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 Cartwright: he has but one idea or subject of discourse,
Parliamentary Reform. Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) 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
schoolboys 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 anything 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 pain 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 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 encumbrance 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!'--l 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 in
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
everywhere 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 pikestaff. 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 anything but repeat after others by rote, the pangs, the labour,
the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs to get at 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, bout 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 draft 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_, etc.) 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 still-born 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!_'(1)--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.(2)
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 anything 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
woodcuts 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 downstairs after reading his lecture of truisms like a
playbill 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 anything, 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 countree.
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. Everything 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 to him, 'You know (Manning) is a very
plain good sort of a young man, but he is not anything at all out of the
common.' Leigh Hunt 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
backgrounds 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.
NOTES to ESSAY VII.
(1) Quarto poetry, as well as quarto metaphysics, does not always sell.
Going one day into a shop in Paternoster Row to see for some lines in
Mr. Wordsworth's _Excursion_ to interlard some prose with, I applied to
the constituted authorities, and asked if I could look at a copy of the
_Excursion?_ The answer was, 'Into which country, sir?'
(2) These fantastic poets are like a foolish ringer at Plymouth that
Northcote tells the story of. He was proud of his ringing, and the boys
who made a jest of his foible used to get him in the belfry and ask him,
'Well now, John, how many good ringers are there in Plymouth?' 'Two,' he
would say, without any hesitation. 'Ay, indeed! and who are they?' 'Why,
first, there's myself, that's one; and-- and--' 'Well, and who's the
other?' 'Why, there's-- there's-- Ecod, I can't think of any other but
myself.' _Talk we of one Master Launcelot._ The story is of ringers: it
will do for any vain, shallow, self-satisfied egotist of them all.