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Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners

by William Hazlitt · English · Gutenberg #3020 · 917,271 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners

Author: William Hazlitt


        
Release date: January 1, 2002 [eBook #3020]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2019

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3020

Credits: Produced by Christopher Hapka, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TABLE TALK: ESSAYS ON MEN AND MANNERS ***




Produced by Christopher Hapka





TABLE-TALK

ESSAYS ON MEN AND MANNERS

By William Hazlitt



CONTENTS


VOLUME I

  1. On the Pleasure of Painting
  2. The Same Subject Continued
  3. On the Past and Future
  4. On Genius and Common Sense
  5. The Same Subject Continued
  6. Character of Cobbett
  7. On People With One Idea
  8. On the Ignorance of the Learned
  9. The Indian Jugglers
  10. On Living To One's-Self
  11. On Thought and Action
  12. On Will-Making
  13. On Certain Inconsistencies In Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses
  14. The Same Subject Continued
  15. On Paradox and Common-Place
  16. On Vulgarity and Affectation


VOLUME II

  1. On a Landscape of Nicholas Poussin
  2. On Milton's Sonnets
  3. On Going a Journey
  4. On Coffee-House Politicians
  5. On the Aristocracy of Letters
  6. On Criticism
  7. On Great and Little Things
  8. On Familiar Style
  9. On Effeminacy of Character
  10. Why Distant Objects Please
  11. On Corporate Bodies
  12. Whether Actors Ought To Sit in the Boxes
  13. On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority
  14. On Patronage and Puffing
  15. On the Knowledge of Character
  16. On the Picturesque and Ideal
  17. On the Fear of Death




VOLUME I




ESSAY I. ON THE PLEASURE OF PAINTING


'There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.' In
writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only
to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. You sit down to your task,
and are happy. From the moment that you take up the pencil, and look
Nature in the face, you are at peace with your own heart. No angry
passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the
hand, or dim the brow: no irritable humours are set afloat: you have no
absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush,
no fool to annoy--you are actuated by fear or favour to no man. There
is 'no juggling here,' no sophistry, no intrigue, no tampering with the
evidence, no attempt to make black white, or white black: but you resign
yourself into the hands of a greater power, that of Nature, with the
simplicity of a child, and the devotion of an enthusiast--'study with
joy her manner, and with rapture taste her style.' The mind is calm, and
full at the same time. The hand and eye are equally employed. In
tracing the commonest object, a plant or the stump of a tree, you
learn something every moment. You perceive unexpected differences, and
discover likenesses where you looked for no such thing. You try to set
down what you see--find out your error, and correct it. You need not
play tricks, or purposely mistake: with all your pains, you are still
far short of the mark. Patience grows out of the endless pursuit, and
turns it into a luxury. A streak in a flower, a wrinkle in a leaf, a
tinge in a cloud, a stain in an old wall or ruin grey, are seized
with avidity as the _spolia opima_ of this sort of mental warfare, and
furnish out labour for another half-day. The hours pass away untold,
without chagrin, and without weariness; nor would you ever wish to
pass them otherwise. Innocence is joined with industry, pleasure
with business; and the mind is satisfied, though it is not engaged in
thinking or in doing any mischief.(1)

I have not much pleasure in writing these _Essays_, or in reading them
afterwards; though I own I now and then meet with a phrase that I like,
or a thought that strikes me as a true one. But after I begin them, I am
only anxious to get to the end of them, which I am not sure I shall do,
for I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence beforehand; and when I
have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself little more about them.
I sometimes have to write them twice over: then it is necessary to read
the _proof_, to prevent mistakes by the printer; so that by the time
they appear in a tangible shape, and one can con them over with a
conscious, sidelong glance to the public approbation, they have lost
their gloss and relish, and become 'more tedious than a twice-told
tale.' For a person to read his own works over with any great delight,
he ought first to forget that he ever wrote them. Familiarity naturally
breeds contempt. It is, in fact, like poring fondly over a piece of
blank paper; from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning
to the mind--are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an
interest and property in them. I have more satisfaction in my own
thoughts than in dictating them to others: words are necessary to
explain the impression of certain things upon me to the reader, but they
rather weaken and draw a veil over than strengthen it to myself. However
I might say with the poet, 'My mind to me a kingdom is,' yet I have
little ambition 'to set a throne or chair of state in the understandings
of other men.' The ideas we cherish most exist best in a kind of shadowy
abstraction,

 Pure in the last recesses of the mind,

and derive neither force nor interest from being exposed to public view.
They are old familiar acquaintance, and any change in them, arising
from the adventitious ornaments of style or dress, is little to their
advantage. After I have once written on a subject, it goes out of my
mind: my feelings about it have been melted down into words, and _then_
I forget. I have, as it were, discharged my memory of its old habitual
reckoning, and rubbed out the score of real sentiment. For the future
it exists only for the sake of others. But I cannot say, from my own
experience, that the same process takes place in transferring our
ideas to canvas; they gain more than they lose in the mechanical
transformation. One is never tired of painting, because you have to set
down not what you knew already, but what you have just discovered. In
the former case you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names
into things. There is a continual creation out of nothing going on.
With every stroke of the brush a new field of inquiry is laid open;
new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them. By
comparing the imitation with the original, you see what you have done,
and how much you have still to do. The test of the senses is severer
than that of fancy, and an over-match even for the delusions of our
self-love. One part of a picture shames another, and you determine to
paint up to yourself, if you cannot come up to Nature. Every object
becomes lustrous from the light thrown back upon it by the mirror of
art: and by the aid of the pencil we may be said to touch and handle
the objects of sight. The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge of
existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas: the form
of beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the
universe is made 'palpable to feeling as well as sight.'--And see! a
rainbow starts from the canvas, with its humid train of glory, as if
it were drawn from its cloudy arch in heaven. The spangled landscape
glitters with drops of dew after the shower. The 'fleecy fools' show
their coats in the gleams of the setting sun. The shepherds pipe their
farewell notes in the fresh evening air. And is this bright vision made
from a dead, dull blank, like a bubble reflecting the mighty fabric of
the universe? Who would think this miracle of Rubens' pencil possible
to be performed? Who, having seen it, would not spend his life to do
the like? See how the rich fallows, the bare stubble-field, the scanty
harvest-home, drag in Rembrandt's landscapes! How often have I looked
at them and nature, and tried to do the same, till the very 'light
thickened,' and there was an earthiness in the feeling of the air! There
is no end of the refinements of art and nature in this respect. One
may look at the misty glimmering horizon till the eye dazzles and the
imagination is lost, in hopes to transfer the whole interminable expanse
at one blow upon the canvas. Wilson said, he used to try to paint the
effect of the motes dancing in the setting sun. At another time, a
friend, coming into his painting-room when he was sitting on the
ground in a melancholy posture, observed that his picture looked like a
landscape after a shower: he started up with the greatest delight,
and said, 'That is the effect I intended to produce, but thought I had
failed.' Wilson was neglected; and, by degrees, neglected his art to
apply himself to brandy. His hand became unsteady, so that it was only
by repeated attempts that he could reach the place or produce the effect
he aimed at; and when he had done a little to a picture, he would say to
any acquaintance who chanced to drop in, 'I have painted enough for one
day: come, let us go somewhere.' It was not so Claude left his pictures,
or his studies on the banks of the Tiber, to go in search of other
enjoyments, or ceased to gaze upon the glittering sunny vales and
distant hills; and while his eye drank in the clear sparkling hues and
lovely forms of nature, his hand stamped them on the lucid canvas to
last there for ever! One of the most delightful parts of my life was
one fine summer, when I used to walk out of an evening to catch the last
light of the sun, gemming the green slopes or russet lawns, and gilding
tower or tree, while the blue sky, gradually turning to purple and gold,
or skirted with dusky grey, hung its broad marble pavement over all,
as we see it in the great master of Italian landscape. But to come to a
more particular explanation of the subject:--

The first head I ever tried to paint was an old woman with the upper
part of the face shaded by her bonnet, and I certainly laboured (at) it
with great perseverance. It took me numberless sittings to do it. I have
it by me still, and sometimes look at it with surprise, to think how
much pains were thrown away to little purpose,--yet not altogether in
vain if it taught me to see good in everything, and to know that there
is nothing vulgar in Nature seen with the eye of science or of true
art. Refinement creates beauty everywhere: it is the grossness of the
spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in the object. Be this as
it may, I spared no pains to do my best. If art was long, I thought that
life was so too at that moment. I got in the general effect the first
day; and pleased and surprised enough I was at my success. The rest was
a work of time--of weeks and months (if need were), of patient toil
and careful finishing. I had seen an old head by Rembrandt at Burleigh
House, and if I could produce a head at all like Rembrandt in a year, in
my lifetime, it would be glory and felicity and wealth and fame enough
for me! The head I had seen at Burleigh was an exact and wonderful
facsimile of nature, and I resolved to make mine (as nearly as I could)
an exact facsimile of nature. I did not then, nor do I now believe,
with Sir Joshua, that the perfection of art consists in giving
general appearances without individual details, but in giving general
appearances with individual details. Otherwise, I had done my work the
first day. But I saw something more in nature than general effect, and
I thought it worth my while to give it in the picture. There was a
gorgeous effect of light and shade; but there was a delicacy as well as
depth in the chiaroscuro which I was bound to follow into its dim and
scarce perceptible variety of tone and shadow. Then I had to make
the transition from a strong light to as dark a shade, preserving the
masses, but gradually softening off the intermediate parts. It was so
in nature; the difficulty was to make it so in the copy. I tried, and
failed again and again; I strove harder, and succeeded as I thought.
The wrinkles in Rembrandt were not hard lines, but broken and
irregular. I saw the same appearance in nature, and strained every nerve
to give it. If I could hit off this edgy appearance, and insert the
reflected light in the furrows of old age in half a morning, I did not
think I had lost a day. Beneath the shrivelled yellow parchment look of
the skin, there was here and there a streak of the blood-colour tinging
the face; this I made a point of conveying, and did not cease to compare
what I saw with what I did (with jealous, lynx-eyed watchfulness) till
I succeeded to the best of my ability and judgment. How many revisions
were there! How many attempts to catch an expression which I had seen
the day before! How often did we try to get the old position, and wait
for the return of the same light! There was a puckering up of the lips,
a cautious introversion of the eye under the shadow of the bonnet,
indicative of the feebleness and suspicion of old age, which at last we
managed, after many trials and some quarrels, to a tolerable nicety.
The picture was never finished, and I might have gone on with it to the
present hour.(2) I used to sit it on the ground when my day's work was
done, and saw revealed to me with swimming eyes the birth of new hopes
and of a new world of objects. The painter thus learns to look at Nature
with different eyes. He before saw her 'as in a glass darkly, but now
face to face.' He understands the texture and meaning of the visible
universe, and 'sees into the life of things,' not by the help of
mechanical instruments, but of the improved exercise of his faculties,
and an intimate sympathy with Nature. The meanest thing is not lost upon
him, for he looks at it with an eye to itself, not merely to his own
vanity or interest, or the opinion of the world. Even where there is
neither beauty nor use--if that ever were--still there is truth, and a
sufficient source of gratification in the indulgence of curiosity and
activity of mind. The humblest printer is a true scholar; and the best
of scholars--the scholar of Nature. For myself, and for the real comfort
and satisfaction of the thing, I had rather have been Jan Steen, or
Gerard Dow, than the greatest casuist or philologer that ever lived.
The painter does not view things in clouds or 'mist, the common gloss of
theologians,' but applies the same standard of truth and disinterested
spirit of inquiry, that influence his daily practice, to other subjects.
He perceives form, he distinguishes character. He reads men and books
with an intuitive eye. He is a critic as well as a connoisseur. The
conclusions he draws are clear and convincing, because they are taken
from the things themselves. He is not a fanatic, a dupe, or a slave; for
the habit of seeing for himself also disposes him to judge for himself.
The most sensible men I know (taken as a class) are painters; that is,
they are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about
them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds. From
their profession they in general mix more with the world than authors;
and if they have not the same fund of acquired knowledge, are obliged
to rely more on individual sagacity. I might mention the names of Opie,
Fuseli, Northcote, as persons distinguished for striking description
and acquaintance with the subtle traits of character.(3) Painters in
ordinary society, or in obscure situations where their value is
not known, and they are treated with neglect and indifference, have
sometimes a forward self-sufficiency of manner; but this is not so much
their fault as that of others. Perhaps their want of regular education
may also be in fault in such cases. Richardson, who is very tenacious of
the respect in which the profession ought to be held, tells a story of
Michael Angelo, that after a quarrel between him and Pope Julius II.,
'upon account of a slight the artist conceived the pontiff had put upon
him, Michael Angelo was introduced by a bishop, who, thinking to serve
the artist by it, made it an argument that the Pope should be reconciled
to him, because men of his profession were commonly ignorant, and of no
consequence otherwise; his holiness, enraged at the bishop, struck him
with his staff, and told him, it was he that was the blockhead, and
affronted the man himself would not offend: the prelate was driven
out of the chamber, and Michael Angelo had the Pope's benediction,
accompanied with presents. This bishop had fallen into the vulgar error,
and was rebuked accordingly.'

Besides the exercise of the mind, painting exercises the body. It is a
mechanical as well as a liberal art. To do anything, to dig a hole in
the ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, to move a shuttle, to
work a pattern,--in a word, to attempt to produce any effect, and to
_succeed,_ has something in it that gratifies the love of power, and
carries off the restless activity of the mind of man. Indolence is
a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be
happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive
tendencies of the human frame; and painting combines them both
incessantly.(4) The hand is furnished a practical test of the
correctness of the eye; and the eye, thus admonished, imposes fresh
tasks of skill and industry upon the hand. Every stroke tells as the
verifying of a new truth; and every new observation, the instant it is
made, passes into an act and emanation of the will. Every step is
nearer what we wish, and yet there is always more to do. In spite of the
facility, the fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play round the
pencil of Rubens and Van-dyke, however I may admire, I do not envy them
this power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution of
Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea del Sarto, where every touch
appears conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and where the painful
artist has so distinctly wrought,

 That you might almost say his picture thought.


In the one case the colours seem breathed on the canvas as if by magic,
the work and the wonder of a moment; in the other they seem inlaid in
the body of the work, and as if it took the artist years of unremitting
labour, and of delightful never-ending progress to perfection.(5) Who
would wish ever to come to the close of such works,--not to dwell on
them, to return to them, to be wedded to them to the last? Rubens, with
his florid, rapid style, complains that when he had just learned his
art, he should be forced to die. Leonardo, in the slow advances of his,
had lived long enough!

Painting is not, like writing, what is properly understood by a
sedentary employment. It requires not indeed a strong, but a continued
and steady exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy of
the manual operation, makes up for the want of vehemence,--as to balance
himself for any time in the same position the rope-dancer must strain
every nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an
appetite for one's dinner as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by
riding over Banstead Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that
'he took no other exercise than what he used in his painting-room,'--the
writer means, in walking backwards and forwards to look at his picture;
but the act of painting itself, of laying on the colours in the
proper place and proper quantity, was a much harder exercise than this
alternate receding from and returning to the picture. This last would be
rather a relaxation and relief than an effort. It is not to be wondered
at, that an artist like Sir Joshua, who delighted so much in the
sensual and practical part of his art, should have found himself at a
considerable loss when the decay of his sight precluded him, for
the last year or two of his life, from the following up of his
profession,--'the source,' according to his own remark, 'of thirty
years' uninterrupted enjoyment and prosperity to him.' It is only those
who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to brood
incessantly on abstract ideas, that never feel ennui.

To give one instance more, and then I will have done with this rambling
discourse. One of my first attempts was a picture of my father, who was
then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred
with the smallpox. I drew it out with a broad light crossing the face,
looking down, with spectacles on, reading. The book was Shaftesbury's
_Characteristics_, in a fine old binding, with Gribelin's etchings. My
father would as lieve it had been any other book; but for him to read
was to be content, was 'riches fineless.' The sketch promised well; and
I set to work to finish it, determined to spare no time nor pains. My
father was willing to sit as long as I pleased; for there is a natural
desire in the mind of man to sit for one's picture, to be the object of
continued attention, to have one's likeness multiplied; and besides his
satisfaction in the picture, he had some pride in the artist, though he
would rather I should have written a sermon than painted like Rembrandt
or like Raphael. Those winter days, with the gleams of sunshine
coming through the chapel-windows, and cheered by the notes of the
robin-redbreast in our garden (that 'ever in the haunch of winter
sings'),--as my afternoon's work drew to a close,--were among the
happiest of my life. When I gave the effect I intended to any part of
the picture for which I had prepared my colours; when I imitated the
roughness of the skin by a lucky stroke of the pencil; when I hit
the clear, pearly tone of a vein; when I gave the ruddy complexion of
health, the blood circulating under the broad shadows of one side of
the face, I thought my fortune made; or rather it was already more
than made, I might one day be able to say with Correggio, '_I also am a
painter!_' It was an idle thought, a boy's conceit; but it did not make
me less happy at the time. I used regularly to set my work in the chair
to look at it through the long evenings; and many a time did I return to
take leave of it before I could go to bed at night. I remember sending
it with a throbbing heart to the Exhibition, and seeing it hung up there
by the side of one of the Honourable Mr. Skeffington (now Sir George).
There was nothing in common between them, but that they were the
portraits of two very good-natured men. I think, but am not sure, that I
finished this portrait (or another afterwards) on the same day that the
news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out in the afternoon,
and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage
with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh for
the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come
over again! I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand
intervening years very contentedly!--The picture is left: the table, the
chair, the window where I learned to construe Livy, the chapel where my
father preached, remain where they were; but he himself is gone to rest,
full of years, of faith, of hope, and charity!



NOTES to ESSAY I


(1) There is a passage in Werter which contains a very pleasing
illustration of this doctrine, and is as follows:--

'About a league from the town is a place called Walheim. It is very
agreeably situated on the side of a hill: from one of the paths which
leads out of the village, you have a view of the whole country; and
there is a good old woman who sells wine, coffee, and tea there: but
better than all this are two lime-trees before the church, which spread
their branches over a little green, surrounded by barns and cottages. I
have seen few places more retired and peaceful. I send for a chair and
table from the old woman's, and there I drink my coffee and read Homer.
It was by accident that I discovered this place one fine afternoon: all
was perfect stillness; everybody was in the fields, except a little boy
about four years old, who was sitting on the ground, and holding between
his knees a child of about six months; he pressed it to his bosom
with his little arms, which made a sort of great chair for it; and
notwithstanding the vivacity which sparkled in his eyes, he sat
perfectly still. Quite delighted with the scene, I sat down on a plough
opposite, and had great pleasure in drawing this little picture of
brotherly tenderness. I added a bit of the hedge, the barn-door, and
some broken cart-wheels, without any order, just as they happened
to lie; and in about an hour I found I had made a drawing of great
expression and very correct design without having put in anything of my
own. This confirmed me in the resolution I had made before, only to
copy Nature for the future. Nature is inexhaustible, and alone forms
the greatest masters. Say what you will of rules, they alter the true
features and the natural expression.'

(2) It is at present covered with a thick slough of oil and varnish
(the perishable vehicle of the English school), like an envelope of
goldbeaters' skin, so as to be hardly visible.

(3) Men in business, who are answerable with their fortunes for
the consequences of their opinions, and are therefore accustomed to
ascertain pretty accurately the grounds on which they act, before they
commit themselves on the event, are often men of remarkably quick and
sound judgements. Artists in like manner must know tolerably well what
they are about, before they can bring the result of their observations
to the test of ocular demonstration.

(4) The famous Schiller used to say, that he found the great happiness
of life, after all, to consist in the discharge of some mechanical duty.

(5) The rich _impasting_ of Titian and Giorgione combines something of
the advantages of both these styles, the felicity of the one with the
carefulness of the other, and is perhaps to be preferred to either.




ESSAY II. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED


The painter not only takes a delight in nature, he has a new
and exquisite source of pleasure opened to him in the study and
contemplation of works of art--

 Whate'er Lorraine light touch'd with soft'ning hue,
 Or savage Rosa dash'd, or learned Poussin drew.

He turns aside to view a country gentleman's seat with eager looks,
thinking it may contain some of the rich products of art. There is
an air round Lord Radnor's park, for there hang the two Claudes, the
Morning and Evening of the Roman Empire--round Wilton House, for there
is Vandyke's picture of the Pembroke family--round Blenheim, for there
is his picture of the Duke of Buckingham's children, and the most
magnificent collection of Rubenses in the world--at Knowsley, for there
is Rembrandt's Handwriting on the Wall--and at Burleigh, for there are
some of Guido's angelic heads. The young artist makes a pilgrimage to
each of these places, eyes them wistfully at a distance, 'bosomed high
in tufted trees,' and feels an interest in them of which the owner is
scarce conscious: he enters the well-swept walks and echoing archways,
passes the threshold, is led through wainscoted rooms, is shown the
furniture, the rich hangings, the tapestry, the massy services of
plate--and, at last, is ushered into the room where his treasure is, the
idol of his vows--some speaking face or bright landscape! It is stamped
on his brain, and lives there thenceforward, a tally for nature, and a
test of art. He furnishes out the chambers of the mind from the spoils
of time, picks and chooses which shall have the best places--nearest his
heart. He goes away richer than he came, richer than the possessor;
and thinks that he may one day return, when he perhaps shall have done
something like them, or even from failure shall have learned to admire
truth and genius more.

My first initiation in the mysteries of the art was at the Orleans
Gallery: it was there I formed my taste, such as it is; so that I am
irreclaimably of the old school in painting. I was staggered when I saw
the works there collected, and looked at them with wondering and with
longing eyes. A mist passed away from my sight: the scales fell off. A
new sense came upon me, a new heaven and a new earth stood before me.
I saw the soul speaking in the face--'hands that the rod of empire had
swayed' in mighty ages past--'a forked mountain or blue promontory,'

 --with trees upon't
 That nod unto the world, and mock our eyes with air.

Old Time had unlocked his treasures, and Fame stood portress at
the door. We had all heard of the names of Titian, Raphael, Guido,
Domenichino, the Caracci--but to see them face to face, to be in the
same room with their deathless productions, was like breaking some
mighty spell--was almost an effect of necromancy! From that time I lived
in a world of pictures. Battles, sieges, speeches in parliament seemed
mere idle noise and fury, 'signifying nothing,' compared with those
mighty works and dreaded names that spoke to me in the eternal silence
of thought. This was the more remarkable, as it was but a short time
before that I was not only totally ignorant of, but insensible to the
beauties of art. As an instance, I remember that one afternoon I was
reading _The Provoked Husband_ with the highest relish, with a green
woody landscape of Ruysdael or Hobbima just before me, at which I looked
off the book now and then, and wondered what there could be in that sort
of work to satisfy or delight the mind--at the same time asking myself,
as a speculative question, whether I should ever feel an interest in it
like what I took in reading Vanbrugh and Cibber?

I had made some progress in painting when I went to the Louvre to study,
and I never did anything afterwards. I never shall forget conning
over the Catalogue which a friend lent me just before I set out. The
pictures, the names of the painters, seemed to relish in the mouth.
There was one of Titian's Mistress at her toilette. Even the colours
with which the painter had adorned her hair were not more golden, more
amiable to sight, than those which played round and tantalised my fancy
ere I saw the picture. There were two portraits by the same hand--'A
young Nobleman with a glove'--Another, 'a companion to it.' I read
the description over and over with fond expectancy, and filled up the
imaginary outline with whatever I could conceive of grace, and dignity,
and an antique gusto--all but equal to the original. There was the
Transfiguration too. With what awe I saw it in my mind's eye, and
was overshadowed with the spirit of the artist! Not to have been
disappointed with these works afterwards, was the highest compliment I
can pay to their transcendent merits. Indeed, it was from seeing other
works of the same great masters that I had formed a vague, but no
disparaging idea of these. The first day I got there, I was kept for
some time in the French Exhibition Room, and thought I should not be
able to get a sight of the old masters. I just caught a peep at them
through the door (vile hindrance!) like looking out of purgatory into
paradise--from Poussin's noble, mellow-looking landscapes to where
Rubens hung out his gaudy banner, and down the glimmering vista to
the rich jewels of Titian and the Italian school. At last, by much
importunity, I was admitted, and lost not an instant in making use of my
new privilege. It was _un beau jour_ to me. I marched delighted through
a quarter of a mile of the proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole
creation of genius, a universe of art! I ran the gauntlet of all the
schools from the bottom to the top; and in the end got admitted into the
inner room, where they had been repairing some of their greatest works.
Here the Transfiguration, the St. Peter Martyr, and the St. Jerome of
Domenichino stood on the floor, as if they had bent their knees, like
camels stooping, to unlade their riches to the spectator. On one side,
on an easel, stood Hippolito de Medici (a portrait by Titian), with a
boar-spear in his hand, looking through those he saw, till you turned
away from the keen glance; and thrown together in heaps were landscapes
of the same hand, green pastoral hills and vales, and shepherds piping
to their mild mistresses underneath the flowering shade. Reader, 'if
thou hast not seen the Louvre thou art damned!'--for thou hast not seen
the choicest remains of the works of art; or thou hast not seen all
these together with their mutually reflected glories. I say nothing of
the statues; for I know but little of sculpture, and never liked any
till I saw the Elgin Marbles.... Here, for four months together, I
strolled and studied, and daily heard the warning sound--'Quatres heures
passees, il faut fermer, Citoyens'--(Ah! why did they ever change their
style?) muttered in coarse provincial French; and brought away with
me some loose draughts and fragments, which I have been forced to
part with, like drops of life-blood, for 'hard money.' How often, thou
tenantless mansion of godlike magnificence--how often has my heart since
gone a pilgrimage to thee!

It has been made a question, whether the artist, or the mere man
of taste and natural sensibility, receives most pleasure from the
contemplation of works of art; and I think this question might be
answered by another as a sort of _experimentum crucis_, namely, whether
any one out of that 'number numberless' of mere gentlemen and amateurs,
who visited Paris at the period here spoken of, felt as much interest,
as much pride or pleasure in this display of the most striking monuments
of art as the humblest student would? The first entrance into the Louvre
would be only one of the events of his journey, not an event in his
life, remembered ever after with thankfulness and regret. He would
explore it with the same unmeaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would
the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden in the Tuileries, but
not with the fond enthusiasm of an artist. How should he? His is
'casual fruition, joyless, unendeared.' But the painter is wedded to his
art--the mistress, queen, and idol of his soul. He has embarked his
all in it, fame, time, fortune, peace of mind--his hopes in youth, his
consolation in age: and shall he not feel a more intense interest
in whatever relates to it than the mere indolent trifler? Natural
sensibility alone, without the entire application of the mind to that
one object, will not enable the possessor to sympathise with all
the degrees of beauty and power in the conceptions of a Titian or a
Correggio; but it is he only who does this, who follows them into all
their force and matchless race, that does or can feel their full value.
Knowledge is pleasure as well as power. No one but the artist who has
studied nature and contended with the difficulties of art, can be aware
of the beauties, or intoxicated with a passion for painting. No one who
has not devoted his life and soul to the pursuit of art can feel the
same exultation in its brightest ornaments and loftiest triumphs which
an artist does. Where the treasure is, there the heart is also. It is
now seventeen years since I was studying in the Louvre (and I have on
since given up all thoughts of the art as a profession), but long after
I returned, and even still, I sometimes dream of being there again--of
asking for the old pictures--and not finding them, or finding them
changed or faded from what they were, I cry myself awake! What
gentleman-amateur ever does this at such a distance of time,--that is,
ever received pleasure or took interest enough in them to produce so
lasting an impression?

But it is said that if a person had the same natural taste, and the
same acquired knowledge as an artist, without the petty interests and
technical notions, he would derive a purer pleasure from seeing a fine
portrait, a fine landscape, and so on. This, however, is not so much
begging the question as asking an impossibility: he cannot have the same
insight into the end without having studied the means; nor the same
love of art without the same habitual and exclusive attachment to it.
Painters are, no doubt, often actuated by jealousy to that only which
they find useful to themselves in painting. Wilson has been seen poring
over the texture of a Dutch cabinet-picture, so that he could not see
the picture itself. But this is the perversion and pedantry of the
profession, not its true or genuine spirit. If Wilson had never looked
at anything but megilps and handling, he never would have put the soul
of life and manners into his pictures, as he has done. Another objection
is, that the instrumental parts of the art, the means, the first
rudiments, paints, oils, and brushes, are painful and disgusting;
and that the consciousness of the difficulty and anxiety with which
perfection has been attained must take away from the pleasure of the
finest performance. This, however, is only an additional proof of the
greater pleasure derived by the artist from his profession; for these
things which are said to interfere with and destroy the common interest
in works of art do not disturb him; he never once thinks of them, he
is absorbed in the pursuit of a higher object; he is intent, not on the
means, but the end; he is taken up, not with the difficulties, but with
the triumph over them. As in the case of the anatomist, who overlooks
many things in the eagerness of his search after abstract truth; or the
alchemist who, while he is raking into his soot and furnaces, lives in
a golden dream; a lesser gives way to a greater object. But it is
pretended that the painter may be supposed to submit to the unpleasant
part of the process only for the sake of the fame or profit in view. So
far is this from being a true state of the case, that I will venture to
say, in the instance of a friend of mine who has lately succeeded in an
important undertaking in his art, that not all the fame he has acquired,
not all the money he has received from thousands of admiring spectators,
not all the newspaper puffs,--nor even the praise of the _Edinburgh
Review_,--not all these put together ever gave him at any time the same
genuine, undoubted satisfaction as any one half-hour employed in the
ardent and propitious pursuit of his art--in finishing to his heart's
content a foot, a hand, or even a piece of drapery. What is the state
of mind of an artist while he is at work? He is then in the act of
realising the highest idea he can form of beauty or grandeur: he
conceives, he embodies that which he understands and loves best: that
is, he is in full and perfect possession of that which is to him the
source of the highest happiness and intellectual excitement which he can
enjoy.

In short, as a conclusion to this argument, I will mention a
circumstance which fell under my knowledge the other day. A friend had
bought a print of Titian's Mistress, the same to which I have alluded
above. He was anxious to show it me on this account. I told him it was
a spirited engraving, but it had not the look of the original. I believe
he thought this fastidious, till I offered to show him a rough sketch
of it, which I had by me. Having seen this, he said he perceived exactly
what I meant, and could not bear to look at the print afterwards. He had
good sense enough to see the difference in the individual instance;
but a person better acquainted with Titian's manner and with art in
general--that is, of a more cultivated and refined taste--would know
that it was a bad print, without having any immediate model to compare
it with. He would perceive with a glance of the eye, with a sort
of instinctive feeling, that it was hard, and without that bland,
expansive, and nameless expression which always distinguished Titian's
most famous works. Any one who is accustomed to a head in a picture can
never reconcile himself to a print from it; but to the ignorant they are
both the same. To a vulgar eye there is no difference between a Guido
and a daub--between a penny print, or the vilest scrawl, and the most
finished performance. In other words, all that excellence which lies
between these two extremes,--all, at least, that marks the excess above
mediocrity,--all that constitutes true beauty, harmony, refinement,
grandeur, is lost upon the common observer. But it is from this point
that the delight, the glowing raptures of the true adept commence. An
uninformed spectator may like an ordinary drawing better than the
ablest connoisseur; but for that very reason he cannot like the highest
specimens of art so well. The refinements not only of execution but of
truth and nature are inaccessible to unpractised eyes. The exquisite
gradations in a sky of Claude's are not perceived by such persons, and
consequently the harmony cannot be felt. Where there is no conscious
apprehension, there can be no conscious pleasure. Wonder at the first
sights of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but
real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste
and knowledge. 'I would not wish to have your eyes,' said a good-natured
man to a critic who was finding fault with a picture in which the other
saw no blemish. Why so? The idea which prevented him from admiring this
inferior production was a higher idea of truth and beauty which was
ever present with him, and a continual source of pleasing and lofty
contemplations. It may be different in a taste for outward luxuries and
the privations of mere sense; but the idea of perfection, which acts
as an intellectual foil, is always an addition, a support, and a proud
consolation!

Richardson, in his _Essays_, which ought to be better known, has left
some striking examples of the felicity and infelicity of artists, both
as it relates to their external fortune and to the practice of their
art. In speaking of _the knowledge of hands_, he exclaims: 'When one is
considering a picture or a drawing, one at the same time thinks this was
done by him(1) who had many extraordinary endowments of body and mind,
but was withal very capricious; who was honoured in life and death,
expiring in the arms of one of the greatest princes of that age, Francis
I., King of France, who loved him as a friend. Another is of him(2) who
lived a long and happy life, beloved of Charles V. emperor; and many
others of the first princes of Europe. When one has another in hand, we
think this was done by one(3) who so excelled in three arts as that any
of them in that degree had rendered him worthy of immortality; and one
moreover that durst contend with his sovereign (one of the haughtiest
popes that ever was) upon a slight offered to him, and extricated
himself with honour. Another is the work of him(4) who, without any one
exterior advantage but mere strength of genius, had the most sublime
imaginations, and executed them accordingly, yet lived and died
obscurely. Another we shall consider as the work of him(5) who restored
Painting when it had almost sunk; of him whom art made honourable, but
who, neglecting and despising greatness with a sort of cynical pride,
was treated suitably to the figure he gave himself, not his intrinsic
worth; which, (he) not having philosophy enough to bear it, broke
his heart. Another is done by one(6) who (on the contrary) was a fine
gentleman and lived in great magnificence, and was much honoured by his
own and foreign princes; who was a courtier, a statesman, and a painter;
and so much all these, that when he acted in either character, _that_
seemed to be his business, and the others his diversion. I say when
one thus reflects, besides the pleasure arising from the beauties and
excellences of the work, the fine ideas it gives us of natural things,
the noble way of thinking it suggest to us, an additional pleasure
results from the above considerations. But, oh! the pleasure, when a
connoisseur and lover of art has before him a picture or drawing of
which he can say this is the hand, these are the thoughts of him(7)
who was one of the politest, best-natured gentlemen that ever was; and
beloved and assisted by the greatest wits and the greatest men then in
Rome: of him who lived in great fame, honour, and magnificence, and
died extremely lamented; and missed a Cardinal's hat only by dying a
few months too soon; but was particularly esteemed and favoured by two
Popes, the only ones who filled the chair of St. Peter in his time, and
as great men as ever sat there since that apostle, if at least he ever
did: one, in short, who could have been a Leonardo, a Michael Angelo,
a Titian, a Correggio, a Parmegiano, an Annibal, a Rubens, or any other
whom he pleased, but none of them could ever have been a Raffaelle.'

The same writer speaks feelingly of the change in the style of different
artists from their change of fortune, and as the circumstances are
little known I will quote the passage relating to two of them:--

'Guido Reni, from a prince-like affluence of fortune (the just reward of
his angelic works), fell to a condition like that of a hired servant
to one who supplied him with money for what he did at a fixed rate; and
that by his being bewitched by a passion for gaming, whereby he lost
vast sums of money; and even what he got in his state of servitude
by day, he commonly lost at night: nor could he ever be cured of this
cursed madness. Those of his works, therefore, which he did in this
unhappy part of his life may easily be conceived to be in a different
style to what he did before, which in some things, that is, in the airs
of his heads (in the gracious kind) had a delicacy in them peculiar to
himself, and almost more than human. But I must not multiply instances.
Parmegiano is one that alone takes in all the several kinds of
variation, and all the degrees of goodness, from the lowest of the
indifferent up to the sublime. I can produce evident proofs of this in
so easy a gradation, that one cannot deny but that he that did this
might do that, and very probably did so; and thus one may ascend and
descend, like the angels on Jacob's ladder, whose foot was upon the
earth, but its top reached to Heaven.

'And this great man had his unlucky circumstance. He became mad after
the philosopher's stone, and did but very little in painting or drawing
afterwards. Judge what that was, and whether there was not an alteration
of style from what he had done before this devil possessed him. His
creditors endeavoured to exorcise him, and did him some good, for he
set himself to work again in his own way; but if a drawing I have of a
Lucretia be that he made for his last picture, as it probably is (Vasari
says that was the subject of it), it is an evident proof of his decay;
it is good indeed, but it wants much of the delicacy which is commonly
seen in his works; and so I always thought before I knew or imagined it
to be done in this his ebb of genius.'

We have had two artists of our own country whose fate has been as
singular as it was hard: Gandy was a portrait-painter in the beginning
of the last century, whose heads were said to have come near to
Rembrandt's, and he was the undoubted prototype of Sir Joshua Reynolds's
style. Yet his name has scarcely been heard of; and his reputation, like
his works, never extended beyond his own country. What did he think of
himself and of a fame so bounded? Did he ever dream he was indeed an
artist? Or how did this feeling in him differ from the vulgar conceit
of the lowest pretender? The best known of his works is a portrait of an
alderman of Exeter, in some public building in that city.

Poor Dan. Stringer! Forty years ago he had the finest hand and the
clearest eye of any artist of his time, and produced heads and drawings
that would not have disgraced a brighter period in the art. But he fell
a martyr (like Burns) to the society of country gentlemen, and then of
those whom they would consider as more his equals. I saw him many
years ago when he treated the masterly sketches he had by him (one
in particular of the group of citizens in Shakespeare 'swallowing the
tailor's news') as 'bastards of his genius, not his children,' and
seemed to have given up all thoughts of his art. Whether he is since
dead, I cannot say; the world do not so much as know that he ever lived!



NOTES to ESSAY II


(1) Leonardo da Vinci.

(2) Titian.

(3) Michael Angelo.

(4) Correggio.

(5) Annibal Caracci.

(6) Rubens.

(7) Raffaelle.




ESSAY III. ON THE PAST AND FUTURE


I have naturally but little imagination, and am not of a very sanguine
turn of mind. I have some desire to enjoy the present good, and some
fondness for the past; but I am not at all given to build castles in the
air, nor to look forward with much confidence or hope to the brilliant
illusions held out by the future. Hence I have perhaps been led to form
a theory, which is very contrary to the common notions and feelings on
the subject, and which I will here try to explain as well as I can. When
Sterne in the _Sentimental Journey_ told the French Minister, that if
the French people had a fault, it was that they were too serious, the
latter replied that if that was his opinion, he must defend it with all
his might, for he would have all the world against him; so I shall have
enough to do to get well through the present argument.

I cannot see, then, any rational or logical ground for that mighty
difference in the value which mankind generally set upon the past and
future, as if the one was everything, and the other nothing--of no
consequence whatever. On the other hand, I conceive that the past is
as real and substantial a part of our being, that it is as much a _bona
fide_, undeniable consideration in the estimate of human life, as
the future can possibly be. To say that the past is of no importance,
unworthy of a moment's regard, because it has gone by, and is no longer
anything, is an argument that cannot be held to any purpose; for if the
past has ceased to be, and is therefore to be accounted nothing in the
scale of good or evil, the future is yet to come, and has never been
anything. Should any one choose to assert that the present only is of
any value in a strict and positive sense, because that alone has a real
existence, that we should seize the instant good, and give all else to
the winds, I can understand what he means (though perhaps he does not
himself);(1) but I cannot comprehend how this distinction between that
which has a downright and sensible, and that which has only a remote and
airy existence, can be applied to establish the preference of the
future over the past; for both are in this point of view equally ideal,
absolutely nothing, except as they are conceived of by the mind's eye,
and are thus rendered present to the thoughts and feelings. Nay, the one
is even more imaginary, a more fantastic creature of the brain than the
other, and the interest we take in it more shadowy and gratuitous; for
the future, on which we lay so much stress, may never come to pass at
all, that is, may never be embodied into actual existence in the whole
course of events, whereas the past has certainly existed once, has
received the stamp of truth, and left an image of itself behind. It is
so far then placed beyond the possibility of doubt, or as the poet has
it,

 Those joys are lodg'd beyond the reach of fate.

It is not, however, attempted to be denied that though the future is
nothing at present, and has no immediate interest while we are speaking,
yet it is of the utmost consequence in itself, and of the utmost
interest to the individual, because it will have a real existence, and
we have an idea of it as existing in time to come. Well, then, the
past also has no real existence; the actual sensation and the interest
belonging to it are both fled; but it _has had_ a real existence, and
we can still call up a vivid recollection of it as having once been;
and therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a thing perfectly
insignificant in itself, nor wholly indifferent to the mind whether it
ever was or not. Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold
upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us
to existence. Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or
miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been
one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a
dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure
fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and
the records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender
regret to that which was at one time to me my all, when I revive the
glowing image of some bright reality,

 The thoughts of which can never from my heart?

Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my eyes on nothing, when I turn
back in fancy to 'those suns and skies so pure' that lighted up my early
path? Is it to think of nothing, to set an idle value upon nothing, to
think of all that has happened to me, and of all that can ever interest
me? Or, to use the language of a fine poet (who is himself among my
earliest and not least painful recollections)--

 What though the radiance which was once so bright
 Be now for ever vanish'd from my sight,
 Though nothing can bring back the hour
 Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r--

yet am I mocked with a lie when I venture to think of it? Or do I not
drink in and breathe again the air of heavenly truth when I but 'retrace
its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore'? I cannot say with the same
poet--

 And see how dark the backward stream,
 A little moment past so smiling--

for it is the past that gives me most delight and most assurance of
reality. What to me constitutes the great charm of the _Confessions_ of
Rousseau is their turning so much upon this feeling. He seems to gather
up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a
precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the
bead-roll that he tells over and piously worships; he makes a rosary of
the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years. When
he begins the last of the _Reveries of a Solitary Walker_, 'Il y a
aujourd'hui, jour des Paques Fleuris, cinquante ans depuis que j'ai
premier vu Madame Warens,' what a yearning of the soul is implied in
that short sentence! Was all that had happened to him, all that he had
thought and felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted nothing?
Was that long, dim, faded retrospect of years happy or miserable--a
blank that was not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint within
him in trying to grasp all that had once filled it and that had since
vanished, because it was not a prospect into futurity? Was he wrong in
finding more to interest him in it than in the next fifty years--which
he did not live to see? Or if he had, what then? Would they have been
worth thinking of, compared with the times of his youth, of his first
meeting with Madame Warens, with those times which he has traced with
such truth and pure delight 'in our heart's tables'? When 'all the life
of life was flown,' was he not to live the first and best part of it
over again, and once more be all that he then was?--Ye woods that crown
the clear lone brow of Norman Court, why do I revisit ye so oft, and
feel a soothing consciousness of your presence, but that your high tops
waving in the wind recall to me the hours and years that are for ever
fled; that ye renew in ceaseless murmurs the story of long-cherished
hopes and bitter disappointment; that in your solitudes and tangled
wilds I can wander and lose myself as I wander on and am lost in the
solitude of my own heart; and that as your rustling branches give the
loud blast to the waste below--borne on the thoughts of other years, I
can look down with patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which
I feel within! Without that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine
locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking
thoughts as in a dream; without that smile which my heart could never
turn to scorn; without those eyes dark with their own lustre, still
bent on mine, and drawing the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea
of love; without that name trembling in fancy's ear; without that form
gliding before me like Oread or Dryad in fabled groves, what should I
do? how pass away the listless, leaden-footed hours? Then wave, wave on,
ye woods of Tuderley, and lift your high tops in the air; my sighs and
vows uttered by your mystic voice breathe into me my former being, and
enable me to bear the thing I am!--The objects that we have known
in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our
affections, and give us strength to await our future lot. The future is
like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view;
the past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of
unfading interest. What is it in fact that we recur to oftenest? What
subjects do we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future, but the
well-stored past. Othello, the Moor of Venice, amused himself and his
hearers at the house of Signor Brabantio by 'running through the story
of his life even from his boyish days'; and oft 'beguiled them of their
tears, when he did speak of some disastrous stroke which his youth
suffered.' This plan of ingratiating himself would not have answered if
the past had been, like the contents of an old almanac, of no use but
to be thrown aside and forgotten. What a blank, for instance, does the
history of the world for the next six thousand years present to the
mind, compared with that of the last! All that strikes the imagination
or excites any interest in the mighty scene is _what has been_!(2)

***

Neither in itself, then, nor as a subject of general contemplation, has
the future any advantage over the past. But with respect to our grosser
passions and pursuits it has. As far as regards the appeal to the
understanding or the imagination, the past is just as good, as real,
of as much intrinsic and ostensible value as the future; but there is
another principle in the human mind, the principle of action or will;
and of this the past has no hold, the future engrosses it entirely to
itself. It is this strong lever of the affections that gives so powerful
a bias to our sentiments on this subject, and violently transposes the
natural order of our associations. We regret the pleasures we have
lost, and eagerly anticipate those which are to come: we dwell with
satisfaction on the evils from which we have escaped (_Posthaec
meminisse iuvabit_)--and dread future pain. The good that is past is
in this sense like money that is spent, which is of no further use, and
about which we give ourselves little concern. The good we expect is
like a store yet untouched, and in the enjoyment of which we promise
ourselves infinite gratification. What has happened to us we think of
no consequence: what is to happen to us, of the greatest. Why so? Simply
because the one is still in our power, and the other not--because
the efforts of the will to bring any object to pass or to prevent it
strengthen our attachment or aversion to that object--because the pains
and attention bestowed upon anything add to our interest in it--and
because the habitual and earnest pursuit of any end redoubles the
ardour of our expectations, and converts the speculative and indolent
satisfaction we might otherwise feel in it into real passion. Our
regrets, anxiety, and wishes are thrown away upon the past; but the
insisting on the importance of the future is of the utmost use in aiding
our resolutions and stimulating our exertions. If the future were
no more amenable to our wills than the past; if our precautions, our
sanguine schemes, our hopes and fears were of as little avail in the one
case as the other; if we could neither soften our minds to pleasure, nor
steel our fortitude to the resistance of pain beforehand; if all objects
drifted along by us like straws or pieces of wood in a river, the will
being purely passive, and as little able to avert the future as to
arrest the past, we should in that case be equally indifferent to both;
that is, we should consider each as they affected the thoughts and
imagination with certain sentiments of approbation or regret, but
without the importunity of action, the irritation of the will, throwing
the whole weight of passion and prejudice into one scale, and leaving
the other quite empty. While the blow is coming, we prepare to meet it,
we think to ward off or break its force, we arm ourselves with patience
to endure what cannot be avoided, we agitate ourselves with fifty
needless alarms about it; but when the blow is struck, the pang is over,
the struggle is no longer necessary, and we cease to harass or torment
ourselves about it more than we can help. It is not that the one belongs
to the future and the other to time past; but that the one is a subject
of action, of uneasy apprehension, of strong passion, and that the other
has passed wholly out of the sphere of action into the region of

 Calm contemplation and majestic pains.(3)

It would not give a man more concern to know that he should be put to
the rack a year hence, than to recollect that he had been put to it a
year ago, but that he hopes to avoid the one, whereas he must sit down
patiently under the consciousness of the other. In this hope he wears
himself out in vain struggles with fate, and puts himself to the rack
of his imagination every day he has to live in the meanwhile. When the
event is so remote or so independent of the will as to set aside the
necessity of immediate action, or to baffle all attempts to defeat it,
it gives us little more disturbance or emotion than if it had already
taken place, or were something to happen in another state of being, or
to an indifferent person. Criminals are observed to grow more anxious as
their trial approaches; but after their sentence is passed, they become
tolerably resigned, and generally sleep sound the night before its
execution.

It in some measure confirms this theory, that men attach more or less
importance to past and future events according as they are more or less
engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune
to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the
past, for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have
nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as
in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real as
that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the remembrance of
it is left. The past still lives in the memory of those who have
leisure to look back upon the way that they have trod, and can from
it 'catch glimpses that may make them less forlorn.' The turbulence of
action, and uneasiness of desire, must point to the future: it is only
in the quiet innocence of shepherds, in the simplicity of pastoral ages,
that a tomb was found with this inscription--'I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN!'

Though I by no means think that our habitual attachment to life is in
exact proportion to the value of the gift, yet I am not one of those
splenetic persons who affect to think it of no value at all. _Que peu de
chose est la vie humaine_, is an exclamation in the mouths of moralists
and philosophers, to which I cannot agree. It is little, it is short,
it is not worth having, if we take the last hour, and leave out all that
has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the subject. Such
calculators seem to say that life is nothing when it is over, and that
may in their sense be true. If the old rule--_Respice finem_--were to be
made absolute, and no one could be pronounced fortunate till the day
of his death, there are few among us whose existence would, upon those
conditions, be much to be envied. But this is not a fair view of the
case. A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of
the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a _little matter_,
whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish
conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated desires or
forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a man never was
young because he has grown old, or never lived because he is now dead.
The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last
steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last
stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor last hour of our
existence, but the space that parts these two--not our exit nor our
entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think while there--
that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it. Indeed it
would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human life, the
infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and
fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the
hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it
is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of
events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual
perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in
its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing!
It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to
hold its striking groups, its endless subjects! It is light as vanity,
and yet if all its weary moments, if all its head and heart aches were
compressed into one, what fortitude would not be overwhelmed with the
blow! What a huge heap, a 'huge, dumb heap,' of wishes, thoughts,
feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is
composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and
intense, often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or
reading, for instance! How many such days are there in a year, how many
years in a long life, still occupied with something interesting, still
recalling some old impression, still recurring to some difficult
question and making progress in it, every step accompanied with a sense
of power, and every moment conscious of 'the high endeavour or the glad
success'; for the mind seizes only on that which keeps it employed, and
is wound up to a certain pitch of pleasurable excitement or lively
solicitude, by the necessity of its own nature. The division of the map
of life into its component parts is beautifully made by King Henry VI.:--

 Oh God! methinks it were a happy life
 To be no better than a homely swain,
 To sit upon a hill as I do now,
 To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
 Thereby to see the minutes how they run
 How many make the hour full complete,
 How many hours bring about the day,
 How many days will finish up the year,
 How many years a mortal man may live:
 When this is known, then to divide the times;
 So many hours must I tend my flock,
 So many hours must I take my rest,
 So many hours must I contemplate,
 So many hours must I sport myself;
 So many days my ewes have been with young,
 So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean,
 So many months ere I shall shear the fleece:
 So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years
 Past over to the end they were created,
 Would bring grey hairs unto a quiet grave.

I myself am neither a king nor a shepherd: books have been my fleecy
charge, and my thoughts have been my subjects. But these have found me
sufficient employment at the time, and enough to think of for the time
to come.

The passions contract and warp the natural progress of life. They
paralyse all of it that is not devoted to their tyranny and caprice.
This makes the difference between the laughing innocence of childhood,
the pleasantness of youth, and the crabbedness of age. A load of cares
lies like a weight of guilt upon the mind: so that a man of business
often has all the air, the distraction and restlessness and hurry of
feeling of a criminal. A knowledge of the world takes away the freedom
and simplicity of thought as effectually as the contagion of its
example. The artlessness and candour of our early years are open to all
impressions alike, because the mind is not clogged and preoccupied with
other objects. Our pleasures and our pains come single, make room for
one another, and the spring of the mind is fresh and unbroken, its
aspect clear and unsullied. Hence 'the tear forgot as soon as shed,
the sunshine of the breast.' But as we advance farther, the will
gets greater head. We form violent antipathies and indulge exclusive
preferences. We make up our minds to some one thing, and if we cannot
have that, will have nothing. We are wedded to opinion, to fancy,
to prejudice; which destroys the soundness of our judgments, and the
serenity and buoyancy of our feelings. The chain of habit coils itself
round the heart, like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it. It grows rigid
and callous; and for the softness and elasticity of childhood, full of
proud flesh and obstinate tumours. The violence and perversity of our
passions come in more and more to overlay our natural sensibility and
well-grounded affections; and we screw ourselves up to aim only at those
things which are neither desirable nor practicable. Thus life passes
away in the feverish irritation of pursuit and the certainty of
disappointment. By degrees, nothing but this morbid state of feeling
satisfies us: and all common pleasures and cheap amusements are
sacrificed to the demon of ambition, avarice, or dissipation. The
machine is overwrought: the parching heat of the veins dries up and
withers the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy; and any pause, any
release from the rack of ecstasy on which we are stretched, seems more
insupportable than the pangs which we endure. We are suspended between
tormenting desires and the horrors of _ennui_. The impulse of the will,
like the wheels of a carriage going down hill, becomes too strong for
the driver, Reason, and cannot be stopped nor kept within bounds. Some
idea, some fancy, takes possession of the brain; and however ridiculous,
however distressing, however ruinous, haunts us by a sort of fascination
through life.

Not only is this principle of excessive irritability to be seen at work
in our more turbulent passions and pursuits, but even in the formal
study of arts and sciences, the same thing takes place, and undermines
the repose and happiness of life. The eagerness of pursuit overcomes the
satisfaction to result from the accomplishment. The mind is overstrained
to attain its purpose; and when it is attained, the ease and alacrity
necessary to enjoy it are gone. The irritation of action does not cease
and go down with the occasion for it; but we are first uneasy to get to
the end of our work, and then uneasy for want of something to do. The
ferment of the brain does not of itself subside into pleasure and soft
repose. Hence the disposition to strong stimuli observable in persons of
much intellectual exertion to allay and carry off the over-excitement.
The _improvisatori_ poets (it is recorded by Spence in his _Anecdotes
of Pope_) cannot sleep after an evening's continued display of their
singular and difficult art. The rhymes keep running in their head in
spite of themselves, and will not let them rest. Mechanics and labouring
people never know what to do with themselves on a Sunday, though they
return to their work with greater spirit for the relief, and look
forward to it with pleasure all the week. Sir Joshua Reynolds was never
comfortable out of his painting-room, and died of chagrin and regret
because he could not paint on to the last moment of his life. He used
to say that he could go on retouching a picture for ever, as long as it
stood on his easel; but as soon as it was once fairly out of the house,
he never wished to see it again. An ingenious artist of our own time has
been heard to declare, that if ever the Devil got him into his clutches,
he would set him to copy his own pictures. Thus secure, self-complacent
retrospect to what is done is nothing, while the anxious, uneasy looking
forward to what is to come is everything. We are afraid to dwell upon
the past, lest it should retard our future progress; the indulgence of
ease is fatal to excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of
being!



NOTES to ESSAY III


(1) If we take away from the _present_ the moment that is just gone by
and the moment that is next to come, how much of it will be left for
this plain, practical theory to rest upon? Their solid basis of sense
and reality will reduce itself to a pin's point, a hair line, on which
our moral balance-masters will have some difficulty to maintain their
footing without falling over on either side.

(2) A treatise on the Millennium is dull; but who was ever weary of
reading the fables of the Golden Age? On my once observing I should like
to have been Claude, a person said, 'they should not, for that then
by this time it would have been all over with them.' As if it could
possibly signify when we live (save and excepting the present minute),
or as if the value of human life decreased or increased with successive
centuries. At that rate, we had better have our life still to come at
some future period, and so postpone our existence century after century
_ad infinitum_.

(3) In like manner, though we know that an event must have taken place
at a distance, long before we can hear the result, yet as long as we
remain in Ignorance of it, we irritate ourselves about it, and suffer
all the agonies of suspense, as if it was still to come; but as soon as
our uncertainty is removed, our fretful impatience vanishes, we resign
ourselves to fate, and make up our minds to what has happened as well as
we can.




ESSAY IV. ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE


We hear it maintained by people of more gravity than understanding, that
genius and taste are strictly reducible to rules, and that there is a
rule for everything. So far is it from being true that the finest breath
of fancy is a definable thing, that the plainest common sense is only
what Mr. Locke would have called a _mixed mode_, subject to a particular
sort of acquired and undefinable tact. It is asked, "If you do not know
the rule by which a thing is done, how can you be sure of doing it a
second time?" And the answer is, "If you do not know the muscles by the
help of which you walk, how is it you do not fall down at every step you
take?" In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling,
and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things
on the mind, from which impression is true and well founded, though you
may not be able to analyse or account for it in the several particulars.
In a gesture you use, in a look you see, in a tone you hear, you judge
of the expression, propriety, and meaning from habit, not from reason
or rules; that is to say, from innumerable instances of like gestures,
looks, and tones, in innumerable other circumstances, variously
modified, which are too many and too refined to be all distinctly
recollected, but which do not therefore operate the less powerfully
upon the mind and eye of taste. Shall we say that these impressions (the
immediate stamp of nature) do not operate in a given manner till they
are classified and reduced to rules, or is not the rule itself grounded,
upon the truth and certainty of that natural operation?

How then can the distinction of the understanding as to the manner in
which they operate be necessary to their producing their due and uniform
effect upon the mind? If certain effects did not regularly arise out of
certain causes in mind as well as matter, there could be no rule given
for them: nature does not follow the rule, but suggests it. Reason is
the interpreter and critic of nature and genius, not their law-giver and
judge. He must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do
not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding, or who does
not feel and know much more than he can give a reason for. Hence the
distinction between eloquence and wisdom, between ingenuity and common
sense. A man may be dexterous and able in explaining the grounds of his
opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, because he only sees one-half
of a subject. Another may feel the whole weight of a question, nothing
relating to it may be lost upon him, and yet he may be able to give no
account of the manner in which it affects him, or to drag his reasons
from their silent lurking-places. This last will be a wise man, though
neither a logician nor rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. Johnson
in argument; that is, in assigning the specific grounds of his opinions:
Dr. Johnson was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the airy,
intuitive faculty with which he skimmed the surfaces of things, and
unconsciously formed his Opinions. Common sense is the just result
of the sum total of such unconscious impressions in the ordinary
occurrences of life, as they are treasured up in the memory, and
called out by the occasion. Genius and taste depend much upon the same
principle exercised on loftier ground and in more unusual combinations.

I am glad to shelter myself from the charge of affectation or
singularity in this view of an often debated but ill-understood point,
by quoting a passage from Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Discourses_, which is
full, and, I think, conclusive to the purpose. He says:--

'I observe, as a fundamental ground common to all the Arts with which we
have any concern in this Discourse, that they address themselves only to
two faculties of the mind, its imagination and its sensibility.

'All theories which attempt to direct or to control the Art, upon any
principles falsely called rational, which we form to ourselves upon
a supposition of what ought in reason to be the end or means of Art,
independent of the known first effect produced by objects on the
imagination, must be false and delusive. For though it may appear
bold to say it, the imagination is here the residence of truth. If the
imagination be affected, the conclusion is fairly drawn; if it be not
affected, the reasoning is erroneous, because the end is not obtained;
the effect itself being the test, and the only test, of the truth and
efficacy of the means.

'There is in the commerce of life, as in Art, a sagacity which is
far from being contradictory to right reason, and is superior to any
occasional exercise of that faculty which supersedes it and does not
wait for the slow progress of deduction, but goes at once, by what
appears a kind of intuition, to the conclusion. A man endowed with this
faculty feels and acknowledges the truth, though it is not always in his
power, perhaps, to give a reason for it; because he cannot recollect and
bring before him all the materials that gave birth to his opinion;
for very many and very intricate considerations may unite to form the
principle, even of small and minute parts, involved in, or dependent on,
a great many things:--though these in process of time are forgotten, the
right impression still remains fixed in his mind.

'This impression is the result of the accumulated experience of our
whole life, and has been collected, we do not always know how or when.
But this mass of collective observation, however acquired, ought to
prevail over that reason, which, however powerfully exerted on any
particular occasion, will probably comprehend but a partial view of the
subject; and our conduct in life, as well as in the arts, is or ought to
be generally governed by this habitual reason: it is our happiness that
we are enabled to draw on such funds. If we were obliged to enter into a
theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be
at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

'It appears to me therefore' (continues Sir Joshua) 'that our first
thoughts, that is, the effect which any thing produces on our minds on
its first appearance, is never to be forgotten; and it demands for that
reason, because it is the first, to be laid up with care. If this be not
done, the artist may happen to impose on himself by partial reasoning;
by a cold consideration of those animated thoughts which proceed, not
perhaps from caprice or rashness (as he may afterwards conceit), but
from the fulness of his mind, enriched with the copious stores of all
the various inventions which he had ever seen, or had ever passed in
his mind. These ideas are infused into his design, without any conscious
effort; but if he be not on his guard, he may reconsider and correct
them, till the whole matter is reduced to a commonplace invention.

'This is sometimes the effect of what I mean to caution you against;
that is to say, an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling,
in favour of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories, and of
principles that seem to apply to the design in hand, without considering
those general impressions on the fancy in which real principles of
_sound reason_, and of much more weight and importance, are involved,
and, as it were, lie hid under the appearance of a sort of vulgar
sentiment. Reason, without doubt, must ultimately determine everything;
at this minute it is required to inform us when that very reason is to
give way to feeling.'(1)

Mr. Burke, by whom the foregoing train of thinking was probably
suggested, has insisted on the same thing, and made rather a
perverse use of it in several parts of his _Reflections on the French
Revolution_; and Windham in one of his _Speeches_ has clenched it into
an aphorism--'There is nothing so true as habit.' Once more I would
say, common sense is tacit reason. Conscience is the same tacit sense
of right and wrong, or the impression of our moral experience and
moral apprehensions on the mind, which, because it works unseen, yet
certainly, we suppose to be an instinct, implanted in the mind; as we
sometimes attribute the violent operations of our passions, of which we
can neither trace the source nor assign the reason, to the instigation
of the Devil!

I shall here try to go more at large into this subject, and to give such
instances and illustrations of it as occur to me.

One of the persons who had rendered themselves obnoxious to Government
and been included in a charge for high treason in the year 1794, had
retired soon after into Wales to write an epic poem and enjoy the
luxuries of a rural life. In his peregrinations through that beautiful
scenery, he had arrived one fine morning at the inn at Llangollen, in
the romantic valley of that name. He had ordered his breakfast, and was
sitting at the window in all the dalliance of expectation when a
face passed, of which he took no notice at the instant--but when his
breakfast was brought in presently after, he found his appetite for
it gone--the day had lost its freshness in his eye--he was uneasy and
spiritless; and without any cause that he could discover, a total change
had taken place in his feelings. While he was trying to account for this
odd circumstance, the same face passed again--it was the face of Taylor
the spy; and he was longer at a loss to explain the difficulty. He had
before caught only a transient glimpse, a passing side-view of the face;
but though this was not sufficient to awaken a distinct idea in his
memory, his feelings, quicker and surer, had taken the alarm; a string
had been touched that gave a jar to his whole frame, and would not let
him rest, though he could not at all tell what was the matter with him.
To the flitting, shadowy, half-distinguished profile that had glided by
his window was linked unconsciously and mysteriously, but inseparably,
the impression of the trains that had been laid for him by this
person;--in this brief moment, in this dim, illegible short-hand of
the mind he had just escaped the speeches of the Attorney and
Solicitor-General over again; the gaunt figure of Mr. Pitt glared by
him; the walls of a prison enclosed him; and he felt the hands of the
executioner near him, without knowing it till the tremor and disorder of
his nerves gave information to his reasoning faculties that all was
not well within. That is, the same state of mind was recalled by one
circumstance in the series of association that had been produced by the
whole set of circumstances at the time, though the manner in which this
was done was not immediately perceptible. In other words, the feeling of
pleasure or pain, of good or evil, is revived, and acts instantaneously
upon the mind, before we have time to recollect the precise objects
which have originally given birth to it.(2) The incident here mentioned
was merely, then, one case of what the learned understand by the
_association of ideas_: but all that is meant by feeling or common sense
is nothing but the different cases of the association of ideas, more
or less true to the impression of the original circumstances, as reason
begins with the more formal development of those circumstances, or
pretends to account for the different cases of the association of ideas.
But it does not follow that the dumb and silent pleading of the former
(though sometimes, nay often, mistaken) is less true than that of its
babbling interpreter, or that we are never to trust its dictates without
consulting the express authority of reason. Both are imperfect, both are
useful in their way, and therefore both are best together, to correct or
to confirm one another. It does not appear that in the singular instance
above mentioned, the sudden impression on the mind was superstition or
fancy, though it might have been thought so, had it not been proved by
the event to have a real physical and moral cause. Had not the same face
returned again, the doubt would never have been properly cleared up,
but would have remained a puzzle ever after, or perhaps have been soon
forgot.--By the law of association as laid down by physiologists, any
impression in a series can recall any other impression in that series
without going through the whole in order; so that the mind drops the
intermediate links, and passes on rapidly and by stealth to the more
striking effects of pleasure or pain which have naturally taken the
strongest hold of it. By doing this habitually and skillfully with
respect to the various impressions and circumstances with which our
experience makes us acquainted, it forms a series of unpremeditated
conclusions on almost all subjects that can be brought before it, as
just as they are of ready application to human life; and common sense is
the name of this body of unassuming but practical wisdom. Common sense,
however, is an impartial, instinctive result of truth and nature, and
will therefore bear the test and abide the scrutiny of the most severe
and patient reasoning. It is indeed incomplete without it. By ingrafting
reason on feeling, we 'make assurance double sure.'

 'Tis the last key-stone that makes up the arch...
 Then stands it a triumphal mark!  Then men
 Observe the strength, the height, the why and when
 It was erected; and still walking under,
 Meet some new matter to look up, and wonder.


But reason, not employed to interpret nature, and to improve and perfect
common sense and experience, is, for the most part, a building without a
foundation. The criticism exercised by reason, then, on common sense may
be as severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as it is severe.
Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy or
bigoted prejudice. It is systematic, ostentatious in error, closes up
the avenues of knowledge, and 'shuts the gates of wisdom on mankind.' It
is not enough to show that there is no reason for a thing that we do
not see the reason of it: if the common feeling, if the involuntary
prejudice sets in strong in favour of it, if, in spite of all we can do,
there is a lurking suspicion on the side of our first impressions,
we must try again, and believe that truth is mightier than we. So, in
ordering a definition of any subject, if we feel a misgiving that there
is any fact or circumstance emitted, but of which we have only a vague
apprehension, like a name we cannot recollect, we must ask for more
time, and not cut the matter short by an arrogant assumption of the
point in dispute. Common sense thus acts as a check-weight on sophistry,
and suspends our rash and superficial judgments. On the other hand, if
not only no reason can be given for a thing, but every reason is clear
against it, and we can account from ignorance, from authority, from
interest, from different causes, for the prevalence of an opinion or
sentiment, then we have a right to conclude that we have mistaken
a prejudice for an instinct, or have confounded a false and partial
impression with the fair and unavoidable inference from general
observation. Mr. Burke said that we ought not to reject every prejudice,
but should separate the husk of prejudice from the truth it encloses,
and so try to get at the kernel within; and thus far he was right. But
he was wrong in insisting that we are to cherish our prejudices 'because
they are prejudices': for if all are well founded, there is no occasion
to inquire into their origin or use; and he who sets out to philosophise
upon them, or make the separation Mr. Burke talks of in this spirit
and with this previous determination, will be very likely to mistake
a maggot or a rotten canker for the precious kernel of truth, as was
indeed the case with our Political sophist.

There is nothing more distinct than common sense and vulgar opinion.
Common sense is only a judge of things that fall under common
observation, or immediately come home to the business and bosoms of men.
This is of the very essence of its principle, the basis of its
pretensions. It rests upon the simple process of feeling,--it anchors
in experience. It is not, nor it cannot be, the test of abstract,
speculative opinions. But half the opinions and prejudices of mankind,
those which they hold in the most unqualified approbation and which
have been instilled into them under the strongest sanctions, are of this
latter kind, that is, opinions not which they have ever thought, known,
or felt one tittle about, but which they have taken up on trust from
others, which have been palmed on their understandings by fraud or
force, and which they continue to hold at the peril of life, limb,
property, and character, with as little warrant from common sense in the
first instance as appeal to reason in the last. The _ultima ratio regum_
proceeds upon a very different plea. Common sense is neither priestcraft
nor state-policy. Yet 'there's the rub that makes absurdity of so long
life,' and, at the same time, gives the sceptical philosophers the
advantage over us. Till nature has fair play allowed it, and is not
adulterated by political and polemical quacks (as it so often has been),
it is impossible to appeal to it as a defence against the errors and
extravagances of mere reason. If we talk of common sense, we are twitted
with vulgar prejudice, and asked how we distinguish the one from the
other; but common and received opinion is indeed 'a compost heap' of
crude notions, got together by the pride and passions of individuals,
and reason is itself the thrall or manumitted slave of the same lordly
and besotted masters, dragging its servile chain, or committing all
sorts of Saturnalian licenses, the moment it feels itself freed from
it.--If ten millions of Englishmen are furious in thinking themselves
right in making war upon thirty millions of Frenchmen, and if the last
are equally bent upon thinking the others always in the wrong, though it
is a common and national prejudice, both opinions cannot be the dictate
of good sense; but it may be the infatuated policy of one or both
governments to keep their subjects always at variance. If a few
centuries ago all Europe believed in the infallibility of the Pope,
this was not an opinion derived from the proper exercise or erroneous
direction of the common sense of the people; common sense had nothing to
do with it--they believed whatever their priests told them. England at
present is divided into Whigs and Tories, Churchmen and Dissenters; both
parties have numbers on their side; but common sense and party spirit
are two different things. Sects and heresies are upheld partly by
sympathy, and partly by the love of contradiction; if there was nobody
of a different way of thinking, they would fall to pieces of themselves.
If a whole court say the same thing, this is no proof that they think
it, but that the individual at the head of the court has said it; if a
mob agree for a while in shouting the same watchword, this is not to
me an example of the _sensus communis_, they only repeat what they have
heard repeated by others. If indeed a large proportion of the people are
in want of food, of clothing, of shelter--if they are sick, miserable,
scorned, oppressed--and if each feeling it in himself, they all say so
with one voice and one heart, and lift up their hands to second their
appeal, this I should say was but the dictate of common sense, the cry
of nature. But to waive this part of the argument, which it is needless
to push farther,--l believe that the best way to instruct mankind is
not by pointing out to them their mutual errors, but by teaching them
to think rightly on indifferent matters, where they will listen with
patience in order to be amused, and where they do not consider a
definition or a syllogism as the greatest injury you can offer them.

There is no rule for expression. It is got at solely by _feeling_, that
is, on the principle of the association of ideas, and by transferring
what has been found to hold good in one case (with the necessary
modifications) to others. A certain look has been remarked strongly
indicative of a certain passion or trait of character, and we attach the
same meaning to it or are affected in the same pleasurable or painful
manner by it, where it exists in a less degree, though we can define
neither the look itself nor the modification of it. Having got the
general clue, the exact result may be left to the imagination to
vary, to extenuate or aggravate it according to circumstances. In the
admirable profile of Oliver Cromwell after ----, the drooping eyelids,
as if drawing a veil over the fixed, penetrating glance, the nostrils
somewhat distended, and lips compressed so as hardly to let the breath
escape him, denote the character of the man for high-reaching policy
and deep designs as plainly as they can be written. How is it that we
decipher this expression in the face? First, by feeling it. And how is
it that we feel it? Not by re-established rules, but by the instinct of
analogy, by the principle of association, which is subtle and sure in
proportion as it is variable and indefinite. A circumstance, apparently
of no value, shall alter the whole interpretation to be put upon an
expression or action and it shall alter it thus powerfully because
in proportion to its very insignificance it shows a strong general
principle at work that extends in its ramifications to the smallest
things. This in fact will make all the difference between minuteness
and subtlety or refinement; for a small or trivial effect may in given
circumstances imply the operation of a great power. Stillness may be the
result of a blow too powerful to be resisted; silence may be imposed
by feelings too agonising for utterance. The minute, the trifling
and insipid is that which is little in itself, in its causes and
its consequences; the subtle and refined is that which is slight and
evanescent at first sight, but which mounts up to a mighty sum in
the end, which is an essential part of an important whole, which has
consequences greater than itself, and where more is meant than meets
the eye or ear. We complain sometimes of littleness in a Dutch picture,
where there are a vast number of distinct parts and objects, each small
in itself, and leading to nothing else. A sky of Claude's cannot fall
under this censure, where one imperceptible gradation is as it were
the scale to another, where the broad arch of heaven is piled up of
endlessly intermediate gold and azure tints, and where an infinite
number of minute, scarce noticed particulars blend and melt into
universal harmony. The subtlety in Shakespear, of which there is an
immense deal scattered everywhere up and down, is always the instrument
of passion, the vehicle of character. The action of a man pulling his
hat over his forehead is indifferent enough in itself, and generally
speaking, may mean anything or nothing; but in the circumstances in
which Macduff is placed, it is neither insignificant nor equivocal.

 What! man, ne'er pull your hat upon your brows, etc.

It admits but of one interpretation or inference, that which follows
it:--

 Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak,
 Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

The passage in the same play, in which Duncan and his attendants are
introduced, commenting on the beauty and situation of Macbeth's castle,
though familiar in itself, has been often praised for the striking
contrast it presents to the scenes which follow.--The same look in
different circumstances may convey a totally different expression. Thus
the eye turned round to look at you without turning the head indicates
generally slyness or suspicion; but if this is combined with large
expanded eyelids or fixed eyebrows, as we see it in Titian's pictures,
it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything
of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases it may imply
merely indolent, enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely's portraits of
women. The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn
to the expression. How should there be a rule for all this beforehand,
seeing it depends on circumstances ever varying, and scarce discernible
but by their effect on the mind? Rules are applicable to abstractions,
but expression is concrete and individual. We know the meaning of
certain looks, and we feel how they modify one another in conjunction.
But we cannot have a separate rule to judge of all their combinations
in different degrees and circumstances, without foreseeing all those
combinations, which is impossible; or if we did foresee them, we should
only be where we are, that is, we could only make the rule as we now
judge without it, from imagination and the feeling of the moment. The
absurdity of reducing expression to a preconcerted system was perhaps
never more evidently shown than in a picture of the Judgment of Solomon
by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once heard admired for the
skill and discrimination of the artist in making all the women, who are
ranged on one side, in the greatest alarm at the sentence of the judge,
while all the men on the opposite side see through the design of it.
Nature does not go to work or cast things in a regular mould in this
sort of way. I once heard a person remark of another, 'He has an eye
like a vicious horse.' This was a fair analogy. We all, I believe, have
noticed the look of a horse's eye just before he is going to bite or
kick. But will any one, therefore, describe to me exactly what that
look is? It was the same acute observer that said of a self-sufficient.,
prating music-master, 'He talks on all subjects _at sight_'--which
expressed the man at once by an allusion to his profession, the
coincidence was indeed perfect. Nothing else could compare with the easy
assurance with which this gentleman would volunteer an explanation of
things of which he was most ignorant, but the _nonchalance_ with which
a musician sits down to a harpsichord to play a piece he has never seen
before. My physiognomical friend would not have hit on this mode of
illustration without knowing the profession of the subject of his
criticism; but having this hint given him, it instantly suggested itself
to his 'sure trailing.' The manner of the speaker was evident; and the
association of the music-master sitting down to play at sight,
lurking in his mind, was immediately called out by the strength of his
impression of the character. The feeling of character and the felicity
of invention in explaining it were nearly allied to each other. The
first was so wrought up and running over that the transition to the last
was very easy and unavoidable. When Mr. Kean was so much praised for the
action of Richard in his last struggle with his triumphant antagonist,
where he stands, after his sword is wrested from him, with his hands
stretched out, 'as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very
phantoms of his despair had a withering power,' he said that he borrowed
it from seeing the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver.
This assuredly did not lessen the merit of it. Thus it ever is with the
man of real genius. He has the feeling of truth already shrined in his
own breast, and his eye is still bent on Nature to see how she expresses
herself. When we thoroughly understand the subject it is easy to
translate from one language into another. Raphael, in muffling up the
figure of Elymas the Sorcerer in his garments, appears to have extended
the idea of blindness even to his clothes. Was this design? Probably
not; but merely the feeling of analogy thoughtlessly suggesting this
device, which being so suggested was retained and carried on, because
it flattered or fell in with the original feeling. The tide of passion,
when strong, overflows and gradually insinuates itself into all nooks
and corners of the mind. Invention (of the best kind) I therefore do not
think so distinct a thing from feeling as some are apt to imagine. The
springs of pure feeling will rise and fill the moulds of fancy that are
fit to receive it. There are some striking coincidences of colour
in well-composed pictures, as in a straggling weed in the foreground
streaked with blue or red to answer to a blue or red drapery, to the
tone of the flesh or an opening in the sky:--not that this was intended,
or done by the rule (for then it would presently become affected and
ridiculous), but the eye, being imbued with a certain colour, repeats
and varies it from a natural sense of harmony, a secret craving and
appetite for beauty, which in the same manner soothes and gratifies the
eye of taste, though the cause is not understood. _Tact, finesse_,
is nothing but the being completely aware of the feeling belonging to
certain situations, passions, etc., and the being consequently sensible
to their slightest indications or movements in others. One of the most
remarkable instances of this sort of faculty is the following story,
told of Lord Shaftesbury, the grandfather of the author of the
_Characteristics_. He had been to dine with Lady Clarendon and her
daughter, who was at that time privately married to the Duke of York
(afterwards James II.), and as he returned home with another nobleman
who had accompanied him, he suddenly turned to him, and said, 'Depend
upon it, the Duke has married Hyde's daughter.' His companion could
not comprehend what he meant; but on explaining himself, he said, 'Her
mother behaved to her with an attention and a marked respect that it is
impossible to account for in any other way; and I am sure of it.' His
conjecture shortly afterwards proved to be the truth. This was carrying
the prophetic spirit of common sense as far as it could go.



NOTES to ESSAY IV


(1) Discourse XIII. vol. ii. pp. 113-117.

(2) Sentiment has the same source as that here pointed out. Thus the
_Ranz des Vaches_, which has such an effect on the minds of the Swiss
peasantry, when its well-known sound is heard, does not merely recall
to them the idea of their country, but has associated with it a thousand
nameless ideas, numberless touches of private affection, of early hope,
romantic adventure and national pride, all which rush in (with mingled
currents) to swell the tide of fond remembrance, and make them languish
or die for home. What a fine instrument the human heart is! Who shall
touch it? Who shall fathom it? Who shall 'sound it from Its lowest note
to the top of its compass?' Who shall put his hand among the strings,
and explain their wayward music? The heart alone, when touched by
sympathy, trembles and responds to their hidden meaning!




ESSAY V. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED


Genius or originality is, for the most part, _some strong quality in
the mind, answering to and bringing out some new and striking quality in
nature._

Imagination is, more properly, the power of carrying on a given feeling
into other situations, which must be done best according to the hold
which the feeling itself has taken of the mind.(1) In new and unknown
combinations the impression must act by sympathy, and not by rule, but
there can be no sympathy where there is no passion, no original
interest. The personal interest may in some cases oppress and
circumscribe the imaginative faculty, as in the instance of Rousseau:
but in general the strength and consistency of the imagination will be
in proportion to the strength and depth of feeling; and it is rarely
that a man even of lofty genius will be able to do more than carry on
his own feelings and character, or some prominent and ruling passion,
into fictitious and uncommon situations. Milton has by allusion embodied
a great part of his political and personal history in the chief
characters and incidents of _Paradise Lost_. He has, no doubt,
wonderfully adapted and heightened them, but the elements are the same;
you trace the bias and opinions of the man in the creations of the poet
above the definition of genius above the definition of genius.
Shakespear (almost alone) seems to have a man of genius raised above the
definition of genious. 'Born universal heir to all humanity,' he was 'as
one, in suffering all who suffered nothing'; with a perfect sympathy
with all things, yet alike indifferent to all: who did not tamper with
Nature or warp her to his own purposes; who 'knew all qualities with a
learned spirit,' instead of judging of them by his own predilections;
and was rather 'a pipe for the Muse's finger to play what stop she
pleasd,' than anxious to set up any character or pretensions of his own.
His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into
whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object
from the exact point of view in which others would see it. He was the
Proteus of human intellect. Genius in ordinary is a more obstinate and
less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed,
quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing
else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all excellence but
its own. It is just the reverse of the cameleon; for it does not borrow,
but lends its colour to all about it; or like the glow-worm, discloses a
little circle of gorgeous light in the twilight of obscurity, in the
night of intellect that surrounds it. So did Rembrandt. If ever there
was a man of genius, he was one, in the proper sense of the term. He
lived in and revealed to otters a world of his own, and might be said to
have invented a new view of nature. He did not discover things _out of_
nature, in fiction or fairy land, or make a voyage to the moon 'to
descry new lands, rivers or mountains in her spotty globe,' but saw
things _in_ nature that every one had missed before him and gave others
eyes to see them with. This is the test and triumph of originality, not
to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily
never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and
under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for
want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind,
to seize and retain it. Rembrandt's conquests were not over the _ideal_,
but the real. He did not contrive a new story or character, but we
nearly owe to him a fifth part of painting, the knowledge of
_chiaroscuro_--a distinct power and element in art and nature. He had a
steadiness, a firm keeping of mind and eye, that first stood the shock
of 'fierce extremes' in light and shade, or reconciled the greatest
obscurity and the greatest brilliancy into perfect harmony; and he
therefore was the first to hazard this appearance upon canvas, and give
full effect to what he saw and delighted in. He was led to adopt this
style of broad and startling contrast from its congeniality to his own
feelings: his mind grappled with that which afforded the best exercise
to its master-powers: he was bold in act, because he was urged on by a
strong native impulse. Originality is then nothing but nature and
feeling working in the mind. A man does not affect to be original: he is
so, because he cannot help it, and often without knowing it. This
extraordinary artist indeed might be said to have had a particular organ
for colour. His eye seemed to come in contact with it as a feeling, to
lay hold of it as a substance, rather than to contemplate it as a visual
object. The texture of his landscapes is 'of the earth, earthy'--his
clouds are humid, heavy, slow; his shadows are 'darkness that may be
felt,' a 'palpable obscure'; his lights are lumps of liquid splendour!
There is something more in this than can be accounted for from design or
accident: Rembrandt was not a man made up of two or three rules and
directions for acquiring genius.

I am afraid I shall hardly write so satisfactory a character of Mr.
Wordsworth, though he too, like Rembrandt, has a faculty of making
something out of nothing, that is, out of himself, by the medium through
which he sees and with which he clothes the barrenest subject. Mr.
Wordsworth is the last man to 'look abroad into universality,' if that
alone constituted genius: he looks at home into himself, and is 'content
with riches fineless.' He would in the other case be 'poor as winter,'
if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is the greatest,
that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because he is
the greatest egotist. He is 'self-involved, not dark.' He sits in the
centre of his own being, and there 'enjoys bright day.' He does not
waste a thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively
and wholly to himself is foreign to his views. He contemplates a
whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line of
his personal identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all other
interests, with scorn and impatience, that he may repose on his own
being, that he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it,
that he may unfold the precious stores of a mind for ever brooding over
itself. His genius is the effect of his individual character. He stamps
that character, that deep individual interest, on whatever he meets. The
object is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for
old associations. If there had been no other being in the universe, Mr.
Wordsworth's poetry would have been just what it is. If there had been
neither love nor friendship, neither ambition nor pleasure nor business
in the World, the author of the _Lyrical Ballads_ need not have been
greatly changed from what he is--might still have 'kept the noiseless
tenour of his way,' retired in the sanctuary of his own heart, hallowing
the Sabbath of his own thoughts. With the passions, the pursuits, and
imaginations of other men he does not profess to sympathise, but 'finds
tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,
and good in everything.' With a mind averse from outward objects, but
ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and
feeling upon every trifling circumstance connected with his past
history. The note of the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of
other years; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight
that stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud arch
in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to manhood; an old thorn
is buried, bowed down under the mass of associations he has wound about
it; and to him, as he himself beautifully says,

 The meanest flow'r that blows can give
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

It is this power of habitual sentiment, or of transferring the interest
of our conscious existence to whatever gently solicits attention, and
is a link in the chain of association without rousing our passions or
hurting our pride, that is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth's mind
and poetry. Others have left and shown this power before, as Wither,
Burns, etc., but none have felt it so intensely and absolutely as to
lend to it the voice of inspiration, as to make it the foundation of a
new style and school in poetry. His strength, as it so often happens,
arises from the excess of his weakness. But he has opened a new avenue
to the human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of
nature, 'sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame.' Compared with
his lines, Lord Byron's stanzas are but exaggerated common-place, and
Walter Scott's poetry (not his prose) old wives' fables.(2) There is no
one in whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken
of, nor with whom I am more disposed on certain points to quarrel; but
the love of truth and justice which obliges me to do this, will not
suffer me to blench his merits. Do what he can, he cannot help being an
original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo returns
in the spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while the
rainbow lifts its head above the storm--

 Yet I'll remember thee, Glencairn,
 And all that thou hast done for me!

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring to show that there is no such thing
as proper originality, a spirit emanating from the mind of the artist
and shining through his works, has traced Raphael through a number of
figures which he has borrowed from Masaccio and others. This is a bad
calculation. If Raphael had only borrowed those figures from others,
would he, even in Sir Joshua's sense, have been entitled to the praise
of originality? Plagiarism, in so far as it is plagiarism, is not
originality. Salvator is considered by many as a great genius. He is
what they call an irregular genius. My notion of genius is not exactly
the same as theirs. It has also been made a question; whether there is
not more genius in Rembrandt's Three Trees than in all Claude Lorraine's
landscapes. I do not know how that may be; but it was enough for Claude
to have been a perfect landscape-painter.

Capacity is not the same thing as genius. Capacity may be described to
relate to the quantity of knowledge, however acquired; genius, to its
quality and the mode of acquiring it. Capacity is power over given ideas
combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not
given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or
capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from
what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding, is
capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of
prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he had an
atom of genius. His verses that remain are dull and sterile. He could
learn all that was known of any subject; he could do anything if others
could show him the way to do it. This was very wonderful; but that is
all you can say of it. It requires a good capacity to play well at
chess; but, after all, it is a game of skill, and not of genius. Know
what you will of it, the understanding still moves in certain tracks in
which others have trod it before, quicker or slower, with more or less
comprehension and presence of mind. The greatest skill strikes out
nothing for itself, from its own peculiar resources; the nature of the
game is a thing determinate and fixed: there is no royal or poetical
road to checkmate your adversary. There is no place for genius but in
the indefinite and unknown. The discovery of the binomial theorem was an
effort of genius; but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton's being
able to multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied
90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would have been equally useless toil
and trouble.(3) He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable
intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new
ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet
as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the
discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the whole
meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to
some things; short-sightedness to others. Every mind is not a gauge and
measure of truth. Nature has her surface and her dark recesses. She is
deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her
fullest impressions that can penetrate her shrine or unveil her _Holy of
Holies_. It is only those whom she has filled with her spirit that have
the boldness or the power to reveal her mysteries to others. But Nature
has a thousand aspects, and one man can only draw out one of them.
Whoever does this is a man of genius. One displays her force, another
her refinement; one her power of harmony, another her suddenness of
contrast; one her beauty of form, another her splendour of colour. Each
does that for which he is best fitted by his particular genius, that is
to say, by some quality of mind into which the quality of the object
sinks deepest, where it finds the most cordial welcome, is perceived to
its utmost extent, and where again it forces its way out from the
fulness with which it has taken possession of the mind of the student.
The imagination gives out what it has first absorbed by congeniality of
temperament, what it has attracted and moulded into itself by elective
affinity, as the loadstone draws and impregnates iron. A little
originality is more esteemed and sought for than the greatest acquired
talent, because it throws a new light upon things, and is peculiar to
the individual. The other is common; and may be had for the asking, to
any amount.

The value of any work is to be judged of by the quantity of originality
contained in it. A very little of this will go a great way. If Goldsmith
had never written anything but the two or three first chapters of the
_Vicar of Wakefield_ or the character of a Village Schoolmaster, they
would have stamped him a man of genius. The editors of Encyclopedias are
not usually reckoned the first literary characters of the age. The works
of which they have the management contain a great deal of knowledge,
like chests or warehouses, but the goods are not their own. We should
as soon think of admiring the shelves of a library; but the shelves of a
library are useful and respectable. I was once applied to, in a
delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an
Encyclopedia, and was advised to take time and give it a systematic and
scientific form, to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be
obtained on the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I
made answer that as to the first, I had taken time to do all that I ever
pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for
twenty years of my life;(4) that I had no particular knowledge of the
subject in question, and no head for arrangement; and that the utmost
I could do in such a case would be, when a systematic and scientific
article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert
a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former
Encyclopedias), or to suggest a better definition than had been offered
in the text. There are two sorts of writing. The first is compilation;
and consists in collecting and stating all that is already known of any
question in the best possible manner, for the benefit of the uninformed
reader. An author of this class is a very learned amanuensis of other
people's thoughts. The second sort proceeds on an entirely different
principle: instead of bringing down the account of knowledge to the
point at which it has already arrived, it professes to start from
that point on the strength of the writer's individual reflections; and
supposing the reader in possession of what is already known, supplies
deficiencies, fills up certain blanks, and quits the beaten road in
search of new tracts of observation or sources of feeling. It is in vain
to object to this last style that it is disjointed, disproportioned,
and irregular. It is merely a set of additions and corrections to
other men's works, or to the common stock of human knowledge, printed
separately. You might as well expect a continued chain of reasoning
in the notes to a book. It skips all the trite, intermediate, level
common-places of the subject, and only stops at the difficult passages
of the human mind, or touches on some striking point that has been
overlooked in previous editions. A view of a subject, to be connected
and regular, cannot be all new. A writer will always be liable to be
charged either with paradox or common-place, either with dulness or
affectation. But we have no right to demand from any one more than
he pretends to. There is indeed a medium in all things, but to unite
opposite excellencies is a task ordinarily too hard for mortality. He
who succeeds in what he aims at, or who takes the lead in any one mode
or path of excellence, may think himself very well off. It would not
be fair to complain of the style of an Encyclopedia as dull, as wanting
volatile salt; nor of the style of an Essay because it is too light and
sparkling, because it is not a _caput mortuum_. So it is rather an
odd objection to a work that it is made up entirely of 'brilliant
passages'--at least it is a fault that can be found with few works, and
the book might be pardoned for its singularity. The censure might indeed
seem like adroit flattery, if it were not passed on an author whom any
objection is sufficient to render unpopular and ridiculous. I grant it
is best to unite solidity with show, general information with particular
ingenuity. This is the pattern of a perfect style; but I myself do not
pretend to be a perfect writer. In fine, we do not banish light French
wines from our tables, or refuse to taste sparkling Champagne when we
can get it because it has not the body of Old Port. Besides, I do not
know that dulness is strength, or that an observation is slight because
it is striking. Mediocrity, insipidity, want of character is the great
fault.

 Mediocribus esse poetis
 Non Dii, non homines, non concessere columnae.

Neither is this privilege allowed to prose-writers in our time any more
than to poets formerly.

It is not then acuteness of organs or extent of capacity that
constitutes rare genius or produces the most exquisite models of
art, but an intense sympathy with some one beauty or distinguishing
characteristic in nature. Irritability alone, or the interest taken in
certain things, may supply the place of genius in weak and otherwise
ordinary minds. As there are certain instruments fitted to perform
certain kinds of labour, there are certain minds so framed as to produce
certain _chef-d'oeuvres_ in art and literature, which is surely the best
use they can be put to. If a man had all sorts of instruments in his
shop and wanted one, he would rather have that one than be supplied with
a double set of all the others. If he had them twice over, he could only
do what he can do as it is, whereas without that one he perhaps cannot
finish any one work he has in hand. So if a man can do one thing better
than anybody else, the value of this one thing is what he must stand
or fall by, and his being able to do a hundred other things merely
_as well_ as anybody else would not alter the sentence or add to his
respectability; on the contrary, his being able to do so many other
things well would probably interfere with and encumber him in the
execution of the only thing that others cannot do as well as he, and so
far be a drawback and a disadvantage. More people, in fact, fail from a
multiplicity of talents and pretensions than from an absolute poverty
of resources. I have given instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps
Shakespear's tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had
never written comedies at all; and in that case his comedies might well
have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret. Racine,
it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the
cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic
Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to the
perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies
as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as Crebillon. Yet I count those
persons fools who think it a pity Hogarth did not succeed better in
serious subjects. The division of labour is an excellent principle in
taste as well as in mechanics. Without this, I find from Adam Smith, we
could not have a pin made to the degree of perfection it is. We do not,
on any rational scheme of criticism, inquire into the variety of a man's
excellences, or the number of his works, or his facility of production.
_Venice Preserved_ is sufficient for Otway's fame. I hate all those
nonsensical stories about Lope de Vega and his writing a play in a
morning before breakfast. He had time enough to do it after. If a man
leaves behind him any work which is a model in its kind, we have no
right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or
how long he was about it. All that talent which is not necessary to the
actual quantity of excellence existing in the world, loses its object,
is so much waste talent or _talent to let_. I heard a sensible man say
he should like to do some one thing better than all the rest of the
world, and in everything else to be like all the rest of the world. Why
should a man do more than his part? The rest is vanity and vexation
of spirit. We look with jealous and grudging eyes at all those
qualifications which are not essential; first, because they are
superfluous, and next, because we suspect they will be prejudicial.
Why does Mr. Kean play all those harlequin tricks of singing, dancing,
fencing, etc.? They say, 'It is for his benefit.' It is not for his
reputation. Garrick indeed shone equally in comedy and tragedy. But he
was first, not second-rate in both. There is not a greater impertinence
than to ask, if a man is clever out of his profession. I have heard
of people trying to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons. I would as soon try to
entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an argument. Good nature and common
sense are required from all people; but one proud distinction is enough
for any one individual to possess or to aspire to.



NOTES to ESSAY V


(1) I do not here speak of the figurative or fanciful exercise of the
imagination, which consists in finding out some striking object or image
to illustrate another.

(2) Mr. Wordsworth himself should not say this, and yet I am not sure he
would not.

(3) The only good thing I have ever heard come of this man's singular
faculty of memory was the following. A gentleman was mentioning his
having been sent up to London from the place where he lived to see
Garrick act. When he went back into the country he was asked what he
thought of the player and the play. 'Oh!' he said, 'he did not know: he
had only seen a little man strut about the stage and repeat 7956 words
one hand to his forehead, and seeming mightily delighted, called
out, 'Ay, indeed! And pray, was he found to be correct?' This was the
supererogation of literal matter-of-fact curiosity. Jedediah Buxton's
counting the number of words was idle enough; but here was a fellow who
wanted some one to count them over again to see if he was correct.

 The force of _dulness_ could no farther go!

(4) Sir Joshua Reynolds, being asked how long it had taken him to do a
certain picture, made answer, 'All my life!.'




ESSAY VI. CHARACTER OF COBBETT


People have about as substantial an idea of Cobbett as they have of
Cribb. His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has
no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist;
his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the public with
a three-man beetle.' He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist;
'lays waste' a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon
the Government itself. He is a kind of _fourth estate_ in the politics
of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful
political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the
language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English. He might
be said to have the clearness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe,
and the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville; if all such
comparisons were not impertinent. A really great and original writer is
like nobody but himself. In one sense Sterne was not a wit, nor
Shakespear a poet. It is easy to describe second-rate talents, because
they fall into a class and enlist under a standard; but first-rate
powers defy calculation or comparison, and can be defined only by
themselves. They are _sui generis_, and make the class to which they
belong. I have tried half a dozen times to describe Burke's style
without ever succeeding,--its severe extravagance; its literal boldness;
its matter-of-fact hyperboles; its running away with a subject, and from
it at the same time,--but there is no making it out, for there is no
example of the same thing anywhere else. We have no common measure to
refer to; and his qualities contradict even themselves.

Cobbett is not so difficult. He has been compared to Paine; and so far
it is true there are no two writers who come more into juxtaposition
from the nature of their subjects, from the internal resources on which
they draw, and from the popular effect of their writings and their
adaptation (though that is a bad word in the present case) to the
capacity of every reader. But still if we turn to a volume of Paine's
(his _Common Sense_ or _Rights of Man_) we are struck (not to say
somewhat refreshed) by the difference. Paine is a much more sententious
writer than Cobbett. You cannot open a page in any of his best and
earlier works without meeting with some maxim, some antithetical and
memorable saying, which is a sort of starting-place for the argument,
and the goal to which it returns. There is not a single _bon mot_, a
single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If anything
is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is
an excellent hand at invention in that way, and has 'damnable iteration'
in him. What could be better than his pestering Erskine year after year
with his second title of Baron Clackmannan? He is rather too fond of
_the Sons and Daughters of Corruption_. Paine affected to reduce things
to first principles, to announce self-evident truths. Cobbett troubles
himself about little but the details and local circumstances. The first
appeared to have made up his mind beforehand to certain opinions, and to
try to find the most compendious and pointed expressions for them: his
successor appears to have no clue, no fixed or leading principles, nor
ever to have thought on a question till he sits down to write about it;
but then there seems no end of his matters of fact and raw materials,
which are brought out in all their strength and sharpness from not
having been squared or frittered down or vamped up to suit a theory--he
goes on with his descriptions and illustrations as if he would never
come to a stop; they have all the force of novelty with all the
familiarity of old acquaintance; his knowledge grows out of the subject,
and his style is that of a man who has an absolute intuition of what
he is talking about, and never thinks of anything else. He deals in
premises and speaks to evidence--the coming to a conclusion and summing
up (which was Paine's _forte_) lies in a smaller compass. The one could
not compose an elementary treatise on politics to become a manual for
the popular reader, nor could the other in all probability have kept
up a weekly journal for the same number of years with the same spirit,
interest, and untired perseverance. Paine's writings are a sort of
introduction to political arithmetic on a new plan: Cobbett keeps
a day-book, and makes an entry at full of all the occurrences and
troublesome questions that start up throughout the year. Cobbett, with
vast industry, vast information, and the utmost power of making what he
says intelligible, never seems to get at the beginning or come to
the end of any question: Paine in a few short sentences seems by his
peremptory manner 'to clear it from all controversy, past, present, and
to come.' Paine takes a bird's-eye view of things. Cobbett sticks
close to them, inspects the component parts, and keeps fast hold of the
smallest advantages they afford him. Or, if I might here be indulged
in a pastoral allusion, Paine tries to enclose his ideas in a fold for
security and repose; Cobbett lets _his_ pour out upon the plain like a
flock of sheep to feed and batten. Cobbett is a pleasanter writer for
those to read who do not agree with him; for he is less dogmatical, goes
more into the common grounds of fact and argument to which all appeal,
is more desultory and various, and appears less to be driving at a
present conclusion than urged on by the force of present conviction.
He is therefore tolerated by all parties, though he has made himself by
turns obnoxious to all; and even those he abuses read him. The Reformers
read him when he was a Tory, and the Tories read him now that he is a
Reformer. He must, I think, however, be _caviare_ to the Whigs.(1)

If he is less metaphysical and poetical than his celebrated prototype,
he is more picturesque and dramatic. His episodes, which are numerous
as they are pertinent, are striking, interesting, full of life
and _naivete_, minute, double measure running over, but never
tedious--_nunquam sufflaminandus erat_. He is one of those writers who
can never tire us, not even of himself; and the reason is, he is always
'full of matter.' He never runs to lees, never gives us the vapid
leavings of himself, is never 'weary, stale, and unprofitable,' but
always setting out afresh on his journey, clearing away some old
nuisance, and turning up new mould. His egotism is delightful, for
there is no affectation in it. He does not talk of himself for lack
of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has
happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject,
and he is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible
illustration of the subject from a squeamish delicacy. He likes both
himself and his subject too well. He does not put himself before it,
and say, 'Admire me first,' but places us in the same situation with
himself, and makes us see all that he does. There is no blindman's-buff,
no conscious hints, no awkward ventriloquism, no testimonies of
applause, no abstract, senseless self-complacency, no smuggled
admiration of his own person by proxy: it is all plain and above-board.
He writes himself plain William Cobbett, strips himself quite as naked
as anybody would wish--in a word, his egotism is full of individuality,
and has room for very little vanity in it. We feel delighted, rub our
hands, and draw our chair to the fire, when we come to a passage of this
sort: we know it will be something new and good, manly and simple, not
the same insipid story of self over again. We sit down at table with
the writer, but it is to a course of rich viands, flesh, fish, and
wild-fowl, and not to a nominal entertainment, like that given by the
Barmecide in the _Arabian Nights_, who put off his visitors with calling
for a number of exquisite things that never appeared, and with the
honour of his company. Mr. Cobbett is not a _make-believe_ writer: his
worst enemy cannot say that of him. Still less is he a vulgar one: he
must be a puny, common-place critic indeed who thinks him so. How
fine were the graphical descriptions he sent us from America: what a
Transatlantic flavour, what a native gusto, what a fine _sauce piquante_
of contempt they were seasoned with! If he had sat down to look
at himself in the glass, instead of looking about him like Adam in
Paradise, he would not have got up these articles in so capital a
style. What a noble account of his first breakfast after his arrival in
America! It might serve for a month. There is no scene on the stage more
amusing. How well he paints the gold and scarlet plumage of the American
birds, only to lament more pathetically the want of the wild wood-notes
of his native land! The groves of the Ohio that had just fallen beneath
the axe's stroke 'live in his description,' and the turnips that he
transplanted from Botley 'look green' in prose! How well at another time
he describes the poor sheep that had got the tick and had bled down in
the agonies of death! It is a portrait in the manner of Bewick, with
the strength, the simplicity, and feeling of that great naturalist. What
havoc be makes, when he pleases, of the curls of Dr. Parr's wig and
of the Whig consistency of Mr. (Coleridge?)! His _Grammar_, too, is as
entertaining as a story-book. He is too hard upon the style of others,
and not enough (sometimes) on his own.

As a political partisan no one can stand against him. With his
brandished club, like Giant Despair in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, he
knocks out their brains; and not only no individual but no corrupt
system could hold out against his powerful and repeated attacks, but
with the same weapon, swung round like a flail, that he levels his
antagonists, he lays his friends low, and puts his own party _hors de
combat_. This is a bad propensity, and a worse principle in political
tactics, though a common one. If his blows were straightforward and
steadily directed to the same object, no unpopular minister could live
before him; instead of which he lays about right and left, impartially
and remorselessly, makes a clear stage, has all the ring to himself, and
then runs out of it, just when he should stand his ground. He throws
his head into his adversary's stomach, and takes away from him all
inclination for the fight, hits fair or foul, strikes at everything, and
as you come up to his aid or stand ready to pursue his advantage, trips
up your heels or lays you sprawling, and pummels you when down as
much to his heart's content as ever the Yanguesian carriers belaboured
Rosinante with their pack-staves. 'He has the back-trick simply the best
of any man in Illyria.' He pays off both scores of old friendship and
new-acquired enmity in a breath, in one perpetual volley, one raking
fire of 'arrowy sleet' shot from his pen. However his own reputation or
the cause may suffer in consequence, he cares not one pin about that, so
that he disables all who oppose, or who pretend to help him. In fact, he
cannot bear success of any kind, not even of his own views or party; and
if any principle were likely to become popular, would turn round against
it to show his power in shouldering it on one side. In short, wherever
power is, there he is against it: he naturally butts at all obstacles,
as unicorns are attracted to oak trees, and feels his own strength only
by resistance to the opinions and wishes of the rest of the world. To
sail with the stream, to agree with the company, is not his humour. If
he could bring about a Reform in Parliament, the odds are that he would
instantly fall foul of and try to mar his own handiwork; and he quarrels
with his own creatures as soon as he has written them into a little
vogue--and a prison. I do not think this is vanity or fickleness so much
as a pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonistic power to
contend with, and only finds itself at ease in systematic opposition.
If it were not for this, the high towers and rotten places of the world
would fall before the battering-ram of his hard-headed reasoning; but if
he once found them tottering, he would apply his strength to prop them
up, and disappoint the expectations of his followers. He cannot agree to
anything established, nor to set up anything else in its stead. While it
is established, he presses hard against it, because it presses upon him,
at least in imagination. Let it crumble under his grasp, and the motive
to resistance is gone. He then requires some other grievance to set his
face against. His principle is repulsion, his nature contradiction: he
is made up of mere antipathies, an Ishmaelite indeed without a fellow.
He is always playing at hunt-the-slipper in politics. He turns round
upon whoever is next him. The way to wean him from any opinion, and
make him conceive an intolerable hatred against it, would be to place
somebody near him who was perpetually dinning it in his ears. When he is
in England he does nothing but abuse the Boroughmongers and laugh at the
whole system; when he is in America he grows impatient of freedom and a
republic. If he had stayed there a little longer he would have become a
loyal and a loving subject of His Majesty King George IV. He lampooned
the French Revolution when it was hailed as the dawn of liberty by
millions: by the time it was brought into almost universal ill-odour by
some means or other (partly no doubt by himself), he had turned, with
one or two or three others, staunch Buonapartist. He is always of the
militant, not of the triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show
of magnanimity. But his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp. It wants
principle; for though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim
of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his
disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents
he might do great things, if he would go right forward to any useful
object, make thorough stitch-work of any question, or join hand and
heart with any principle. He changes his opinions as he does his
friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed
principles; as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels
with it. He has no satisfaction but the chase after truth, runs a
question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like a vermin, and
starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh
breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels
and the leaders perpetually at fault. This he calls sport-royal. He
thinks it as good as cudgel-playing or single-stick, or anything else
that has life in it. He likes the cut and thrust, the falls, bruises,
and dry blows of an argument: as to any good or useful results that may
come of the amicable settling of it, any one is welcome to them for him.
The amusement is over when the matter is once fairly decided.

There is another point of view in which this may be put. I might say
that Mr. Cobbett is a very honest man with a total want of principle,
and I might explain this paradox thus:--I mean that he is, I think, in
downright earnest in what he says, in the part he takes at the time;
but in taking that part, he is led entirely by headstrong obstinacy,
caprice, novelty pique, or personal motive of some sort, and not by
a steadfast regard for truth or habitual anxiety for what is right
uppermost in his mind. He is not a fee'd, time-serving, shuffling
advocate (no man could write as he does who did not believe himself
sincere); but his understanding is the dupe and slave of his
momentary, violent, and irritable humours. He does not adopt an opinion
'deliberately or for money,' yet his conscience is at the mercy of the
first provocation he receives, of the first whim he takes in his
head: he sees things through the medium of heat and passion, not with
reference to any general principles, and his whole system of thinking is
deranged by the first object that strikes his fancy or sours his temper
education. He is a self-taught man, and has the faults as well as
excellences of that class of persons in their most striking and glaring
excess. It must be acknowledged that the editor of the _Political
Register_ (the _twopenny trash_, as it was called, till a bill passed
the House to raise the price to sixpence) is not 'the gentleman and
scholar,' though he has qualities that, with a little better management,
would be worth (to the public) both those titles. For want of knowing
what has been discovered before him, he has not certain general
landmarks to refer to, or a general standard of thought to apply to
individual cases. He relies on his own acuteness and the immediate
evidence, without being acquainted with the comparative anatomy or
philosophical structure of opinion. He does not view things on a large
scale or at the horizon (dim and airy enough, perhaps)--but as they
affect himself, close, palpable, tangible. Whatever he finds out is his
own, and he only knows what he finds out. He is in the constant hurry
and fever of gestation; his brain teems incessantly with some fresh
project. Every new light is the birth of a new system, the dawn of a
new world outstripping and overreaching himself. The last opinion is the
only true one. He is wiser to-day than he was yesterday. Why should he
not be wiser to-morrow than he was to-day?--Men of a learned education
are not so sharp-witted as clever men without it; but they know the
balance of the human intellect better; if they are more stupid, they are
more steady, and are less liable to be led astray by their own sagacity
and the overweening petulance of hard-earned and late-acquired wisdom.
They do not fall in love with every meretricious extravagance at first
sight, or mistake an old battered hypothesis for a vestal, because they
are new to the ways of this old world. They do not seize upon it as a
prize, but are safe from gross imposition by being as wise and no wiser
than those who went before them.

Paine said on some occasion, 'What I have written, I have written'--as
rendering any further declaration of his principles unnecessary. Not so
Mr. Cobbett. What he has written is no rule to him what he is to write
maintain the opinions of the last six days against friend or foe. I
doubt whether this outrageous inconsistency, this headstrong fickleness,
this understood want of all rule and method, does not enable him to go
on with the spirit, vigour, and variety that he does. He is not pledged
to repeat himself. Every new _Register_ is a kind of new Prospectus. He
blesses himself from all ties and shackles on his understanding; he has
no mortgages on his brain; his notions are free and unencumbered. If he
was put in trammels, he might become a vile hack like so many more. But
he gives himself 'ample scope and verge enough.' He takes both sides of
a question, and maintains one as sturdily as the other. If nobody else
can argue against him, he is a very good match for himself. He writes
better in favour of Reform than anybody else; he used to write better
against it. Wherever he is, there is the tug of war, the weight of the
argument, the strength of abuse. He is not like a man in danger of being
_bed-rid_ in his faculties--he tosses and tumbles about his unwieldy
bulk, and when he is tired of lying on one side, relieves himself by
turning on the other. His shifting his point of view from time to time
not merely adds variety and greater compass to his topics (so that the
_Political Register_ is an armoury and magazine for all the materials
and weapons of political warfare), but it gives a greater zest and
liveliness to his manner of treating them. Mr. Cobbett takes nothing
for granted as what he has proved before; he does not write a book of
reference. We see his ideas in their first concoction, fermenting and
overflowing with the ebullitions of a lively conception. We look on at
the actual process, and are put in immediate possession of the grounds
and materials on which he forms his sanguine, unsettled conclusions. He
does not give us samples of reasoning, but the whole solid mass, refuse
and all.

 He pours out all as plain
 As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.

This is one cause of the clearness and force of his writings. An
argument does not stop to stagnate and muddle in his brain, but passes
at once to his paper. His ideas are served up, like pancakes, hot and
hot. Fresh theories give him fresh courage. He is like a young and lusty
bridegroom that divorces a favourite speculation every morning, and
marries a new one every night. He is not wedded to his notions, not he.
He has not one Mrs. Cobbett among all his opinions. He makes the most
of the last thought that has come in his way, seizes fast hold of it,
rumbles it about in all directions with rough strong hands, has his
wicked will of it, takes a surfeit, and throws it away.--Our author's
changing his opinions for new ones is not so wonderful; what is more
remarkable is his facility in forgetting his old ones. He does not
pretend to consistency (like Mr. Coleridge); he frankly disavows all
connection with himself. He feels no personal responsibility in this
way, and cuts a friend or principle with the same decided indifference
that Antipholis of Ephesus cuts Aegeon of Syracuse. It is a hollow
thing. The only time he ever grew romantic was in bringing over the
relics of Mr. Thomas Paine with him from America to go a progress
with them through the disaffected districts. Scarce had he landed in
Liverpool when he left the bones of a great man to shift for themselves;
and no sooner did he arrive in London than he made a speech to disclaim
all participation in the political and theological sentiments of his
late idol, and to place the whole stock of his admiration and enthusiasm
towards him to the account of his financial speculations, and of his
having predicted the fate of paper-money. If he had erected a little
gold statue to him, it might have proved the sincerity of this
assertion; but to make a martyr and a patron saint of a man, and to dig
up 'his canonised bones' in order to expose them as objects of devotion
to the rabble's gaze, asks something that has more life and spirit in
it, more mind and vivifying soul, than has to do with any calculation
of pounds, shillings, and pence! The fact is, he _ratted_ from his own
project. He found the thing not so ripe as he had expected. His heart
failed him; his enthusiasm fled, and he made his retractation. His
admiration is short-lived; his contempt only is rooted, and his
resentment lasting.--The above was only one instance of his building too
much on practical _data_. He has an ill habit of prophesying, and goes
on, though still decieved. The art of prophesying does not suit Mr.
Cobbett's style. He has a knack of fixing names and times and places.
According to him, the Reformed Parliament was to meet in March 1818--it
did not, and we heard no more of the matter. When his predictions
fail, he takes no further notice of them, but applies himself to new
ones--like the country people who turn to see what weather there is in
the almanac for the next week, though it has been out in its reckoning
every day of the last.

Mr. Cobbett is great in attack, not in defence; he cannot fight an
up-hill battle. He will not bear the least punishing. If any one turns
upon him (which few people like to do) he immediately turns tail. Like
an overgrown schoolboy, he is so used to have it all his own way, that
he cannot submit to anything like competition or a struggle for the
mastery; he must lay on all the blows, and take none. He is bullying
and cowardly; a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush
them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon
staggered by a few smart blows. Whenever he has been set upon, he has
slunk out of the controversy. The _Edinburgh Review_ made (what is
called) a dead set at him some years ago, to which he only retorted by
an eulogy on the superior neatness of an English kitchen-garden to a
Scotch one. I remember going one day into a bookseller's shop in Fleet
Street to ask for the _Review_, and on my expressing my opinion to a
young Scotchman, who stood behind the counter, that Mr. Cobbett might
hit as hard in his reply, the North Briton said with some alarm, 'But
you don't think, sir, Mr. Cobbett will be able to injure the Scottish
nation?' I said I could not speak to that point, but I thought he was
very well able to defend himself. He, however, did not, but has borne a
grudge to the _Edinburgh Review_ ever since, which he hates worse than
the _Quarterly_. I cannot say I do.(2)



NOTES to ESSAY VI


(1) The late Lord Thurlow used to say that Cobbett was the only writer
that deserved the name of a political reasoner.

(2) Mr. Cobbett speaks almost as well as he writes. The only time l ever
saw him he seemed to me a very pleasant man--easy of access, affable,
clear-headed, simple and mild in his manner, deliberate and unruffled in
his speech, though some of his expressions were not very qualified. His
figure is tall and portly. He has a good, sensible face--rather full,
with little grey eyes, a hard, square forehead, a ruddy complexion, with
hair grey or powdered; and had on a scarlet broadcloth waistcoat
with the flaps of the pockets hanging down, as was the custom for
gentlemen-farmers in the last century, or as we see it in the pictures
of Members of Parliament in the reign of George I. I certainly did not
think less favourably of him for seeing him.




ESSAY VII. ON PEOPLE WITH ONE IDEA


There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more,
they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.

There is Major Cartwright: he has but one idea or subject of discourse,
Parliamentary Reform. Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) a
very good subject to talk about; but why should it be the only one? To
hear the worthy and gallant Major resume his favourite topic, is like
law-business, or a person who has a suit in Chancery going on. Nothing
can be attended to, nothing can be talked of but that. Now it is getting
on, now again it is standing still; at one time the Master has promised
to pass judgment by a certain day, at another he has put it off again
and called for more papers, and both are equally reasons for speaking of
it. Like the piece of packthread in the barrister's hands, he turns
and twists it all ways, and cannot proceed a step without it. Some
schoolboys cannot read but in their own book; and the man of one idea
cannot converse out of his own subject. Conversation it is not; but
a sort of recital of the preamble of a bill, or a collection of grave
arguments for a man's being of opinion with himself. It would be well if
there was anything of character, of eccentricity in all this; but
that is not the case. It is a political homily personified, a walking
common-place we have to encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man
was to insist on your hearing him go through the fifth chapter of the
Book of Judges every time you meet, or like the story of the Cosmogony
in the _Vicar of Wakefield._ It is a tune played on a barrel-organ. It
is a common vehicle of discourse into which they get and are set down
when they please, without any pain or trouble to themselves. Neither is
it professional pedantry or trading quackery: it has no excuse. The man
has no more to do with the question which he saddles on all his hearers
than you have. This is what makes the matter hopeless. If a farmer talks
to you about his pigs or his poultry, or a physician about his patients,
or a lawyer about his briefs, or a merchant about stock, or an author
about himself, you know how to account for this, it is a common
infirmity, you have a laugh at his expense and there is no more to be
said. But here is a man who goes out of his way to be absurd, and is
troublesome by a romantic effort of generosity. You cannot say to him,
'All this may be interesting to you, but I have no concern in it':
you cannot put him off in that way. He retorts the Latin adage upon
you-_Nihil humani a me alienum puto._ He has got possession of a subject
which is of universal and paramount interest (not 'a fee-grief, due to
some single breast'), and on that plea may hold you by the button as
long as he chooses. His delight is to harangue on what nowise regards
himself: how then can you refuse to listen to what as little amuses you?
Time and tide wait for no man. The business of the state admits of no
delay. The question of Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments stands
first on the order of the day--takes precedence in its own right of
every other question. Any other topic, grave or gay, is looked upon
in the light of impertinence, and sent _to Coventry._ Business is an
interruption; pleasure a digression from it. It is the question before
every company where the Major comes, which immediately resolves itself
into a committee of the whole upon it, is carried on by means of a
perpetual virtual adjournment, and it is presumed that no other is
entertained while this is pending--a determination which gives its
persevering advocate a fair prospect of expatiating on it to his dying
day. As Cicero says of study, it follows him into the country, it stays
with him at home: it sits with him at breakfast, and goes out with him
to dinner. It is like a part of his dress, of the costume of his person,
without which he would be at a loss what to do. If he meets you in the
street, he accosts you with it as a form of salutation: if you see him
at his own house, it is supposed you come upon that. If you happen to
remark, 'It is a fine day,' or 'The town is full,' it is considered as a
temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going
the whole length of the principle. As Sancho, when reprimanded for
mentioning his homely favourite in the Duke's kitchen, defended himself
by saying, 'There I thought of Dapple, and there I spoke of him,' so
the true stickler for Reform neglects no opportunity of introducing
the subject wherever he is. Place its veteran champion under the frozen
north, and he will celebrate sweet smiling Reform; place him under the
mid-day Afric suns, and he will talk of nothing but Reform--Reform so
sweetly smiling and so sweetly promising for the last forty years--

 Dulce ridentem Lalagen,
 Dulce loquentem!

A topic of this sort of which the person himself may be considered as
almost sole proprietor and patentee is an estate for life, free from
all encumbrance of wit, thought, or study, you live upon it as a settled
income; and others might as well think to eject you out of a capital
freehold house and estate as think to drive you out of it into the wide
world of common sense and argument. Every man's house is his castle; and
every man's common-place is his stronghold, from which he looks out
and smiles at the dust and heat of controversy, raised by a number of
frivolous and vexatious questions--'Rings the world with the vain stir!'
A cure for this and every other evil would be a Parliamentary Reform;
and so we return in a perpetual circle to the point from which we set
out. Is not this a species of sober madness more provoking than the
real? Has not the theoretical enthusiast his mind as much warped, as
much enslaved by one idea as the acknowledged lunatic, only that the
former has no lucid intervals? If you see a visionary of this class
going along the street, you can tell as well what he is thinking of and
will say next as the man that fancies himself a teapot or the Czar of
Muscovy. The one is as inaccessible to reason as the other: if the one
raves, the other dotes!

There are some who fancy the Corn Bill the root of all evil, and others
who trace all the miseries of life to the practice of muffling up
children in night-clothes when they sleep or travel. They will declaim
by the hour together on the first, and argue themselves black in the
face on the last. It is in vain that you give up the point. They persist
in the debate, and begin again--'But don't you see--?' These sort of
partial obliquities, as they are more entertaining and original, are
also by their nature intermittent. They hold a man but for a season. He
may have one a year or every two years; and though, while he is in the
heat of any new discovery, he will let you hear of nothing else, he
varies from himself, and is amusing undesignedly. He is not like the
chimes at midnight.

People of the character here spoken of, that is, who tease you to death
with some one idea, generally differ in their favourite notion from the
rest of the world; and indeed it is the love of distinction which is
mostly at the bottom of this peculiarity. Thus one person is remarkable
for living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to entertain you
all dinner-time with an invective against animal food. One of this
self-denying class, who adds to the primitive simplicity of this sort of
food the recommendation of having it in a raw state, lamenting the death
of a patient whom he had augured to be in a good way as a convert to his
system, at last accounted for his disappointment in a whisper--'But she
ate meat privately, depend upon it.' It is not pleasant, though it is
what one submits to willingly from some people, to be asked every time
you meet, whether you have quite left off drinking wine, and to be
complimented or condoled with on your looks according as you answer in
the negative or affirmative. Abernethy thinks his pill an infallible
cure for all disorders. A person once complaining to his physician that
he thought his mode of treatment had not answered, he assured him it was
the best in the world,--'and as a proof of it,' says he, 'I have had one
gentleman, a patient with your disorder, under the same regimen for the
last sixteen years!'--l have known persons whose minds were entirely
taken up at all times and on all occasions with such questions as
the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Restoration of the Jews, or the
progress of Unitarianism. I myself at one period took a pretty strong
turn to inveighing against the doctrine of Divine Right, and am not yet
cured of my prejudice on that subject. How many projectors have gone mad
in good earnest from incessantly harping on one idea: the discovery of
the philosopher's stone, the finding out the longitude, or paying off
the national debt! The disorder at length comes to a fatal crisis;
but long before this, and while they were walking about and talking as
usual, the derangement of the fancy, the loss of all voluntary power to
control or alienate their ideas from the single subject that occupied
them, was gradually taking place, and overturning the fabric of the
understanding by wrenching it all on one side. Alderman Wood has, I
should suppose, talked of nothing but the Queen in all companies for the
last six months. Happy Alderman Wood! Some persons have got a definition
of the verb, others a system of short-hand, others a cure for typhus
fever, others a method for preventing the counterfeiting of bank-notes,
which they think the best possible, and indeed the only one. Others in
leaving you to add a fourth. A man who has been in Germany will
sometimes talk of nothing but what is German: a Scotchman always
leads the discourse to his own country. Some descant on the Kantean
philosophy. There is a conceited fellow about town who talks always and
everywhere on this subject. He wears the Categories round his neck like
a pearl-chain: he plays off the names of the primary and transcendental
qualities like rings on his fingers. He talks of the Kantean system
while he dances; he talks of it while he dines; he talks of it to his
children, to his apprentices, to his customers. He called on me to
convince me of it, and said I was only prevented from becoming a
complete convert by one or two prejudices. He knows no more about it
than a pikestaff. Why then does he make so much ridiculous fuss about
it? It is not that he has got this one idea in his head, but that he has
got no other. A dunce may talk on the subject of the Kantean philosophy
with great impunity: if he opened his lips on any other he might be
found out. A French lady who had married an Englishman who said little,
excused him by saying, 'He is always thinking of Locke and Newton.'
This is one way of passing muster by following in the suite of great
names!--A friend of mine, whom I met one day in the street, accosted
me with more than usual vivacity, and said, 'Well, we're selling, we're
selling!' I thought he meant a house. 'No,' he said, 'haven't you seen
the advertisement in the newspapers? I mean five and twenty copies of
the Essay.' This work, a comely, capacious quarto on the most abstruse
metaphysics, had occupied his sole thoughts for several years, and he
concluded that I must be thinking of what he was. I believe, however, I
may say I am nearly the only person that ever read, certainly that ever
pretended to understand it. It is an original and most ingenious work,
nearly as incomprehensible as it is original, and as quaint as it is
ingenious. If the author is taken up with the ideas in his own head and
no others, he has a right; for he has ideas there that are to be met
with nowhere else, and which occasionally would not disgrace a Berkeley.
A dextrous plagiarist might get himself an immense reputation by putting
them in a popular dress. Oh! how little do they know, who have never
done anything but repeat after others by rote, the pangs, the labour,
the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs to get at the germ of
an original idea--to dig it out of the hidden recesses of thought and
nature, and bring it half-ashamed, struggling, and deformed into the
day--to give words and intelligible symbols to that which was never
imagined or expressed before! It is as if the dumb should speak for the
first time, as if things should stammer out their own meaning through
the imperfect organs of mere sense. I wish that some of our fluent,
plausible declaimers, who have such store of words to cover the want of
ideas, could lend their art to this writer. If he, 'poor, unfledged' in
this respect, 'who has scarce winged from view o' th' nest,' could find
a language for his ideas, truth would find a language for some of her
secrets. Mr. Fearn was buried in the woods of Indostan. In his leisure
from business and from tiger-shooting, he took it into his head to look
into his own mind. A whim or two, an odd fancy, like a film before the
eye, now and then crossed it: it struck him as something curious, but
the impression at first disappeared like breath upon glass. He thought
no more of it; yet still the same conscious feelings returned, and what
at first was chance or instinct became a habit. Several notions had
taken possession of his brain relating to mental processes which he had
never heard alluded to in conversation, but not being well versed in
such matters, he did not know whether they were to be found in learned
authors or not. He took a journey to the capital of the Peninsula on
purpose, bout Locke, Reid, Stewart, and Berkeley, whom he consulted with
eager curiosity when he got home, but did not find what he looked for.
He set to work himself, and in a few weeks sketched out a rough draft of
his thoughts and observations on bamboo paper. The eagerness of his new
pursuit, together with the diseases of the climate, proved too much for
his constitution, and he was forced to return to this country. He put
his metaphysics, his bamboo manuscript, into the boat with him, and as
he floated down the Ganges, said to himself, 'If I live, this will live;
if I die, it will not be heard of.' What is fame to this feeling? The
babbling of an idiot! He brought the work home with him and twice had it
stereotyped. The first sketch he allowed was obscure, but the improved
copy he thought could not fail to strike. It did not succeed. The world,
as Goldsmith said of himself, made a point of taking no notice of it.
Ever since he has had nothing but disappointment and vexation,--the
greatest and most heart-breaking of all others--that of not being able
to make yourself understood. Mr. Fearn tells me there is a sensible
writer in the _Monthly Review_ who sees the thing in its proper
light, and says so. But I have heard of no other instance. There are,
notwithstanding, ideas in this work, neglected and ill-treated as it has
been, that lead to more curious and subtle speculations on some of the
most disputed and difficult points of the philosophy of the human mind
(such as _relation_, _abstraction_, etc.) than have been thrown out in
any work for the last sixty years, I mean since Hume; for since his time
there has been no metaphysician in this country worth the name. Yet
his _Treatise on Human Nature_, he tells us, 'fell still-born from the
press.' So it is that knowledge works its way, and reputation lingers
far behind it. But truth is better than opinion, I maintain it; and
as to the two stereotyped and unsold editions of the Essay on
Consciousness, I say, _Honi soit qui mal y pense!_'(1)--My Uncle Toby had
one idea in his head, that of his bowling-green, and another, that of
the Widow Wadman. Oh, spare them both! I will only add one more anecdote
in illustration of this theory of the mind's being occupied with one
idea, which is most frequently of a man's self. A celebrated lyrical
writer happened to drop into a small party where they had just got
the novel of _Rob Roy,_ by the author of _Waverley_. The motto in the
title-page was taken from a poem of his. This was a hint sufficient, a
word to the wise. He instantly went to the book-shelf in the next
room, took down the volume of his own poems, read the whole of that in
question aloud with manifest complacency, replaced it on the shelf, and
walked away, taking no more notice of Rob Roy than if there had been no
such person, nor of the new novel than if it had not been written by
its renowned author. There was no reciprocity in this. But the writer in
question does not admit of any merit second to his own.(2)

Mr. Owen is a man remarkable for one idea. It is that of himself and the
Lanark cotton-mills. He carries this idea backwards and forwards with
him from Glasgow to London, without allowing anything for attrition,
and expects to find it in the same state of purity and perfection in
the latter place as at the former. He acquires a wonderful velocity and
impenetrability in his undaunted transit. Resistance to him is vain,
while the whirling motion of the mail-coach remains in his head.

 Nor Alps nor Apennines can keep him out,
  Nor fortified redoubt.

He even got possession, in the suddenness of his onset, of the
steam-engine of the _Times_ newspaper, and struck off ten thousand
woodcuts of the Projected Villages, which afforded an ocular
demonstration to all who saw them of the practicability of Mr. Owen's
whole scheme. He comes into a room with one of these documents in his
hand, with the air of a schoolmaster and a quack doctor mixed, asks very
kindly how you do, and on hearing you are still in an indifferent state
of health owing to bad digestion, instantly turns round and observes
that 'All that will be remedied in his plan; that indeed he thinks too
much attention has been paid to the mind, and not enough to the body;
that in his system, which he has now perfected and which will shortly
be generally adopted, he has provided effectually for both; that he has
been long of opinion that the mind depends altogether on the physical
organisation, and where the latter is neglected or disordered the former
must languish and want its due vigour; that exercise is therefore a part
of his system, with full liberty to develop every faculty of mind and
body; that two Objections had been made to his _New View of Society_,
viz. its want of relaxation from labour, and its want of variety; but
the first of these, the too great restraint, he trusted he had already
answered, for where the powers of mind and body were freely exercised
and brought out, surely liberty must be allowed to exist in the highest
degree; and as to the second, the monotony which would be produced by a
regular and general plan of co-operation, he conceived he had proved
in his _New View_ and _Addresses to the Higher Classes_, that the
co-operation he had recommended was necessarily conducive to the most
extensive improvement of the ideas and faculties, and where this was the
case there must be the greatest possible variety instead of a want of
it.' And having said this, this expert and sweeping orator takes up his
hat and walks downstairs after reading his lecture of truisms like a
playbill or an apothecary's advertisement; and should you stop him at
the door to say, by way of putting in a word in common, that Mr. Southey
seems somewhat favourable to his plan in his late Letter to Mr. William
Smith, he looks at you with a smile of pity at the futility of all
opposition and the idleness of all encouragement. People who thus swell
out some vapid scheme of their own into undue importance seem to me to
labour under water in the head--to exhibit a huge hydrocephalus! They
may be very worthy people for all that, but they are bad companions and
very indifferent reasoners. Tom Moore says of some one somewhere, 'that
he puts his hand in his breeches pocket like a crocodile.' The phrase is
hieroglyphical; but Mr. Owen and others might be said to put their
foot in the question of social improvement and reform much in the same
unaccountable manner.

I hate to be surfeited with anything, however sweet. I do not want to
be always tied to the same question, as if there were no other in the
world. I like a mind more Catholic.

 I love to talk with mariners,
 That come from a far countree.


I am not for 'a collusion' but 'an exchange' of ideas. It is well to
hear what other people have to say on a number of subjects. I do not
wish to be always respiring the same confined atmosphere, but to vary
the scene, and get a little relief and fresh air out of doors. Do all
we can to shake it off, there is always enough pedantry, egotism,
and self-conceit left lurking behind; we need not seal ourselves up
hermetically in these precious qualities, so as to think of nothing but
our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own
voice. Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito.
Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be
five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are.
They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its
shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot
understand this at all. What is the use of a man's always revolving
round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it
himself, as well as tire other people. A well-known writer says with
much boldness, both in the thought and expression, that 'a Lord is
imprisoned in the Bastille of a name, and cannot enlarge himself into
man'; and I have known men of genius in the same predicament. Why must
a man be for ever mouthing out his own poetry, comparing himself with
Milton, passage by passage, and weighing every line in a balance of
posthumous fame which he holds in his own hands? It argues a want of
imagination as well as common sense. Has he no ideas but what he has put
into verse; or none in common with his hearers? Why should he think it
the only scholar-like thing, the only 'virtue extant,' to see the merit
of his writings, and that 'men were brutes without them'? Why should he
bear a grudge to all art, to all beauty, to all wisdom, that does not
spring from his own brain? Or why should he fondly imagine that there is
but one fine thing in the world, namely, poetry, and that he is the only
poet in it? It will never do. Poetry is a very fine thing; but there are
other things besides it. Everything must have its turn. Does a wise man
think to enlarge his comprehension by turning his eyes only on himself,
or hope to conciliate the admiration of others by scouting, proscribing,
and loathing all that they delight in? He must either have a
disproportionate idea of himself, or be ignorant of the world in which
he lives. It is quite enough to have one class of people born to think
the universe made for them!--It seems also to argue a want of repose,
of confidence, and firm faith in a man's real pretensions, to be always
dragging them forward into the foreground, as if the proverb held
here--_Out of sight out of mind._ Does he, for instance, conceive that
no one would ever think of his poetry unless he forced it upon them by
repeating it himself? Does he believe all competition, all allowance
of another's merit, fatal to him? Must he, like Moody in the _Country
Girl_, lock up the faculties of his admirers in ignorance of all other
fine things, painting, music, the antique, lest they should play truant
to him? Methinks such a proceeding implies no good opinion of his own
genius or their taste: it is deficient in dignity and in decorum. Surely
if any one is convinced of the reality of an acquisition, he can bear
not to have it spoken of every minute. If he knows he has an undoubted
superiority in any respect, he will not be uneasy because every one
he meets is not in the secret, nor staggered by the report of rival
excellence. One of the first mathematicians and classical scholars of
the day was mentioning it as a compliment to himself that a cousin of
his, a girl from school, had said to him, 'You know (Manning) is a very
plain good sort of a young man, but he is not anything at all out of the
common.' Leigh Hunt once said to me, 'I wonder I never heard you speak
upon this subject before, which you seem to have studied a good deal.' I
answered, 'Why, we were not reduced to that, that I know of!'--

There are persons who, without being chargeable with the vice here
spoken of, yet 'stand accountant for as great a sin'; though not dull
and monotonous, they are vivacious mannerists in their conversation,
and excessive egotists. Though they run over a thousand subjects in
mere gaiety of heart, their delight still flows from one idea, namely,
themselves. Open the book in what page you will, there is a frontispiece
of themselves staring you in the face. They are a sort of Jacks o' the
Green, with a sprig of laurel, a little tinsel, and a little smut,
but still playing antics and keeping in incessant motion, to attract
attention and extort your pittance of approbation. Whether they talk of
the town or the country, poetry or politics, it comes to much the same
thing. If they talk to you of the town, its diversions, 'its palaces,
its ladies, and its streets,' they are the delight, the grace, and
ornament of it. If they are describing the charms of the country, they
give no account of any individual spot or object or source of pleasure
but the circumstance of their being there. 'With them conversing, we
forget all place, all seasons, and their change.' They perhaps pluck a
leaf or a flower, patronise it, and hand it you to admire, but select no
one feature of beauty or grandeur to dispute the palm of perfection
with their own persons. Their rural descriptions are mere landscape
backgrounds with their own portraits in an engaging attitude in front.
They are not observing or enjoying the scene, but doing the honours as
masters of the ceremonies to nature, and arbiters of elegance to all
humanity. If they tell a love-tale of enamoured princesses, it is plain
they fancy themselves the hero of the piece. If they discuss poetry,
their encomiums still turn on something genial and unsophisticated,
meaning their own style. If they enter into politics, it is understood
that a hint from them to the potentates of Europe is sufficient. In
short, as a lover (talk of what you will) brings in his mistress at
every turn, so these persons contrive to divert your attention to the
same darling object--they are, in fact, in love with themselves, and,
like lovers, should be left to keep their own company.



NOTES to ESSAY VII.

(1) Quarto poetry, as well as quarto metaphysics, does not always sell.
Going one day into a shop in Paternoster Row to see for some lines in
Mr. Wordsworth's _Excursion_ to interlard some prose with, I applied to
the constituted authorities, and asked if I could look at a copy of the
_Excursion?_ The answer was, 'Into which country, sir?'

(2) These fantastic poets are like a foolish ringer at Plymouth that
Northcote tells the story of. He was proud of his ringing, and the boys
who made a jest of his foible used to get him in the belfry and ask him,
'Well now, John, how many good ringers are there in Plymouth?' 'Two,' he
would say, without any hesitation. 'Ay, indeed! and who are they?' 'Why,
first, there's myself, that's one; and-- and--' 'Well, and who's the
other?' 'Why, there's-- there's-- Ecod, I can't think of any other but
myself.' _Talk we of one Master Launcelot._ The story is of ringers: it
will do for any vain, shallow, self-satisfied egotist of them all.




ESSAY VIII. ON THE IGNORANCE OF THE LEARNED


 For the more languages a man can speak,
 His talent has but sprung the greater leak:
 And, for the industry he has spent upon't,
 Must full as much some other way discount.
 The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the Syriac
 Do, like their letters, set men's reason back,
 And turn their wits that strive to understand It
 (Like those that write the characters) left-handed.
 Yet he that is but able to express
 No sense at all in several languages
 Will pass for learneder than he that's known
 To speak the strongest reason in his own.
 --BUTLER.

The description of persons who have the fewest ideas of all others are
mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor
write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily
seen with a book in his hand is (we may be almost sure) equally without
the power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him or
in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about
with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves.
He is afraid of venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out
any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by parsing
his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of
thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and
sits down contented with an endless, wearisome succession of words and
half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually
efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common
sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of
as 'spectacles' to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out
its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent
dispositions. The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal
generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected
from the minds of others. Nature _puts him out._ The impressions of real
objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous roundabout
descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their
rapidity exhausts him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and
glare, and whirling motion of the world about him (which he has not an
eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce
to fixed principles), to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and
the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of
the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. 'Leave me to my repose,'
is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the
paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without
a miracle, to 'take up his bed and walk,' as expect the learned reader
to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his
intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the
horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other
men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of
his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying
our ideas from foreign sources 'enfeebles all internal strength of
thought,' as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.
The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom
and authority, become listless, torpid, and unfit for the purposes of
thought or action. Can we wonder at the languor and lassitude which is
thus produced by a life of learned sloth and ignorance; by poring over
lines and syllables that excite little more idea or interest than if
they were the characters of an unknown tongue, till the eye closes on
vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a
wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day 'sweats in the eye of
Phoebus, and at night sleeps in Elysium,' than wear out my life so,
'twixt dreaming and awake.' The learned author differs from the learned
student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The
learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original
composition, their heads turn, they don't know where they are. The
indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of
pictures, who, when they attempt to do anything of their own, find
they want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright
enough, to trace the living forms of nature.

Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical
education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having
had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys who shine at
school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out
into the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at
school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not
require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties
of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty
called into play in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in
grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, etc., so that he who
has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other
things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish
attention, will make the most forward school-boy. The jargon containing
the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for casting up an
account, or the inflections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction to
the tyro of ten years old, except as they are imposed as a task upon
him by others, or from his feeling the want of sufficient relish of
amusement in other things. A lad with a sickly constitution and no very
active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has
neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will
generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the other
hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of
his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his
blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a
breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open
air in his face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path,
or enter with eagerness into all the little conflicts and interests of
his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book,
repeat barbarous distichs after his master, sit so many hours pinioned
to a writing-desk, and receive his reward for the loss of time and
pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Midsummer. There is
indeed a degree of stupidity which prevents children from learning the
usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours. But what
passes for stupidity is much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient
motive to fix the attention and force a reluctant application to the dry
and unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. The best capacities are as
much above this drudgery as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the
greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their acquirements
at school or at the university.

 Th' enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever.


Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition.
Such persons do not think so highly of the advantages, nor can they
submit their imaginations so servilely to the trammels of strict
scholastic discipline. There is a certain kind and degree of intellect
in which words take root, but into which things have not power to
penetrate. A mediocrity of talent, with a certain slenderness of moral
constitution, is the soil that produces the most brilliant specimens of
successful prize-essayists and Greek epigrammatists. It should not be
forgotten that the least respectable character among modern politicians
was the cleverest boy at Eton.

Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to
others, and which we can only derive at second-hand from books or other
artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is before us, or about
us, which appeals to our experience, passions, and pursuits, to the
bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge
of that which none but the learned know. He is the most learned man who
knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual
observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to
be brought to the test of experience, and that, having been handed down
through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full
of uncertainty, difficulties, and contradictions. It is seeing with the
eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their
understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names
and dates, not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing about his
next-door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and castes of
the Hindoos and Calmue Tartars. He can hardly find his way into the
next street, though he is acquainted with the exact dimensions
of Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his oldest
acquaintance is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous
lecture on all the principal characters in history. He cannot tell
whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a
professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He
knows as much of what he talks about as a blind man does of colours. He
cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he
ever in the right in any one of his opinions upon any one matter of
fact that really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an
infallible judge on all these points, of which it is impossible that he
or any other person living should know anything but by conjecture. He is
expert in all the dead and in most of the living languages; but he can
neither speak his own fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of
this class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook to point out
several solecisms in Milton's Latin style; and in his own performance
there is hardly a sentence of common English. Such was Dr. ----. Such
is Dr. ----. Such was not Porson. He was an exception that confirmed
the general rule, a man that, by uniting talents and knowledge with
learning, made the distinction between them more striking and palpable.

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of
them. 'Books do not teach the use of books.' How should he know anything
of a work who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is
conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those
again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others.
He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he
knows nothing of the _thing_ which it means in any one of them. He
stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations
quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding,
and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and manners of the
world; he is to seek in the characters of individuals. He sees no beauty
in the face of nature or of art. To him 'the mighty world of eye and
ear' is hid; and 'knowledge,' except at one entrance, 'quite shut out.'
His pride takes part with his ignorance; and his self-importance rises
with the number of things of which he does not know the value, and which
he therefore despises as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing of
pictures,--'Of the colouring of Titian, the grace of Raphael, the
purity of Domenichino, the _corregioscity_ of Correggio, the learning
of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caracci, or the grand
contour of Michael Angelo,'--of all those glories of the Italian and
miracles of the Flemish school, which have filled the eyes of mankind
with delight, and to the study and imitation of which thousands have in
vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they had never been,
a mere dead letter, a by-word; and no wonder, for he neither sees
nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print of Rubens'
Watering-place or Claude's Enchanted Castle may be hanging on the walls
of his room for months without his once perceiving them; and if you
point them out to him he will turn away from them. The language of
nature, or of art (which is another nature), is one that he does not
understand. He repeats indeed the names of Apelles and Phidias, because
they are to be found in classic authors, and boasts of their works as
prodigies, because they no longer exist; or when he sees the finest
remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin Marbles, takes
no other interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute,
and (which is the same thing) a quarrel about the meaning of a Greek
particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he 'knows no touch of it,'
from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the shepherd's pipe
upon the mountain. His ears are nailed to his books; and deadened with
the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the din and smithery of
school-learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the
number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or
spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a
Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the trouble
he leaves to the critics. Does he understand 'the act and practique
part of life' better than 'the theorique'? No. He knows no liberal
or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of skill or chance.
Learning 'has no skill in surgery,' in agriculture, in building, in
working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of labour,
or use it when made; it cannot handle the plough or the spade, or the
chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or
shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel-playing,
or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or anything else. The learned professor
of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to practice,
though he may contribute an account of them to an Encyclopedia. He has
not the use of his hands nor of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk,
nor swim; and he considers all those who actually understand and can
exercise any of these arts of body or mind as vulgar and mechanical
men,--though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long
time and practice, with powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind
particularly devoted to them. It does not require more than this to
enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a doctor's
degree and a fellowship, and to eat, drink, and sleep the rest of his
life!

The thing is plain. All that men really understand is confined to a very
small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have
an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest
is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use of their
limbs; for they live by their labour or skill. They understand their own
business and the characters of those they have to deal with; for it
is necessary that they should. They have eloquence to express their
passions, and wit at will to express their contempt and provoke
laughter. Their natural use of speech is not hung up in monumental
mockery, in an obsolete language; nor is their sense of what is
ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to express it, buried
in collections of _Anas_. You will hear more good things on the outside
of a stage-coach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a
twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that
famous university; and more _home_ truths are to be learnt from
listening to a noisy debate in an alehouse than from attending a formal
one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often
know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing
anecdotes taken from the history of what has been said, done, and
gossiped in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best
bluestocking of the age will be able to glean from that sort of learning
which consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and satirical
poems published in the same period. People in towns, indeed, are
woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only _in
the bust_, not as a whole-length. People in the country not only know
all that has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as they
do his features, in their descent through several generations, and
solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed half
a century ago. The learned know nothing of the matter, either in town
or country. Above all, the mass of society have common sense, which the
learned in all ages want. The vulgar are in the right when they judge
for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to their blind guides.
The celebrated nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned to death
by the good women of Kidderminster, for asserting from the pulpit that
'hell was paved with infants' skulls'; but, by the force of argument,
and of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at
length prevailed over the scruples of his congregation, and over reason
and humanity.

Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers
in this vineyard seem as if it was their object to confound all common
sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means of traditional
maxims and preconceived notions taken upon trust, and increasing in
absurdity with increase of age. They pile hypothesis on hypothesis,
mountain high, till it is impossible to come at the plain truth on any
question. They see things, not as they are, but as they find them in
books, and 'wink and shut their apprehensions up,' in order that they
may discover nothing to interfere with their prejudices or convince them
of their absurdity. It might be supposed that the height of human wisdom
consisted in maintaining contradictions and rendering nonsense sacred.
There is no dogma, however fierce or foolish, to which these persons
have not set their seals, and tried to impose on the understandings of
their followers as the will of Heaven, clothed with all the terrors
and sanctions of religion. How little has the human understanding been
directed to find out the true and useful! How much ingenuity has been
thrown away in the defence of creeds and systems! How much time
and talents have been 

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