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 Grandison, 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
got 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 know 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 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
seaside--
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 nor 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
everything. 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 woodside 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 war 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 lodgings in a cat's ear'(2) 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 inflections 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 _virtu_, 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 inquiring 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 it 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'oeil_ 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 sea her gain'd
By a far worse; or it 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.(3)
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 filled 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 behindhand 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 affixed
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 misdemeanor, a contempt of court, an extreme piece
of impertinence. Or if you prove every charge unfounded, they never
think of retracing 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 by-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 Bolinbroke'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(4) will guide the course of our year.
The same azure vault, bespangled with stars, will be everywhere 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, it
imports me little what ground I tread-upon.'