The fourth and last canto of _Childe Harold_ has disappointed us. It is

a falling off from the three former ones. We have read it carefully

through, but it has left only the same impression on our minds that a

troubled dream does,—as disturbed, as confused, as disjointed, as

harassing, and as unprofitable. It is an indigestion of the mind. It is

the lassitude or feverish tossing and tumbling of the imagination, after

having taken a surfeit of pleasure, and fed upon the fumes of pride.

Childe Harold is a spoiled child of the Muses—and of Fortune. He looks

down upon human life, not more with the superiority of intellect than

with the arrogance of birth. The poet translates the lord into high

sounding and supercilious verse. It is Agamemnon and Thersites in one

person. The common events and calamities of the world afford matter for

the effusions of his spleen, while they seem resented as affronts to his

personal dignity.

‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,

He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,

To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse

Betwixt the wind and his nobility.’

So when ‘the very age and body of the time’ comes between his Lordship’s

speculative notions and hereditary prejudices, he stops the nose at it,

and plays some very fantastic tricks before the public, who are

lookers-on. In general, the idle wants, the naughty airs, the ill

humours and _ennui_, the contempt for others, and disgust at themselves,

common to exalted birth and station, are suffered to corrupt and

stagnate in the blood that inherits them;—they are a disease in the

flesh, an obstinate tumour in the mind, a cloud upon the brow, a venom

that vents itself in hateful looks and peevish words to those about

them; but in this poem and this author they have acquired ‘an

understanding and a tongue,’—are sublimed by imagination, systematised

by sophistry—mount the steps of the Capitol, fulmine over Greece, and

are poured in torrents of abuse on the world. It is well if the world

like it—we are tired of the monotony of his Lordship’s griefs, of which

we can perceive neither beginning nor end. ‘They are begot of nothing,

born of nothing.’ He volunteers his own Pilgrimage,—appoints his own

penance,—makes his own confession,—and all—for nothing. He is in

despair, because he has nothing to complain of—miserable, because he is

in want of nothing. ‘He has tasted of all earth’s bliss, both living and

loving,’ and therefore he describes himself as suffering the tortures of

the damned. He is in love with misery, because he has possessed every

enjoyment; and because he has had his will in every thing, is

inconsolable because he cannot have impossibilities. His Lordship, in

fact, makes out his own hard case to be, that he has attained all those

objects that the rest of the world admire; that he has met with none of

those disasters which embitter their lives; and he calls upon us to

sympathise with his griefs and his despair.

This will never do. It is more intolerable than even Mr. Wordsworth’s

arbitrary egotism and pampered self-sufficiency. _He_ creates a

factitious interest out of nothing: Lord Byron would destroy our

interest in all that is. Mr. Wordsworth, to salve his own self-love,

makes the merest toy of his own mind,—the most insignificant object he

can meet with,—of as much importance as the universe: Lord Byron would

persuade us that the universe itself is not worth his or our notice; and

yet he would expect us to be occupied with him.

——‘The man whose eye

Is ever on himself doth look on one,

The least of Nature’s works, one who might move

The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds

Unlawful ever.’

These lines, written by one of these two poets, might be addressed to

both of them with equal propriety.

Lord Byron, in this the fourth and last Canto of _Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage_, seems to have worn out the glowing fervour of his genius to

a _calx_, and to have exhausted the intense enthusiasm of his favourite

topics of invective. There is little about himself, historically

speaking—there is no plot, no story, no interest excited, no

catastrophe. The general reflections are connected together merely by

the accidental occurrence of different objects—the Venus of Medici, or

the statue of Pompey,—the Capitol at Rome, or the Bridge of Sighs at

Venice,—Shakespear, and Mrs. Radcliffe,—Bonaparte, and his Lordship in

person,—are brought together as in a phantasmagoria, and with as little

attention to keeping or perspective, as in Hogarth’s famous print for

reversing the laws of vision. The judgements pronounced are often more

dogmatical than profound, and with all their extravagance of expression,

common-place. His Lordship does not understand the Apollo Belvidere or

the Venus de Medicis, any more than Bonaparte. He cants about the one

and against the other, and in doing the last, cuts his own throat. We

are not without hopes that his friend Mr. Hobhouse will set this matter

right in his ‘Historical Illustrations’; and shew that, however it may

suit his Noble Friend’s poetical cross-purposes, politically and

practically speaking, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He

first, in his disdain of modern times, finds nothing to compare with the

grandeur of antiquity but Bonaparte; and then ‘as ’twere in spite of

scorn,’ goes on to disdain this idol, which he had himself gratuitously

set up, in a strain of effeminate and rancorous abuse worthy of Mr.

Wordsworth’s pastoral, place-hunting Muse. Suppose what is here said of

‘the child and champion of Jacobinism’ to be true, are there not venal

tongues and venal pens enough to echo it, without his Lordship’s joining

in the cry? Will ‘the High Legitimates, the Holy Band’ be displeased

with these captious efforts to level the object of their hate to the

groveling standard of royalty? Is there not a division of labour even on

Mount Parnassus? The other writers of prose and verse, who enter the

Temple of Fame by Mr. Murray’s door in Albemarle-street, have their

cues. Mr. Southey, for instance, never sings or says, or dreams of

singing or saying, that the Prince Regent is not so great a man as

Julius Cæsar. Why then should Lord Byron force the comparison between

the modern and the ancient hero? It is because the slaves of power mind

the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned;

but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is _only_

the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.

The league between tyrants and slaves is a chain of adamant; the bond

between poets and the people is a rope of sand. Is this a truth, or is

it not? If it is not, let Lord Byron write no more on this subject,

which is beyond his height and his depth. Let him not trample on the

mighty or the fallen! Bonaparte is not Beppo.

The versification and style of this poem are as perverse and capricious

as the method or the sentiments. One stanza perpetually runs on into the

next, making the exception the rule, merely because it properly ends in

itself; and there is a strange mixture of stately phraseology and

far-fetched metaphor, with the most affected and bald simplicity of

expression and uncouthness in the rhymes. It is well his Lordship is

born so high, or all Grub street would set him down as a plebeian for

such lines as the following:—

[‘I lov’d her[46] from my boyhood,’ &c. (stanza 18 and part of 19)].

What will the Critics of the Cockney School of Poetry say to this?—Lie

on, and swear that it is high patrician poetry, and of very noble birth.

The introductory stanzas are on the same subject, Venice; and are

better.

[‘I stood in Venice, on the bridge of sighs,’ &c. (stanzas 1, 2, and

3)].

The thought expressed in the last stanza, ‘but nature doth not die,’ is

particularly fine, and consolatory to the mind. We prefer the stanza

relating to the tomb of Petrarch, to any others in the poem:—

[‘There is a tomb in Arqua;—rear’d in air,’ &c. (stanzas 30–33)].

The apostrophe to Tasso and to his patron is written with great force,

but in a different spirit:—

[‘Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets,’ &c. (stanzas 35–38)].

In the same strain, and with an alternate mixture of enthusiasm and

spleen, the author pays the tribute of acknowledgement to the artist of

‘the statue that enchants the world,’ to the shades of Michael Angelo,

Alfieri, ‘the starry Galileo,’ Machiavel, and to the Bard of Prose, ‘him

of the Hundred Tales of Love’—Boccacio.

From these recollections the poet proceeds to describe the fall of the

Velino, ‘a hell of waters.’ We cannot say but that we think his powers

better suited to express the human passions than to reflect the forms of

nature. In the present instance, however, the poet has not invoked the

genius of the place in vain: it represents, in some measure, the

workings of his own spirit,—disturbed, restless, labouring, foaming,

sparkling, and now hid in labyrinths and plunging into the gloom of

night. The following description is obscure, tortuous, perplexed, and

abortive; yet who can say that it is not beautiful, striking, and

impassioned?—

[‘How profound

The gulf! and how the giant element,’ &c. (stanzas 70–72)].

We’ll look no more: such kind of writing is enough to turn the brain of

the reader or the author. The repetitions in the last stanza are like

interlineations in an imperfect manuscript, left for afterselection;

such as, ‘Hope upon a death-bed’—‘Love watching madness,’—‘Unworn its

steady dies’—‘Serene its brilliant hues,’—‘the distracted waters’—‘the

torture of the scene,’ &c. There is here in every line an effort at

brilliancy, and a successful effort; and yet, in the next, as if nothing

had been done, the same thing is attempted to be expressed again with

the same labour as before, the same success, and with as little

appearance of repose or satisfaction of mind.

It is in vain to attempt a regular account of the remainder of this

poem, which is a mass of discordant things, incoherent, not gross, seen

‘now in glimmer and now in gloom,’ and ‘moving wild laughter in the

throat of death.’ The poem is like the place it describes:—

‘The double night of ages, and of her,

Night’s daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt and wrap[47]

All round us: we but feel our way to err:

The ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,

And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;

But Rome is as the desart, where we steer

Stumbling on recollections; now we clap

Our hands, and cry “Eureka!” it is clear—

When but some false mirage[48] of ruin rises near.’

This is undoubtedly fine: but Rome was glorious, before she became a

ruin; stately, before she was laid low; was ‘seen of all eyes,’ before

she was confounded in oblivion. Lord Byron’s poetry, in its irregular

and gloomy magnificence, we fear, antedates its own doom; and is buried

in a desolation of his own creating, where the mists of fancy cloud,

instead of lighting up the face of nature; and the fierceness of the

passions, like the Sirocco of the Desart, withers and consumes the

heart. We give this judgment against our wills; and shall be happy,

should we live to see it reversed by another generation. All our

prejudices are in favour of the Noble Poet, and against his maligners.

_Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ is dedicated to Mr. Hobhouse, and there are

passages both in the dedication and the poem which would bribe our

opinions, were they to be bribed either by our admiration of genius or

our love of liberty. Such are the following passages:—

[‘What from this barren being do we reap,’ &c. (stanzas 93–95)].

But we must conclude; not, however, till we have made two extracts more.

We shall not give the passages relating to his separation from his wife,

or the death of the Princess Charlotte: we see nothing remarkable in the

events, or in his Lordship’s reflections on them. As to his vow of

revenge, which is to end in forgiveness, it is unconscious,

constitutional caprice and contradiction: it is self-will exerting

itself in straining at a violent conclusion; and then, by another

exertion, defeating itself by doing nothing. So also he expatiates on

the boundless anticipated glories of a female reign, which were never

likely, and are now impossible, only that he may rail at lady Fortune in

good set terms, and indulge a deeper disgust at all that is real or

possible. We will give what is better than such cant,—the description of

the dying Gladiator, and the conclusion of the poem:—

[‘I see before me the Gladiator lie,’ &c. (stanzas 140 and 141)].

_O si sic Omnia!_ All, however, is not so. The stanzas immediately

following, on the story of the Grecian Daughter and the Apollo

Belvidere, are in as false and sophisticated a taste, as these are pure

and sublime. But, at the close of the poem, in addressing the pathless

ocean,—the self-willed, untamed mighty world of waters,—his genius

resumes its beauty and its power, and the Pilgrim sinks to rest in

strains as mild and placid as the breath of childhood, that frets itself

asleep.

[‘My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme,’ &c. (stanzas 185 and

186)].

THE OPERA

_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_May 23, 1818._

The Opera is a fine thing: the only question is, whether it is not too

fine. It is the most fascinating, and at the same time the most

tantalising of all places. It is not the _too little_, but the _too

much_, that offends us. Every object is there collected, and displayed

in ostentatious profusion, that can strike the senses or dazzle the

imagination; music, dancing, painting, poetry, architecture, the blaze

of beauty, ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’ and yet we are

not satisfied—because the multitude and variety of objects distracts the

attention, and by flattering us with a vain shew of the highest

gratification of every faculty and wish, leaves us at last in a state of

listlessness, disappointment, and _ennui_. The powers of the mind are

exhausted, without being invigorated; our expectations are excited, not

satisfied; and we are at some loss to distinguish an excess of

irritation from the height of enjoyment. To sit at the Opera for a whole

evening, is like undergoing the process of animal magnetism for the same

length of time. It is an illusion and a mockery, where the mind is made

‘the fool of the senses,’ and cheated of itself; where pleasure after

pleasure courts us, as in a fairy palace; where the Graces and the

Muses, waving in a gay, fantastic round with one another, still turn

from our pursuit; where art, like an enchantress with a thousand faces,

still allures our giddy admiration, shifts her mask, and again

disappoints us. The Opera, in short, proceeds upon a false estimate of

taste and morals; it supposes that the capacity for enjoyment may be

multiplied with the objects calculated to afford it. It is a species of

intellectual prostitution; for we can no more receive pleasure from all

our faculties at once than we can be in love with a number of mistresses

at the same time. Though we have different senses, we have but one

heart; and if we attempt to force it into the service of them all at

once, it must grow restive or torpid, hardened or enervated. The

spectator may say to the sister-arts of Painting, Poetry, and Music, as

they advance to him in a _Pas de Trois_ at the Opera, ‘How happy could I

be with either, were t’other dear charmer away;’ but while ‘they all

tease him together,’ the heart gives a satisfactory answer to none of

them;—is ashamed of its want of resources to supply the repeated calls

upon its sensibility, seeks relief from the importunity of endless

excitement in fastidious apathy or affected levity; and in the midst of

luxury, pomp, vanity, indolence, and dissipation, feels only the hollow,

aching void within, the irksome craving of unsatisfied desire, because

more pleasures are placed within its reach than it is capable of

enjoying, and the interference of one object with another ends in a

double disappointment. Such is the best account we can give of the

nature of the Opera,—of the contradiction between our expectations of

pleasure and our uneasiness there,—of our very jealousy of the

flattering appeals which are made to our senses, our passions, and our

vanity, on all sides,—of the little relish we acquire for it, and the

distaste it gives us for other things. Any one of the sources of

amusement to be found there would be enough to occupy and keep the

attention alive; the _tout ensemble_ fatigues and oppresses it. One may

be stifled to death with roses. A head-ache may be produced by a

profusion of sweet smells or of sweet sounds: but we do not like the

head-ache the more on that account. Nor are we reconciled to it, even at

the Opera.

What makes the difference between an opera of Mozart’s, and the singing

of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the corner of the street? The

one is nature, and the other is art: the one is paid for, and the other

is not. Madame Fodor sings the air of _Vedrai Carino_ in _Don Giovanni_

so divinely, because she was hired to sing it; she sings it to please

the audience, not herself, and does not always like to be _encored_ in

it; but the thrush that awakes at daybreak with its song, does not sing

because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or

criticised. It sings because it is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds

from its throat, to relieve the overflowings of its own heart—the liquid

notes come from, and go to the heart, dropping balm into it, as the

gushing spring revives the traveller’s parched and fainting lips. That

stream of joy comes pure and fresh to the longing sense, free from art

and affectation; the same that rises over vernal groves, mingled with

the breath of morning, and the perfumes of the wild hyacinth, that waits

for no audience, that wants no rehearsing, and still—

‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’

This is the great difference between nature and art, that the one _is_

what the other _seems_, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because

it feels it itself. Madame Fodor sings, as a musical instrument may be

made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is

not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases,

and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its

singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than bass or

treble, than the Italian or the German school, than quavers or

crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in

the world but truth and nature!

The Opera is the most artificial of all things. It is not only art, but

ostentatious, unambiguous, exclusive art. It does not subsist as an

imitation of nature, but in contempt of it; and instead of seconding,

its object is to pervert and sophisticate all our natural impressions of

things. When the Opera first made its appearance in this country, there

were strong prejudices entertained against it, and it was ridiculed as a

species of the _mock-heroic_. The prejudices have worn out with time,

and the ridicule has ceased; but the grounds for both remain the same in

the nature of the thing itself. At the theatre, we see and hear what has

been said, thought, and done by various people elsewhere; at the Opera,

we see and hear what was never said, thought, or done any where but at

the Opera. Not only is all communication with nature cut off, but every

appeal to the imagination is sheathed and softened in the melting medium

of Siren sounds. The ear is cloyed and glutted with warbled ecstacies or

agonies; while every avenue to terror or pity is carefully stopped up

and guarded by song and recitative. Music is not made the vehicle of

poetry, but poetry of music: the very meaning of the words is lost or

refined away in the effeminacy of a foreign language. A grand serious

Opera is a tragedy wrapped up in soothing airs, to suit the tender

feelings of the nurselings of fortune—where tortured victims swoon on

beds of roses, and the pangs of despair sink in tremulous accents into

downy repose. Just so much of human misery is given as to lull those who

are exempted from it into a deeper sense of their own security: just

enough of the picture of human life is shewn to relieve their languor,

without disturbing their indifference;—not to excite their sympathy, but

‘with some sweet, oblivious antidote,’ to pamper their sleek and sordid

apathy. In a word, the whole business of the Opera is to stifle emotion

in its birth, and to intercept every feeling in its progress to the

heart. Every impression that, left to itself, might sink deep into the

mind, and wake it to real sympathy, is overtaken and baffled by means of

some other impression, plays round the surface of the imagination,

trembles into airy sound, or expires in an empty pageant. In the grand

carnival of the senses,

‘The cloister’d heart

Sits squat at home, like Pagod in a niche

Obscure’;—

the pulse of life is suspended, the link which binds us to humanity is

broken; the soul is fretted by the sense of excessive softness into a

feverish hectic dream; truth becomes a fable, good and evil matters of

perfect indifference, except as they can be made subservient to our

selfish gratification; and there is hardly a vice for which the mind on

coming out of the Opera is not prepared, no virtue of which it is

capable!

But what shall we say of the company at the Opera? Is it not grand,

select, splendid, and imposing? Do we not see there ‘the flower of

Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ her nobles and her

diplomatic characters? First, we only know the diplomatic characters by

their taking prodigious quantities of snuff. As to great warriors, some

that we know had better not shew their faces—if there is any truth in

physiognomy; and as to great men, we know of but one in modern times,

and neither Europe nor the Opera-house was big enough to hold him. With

respect to Lords and Ladies, we see them as we do gilded butterflies in

glass cases. We soon get tired of them, for they seem tired of

themselves, and one another. They gape, stare, affect to whisper, laugh,

or talk loud, to fill up the vacuities of thought and expression. They

do not gratify our predilection for happy faces! But do we not feel the

throb of pleasure from the blaze of beauty in the side-boxes? That blaze

would be brighter, were it not quenched in the sparkling of diamonds. As

for the rest, _the grapes are sour_. Beauty is a thing that is not made

only to be seen. Who can behold it without a transient wish to be near

it, to adore, to possess it? He must be a fool or a coxcomb, whom the

sight of a beauty dazzles, but does not warm; whom a thousand glances

shot from a thousand heavenly faces pierce without wounding; who can

behold without a pang the bowers of Paradise opening to him by a

thousand doors, and barred against him by magic spells!—Bright

creatures, fairest of the fair, ye shine above our heads, bright as

Ariadne’s crown, fair as the dewy star of evening: but ye are no more to

us! There is no golden chain let down to us from you: we have sometimes

seen you at a play, or caught a glimpse of your faces passing in a

coronet-coach; but——As we are growing romantic, we shall take a turn

into the _crush-room_, where, following the train of the great

statesmen, the warriors, and the diplomatic characters, we shall meet

with a nearly equal display of external elegance and accomplishment,

without the pride of sex, rank, or virtue! If the women were all Junos

before, here they are all Venuses, and no less Goddesses! Those who

complained of inaccessible beauty before, may here find beauty more

accessible, and take their revenge on the boxes in the lobbies!

* * * * *

In fine, though we do not agree with a contemporary critic, that the

Opera is an entertainment that ought to be held in general estimation,

yet we think the present a very proper time for its encouragement. It

may serve to assist the _euthanasia_ of the British character, of

British liberty, and British morals,—by hardening the heart, while it

softens the senses, and dissolving every manly and generous feeling in

an atmosphere of voluptuous effeminacy.

ON THE QUESTION WHETHER POPE WAS A POET

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_February, 1818._

The question whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and

is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have

been a great prose writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort.

He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and

as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the

vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a

good one. If, indeed, by a great poet we mean one who gives the utmost

grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the

passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the

bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the contrary way;

namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent

observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his critical essays;

or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point

of view, as in his satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity,

as in his poems of fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and

familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and

all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his

epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm,

of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of

nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a

wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world; with a

keen relish for the elegancies of art, or of nature when embellished by

art, a quick _tact_ for propriety of thought and manners, as established

by the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the

sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them, within the

little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet not

of nature but of art: and the distinction between the two is this. The

poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of

passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and

grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its

immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men;

so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his

mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be

identified with, and to foreknow, and to record the feelings of all men,

at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and

to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does.

He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he

feels them in their universal interest; for he feels them as they affect

the first principles of his and our common nature. Pope was not

assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it. He saw

nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought

for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of

others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakespeare had an intuitive

and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in

all possible circumstances; Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he

himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring

flight from heaven to earth through chaos and old night. Pope’s muse

never wandered with safety but from his library to his grotto, or from

his grotto into his library again. His mind dwelt with greater pleasure

on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could describe the

faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person better than

the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven; a piece

of cut glass, or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect

than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more

delighted with a patent lamp than with ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s

brow,’ that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, trembles

through the cottage casement, and cheers the watchful mariner on the

lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished

life. That which was nearest to him was the greatest: the fashion of the

day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He

preferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he

had a stronger fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or

proprietor of a gewgaw than admiration of that which was interesting to

all mankind alike. He preferred the artificial to the natural in

passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating impulses of the one

hurried him away with a force and vehemence with which he could not

grapple, while he could trifle with the conventional and superficial

modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, put them on

or off like a masquerade dress, make much or little of them, indulge

them for a longer or a shorter time as he pleased, and because, while

they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once

disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the

antithesis of strength and grandeur: its power was the power of

indifference. He had none of the inspired raptures of poetry: he was in

poetry what the sceptic is in religion. It cannot be denied that his

chief excellence lay more in diminishing than ‘in aggrandizing

objects,—in checking than in encouraging our enthusiasm,—in sneering at

the extravagancies of fancy or passion, instead of giving a loose to

them,—in describing a row of pins and needles rather than the embattled

spears of Greeks and Trojans,—in penning a lampoon or a compliment,—and

in praising Martha Blount!

Shakespeare says,—

‘In fortune’s ray and brightness

The herd hath more annoyance by the brize

Than by the tyger: But when the splitting wind

Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,

And flies fled under shade, why then

The thing of courage,

As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize,

And with an accent tuned i’ th’ self-same key,

Replies to chiding fortune.’

There is hardly any of this rough work in Pope. His muse was on a peace

establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence.

He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the

great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of

nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered

flatteries; his forked lightnings playful sarcasms; for the ‘gnarled

oak’ he gives us ‘the soft myrtle’; for rocks, and seas, and mountains,

artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for

earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a

china-jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of

the passions, we have

‘Calm contemplation and poetic ease.’

Yet within this retired and narrow circle, how much, and that how

exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,

what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what

refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a

microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new

consequence,—where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and

slightest shades of difference,—when the little becomes gigantic, the

deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the

magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing; but still the exhibition

is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or

surprised.

ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE.

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_August 1818._

There is not any term that is oftener misapplied, or that is a stronger

instance of the abuse of language, than this same word, _respectable_.

By a _respectable man_ is generally meant a person whom there is no

reason for respecting, or none that we choose to name: for if there is

any good reason for the opinion we wish to express, we naturally assign

it as the ground of his respectability. If the person whom you are

desirous to characterize favourably, is distinguished for his

good-nature, you say that he is a good-natured man; if by his zeal to

serve his friends, you call him a friendly man; if by his wit or sense,

you say that he is witty or sensible; if by his honesty or learning, you

say so at once; but if he is none of these, and there is no one quality

which you can bring forward to justify the high opinion you would be

thought to entertain of him, you then take the question for granted, and

jump at a conclusion, by observing gravely, that ‘he is a very

respectable man.’ It is clear, indeed, that where we have any striking

and generally admitted reasons for respecting a man, the most obvious

way to ensure the respect of others, will be to mention his estimable

qualities; where these are wanting, the wisest course must be to say

nothing about them, but to insist on the general inference which we have

our particular reasons for drawing, only vouching for its authenticity.

If, for instance, the only motive we have for thinking or speaking well

of another is, that he gives us good dinners, as this is not a valid

reason to those who do not, like us, partake of his hospitality, we may

(without going into particulars) content ourselves with assuring them,

that he is a most respectable man: if he is a slave to those above him,

and an oppressor of those below him, but sometimes makes us the channels

of his bounty or the tools of his caprice, it may be as well to say

nothing of the matter, but to confine ourselves to the safer generality,

that he is a person of the highest respectability: if he is a low dirty

fellow, who has amassed an immense fortune, which he does not know what

to do with, the possession of it alone will guarantee his

respectability, if we say nothing of the manner in which he has come by

it, or in which he spends it. A man may be a knave or a fool, or both

(as it may happen), and yet be a most respectable man, in the common and

authorized sense of the term, provided he keeps up appearances, and does

not give common fame a handle for no longer keeping up the imposture.

The best title to the character of respectability lies in the

convenience of those who echo the cheat, and in the conventional

hypocrisy of the world. Any one may lay claim to it who is willing to

give himself airs of importance, and can find means to divert others

from inquiring too strictly into his pretensions. It is a disposable

commodity,—not a part of the man, that sticks to him like his skin, but

an appurtenance, like his goods and chattels. It is meat, drink, and

clothing to those who take the benefit of it by allowing others the

credit. It is the current coin, the circulating medium, in which the

fictitious intercourse of the world is carried on, the bribe which

interest pays to vanity. Respectability includes all that vague and

indefinable mass of respect floating in the world, which arises from

sinister motives in the person who pays it, and is offered to

adventitious and doubtful qualities in the person who receives it. It is

spurious and nominal; hollow and venal. To suppose that it is to be

taken literally or applied to sterling merit, would betray the greatest

ignorance of the customary use of speech. When we hear the word coupled

with the name of any individual, it would argue a degree of romantic

simplicity to imagine that it implies any one quality of head or heart,

any one excellence of body or mind, any one good action or praiseworthy

sentiment; but as soon as it is mentioned, it conjures up the ideas of a

handsome house with large acres round it, a sumptuous table, a cellar

well stocked with excellent wines, splendid furniture, a fashionable

equipage, with a long list of elegant contingencies. It is not what a

man _is_, but what he _has_, that we speak of in the significant use of

this term. He may be the poorest creature in the world in himself, but

if he is well to do, and can spare some of his superfluities, if he can

lend us his purse or his countenance upon occasion, he then ‘buys golden

opinions’ of us;—it is but fit that we should speak well of the bridge

that carries us over, and in return for what we can get from him, we

embody our servile gratitude, hopes, and fears, in this word

respectability. By it we pamper his pride, and feed our own necessities.

It must needs be a very honest uncorrupted word that is the go-between

in this disinterested kind of traffic. We do not think of applying this

word to a great poet or a great painter, to the man of genius or the man

of virtue, for it is seldom we can _spunge_ upon them. It would be a

solecism for any one to pretend to the character who has a shabby coat

to his back, who goes without a dinner, or has not a good house over his

head. He who has reduced himself in the world by devoting himself to a

particular study, or adhering to a particular cause, excites only a

smile of pity, or a shrug of the shoulders at the mention of his name;

while he who has raised himself in it by a different course, who has

become rich for want of ideas, and powerful from want of principle, is

looked up to with silent homage, and passes for a respectable man. ‘The

learned pate ducks to the golden fool.’ We spurn at virtue and genius in

rags; and lick the dust in the presence of vice and folly in purple.

When Otway was left to starve after having produced _Venice Preserv’d_,

there was nothing in the phrenzied action with which he devoured the

food that choked him, to provoke the respect of the mob, who would have

hooted at him the more for knowing that he was a poet. Spenser, kept

waiting for the hundred pounds which Burleigh grudged him ‘for a song,’

might feel the mortification of his situation; but the statesman never

felt any diminution of his sovereign’s favour in consequence of it.

Charles II.’s neglect of his favourite poet Butler did not make him look

less gracious in the eyes of his courtiers, or of the wits and critics

of the time. Burns’s embarrassments, and the temptations to which he was

exposed by his situation, degraded him, but left no stigma on his

patrons, who still meet to celebrate his memory, and consult about his

monument, in the face of day. To enrich the mind of a country by works

of art or science, and leave yourself poor, is not the way for any one

to rank as respectable, at least in his lifetime:—to oppress, to

enslave, to cheat, and plunder it, is a much better way. ‘The time gives

evidence of it.’ But the instances are common.

Respectability means a man’s situation and success in life, not his

character or conduct. The city merchant never loses his respectability

till he becomes bankrupt. After that, we hear no more of it or him. The

justice of the peace, and the parson of the parish, the lord and the

squire, are allowed, by immemorial usage, to be very respectable people,

though no one ever thinks of asking why. They are a sort of fixtures in

this way. To take an example from one of them. The country parson may

pass his whole time, when he is not employed in the cure of souls, in

flattering his rich neighbours, and leaguing with them to _snub_ his

poor ones, in seizing poachers, and encouraging informers; he may be

exorbitant in exacting his tithes, harsh to his servants, the dread and

bye-word of the village where he resides, and yet all this, though it

may be notorious, shall abate nothing of his respectability. It will not

hinder his patron from giving him another living to play the petty

tyrant in, or prevent him from riding over to the squire’s in his

carriage and being well received, or from sitting on the bench of

justices with due decorum and with clerical dignity. The poor curate, in

the mean time, who may be a real comfort to the bodies and minds of his

parishioners, will be passed by without notice. Parson Adams, drinking

his ale in Sir Thomas Booby’s kitchen, makes no very respectable figure;

but Sir Thomas himself was right worshipful, and his widow a person of

honour! A few such historiographers as Fielding would put an end to the

farce of respectability, with others like it. Peter Pounce, in the same

author, was a consummation of this character, translated into the most

vulgar English. The character of Captain Blifil, his epitaph, and

funeral sermon, are worth tomes of casuistry, and patched up theories of

moral sentiments. Pope somewhere exclaims, in his fine indignant way,

‘What can ennoble sots, or knaves, or cowards?

Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.’

But this is the heraldry of poets, not of the world. In fact, the only

way for a poet now-a-days to emerge from the obscurity of poverty and

genius, is to prostitute his pen, turn literary pimp to some

borough-mongering lord, canvass for him at elections, and by this means

aspire to the same importance, and be admitted on the same respectable

footing with him as his valet, his steward, or his practising attorney.

A Jew, a stock-jobber, a war contractor, a successful monopolist, a

nabob, an Indian director, or an African slave-dealer, are all very

respectable people in their turn. A member of parliament is not only

respectable, but _honourable_;—‘all honourable men!’ Yet this

circumstance, which implies such a world of respect, really means

nothing. To say of any one that he is a member of parliament, is to say,

at the same time, that he is not at all distinguished as such. No body

ever thought of telling you, that Mr. Fox or Mr. Pitt were members of

parliament. Such is the constant difference between names and things!

The most mischievous and offensive use of this word has been in

politics. By respectable people (in the fashionable cant of the day) are

meant those who have not a particle of regard for any one but

themselves, who have feathered their own nests, and only want to lie

snug and warm in them. They have been set up and appealed to as the only

friends of their country and the constitution, while in truth they were

friends to nothing but their own interest. With them all is well, if

they are well off. They are raised by their lucky stars above the reach

of the distresses of the community, and are cut off by their situation

and sentiments, from any sympathy with their kind. They would see their

country ruined before they would part with the least of their

superfluities. Pampered in luxury and their own selfish comforts, they

are proof against the calls of patriotism, and the cries of humanity.

They would not get a scratch with a pin to save the universe. They are

more affected by the overturning of a plate of turtle soup than by the

starving of a whole county. The most desperate characters, picked up

from the most necessitous and depraved classes, are not worse judges of

politics than your true, staunch, thorough-paced ‘lives and fortunes

men,’ who have what is called a stake in the country, and see every

thing through the medium of their cowardly and unprincipled hopes and

fears. London is, perhaps, the only place in which the standard of

respectability at all varies from the standard of money. There things go

as much by appearance as by weight; and he may be said to be a

respectable man who cuts a certain figure in company by being dressed in

the fashion, and venting a number of common-place things with tolerable

grace and fluency. If a person there brings a certain share of

information and good manners into mixed society, it is not asked, when

he leaves it, whether he is rich or not. Lords and fiddlers, authors and

common council men, editors of newspapers and parliamentary speakers,

meet together, and the difference is not so much marked as one would

suppose. To be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in

modern literary society.

ON FASHION

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_September 1818._

‘Born of nothing, begot of nothing.’

‘His garment neither was of silk nor say,

But painted plumes in goodly order dight,

Like as the sun-burnt Indians do array

Their tawny bodies in their proudest plight:

As those same plumes, so seem’d he vain and light,

That of his gait might easily appear;

For still he far’d as dancing in delight,

And in his hands a windy fan did bear,

That in the idle air he mov’d still here and there.’

Fashion is an odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and

antipathies. It exists only by its being participated among a certain

number of persons, and its essence is destroyed by being communicated to

a greater number. It is a continual struggle between ‘the great vulgar

and the small’ to get the start of or keep up with each other in the

race of appearances, by an adoption on the part of the one of such

external and fantastic symbols as strike the attention and excite the

envy or admiration of the beholder, and which are no sooner made known

and exposed to public view for this purpose, than they are successfully

copied by the multitude, the slavish herd of imitators, who do not wish

to be behind-hand with their betters in outward show and pretensions,

and which then sink, without any farther notice, into disrepute and

contempt. Thus fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy

innovation and restless vanity. To be old-fashioned is the greatest

crime a coat or a hat can be guilty of. To look like nobody else is a

sufficiently mortifying reflection; to be in danger of being mistaken

for one of the rabble is worse. Fashion constantly begins and ends in

the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity. It is the

perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste,

elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority

than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was

yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious

from its being common. It is one of the most slight and insignificant of

all things. It cannot be lasting, for it depends on the constant change

and shifting of its own harlequin disguises; it cannot be sterling, for,

if it were, it could not depend on the breath of caprice; it must be

superficial, to produce its immediate effect on the gaping crowd; and

frivolous, to admit of its being assumed at pleasure by the numbers of

those who affect, by being in the fashion, to be distinguished from the

rest of the world. It is not any thing in itself, nor the sign of any

thing but the folly and vanity of those who rely upon it as their

greatest pride and ornament. It takes the firmest hold of the most

flimsy and narrow minds, of those whose emptiness conceives of nothing

excellent but what is thought so by others, and whose self-conceit makes

them willing to confine the opinion of all excellence to themselves and

those like them. That which is true or beautiful in itself, is not the

less so for standing alone. That which is good for any thing, is the

better for being more widely diffused. But fashion is the abortive issue

of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling,

affected, servile, despotic, mean, and ambitious, precise and

fantastical, all in a breath—tied to no rule, and bound to conform to

every whim of the minute. ‘The fashion of an hour old mocks the wearer.’

It is a sublimated essence of levity, caprice, vanity, extravagance,

idleness, and selfishness. It thinks of nothing but not being

contaminated by vulgar use, and winds and doubles like a hare, and

betakes itself to the most paltry shifts to avoid being overtaken by the

common hunt that are always in full chase after it. It contrives to keep

up its fastidious pretensions, not by the difficulty of the attainment,

but by the rapidity and evanescent nature of the changes. It is a sort

of conventional badge, or understood passport into select circles, which

must still be varying (like the water-mark in bank-notes) not to be

counterfeited by those without the pale of fashionable society; for to

make the test of admission to all the privileges of that refined and

volatile atmosphere depend on any real merit or extraordinary

accomplishment, would exclude too many of the pert, the dull, the

ignorant, too many shallow, upstart, and self-admiring pretenders, to

enable the few that passed muster to keep one another in any tolerable

countenance. If it were the fashion, for instance, to be distinguished

for virtue, it would be difficult to set or follow the example; but then

this would confine the pretension to a small number, (not the most

fashionable part of the community), and would carry a very singular air

with it. Or if excellence in any art or science were made the standard

of fashion, this would also effectually prevent vulgar imitation, but

then it would equally prevent fashionable impertinence. There would be

an obscure circle of _virtù_ as well as virtue, drawn within the

established circle of fashion, a little province of a mighty empire;—the

example of honesty would spread slowly, and learning would still have to

boast of a respectable minority. But of what use would such uncourtly

and out-of-the-way accomplishments be to the great and noble, the rich

and the fair, without any of the _eclat_, the noise and nonsense which

belong to that which is followed and admired by all the world alike? The

real and solid will never do for the current coin, the common wear and

tear of foppery, and fashion. It must be the meretricious, the showy,

the outwardly fine, and intrinsically worthless—that which lies within

the reach of the most indolent affectation, that which can be put on or

off at the suggestion of the most wilful caprice, and for which, through

all its fluctuations, no mortal reason can be given, but that it is the

newest absurdity in vogue! The shape of a head-dress, whether flat or

piled (curl on curl) several stories high by the help of pins and

pomatum, the size of a pair of paste buckles, the quantity of gold-lace

on an embroidered waistcoat, the mode of taking a pinch of snuff, or of

pulling out a pocket-handkerchief, the lisping and affected

pronunciation of certain words, the saying _Me’m_ for _Madam_, Lord

Foppington’s _Tam and ’Paun honour_, with a regular set of visiting

phrases and insipid sentiments ready sorted for the day, were what

formerly distinguished the mob of fine gentlemen and ladies from the mob

of their inferiors. These marks and appendages of gentility had their

day, and were then discarded for others equally peremptory and

unequivocal. But in all this chopping and changing, it is generally one

folly that drives out another; one trifle that by its specific levity

acquires a momentary and surprising ascendency over the last. There is

no striking deformity of appearance or behaviour that has not been made

‘the sign of an inward and invisible grace.’ Accidental imperfections

are laid hold of to hide real defects. Paint, patches, and powder, were

at one time synonymous with health, cleanliness, and beauty. Obscenity,

irreligion, small oaths, tippling, gaming, effeminacy in the one sex and

Amazon airs in the other, any thing is the fashion while it lasts. In

the reign of Charles II., the profession and practice of every species

of extravagance and debauchery were looked upon as the indispensable

marks of an accomplished cavalier. Since that period the court has

reformed, and has had rather a rustic air. Our belles formerly

overloaded themselves with dress: of late years, they have affected to

go almost naked,—‘and are, when unadorned, adorned the most.’ The women

having left off stays, the men have taken to wear them, if we are to

believe the authentic Memoirs of the Fudge Family. The Niobe head is at

present buried in the _poke_ bonnet, and the French milliners and

_marchands des modes_ have proved themselves an overmatch for the Greek

sculptors, in matters of taste and costume.

A very striking change has, however, taken place in dress of late years,

and some progress has been made in taste and elegance, from the very

circumstance, that, as fashion has extended its empire in that

direction, it has lost its power. While fashion in dress included what

was costly, it was confined to the wealthier classes: even this was an

encroachment on the privileges of rank and birth, which for a long time

were the only things that commanded or pretended to command respect, and

we find Shakespear complaining that ‘the city madam bears the cost of

princes on unworthy shoulders;’ but, when the appearing in the top of

the mode no longer depended on the power of purchasing certain expensive

articles of dress, or the right of wearing them, the rest was so obvious

and easy, that any one who chose might cut as coxcombical a figure as

the best. It became a matter of mere affectation on the one side, and

gradually ceased to be made a matter of aristocratic assumption on the

other. ‘In the grand carnival of this our age,’ among other changes this

is not the least remarkable, that the monstrous pretensions to

distinctions in dress have dwindled away by tacit consent, and the

simplest and most graceful have been in the same request with all

classes. In this respect, as well as some others, ‘the age is grown so

picked, the peasant’s toe comes so near the courtier’s heel, it galls

his kibe;’ a lord is hardly to be distinguished in the street from an

attorney’s clerk; and a plume of feathers is no longer mistaken for the

highest distinction in the land! The ideas of natural equality and the

Manchester steam-engines together have, like a double battery, levelled

the high towers and artificial structures of fashion in dress, and a

white muslin gown is now the common costume of the mistress and the

maid, instead of their wearing, as heretofore, rich silks and satins or

coarse linsey-wolsey. It would be ridiculous (on a similar principle)

for the courtier to take the wall of the citizen, without having a sword

by his side to maintain his right of precedence; and, from the stricter

notions that have prevailed of a man’s personal merit and identity, a

cane dangling from his arm is the greatest extension of his figure that

can be allowed to the modern _petit-maître_.

What shews the worthlessness of mere fashion is, to see how easily this

vain and boasted distinction is assumed, when the restraints of decency

or circumstances are once removed, by the most uninformed and commonest

of the people. I know an undertaker that is the greatest prig in the

streets of London, and an Aldermanbury haberdasher, that has the most

military strut of any lounger in Bond-street or St. James’s. We may, at

any time, raise a regiment of fops from the same number of fools, who

have vanity enough to be intoxicated with the smartness of their

appearance, and not sense enough to be ashamed of themselves. Every one

remembers the story in Peregrine Pickle, of the strolling gipsy that he

picked up in spite, had well scoured, and introduced her into genteel

company, where she met with great applause, till she got into a passion

by seeing a fine lady cheat at cards, rapped out a volley of oaths, and

let nature get the better of art. Dress is the great secret of address.

Clothes and confidence will set anybody up in the trade of modish

accomplishment. Look at the two classes of well-dressed females whom we

see at the play-house, in the boxes. Both are equally dressed in the

height of the fashion, both are _rouged_, and wear their neck and arms

bare,—both have the same conscious, haughty, theatrical air;—the same

toss of the head, the same stoop in the shoulders, with all the grace

that arises from a perfect freedom from embarrassment, and all the

fascination that arises from a systematic disdain of formal prudery,—the

same pretence and jargon of fashionable conversation,—the same mimicry

of tones and phrases,—the same ‘lisping, and ambling, and painting, and

nicknaming of Heaven’s creatures;’ the same every thing but real

propriety of behaviour, and real refinement of sentiment. In all the

externals, they are as like as the reflection in the looking-glass. The

only difference between the woman of fashion and the woman of pleasure

is, that the one _is_ what the other only _seems to be_; and yet, the

victims of dissipation who thus rival and almost outshine women of the

first quality in all the blaze, and pride, and glitter of shew and

fashion, are, in general, no better than a set of raw, uneducated,

inexperienced country girls, or awkward, coarse-fisted servant maids,

who require no other apprenticeship or qualification to be on a level

with persons of the highest distinction in society, in all the

brilliancy and elegance of outward appearance, than that they have

forfeited its common privileges, and every title to respect in reality.

The truth is, that real virtue, beauty, or understanding, are the same,

whether ‘in a high or low degree;’ and the airs and graces of pretended

superiority over these which the highest classes give themselves, from

mere frivolous and external accomplishments, are easily imitated, with

provoking success, by the lowest, whenever they _dare_.

The two nearest things in the world are gentility and vulgarity—

‘And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’

Where there is much affectation of the one, we may be always sure of

meeting with a double share of the other. Those who are conscious to

themselves of any real superiority or refinement, are not particularly

jealous of the adventitious marks of it. Miss Burney’s novels all turn

upon this slender distinction. It is the only thing that can be said

against them. It is hard to say which she has made out to be the worst;

low people always aping gentility, or people in high life always

avoiding vulgarity. Mr. Smith and the Brangtons were everlastingly

trying to do as their fashionable acquaintances did, and these again

were always endeavouring _not_ to do and say what Mr. Smith and the

Brangtons did or said. What an instructive game at cross-purposes!

‘Kings are naturally lovers of low company,’ according to the

observation of Mr. Burke; because their rank cannot be called into

question by it, and they can only hope to find, in the opposite extreme

of natural and artificial inequality, any thing to confirm them in the

belief, that their personal pretensions at all answer to the ostensible

superiority to which they are raised. By associating only with the worst

and weakest, they persuade themselves that they are the best and wisest

of mankind.

ON NICKNAMES

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_September 1818._

‘Hæ nugæ in seria ducunt.’

This is a more important subject than it seems at first sight. It is

as serious in its results as it is contemptible in the means by which

those results are brought about. Nicknames for the most part govern

the world. The history of politics, of religion, of literature, of

morals, and of private life, is too often little less than the history

of nicknames. What are half the convulsions of the civilised world,

the frequent overthrow of states and kingdoms, the shock and hostile

encounter of mighty continents, the battles by sea and land, the

intestine commotions, the feuds of the Vitelli and Orsini, of the

Guelphs and Gibellines, the civil wars in England, and the League in

France, the jealousies and heart-burnings of cabinets and councils,

the uncharitable proscriptions of creeds and sects, Turk, Jew, Pagan,

Papist and Puritan, Quaker and Methodist,—the persecutions and

massacres, the burnings, tortures, imprisonments, and lingering deaths

inflicted for a different profession of faith,—but so many

illustrations of the power of this principle? Fox’s Book of Martyrs,

and Neale’s History of the Puritans, are comments on the same text.

The fires in Smithfield were fanned by nicknames, and a nickname set

its seal on the unopened dungeons of the Holy Inquisition. Nicknames

are the talismans and spells that collect and set in motion all the

combustible part of men’s passions and prejudices, which have hitherto

played so much more successful a game, and done their work so much

more effectually than reason, in all the grand concerns and petty

details of human life, and do not yet seem tired of the task assigned

them. Nicknames are the convenient portable tools by which they

simplify the process of mischief, and get through their job with the

least time and trouble. These worthless, unmeaning, irritating,

envenomed words of reproach are the established signs by which the

different compartments of society are ticketted, labelled, and marked

out for each other’s hatred and contempt. They are to be had, ready

cut and dry, of all sorts and sizes, wholesale and retail, for foreign

exportation or home consumption, and for all occasions in life. ‘The

priest calls the lawyer a cheat, the lawyer beknaves the divine.’ The

Frenchman hates the Englishman because he is an Englishman, and the

Englishman hates the Frenchman for as good a reason. The Whig hates

the Tory, and the Tory the Whig. The Dissenter hates the

Church-of-England-man, and the Church-of-England-man hates the

Dissenter, as if they were of a different species, because they have a

different designation. The Mussulman calls the worshipper of the Cross

‘Christian dog,’ spits in his face, and kicks him from the pavement,

by virtue of a nickname; and the Papist retorts the indignity upon the

Infidel and the Jew by the same infallible rule of right. In France,

they damn Shakespear in the lump, by calling him a _barbare_; and we

talk of Racine’s _verbiage_ with inexpressible contempt and

self-complacency. Among ourselves, an anti-Jacobin critic denounces a

Jacobin poet and his friends, at a venture, ‘as infidels and

fugitives, who have left their wives destitute, and their children

fatherless’—whether they have wives and children or not. The

unenlightened savage makes a meal of his enemy’s flesh, after

reproaching him with the name of his tribe, because he is differently

tattooed; and the literary cannibal cuts up the character of his

opponent by the help of a nickname. The jest of all this is, that a

party nickname is always a relative term, and has its counter-sign,

which has just the same force and meaning, so that both must be

perfectly ridiculous and insignificant. A Whig implies a Tory; there

must be ‘Malcontents’ as well as ‘Malignants’; Jacobins and

Anti-Jacobins; French and English. These sort of _noms des guerres_

derive all their force from their contraries. Take away the meaning of

the one, and you take the sting out of the other. They could not exist

but upon the strength of mutual and irreconcileable antipathies; there

must be no love lost between them. What is there in the names

themselves to give them a preference over each other? ‘Sound them,

they do become the mouth as well; weigh them, they are as heavy;

conjure with them, one will raise a spirit as soon as the other.’ If

there were not fools and madmen who hated both, there could not be

fools and madmen bigotted to either. I have heard an eminent character

boast that he had done more to produce the late war by nicknaming

Buonaparte ‘the Corsican,’ than all the state-papers and documents on

the subject put together. And yet Mr. Southey asks triumphantly, ‘Is

it to be supposed that it is England, _our_ England, to whom that war

was owing?’ As if, in a dispute between two countries, the conclusive

argument which lies in the pronoun _our_, belonged only to one of

them. I like Shakespear’s version of the matter better:

‘Hath Britain all the sun that shines? day, night,

Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume

_Our_ Britain seems as of it, but not in it;

In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee think

There’s livers out of Britain.’

In all national disputes, it is common to appeal to the numbers on your

side as decisive on the point. If every body in England thought the late

war right, every body in France thought it wrong. There were ten

millions on one side of the question, (or rather of the water), and

thirty millions on the other side. That’s all. I remember some one

arguing, in justification of our ministers interfering on that occasion,

‘That governments would not go to war for nothing;’ to which I answered,

Then they could not go to war at all, for, at that rate, neither of them

could be in the wrong, and yet both of them must be in the right, which

was absurd. The only meaning of these vulgar nicknames and

party-distinctions, where they are urged most violently and confidently,

is, that others differ from you in some particular or other, (whether it

be opinion, dress, clime, complexion), which you highly disapprove of,

forgetting, that, by the same rule, they have the very same right to be

offended at you because you differ from them. Those who have reason on

their side do not make the most obstinate and furious appeals to

prejudice and abusive language. I know but of one exception to this

general rule, and that is, where the things that excite disgust are of

such a kind that they cannot well be gone into without offence to

decency and good manners; but it is equally certain in this case, that

those who are most shocked at the things are not those who are most

forward to apply the names. A person will not be fond of repeating a

charge, or adverting to a subject, that inflicts a wound on his own

feelings, even for the sake of wounding the feelings of another. A man

should be very sure that he himself is not what he has always in his

mouth. The greatest prudes have been often accounted the greatest

hypocrites, and a satirist is at best but a suspicious character. The

loudest and most unblushing invectives against vice and debauchery will

as often proceed from a desire to inflame and pamper the passions of the

writer, by raking into a nauseous subject, as from a wish to excite

virtuous indignation against it in the public mind, or to reform the

individual. To familiarise the mind to gross ideas is not the way to

increase your own or the general repugnance to them. But, to return to

the subject of nicknames.

The use of this figure of speech is, that it excites a strong idea

without requiring any proof. It is a shorthand compendious mode of

getting at a conclusion, and never troubling yourself or any body else

with the formalities of reasoning or the dictates of common sense. It is

superior to all evidence, for it does not rest upon any, and operates

with the greatest force and certainty in proportion to the utter want of

probability. Belief is only a strong impression, and the malignity or

extravagance of the accusation passes for a proof of the crime. ‘Brevity

is the soul of wit;’ and of all eloquence a nickname is the most

concise, and of all arguments the most unanswerable. It gives _carte

blanche_ to the imagination, throws the reins on the neck of the

passions, and suspends the use of the understanding altogether. It does

not stand upon ceremony, on the nice distinctions of right and wrong. It

does not wait the slow processes of reason, or stop to unravel the web

of sophistry. It takes every thing for granted that serves for

nourishment for the spleen. It is instantaneous in its operations. There

is nothing to interpose between the effect and it. It is passion without

proof, and action without thought,—‘the unbought grace of life, the

cheap defence of nations.’ It does not, as Mr. Burke expresses it,

‘leave the will puzzled, undecided, and sceptical in the moment of

action.’ It is a word and a blow.

‘Bring but a Scotsman frae his hill,

Clap in his cheek a Highland gill,

Say such is royal George’s will,

And there’s the foe,

He has nae thought but how to kill

Twa at a blow.’

The ‘No Popery’ cry, raised a little while ago, let loose all the

lurking spite and prejudice which had lain rankling in the proper

receptacles for them for above a century, without any knowledge of the

past history of the country which had given rise to them, or any

reference to their connection with present circumstances; for the

knowledge of the one would have prevented the possibility of their

application to the other. Facts present a tangible and definite idea to

the mind, a train of causes and consequences, accounting for each other,

and leading to a positive conclusion—but no farther. But a nickname is

tied down to no such limited service; it is a disposable force, that is

almost always perverted to mischief. It clothes itself with all the

terrors of uncertain abstraction, and there is no end of the abuse to

which it is liable but the cunning of those who employ, or the credulity

of those who are gulled by it. It is a reserve of the ignorance,

bigotry, and intolerance of weak and vulgar minds, brought up where

reason fails, and always ready, at a moment’s warning, to be applied to

any, the most absurd purposes. If you bring specific charges against a

man, you thereby enable him to meet and repel them, if he thinks it

worth his while; but a nickname baffles reply, by the very vagueness of

the inferences from it, and gives increased activity to the confused,

dim, and imperfect notions of dislike connected with it, from their

having no settled ground to rest upon. The mind naturally irritates

itself against an unknown object of fear or jealousy, and makes up for

the blindness of its zeal by an excess of it. We are eager to indulge

our hasty feelings to the utmost, lest, by stopping to examine, we

should find that there is no excuse for them. The very consciousness of

the injustice we may be doing another makes us only the more loud and

bitter in our invectives against him. We keep down the admonitions of

returning reason, by calling up a double portion of gratuitous and

vulgar spite. The will may be said to act with most force _in vacuo_;

the passions are the most ungovernable when they are blindfolded. That

malignity is always the most implacable which is accompanied with a

sense of weakness, because it is never satisfied of its own success or

safety. A nickname carries the weight of the pride, the indolence, the

cowardice, the ignorance, and the ill-nature of mankind on its side. It

acts, by mechanical sympathy, on the nerves of society. Any one who is

without character himself may make himself master of the reputation of

another by the application of a nickname, as, if you do not mind soiling

your fingers, you may always throw dirt on another. No matter how

undeserved the imputation, it will stick; for, though it is sport to the

bye-standers to see you bespattered, they will not stop to see you wipe

out the stains. You are not heard in your own defence; it has no effect,

it does not tell, excites no sensation, or it is only felt as a

disappointment of their triumph over you. Their passions and prejudices

are inflamed by the charge, ‘as rage with rage doth sympathise;’ by

vindicating yourself, you merely bring them back to common sense, which

is a very sober, mawkish state. _Give a dog a bad name, and hang him_,

is a proverb. ‘A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw

at a man.’ It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not

believe it, it still haunts our apprehensions. Let a nickname be

industriously applied to our dearest friend, and let us know that it is

ever so false and malicious, yet it will answer its end; it connects the

person’s name and idea with an ugly association, you think of them with

pain together, or it requires an effort of indignation or magnanimity on

your part to disconnect them; it becomes an uneasy subject, a sore

point, and you will sooner desert your friend, or join in the conspiracy

against him, than be constantly forced to repel charges without truth or

meaning, and have your penetration or character called in question by a

rascal. Nay, such is the unaccountable construction of language and of

the human mind, that the affixing the most innocent or praiseworthy

appellation to any individual or set of individuals, _as a nickname_,

has all the effect of the most opprobrious epithets. Thus the cant name

‘The Talents,’ was successfully applied as a stigma to the Whigs at one

time; it held them up to ridicule, and made them obnoxious to public

feeling, though it was notorious to every body that the Whig leaders

were ‘the Talents,’ and that their adversaries nicknamed them so from

real hatred and pretended derision. ‘The Party’ is now substituted for

‘the Talents,’ since success has given their own set the monstrous

affectation of being men of talents; and the poor Morning Chronicle is

persecuted daily as the Party as it formerly stood the brunt (innocently

enough) of all the abuse and sarcasms that were showered on the Talents.

Call a man short by his Christian name, as Tom or Dick such a one, or by

his profession, (however respectable), as Canning pelted a noble lord

with his left-off title of Doctor,—and you undo him for ever, if he has

a reputation to lose. Such is the tenaciousness of spite and ill-nature,

or the jealousy of public opinion, even this will be peg enough to hang

doubtful inuendos, weighty dilemmas upon. ‘With so small a web as this

will I catch so great a fly as Cassio.’ The public do not like to see

their favourites treated with impertinent familiarity—it lowers the tone

of admiration very speedily. It implies that some one stands in no great

awe of their idol, and he perhaps may know as much about the matter as

they do. It seems as if a man whose name, with some contemptuous

abbreviation, is always dinned in the public ear, was distinguished by

nothing else. By repeating a man’s name in this manner you may soon make

him sick of it, and of his life too. Mr. Southey has by this time, I

should suppose, a tolerable surfeit of his title of Laureate! Children

do not like to be _called out of their names_. It is questioning their

personal identity. A writer, who has made his vocabulary rich in

nicknames, (the late Editor of the Times,) thought he had made a great

acquisition to his stock, when it was pretended at one time that

Bonaparte’s real name was not Napoleon but Nicholas. He congratulated

himself on this discovery, as a standing jest and a lasting triumph. Yet

there was nothing in the name to signify. Nicholas Poussin was an

instance of a great man in the last age, and in our own times, have we

not Nicholas Vansittart? The same writer has the merit of having carried

this figure of speech as far as it would go. He fairly worried his

readers into conviction by abuse and nicknames. People surrendered their

judgments to escape the persecution of his style, and the disgust and

indignation which his incessant violence and vulgarity excited, at last

made you hate those who were the objects of it. _Causa causæ causa

causati._ He made people sick of a subject by making them sick of his

arguments. Yet he attributed the effect he produced to the eloquence of

his phraseology and the force of his reasonings!

A parrot may be taught to call names; and if the person who keeps the

parrot has a spite to his neighbours, he may give them a great deal of

annoyance without much wit, either in the employer or the puppet. The

insignificance of the instrument has nothing to do with the efficacy of

the means. Hotspur would have had ‘a _starling_ taught to repeat nothing

but Mortimer,’ in the ears of his enemy. Nature, it is said, has given

arms to all creatures the most proper to defend themselves, and annoy

others: to the lowest she has given the use of nicknames.

There are some droll instances of the effect of proper names combined

with circumstances. A young student had come up to London from

Cambridge, and went in the evening and planted himself in the pit of the

play-house. He had not been seated long when, in one of the front boxes

near him, he discovered one of his college tutors, with whom he felt an

immediate and strong desire to claim acquaintance, and called out in a

low and respectful voice, ‘Dr. Topping!’ The appeal was, however,

ineffectual. He then repeated in a louder tone, but still in an under

key, so as not to excite the attention of any one but his friend, ‘Dr.

Topping!’ The Doctor took no notice. He then grew more impatient, and

repeated ‘Dr. Topping, Dr. Topping!’ two or three times pretty loud, to

see whether the Doctor did not or would not hear him. Still the Doctor

remained immovable. The joke began at length to get round, and one or

two persons, as he continued his invocations of the Doctor’s name,

joined with him in them; these were reinforced by others calling out,

‘Dr. Topping! Dr. Topping!’ on all sides, so that he could no longer

avoid perceiving it, and at length the whole pit rose and roared, ‘Dr.

Topping!’ with loud and repeated cries, and the Doctor was forced to

retire precipitately, frightened at the sound of his own name. There is

sometimes an inconvenience in common as well as uncommon names. On the

night that Garrick took his leave of the stage, an inveterate playgoer

could not get a seat in any part of the house. At length he went up into

the gallery, but found that equally full with the rest. In this

extremity a thought struck him, and he called out as loud as he could,

‘Mr. Smith, you’re wanted. Your wife’s taken suddenly ill, and you must

go home immediately.’ In an instant, half a dozen persons started up

from different parts of the gallery to go out, and the gentleman took

possession of the first place that offered. No doubt these persons would

be disposed to quarrel with their names and their wives for some time

after.

The calling people by their Christian or surnames is a proof of

affection, as well as of hatred. They are generally the best good

fellows with whom their friends take this sort of liberty. _Diminutives_

are titles of endearment. Dr. Johnson’s calling Goldsmith ‘Goldy’ did

equal honour to both. It shewed the regard he had for him. This

familiarity may perhaps imply a certain want of formal respect; but

formal respect is not necessary to, if it is consistent with, cordial

friendship. Titles of honour are the reverse of nicknames,—they convey

the idea of respect as the others do of contempt, and equally mean

little or nothing. Junius’s motto, _Stat nominis umbra_, is a very

significant one, it might be extended farther. A striking instance of

the force of names, standing by themselves, is in the respect felt

towards Michael Angelo in this country. We know nothing of him but his

name. It is an abstraction of fame and greatness. Our admiration of him

supports itself, and our idea of his superiority seems self-evident,

because it is attached to his name only. Some of our artists seem trying

to puff their names into reputation from an instinctive knowledge of

this principle,—by talking incessantly of themselves and doing nothing.

It is not, indeed, easy to deny the merit of the works—which they do

_not_ produce. Those which they have produced are very bad.

THOUGHTS ON TASTE

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_Oct. 1818._

Taste is nothing but sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of

excellence in the works of art or nature. This definition will perhaps

be disputed; for I am aware the general practice is to make it consist

in a disposition to find fault.

A French man or woman will in general conclude their account of

Voltaire’s denunciation of Shakespeare and Milton as barbarians, on the

score of certain technical improprieties, with assuring you, that ‘he

(Voltaire) had a great deal of taste.’ It is their phrase, _Il avait

beaucoup du goût_. To which the proper answer is, that that might be;

but that he did not shew it in this case; as the overlooking great and

countless beauties, and being taken up only with petty or accidental

blemishes, shews as little strength of understanding as it does

refinement or elevation of taste. The French author, indeed, allows of

Shakespeare, that ‘he had found a few pearls on his enormous dunghill.’

But there is neither truth nor proportion in this sentence, for his

works are (to say the least),

‘Rich as the oozy bottom of the sea,

With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.’

Genius is the power of producing excellence: taste is the power of

perceiving the excellence thus produced in its several sorts and

degrees, with all their force, refinement, distinctions, and

connections. In other words, taste (as it relates to the productions of

art) is strictly the power of being properly affected by works of

genius. It is the proportioning admiration to power, pleasure to beauty:

it is entire sympathy with the finest impulses of the imagination, not

antipathy, not indifference to them. The eye of taste may be said to

reflect the impressions of real genius, as the even mirror reflects the

objects of nature in all their clearness and lustre, instead of

distorting or diminishing them;

‘Or like a gate of steel,

Fronting the sun, receives and renders back

His figure and his heat.’

To take a pride and pleasure in nothing but defects (and those perhaps

of the most paltry, obvious, and mechanical kind)—in the disappointment

and tarnishing of our faith in substantial excellence, in the proofs of

weakness, not of power, (and this where there are endless subjects to

feed the mind with wonder and increased delight through years of patient

thought and fond remembrance), is not a sign of uncommon refinement, but

of unaccountable perversion of taste. So, in the case of Voltaire’s

hypercriticisms on Milton and Shakespeare, the most common-place and

prejudiced admirer of these authors knows, as well as Voltaire can tell

him, that it is a fault to make a sea-port (we will say) in Bohemia, or

to introduce artillery and gunpowder in the war in Heaven. This is

common to Voltaire, and the merest English reader: there is nothing in

it either way. But what he differs from us in, and, as it is supposed,

greatly to his advantage, and to our infinite shame and mortification,

is, that this is all that he perceives, or will hear of in Milton or

Shakespeare, and that he either knows, or pretends to know, nothing of

that prodigal waste, or studied accumulation of grandeur, truth, and

beauty, which are to be found in each of these authors. Now, I cannot

think, that, to be dull and insensible to so great and such various

excellence,—to have no feeling in unison with it, no latent suspicion of

the treasures hid beneath our feet, and which we trample upon with

ignorant scorn, to be cut off, as by a judicial blindness, from that

universe of thought and imagination that shifts its wondrous pageant

before us, to turn aside from the throng and splendour of airy shapes

that fancy weaves for our dazzled sight, and to strut and vapour over a

little pettifogging blunder in geography or chronology, which a

school-boy, or a village pedagogue, would be ashamed to insist upon, is

any proof of the utmost perfection of taste, but the contrary. At this

rate, it makes no difference whether Shakespeare wrote his works or not,

or whether the critic, who ‘damns him into everlasting redemption’ for a

single slip of the pen, ever read them;—he is absolved from all

knowledge, taste, or feeling, of the different excellencies, and

inimitable creations of the poet’s pen—from any sympathy with the

wanderings and the fate of Imogen, the beauty and tenderness of Ophelia,

the thoughtful abstraction of Hamlet; his soliloquy on life may never

have given him a moment’s pause, or touched his breast with one solitary

reflection;—the Witches in Macbeth may ‘lay their choppy fingers upon

their skinny lips’ without making any alteration in his pulse,—and

Lear’s heart may break in vain for him;—he may hear no strange noises in

Prospero’s island,—and the moonlight that sleeps on beds of flowers,

where fairies couch in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, may never once have

steeped his senses in repose. Nor will it avail Milton to ‘have built

high towers in Heaven,’ nor to have brought down heaven upon earth, nor

that he has made Satan rear his giant form before us, ‘majestic though

in ruin,’ or decked the bridal bed of Eve with beauty, or clothed her

with innocence, ‘likest heaven,’ as she ministered to Adam, and his

angel guest. Our critic knows nothing of all this, of beauty or

sublimity, of thought or passion, breathed in sweet or solemn sounds,

with all the magic of verse ‘in tones and numbers hit;’ he lays his

finger on the map, and shews you, that there is no sea-port for

Shakespeare’s weather-beaten travellers to land at in Bohemia, and takes

out a list of mechanical inventions, and proves that gunpowder was not

known till long after Milton’s battle of the angels; and concludes, that

every one who, after these profound and important discoveries, finds

anything to admire in these two writers, is a person without taste, or

any pretensions to it. By the same rule, a thorough-bred critic might

prove that Homer was no poet, and the Odyssey a vulgar performance,

because Ulysses makes a pun on the name of Noman. Or some other disciple

of the same literal school might easily set aside the whole merit of

Racine’s _Athalie_, or Moliere’s _Ecole des Femmes_, and pronounce these

_chef d’œuvres_ of art barbarous and Gothic, because the characters in

the first address one another (absurdly enough) as _Monsieur_ and

_Madame_, and because the latter is written in rhyme, contrary to all

classical precedent. These little false measures of criticism may be

misapplied and retorted without end, and require to be eked out by

national antipathy or political prejudice to give them currency and

weight. Thus it was in war-time that the author of the ‘Friend’ ventured

to lump all the French tragedies together as a smart collection of

epigrams, and that the author of the ‘Excursion, a poem, being

portion[49] of a larger poem, to be named the Recluse,’ made bold to

call Voltaire a dull prose-writer—with impunity. Such pitiful quackery

is a cheap way of setting up for exclusive taste and wisdom, by

pretending to despise what is most generally admired, as if nothing

could come up to or satisfy that ideal standard of excellence, of which

the person bears about the select pattern in his own mind. ‘Not to

admire any thing’ is as bad a test of wisdom as it is a rule for

happiness. We sometimes meet with individuals who have formed their

whole character on this maxim, and who ridiculously affect a decided and

dogmatical tone of superiority over others, from an uncommon degree both

of natural and artificial stupidity. They are blind to painting—deaf to

music—indifferent to poetry; and they triumph in the catalogue of their

defects as the fault of these arts, because they have not sense enough

to perceive their own want of perception. To treat any art or science

with contempt, is only to prove your own incapacity and want of taste

for it: to say that what has been done best in any kind is good for

nothing, is to say that the utmost exertion of human ability is not

equal to the lowest, for the productions of the lowest are worth

something, except by comparison with what is better. When we hear

persons exclaiming that the pictures at the Marquis of Stafford’s or Mr.

Angerstein’s, or those at the British Gallery, are a heap of trash, we

might tell them that they betray in this a want not of taste only, but

of common sense, for that these collections contain some of the finest

specimens of the greatest masters, and that _that_ must be excellent in

the productions of human art, beyond which human genius, in any age or

country, has not been able to go. Ask these very fastidious critics what

it is that they _do_ like, and you will soon find, from tracing out the

objects of their secret admiration, that their pretended disdain of

first-rate excellence is owing either to ignorance of the last

refinements of works of genius, or envy at the general admiration which

they have called forth. I have known a furious Phillippic against the

faults of shining talents and established reputation subside into

complacent approbation of dull mediocrity, that neither tasked the

kindred sensibility of its admirer beyond its natural inertness, nor

touched his self-love with a consciousness of inferiority; and that, by

never attempting original beauties, and never failing, gave no

opportunity to intellectual ingratitude to be plausibly revenged for the

pleasure or instruction it had reluctantly received. So there are judges

who cannot abide Mr. Kean, and think Mr. Young an incomparable actor,

for no other reason than because he never shocks them with an idea which

they had not before. The only excuse for the over-delicacy and

supercilious indifference here described, is when it arises from an

intimate acquaintance with, and intense admiration of, other and higher

degrees of perfection and genius. A person whose mind has been worked up

to a lofty pitch of enthusiasm in this way, cannot perhaps condescend to

notice, or be much delighted with inferior beauties; but then neither

will he dwell upon, and be preposterously offended with, slight faults.

So that the ultimate and only conclusive proof of taste is even here not

indifference, but enthusiasm; and before a critic can give himself airs

of superiority for what he despises, he must first lay himself open to

reprisals, by telling us what he admires. There we may fairly join issue

with him. Without this indispensable condition of all true taste,

absolute stupidity must be more than on a par with the most exquisite

refinement; and the most formidable drawcansir of all would be the most

impenetrable blockhead. Thus, if we know that Voltaire’s contempt of

Shakespeare arose from his idolatry of Racine, this may excuse him in a

national point of view; but he has no longer any advantage over us; and

we must console ourselves as well as we can for Mr. Wordsworth’s not

allowing us to laugh at the wit of Voltaire, by laughing now and then at

the only author whom he is known to understand and admire![50]

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_July, 1819._

Instead of making a disposition to find fault a proof of taste, I would

reverse the rule, and estimate every one’s pretensions to taste by the

degree of their sensibility to the highest and most various excellence.

An indifference to less degrees of excellence is only excusable as it

arises from a knowledge and admiration of higher ones; and a readiness

in the detection of faults should pass for refinement only as it is

owing to a quick sense and impatient love of beauties. In a word, fine

taste consists in sympathy, not in antipathy; and the rejection of what

is bad is only to be accounted a virtue when it implies a preference of

and attachment to what is better.

There is a certain point, which may be considered as the highest point

of perfection at which the human faculties can arrive in the conception

and execution of certain things: to be able to reach this point in

reality is the greatest proof of genius and power; and I imagine that

the greatest proof of taste is given in being able to appreciate it when

done. For instance, I have heard (and I can believe) that Madame

Catalani’s manner of singing ‘Hope told a flattering tale,’ was the

perfection of singing; and I cannot conceive that it would have been the

perfection of taste to have thought nothing at all of it. There was, I

understand, a sort of fluttering of the voice and a breathless

palpitation of the heart, (like the ruffling of the feathers of the

robin-redbreast), which completely gave back all the uneasy and

thrilling voluptuousness of the sentiment; and I contend that the person

on whom not a particle of this expression was lost, (or would have been

lost, if it had even been finer), into whom the tones of sweetness or

tenderness sink deeper and deeper as they approach the farthest verge of

ecstacy or agony, he who has an ear attuned to the trembling harmony,

and a heart ‘pierceable’ by pleasure’s finest point, is the best judge

of music,—not he who remains insensible to the matter himself, or, if

you point it out to him, asks, ‘What of it?’ I fancied that I had a

triumph some time ago, over a critic and connoisseur of music, who

thought little of the minuet in Don Giovanni; but the same person

redeemed his pretensions to musical taste in my opinion by saying of

some passage in Mozart, ‘This is a soliloquy equal to any in Hamlet.’ In

hearing the accompaniment in the Messiah of angels’ voices to the

shepherds keeping watch at night, who has the most taste and delicacy,

he who listens in silent rapture to the silver sounds, as they rise in

sweetness and soften into distance, drawing the soul from earth to

heaven, and making it partaker of the music of the spheres, or he who

remains deaf to the summons, and remarks that it is an allegorical

conceit? Which would Handel have been most pleased with, the man who was

seen standing at the performance of the Coronation anthem in Westminster

Abbey, with his face bathed in tears, and mingling ‘the drops which

sacred joy had engendered’ with that ocean of circling sound, or with

him who sat with frigid, critical aspect, his heart untouched and his

looks unaltered as the marble statue on the wall?[51] Again, if any one,

in looking at Rembrandt’s picture of Jacob’s Dream, should not be struck

with the solemn awe that surrounds it, and with the dazzling flights of

angels’ wings like steps of golden light, emanations of flame or spirit

hovering between earth and sky, and should observe very wisely that

Jacob was thrown in one corner of the picture like a bundle of clothes,

without power, form, or motion, and should think this a defect, I should

say that such a critic might possess great knowledge of the mechanical

part of painting, but not an atom of feeling or imagination.[52] Or who

is it that, in looking at the productions of Raphael or Titian, is the

person of true taste? He who finds what there is, or he who finds what

there is not in each? Not he who picks a petty vulgar quarrel with the

colouring of Raphael or the drawing of Titian is the true critic and

judicious spectator, but he who broods over the expression of the one

till it takes possession of his soul, and who dwells on the tones and

hues of the other till his eye is saturated with truth and beauty, for

by this means he moulds his mind to the study and reception of what is

most perfect in form and colour, instead of letting it remain empty,

‘swept and garnished,’ or rather a dull blank, with ‘knowledge at each

entrance quite shut out.’ He who cavils at the want of drawing in Titian

is not the most sensible to it in Raphael; instead of that, he only

insists on his want of colouring. He who is offended at Raphael’s

hardness and monotony is not delighted with the soft, rich pencilling of

Titian; he only takes care to find fault with him for wanting that

which, if he possessed it in the highest degree, he would not admire or

understand. And this is easy to be accounted for. First, such a critic

has been told what to do, and follows his instructions. Secondly, to

perceive the height of any excellence, it is necessary to have the most

exquisite sense of that kind of excellence through all its gradations:

to perceive the want of any excellence, it is merely necessary to have a

negative or abstract notion of the thing, or perhaps only of the name.

Or, in other words, any the most crude and mechanical idea of a given

quality is a measure of positive deficiency, whereas none but the most

refined idea of the same quality can be a standard of superlative merit.

To distinguish the finest characteristics of Titian or Raphael, to go

along with them in their imitation of Nature, is to be so far like them:

to be occupied only with that in which they fell short of others,

instead of that in which they soared above them, shows a vulgar, narrow

capacity, insensible to any thing beyond mediocrity, and an ambition

still more grovelling. To be dazzled by admiration of the greatest

excellence, and of the highest works of genius, is natural to the best

capacities, and the best natures; envy and dulness are most apt to

detect minute blemishes and unavoidable inequalities, as we see the

spots in the sun by having its rays blunted by mist or smoke. It may be

asked, then, whether mere extravagance and enthusiasm are proofs of

taste? And I answer, no, where they are without reason and knowledge.

Mere sensibility is not true taste, but sensibility to real excellence

is. To admire and be wrapt up in what is trifling or absurd, is a proof

of nothing but ignorance or affectation: on the contrary, he who admires

most what is most worthy of admiration, (let his raptures or his

eagerness to express them be what they may), shows himself neither

extravagant nor ‘unwise.’ When Mr. Wordsworth once said that he could

read the description of Satan in Milton,

‘Nor seem’d

Less than archangel ruin’d, and the excess

Of glory obscur’d,’

till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of

beauty and grandeur, I saw no extravagance in this, but the utmost truth

of feeling. When the same author, or his friend Mr. Southey, says, that

the Excursion is better worth preserving than the Paradise Lost, this

appears to me, I confess, a great piece of impertinence, or an

unwarrantable stretch of friendship. Nor do I think the preference given

by certain celebrated reviewers, of Mr. Rogers’s Human Life over Mr.

Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, founded on the true principles of poetical

justice; for something is, after all, better than nothing.

To hasten to a conclusion of these desultory observations. The highest

taste is shown in habitual sensibility to the greatest beauties; the

most general taste is shown in a perception of the greatest variety of

excellence. Many people admire Milton, and as many admire Pope, while

there are but few who have any relish for both. Almost all the disputes

on this subject arise, not so much from false, as from confined taste.

We suppose that only one thing can have merit; and that, if we allow it

to any thing else, we deprive the favourite object of our critical faith

of the honours due to it. We are generally right in what we approve

ourselves; for liking proceeds from a certain conformity of objects to

the taste; as we are generally wrong in condemning what others admire;

for our dislike mostly proceeds from our want of taste for what pleases

them. Our being totally senseless to what excites extreme delight in

those who have as good a right to judge as we have, in all human

probability implies a defect of faculty in us, rather than a limitation

in the resources of nature or art. Those who are pleased with the fewest

things, know the least; as those who are pleased with every thing, know

nothing. Shakespeare makes Mrs. Quickly say of Falstaff, by a pleasant

blunder, that ‘Carnation was a colour he could never abide.’ So there

are persons who cannot like Claude, because he is not Salvator Rosa;

some who cannot endure Rembrandt, and others who would not cross the

street to see a Vandyke; one reader does not like the neatness of

Junius, and another objects to the extravagance of Burke; and they are

all right, if they expect to find in others what is only to be found in

their favourite author or artist, but equally wrong if they mean to say,

that each of those they would condemn by a narrow and arbitrary standard

of taste, has not a peculiar and transcendent merit of his own. The

question is not, whether _you_ like a certain excellence, (it is your

own fault if you do not), but whether another possessed it in a very

eminent degree. If he did not, who is there that possessed it in a

greater—that ranks above him in that particular? Those who are accounted

the best, are the best in their line. When we say that Rembrandt was a

master of _chiaro-scuro_, for instance, we do not say that he joined to

this the symmetry of the Greek statues, but we mean that we must go to

him for the perfection of _chiaro-scuro_, and that a Greek statue has

not _chiaro-scuro_. If any one objects to Junius’s Letters, that they

are a tissue of epigrams, we answer, Be it so; it is for that very

reason that we admire them. Again, should any one find fault with Mr.

Burke’s writings as a collection of rhapsodies, the proper answer always

would be, Who is there that has written finer rhapsodies? I know an

admirer of Don Quixote who can see no merit in Gil Blas, and an admirer

of Gil Blas who could never get through Don Quixote. I myself have great

pleasure in reading both these works, and in that respect think I have

an advantage over both these critics. It always struck me as a singular

proof of good taste, good sense, and liberal thinking, in an old friend,

who had Paine’s Rights of Man and Burke’s Reflections on the French

Revolution, bound up in one volume, and who said, that, both together,

they made a very good book. To agree with the greatest number of good

judges, is to be in the right; and good judges are persons of natural

sensibility and acquired knowledge.[53] On the other hand, it must be

owned, there are critics whose praise is a libel, and whose

recommendation of any work is enough to condemn it. Men of the greatest

genius and originality are not always persons of the most liberal and

unprejudiced taste; they have a strong bias to certain qualities

themselves, are for reducing others to their own standard, and lie less

open to the general impressions of things. This exclusive preference of

their own peculiar excellencies to those of others, in writers whose

merits have not been sufficiently understood or acknowledged by their

contemporaries, chiefly because they were _not_ common-place, may

sometimes be seen mounting up to a degree of bigotry and intolerance,

little short of insanity. There are some critics I have known who never

allow an author any merit till all the world ‘cry out upon him,’ and

others who never allow another any merit that any one can discover but

themselves. So there are connoisseurs who spend their lives and waste

their breath in extolling sublime passages in obscure writers, and

lovers who choose their mistresses for their ugly faces. This is not

taste, but affectation. What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and

that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity, had in general much

better remain in it.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

Taste relates to that which, either in the objects of nature, or the

imitation of them or the Fine Arts in general is calculated to give

pleasure. Now, to know what is calculated to give pleasure, the way is

to enquire what does give pleasure: so that taste is, after all, much

more a matter of fact and less of theory than might be imagined. We may

hence determine another point, _viz._—whether there is any universal or

exclusive standard of taste, since this is to inquire, in other words,

whether there is any one thing that pleases all the world alike, or

whether there is only one thing that pleases anybody, both which

questions carry their own answers with them. Still it does not follow,

because there is no dogmatic or bigoted standard of taste, like a

formula of faith, which whoever does not believe without doubt he shall

be damned everlastingly, that there is no standard of taste whatever,

that is to say, that certain things are not more apt to please than

others, that some do not please more generally, that there are not

others that give most pleasure to those who have studied the subject,

that one nation is most susceptible of a particular kind of beauty, and

another of another, according to their characters, &c. It would be a

difficult attempt to force all these into one general rule or system,

and yet equally so to deny that they are absolutely capricious, and

without any foundation or principle whatever. There are, doubtless,

books for children that we discard as we grow up; yet, what are the

majority of mankind, or even readers, but grown children? If put to the

vote of all the milliners’ girls in London, _Old Mortality_, or even

_Heart of Midlothian_, would not carry the day (or, at least, not very

triumphantly) over a common Minerva-press novel; and I will hazard

another opinion, that no woman ever liked Burke. Mr. Pratt, on the

contrary, said that he had to ‘boast of many learned and beautiful

suffrages.’[54] It is not, then, solely from the greatest number of

voices, but from the opinion of the greatest number of well-informed

minds, that we can establish, if not an absolute standard, at least a

comparative scale, of taste. Certainly, it can hardly be doubted that

the greater the number of persons of strong natural sensibility or love

for any art, and who have paid the closest attention to it, who agree in

their admiration of any work of art, the higher do its pretensions rise

to classical taste and intrinsic beauty. In this way, as the opinion of

a thousand good judges may outweigh that of nearly all the rest of the

world, so there may be one individual among them whose opinion may

outweigh that of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine; that is, one of

a still stronger and more refined perception of beauty than all the

rest, and to whose opinion that of the others and of the world at large

would approximate and be conformed, as their taste or perception of what

was pleasing became stronger and more confirmed by exercise and proper

objects to call it forth. Thus, if we were still to insist on an

universal standard of taste, it must be that, not which _does_, but

which _would_ please universally, supposing all men to have paid an

equal attention to any subject and to have an equal relish for it, which

can only be guessed at by the imperfect and yet more than casual

agreement among those who have done so from choice and feeling. Taste is

nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of

imagination, &c. It is time, however, to apply this rule. There is, for

instance, a much greater number of habitual readers and playgoers in

France, who are devoted admirers of Racine or Molière than there are in

England of Shakspeare: does Shakspeare’s fame rest, then, on a less

broad and solid foundation than that of either of the others? I think

not, supposing that the class of judges to whom Shakspeare’s excellences

appeal are a higher, more independent, and more original court of

criticism, and that their suffrages are quite as unanimous (though not

so numerous) in the one case as in the other. A simile or a sentiment is

not the worse in common opinion for being somewhat superficial and

hackneyed, but it is the worse in poetry. The perfection of

_common-place_ is that which would unite the greatest number of

suffrages, if there were not a tribunal above _common-place_. For

instance, in Shakspeare’s description of flowers, primroses are

mentioned—

‘That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty:’

Now, I do not know that this expression is translatable into French, or

intelligible to the common reader of either nation, but raise the scale

of fancy, passion, and observation of nature to a certain point, and I

will be bold to say that there will be no scruple entertained whether

this single metaphor does not contain more poetry of the kind than is to

be found in all Racine. As no Frenchman could write it, so I believe no

Frenchman could understand it. We cannot take this insensibility on

their part as a mark of our superiority, for we have plenty of persons

among ourselves in the same predicament, but not the wisest or most

refined, and to these the appeal is fair from the many—‘and fit audience

find, though few.’ So I think it requires a higher degree of taste to

judge of Titian’s portraits than Raphael’s scripture pieces: not that I

think more highly of the former than the latter, but the world and

connoisseurs in general think there is no comparison (from the dignity

of the subject), whereas I think it difficult to decide which are the

finest. Here again we have a common-place, a preconception, the moulds

of the judgment preoccupied by certain assumptions of degrees and

classes of excellence, instead of judging from the true and genuine

impressions of things. Men of genius, or those who can produce

excellence would be the best judges of it—poets of poetry, painters of

painting, &c.—but that persons of original and strong powers of mind are

too much disposed to refer everything to their own peculiar bias, and

are comparatively indifferent to merely passive impressions. On the

other hand, it is wholly wrong to oppose taste to genius, for genius in

works of art is nothing but the power of producing what is beautiful

(which, however, implies the intimate sense of it), though this is

something very different from mere negative or formal beauties, which

have as little to do with taste as genius.

I have, in a former essay, ascertained one principle of taste or

excellence in the arts of imitation, where it was shown that objects of

sense are not as it were simple and self-evident propositions, but admit

of endless analysis and the most subtle investigation. We do not see

nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. To

suppose that we see the whole of any object, merely by looking at it, is

a vulgar error: we fancy that we do, because we are, of course,

conscious of no more than we see in it, but this circle of our knowledge

enlarges with further acquaintance and study, and we then perceive that

what we perhaps barely distinguished in the gross, or regarded as a dull

blank, is full of beauty, meaning, and curious details. He sees most of

nature who understands its language best, or connects one thing with the

greatest number of other things. Expression is the key to the human

countenance, and unfolds a thousand imperceptible distinctions. How,

then, should every one be a judge of pictures, when so few are of faces?

A merely ignorant spectator, walking through a gallery of pictures, no

more distinguishes the finest than your dog would, if he was to

accompany you. Do not even the most experienced dispute on the

preference, and shall the most ignorant decide? A vulgar connoisseur

would even prefer a Denner to a Titian, because there is more of merely

curious and specific detail. We may hence account for another

circumstance, why things please in the imitation which do not in

reality. If we saw the whole of anything, or if the object in nature

were merely one thing, this could not be the case. But the fact is, that

in the imitation, or in the scientific study of any object, we come to

an analysis of the details or some other abstract view of the subject

which we had overlooked in a cursory examination, and these may be

beautiful or curious, though the object in the gross is disgusting, or

connected with disagreeable or uninteresting associations. Thus, in a

picture of _still life_, as a shell or a marble chimney-piece, the

stains or the gradations of colour may be delicate, and subjects for a

new and careful imitation, though the _tout ensemble_ has not, like a

living face, the highest beauty of intelligence and expression. Here lie

and here return the true effects and triumphs of art. It is not in

making the eye a microscope, but in making it the interpreter and organ

of all that can touch the soul and the affections, that the perfection

of fine art is shown. Taste, then, does not place in the first rank of

merit what merely proves difficulty or gratifies curiosity, unless it is

combined with excellence and sentiment, or the pleasures of imagination

and the moral sense. In this case the pleasure is more than doubled,

where not only the imitation but the thing imitated, is fine in itself.

Hence the preference given to Italian over Dutch pictures.

In respect to the imitation of nature, I would further observe that I

think Sir Joshua Reynolds was wrong in making the grandeur of the design

depend on the omission of the details, or the want of finishing. This

seems also to proceed on the supposition that there cannot be two views

of nature, but that the details are opposed to and inconsistent with an

attention to general effect. Now this is evidently false, since the two

things are undoubtedly combined by nature. For instance, the grandeur of

design or character in the arch of an eyebrow is not injured or

destroyed in reality by the hair-lines of which it is composed. Nor is

the general form or outline of the eyebrow altered in the imitation,

whether you make it one rude mass or descend into the minutiæ of the

parts, which are arranged in such a manner as to produce the arched form

and give the particular expression. So the general form of a nose, say

an aquiline one, is not affected, whether I paint a wart which may

happen to be on it or not, and so of the outline and proportions of the

whole face. That is, general effect is consistent with individual

details, and though these are not necessary to it, yet they often assist

it, and always confirm the sense of verisimilitude. The most finished

paintings, it is true, are not the grandest in effect; but neither is it

true that the greatest daubs are the most sublime in character and

composition. The best painters have combined an eye to the whole with

careful finishing, and as there is a medium in all things, so the rule

here seems to be not to go on _ad infinitum_ with the details, but to

stop when the time and labour necessary seem, in the judgment of the

artist, to exceed the benefit produced.

Beauty does not consist in a medium, but in gradation or harmony. It has

been the fashion of late to pretend to refer everything to association

of ideas (and it is difficult to answer this appeal, since association,

by its nature, mixes up with everything), but as Hartley has himself

observed, who carried this principle to the utmost extent, and might be

supposed to understand its limits, association implies something to be

associated, and if there is a pleasing association, there must be first

something naturally pleasing from which the secondary satisfaction is

reflected, or to which it is conjoined. The chirping of a sparrow is as

much a rural and domestic sound as the notes of the robin or the thrush,

but it does not serve as a point to link other interests to because it

wants beauty in itself; and, on the other hand, the song of the

nightingale draws more attention to itself as a piece of music, and

conveys less sentiment than the simple note of the cuckoo, which, from

its solitary singularity, acts as the warning voice of time. Those who

deny that there is a natural and pleasing softness arising from harmony

or gradation, might as well affirm that sudden and abrupt transitions do

not make our impressions more distinct as that they do not make them

more harsh and violent. Beauty consists in gradation of colours or

symmetry of form (conformity): strength or sublimity arises from the

sense of power, and is aided by contrast. The ludicrous is the

incoherent, arising, not from a conflicting power, but from weakness or

the inability of any habitual impulse to sustain itself. The _ideal_ is

not confined to creation, but takes place in imitation, where a thing is

subjected to one view, as all the parts of a face to the same

expression. Invention is only feigning according to nature, or with a

certain proportion between causes and effects. Poetry is infusing the

same spirit into a number of things, or bathing them all as it were, in

the same overflowing sense of delight (making the language also soft and

musical), as the same torch kindles a number of lamps. I think invention

is chiefly confined to poetry and words or ideas, and has little place

in painting or concrete imagery, where the want of truth, or of the

actual object, soon spoils the effect and force of the representation.

Indeed, I think all genius is, in a great measure, national and local,

arising out of times and circumstances, and being sustained at its full

height by these alone, and that originality is not a deviation from, but

a recurrence to nature. Rules and models destroy genius and art; and the

excess of the artificial in the end cures itself, for it in time becomes

so uniform and vapid as to be altogether contemptible, and to seek

_perforce_ some other outlet or purchase for the mind to take hold of.

The metaphysical theory above premised will account not only for the

difficulty of imitating nature, but for the excellence of various

masters, and the diversity and popularity of different styles. If the

truth of sense and nature were one, there could be but one mode of

representing it, more or less correct. But nature contains an infinite

variety of parts, with their relations and significations, and different

artists take these, and altogether do not give the whole. Thus Titian

coloured, Raphael designed, Rubens gave the florid hue and motions,

Rembrandt _chiaro-scuro_, &c.; but none of these reached perfection in

their several departments, much less with reference to the whole

circumference of art. It is ridiculous to suppose there is but one

standard or one style. One artist looks at objects with as different an

eye from another, as he does from the mathematician. It is erroneous to

tie down individual genius to ideal models. Each person should do that,

not which is best in itself, even supposing this could be known, but

that which he can do best, which he will find out if left to himself.

Spenser could not have written _Paradise Lost_, nor Milton the _Faerie

Queene_. Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce

mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and

unknown to themselves. Did Correggio know what he had done when he had

painted the ‘St. Jerome’—or Rembrandt when he made the sketch of

‘Jacob’s Dream?’ Oh, no! Those who are conscious of their powers never

do anything.

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE

_The London Magazine._] [_October 1820._