He was a man of very extraordinary genius. He has generally been treated
by those who have spoken of him in print as a madman. But this is a
mistake and must have been founded chiefly on the titles of his books. He
was a man of fervid mind and of sublime aspirations: but he was no madman;
or, if he was, then I say that it is so far desirable to be a madman. In
1798 or 1799, when I must have been about thirteen years old, Walking
Stewart was in Bath--where my family at that time resided. He frequented
the pump-room, and I believe all public places--walking up and down, and
dispersing his philosophic opinions to the right and the left, like a
Grecian philosopher. The first time I saw him was at a concert in the
Upper Rooms; he was pointed out to me by one of my party as a very
eccentric man who had walked over the habitable globe. I remember that
Madame Mara was at that moment singing: and Walking Stewart, who was a
true lover of music (as I afterwards came to know), was hanging upon her
notes like a bee upon a jessamine flower. His countenance was striking,
and expressed the union of benignity with philosophic habits of thought.
In such health had his pedestrian exercises preserved him, connected with
his abstemious mode of living, that though he must at that time have been
considerably above forty, he did not look older than twenty-eight; at
least the face which remained upon my recollection for some years was that
of a young man. Nearly ten years afterwards I became acquainted with him.
During the interval I had picked up one of his works in Bristol,--viz. his
_Travels to discover the Source of Moral Motion_, the second volume
of which is entitled _The Apocalypse of Nature_. I had been greatly
impressed by the sound and original views which in the first volume he had
taken of the national characters throughout Europe. In particular he was
the first, and so far as I know the only writer who had noticed the
profound error of ascribing a phlegmatic character to the English nation.
'English phlegm' is the constant expression of authors when contrasting
the English with the French. Now the truth is, that, beyond that of all
other nations, it has a substratum of profound passion: and, if we are to
recur to the old doctrine of temperaments, the English character must be
classed not under the _phlegmatic_ but under the _melancholic_
temperament; and the French under the _sanguine_. The character of a
nation may be judged of in this particular by examining its idiomatic
language. The French, in whom the lower forms of passion are constantly
bubbling up from the shallow and superficial character of their feelings,
have appropriated all the phrases of passion to the service of trivial and
ordinary life: and hence they have no language of passion for the service
of poetry or of occasions really demanding it: for it has been already
enfeebled by continual association with cases of an unimpassioned order.
But a character of deeper passion has a perpetual standard in itself, by
which as by an instinct it tries all cases, and rejects the language of
passion as disproportionate and ludicrous where it is not fully justified.
'Ah Heavens!' or 'Oh my God!' are exclamations with us so exclusively
reserved for cases of profound interest,--that on hearing a woman even
(i.e. a person of the sex most easily excited) utter such words, we look
round expecting to see her child in some situation of danger. But, in
France, 'Ciel!' and 'Oh mon Dieu!' are uttered by every woman if a mouse
does but run across the floor. The ignorant and the thoughtless, however,
will continue to class the English character under the phlegmatic
temperament, whilst the philosopher will perceive that it is the exact
polar antithesis to a phlegmatic character. In this conclusion, though
otherwise expressed and illustrated, Walking Stewart's view of the English
character will be found to terminate: and his opinion is especially
valuable--first and chiefly, because he was a philosopher; secondly,
because his acquaintance with man civilized and uncivilized, under all
national distinctions, was absolutely unrivalled. Meantime, this and
others of his opinions were expressed in language that if literally
construed would often appear insane or absurd. The truth is, his long
intercourse with foreign nations had given something of a hybrid tincture
to his diction; in some of his works, for instance, he uses the French
word _helas!_ uniformly for the English _alas!_ and apparently with no
consciousness of his mistake. He had also this singularity about him
--that he was everlastingly metaphysicizing against metaphysics. To me,
who was buried in metaphysical reveries from my earliest days, this was
not likely to be an attraction any more than the vicious structure of his
diction was likely to please my scholarlike taste. All grounds of disgust,
however, gave way before my sense of his powerful merits; and, as I have
said, I sought his acquaintance. Coming up to London from Oxford about
1807 or 1808 I made inquiries about him; and found that he usually read
the papers at a coffee-room in Piccadilly: understanding that he was poor,
it struck me that he might not wish to receive visits at his lodgings, and
therefore I sought him at the coffee-room. Here I took the liberty of
introducing myself to him. He received me courteously, and invited me to
his rooms--which at that time were in Sherrard-street, Golden-square--a
street already memorable to me. I was much struck with the eloquence of
his conversation; and afterwards I found that Mr. Wordsworth, himself the
most eloquent of men in conversation, had been equally struck when he had
met him at Paris between the years 1790 and 1792, during the early storms
of the French revolution. In Sherrard-street I visited him repeatedly, and
took notes of the conversations I had with him on various subjects. These
I must have somewhere or other; and I wish I could introduce them here, as
they would interest the reader. Occasionally in these conversations, as in
his books, he introduced a few notices of his private history: in
particular I remember his telling me that in the East Indies he had been a
prisoner of Hyder's: that he had escaped with some difficulty; and that,
in the service of one of the native princes as secretary or interpreter,
he had accumulated a small fortune. This must have been too small, I fear,
at that time to allow him even a philosopher's comforts: for some part of
it, invested in the French funds, had been confiscated. I was grieved to
see a man of so much ability, of gentlemanly manners, and refined habits,
and with the infirmity of deafness, suffering under such obvious
privations; and I once took the liberty, on a fit occasion presenting
itself, of requesting that he would allow me to send him some books which
he had been casually regretting that he did not possess; for I was at that
time in the hey-day of my worldly prosperity. This offer, however, he
declined with firmness and dignity, though not unkindly. And I now mention
it, because I have seen him charged in print with a selfish regard to his
own pecuniary interest. On the contrary, he appeared to me a very liberal
and generous man: and I well remember that, whilst he refused to accept of
any thing from me, he compelled me to receive as presents all the books
which he published during my acquaintance with him: two of these,
corrected with his own hand, viz. the Lyre of Apollo and the Sophiometer,
I have lately found amongst other books left in London; and others he
forwarded to me in Westmoreland. In 1809 I saw him often: in the spring of
that year, I happened to be in London; and Mr. Wordsworth's tract on the
Convention of Cintra being at that time in the printer's hands, I
superintended the publication of it; and, at Mr. Wordsworth's request, I
added a long note on Spanish affairs which is printed in the Appendix. The
opinions I expressed in this note on the Spanish character at that time
much calumniated, on the retreat to Corunna then fresh in the public mind,
above all, the contempt I expressed for the superstition in respect to the
French military prowess which was then universal and at its height, and
which gave way in fact only to the campaigns of 1814 and 1815, fell in, as
it happened, with Mr. Stewart's political creed in those points where at
that time it met with most opposition. In 1812 it was, I think, that I saw
him for the last time: and by the way, on the day of my parting with him,
I had an amusing proof in my own experience of that sort of ubiquity
ascribed to him by a witty writer in the London Magazine: I met him and
shook hands with him under Somerset-house, telling him that I should leave
town that evening for Westmoreland. Thence I went by the very shortest
road (_i.e._ through Moor-street, Soho--for I am learned in many
quarters of London) towards a point which necessarily led me through
Tottenham-court-road: I stopped nowhere, and walked fast: yet so it was
that in Tottenham-court-road I was not overtaken by (_that_ was
comprehensible), but overtook, Walking Stewart. Certainly, as the above
writer alleges, there must have been three Walking Stewarts in London. He
seemed no ways surprised at this himself, but explained to me that
somewhere or other in the neighborhood of Tottenham-court-road there was a
little theatre, at which there was dancing and occasionally good singing,
between which and a neighboring coffee-house he sometimes divided his
evenings. Singing, it seems, he could hear in spite of his deafness. In
this street I took my final leave of him; it turned out such; and,
anticipating at the time that it would be so, I looked after his white hat
at the moment it was disappearing and exclaimed--'Farewell, thou half-
crazy and most eloquent man! I shall never see thy face again.' I did not
intend, at that moment, to visit London again for some years: as it
happened, I was there for a short time in 1814: and then I heard, to my
great satisfaction, that Walking Stewart had recovered a considerable sum
(about 14,000 pounds I believe) from the East India Company; and from the
abstract given in the London Magazine of the Memoir by his relation, I
have since learned that he applied this money most wisely to the purchase
of an annuity, and that he 'persisted in living' too long for the peace of
an annuity office. So fare all companies East and West, and all annuity
offices, that stand opposed in interest to philosophers! In 1814, however,
to my great regret, I did not see him; for I was then taking a great deal
of opium, and never could contrive to issue to the light of day soon
enough for a morning call upon a philosopher of such early hours; and in
the evening I concluded that he would be generally abroad, from what he
had formerly communicated to me of his own habits. It seems, however, that
he afterwards held _conversaziones_ at his own rooms; and did not
stir out to theatres quite so much. From a brother of mine, who at one
time occupied rooms in the same house with him, I learned that in other
respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor
of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and
repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St.
James's Park,--where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows,
inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had
also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his
solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts if he ever had any.
The works of Walking Stewart must be read with some indulgence; the titles
are generally too lofty and pretending and somewhat extravagant; the
composition is lax and unprecise, as I have before said; and the doctrines
are occasionally very bold, incautiously stated, and too hardy and high-
toned for the nervous effeminacy of many modern moralists. But Walking
Stewart was a man who thought nobly of human nature: he wrote therefore at
times in the spirit and with the indignation of an ancient prophet against
the oppressors and destroyers of the time. In particular I remember that
in one or more of the pamphlets which I received from him at Grasmere he
expressed himself in such terms on the subject of Tyrannicide
(distinguishing the cases in which it was and was not lawful) as seemed to
Mr. Wordsworth and myself every way worthy of a philosopher; but, from the
way in which that subject was treated in the House of Commons, where it
was at that time occasionally introduced, it was plain that his doctrine
was not fitted for the luxurious and relaxed morals of the age. Like all
men who think nobly of human nature, Walking Stewart thought of it
hopefully. In some respects his hopes were wisely grounded; in others they
rested too much upon certain metaphysical speculations which are
untenable, and which satisfied himself only because his researches in that
track had been purely self-originated and self-disciplined. He relied upon
his own native strength of mind; but in questions, which the wisdom and
philosophy of every age building successively upon each other have not
been able to settle, no mind, however strong, is entitled to build wholly
upon itself. In many things he shocked the religious sense--especially as
it exists in unphilosophic minds; he held a sort of rude and unscientific
Spinosism; and he expressed it coarsely and in the way most likely to give
offence. And indeed there can be no stronger proof of the utter obscurity
in which his works have slumbered than that they should all have escaped
prosecution. He also allowed himself to look too lightly and indulgently
on the afflicting spectacle of female prostitution as it exists in London
and in all great cities. This was the only point on which I was disposed
to quarrel with him; for I could not but view it as a greater reproach to
human nature than the slave-trade or any sight of wretchedness that the
sun looks down upon. I often told him so; and that I was at a loss to
guess how a philosopher could allow himself to view it simply as part of
the equipage of civil life, and as reasonably making part of the
establishment and furniture of a great city as police-offices, lamp-
lighting, or newspapers. Waiving however this one instance of something
like compliance with the brutal spirit of the world, on all other subjects
he was eminently unworldly, child-like, simple-minded, and upright. He
would flatter no man: even when addressing nations, it is almost laughable
to see how invariably he prefaces his counsels with such plain truths
uttered in a manner so offensive as must have defeated his purpose if it
had otherwise any chance of being accomplished. For instance, in
addressing America, he begins thus:--'People of America! since your
separation from the mother-country your moral character has degenerated in
the energy of thought and sense; produced by the absence of your
association and intercourse with British officers and merchants: you have
no moral discernment to distinguish between the protective power of
England and the destructive power of France.' And his letter to the Irish
nation opens in this agreeable and conciliatory manner:--'People of
Ireland! I address you as a true philosopher of nature, foreseeing the
perpetual misery your irreflective character and total absence of moral
discernment are preparing for' &c. The second sentence begins thus--'You
are sacrilegiously arresting the arm of your parent kingdom fighting the
cause of man and nature, when the triumph of the fiend of French police-
terror would be your own instant extirpation--.' And the letter closes
thus:--'I see but one awful alternative--that Ireland will be a perpetual
moral volcano, threatening the destruction of the world, if the education
and instruction of thought and sense shall not be able to generate the
faculty of moral discernment among a very numerous class of the
population, who detest the civic calm as sailors the natural calm--and
make civic rights on which they cannot reason a pretext for feuds which
they delight in.' As he spoke freely and boldly to others, so he spoke
loftily of himself: at p. 313, of 'The Harp of Apollo,' on making a
comparison of himself with Socrates (in which he naturally gives the
preference to himself) he styles 'The Harp,' &c., 'this unparalleled work
of human energy.' At p. 315, he calls it 'this stupendous work;' and lower
down on the same page he says--'I was turned out of school at the age of
fifteen for a dunce or blockhead, because I would not stuff into my memory
all the nonsense of erudition and learning; and if future ages should
discover the unparalleled energies of genius in this work, it will prove
my most important doctrine--that the powers of the human mind must be
developed in the education of thought and sense in the study of moral
opinion, not arts and science.' Again, at p. 225 of his Sophiometer, he
says:--'The paramount thought that dwells in my mind incessantly is a
question I put to myself--whether, in the event of my personal dissolution
by death, I have communicated all the discoveries my unique mind possesses
in the great master-science of man and nature.' In the next page he
determines that he _has_, with the exception of one truth,--viz. 'the
latent energy, physical and moral, of human nature as existing in the
British people.' But here he was surely accusing himself without ground:
for to my knowledge he has not failed in any one of his numerous works to
insist upon this theme at least a billion of times. Another instance of
his magnificent self-estimation is--that in the title pages of several of
his works he announces himself as 'John Stewart, the only man of nature
[1] that ever appeared in the world.'
By this time I am afraid the reader begins to suspect that he was crazy:
and certainly, when I consider every thing, he must have been crazy when
the wind was at NNE; for who but Walking Stewart ever dated his books by a
computation drawn--not from the creation, not from the flood, not from
Nabonassar, or _ab urbe condita_, not from the Hegira--but from
themselves, from their own day of publication, as constituting the one
great era in the history of man by the side of which all other eras were
frivolous and impertinent? Thus, in a work of his given to me in 1812 and
probably published in that year, I find him incidentally recording of
himself that he was at that time 'arrived at the age of sixty-three, with
a firm state of health acquired by temperance, and a peace of mind almost
independent of the vices of mankind--because my knowledge of life has
enabled me to place my happiness beyond the reach or contact of other
men's follies and passions, by avoiding all family connections, and all
ambitious pursuits of profit, fame, or power.' On reading this passage I
was anxious to ascertain its date; but this, on turning to the title page,
I found thus mysteriously expressed: 'in the 7000th year of Astronomical
History, and the first day of Intellectual Life or Moral World, from the
era of this work.' Another slight indication of craziness appeared in a
notion which obstinately haunted his mind that all the kings and rulers of
the earth would confederate in every age against his works, and would hunt
them out for extermination as keenly as Herod did the innocents in
Bethlehem. On this consideration, fearing that they might be intercepted
by the long arms of these wicked princes before they could reach that
remote Stewartian man or his precursor to whom they were mainly addressed,
he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their
importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from
damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the
earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact
to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the
tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus, if
the truth was not to be dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that
here and there the truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret
spots on Mount Caucasus--in the sands of Biledulgerid--and in hiding-
places amongst the forests of America, and was to rise again in some
distant age and to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of
man,--this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to
generation; and, in defiance of a myriad of kings crusading against him,
Walking Stewart was to stretch out the influence of his writings through a
long series of [Greek: _lampadophoroi_] to that child of nature whom
he saw dimly through a vista of many centuries. If this were madness, it
seemed to me a somewhat sublime madness: and I assured him of my co-
operation against the kings, promising that I would bury 'The Harp of
Apollo' in my own orchard in Grasmere at the foot of Mount Fairfield; that
I would bury 'The Apocalypse of Nature' in one of the coves of Helvellyn,
and several other works in several other places best known to myself. He
accepted my offer with gratitude; but he then made known to me that he
relied on my assistance for a still more important service--which was
this: in the lapse of that vast number of ages which would probably
intervene between the present period and the period at which his works
would have reached their destination, he feared that the English language
might itself have mouldered away. 'No!' I said, '_that_ was not probable:
considering its extensive diffusion, and that it was now transplanted into
all the continents of our planet, I would back the English language
against any other on earth.' His own persuasion however was, that the
Latin was destined to survive all other languages; it was to be the
eternal as well as the universal language; and his desire was that
I would translate his works, or some part of them, into that language. [2]
This I promised; and I seriously designed at some leisure hour to
translate into Latin a selection of passages which should embody an
abstract of his philosophy. This would have been doing a service to all
those who might wish to see a digest of his peculiar opinions cleared from
the perplexities of his peculiar diction and brought into a narrow compass
from the great number of volumes through which they are at present
dispersed. However, like many another plan of mine, it went unexecuted.
On the whole, if Walking Stewart were at all crazy, he was so in a way
which did not affect his natural genius and eloquence--but rather exalted
them. The old maxim, indeed, that 'Great wits to madness sure are near
allied,' the maxim of Dryden and the popular maxim, I have heard disputed
by Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth, who maintain that mad people are the
dullest and most wearisome of all people. As a body, I believe they are
so. But I must dissent from the authority of Messrs. Coleridge and
Wordsworth so far as to distinguish. Where madness is connected, as it
often is, with some miserable derangement of the stomach, liver, &c. and
attacks the principle of pleasurable life, which is manifestly seated in
the central organs of the body (i.e. in the stomach and the apparatus
connected with it), there it cannot but lead to perpetual suffering and
distraction of thought; and there the patient will be often tedious and
incoherent. People who have not suffered from any great disturbance in
those organs are little aware how indispensable to the process of thinking
are the momentary influxes of pleasurable feeling from the regular goings
on of life in its primary function; in fact, until the pleasure is
withdrawn or obscured, most people are not aware that they _have_ any
pleasure from the due action of the great central machinery of the system:
proceeding in uninterrupted continuance, the pleasure as much escapes the
consciousness as the act of respiration: a child, in the happiest state of
its existence, does not _know_ that it is happy. And generally whatsoever
is the level state of the hourly feeling is never put down by the
unthinking (_i.e._ by 99 out of 100) to the account of happiness: it is
never put down with the positive sign, as equal to + x; but simply
as = 0. And men first become aware that it _was_ a positive quantity,
when they have lost it (_i.e._ fallen into--x). Meantime the genial
pleasure from the vital processes, though not represented to the
consciousness, is _immanent_ in every act--impulse--motion--word--and
thought: and a philosopher sees that the idiots are in a state of
pleasure, though they cannot see it themselves. Now I say that, where this
principle of pleasure is not attached, madness is often little more than
an enthusiasm highly exalted; the animal spirits are exuberant and in
excess; and the madman becomes, if he be otherwise a man of ability and
information, all the better as a companion. I have met with several such
madmen; and I appeal to my brilliant friend, Professor W----, who is not a
man to tolerate dulness in any quarter, and is himself the ideal of a
delightful companion, whether he ever met a more amusing person than that
madman who took a post-chaise with us from ---- to Carlisle, long years
ago, when he and I were hastening with the speed of fugitive felons to
catch the Edinburgh mail. His fancy and his extravagance, and his furious
attacks on Sir Isaac Newton, like Plato's suppers, refreshed us not only
for that day but whenever they recurred to us; and we were both grieved
when we heard some time afterwards from a Cambridge man that he had met
our clever friend in a stage coach under the care of a brutal keeper.----
Such a madness, if any, was the madness of Walking Stewart: his health was
perfect; his spirits as light and ebullient as the spirits of a bird in
spring-time; and his mind unagitated by painful thoughts, and at peace
with itself. Hence, if he was not an amusing companion, it was because the
philosophic direction of his thoughts made him something more. Of
anecdotes and matters of fact he was not communicative: of all that he had
seen in the vast compass of his travels he never availed himself in
conversation. I do not remember at this moment that he ever once alluded
to his own travels in his intercourse with me except for the purpose of
weighing down by a statement grounded on his own great personal experience
an opposite statement of many hasty and misjudging travellers which he
thought injurious to human nature: the statement was this, that in all his
countless rencontres with uncivilized tribes, he had never met with any so
ferocious and brutal as to attack an unarmed and defenceless man who was
able to make them understand that he threw himself upon their hospitality
and forbearance.
On the whole, Walking Stewart was a sublime visionary: he had seen and
suffered much amongst men; yet not too much, or so as to dull the genial
tone of his sympathy with the sufferings of others. His mind was a mirror
of the sentient universe.--The whole mighty vision that had fleeted before
his eyes in this world,--the armies of Hyder-Ali and his son with oriental
and barbaric pageantry,--the civic grandeur of England, the great deserts
of Asia and America,--the vast capitals of Europe,--London with its
eternal agitations, the ceaseless ebb and flow of its 'mighty heart,'--
Paris shaken by the fierce torments of revolutionary convulsions, the
silence of Lapland, and the solitary forests of Canada, with the swarming
life of the torrid zone, together with innumerable recollections of
individual joy and sorrow, that he had participated by sympathy--lay like
a map beneath him, as if eternally co-present to his view; so that, in the
contemplation of the prodigious whole, he had no leisure to separate the
parts, or occupy his mind with details. Hence came the monotony which the
frivolous and the desultory would have found in his conversation. I,
however, who am perhaps the person best qualified to speak of him, must
pronounce him to have been a man of great genius; and, with reference to
his conversation, of great eloquence. That these were not better known and
acknowledged was owing to two disadvantages; one grounded in his imperfect
education, the other in the peculiar structure of his mind. The first was
this: like the late Mr. Shelley he had a fine vague enthusiasm and lofty
aspirations in connection with human nature generally and its hopes; and
like him he strove to give steadiness, a uniform direction, and an
intelligible purpose to these feelings, by fitting to them a scheme of
philosophical opinions. But unfortunately the philosophic system of both
was so far from supporting their own views and the cravings of their own
enthusiasm, that, as in some points it was baseless, incoherent, or
unintelligible, so in others it tended to moral results, from which, if
they had foreseen them, they would have been themselves the first to
shrink as contradictory to the very purposes in which their system had
originated. Hence, in maintaining their own system they both found
themselves painfully entangled at times with tenets pernicious and
degrading to human nature. These were the inevitable consequences of the
[Greek: _proton pheudos_] in their speculations; but were naturally
charged upon them by those who looked carelessly into their books as
opinions which not only for the sake of consistency they thought
themselves bound to endure, but to which they gave the full weight of
their sanction and patronage as to so many moving principles in their
system. The other disadvantage under which Walking Stewart labored, was
this: he was a man of genius, but not a man of talents; at least his
genius was out of all proportion to his talents, and wanted an organ as it
were for manifesting itself; so that his most original thoughts were
delivered in a crude state--imperfect, obscure, half developed, and not
producible to a popular audience. He was aware of this himself; and,
though he claims everywhere the faculty of profound intuition into human
nature, yet with equal candor he accuses himself of asinine stupidity,
dulness, and want of talent. He was a disproportioned intellect, and so
far a monster: and he must be added to the long list of original-minded
men who have been looked down upon with pity and contempt by commonplace
men of talent, whose powers of mind--though a thousand times inferior--
were yet more manageable, and ran in channels more suited to common uses
and common understandings.