of the _Great Unknown_; but all the rest of the
world, who have heard of the one and not of the other, will give it
against him. We cannot set aside those prejudices which are founded on
the limitation of our faculties or the constitution of society; only
that we need not lay them down as abstract or demonstrable truths. It is
there the bigotry and error begin. The language of taste and moderation
is, _I prefer this, because it is best to me_; the language of dogmatism
and intolerance is, _Because I prefer it, it is best in itself, and I
will allow no one else to be of a different opinion_.
N.—I find in the last conversation I saw, you make me an admirer of
Fielding, and so I am; but I find great fault with him too. I grant he
is one of those writers that I remember; he stamps his characters,
whether good or bad, on the reader’s mind. This is more than I can say
of every one. For instance, when G— plagues me about my not having
sufficient admiration of W—’s poetry, the answer I give is, that it is
not my fault, for I have utterly forgotten it; it seemed to me like the
ravelings of poetry. But to say nothing of Fielding’s immorality, and
his fancying himself a fine gentleman in the midst of all his
coarseness, he has oftener described _habits_ than _character_. For
example, _Western_ is no character; it is merely the language, manners,
and pursuits of the country-squire of that day; and the proof of this
is, that there is no ‘_Squire Western_ now. Manners and customs wear
out, but characters last forever. I remember making this remark to
Holcroft, and he asked me, What was the difference? Are you not
surprised at that?
H.—Not in him. If you mentioned the word _character_, he stopped you
short by saying, that it was merely the difference of circumstances; or
if you hinted at the difference of natural capacity, he said, ‘Then,
Sir, you must believe in _innate ideas_.’ He surrendered his own
feelings and better judgment to a set of cant-phrases, called the
_modern philosophy_.
N.—I need not explain the difference to you. Character is the
ground-work, the natural _stamina_ of the mind, on which circumstances
only act. You see it in St. Giles’s—there are characters there that in
the midst of filth, and vice, and ignorance, retain some traces of their
original goodness, and struggle with their situation to the last: as in
St. James’s, you will find wretches that would disgrace a halter. _Gil
Blas_ has character.
H.—I thought he only gave professions and classes, players, footmen,
sharpers, courtesans, but not the individual, as Fielding often does,
though we should strip _Western_ of his scarlet hunting-dress and jockey
phrases. There is _Square_, _Blifil_, _Black George_, _Mrs.
Fitzpatrick_, _Parson Adams_; and a still greater cluster of them in the
one that is least read, the noble peer, the lodging-house-keeper, _Mrs.
Bennet_, and _Colonel Bath_.
N.—You mean _Amelia_. I have not read that, but will get it. I allow in
part what you say; but in the best there is something too local and
belonging to the time. But what I chiefly object to in Fielding is his
conceit, his consciousness of what he is doing, his everlasting
recommendation and puffing of his own wit and sagacity. His introductory
chapters make me sick.
H.—Why, perhaps, Fielding is to be excused as a disappointed man. All
his success was late in life, for he died in 1754; and _Joseph Andrews_
(the first work of his that was popular) was published in 1748. All the
rest of his life he had been drudging for the booksellers, or bringing
out unsuccessful comedies. He probably anticipated the same result in
his novels, and wished to bespeak the favour of the reader by putting
himself too much forward. His prefaces are like Ben Jonson’s prologues,
and from the same cause, mortified vanity; though it seems odd to say so
at present, after the run his writings have had; but he could not
foresee that, and only lived a short time to witness it.
N.—I can bear any thing but that conscious look—it is to me like the
lump of soot in the broth, that spoils the whole mess. Fielding was one
of the swaggerers.
H.—But he had much to boast of.
N.—He certainly was not idle in his time. Idleness would have ruined a
greater man.
H.—Then you do not agree to a maxim I have sometimes thought might be
laid down, that no one is idle who can do any thing.
N.—No, certainly.
H.—I conceive it may be illustrated from Wilson, who was charged with
idleness, and who, after painting a little, used to say, as soon as any
friend dropped in, ‘Now let us go somewhere,’—meaning to the alehouse.
All that Wilson could do, he did, and that finely too, with a few
well-disposed masses and strokes of the pencil; but he could not finish,
or he would have staid within all the morning to work up his pictures to
the perfection of Claude’s. He thought it better to go to the alehouse
than to spoil what he had already done. I have in my own mind made this
excuse for —, that he could only make a first sketch, and was obliged to
lose the greatest part of his time in waiting for _windfalls_ of heads
and studies. I have sat to him twice, and each time I offered to come
again, and he said he would let me know, but I heard no more of it. The
sketch went as it was—of course in a very unfinished state.
N.—But he might have remedied this by diligence and practice.
H.—I do not know that he could: one might say that there is the same
abruptness and crudity in his character throughout, in his conversation,
his walk, and look—great force and spirit, but neither softness nor
refinement.
N.—If he had more humility, he might have seen all that in the works of
others, and have strove to imitate it.
H.—What I mean is, that it was his not having the sense of these
refinements in himself that prevented his perceiving them in others, or
taking pains to supply a defect to which he was blind.
N.—I do not think that under any circumstances he would have made a
Raphael. But your reasoning goes too much to what Dr. Johnson ridiculed
in poetry—fits of inspiration, and a greater flow of ideas in the autumn
than the spring. Sir Joshua used to work at all times, whether he was in
the humour or not.
H.—And so would every one else with his motives and ability to excel.
Lawyers without fees are accused of idleness, but this goes off when the
briefs pour in.
N.—Did you see the newspaper accounts of the election of the new Pope?
It appears that nothing could exceed his repugnance to be chosen. He
begged and even wept to be let off. You are to consider, he is an old
man labouring under a mortal disease (which is one circumstance that led
to his elevation)—to be taken from the situation of Cardinal (in itself
a very enviable one) and thrust violently into a mass of business, of
questions and cabals which will distract him, and where he can get no
thanks and may incur every kind of odium. It is true, he has an
opportunity of making the fortunes of his family; and if he prefers them
to himself, it is all very well, but not else. To persons of a restless
and aspiring turn of mind, ambition and grandeur are very fine things,
but to others they are the most intolerable tax. There is our own
King—there is no conceiving the punishment that those processions and
public show-days are to him—and then as to all the pomp and glitter that
we so much admire, it is to those who are accustomed to it and who see
behind the curtain, like so much cast-off rags and tinsel or
Monmouth-street finery. They hold it in inconceivable scorn, and yet
they can hardly do without it, from the slavery of habit. Then the time
of such people is never their own—they are always performing a part (and
generally a forced and irksome one) in what no way interests or concerns
them. The late King, to whom rank was a real drudgery, used to stand
buried in a pile of papers, so that you could not see those on the other
side of the table, which he had merely to sign. It is no wonder kings
are sometimes seen to retire to a monastery where religion leaves this
asylum open to them, or are glad to return to their shepherd’s crook
again. No situation can boast of complete ease or freedom; and even
_that_ would have its disadvantages. And then again, look at those
labourers at the top of the house yonder, working from morning till
night, and exposed to all weathers for a bare pittance, without hope to
sweeten their toil, and driven on by hunger and necessity! When we turn
to others, whether those above or below us, we have little reason to be
dissatisfied with our own situation in life. But, in all cases it is
necessary to employ means to ends, be the object what it may; and where
the first have not been taken, it is both unjust and foolish to repine
at the want of success. The common expression, ‘Fortune’s Fools,’ may
seem to convey a slur on the order of Providence; but it rather shows
the equality of its distributions. Are the men of capacity to have all
the good things to themselves? They are proud of their supposed
superiority: why are they not contented with it? If a fool is not to
grow rich, the next thing would be, that none but men of genius should
have a coat to their backs, or be thought fit to live. If it were left
to them to provide food or clothes, they would have none for themselves.
It is urged as a striking inequality that enterprising manufacturers,
for instance, should rise to great wealth and honours, while thousands
of their dependants are labouring hard at one or two shillings a-day:
but we are to recollect, that if it had not been for men like these, the
working classes would have been perishing for want: they collect the
others together, give a direction and find a vent for their industry,
and may be said to exercise a part of _sovereign_ capacity. Every thing
has its place and due subordination. If authors had the direction of the
world, nothing would be left standing but printing-presses.
N.—What do you think of that portrait?
H.—It is very lady-like, and, I should imagine, a good likeness.
N.—J— said I might go on painting yet—he saw no falling-off. _They_ are
pleased with it. I have painted almost the whole family, and the girls
would let their mother sit to nobody else. But Lord! every thing one can
do seems to fall so short of nature: whether it is the want of skill or
the imperfection of the art that cannot give the successive movements of
expression and changes of countenance, I am always ready to beg pardon
of my sitters after I have done, and to say I hope they’ll excuse it.
The more one knows of the art, and indeed the better one can do, the
less one is satisfied. This made Titian write under his pictures
_faciebat_, signifying that they were only in progress. I remember,
Burke came in one day when Sir Joshua had been painting one of the
Lennoxes; he was quite struck with the beauty of the performance, and
said he hoped Sir Joshua would not touch it again: to which the latter
replied, that if he had seen the original, he would have thought little
of the picture, and that there was a _look_ which it was hardly in the
power of art to give. No! all we can do is to produce something that
makes a distant approach to nature, and that serves as a faint relic of
the individual. A portrait is only a little better memorial than the
parings of the nails or a lock of the hair.
H.—Who is it?
N.—It is a Lady W—: you have heard me speak of her before. She is a
person of great sense and spirit, and combines very opposite qualities
from a sort of natural strength of character. She has shown the greatest
feeling and firmness united: no one can have more tenderness in her
domestic connexions, and yet she has borne the loss of some of them with
exemplary fortitude. Perhaps, the one is a consequence of the other; for
where the attachment or even the regret is left, all is not lost. The
mind has still a link to connect it with the beloved object. She has no
affectation; and therefore yields to unavoidable circumstances as they
arise. Inconsolable grief is often mere cant, and a trick to impose on
ourselves and others. People of any real strength of character are
seldom affected: those who have not the clue of their own feelings to
guide them, do not know what to do, and study only how to produce an
effect. I recollect one of the Miss B—s, Lord Orford’s favourites, whom
I met with at a party formerly, using the expression—‘That seal of
mediocrity, affectation!’ Don’t you think this striking?
H.—Yes; but not quite free from the vice it describes.
N.—Oh! they had plenty of that: they were regular _blue-stockings_, I
assure you; or they would not have been so entirely to his lordship’s
taste, who was a mighty coxcomb. But there is none of that in the person
I have been speaking of: she has very delightful, genteel, easy manners.
H.—That is the only thing I envy in people in that class.
N.—But you are not to suppose they all have it: it is only those who are
born with it, and who would have had it in a less degree in every
situation of life. Vulgarity is the growth of courts as well as of the
hovel. We may be deceived by a certain artificial or conventional manner
in persons of rank and fashion; but they themselves see plainly enough
into the natural character. I remember Lady W— told me, as an instance
to this purpose, that when she was a girl, she and her sister were
introduced at court; and it was then the fashion to stand in a circle,
and the Queen came round and spoke to the different persons in turn.
There was some high lady who came in after them, and pushed rudely into
the circle so as to get before them. But the Queen, who saw the
circumstance, went up and spoke to them first, and then passed on (as a
just punishment) without taking any notice whatever of the forward
intruder. I forget how it arose the other day, but she asked me—‘Pray,
Mr. Northcote, is Discretion reckoned one of the cardinal virtues?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it is not one of them, for it is all!’ If we had
discretion at all times, we should never do wrong: but we are taken off
our guard by being thrown into new and difficult situations, and have
not time to weigh the consequences or to summon resolution to our aid.
That is what Opie used to say when he had been engaged in an argument
over-night, what excellent answers he could give the next day—and was
vexed with himself for not having thought of them. No! if we had
sufficient presence of mind to foresee the consequences of our actions
on the spot, we should very rarely have occasion to repent of them
afterwards.
H.—You put me in mind of Cicero’s account of the cardinal virtues, in
his _Offices_, who makes them out to be four; and then says they are all
referable to the first, which is _Prudence_.
N.—Ay; do you recollect what they are?
H.—Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude.
N.—They are too much alike. The most distinct is Fortitude.
H.—I never could make much of Cicero, except his two treatises on
Friendship and Old Age, which are most amiable gossiping. I see that
Canning borrowed his tautology from Cicero, who runs on with such
expressions as ‘I will _bear_, I will _suffer_, I will _endure_ any
extremity.’ This is bad enough in the original: it is inexcusable in the
copy. Cicero’s style, however, answered to the elegance of his
finely-turned features; and in his long, graceful neck you may trace his
winding and involuted periods.
N.—Do you believe in that sort of stuff?
H.—Not more than I can help.
CONVERSATION THE TWENTY-SECOND
N.—I ought to cross myself like the Catholics, when I see you. You
terrify me by repeating what I say. But I see you have regulated
yourself. There is nothing personally offensive, except what relates to
Sir Walter. You make him swear too, which he did not do. He would never
use the expression _Egad_. These little things mark the gentleman. I am
afraid, if he sees it, he’ll say I am a babbler. That is what they dread
so at court, that the least word should transpire.
H.—They may have their reasons for caution. At least, they can gain
nothing, and might possibly lose equally by truth or falsehood, as it
must be difficult to convey an adequate idea of royalty. But authors are
glad to be talked about. If Sir W. Scott has an objection to having his
name mentioned, he is singularly unlucky. Enough was said in his praise;
and I do not believe he is captious. I fancy he _takes the rough with
the smooth_. I did not well know what to do. You seemed to express a
wish that the conversations should proceed, and yet you are startled at
particular phrases, or I would have brought you what I had done to show
you. I thought it best to take my chance of the general impression.
N.—Why, if kept to be published as a diary after my death, they might
do: nobody could then come to ask me questions about them. But I cannot
say they appear very striking to me. One reason may be, what I observe
myself cannot be very new to me. If others are pleased, they are the
best judges. It seems very odd that you who are acquainted with some of
the greatest authors of the day cannot find any thing of theirs worth
setting down.
H.—That by no means pleases them. I understand G— is angry at the
liberty I take with you. He is quite safe in this respect. I might
answer him much in the manner of the fellow in the _Country Girl_ when
his friend introduces his mistress and he salutes her—‘Why, I suppose if
I were to introduce my grandmother to you’—‘Sir,’ replies the other, ‘I
should treat her with the utmost respect.’ So I shall never think of
repeating any of G—’s conversations. My indifference may arise in part,
as you say, from their not being very new to me. G— might, I dare say,
argue very well on the doctrine of philosophical necessity or many other
questions; but then I have read all this before in Hume or other
writers, and I am very little edified, because I have myself had access
to the same sources that he has drawn from. But you, as an artist, have
been pushed into an intercourse with the world as well as an observation
of nature; and combine a sufficient knowledge of general subjects with
living illustrations of them. I do not like the conversation of mere men
of the world or anecdote-mongers, for there is nothing to bind it
together, and the other sort is pedantic and tiresome from repetition,
so that there is nobody but you I can come to.
N.—You do not go enough into society, or you would be cured of what I
cannot help regarding as a whim. You would there find many people of
sense and information whose names you never heard of. It is not those
who have made most noise in the world who are persons of the greatest
general capacity. It is the making the most of a little, or the being
determined to get before others in some one thing (perhaps for want of
other recommendations) that brings men into notice. Individuals gain a
reputation as they make a fortune, by application and by having set
their minds upon it. But you have set out (like other people brought up
among books) with such exclusive notions of authors and literary fame,
that if you find the least glimmering of common sense out of this pale,
you think it a prodigy, and run into the opposite extreme. I do not say
that you have not a perception of character, or have not thought as far
as you have observed; but you have not had the opportunities. You turn
your back on the world, and fancy that they turn their backs on you.
This is a very dangerous principle. You become reckless of consequences.
It leads to an abandonment of character. By setting the opinion of
others at defiance, you lose your self-respect. It is of no use that you
still say, you will do what is right; your passions usurp the place of
reason, and whisper you, that whatever you are bent upon doing is right.
You cannot put this deception on the public, however false or prejudiced
their standard may be; and the opinion of the world, therefore, acts as
a seasonable check upon wilfulness and eccentricity.
H.—What you have stated is the best excuse I could make for my own
faults or blunders. When one is found fault with for nothing, or for
doing one’s best, one is apt to give the world their revenge. All the
former part of my life I was treated as a cipher; and since I have got
into notice, I have been set upon as a wild beast. When this is the
case, and you can expect as little justice as candour, you naturally in
self-defence take refuge in a sort of misanthropy and cynical contempt
for mankind. One is disposed to humour them, and to furnish them with
some ground for their idle and malevolent censures.
N.—But you should not. If you do nothing to confirm them in their first
prejudices, they will come round in time. They are slow to admit claims,
because they are not _sure_ of their validity; and they thwart and
cross-examine you to try what temper you are made of. Without some such
ordeal or difficulty thrown in the way, every upstart and pretender must
be swallowed whole. That would never do. But if you have patience to
stand the test, justice is rendered at last, and you are stamped for as
much as you are worth. You certainly have not spared others: why should
you expect nothing but ‘the milk of human kindness?’ Look to those men
behind you (_a collection of portraits on the same frame_)—there is Pope
and Dryden—did they fare better than living authors? Had not Dryden his
Shadwell, and Pope his Dennis, who fretted him to a shadow, and galled
him almost to death? There was Dr. Johnson, who in his writings was a
pattern of wisdom and morality—he declared that he had been hunted down
as if he had been the great enemy of mankind. But he had strength of
mind to look down upon it. Not to do this, is either infirmity of
temper, or shows a conscious want of any claims that are worth carrying
up to a higher tribunal than the cabal and clamour of the moment. Sir
Joshua always despised malicious reports; he knew they would blow over:
at the same time, he as little regarded exaggerated praise. Nothing you
could say had any effect, if he was not satisfied with himself. He had a
great game to play, and only looked to the result. He had studied
himself thoroughly; and, besides, had great equanimity of temper, which,
to be sure, it is difficult to acquire, if it is not natural. You have
two faults: one is a _feud_ or quarrel with the world, which makes you
despair, and prevents you taking all the pains you might: the other is a
carelessness and mismanagement, which makes you throw away the little
you actually do, and brings you into difficulties that way. Sir Joshua
used to say it was as wrong for a man to think too little as too much of
himself: if the one ran him into extravagance and presumption, the other
sank him in sloth and insignificance. You see the same thing in horses:
if they cannot stir a load at the first effort, they give it up as a
hopeless task; and nothing can rouse them from their sluggish obstinacy
but blows and ill-treatment.
H.—I confess all this, but I hardly know how to remedy it; nor do I feel
any strong inducement. Taking one thing with another, I have no great
cause to complain. If I had been a merchant, a bookseller, or the
proprietor of a newspaper, instead of what I am, I might have had more
money or possessed a town and countryhouse, instead of lodging in a
first or second floor, as it may happen. But what then? I see how the
man of business and fortune passes his time. He is up and in the city by
eight, swallows his breakfast in haste, attends a meeting of creditors,
must read Lloyd’s lists, consult the price of consols, study the
markets, look into his accounts, pay his workmen, and superintend his
clerks: he has hardly a minute in the day to himself, and perhaps in the
four-and-twenty hours does not do a single thing that he would do if he
could help it. Surely, this sacrifice of time and inclination requires
some compensation, which it meets with. But how am I entitled to make my
fortune (which cannot be done without all this anxiety and drudgery) who
do hardly any thing at all, and never any thing but what I like to do? I
rise when I please, breakfast _at length_, write what comes into my
head, and after taking a mutton-chop and a dish of strong tea, go to the
play, and thus my time passes. Mr. — has no time to go to the play. It
was but the other day that I had to get up a little earlier than usual
to go into the city about some money transaction, which appeared to me a
prodigious hardship: if so, it was plain that I must lead a tolerably
easy life: nor should I object to passing mine over again. Till I was
twenty, I had no idea of any thing but books, and thought every thing
else was worthless and mechanical. The having to study painting about
this time, and finding the difficulties and beauties it unfolded, opened
a new field to me, and I began to conclude that there might be a number
of ‘other things between heaven and earth that were never dreamt of in
my philosophy.’ Ask G—, or any other literary man who has never been
taken out of the leading-strings of learning, and you will perceive that
they hold for a settled truth that the universe is built of words. G—
has no interest but in literary fame, of which he is a worshipper: he
cannot believe that any one is clever, or has even common sense, who has
not written a book. If you talk to him of Italian cities, where great
poets and patriots lived, he heaves a sigh; and if I were possessed of a
fortune, he should go and visit the house where Galileo lived or the
tower where Ugolino was imprisoned. He can see with the eyes of his
mind. To all else he is marble. It is like speaking to him of the
objects of a _sixth sense_; every other language seems dumb and
inarticulate.
The end of CONVERSATIONS OF JAMES NORTHCOTE, ESQ., R.A.
NOTES
TABLE TALK
PAGE
2. _An Advertisement, etc._ The advertisement to the Paris edition of
_Table Talk_ was as follows:—
‘The work here offered to the public is a selection from the four
volumes of _Table Talk_, printed in London. Should it meet with
success, it will be followed by two other volumes of the same
description, which will include all that the author wishes to
preserve of his writings in this kind. The title may perhaps
serve to explain what there is of peculiarity in the style or
mode of treating the subjects. I had remarked that when I had
written or thought upon a particular topic, and afterwards had
occasion to speak of it with a friend, the conversation
generally took a much wider range, and branched off into a
number of indirect and collateral questions, which were not
strictly connected with the original view of the subject, but
which often threw a curious and striking light upon it, or upon
human life in general. It therefore occurred to me as possible
to combine the advantages of these two styles, the _literary_
and the _conversational_; or after stating and enforcing some
leading idea, to follow it up by such observations and
reflections as would probably suggest themselves in discussing
the same question in company with others. This seemed to me to
promise a greater variety and richness, and perhaps a greater
sincerity, than could be attained by a more precise and
scholastic method. The same consideration had an influence on
the familiarity and conversational idiom of the style which I
have used. How far the plan was feasible, or how far I have
succeeded in the execution of it must be left to others to
decide. I am also afraid of having too frequently attempted to
give a popular air and effect to subtle distinctions and trains
of thought; so that I shall be considered as too metaphysical by
the careless reader, while by the more severe and scrupulous
inquirer my style will be complained of as too light and
desultory. To all this I can only answer that I have done not
what I wished, but the best I could do; and I heartily wish it
had been better.’
ESSAY I. ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING
This and the following essay are from _The London Magazine_ for December
1820 (Vol. II. pp. 597–607), No. V. of a series entitled _Table Talk_.
5. ‘_There is a pleasure_,’ _etc._ Cf. vol. I. note to p. 76.
‘_No juggling here._’ Cf. ‘Here is such patchery, such juggling,
and such knavery.’ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act II. Scene 3.
‘_Study with joy_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, III. 227–8.
6. ‘_More tedious_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act III. Scene 4.
‘_My mind to me_,’ _etc._ The first line of the well-known poem
attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (d. 1607).
6. Note. See _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ (_Novels and Tales_,
Bohn, p. 254).
7. ‘_Pure in the last recesses of the mind._’ Dryden’s translation of
the Second Satire of Persius, l. 133. According to Frances
Reynolds (_Johnsonian Miscellanies_, ed. G. B. Hill, II. 272),
the lines were quoted by Johnson at the end of an eloquent
eulogium of Mrs. Thrale.
‘_Palpable to feeling_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘If ’tis not gross in
sense ... ’tis probable and palpable to thinking.’ _Othello_,
Act I. Scene 2.
8. ‘_Light thickened._’
‘Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.’
_Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 2.
_Wilson._ Richard Wilson (1714–1782). See _Conversations of
Northcote_, _ante_, pp. 380, 438, 458.
_It was not so Claude_, _etc._ Claude finally settled in Rome in
1627 and remained there till his death in 1682.
_The first head_, _etc._ See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, l. 108
note. The picture, which seems to have been painted near
Manchester in 1803, is still in the possession of Hazlitt’s
family.
9. _With Sir Joshua._ Cf. the second of Hazlitt’s Essays on Sir
Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, _ante_, pp. 131 _et seq._
‘_As in a glass darkly_‘, _etc._ _I Corinthians_, xiii. 12.
10. ‘_Sees into the life of things._’ Wordsworth, _Lines composed a
few miles above Tintern Abbey_.
_Jan Steen, or Gerard Dow._ Jan Steen (1626–1679), and Gerard Dow
(1613–1675).
‘_Mist_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 435–6.
_Richardson._ The _Essays_ of Jonathan Richardson (1665–1745),
which originally appeared in 1715 and 1719, were published in
two volumes in 1725, and in one volume, edited by his son, in
1773. See pp. 297–8 of the one volume edition. Vasari tells this
story of Michael Angelo and the Pope.
11. ‘_That you might almost say_,’ _etc._
‘—— so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say, her body thought.’
John Donne, _An Anatomy of the World, Second Anniversary_, 245–6.
12. _Old Abraham Tucker._ See vol. iv. pp. 371–385.
‘_The source_,’ &c. See Northcote’s _Life of Reynolds_, II. 286.
_A picture of my father._ Exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1806.
See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. III.
_Gribelin’s etchings._ In the second (1714) and subsequent
editions of Shaftesbury’s _Characteristics_.
‘_Riches fineless_.’ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
‘_Ever in the haunch of winter sings._’ _Henry IV._, Part II. Act
IV. Scene 4.
13. ‘_I also am a painter._’ See Vasari’s _Lives_ (ed. Blashfield and
Hopkins), III. 32, note 28.
_Mr. Skeffington._ Sir Lumley St. George Skeffington (1771–1850),
author of _The Sleeping Beauty_ and other plays, and a friend of
the Regent’s, succeeded his father as baronet in 1815.
_The battle of Austerlitz._ December 2, 1805.
_He himself is gone to rest._ Hazlitt’s father died on July 16,
1820.
ESSAY III. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.
13. ‘_Whate’er Lorraine_,’ _etc._ Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_,
Canto I. Stanza 38.
_Lord Radnor’s park._ For a fuller account of the collections here
referred to, see the volume in the present edition containing
Hazlitt’s Fine Art Criticisms.
14. ‘_Bosomed high_,’ _etc._ _L’Allegro_, 78.
‘_Hands that the rod_,’ _etc._ Gray, _Elegy_, 47.
‘_A forked mountain_,’ _etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act IV.
Scene 14.
‘_Signifying nothing._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Scene 5,
15. _When I went to the Louvre._ In 1802. See _Memoirs of William
Hazlitt_, I. 84 _et seq._
_Titian’s Mistress._ The picture so called is in the Louvre. It is
in fact a portrait of Alphonso of Ferrara and Laura Dianti.
_The Transfiguration_, _etc._ On the fall of Napoleon, Raphael’s
_Transfiguration_, and Domenichino’s _Communion of St. Jerome_
were restored to Rome; Titian’s _St. Peter Martyr_ to Venice,
and his Hippolito de Medici to Florence. The _St. Peter Martyr_
was destroyed by fire in 1867. Hazlitt’s copy of ‘A young
Nobleman with a glove’ is still in the possession of Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt.
16. ‘_If thou hast not seen_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Wast ever in court,
shepherd?—No, truly.—Then thou art damned.’ _As You Like It_,
Act III., Scene 2.
_The Elgin marbles._ See Vol. i. p. 143 and note.
‘_Hard money._’ Specie opposed to paper currency. Cf. ‘Your mother
has a hundred pounds in hard money’ etc. Farquhar, _The
Recruiting Officer_, Act IV. Scene 3.
‘_Number numberless._’ _Paradise Regained_, III. 310 [numbers].
‘_Casual fruition_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 766–7.
17. _W—._ Richard Wilson.
18. _A friend of mine._ Northcote, presumably, whose _Life of Sir
Joshua Reynolds_ had been praised in _The Edinburgh Review_
(vol. xxiii. pp. 263 _et seq._)
_A friend had bought_, _etc._ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt suggests that this
was Haydon.
19. _Richardson, in his Essays._ _A Discourse on the Science of a
Connoisseur_ (_Essays_, 1773, pp. 327 _et seq._)
20. ‘_Guido Reni_,’ _etc._ Richardson, _Essays_, 1773, pp. 217–8.
21. _Gandy._ William Gandy (died 1729). See Hazlitt’s _Conversations
of James Northcote_, _ante_, p. 345. A short Memoir of Gandy
forms the Appendix to Northcote’s _Life of Reynolds_.
_Poor Dan. Stringer._ Cf. _ante_, pp. 345–6.
‘_Swallowing the tailor’s news._’ _King John_, Act IV., Scene 2.
‘_Bastards of his genius_,’ _etc._ Cf. Vol. iv. p. 209.
ESSAY III. ON THE PAST AND FUTURE.
22. _When Sterne in the Sentimental Journey._ _A Sentimental Journey_,
‘Character. Versailles.’
23. ‘_The thoughts of which_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Yet loss of thee would
never from my heart.’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 912.
‘_What though the radiance_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, Ode, _Intimations
of Immortality_, 179 _et seq._
‘_Retrace its footsteps_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, XI. 329–333.
‘_And see how dark_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Lines written while
sailing in a boat at evening_.
23. ‘_In our heart’s tables._’ _All’s Well that Ends Well_, Act I.
Scene 1.
‘_All the life of life was flown._’
‘In weary being now I pine,
For a’ the life of life is dead,’
Burns, _Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn_, Stanza 6.
Cf. also ‘Till youth and genial years are flown,
And all the life of life is gone,’
from Thomson’s song addressed to Fortune and beginning—
‘For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove,’ etc.
_Norman Court._ See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, II. 14–15. and
W. Hazlitt the younger’s Preface to the 1850 edition of
_Winterslow_.
25. ‘_Running through the story_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Scene 3.
‘_Beguiled them_,’ _etc._ _Ib._
_Posthæc meminisse juvabit._ Virgil, _Æneid_, I. 203.
26. ‘_Calm contemplation_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Laodamia_, 72.
27. ‘_Catch glimpses_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, Sonnet, ‘The world is too
much with us.’
‘_I also was an Arcadian._’ This saying, or its Latin equivalent,
‘et ego in Arcadia,’ often quoted by Hazlitt in connection with
Poussin’s picture, has been much discussed in _Notes and
Queries_. See 4th Ser., I. 509, 561, etc. Goethe adopted it as a
motto for his _Travels in Italy_.
‘_Que peu de chose_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Je vous exhorte à jouir, autant
que vous pourrez, de la vie qui est peu de chose,’ etc.
Voltaire, Letter to Madame du Deffand, Oct. 13, 1759.
_Respice finem._ A tag, quoted in _The Comedy of Errors_, Act IV.
Scene 4. See _Notes and Queries_, 5th Series, VI. 313, where the
line ‘si quid agas prudenter agas, et respice finem’ is quoted
from the fable ‘De accipitre et columbis’ in _Fabulae Variorum
Auctorum_ (Francof. 1560), p. 503.
‘_The high endeavour_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, V. 901.
‘_Oh God! methinks_,’ _etc._ _Henry VI._, Part III. Act II. Scene
5.
29. ‘_The tear forgot_,’ _etc._ Gray, _On a Distant Prospect of Eton
College_, Stanza 5.
30. _Recorded by Spence._ _Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of
Books and Men. Collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope,
etc._ (edit. 1820), pp. 116–7.
ESSAY IV. ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE.
33. _Mr. Burke, by whom_, _etc._ Cf. _Conversations of James
Northcote_, _ante_, p. 366.
_Windham in one of his Speeches._ Speech on the Conduct of the
Duke of York, March 14, 1809. _Speeches_, III. 205.
34. _One of the persons_, _etc._ No doubt John Thelwall (1764–1834),
who was acquitted in December, 1794, and retired to Brecon in
1798. Hazlitt afterwards became acquainted with him. Among his
_Poems_ (1801) is an epic entitled ‘Edwin of Northumbria.’
35. Note. ‘_Sound it_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.
36. ‘_Make assurance_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Scene 1.
‘_Shuts the gates_,’ _etc._ Gray, _Elegy_, Stanza 17.
_Mr. Burke said._ _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 102).
37. _Come home to the business_, _etc._ Bacon, Dedication to the
_Essays_.
_Ultima ratio regum._ See vol. III., note to p. 44.
‘_There’s the rub_,’ _etc._ ‘There’s the respect that makes
calamity of so long life.’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
37. ‘_A compost heap._’ Cf. ‘A new accession to the loaded compost
heap of corrupt influence.’ Burke, _Speech on Economical Reform_
(_Works_, Bohn, II. 109).
39. ‘_What! man_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Scene 3.
_The passage in the same play._ _Ib._, Act I. Scene 6.
40. _The Judgment of Solomon._ In the Louvre Gallery.
‘_Sure trailing._’ Cf.
‘And I do think, or else this brain of mine
Hunts not the trail of policy so sure
As it hath used to do.’
_Hamlet_, Act II. Scene 2.
‘_As if his will_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt quotes from one of his own
notices of Kean’s Richard (_Morning Chronicle_, Feb. 15, 1814).
_Painter in his fight with Oliver._ Edward Painter (1784–1852) was
defeated by Tom Oliver (1782–1864) in May 1814, but defeated him
in July 1820.
41. _The figure of Elymas._ In one of the Cartoons.
ESSAY V. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED.
42. ‘_As one, in suffering_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.
‘_Knew all qualities_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
‘_A pipe for the Muse’s finger_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘That they are not a
pipe for fortune’s finger to sound what stop she please.’
_Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.
43. ‘_To descry new lands_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 290–1.
‘_Fierce extremes_,’ _etc._ _Ib._ II. 599.
‘_Of the earth, earthy._’ _I Corinthians_, XV. 47.
‘_Darkness that may be felt._’ _Exodus_, X. 21.
‘_Palpable obscure._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 406.
44. ‘_Look abroad into universality._’ Bacon, ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING,
Book I.
‘_Content with riches fineless._’ _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.
‘_Poor as Winter._’ _Ib._
‘_Self-involved, not dark._’ Cf. ‘Pensive, not sad; in thought
involved, not dark.’ Thomson, _The Castle of Indolence_, Canto
I. Stanza 57.
‘_Enjoys bright day._’ _Comus_, 382.
‘_Kept the noiseless tenour of his way._’ Gray’s _Elegy_, Stanza
19.
‘_Finds tongues_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Scene 1.
‘_The meanest flow’r_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, Ode, _Intimations of
Immortality_.
45. ‘_Yet I’ll remember thee_,’ _etc._ Burns, _Lament for James, Earl
of Glencairn_.
_Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring_, _etc._ Cf. the essays ‘On
Certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses,
_ante_, pp. 122 _et seq._
46. _The admirable Crichton._ James Crichton (1560–1585?).
_Jedediah Buxton._ For Jedidiah Buxton (1707–1772) see
_Gentleman’s Magazine_, June 1754.
Note. ‘_The force of dulness_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘The force of Nature
could no further go.’ Dryden, _Under Mr. Milton’s Picture_.
49. _Mediocribus esse_, _etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 372–3.
_I find from Adam Smith._ _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. i.
_Those nonsensical stories about Lopez de Vega._ See Lord
Holland’s _Some Account of the life and writings of Lope Felix
de Vega Carpio_ (1806), pp. 75–82.
50. _Why does Mr. Kean_, _etc._ See the volume containing Hazlitt’s
theatrical criticisms.
ESSAY VI. CHARACTER OF COBBETT
58. This essay was afterwards republished in the second edition of
_The Spirit of the Age_. See vol. IV. pp. 334–343, and notes
thereto.
ESSAY VII. ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA
59. _Major C—._ John Cartwright (1740–1824), major in the
Nottinghamshire Militia, and author of a large number of tracts,
chiefly on parliamentary reform.
60. _Like the story of the Cosmogony._ _The Vicar of Wakefield_, chap.
xiv.
_Nihil humani_, _etc._ Terence, _Heautontimorumenos_, Act I. Scene
1.
‘_A fee-grief_’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Scene 3.
61. _As Cicero says of study._ ‘Haec studia adolescentiam alunt,
senectutem oblectant,’ _etc._ Cicero, _Pro Archia_, VII. 16.
_As Sancho_, _etc._ _Don Quixote_, Second Part, Book II. chap.
xxxi.
_Dulce ridentem_, _etc._ Horace, _Odes_, I. xxii., 23–4.
‘_Rings the world_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, III. 129–130.
62. _Abernethy._ John Abernethy (1764–1831), whose chief work, _An
Essay on the Constitutional Origin of Local Diseases_, appeared
in 1806.
63. _Alderman Wood._ Sir Matthew Wood (1768–1843), lord mayor 1815–16,
and member for the city from 1817 till his death, had recently
(1820) made himself notorious as a champion of Queen Caroline.
_A conceited fellow about town_, _etc._ Hazlitt probably refers to
Wirgmann, the goldsmith, of whom Crabb Robinson gives an amusing
account in his _Diary_ (1872 ed.) Vol. I. pp. 310–311.
_A friend of mine._ John Fearn (1768–1837), of whom Hazlitt gives
some account in the following page. The essay referred to was
_An Essay on Consciousness_ (2nd ed. 4to, 1812). Hazlitt quotes
a long passage from the Essay in _Why Distant Objects Please_.
See _ante_, pp. 260–2.
64. ‘_Poor, unfledged_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Scene 3.
65. _As Goldsmith said._ See Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ (ed. G. B.
Hill), III. 252.
_Yet his Treatise on Human Nature_, _etc._ ‘Never literary attempt
was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell
_dead-born from the press_,’ _etc._ _The Life of David Hume,
Esq. Written by Himself._
_A celebrated lyrical writer._ Wordsworth.
_The motto in the title-page._
‘For why? Because the good old rule
Sufficeth them: the simple plan,
That they should take, who have the power,
And they should keep who can.’
Wordsworth, _Rob Roy’s Grave_.
Note 1. _The Excursion_ was published in a 4to volume in 1814.
Note 2. _Talk we of one Master Launcelot._ _Merchant of Venice_,
Act II. Scene 2.
66. _Mr. Owen._ See _Political Essays_, vol. III. pp. 121 _et seq._
‘_Nor Alps_,’ _etc._ John Dennis, _Ode on the Battle of Aghrim_,
St. 3. See _The Art of Sinking in Poetry_ (Pope’s _Works_, ed.
Elwin and Courthope, X. 382). ‘Apennines’ should be ‘Pyrenæaus.’
67. _Letter to Mr. William Smith._ See _Political Essays_, vol. III.
210–232.
‘_That he puts his hand_,’ _etc._ See _The Fudge Family in Paris_,
Letter II. note 2.
‘_I love to talk_,’ _etc._ Coleridge, _The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner_, 517–8.
‘_A collusion_,’ _etc._ ‘’Tis true indeed: the collusion holds in
the exchange.’ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act IV. Scene 2.
68. _Why must a man_, _etc._ Hazlitt is referring to Wordsworth. Cf.
_The Spirit of the Age_, vol. IV. p. 276 and note.
‘_Virtue extant._’ _Henry IV._ Part I., Act II. Scene 4.
‘_Men were brutes without them._’ Cf.
‘O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.’
Otway, _Venice Preserved_, Act I. Scene 1.
_Moody in the Country Girl._ Garrick’s _Country Girl_, altered
from Wycherley’s _Country Wife_, was produced in 1766.
_M—._ Lamb’s friend, Thomas Manning (1772–1840).
_L. H._ Leigh Hunt.
69. ‘_Stand accountant_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act II. Scene 1.
‘_Its palaces_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, I. 643–4.
‘_With them conversing_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 639–40.
ESSAY VIII. ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED
First published in the _Scots’ Magazine_ (New Series), July 1818, vol.
III. pp. 55 _et seq._ Hazlitt refers to this essay in _A Letter to
William Gifford_ (vol. I., p. 382).
70. ‘_For the more languages_,’ _etc._ _Satire upon the Abuse of Human
Learning_, 57–68.
‘_Spectacles._’ Dryden says of Shakespeare, ‘he needed not the
spectacles of books to read Nature.’ _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_
(_Essays_, ed. Ker, I. 80).
71. ‘_Leave me to my repose._’ ‘Leave me, leave me to repose,’ the
refrain of the Prophetess in Gray’s _The Vegtam’s Kivitha_. The
line is quoted by Burke in _A Letter to a Noble Lord_ (_Works_,
Bohn, V. 112).
‘_Take up his bed and walk._’ _St. Matthew_, ix. 6.
‘_Enfeebles all internal strength of thought._’ Goldsmith, _The
Traveller_, 270.
‘_Sweats in the eye of Phœbus._’ _Henry V._, Act IV. Scene 1.
72. ‘_Th’ enthusiast Fancy_,’ _etc._ ‘The truant fancy was a wanderer
ever.’ Lamb, _Fancy Employed on Divine Subjects_, I. 1.
_The least respectable character._ Hazlitt is probably referring
to Canning.
73. _A person of this class._ Charles Burney, D.D. (1757–1817), whose
_Remarks on the Greek Verses of Milton_ appeared in 1790.
_Dr. —._ Hazlitt refers to Charles Burney (see last note) and Dr.
Parr. Cf. a similar passage in _The Examiner_, vol. I. p. 425.
74. ‘_The mighty world of eye and ear._’ Wordsworth, _Lines composed a
few miles above Tintern Abbey_, 105–6.
‘_Knowledge quite shut out._’ ‘And wisdom at one entrance quite
shut out.’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 50.
‘_Of the colouring of Titian_,’ _etc._ _Tristram Shandy_, III. 12.
_The Elgin marbles._ See _The Round Table_, vol. I. p. 143 and
note.
‘_Knows no touch of it._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.
‘_The art and practique_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Scene 1.
‘_Has no skill in surgery._’ _Henry IV._, Part I., Act V. Scene 1.
76. _Baxter._ Cf. the essay ‘On People of Sense’ in the _Plain
Speaker_, vol. VII. p. 243.
‘_Wink and shut_,’ _etc._ Prologue to Marston’s _Antonio’s
Revenge_ (_History of Antonio and Mellida_, Part II.).
_Laud_, _etc._ William Laud (1573–1645), and John Whitgift
(1530?–1604), Archbishops of Canterbury; George Bull
(1634–1710), Bishop of St. David’s, author of _Defensio Fidei
Nicenae_ (1685) and other theological works; Daniel Waterland
(1683–1740), whose works were edited in eleven vols. in
1823–1828, was not a bishop; Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724),
whose _Old and New Testament connected ... to the Time of
Christ_ first appeared in two folio volumes 1716–1718; Isaac de
Beausobre (1659–1738), the Huguenot writer; Augustine Calmet
(1672–1757); Samuel, Baron von Puffendorf (1632–1694) and Eméric
de Vattel (1714–1767), the jurists; Joseph Justus Scaliger
(1540–1609); Jerome Cardan (1501–1576), and Kaspar Schoppe
(1576–1649).
76. ‘_Gone to the vault of all the Capulets._’ See vol. I. note to p.
150.
ESSAY IX. THE INDIAN JUGGLERS
79. Note. It was at Truro that Opie, who had already acquired
some practice as a portrait painter, met with John Wolcot
(1738–1819).
80. _I was at that time employed_, _etc._ See _Memoirs of William
Hazlitt_, I. xvi.
‘_In argument_,’ _etc._ _The Deserted Village_, 211–2.
81. ‘_To allow for the wind._’ _Ivanhoe_, chap. xiii.
‘_Human face divine._’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 44.
82. _H—s and H—s._ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in his edition of _Table Talk_
prints ‘Haydons and H—s.’
‘_In tones and gestures hit._’ ‘In tones and numbers hit.’
_Paradise Regained_, IV. 255.
_To snatch this grace_, _etc._ An unacknowledged quotation from
Pope, _Essay on Criticism_, 153.
‘_Commercing with the skies._’ _Il Penseroso_, 39.
83. ‘_Thrills in each nerve_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘a sudden horror chill
Ran through each nerve, and thrilled in ev’ry vein.’
Addison, _Milton’s Style Imitated_, 123–4.
‘_Half flying, half on foot._’ ‘Half on foot, half flying.’
_Paradise Lost_, II. 941–2.
_I know an individual._ Leigh Hunt, no doubt. Hazlitt’s son
dedicated the third edition of _Table Talk_ ‘to Leigh Hunt, whom
the author alike admired and esteemed; the “Rochester without
the vice, the modern Surrey,” whom he celebrates in one of these
Essays.’
84. _Nugæ canoræ._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 322.
_Themistocles said._ See North’s _Plutarch_ (ed. Rouse, Temple
Classics, II. 3). Hazlitt probably read the story in Bacon,
_Advancement of Learning_, Book I.
85. _Napier’s bones._ Hazlitt refers, apparently, to John Napier
(1550–1617), the inventor of logarithms.
‘_He dies_,’ _etc._
‘Lady, you are the cruell’st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave
And leave the world no copy.’
_Twelfth Night_, Act I. Scene 5.
_John Hunter._ John Hunter (1728–1793).
_Sir Humphry Davy._ Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829).
86. ‘_Great scholar’s memory_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Then there’s hope a great
man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.’ _Hamlet_, Act
III. Scene 2.
87. ‘_Care mounted_,’ _etc._ ‘Post equitem sedet atra cura.’ Horace,
_Odes_, III. l. 40.
‘_In the instant._’
‘And I feel now
The future in the instant.’
_Macbeth_, Act I. Scene 5.
87. ‘_Domestic treason_,’ _etc._ _Ib._ Act III. Scene 2.
88. _Rosemary Branch._ A much frequented tavern at Peckham.
_Copenhagen-house._ A tavern and tea-garden ‘in the fields north
of the metropolis, between Maiden-lane, the old road to Highgate
on the west, and the very ancient north road, or bridle-way,
called Hogbush-lane, on the east.’ See Hone’s _Every Day Book_
(I. 858 _et seq._), where an interesting account of the house is
given, and the greater part of Hazlitt’s account of Cavanagh is
reproduced.
89. _The Fleet or King’s Bench._ The Fleet Prison in Farringdon Street
and the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, where there were open
ground racket courts.
‘_Who enters here._’ Hazlitt may have been recalling the lines in
_The Dunciad_, (IV. 518–9):
‘Which whoso tastes, forgets his former friends,
Sire, Ancestors, Himself,’ etc.
_Sutton._ Charles Manners Sutton, first Viscount Canterbury
(1780–1845), was elected Speaker on June 2, 1817.
‘_Let no rude hand_,’ _etc._
‘May no rude hand deface it,
And its forlorn _hic jacet_.’
Wordsworth, _Ellen Irwin_, 55–6.
ESSAY X. ON LIVING TO ONE’S-SELF
90. ‘_Remote, unfriended_,’ _etc._ Goldsmith, _The Traveller_, l. 1.
_Winterslow._ Hazlitt’s wife inherited some cottages at
Winterslow, a small village six or seven miles from Salisbury on
the Andover road, and in one of these cottages a part of their
early married life was spent. See _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_,
I. 168 _et seq._, where an account is given of a visit paid to
Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt by Charles and Mary Lamb. After 1819 (see
_Memoirs_ II. 16) Hazlitt began to frequent Winterslow Hut or
the Pheasant Inn, where many of his essays (collected under the
title of ‘Winterslow’) were written.
‘_While Heavn’s chancel-vault_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘When the chill rain begins at shut of eve
In dull November, and their chancel vault,
The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.’
Keats, _Hyperion_, II. 36–8.
91. _He hears the tumult_, _etc._
‘I behold
The tumult and am still.’
Cowper, _The Task_, IV. 99–100.
‘_The man whose eye_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Lines left upon a Seat
in a Yew-tree_, _etc._ (‘Poems written in youth’) ll. 55–9.
92. ‘_To see the children_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, Ode, _Intimations of
Immortality_, 170–1.
_Nicholson._ William Nicholson (1753–1815).
‘_Never ending, still beginning._’ Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_, l.
102.
‘_The witchery of the soft blue sky._’ Wordsworth, _Peter Bell_,
l. 265.
93. _Goldsmith_, _etc._ Hazlitt had probably read the story in
Northcote’s _Life of Reynolds_, where the scene is laid at
Antwerp. The incident really occurred at Lisle, while Goldsmith
was on his way to Paris with the Hornecks. We have Miss
Horneck’s authority for believing that the story, as told by
Northcote, and here repeated by Hazlitt, is much exaggerated.
See Prior’s _Life of Goldsmith_, II. 290–1; Forster’s _Life and
Times of Oliver Goldsmith_, II. 217; and Boswell’s _Life of
Johnson_ (ed. G. B. Hill), I. 414 and note.
93. ‘_Whose top to climb_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Scene 3.
_Exclaimed Cromwell._ Speech XVIII., Feb. 4, 1658. See Carlyle,
_Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches_.
94. ‘_The insolence of office_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 1.
‘_After the heart-aches_,’ _etc._ _Ibid._
‘_A mouse_,’ _etc._ Webster’s _The Duchess of Malfi_, Act IV.
Scene 1.
_Says Rousseau._ _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, V. Lettre III. (édit.
Firmin-Didot, p. 529 note).
‘_Some demon_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, IV. 16.
95. _Canaletti._ Antonio Canal (1697–1768), the Venetian painter, or
Bernardo Bellotto (1724?–1780), his nephew.
‘_Virgined it e’er since._’ _Coriolanus_, Act V. Scene 3.
_The Clandestine Marriage._ By George Colman the elder, and
Garrick; first produced in 1766.
96. ‘_The baby of a girl._’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Scene 4.
‘_With what a waving air_,’ _etc._ B. W. Procter’s (Barry
Cornwall’s) _Mirandola_, Act I. Scene 3. Hazlitt quoted the
lines in _Liber Amoris_ (see vol. II. p. 334), and it is clear
that here as in many other parts of _Table Talk_ he is referring
to the story recorded in that book.
‘_The fly that sips treacle_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act
II. Scene 2.
‘_For either_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, X. 898–908.
97. _The madman in Don Quixote._ ‘He loved and was abhorred; he
adored, and was scorned; he courted a savage; he solicited a
statue; he pursued the wind; he called aloud to the desert,’
etc. _Don Quixote_ (trans. Jarvis), Part I. Book II. chap. xiii.
‘_I have not loved the world_,’ _etc._ Byron, _Childe Harold_,