is matter for consideration, as the point of view in which it may be
presented, and the manner of effecting its separation from the interests
in which it is involved. The attack upon established error should
resemble that game which children play, by casting a bundle of small
sticks into a confused heap; and then endeavouring to pick them out, one
by one, without disturbing the rest. We should begin by casting about for
the detached and isolated points, and next remove those which have the
fewest connexions—leaving untouched the pieces in which there are the
greatest implications—till at last perhaps they will fall by their own
weight.
Much also depends upon times and seasons. When the current of opinion
runs strong, an expert swimmer will not directly breast it, but take
advantage of back-waters and of sheltering prominences: but when the tide
is on the turn, and the force of the stream is nearly spent, he dashes
boldly into the middle of the waters, and gains his point by the shortest
possible cut.
It is by inattention to this fact, that effect is often mistaken for
cause. Preachers and orators lay the French revolution to the charge
of Voltaire and the philosophers, who were but the creatures of the
revolutionary movement. They would neither have shewn themselves so
boldly, nor obtained so much sympathy, if the spirit of the age had not
been preeminently coincident with, and favourable to, their efforts.
Had Bacon lived in the twelfth century, and had he, by a miracle,
possessed the knowledge which he afterwards displayed, he would have
either been brought to the stake, or his books, through the neglect of
his cotemporaries, would have been consigned to the dust of libraries,
to have awaited a more congenial and spirit-stirring epoch. Wickliff
was as bold and as clear-sighted a reformer, as Luther; but he was more
in advance of his age: and his want of success was the penalty of the
discrepancy.
In combating error, it is a golden rule to leave unnoticed whatever is
indifferent to the point at issue. In converting a Jew, it is unwise to
begin by ostentatiously eating pork. Leave the Quaker in the undisturbed
possession of his hat, and the Catholic in the quiet enjoyment of his red
herring. In the same spirit, it is good to back truth by authority and
precedent: for though mere reason is better argument, yet authority, by
chiming in with the prejudices of the hearer, will in all probability be
the more availing. There are thousands who would reject the doctrine of
philosophical necessity, nakedly proposed, who would willingly embrace
it, if disguised under the mask of grace and predestination; simply
because a few grave names may be cited in favour of the latter opinion.
The interests and passions of those who may be hostile to a given
reformation, are not all involved in an equal degree. There are thousands
and tens of thousands who will accept of a principle, up to a certain
point, where it begins to operate on themselves. With a few exceptions,
all the world is beginning to be reconciled with free trade in every
branch of industry,—but their own. It is therefore dangerous to push
a principle at once to its utmost extreme. The further it is carried,
the more persons are alarmed, and the less is the shame attendant upon
brutish opposition. The moderate, moreover, in all disputes, collect
around them the half thinkers and half feelers—a powerful faction,
embracing those who are too indolent to inquire, or too corrupt to desire
a practical improvement to the fullest extent. For such personages
a middle term is a convenient retreat; and by neutralizing their
opposition, you gain time and a clearer stage. This may not always be
very candid: but if the “_così al egro_” system be allowable in oratory,
it is no less justifiable where the grave interests of the species are at
issue. The number of those who see questions in their wholeness, is very
small; the mass are more moved by especial instances and examples.
In knowledge, nothing is isolated; and the establishment of one truth
is the dethronement of many errors. With these, it is best to deal in
detail; and await the gradual development of a growing spirit, before
venturing upon points in which the age is not prepared to follow. Every
body admits that the Deity is wise and good: but he who should deduce all
the necessary consequences of this abstract verity, would expose such a
mass of inconsistencies and absurdities, as would bring the whole force
of the many to bear against him; and would ensure for himself the palm of
martyrdom, without advancing public opinion one iota. Proceed, therefore,
like the snail, with your feelers before you; and reserve to yourself, by
a timely halt, the privilege of never combating with more opponents at
once than you feel able to overthrow. Disgraceful retreats are pregnant
with fearful delays: for a _coup manqué_ is followed by a revulsion of
sentiment which may require the lapse of a generation to recover.
A point of prudence, equally commendable, is to avoid taking in hand
too many simultaneous reforms. In this respect Voltaire was wiser than
Rousseau, who levelled his attacks at once against the abuses of church
and state. By respecting the nobility, while he attacked the clergy,
Voltaire even now exercises a beneficial influence on French affairs. The
Jesuits have at this moment many opponents among the old noblesse, who
have derived their opinions on church government from that writer, simply
because he spared the pretensions of their own class. In the field of
argument, as in the field of battle, an undue extension of the line is
accompanied by a corresponding weakness in all its points.
There is, however, one case in which a contrary method is more availing;
namely, when the public spirit is not carried very powerfully in any
certain direction, and when opinion stagnates. In such moments, the more
startling and extravagant the novelty, the more likely it is to produce
an impression. Authority and precedent are beaten down and trodden upon
by a shock which unsettles all habitual notions: and an enthusiasm is
unexpectedly engendered, which commences a new epoch in the history of
nations. It was thus that the American revolution found its age; and
that the political works of Thomas Paine produced an effect, which a
writer of less daring and intensity could never have achieved. Under all
circumstances, extreme opinions have the merit of setting the thinking
part of the public to work: but when they are scattered _mal à propos_,
it is with the certain shipwreck of the propounders; and often with a
flux and reflux of sentiment, that eventually consumes more time and
means, than are necessary to arrive at the proposed end, by a gentler and
more undermining method.
These remarks will explain the partial successes of writers, who have
taken in one age and country more than in others. Newton and Locke were
admired in England, long before they made their way on the Continent; but
latterly Locke has been more popular abroad than at home: because the
spirit of the age, moving in contrary directions, has led the English
back towards despotism in politics and mysticism in religion; whereas,
abroad, it flowed in a full tide towards reason and liberality. It is
now fashionable to question Locke’s fundamental principle, not because
an innate idea can be brought in evidence against him, but on account
of certain supposed consequences to which his principle is said to
lead—and this happens in the nineteenth century! So, likewise, Beccaria,
Filangieri, and other writers of the same cast, have never attained the
same popularity in England, as with their own countrymen; while Bentham,
who at home is an object of sarcasm and suspicion, is admired on the
Continent as the very prophet of legislation. A change in the spirit
of the age is at this moment (1821) working a corresponding alteration
in the reputation of the writers of the French Augustan epoch; who are
losing much of their former popularity, or rather idolatry, among their
countrymen; and are giving place to authors, whose ideas and manners are
more consonant to the existing state of public feeling and opinion.
Knaves and hypocrites are perfectly aware of these truths; unless,
indeed, it is the blind instinct of cupidity, which leads them so
directly to their corrupt ends. But reformers in general, either are
ignorant of them, or disregard them. The enthusiasm which leads forward
the advanced guard of opinion, but rarely allows an observance of what
is merely prudential; and the high-minded votarist of truth, shrinks
from whatever assumes the aspect of compromise, as from a degradation.
The first promulgators of useful innovations are therefore usually the
victims of their zeal. They gain the honour of the day with posterity;
but in the mean time they are cast down, and form with their bodies the
bridge over which the more calculating spirits of a future day pass in
triumph to their end. Thus Romilly spent a life of disappointment and
vexation, that Mr. Peel might reap the fruits of his labours; and thus
the Archbishop of Canterbury enjoys a splendid income, for preaching the
doctrines which brought Latimer and Ridley to the stake.
THE KEY OF THE BOOK CASE.
“Casa mia, casa mia,
Piccolina che sia,
Tu sei sempre casa mia.”[57]
Where did the Italians get these homely lines? they who have no “_casa
piccolina_,” and whose home is an opera box. Now I have just such a
_casa_ as this domestic maxim implies; and I love it beyond measure.
Though often glad to leave it behind me, I always return to it with
satisfaction. I never knew any, but the foolish and the worthless of my
own sex, who did not feel a real pleasure in the performance of domestic
duties; and though one may be sometimes inclined to leave behind, “_tous
ses maris et tous ses enfans_,” as Madame de Coulanges has it, still a
true woman always comes back with pride and delight to the fuss, and
rummage, and self-importance of domestic legislation. The great must
know less of this, than those whose fortunes are at odds with their
tastes and position; and the blue stockings, of all ranks, affect to have
souls above saucepans. But we of the trade, who have taken our places as
candidates for the emoluments and honours of authorship, are not forced
upon such affectation.
“One of the advantages of being a wit,” says Swift, “is the license it
gives to play the fool;” and one of the privileges of a female writer
who has no longer a name to make, is, that she may make her own—pudding,
if she likes it. For myself, I am a heaven-born cook: but of this, more
hereafter. Still, what I miss most, when I leave my own house, is not my
_batterie de cuisine_, but my library. Not that it is as large as the
Alexandrian, nor as curious as the Vatican; but that it is just that sort
of library in which, as Madame de Sévigné says, “you cannot lay your hand
on a volume without a desire to read it through.”
_Madonna mia!_ how well I know the smell of a country-house library!
Being, by divine indignation, an author, people think I do nothing but
read and write books, “eat paper, and drink ink,” as Sir Nathaniel says;
and are pleased to consider that which is but the episode, as the history
of my life. It frequently happens that, before I have made acquaintance
with half the rose trees, smelled the geraniums, or swallowed a draught
of the delicious air I left town expressly to breathe, I am presented
with the key of the book-case—[I would as soon lock up my bells as my
books, since the great merit of both is to be always at hand]—So I go
twisting and turning the said key into its rusty lock; and, _ouf!_ the
fust and the must, when the book-case is opened! Then, what a search for
something one can read through in less than a twelvemonth. Out of every
hundred volumes, there are scarcely more than six or seven works; for
country-house libraries are made up of folios, quartos, or large octavos,
_pour le moins_; except that here and there is a sort of thick, short,
squat volume, that belongs to no class of form; and every work runs from
ten to fifteen volumes. The reason is, that country-house libraries
are generally heir-looms, originally collected as a mark of gentility
by the wisdom of the country-house ancestors. They consist of what are
called standard books—books that would let the world stand still to the
end of time!—composed and collected when knowledge, instead of being
given, as now, in quintessential drops, was weighed out by the stone,
or measured by the yard. Concentration, in all things—the throwing off
the rubbish, and getting at the element—is the true proof of excellence;
and it is now, in literature, as in medicine; instead of being choked
with a pint of bark mud, (all port wine as it may be,) we swallow a few
pellucid drops of _quinine_, without wry faces or deep inspirations! It
formerly took a life to write a book, and half a one to read it. Oh, the
“Rollin’s Histories,” and “Voyages round the World,” and the “Clelias and
Cassandras,” and the poems in fifty-nine cantos—the folio “Thoughts upon
Nothing,” and the seven-volume ponderosity of “Sir Charles Grandison!”
Denon—whose own work on Egypt, hit off, as it is, with his own
peculiar _finesse_ and spirit, (_touche fine et spirituelle_,)—is a
fair illustration of the genuine style of modern writing—Denon was the
most impatient person under the infliction of voluminous works (myself
excepted) that I ever knew. It was a constant theme of abuse and
laughter between us. One night I was leaning on his arm, at a _soirée_,
at the Prince de Beauveau’s, when the excellent and estimable Monsieur
S——, in passing close by us, trod on his foot: he turned to me, with an
expression of pain, and said, “_Ah! ma chère petite, les dix-huit volumes
m’ont tombé sur le pied!_”[58] And yet, after all, I, too, have appeared
pranked out in two quarto volumes, heavier than myself, and quite as
tall: but of this presumptuous magnitude, I stood as guiltless as of the
Talmud. Three small, compact, lady-like octavos were ever the utmost
boundary of my authorical ambition. For all beyond this, my publishers
were more in fault than I.
One exception I must make: I originally wrote my “Novice of St. Dominick”
in ten goodly, stout volumes, which, with much humility, as I thought,
I cut down to seven. With these seven—by far the heaviest part of
my luggage—I arrived in London, and presented myself to Sir Richard
Phillips, who advised me, to take back my manuscript, like a good girl,
and reduce it to five. “Insatiate monster, would not one suffice!” But
down went the volumes; and when I took the remaining sibyl leaves to
Sir Richard, he again begged they might be reduced to four. This was
too much; though I verily believe, at this moment, that the publisher’s
good-natured consideration of my _amour propre_ alone prevented him from
stinting my exuberance to two volumes, which, perhaps, he ought to have
done. The work, however, succeeded, in spite of its bulk, and still
maintains a preference over my lighter and better productions, in the
estimation at least of my cotemporaries, the ladies of a certain age, who
first read its multitudinous pages, when they were as young as the author
who wrote them; and who still mistake their own first, warm impressions
for the merits of a work, which, truth to tell, had not too many to boast
of.
Extreme youth, like extreme age, is naturally verbose. If the aged speak
from the fulness of memory, the young are loquacious from the novelty
and strength of their sensations. Youth, likewise, suspects not its
own tritisms and plagiarisms; nor thinks it is telling what every body
knows, and nobody cares for. The secret, the grand secret, that “_l’art
d’ennuyer est l’art de tout dire_”[59]—that to exhaust a subject is not
to illustrate it—is unknown to the young, who know so little, and who
feel so much.
When I wrote “The Novice,” two volumes or ten were alike to me. But I
must keep the history of my authorship for another time. It would make a
cat laugh: alas! it has often made me cry!
APOTHECARIES.
À propos to _quinine_, that pretty, elegant medicine, that looks like
distilled diamonds, or the rill that runs between the ornamented banks
of my dear Kilfane. This getting at quintessences is rather injurious to
the craft and mystery of compounding. When people cease to take medicine
by the pint, adieu to _Messieurs les Apothicaires_! This was confessed,
with much _naïveté_, lately, by one of the profession, who left it, to
undertake an extensive brewery. Being asked the motive of this change, he
said, “The public will now swallow my drugs by the quart, instead of the
phial.”
How many professions depend upon the ignorance of the age in which they
flourish. In the middle ages, the apothecaries were general shopkeepers,
and, in England, for a long time, the exclusive dealers in wine. In
Italy, where so many traces of the middle ages still subsist unchanged,
the apothecary is called, to this day, _speziale_, or spice-dealer.
When we resided at Como, we purchased our tea, sugar, wax-lights, oils,
and medicines, all at the same shop. Up to the time of James the First,
the apothecaries of London were not a distinct body, but belonged to the
Grocers’ Company. The probability is, that humanity gained little by the
change; for a trade, when turned into a mystery, is but better fitted to
play upon the innate gullibility of man. The _hocus-pocus_ of pouring one
bottle into another, lost nothing in the hands of persons, who assumed
the right of administering, by gallons, their own compositions.
_Rabelais_, by-the-by, was the son of an apothecary, who was Seigneur de
la Devinière. Could this feudal lord of lands have been an apothecary, in
the modern sense of the word?—or was he not rather a wholesale general
merchant?
The Chinese, in their dull wisdom, have a curious custom in their great
towns—a substitute for our dispensaries. A stone, of many cubits high, is
erected in some public place, with the names and prices of every medicine
inscribed; and when the poor want physic, they apply to the treasury,
and get the price of the drug required. This speaks volumes for the
probity of the people. If, in Ireland, the treasury was authorized thus
to advance the purchase-money of medicines to the poor, instead of their
applying to the Medical-Hall, I fear their steps would more probably
wander to the whisky-shop. This public pricing of drugs bespeaks also
great and general ignorance among the people, who are not considered
capable of purchasing the outlandish commodity. How different from the
modern American, who buys not only his physic, but his theology, where
and how he pleases!
In our own times, there has been a vast revolution in apothecaries. As
to the mere outward man, what a difference between the formal proprietor
of a Dalmahoy-wig, and a snuff-coloured or crimson suit of dittoes, an
amber-headed cane, and scarlet _roquelaure_, (who phlebotomized our
fathers, with the solemn air of his own Galen’s-head,) and the spruce,
dapper incumbent of a cabriolet, who now bounds up to your knocker with
a hop-step-and-a-jump! But the “march of intellect” has done much more
still for the interior. Every professional man must, in these days, know
something of his business; and the apothecary, whose mental stock in
trade is not as much improved as his _matériel_, will have poor chance of
employment.—The dealers in physic first began as conjurors; then figured
as priests; next sunk into retailers of hard words; and finally have
become almost as reasonable and intelligible mortals, as the patients to
whom they administer. What will this jacobinical age come to next?
MAXIMS—PORTRAITS.
Nobody writes maxims now. Maxims do not belong to the state of intellect
and literature of the present age. In times when knowledge was the
exclusive property of a particular class, and when mankind leaned upon
the opinions of the learned, they were more apt to refer their conduct
to a well established rule, than to govern it by their own reflections.
These were the times for “wise saws and modern instances.” Men now
think for themselves, and do not require recipes for thinking. It is
remarkable, that the most celebrated maxim-mongers of modern times were
men of quality; and that their aphorisms are chiefly applicable to
the exigencies, vices, and virtues of a court, of which the flower of
maxim-mongers has said, “It does not render us happy, while it prevents
the search of happiness in other directions.”
Towards the middle of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, maxims became
a rage in France. Their terseness, point, and epigrammatic turn,
particularly adapted them to _l’esprit du siècle_, and to a language
made up of phrases—All the coteries of the Hôtels La Rochefoucauld,
Carnavalet, D’Albret, &c. &c., including all the genuine wit and taste
of the day, as opposed to the Hôtel Rambouillet and other “_bureaux
d’esprit_,” dealt largely in maxims. The Duc de Rochefoucauld published
his, and distanced all competitors. The philosophy of more enlightened
times owed much to this breviary of practical and worldly experience.
Helvetius borrowed from it his leading doctrine; and Hume, without
acknowledging the obligation, stood deeply indebted to its dogmas for his
opinions.
What a sensation the “Maxims” must have made at Versailles, when they
first came out, and
“Each cried, ‘that is levelled at me.’”
Mesdames de La Fayette, Sévigné, Coulange, Cornuel, and others of the
female wits who surrounded the gouty chair of the once brilliant cavalier
of the beautiful De Longueville, saw the work in MS. long before it
was published, and probably helped the illustrious author to some of
the poignant maxims, to which female _finesse_ seems to have lent its
delicacy and its bitterness. It was from this very MS. that a splendid
edition of the work was published, some years back, by the Rochefoucauld
family, and edited by Mons. Suard, the late perpetual Secretary of the
Academy; who assured me, not only that the work was printed from this
precious morsel of autography, but that he was further assisted in his
editorial capacity by a copy of the first printed edition, which was
marked all over with the duke’s own corrections, erasures, and marginal
notes.
One morning, in Paris, (1818) as I sat reading a letter of Madame de
Sévigné, dated from the Hôtel de la Rochefoucauld, the Count G—— de
la R—— was announced. I was so deep in the _coterie_ of Le Faubourg,
that I started, and expected to find the coadjutor along with him. “I
have brought you,” said my noble visitor, “a little _étrenne_;” and
he presented me with the works of his illustrious ancestor—_Me voilà
donc_ a link in the chain with times and persons who so early got
possession of my mind and imagination, through the accidents of my
miscellaneous and unguided studies. There is a magic in an historical
name, that no democracy of opinion or principle can resist, except in
the dull and unlettered; and it is to the glory of some of the greatest
families of France, that they were illustrated by some highly-gifted and
highly-spirited member, who enhanced the advantages of descent and birth,
and redeemed their class from the popular odium which the vices and
meanness of its majority incurred.