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 anything 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 anything 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 everything, 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 cheek it or recall 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 tragi-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, ore 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.(1)
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 Pergarna 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.(2) 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 fastastical 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 anything 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 Lamb'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 Lamb) 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 Lamb 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 were
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(3) (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 anything 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 haec 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 checkmating 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 backgammon, 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 backgammon, 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 anything truly great and important beyond forms
and minutiae. 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 anything for them to do they would become immovable. 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, teasing, contemptible, familiar, favourite sources of uneasiness
and dissatisfaction. When they are of a sanguine instead of a morbid
temperament, they become _quid-nuncs_ 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, riveted 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 bedfellows';
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 anything better. Instead
of launching out into greater expense and liberality with the tide of
fortune, they draw back with the 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. Lamb 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 background. 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 show 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 Vestris. 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 pathetique a 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 anything 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 over
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, recall
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!(4)
Poets choose 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 storehouse
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 anything 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 daytime; 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 entreat
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 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 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
heartbreaking 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 greengrocer'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 everything 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 the 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
qualities._ 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 Lapithae; 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 showed the same magnificence even
in small things.(5)