The very essence of vulgarity, after all, consists merely in one
error--in taking manners, actions, words, opinions, on trust from
others, without examining one’s own feelings, or weighing the merits of
the case. It is coarseness or shallowness of taste, arising from want
of individual refinement, together with the confidence and presumption
inspired by example and numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution
of the mind or body to ape the more or less obvious defects of others,
because by so doing we shall secure the suffrages of those we associate
with. To affect a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage
with a large number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because
another set of persons very little, if at all, better informed, cry
it down to distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case
equal vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it
is common. It is common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing
is vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not
vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity;
but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the
authority of others, or to fall in with the fashion or the company we
keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as
well spurn the clod under our feet, and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse
enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing
real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator of
Cobbett a vulgar man. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the looking to
imitation or affectation of any sort for distinction is. A Cockney is a
vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs of
the metropolis. An aristocrat, also, who is always thinking of the High
Street, Edinburgh, is vulgar. We want a name for this last character. An
opinion is often vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble;
but it is not a bit purer or more refined for having passed through the
well-cleansed teeth of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity lies in the
having no other feeling on any subject than the crude, blind, headlong,
gregarious notion acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude, or with
a fastidious minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth,
and as indifferent to every thing but their own frivolous pretensions.
The upper are not wiser than the lower orders, because they resolve to
differ from them. The fashionable have the advantage of the unfashionable
in nothing but the fashion. The true vulgar are the persons who have
a horrible dread of daring to differ from their clique--the herd of
pretenders to what they do not feel, and to do what is not natural to
them, whether in high or low life. To belong to any class, to move in
any rank or sphere of life, is not a very exclusive distinction or test
of refinement. Refinement will in all classes be the exception, not the
rule; and the exception may occur in one class as well as another. A
king is but a man with a hereditary title. A nobleman is only one of the
House of Peers. To be a knight or alderman--above all, to desire being
either, is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king made Walter Scott a
baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make another
“Author of Waverley.” Princes, heroes, are often commonplace people, and
sometimes the reverse; Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don
Quixote. To be an author, to be a painter, one of the many, is nothing.
It is a trick, it is a trade. Nay, to be a member of the Royal Academy,
or a Fellow of the Royal Society, is but a vulgar distinction. But to
be a Virgil, a Milton, a Raphael, a Claude, is what falls to the lot of
humanity but once. I do not think those were vulgar people, though, for
any thing I know to the contrary, the First Lord of the Bedchamber may
be a very vulgar man. Such are pretty much my notions with regard to
vulgarity.--_Hazlitt’s Table-Talk._