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Title: The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 11 (of 12)
Author: William Hazlitt
Editor: Arnold Glover
A. R. Waller
Release date: November 19, 2023 [eBook #72168]
Language: English
Original publication: London: J. M. Dent & Co, 1902
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT, VOL. 11 (OF 12) ***
THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT
IN TWELVE VOLUMES
VOLUME ELEVEN
_All rights reserved_
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM HAZLITT
EDITED BY A. R. WALLER
AND ARNOLD GLOVER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
W. E. HENLEY
❦
Fugitive Writings
❦
1904
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This volume and volume XII. contain those of Hazlitt’s writings which
remained uncollected during his lifetime and have not been included in
earlier volumes of the present edition. Some of these writings were
published by the author’s son in the three works of which particulars
are given below; one of them, the essay ‘On Abstract Ideas,’ was
published in the second edition (1836) of _An Essay on the Principles of
Human Action_ (cf. Bibliographical Note, vol. VII. p. 384); a few, viz.
‘Common Places’ and ‘Trifles Light as Air,’ were included in Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt’s edition of _The Round Table_ (Bohn’s Standard Library, 1871);
but most of the papers are here reprinted for the first time. See the
Table of Contents, where the essays which have never been republished
before are marked by an asterisk. The evidence upon which the Editors
have relied in respect of this fresh material will be found in the
Notes. A great many of the Essays now printed have not hitherto been
identified as Hazlitt’s, but none have been included concerning which
the Editors feel any doubt.
The works published by the author’s son and referred to above are as
follows:—
1. ‘_Literary Remains of the late William Hazlitt._ With a Notice of his
Life, By his Son, and Thoughts on his Genius and Writings, By E. L.
Bulwer, Esq., M.P. and Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, M.P. In Two Volumes.
London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street. 1836.’ Vol. I. contained (as
a frontispiece) Bewick’s crayon drawing of Hazlitt reproduced in vol.
VIII. of the present edition; a Sonnet ‘written on seeing Bewick’s
Chalk-Drawing of the Head of Hazlitt’ by Sheridan Knowles; a
‘Biographical Sketch’ of Hazlitt by his son; ‘Some Thoughts on the
Genius of William Hazlitt’ signed ‘The Author of “Eugene Aram”‘;
‘Thoughts upon the Intellectual Character of the late William Hazlitt,’
by Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, M.P.; ‘Character of Hazlitt,’ by Charles Lamb,
extracted from the well-known ‘Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.’
(1823); six ‘Sonnets to the Memory of Hazlitt’ by ‘A Lady’; and the
following essays by Hazlitt, viz.: (i) Project for a new Theory of Civil
and Criminal Legislation, (ii) Definition of Wit, (iii) On Means and
Ends, (iv) Belief, whether Voluntary? (v) Personal Politics, (vi) On the
Writings of Hobbes, (vii) On Liberty and Necessity, (viii) On Locke’s
Essay on the Human Understanding, and (ix) On Tooke’s Diversions of
Purley.—Vol. II. contained the following essays by Hazlitt, viz.: (i) On
Self-Love, (ii) On the Conduct of Life; or, Advice to a School-boy,
(iii) On the Fine Arts, (iv) The Fight, (v) On the Want of Money, (vi)
On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth, (vii) The Main-Chance, (viii)
The Opera, (ix) Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen, (x) My First
Acquaintance with Poets, (xi) The Shyness of Scholars, (xii) The
Vatican, and (xiii) On the Spirit of Monarchy. Of these, the essay ‘On
the Fine Arts’ and the essay on ‘The Vatican’ are included in vol. IX.
of the present edition; the rest are published in this volume or in vol.
XII.
2. ‘_Sketches and Essays._ By William Hazlitt. Now first collected by
his Son. London: John Templeman, 248, Regent Street. MDCCCXXXIX.’ An
Advertisement states that ‘The volume which the Editor has here the
gratification of presenting to the public, consists of Essays
contributed by their author to various periodicals. None of them have
hitherto been published in a collective form, and it is confidently
anticipated that they will be received as an acceptable Companion to the
“Table Talk” and “Plain Speaker.”’ The contents are as follows: (i) On
Reading New Books, (ii) On Cant and Hypocrisy, (iii) Merry England, (iv)
On a Sun-Dial, (v) On Prejudice, (vi) Self-Love and Benevolence (a
Dialogue), (vii) On Disagreeable People, (viii) On Knowledge of the
World, (ix) On Fashion, (x) On Nicknames, (xi) On Taste, (xii) Why the
Heroes of Romance are insipid, (xiii) On the Conversation of Lords,
(xiv) The Letter-Bell, (xv) Envy, (xvi) On the Spirit of Partisanship,
(xvii) Footmen, and (xviii) A Chapter on Editors. This volume was
reprinted in 1852 with ‘Sketches and Essays’ as a half-title and the
following title-page: ‘Men and Manners: Sketches and Essays. By William
Hazlitt. London: Published at the office of the Illustrated London
Library, 227 Strand. MDCCCII.’ In this edition the essay entitled
‘Self-Love and Benevolence (A Dialogue)’ is omitted. A third edition
(which has been reprinted from time to time) was published in 1872 in
Bohn’s Standard Library, edited by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt.
3. ‘_Winterslow: Essays and Characters written there._ By William
Hazlitt. Collected by his Son. London: David Bogue, Fleet Street.
MDCCCL.’ This small 8vo volume contained the following essays: (i) My
First Acquaintance with Poets, (ii) Of Persons One Would Wish to Have
Seen, (iii) Party Spirit, (iv) On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,
(v) On Public Opinion, (vi) On Personal Identity, (vii) Mind and Motive,
(viii) On Means and Ends, (ix) Matter and Manner, (x) On Consistency of
Opinion, (xi) Project for a new Theory of Civil and Criminal
Legislation, (xii) On the Character of Burke, (xiii) On the Character of
Fox, (xiv) On the Character of Pitt, (xv) On the Character of Lord
Chatham, (xvi) Belief, whether Voluntary, and (xvii) A Farewell to
Essay-Writing. This volume was republished in 1872 along with _Sketches
and Essays_ in the volume of Bohn’s Standard Library referred to above.
Of the essays published in _Winterslow_ the Characters of Burke, Fox,
Pitt and Lord Chatham are included in vol. III. of the present edition
(_Political Essays_). The rest of the essays published in _Sketches and
Essays_ and _Winterslow_ are included in vols. XI. and XII. of the
present edition.
It will be seen that _Literary Remains_ and _Winterslow_ to some extent
overlap one another, and that _Winterslow_ contained several essays
which had already been published in _Political Essays_. Under these
circumstances it has been found necessary in the present edition to
adopt a fresh scheme of arrangement in place of republishing _Literary
Remains_, _Sketches and Essays_ and _Winterslow_ as they stand. Each
essay, whether contained in one of those posthumous collections or now
republished for the first time, is printed in chronological order under
the heading of the magazine or newspaper in which it originally
appeared; and the magazines themselves are arranged in a chronological
order based upon the respective dates at which Hazlitt began to
contribute to them. The only exception to this last scheme of
arrangement is that at the end of the present volume it was found
convenient to take the ‘Common Places’ from _The Literary Examiner_ a
little before their turn. They should strictly have followed the
contributions to _The Liberal_ in vol. XII., but it was thought better
not to divide between two volumes the important essays from _The New
Monthly Magazine_ which now begin vol. XII.
This plan of arrangement seemed on the whole the simplest and best, and
it is hoped that with the aid of the Tables of Contents and the Index
the reader will have no difficulty in finding any particular essay.
In the present edition all the essays, the magazine source of which is
known, have been printed _verbatim_ from the magazines themselves. In
preparing _Literary Remains_, _Sketches and Essays_ and _Winterslow_ for
the press the author’s son took considerable liberties with the text. In
one or two cases the alterations which he made may have been based on a
MS. or a copy of a magazine with corrections by Hazlitt, but far more
often the essays were reprinted with omissions and trifling alterations
made, as it would seem, by the editor himself on his own responsibility.
Some passages thus omitted and now restored for the first time are of
great interest. The more important of them are specially indicated in
the notes. In the few cases where the author’s son added passages from a
MS. or other authoritative source, the passages have been given either
in the text (with a note indicating where they occur), or in the Notes.
In addition to the essays printed in the text of this volume and to
those referred to in the notes it may be convenient to mention here a
few essays which may have been written by Hazlitt but have been omitted
from the present edition on the ground that his authorship is not
sufficiently certain. They are arranged in the following list under the
heading of the magazine in which they first appeared.
I. _The Examiner._
1. A review (Sept. 29 and Oct. 13, 1816) of George Ensor’s _On the
State of Europe in January, 1816_. This work of George Ensor’s
(1769–1843), ‘full,’ as the reviewer says, ‘of undeniable facts,
and undeniable inferences from them,’ was likely to appeal to
Hazlitt’s political sympathies. The review consists mainly of
extracts from the work itself, but what there is of comment is
certainly very much in Hazlitt’s vein.
2. ‘A Modern Tory Delineated’ (Oct. 6). This paper, which is dated
from Gloucester, Oct. 1, 1816, has certainly a very strong
flavour of Hazlitt.
3. Some political leaders and articles which appeared at the beginning
of 1817 and are not signed with Leigh Hunt’s mark. The most
important of these are: ‘Mr. Pitt—Finance, Sinking Fund’ (Jan.
19); ‘Defence of National Debt’ (Jan. 26); ‘Progress of Finance’
(Feb. 16); and ‘Friends of Revolution’ (Feb. 23).
4. Some theatrical notices published in 1828, viz.: June 29 (_The
Rivals_); Aug. 3 and 10 (_Cosi fan Tutte_); Oct. 19 (Kean’s
Shylock, _Figaro_, and Mathews in _The May Queen_); Oct. 26
(Madame Vestris in _The Marriage of Figaro_, and Rovere the
conjurer); Nov. 2 (Farren’s Dr. Cantwell in _The Hypocrite_, _The
Youthful Queen_, and Kean’s Overreach, Macbeth and Othello); Nov.
16 (_Guy Mannering_ and _The Stranger_).
II. _The Edinburgh Magazine_ (new Series).
Three papers on the criminal law, viz.: ‘Historical View of the
Progress of Opinion on the Criminal Law and the Punishment of
Death’ (March, 1819, vol. IV. p. 195); ‘Parliamentary Report on
the Criminal Laws’ (Dec., 1819, vol. V. p. 491); and a short
paper on the same subject (Jan. 1820, vol. VI. p. 26). Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt in his _Memoirs, etc._ (vol. I. p. xxvi.) attributes
these articles to Hazlitt, perhaps on the strength of some MS. or
proof in his possession at the date of the _Memoirs_ (1867).
Hazlitt’s authorship, however, though very probable, does not
seem to be certain, and as the papers consist largely of extracts
from a Parliamentary Report, they have been omitted from the
present edition. Hazlitt’s views on capital punishment will be
found in an extract which was first published in _Fraser’s
Magazine_ in 1831 and is reprinted in vol. XII.
III. _The London Magazine._
1. A review of ‘The Memoirs of Mr. Hardy Vaux’ (Jan. 1820, vol. I. p.
25).
2. ‘Letters of Foote, Garrick,’ etc. (Dec. 1820, vol. II. p. 647, and
Feb. 1821, vol. III. p. 202).
3. A review of Byron’s _Marino Faliero_ (May, 1821, vol. III. p. 550).
4. A review of Byron’s _Sardanapalus_ (Jan. 1822, vol. V. p. 66).
CONTENTS[1]
PAGE
On Abstract Ideas 1
_FRAGMENTS OF LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY_ (1812)
On the Writings of Hobbes 25
On Liberty and Necessity 48
On Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding 74
On Tooke’s ‘Diversions of Purley’ 119
On Self-Love 132
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE MORNING CHRONICLE
*Madame de Staël’s Account of German Philosophy and Literature 162
*The Same Subject continued 167
*The Same Subject continued 172
*The Same Subject continued (On Abstraction) 180
*Fine Arts. British Institution 187
*The Stage 191
*Fine Arts (The Louvre) 195
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE CHAMPION
*Wilson’s Landscapes at the British Institution 198
*On Gainsborough’s Pictures 202
*Mr. Kemble’s Penruddock 205
*Introduction to an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses 208
*On Genius and Originality 210
*On the Imitation of Nature 216
*On the Ideal 223
*L. Buonaparte’s Charlemagne: ou l’Église Délivrée 230
*The Same Subject continued 234
*L. Buonaparte’s Collection of Pictures 237
*British Institution 242
*The Same Subject continued 246
*The Same Subject continued 248
*On Mr. Wilkie’s Pictures 249
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE EXAMINER
*On Rochefoucault’s Maxims 253
On the Predominant Principles and Excitements of the Human Mind[2] 258
The Love of Power or Action as Main a Principle in the Human Mind
as Sensibility to Pleasure or Pain[2] 263
Essay on Manners[3] 269
*Kean’s Bajazet, and ‘The Country Girl’ 274
*Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity 277
*Parallel Passages in various Poets 282
*Mr. Locke a great Plagiarist 284
[The Same Subject continued] 578
*Shakespear’s Female Characters 290
*Miss O’Neill’s Widow Cheerly 297
*Penelope and The Dansomanie. 299
*Oroonoko 301
*The Pannel and The Ravens 303
*John Gilpin 305
*Don Giovanni and Kean’s Eustace de St. Pierre 307
*Character of the Country People 309
*Mr. Macready’s Macbeth 315
*Guy Faux 317
*The Same Subject continued 323
*The Same Subject concluded 328
Character of Mr. Canning 334
*The Dandy School 343
*Actors and the Public 348
*French Plays 352
*French Plays (continued) 356
*The Theatres and Passion-Week 358
*Charles Kean 362
*Some of the Old Actors 366
*The Company at the Opera 369
*The Beggar’s Opera 373
*The Taming of the Shrew and L’Avare 377
*Mrs. Siddons 381
*The Three Quarters, etc. 384
*Mr. Kean 389
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE TIMES
*Munden’s Sir Peter Teazle 392
*Young’s Hamlet 394
*Dowton in The Hypocrite 395
*Miss Brunton’s Rosalind 396
*Maywood’s Zanga 397
*Kean’s Richard III. 399
*The Wonder 401
*Venice Preserved 402
*She Stoops to Conquer 403
*Kean’s Macbeth 404
*Kean’s Othello 405
*Kean and Miss O’Neill 407
*The Honey Moon 409
*Mr. Kean 410
*King John 410
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE YELLOW DWARF
*The Press—Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Bentham 411
*Mr. Coleridge’s Lectures 416
*Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 420
The Opera 426
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE EDINBURGH (NEW SCOTS) MAGAZINE
*On the Question whether Pope was a Poet 430
*On Respectable People 433
On Fashion 437
On Nicknames 442
Thoughts on Taste 450
The Same Subject continued 454
The Same Subject continued[4] 459
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE LONDON MAGAZINE
*On the Present State of Parliamentary Eloquence 464
*Haydon’s ‘Christ’s Agony in the Garden’ 481
*Pope, Lord Byron, and Mr. Bowles 486
On Consistency of Opinion 508
On the Spirit of Partisanship 521
*‘The Pirate’ 531
*‘Peveril of the Peak’ 537
_CONTRIBUTIONS TO_ THE LITERARY EXAMINER
Common Places 540
NOTES 563
_ESSAYS NOT CERTAINLY HAZLITT’S, AND FRAGMENTS_
Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem The Excursion 572
The Duke D’Enghien 577
Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ 580
Sketches of the History of the Good Old Times 582
Historical Illustrations of Shakespeare 601
Mr. Crabbe 603
[Illustration: FACSIMILE (REDUCED) OF HAZLITT’s HANDWRITING, FROM A MS.
IN THE POSSESSION OF MR. W. C. HAZLITT.]
FUGITIVE WRITINGS
ON ABSTRACT IDEAS
I shall in this essay state Mr. Locke’s account of generalization,
abstraction, and reasoning, as contrasted with the modern one, and then
endeavour to defend the existence of these faculties, or acts of the
mind from the objections urged against them by Hume, Berkeley,
Condillac, and others, which are in truth merely repetitions of what
Hobbes has said on the subject. I must premise, however, that I do not
think it possible ever to arrive at a demonstration of generals or
abstractions by beginning in Mr. Locke’s method with particular ones:
this faculty of abstraction is by most considered as a sort of
artificial refinement upon our other ideas, as an excrescence, no ways
contained in the common impressions of things, nor scarcely necessary to
the common purposes of life, and it is by Mr. Locke altogether denied to
be among the faculties of brutes. It is the ornament and top-addition of
the mind of man, which proceeding from simple sensations upwards, is
gradually sublimed into the abstract notions of things; ‘from the root
springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves more airy, last
the bright consummate flower.’ On the other hand, I conceive that all
our notions from first to last, are strictly speaking, general and
abstract, not absolute and particular; and that to have a perfectly
distinct idea of any one individual thing, or concrete existence, either
as to the parts of which it is composed, or the differences belonging to
it, or the circumstances connected with it, would imply an unlimited
power of comprehension in the human mind, which is impossible. All
particular things consist of, and lead to an infinite number of other
things. Abstraction is a consequence of the limitation of the
comprehensive faculty, and mixes itself more or less with every act of
the mind of whatever kind, and in every moment of its existence. There
is no idea of an individual object, which consists of a single
impression, but of a number of impressions massed together: there is no
idea of a particular quality of an object, which is perfectly simple, or
which is not the result of a number of impressions of the same sort
classed together by the mind without attending to their particular
differences. Every idea of an object is, therefore, in a strict sense an
imperfect and general notion of an aggregate: of a house, or tree, as
well as of a city, or forest: of a grain of sand as well as of the
universe. Every idea of a sensible quality, as of the whiteness of the
sheet of paper before me, or the hardness of the table on which I lean,
implies the same power of generalization, of connecting several
impressions into one sort, as the most refined and abstract idea of
virtue and justice, of motion, or extension, or space of time, or being
itself. This view of the subject is not, I confess, very obvious at
first sight, and it will be more easily understood after I have stated
the arguments of others on this difficult question. The concise account
of the nature of abstract ideas is that which Mr. Locke has given, as
follows. ‘All things that exist being particular, it may be perhaps
thought reasonable that words which ought to be conformed to things
should be so too, I mean in their signification: but yet we find quite
the contrary. The far greatest part of words that make all languages are
general terms, which has not been the effect of neglect or chance, but
of reason and necessity.’ ‘First, it is impossible that every particular
thing should have a distinct peculiar name. For the signification and
use of words depending on that connection which the mind makes between
its ideas and the sounds it uses as signs of them, it is necessary in
the applications of names to things, that the mind should have distinct
ideas of the things, and retain also the particular name that belongs to
every one, with its peculiar appropriation to that idea. But it is
beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of
all the particular things we meet with; every bird and beast we see,
every tree and plant that affect the senses, could not find a place in
the most capacious understanding. If it be looked on as an instance of a
prodigious memory, that some generals have been able to call every
soldier in their army by his proper name, we may easily find a reason
why men never attempted to give names to each sheep in their flock, or
crow that flies over their heads, much less to call every leaf of plants
or grain of sand that came in their way, by a peculiar name. Secondly,
if it were possible, it would not serve to the chief end of language.
Men would not in vain heap up names of particular things that would not
serve them to communicate their thoughts. Men learn names, and use them
in talk with others, only that they may be understood, which is then
only done, when by use or consent, the sound I make by the organs of
speech, excites in another man’s mind who hears it, the idea I apply to
it in mine when I speak it. This cannot be done by names applied to
particular things, whereof I alone have the ideas in my mind, the names
of them could not be significant, intelligible to another who was not
acquainted with all those very particular things which had fallen under
my notice. Thirdly, granting this feasible, which I think it is not, yet
a distinct name of every particular thing would not be of any great use
for the improvement of knowledge; which though founded in particular
things, enlarges itself by general views, to which things reduced into
sorts under general names are properly subservient. These with the names
belonging to them come within some compass, and do not multiply every
moment beyond what either the mind can contain, or use requires, and
therefore in these men have for the most part stopped. But yet not so,
as to hinder themselves from distinguishing particular things by
appropriated names, where convenience demands it. And therefore in their
own species, which they have to do with, and wherein they have often
occasion to mention particular persons, they make use of proper names;
and these distinct individuals have distinct denominations. Besides
persons, countries, cities, rivers, mountains, and other like
distinctions of place have usually found particular names, and that for
the same reason; and I doubt not but if we had reason to mention
particular horses, as often as we have to mention particular men, we
should have proper names for the one as familiarly as for the other, and
Bucephalus would be a word as much in use as Alexander. And therefore we
see amongst jockies, horses have their proper names to be known and
distinguished by, as commonly as their servants, because amongst them
there is often occasion to mention this or that particular horse, when
he is out of sight. The next thing to be considered is how general words
came to be made. For since all things that exist are only particulars,
how come we by general terms, or where find we those general natures
they are supposed to stand for? Words become general by being made the
signs of general ideas, and ideas become general by separating from them
the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may
determine them to this or that particular existence. By this way of
abstraction they are made capable of representing more individuals than
one, each of which having in it a conformity to that abstract idea is
(as we call it) of that sort.
‘But to deduce this a little more distinctly, it will not, perhaps, be
amiss to trace our notions and names from their beginning, and observe
by what degrees we proceed, and by what steps we enlarge our ideas from
their first infancy. There is nothing more evident than that the ideas
of the persons children converse with, are like the persons themselves,
only particulars. The ideas of the nurse and the mother are well framed
in the mind and like pictures of them there, represent only those
individuals. The names they first give rise to are confined to these
individuals, and the names of _nurse_ and _mamma_ which the child uses,
determine themselves to those persons. Afterwards when time and a larger
acquaintance has made them observe that there are a great many other
things in the world, that in some common agreements of shape, and
several other properties resemble their father and mother, and those
persons they have been used to, they frame an idea which they find those
many particulars do partake in, and to that they give with others the
name _Man_, for example. And thus they come to have a general name, and
a general idea. Wherein they make nothing new, but only leave out of the
complex idea they had of Peter and James, Mary and Jane, that which is
peculiar to each, and retain what is common to them all. By the same way
that they come by the general name and idea of man, they easily advance
to more general names and notions. For observing that several things
that differ from their idea of man, and therefore cannot be comprehended
under that name, have yet certain qualities wherein they agree with man,
by retaining only those qualities and uniting them into one idea, they
have again another and more general idea; to which having given a name,
they make a term of a more comprehensive extension; which new idea is
made, not by any new addition, but only as before, by leaving out the
shape, and some other properties signified by the name man, and
retaining only a body with life, sense, and spontaneous motion,
comprehended under the name _animal_. That this is the way that men
first formed general ideas and general names to them, I think is so
evident that there needs no other proof of it, but the considering of a
man’s self or others, and the ordinary proceedings of their mind in
knowledge: and he that thinks general natures or notions are anything
else but _such abstracts and partial ideas of more complex ones taken at
first from particular existencies_, will I fear be at a loss where to
find them. For let any one reflect and then tell me, wherein does his
idea of _man_ differ from that of Paul and Peter, or his idea of horse
from that of Bucephalus, but in the leaving out something that is
peculiar to each individual; and retaining so much of those particular
complex ideas of several particular existencies, as they are found to
agree in? Of the complex ideas signified by the names _man_ and _horse_,
leaving out those particulars wherein they differ, and retaining only
those wherein they agree, and of those making a new distinct complex
idea and giving the name _animal_ to it, one has a more general term
that comprehends with man several other creatures.
‘Leave out of the idea of animal sense and spontaneous motion, and the
remaining complex idea, made up of the remaining simple ones of body,
life, and nourishment, becomes a more general one under the more
comprehensive word _vivens_. And not to dwell upon these particular, so
evident in itself, by the same way the mind proceeds to _body_,
_substance_, and at last to _being_, thing, and such universal terms,
which stand for any of our ideas whatsoever. To conclude: this whole
mystery of genera and species, which make such a noise in the schools,
and are with justice so little regarded out of them, is nothing else but
abstract ideas, more or less comprehensive, with names annexed to them.
In all which this is constant and invariable, that every more general
term stands for such an idea as is but a part of any of those contained
under it.’
The author adds, ‘It is plain by what has been said, that general and
universal belong not only to the real existence of things, but are the
inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it, for its own
use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas. Words are general,
when used for signs of general ideas, and so are applicable
indifferently to many particular things; and ideas are general when they
are set up as the representatives of many particular things, but
universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them
particular in their existence, even those words and ideas which in their
significations are general. When, therefore, we quit particulars, the
generals that rest are only creatures of our own making, their general
nature being nothing but the capacity they are put in to of signifying
many particulars. For the signification they have is nothing but a
relation, that by the mind of man is added to them.’ See p. 15, vol. 2.
Mr. Locke at first here evidently supposes that we have ideas answering
to general terms, i.e. certain ideas of such particulars as a number of
things are found to agree in, or that there are some common qualities by
retaining which and only leaving out what is peculiar and foreign,
without adding anything new, we get at the general notion. He afterwards
to all appearance reduces these general notions to mere signs or sounds
with which several particular ideas are associated, but which do not
correspond to any common properties or general nature really inhering in
these particular things. In the same manner he continues to take
different sides of the question, when he comes to treat of genera, and
species, when his antipathy to the word _essence_ constantly drives him
back into the notion that all our ideas of essences are mere terms, and
the want of solidity in that opinion again as constantly disposes him to
admit a real difference in the sorts of things, besides the difference
of the names we give to them. For immediately after affirming that the
abstract essences of things are the workmanship of the understanding, he
adds, ‘I would not here be thought to forget, much less to deny, that
nature, in the production of things makes several of them alike: there
is nothing more obvious, especially in the races of animals, and all
things propagated by seed. But yet, I think we may say, the sorting of
them by names is the workmanship of the understanding taking occasion
from the similitude it observes amongst them to make abstract general
ideas, and set them up as patterns in forms (for in that sense the word
form has a very proper signification), to which as particular things
existing are found to agree, so they come to be of that species, have
that denomination, or are put into that class. For when we say this is a
_man_, that a _horse_, &c. what do we else but rank things under
different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of which
we have made these names the signs? And what are the essences of those
species set out and marked by names, but those abstract ideas in the
mind, which are as it were the bonds between particular things that
exist,’ &c. For my own part I must confess that I agree with the Bishop
of Worcester on this occasion, who asks, ‘What is it that makes Peter,
James, and John real men? Is it the attributing the general name to
them? No, certainly, but that the true and real essence of a man is in
every one of them. They take their denomination of being men from that
common nature or essence which is in them.’ On the opposite system it is
not the nature of the thing which determines the imposition of the name,
but the imposition of the name which determines the nature of the thing;
or giving them the name makes Peter, James, and John men, as in the
opinion of some divines Baptism makes them Christians. That there is a
real difference in things and ideas, answering to their general names,
appears evident from this single observation, that if it were not so, we
could never know how to apply these general names, and we could no more
distinguish between a man and a horse than we could tell at first sight,
that one man’s proper name was John and another’s Thomas. The puzzle
about genera and species, in this view of the question, seems to arise
from a very obvious transposition of ideas. Because the abstracting or
separating these general ideas from particular circumstances is the
workmanship of the understanding: it has, therefore, been inferred, that
the ideas themselves are so too, and that they exist no where but in the
mind which perceives them.
But I would fain ask, in the account which Mr. Locke gives of the
abstract ideas of _animal_ for example, whether body, sense, and motion,
as they exist in different individuals, have not a general nature, or
something common in all those individuals. If _body_ in one case
expresses the same thing, or same idea as _body_ in another, their
generals belong to things and ideas, as well as to names; if body in one
case expresses quite a different thing in one to what it does in
another, then it is not easy to imagine what determines the mind to
apply the name to these different things, or on what foundation Mr.
Locke’s definition rests. Extreme opinions were not in general the side
on which Mr. Locke erred; and, on the present occasion, he has qualified
his opposition to the prevailing system in such a manner, that it is
difficult to say in what point he admitted or rejected it. He evidently,
in the general scope of this argument, admits the reality of abstract
ideas in the mind, though he denies the existence of real sorts, or
nature of things of the mind to correspond to them: for the expressions
which intimate any doubt of the former are occasional and parenthetical,
and his acknowledgment that there is something in nature which guides
and determines the mind in the sorting of things and giving names to
them is equally extorted from him. There is none of this doubt and
perplexity in the minds of his French commentators; none of this
suspicion of error and anxious desire to correct it; no lurking
objections arise to stagger their confidence in themselves; it is all
the same light airy self-complacency; not a speck is to be seen in the
clear sky of their metaphysics, not a cloud obscures the sparkling
current of their thoughts. In the logic of Condillac, the whole question
of abstract ideas, of genera and species, and of the nature of reasoning
as founded upon them, is settled and cleared from all difficulties,
past, present, and to come, with as little expence of thought, time, and
trouble, as possible. The Abbé demonstrates with ease. ‘General ideas,’
he says, ‘of which we have explained the formation, are a part of the
aggregate idea of each of the individuals to which they correspond, and
they are considered, for this reason, as so many partial or imperfect
ideas. The idea of man, for instance, makes part of the complex ideas of
Peter and Paul, since it is equally to be found in both. There is no
such thing as man in general. This partial idea has then no reality out
of the mind, but it has one in the mind, where it exists separately from
the aggregate or individual ideas of which it is a part. All our general
ideas are then so many abstract ideas, and you see that we form them
only in consequence of taking from each individual idea that which is
common to all.
‘But what, in truth, is the reality which a general and abstract idea
has in the mind. It is nothing but a name: or, if it is any thing more,
it necessarily ceases to be abstract, and general. When, for example, I
think of a _man_, I consider this word as a common denomination, in
which case, it is very evident, that my idea is in some sort
circumscribed within this name, that it does not extend to anything
beyond it, and that consequently it is nothing but the name itself. If,
on the contrary, thinking of man in general, I contemplate any thing in
this word, besides the mere denomination, it can only be by representing
myself to some one man; and a man can no more be man in general, or in
the abstract in my mind, than in nature. Abstract ideas are therefore
only denominations. If we will absolutely think that they are something
else, we shall only resemble a painter who should obstinately persist in
painting the figure of a man in general, and who would still paint only
individuals. This observation concerning abstract and general ideas,
demonstrates that their clearness depends entirely on the order in which
we have arranged the denominations of classes; and that, consequently,
to determine this sort of ideas, there is only one means, which is to
construct a language properly.
‘This confirms what we have already demonstrated, how necessary words
are to us: for if we had no general terms, we should have no abstract
ideas, we should have neither _genera_, or _species_, and without
_genera_ and _species_, we could reason upon nothing. But if we reason
only by means of words this is a new proof that we can only reason well
or ill, according as the language, in which we reason, is well or ill
made. The analysis of our thoughts can only enable us to reason in
proportion as by instructing us how to class our abstract ideas, it
enables us how to form our language correctly, and the whole art of
reasoning is thus reduced to the art of well speaking.’
What in this supremacy of words is to be the criterion of well speaking
the Abbé does not say.
‘To speak, to reason, to form general or abstract ideas, are then in
fact the same thing: and this truth, simple as it is, might pass for a
discovery. Certainly, men in general have not had any notion of it; this
is evident from the manner in which they speak and reason; it is evident
from the abuse which they make of abstract ideas; finally, it is evident
from the difficulties which those persons confessedly find in conceiving
of abstract ideas who have so little in speaking of them.
‘The art of reasoning resolves into the construction of languages, only
because the order of our ideas itself depends entirely on the
subordination that subsists between the names given to _genera_ and
_species_; and as we arrive at new ideas only by forming new classes, it
follows that we can only determine or define our ideas by determining
their classes. In this case we should reason well, because we should be
guided by analogy in our conclusions as well as in the acceptation of
words.
‘Convinced, therefore, that classes or sorts of things are pure
denominations, we shall never think of supposing that there exist in
nature _genera_ or _species_; and we shall understand by these words
nothing but a certain mode of classing things according to the relations
which they have to ourselves and to one another. We shall be sensible
that we can only discover those relations, and not what the things truly
are.’
Berkeley handled his subjects with little tenderness, and he has
perfectly anatomised this subject of abstract ideas. In choosing to
answer the objections to this doctrine as stated by him, I shall not be
accused of wishing to encounter a mean adversary. I can only trust to
the goodness of my cause. I hope I shall be excused for going at some
length into the argument, because it is one of the most difficult and
complicated in itself, and is of the most extensive application to other
questions relating to the human understanding. If we can come to any
satisfactory issue to it, it will be worth the pains of enquiry.
‘It is agreed on all hands,’ says this author, ‘that the quantities or
modes of things do never really exist in each of them, apart by itself,
and separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended
together, several in the same object. But we are told the mind being
able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other
qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to itself
abstract ideas. For example, there is perceived by sight, an object,
extended, coloured, and moved. This mixed idea the mind resolving into
its simple constituent parts, and viewing each by itself exclusive of
the rest, does frame the abstract ideas of extension, colour, and
motion. Not that it is possible for colour or motion to exist without
extension, but only that the mind can frame to itself by abstraction the
idea of colour, exclusive of extension, and of motion exclusive both of
colour and extension. Again, the mind having observed that in the
particular extensions perceived by sense, there is something common and
alike in all, and some other things peculiar, as this or that figure, or
magnitude, which distinguish them one from another, it considers apart,
or singles out by itself that which is most common, making thereof a
most abstract idea of extension, line, surface, or solid, nor has any
figure or magnitude, but is an idea prescinded from all these. So
likewise the mind by leaving out of the particular colours perceived by
sense, that which distinguishes them one from another, and retaining
that which only is common to all, makes an idea of colour in abstract,
which is neither red, nor blue, not white, &c. And in like manner by
considering motion abstractedly, not only the body moved, but likewise
from the figure it describes, and all particular directions and
velocities, the abstract idea of motion is framed, which equally
corresponds to all particular motions whatsoever that may be perceived
by sense.
‘And as the mind frames to itself abstract ideas of qualities, or modes,
so does it by the precision or mental separation, attain abstract ideas
of the more compound beings, which include several co-existent
qualities:—for example, the mind having observed, that Peter, James,
John, &c., resemble each other in certain common agreements of shape,
and other qualities, leaves out of the complex or compounded idea it has
of Peter, James, &c., that which is peculiar to each, retaining only
what is common to all; and so makes an abstract idea wherein the
particulars equally partake, abstracting entirely, and cutting off all
those circumstances and differences which might determine it, to any
particular existence. And after this manner it is said, we come by the
abstract idea of man, or if you please humanity, or human nature; ’tis
true, there is included colour, because there is no man but has some
colour, but then it can be neither white nor black, nor any particular
colour, because there is no one particular colour, wherein all men
partake; so there is included stature, but then it is neither tall
stature, nor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but something
abstracted from all these; and so of the rest. Moreover, there being a
great variety of other creatures that partake in some parts, not all, of
the complex idea, man, the mind leaving out those parts which are
peculiar to men, and retaining those only which are common to all living
creatures, frames the idea of animals, which abstracts not only from all
particular men, but also, all birds, beasts, fishes, and insects. By
_Body_ is meant body without any particular shape, or figure, there
being no one shape or figure common to all animals, without covering of
hair, feathers, or scales, &c. nor yet naked; hair, feathers, scales,
and nakedness, being the distinguishing properties of particular
animals, and for that reason left out of the abstract idea; upon the
same account the spontaneous motion must be neither in walking, nor
flying, nor creeping, it is nevertheless a motion, but what that motion
is, it is not easy to conceive.’
‘Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas,
they best can tell: for myself I dare be confident I have it not. I have
a faculty of imagining or representing to myself the ideas of those
particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and
dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads or the upper part of a
man joined to the body of a horse; I can consider the hand, the eye, the
nose, each by itself, abstracted or separated from the rest of the body.
But then, whatever hand or eye, I imagine, it must have some particular
shape, and colour. Likewise, the idea of man that I frame to myself must
be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny; a strait, or a crooked; a
tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought
conceive the abstract idea above-described: and it is equally impossible
for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body
moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor
rectilinear, and the like may be said of other abstract general ideas
whatsoever: to be plain, I own myself able to abstract in one sense, as
when I consider some particular parts or qualities separated from
others, with which, though they are united in some objects, yet it is
possible they may really exist without them. But I deny that I can
abstract from one another, or conceive separately those qualities, which
it is impossible should exist so separated:—or that I can frame a
general notion by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid,
which two last are the proper acceptation of abstraction; and there is
ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to be in my case.
‘The generality of men, which are simple and illiterate, never pretend
to abstract notions. It is said they are difficult and not to be
attained without pains and study; we may therefore reasonably conclude
that, if such there be, they are confined only to the learned. I proceed
to examine what can be alleged in defence of the doctrine of
abstraction, and try if I can discover what it is that inclines the man
of speculation to embrace an opinion so remote from common sense as that
seems to be. There has been a late excellent and deservedly esteemed
philosopher, who no doubt has given it very much, by seeming to think
the having abstract general ideas is what puts the difference in point
of understanding betwixt man and beast.’
The author here quotes a passage from Mr. Locke on the subject, which it
is not necessary to give, and afterwards his opinion that words become
general by being made signs of general ideas. He then proceeds:—‘To this
I cannot assent, being of opinion that a word becomes general by being
made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of several
particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the
mind.’
‘If we will annex a meaning to our words and speak only of what we can
only conceive, I believe we shall acknowledge that an idea, which
considered in itself is particular, becomes general, by being made to
represent or stand for all other particular ideas _of the same sort_. To
make this plain by example, suppose a geometrician is demonstrating the
method of cutting a line in two equal parts. He draws for instance a
black line of an inch in length: this which is in itself a particular
line, is nevertheless, with regard to its signification, general, since,
as it is there used, it represents all particular lines whatsoever, so
that what is demonstrated of it is demonstrated of all lines, or in
other words of a line in general; and, as that particular line becomes
general, by being made a sign, so the name _line_, which taken
absolutely, is particular, by being a sign, is made general. And as the
former owes its generality not to its being the sign of an abstract or
general line, but of all particular right lines that may possibly exist,
so the latter must be thought to derive its generality from the same
cause, namely, the various particular lines which it indifferently
denotes.’
‘To give the reader a clearer view of the nature of abstract ideas, and
the uses they are thought necessary to, I shall add one more passage out
of the Essay on Human Understanding, which is as follows:—“Abstract
ideas are not so obvious or easy to children, or the yet unexercised
mind as particular ones. If they seem so to grown men, it is only by
constant and familiar use they are made so. For when we nicely reflect
upon them, we shall find that general ideas are fictions and
contrivances of the mind, that carry difficulty with them, and do not so
easily offer themselves as we are apt to imagine. For example, does it
not require some skill and pains to form the general idea of a triangle
(which is yet none of the abstract, comprehensive, and difficult), for
it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral,
equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once. In effect
it is something imperfect that cannot exist, an idea wherein some parts
of different and inconsistent ideas are put together. ’Tis true the mind
in this imperfect state has need of such ideas, and makes all the haste
it can to them, for the convenience of communication and enlargement of
knowledge, to both of which it is naturally very much inclined. But yet
one has reason to suspect such ideas are marks of our imperfections, at
least this is enough to show that the most abstract and general ideas
are not those that the mind is first and most easily acquainted with,
nor such as its earliest knowledge is conversant about.”‘—After laughing
at this description of the general idea of a triangle, which is neither
oblique nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all
and none of these at once, Berkeley adds, ‘much is here said of the
difficulty that abstract ideas carry with them, and the pains and skill
requisite to the forming of them. And it is on all hands agreed that
there is need of great toil and labour of mind, to emancipate our
thoughts from particular objects, and raise them to those sublime
speculations that are conversant about abstract ideas. From all which
the natural consequences should seem to be, that so difficult a thing as
forming abstract ideas was not necessary for communication, which is so
familiar to all sorts of men. But, we are told, if they seem obvious and
easy to grown men, it is only because by constant and familiar use they
are made so. Now I would fain know at what time it is, men are employed
in surmounting that difficulty and furnishing themselves with those
necessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, for
then it seems they are not conscious of any such pains-taking; it
therefore remains to be the business of their childhood. And surely the
great and multiplied labour of framing abstract notions will be found a
hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a
couple of children cannot prate of their sugar plums, and rattles, and
the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first packed together
numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds general
abstract ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of.
‘It is I know a point much insisted on that all knowledge and
demonstration are about universal notions, to which I fully assent. But
then it does not appear to me that those notions are formed by
abstraction, in the manner premised; universality, so far as I can
comprehend, not consisting in the absolute, positive nature and
conception of any thing, but in the relation it bears to the particulars
signified, or represented by it. But here it will be demanded, how we
can know any proposition to be true of all particular triangles, except
we have seen it first demonstrated of the abstract idea of a triangle
which equally agrees to all?
‘For because a property may be demonstrated to agree to some particular
triangle, it will not thence follow that it equally belongs to every
other with it. For example, having demonstrated that the three angles of
an isosceles, rectangular triangle, are equal to two right ones, I
cannot therefore conclude this affection argues to all other triangles,
which have neither a right angle, nor two equal sides. It seems,
therefore, that to be certain this proposition is universally true we
must either make a particular demonstration for every particular
triangle, which is impossible, or once for all demonstrate it of the
abstract idea of a triangle, in which all the particulars do
indifferently partake, and by which they are all equally represented.’
To which I answer, that though the idea I have in view, whilst I make
the demonstration, be, for instance, that of an isosceles, not a regular
triangle, whose sides are of a determinate length, I may nevertheless be
certain it extends to all other rectilinear triangles of what sort or
bigness soever. And that neither because the right angle, nor the
equality, nor determinate length of the sides are at all concerned in
the demonstration. It is true, the diagram I have in view includes all
these particulars, but then there is not the least mention made of them
in the proofs of the proposition. It is not said the three angles are
equal to two right ones, because one of these is a right angle, or
because the sides comprehending it are of the same length. Which
sufficiently shews that the right angle might have been oblique and the
sides unequal, and for all the others the demonstrations have held good.
And for this reason it is that I conclude that to be true of any oblique
angular, or scalenon, which I had demonstrated of a particular right
angled, equicrural, triangle, and not because I demonstrated the
proposition of the abstract idea of a triangle.’ The author then adds
some further remarks on the use of abstract terms, and concludes—‘May we
not, for example, be affected with the promise of a _good thing_, though
we have not an idea of what it is? or is not the being threatened with
danger sufficient to excite a dread, though we think not of a particular
evil likely to befal us, and yet frame to ourselves an idea of danger in
abstract?’ Introduction to Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 31.
Hume, who has taken up Berkeley’s arguments on this subject, and affirms
that the doctrine of abstract ideas applies the flattest of all
contradictions, that it is possible for the same thing to be and not to
be, has enlarged a good deal on this last topic of the manner in which
words may be supposed to excite general ideas. His words are these:
‘Where we have found a resemblance between any two objects that often
occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences
we may observe in the degrees of their quantity and quality, and
whatever differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a
custom of this kind, the hearing of that name revives the idea of one of
these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with its particular
circumstances and proportions. But as the same word is supposed to have
been frequently applied to other individuals that are different in many
respects from the idea which is immediately present to the mind, the
word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, only
_touches_ the soul, if I may be allowed so to speak, and revives that
custom, which we have acquired by surveying them. They are not in
reality present to the mind, but only in power, nor do we draw them out
distinctly in the imagination, but keep ourselves in readiness to survey
any of them, as we may be prompted by a present design or necessity. The
word raises up an individual idea, along with a certain custom; and that
custom produces any other individual one, for which we may have
occasion.’ Treatise of Human Nature, p. 43, 4. The author afterwards
adds, with his usual candour, that this account does not perfectly
satisfy him, but he relies principally on the logical demonstration of
the impossibilities of abstract ideas just before given.
I confess it does not seem an easy matter to recover the argument in
this state of it; however, I will attempt it. What I shall endeavour
will not be so much to answer the foregoing reasoning as to prove that
in a strict sense all ideas whatever are mere abstractions and can be
nothing else; that some of the most clear, distinct, and positive ideas
of particular objects are made up of numberless inconsistencies; and
that as Hume expresses it, they do touch the soul, and are not drawn
distinctly in the imagination, &c. Though I shall not be able to point
out distinctly the fallacy of the foregoing reasonings, I hope to make
it appear that there must be something wrong in the premises, and that
the nature of thought and ideas is quite different from what is here
supposed. I may be allowed to set off one paradox against another, and
as these writers affirm that all abstract ideas are particular images,
so I shall try to prove that all particular images are abstract ideas.
If it can be made to appear that our ideas of particular things
themselves are not particular, it may be easily granted that those which
are in general allowed to be abstract are all so. The existence of
abstract and complex ideas in the mind has been disputed for the same
reason, that is, in falsely attributing individuality, or absolute unity
to the objects of sense. While each thing or object was said to be
absolutely one and simple, there was found to be no reach, compass, or
expansion of mind, to comprehend it; and, on the other hand, there was
no room on the same supposition for the doctrine of abstraction, for
there is no abstracting from absolute unity. That which is one positive,
indivisible thing, must remain entire as this, or cease to exist. There
is no alternative between individuality and nothing. As long as we are
determined to consider any one thing or idea, as the knot of a chain, or
the figure of a man, or any thing else, as one individual, it must, as
it were, go together: we can take nothing away without destroying it
altogether. I have already shewn that there is no one object which does
not consist of a number of parts and relations, or which does not
require a comprehensive facility in the mind in order to conceive of it.
Now abstraction is a necessary consequence of the limitation of this
power of the mind, and if it were a previous condition of our having the
ideas of things that we should comprehend distinctly all the particulars
of which they are composed, we could have no ideas at all. An
imperfectly comprehended is a general idea. But the mind perfectly
comprehends the whole of no one object. That is, it has not an absolute
and distinct knowledge of all its parts or differences, and consequently
all our ideas are abstractions, that is a general and confused result
from a number of undistinguished, and undistinguishable impressions, for
there is no possible medium between a perfectly distinct comprehension
of all the particulars, which is impossible, or that imperfect and
confused one, that properly constitutes a general notion in the one case
or the other. To explain this more particularly. In looking at any
object, as a house on the opposite side of the way, it is supposed that
the impression I have of it is a perfectly distinct, precise, or
definite idea, in which abstraction has no concern. And the general idea
of a house, it is said, is rather a mere word, or must reduce itself to
some such positive, individual image as that conveyed by the sight of a
particular house, it being impossible that it should be made up of the
confused, imperfect, and undistinguishable impressions of several
different objects of the same kind. Now it appears to me the easiest
thing in the world to shew that this sensible image of a particular
house, into which the general is to be resolved for greater clearness,
is itself but a confused and vague notion, or numberless inconsistencies
packed together; not one precise individual thing, or any number of
things, distinctly perceived. For I would ask of any one who thinks his
senses furnish him with these infallible and perfect conceptions of
things, free from all contradiction and perplexity, whether he has a
precise knowledge of all the circumstance of the object prescribed to
him. For instance, is the knowledge which he has that the house before
him is larger than another near it, in consequence of his intentively
considering all the bricks of which it is composed, or can he tell that
it contains a greater number of windows than another, without distinctly
counting them? Let us suppose, however, that he does. But this will not
be enough unless he has also a distinct perception of the numbers and
the size of the panes of glass in each window, or of any mark, stain, or
dirt in each separate brick? Otherwise his idea of each of these
particulars will still be general, and his most substantial knowledge
built on shadows; that is composed of a number of parts of the parts of
which he has no knowledge. If objects were what mankind in general
suppose them, single things, we could have no notion of them but what
was particular, for by leaving out any thing we should leave out the
whole object, which is but one thing. We may also be said to have a
particular knowledge of things in proportion to the number of parts we
distinguish in them. But the real foundation of all our knowledge, is
and must be general, that is, a mere confused impression or effect of
feeling produced by a number of things, for there is no object which
does not consist of an infinite number of parts, and we have not an
infinite number of distinct ideas answering to them. Yet it cannot be
denied that we have some knowledge of things, that they make some
impression on us, and this knowledge, this impression, must therefore be
an abstract one, the natural result of a limited understanding, which is
variously affected by a number of things at the same time, but which is
not susceptible of itself to an infinite number of modifications. If it
should be said that the sensible image of the house is still one, as
being one impression, or given result, I answer that the most abstract
ideas of a house, and the imperfect recollection of a number of houses
is in the same sense one, and a real idea, distinct from that of a tree,
though far from being a particular image. Again, it is said, that in
conceiving of the idea of man in general, we must conceive a man a
particular sign or figure. I would ask first is this to be understood
merely of his height, or of his form in general? If the latter, it would
imply that we have, wherever we pronounce the word _man_, no ideas at
all, or a distinct conception of a man with a head and limbs of a
certain extent and proportion, of every turn in each feature, of every
variety in the formation of each part, as well as of its distance from
every other part, a knowledge which no sculptor or painter ever had of
any one figure of which he was the most perfect master, for it would be
a knowledge of an infinite number of lines drawn in all directions from
every part of the body, with their precise length and terminations.
Those who have consigned this business of abstraction over to the senses
with a view to make the whole matter plain and easy, have not been aware
of what they have been doing. They supposed with the vulgar that it was
only necessary to open the eyes in order to see, and that the images
produced by outward objects are completely defined, and unalterable
things, in which there can be no dimness and confusion. These
speculators had no thought but they saw as much of a landscape as
Poussin, and knew as much about a face that was before them as Titian or
Vandyke would have done. This is a great mistake; the having particular
and absolute ideas of things is not only difficult, but impossible. The
ablest painters have never been able to give more than one part of
nature, in abstracted views of things. The most laborious artists never
finished to perfection any one part of an object, or had ever any more
than a confused, vague, uncertain notion of the shape of the mouth or
nose, or the colour of an eye. Ask a logician, or any common man, and he
will no doubt tell you that a face is a face, a nose is a nose, a tree
is a tree, and that he can see what it is as well as another. Ask a
painter and he will tell you otherwise. Secondly, when it is asserted
that we must necessarily have the idea of a particular sign, when we
think of any in general, all that is intended by it is, I believe, that
we must think of a particular height. This idea it is supposed must be
particular and determinate, just as we must draw a line with a piece of
chalk, or make a mark with the slides of a measuring rule, in one place
and not in the other. I think it may be shewn that this view of the
question is also utterly fallacious, and out of the order of our ideas.
The height of the individual is thus resolved with the ideas of the
lines terminating or defining it, and the intermediate space of which it
properly consists is entirely forgotten. For let us take any given
height of a man, whether tall, short, or middle-sized, and let that
height be as visible as you please, I would ask whether the actual
height to which it amounts, does not consist of a number of other
lengths: as if it be a tall man, the length will be six feet, and each
of these feet will consist of so many inches, and those inches will be
again made up of decimals, and those decimals of other subordinate
parts, which must be all distinctly placed, and added together before
the sum total, which they compose, can be pretended to be a distinct
particular, or individual idea; I can only understand by a particular
thing either one precise individual, or a precise number of individuals.
Instead of its being true that all general ideas of extension are
deducible to particular positive extension, the reverse proposition is I
think demonstrable: that all particular extensions, the most positive
and distinct, are never any thing else than a more or less vague notion
of extension in general. In any given visible object we have always the
general idea of something extended, and never of the precise length; for
the precise length as it is thought to be is necessarily composed of a
number of lengths too many, and too minute to be necessarily attended
to, or jointly conceived by the mind, and at last loses itself in the
infinite divisibility of matter. What sort of distinctness or individual
can therefore be found in any visible image, or object of sense, I
cannot well conceive: it seems to me like seeking for certainty in the
dancing of insects in the evening sun, or for fixedness or rest in the
motions of the sea. All particulars are thought nothing but generals,
more or less defined by circumstances, but never perfectly so; in this
all our knowledge both begins and ends, and if we think to exclude all
generality from our ideas of things, we must be content to remain in
utter ignorance. The proof that our ideas of particular things are not
themselves particular, is the uncertainty and difficulty we have only in
comparing them with one another. In looking at a line an inch long, I
have a certain general impression of it, so that I can tell it is
shorter than another, three or four times as long, drawn on the same
sheet of paper, but I cannot immediately tell that it is shorter than
one only a tenth or twentieth of an inch longer. The idea which I have
of it is therefore not an exact one. In looking at a window I cannot
precisely tell the number of panes of glass it contains, yet I can
easily say whether they are few or many, whether the window is large or
small. Now if all our ideas were made up of particulars, we never could
pronounce generally whether there were few or many of these panes of
glass, but we should know the precise number, or at least pitch on some
precise number in our minds, and this we could not help knowing. There
must be either 5, 10, 20, or 30; for it is in vain to urge that the idea
in my mind is a floating one, and shifts from one of them to another, so
that I cannot tell the moment after which it was; but what is this
imperfect recollection but a confused contradictory and abstract idea?
Here is a plain dilemma: it is a fact that we have some idea of a number
of objects presented to us. It is also a fact that we do not know the
precise number, nor can we assign any number confidently whether right
or wrong. Whether this idea is but an abstract and general one it seems
hard to say. Those who contend that we cannot have an idea of a man in
general, without conceiving of some particular man, seem to have little
reason, since the most particular idea we can form of a man, either in
imagination or from the actual impression, is but a general idea. Those
who say we cannot conceive of an army of men without conceiving of the
individuals composing it, ought to go a step further, and affirm that we
must represent to ourselves the features, form, complexion, size,
posture, and dress, with every other circumstance belonging to each
individual.
We must admit the notion of abstraction, first or last, unless any one
will contend for this infinite refinement in our ideas of things, or
assert that we have no idea at all. For the same process takes place in
it, and is absolutely necessary to our most particular notions of
things, as well as our most general, namely, that of abstracting from
particulars, or of passing over the minute differences of things, taking
them in the gross, and attending to the general effect of a number of
distinguished and distinguishable impressions. It is thus we arrive at
our first notion of things, and thus that all our after knowledge is
acquired. The knowledge upon which our ideas rest is general, and the
only difference between abstract and particular, is that of being more
or less general, of leaving out more or fewer circumstances, and more or
fewer objects, perceived either at once or in succession, and forming
either a particular whole, aggregate, or a class of things. It may be
asked farther whether our ideas of things, however abstract in general,
with respect to the objects they represent, are not in their own nature,
and absolute existence particular. To this hard question I shall return
the best answer I can.
1. It is sufficient to the present purpose that ideas are general in
their representation, however particular in themselves. Each idea is
something in itself, and not another idea. This is equally true of the
most abstract or particular ideas of things. The abstract idea of a man
is the abstract idea of a man, not the abstract idea of a horse, nor the
particular one of any given individual man. It is characterized by
general properties, and distinguished by general circumstances, and is
neither a mere word without any idea, nor a particular image of one
thing; so the idea of a particular man, though still only a general
result from a number of particulars is sufficiently positive for the
actual purposes of thought, and distinguishable from that other general
result or impression which institutes the idea of a particular horse,
for instance.
2. That our general notions are any otherwise particular than as they
are the same with themselves, and different from one another, is more
than I know. I must demur on this question, whatever others may do.
Whatever contradictions are involved in the one side of it, those on the
other seem as great. For it is not easy to imagine any thing more absurd
than the supposition that the idea of a line for instance is precisely,
and to a hair’s breadth or to the utmost possible exactness, of a
certain length, when neither the precise number nor the precise
proportion of the parts composing this line are at all known. It is like
saying that we cast up an account to the utmost degree of nicety, when
not one of the items is known, but as of an average conjecture or in
round numbers. We generally estimate our notion of a particular
extension by the point or matter at all terminating it, and it seems as
if this did not admit of an ambiguity, or variation. But in fact all
ideas are a calculation of particulars, and when the parts are only
known in gross, the sum total, or resulting idea can only be so too. The
smallest division of which our notions are susceptible is a general
idea. In the progress of the understanding, we never begin from absolute
unity but always from something that is more. How then is it possible
that these general conceptions should form a whole always commensurate
to a precise number of absolute unity I cannot conceive, any more than
how it is possible to express a fraction in whole numbers. The two
things are incompatible. As to any thing like conscious individuality,
i.e. that which assigneth limits to our ideas, we know they have it not.
3. I would observe that ideas, as far as they are distinct and
particular, seem to involve a greater contradiction than when they are
confused and general. For, in proportion to their distinctness, must be
the number of different acts of the mind excited at the same time; i.e.
in proportion to the individuality of the image or idea, if I may so
express myself, the thought ceases to be individual, inasmuch as the
simplicity of the attention is thus necessarily broken and divided into
a number of different actions, which yet are all united in the same
conscious feeling, or there could be no connection between them. How
then we should ever be able to conceive of things distinctly, clearly,
and particularly, seems the wonder: not how different impressions acting
at once on the mind should be confused, and as it were massed together,
in a general feeling, for want of sufficient activity in the
intellectual faculties to give form and a distinct place to all that
throng of objects which at all times solicit the attention. Let any one
make the experiment of counting a flock of sheep driven fast by him, and
he will soon find his imagination unable to keep pace with the rapid
succession of objects, and his idea of particular number slide into the
general idea of multitude; not that because there are more objects than
he possibly can count, he will think there are many, or that the word
flock will present to his mind a mere name, without any particulars
corresponding to it. Every act of the attention, every object we see or
think of, presents a proof of the same kind.
4. I conceive that the mind has not been fairly dealt with in this and
other similar questions of the same sort. Matter alone seems to have the
privilege of presenting difficulties, and contradictions at every turn;
but the moment any thing of this kind is observed in the understanding,
all the petulance of logicians is up in arms, and the mind is made the
mark on which they vent all the modes and figures of their impertinence.
Let us take an example from some of these self-evident matters of fact,
which contain at least as many, and as great contradictions, as any in
the most abstruse metaphysical doctrine, such as in extension, motion,
and the curve of lines. Now as to the first of these, extension: if we
suppose it to be made up of points, which are in themselves without
extension, but by their combination produce it, we must suppose two
unextended things, when joined together, to become extended, which is
like supposing, that by adding together several nothings, we can arrive
at something. On the other hand, if we suppose the ultimate parts of
which extension is composed, to be themselves extended, we then
attribute extension to that which is indivisible, or affirm a thing to
consist of parts, and to have none, at the same time. The old argument
against the possibility of motion is well known: it was said that the
body moving must either be in the place where it was, or in that into
which it was passing. Now, if it was in either of these, or in any one
place, it must be at rest; and as it could not be in both at once, it
followed that a body moving could exist no where, or that there was no
such thing as motion in nature. Again, a curve line is described
mathematically by a point moving, but always out of a strait line. Now,
a strait line is the nearest between any two points. But that a body
should move forward, and not move strait forward to the next point to
which it is going, seems to imply no less an absurdity than the
affirming that a thing never moves in the direction in which it is
going, but always out of it; for, if it moves in the same direction, the
smallest moment of time, this is not a curve, but a strait line; and if
it does not continue to move in the same direction at all, it seems
utterly inconceivable that it should make any progress, or move either
in a curve or a strait line. Yet any one who, on the strength of the
contradiction involved in the ideas of extension, motion, or curve
lines, should severally deny or disbelieve any one of them, would be
thought to want common sense. I think there are certain facts of the
mind which are equally evident and unaccountable. Those who contend that
the one are to be admitted, and the other not, because the one are the
objects of sense, and the other not, do not deserve any serious answer.
It is as much a fact, that I remember having seen the sun yesterday, as
that I see it to-day, and both of them are much more certain facts than
that there is any such body as the sun really existing out of the mind.
I will now return to Berkeley, and endeavour to answer his chief
objections to the doctrine of abstract ideas. First, then, I conceive
that he has himself virtually given up the question, when he allows that
the mind may be affected with the promise of a good thing, or terrified
by the apprehension of danger, without thinking of any particular good
or evil that is likely to befal us. What this idea of good or evil,
which is not particular, can be, other than abstract, I cannot conceive;
and to say that it is not an idea, but a mere feeling excited by custom,
is an answer very little to the purpose. For this feeling, this custom,
is itself a general impression, and could not, without a power of
abstraction in the mind, think, without a power of being acted upon by a
number of different impulses of pleasure and pain, concurring to produce
a general effect, abstracted from the particular feelings themselves, or
the objects first exciting them. All abstract ideas are several
impressions of the same kind, and are merely customary affections of the
mind, not distinct images of things. But if it be said that the word
idea properly signifies an image, and must be something distinct, then I
answer, first, that this would only restrict the use of the word _idea_
to particular things, and not affect the real question in dispute, and
secondly, that there is no such thing as a distinct and particular image
in the mind. The manner in which Berkeley explains the nature of
mathematical demonstrations, according to his system, shews its utter
inadequateness to any purposes of general reasoning, and is a plain
confession of the necessity of abstract ideas. For all the answer he
gives to the question, how can we know any proposition to be true in
general, from having found it so in a particular instance, comes to
this, that though the diagram we have in view includes a number of
particulars, yet we know the principle to be true generally, because
_there is not the least mention made of these particulars in the proof
of the proposition_. But I would ask also, whether there is not the
least thought of them in the mind? The truth is, that the mind upon
Berkeley’s principle must think of the particular right angled,
isosceles, triangle in question, or it can have no idea at all, for it
has no general idea of a triangle to which it can apply the name
generally. If we suppose that there is any such general form, or notion
to which the other particular circumstances are merely superadded, and
which may be left standing, though they are taken away, we then run
immediately to all the absurdities of abstraction, which he so much
wishes to avoid. If we then demonstrate the proposition of the
particular diagram before us, as of a determinate size, shape, &c., this
demonstration cannot hold good generally. If we are supposed to omit all
these particular circumstances in our minds, then we either demonstrate
the proposition of the general and abstract idea of a triangle, or of no
idea at all; for after the particulars are omitted, or not attended to
by the mind, the only idea remaining must be a general one. Farther,
that on which I am willing to rest the whole controversy, is the
following remark, _viz._, that without the general idea of a line or
triangle, there could be no particular one; that is, no idea of any one
line or triangle, as of the same form, or as any way related to any
other, so that there could be no common measure or line to connect any
of our thoughts or reasoning together into a general conclusion. For to
take the former instance as the most simple. When we speak of any
particular extension, it is evident that we understand something which
is not particular. Besides what is peculiar to it, it must have
something which is not peculiar to it, but general, to merit the common
appellation. Berkeley says, ‘An idea which in itself is particular,
becomes general, by being made to represent or stand for all other
particular ideas _of the same sort_.’ I do request that the import of
these last words may be attended to. Do they suggest any idea or none;
if they mean any thing, it must be something more than the particular
ideas which are said to be of the same sort, _i.e._ some general notion
of them. But this will involve all the absurdities of abstraction. If
there is any thing in the mind besides these particular ideas
themselves—any thing that compares or contrasts them, that refers to
this or that belief, this comparison or classifying can be nothing but a
perception of a general nature in which these things agree, or the
general resemblance which the mind perceives between the several
impressions. If there is no such comparison or perception of
resemblance, or idea of abstract qualities, then there can be no idea
answering to the words ‘of the same sort;’ but these particular ideas
will be left standing by themselves, absolutely unconnected. As far as
our ideas are merely particular, _i.e._ are negations of other ideas, so
far they must be perfectly distinct from each other: there can be
nothing between them to blend or associate them together. Each separate
idea would be surrounded with a _chevaux de frise_ of its own, in a
state of irreconcilable antipathy to every other idea, and the fair form
of nature would present nothing but a number of discordant atoms. A
particular line would no more represent another line, than it would
represent a point: one colour could no more resemble another colour, or
suggest its idea, than it could that of a sound, or a smell; there could
be no clue to make us class different shades of the same colour under
one general name, any more than the most opposite: one triangle would be
as distinct from another, as from a square or a cube, and so through the
whole system of art and nature. There must be a mutual leaning, a
greater proximity between some ideas than others: a common point to
which they tend, that is a common quality: a general nature, in which
they are identified: or there could not be in the mind more ideas of
same or like, or different, or judgment, or reasoning, or truth, or
falsehood, than in the stones in the fields, or the sands of the
sea-shore. The idea of classing things implies only the same sort of
general comparison, or abstract idea of likeness, that is necessary to
the idea of any simple sensible quality of an object. In both cases, we
only contemplate a number of things as alike or under the same general
notion, without attending to their actual differences. Take the idea,
for instance, of a slab of white marble. As long as only one such piece
of marble is considered, it is supposed to be a particular object, and
its whiteness is supposed to be perceived by the mind as a simple
sensible quality. If, on the contrary, several such slabs of marble are
presented to the mind, this is commonly considered as producing a
general idea of marble and of whiteness. But this idea of whiteness, not
as a quality of a particular thing, but as a common quality of different
things, is rejected by the moderns as implying the supposition, that
several different ideas can coalesce in the same general notion, which
amounts, they say, to the contradiction that a thing may be the same,
and different at the same time. Now I would affirm whatever there is
absurd or inconceivable in this latter case applies equally to the
former. For what possible idea can any man form of a slab of white
marble, in any other way than that of abstraction? Is the idea of its
whiteness as a sensible quality the idea of a point. Is it one single
impression? This Berkeley and others deny, for they say there can be no
idea of colour without extension, or of quality without quantity. If
there are in this object several impressions of colour, I would ask are
they all distinctly perceived? Are they all the same? Or if not, are all
their differences perceived by the mind, before it possibly can be
impressed with the general idea of a certain sensible quality, or that
the object before it is white? Is the mind aware of even the slightest
stain in this object, of every thing that may happen to vary it? Yet, if
the idea falls anything short of this minute and perfect knowledge, it
can only be an imperfect and general notion. That is, a number of
differences must be massed together in a common feeling of likeness, and
a number of separate parts make up the idea of a given object. Yet this
is all that is implied in forming the ideas of whiteness in general, as
belonging to several objects, or of colour, or extension, or any other
idea whatever, drawn from numberless objects, impressed at numberless
times. If particular objects or qualities were single things, there
would then be some precise limit between them and abstract or general
ideas, but as the most particular object, or qualities, as well as the
most general combinations and classes of things are necessarily confused
and mixed results, and nothing more than a number of impressions, never
distinctly analyzed by the mind, there can be no general reasoning to
disprove abstracted ideas in the common sense of the word.
ON THE WRITINGS OF HOBBES
In the following Essays I shall attempt to give some account of the rise
and progress of modern metaphysics, to state the opinions of the
principal writers who have treated on the subject, from the time of Lord
Bacon to the present day, and to examine the arguments by which they are
supported. In the first place, it will be my object to shew what the
real conclusions of the most celebrated authors were, and the steps by
which they arrived at them: to trace the connexion or point out the
difference between their several systems, as well as to inquire into the
peculiar bias and turn of their minds, and in what their true strength
or weakness lay. This will undoubtedly be best done by an immediate
reference to their works whenever the nature of the subject admits of
it, or whenever their mode of reasoning is not so loose and desultory as
to render the quotation of particular passages a useless as well as
endless labour. In the History of English Philosophy, of which I
published a prospectus some time ago, I intended to have gone regularly
through with all the writers of any considerable note who fell within
the limits of my plan, and to have given a detailed analysis of their
several subjects and arguments. But this would lead to much greater
length and minuteness of inquiry than seems consistent with my present
object, and would besides, I am afraid, prove (what Hobbes, speaking of
these subjects in general, calls) ‘but dry discourse.’ To avoid this as
much as possible, I shall pass over all those writers who have not been
distinguished either by the boldness of their opinions, or the logical
precision of their arguments. Indeed I shall confine my attention more
particularly to those who have made themselves conspicuous by deviating
from the beaten track, and who have struck out some original discovery
or brilliant paradox; whose metaphysical systems trench the closest on
morality, or whose speculations, by the interest as well as novelty
attached to them, have become topics of general conversation.
Secondly, besides stating the opinions of others, one principal object
which I shall have in view will be to act as judge or umpire between
them, to distinguish, as far as I am able, the boundaries of true and
false philosophy, and to try if I cannot lay the foundation of a system
more conformable to reason and experience, and, in its practical results
at least, approaching nearer to the common sense of mankind, than the
one which has been generally received by the most knowing persons who
have attended to such subjects within the last century; I mean the
material or _modern_ philosophy, as it has been called. According to
this philosophy, as I understand it, all thought is to be resolved into
sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into
mechanical impulse. These three propositions, taken together, embrace
almost every question relating to the human mind, and in their different
ramifications and intersections form a net, not unlike that used by the
enchanters of old, which, whosoever has once thrown over him, will find
all his efforts to escape vain, and his attempts to reason freely on any
subject in which his own nature is concerned, baffled and confounded in
every direction.
This system, which first rose at the suggestion of Lord Bacon, on the
ruins of the school-philosophy, has been gradually growing up to its
present height ever since, from a wrong interpretation of the word
_experience_, confining it to a knowledge of things without us; whereas
it in fact includes all knowledge relating to objects either within or
out of the mind, of which we have any direct and positive evidence. We
only know that we ourselves exist, the most certain of all truths, from
the experience of what passes within ourselves. Strictly speaking, all
other facts of which we are not immediately conscious, are so in a
secondary and subordinate sense only. Physical experience is indeed the
foundation and the test of that part of philosophy which relates to
physical objects: further, physical analogy is the only rule by which we
can extend and apply our immediate knowledge, or infer the effects to be
produced by the different objects around us. But to say that physical
experiment is either the test or source or guide of that other part of
philosophy which relates to our internal perceptions, that we are to
look to external nature for the form, the substance, the colour, the
very life and being of whatever exists in our minds, or that we can only
infer the laws which regulate the phenomena of the mind from those which
regulate the phenomena of matter, is to confound two things entirely
distinct. Our knowledge of mental phenomena from consciousness,
reflection, or observation of their correspondent signs in others is the
true basis of metaphysical inquiry, as the knowledge of _facts_,
commonly so called, is the only solid basis of natural philosophy.
To say that the operations of the mind and the operations of matter are
in reality the same, so that we may always make the one exponents of the
other, is to assume the very point in dispute, not only without any
evidence, but in defiance of every appearance to the contrary. Lord
Bacon was undoubtedly a great man, indeed one of the greatest that have
adorned this or any other country. He was a man of a clear and active
spirit, of a most fertile genius, of vast designs, of general knowledge,
and of profound wisdom. He united the powers of imagination and
understanding in a greater degree than almost any other writer. He was
one of the strongest instances of those men, who by the rare privilege
of their nature are at once poets and philosophers, and see equally into
both worlds. The schoolmen and their followers attended to nothing but
essences and species, to laboured analyses and artificial deductions.
They seem to have alike disregarded both kinds of experience, that
relating to external objects, and that relating to the observation of
our own internal feelings. From the imperfect state of knowledge, they
had not a sufficient number of facts to guide them in their experimental
researches; and intoxicated with the novelty of their vain distinctions,
taught by rote, they would be tempted to despise the clearest and most
obvious suggestions of their own minds. Subtile, restless, and
self-sufficient, they thought that truth was only made to be disputed
about, and existed no where but in their demonstrations and syllogisms.
Hence arose their ‘logomachy’—their everlasting word-fights, their sharp
debates, their captious, bootless controversies.
As Lord Bacon expresses it, ‘they were made fierce with dark keeping,’
signifying that their angry and unintelligible contests with one another
were owing to their not having any distinct objects to engage their
attention. They built altogether on their own whims and fancies, and
buoyed up by their specific levity, they mounted in their airy
disputations in endless flights and circles, clamouring like birds of
prey, till they equally lost sight of truth and nature. This great man
therefore intended an essential service to philosophy, in wishing to
recall the attention to facts and ‘experience’ which had been almost
entirely neglected; and thus, by incorporating the abstract with the
concrete, and general reasoning with individual observation, to give to
our conclusions that solidity and firmness which they must otherwise
always want. He did nothing but insist on the necessity of ‘experience,’
more particularly in natural science; and from the wider field that is
open to it there, as well as the prodigious success it has met with,
this latter application of the word, in which it is tantamount to
physical experiment, has so far engrossed the whole of our attention,
that mind has for a good while past been in some danger of being
overlaid by matter. We run from one error into another; and as we were
wrong at first, so in altering our course, we have turned about to the
opposite extreme. We despised ‘experience’ altogether before; now we
would have nothing but ‘experience,’ and that of the grossest kind.
We have, it is true, gained much by not consulting the suggestions of
our own minds in questions where they inform us of nothing; namely, in
the particular laws and phenomena of the natural world; and we have
hastily concluded, reversing the rule, that the best way to arrive at
the knowledge of ourselves also, was to lay aside the dictates of our
own consciousness, thoughts, and feelings, as deceitful and insufficient
guides, though they are the only means by which we can obtain the least
light upon the subject. We seem to have resigned the natural use of our
understandings, and to have given up our own existence as a nonentity.
We look for our thoughts and the distinguishing properties of our minds
in some image of them in matter, as we look to see our faces in a glass.
We no longer decide physical problems by logical dilemmas, but we decide
questions of logic by the evidences of the senses. Instead of putting
our reason and invention to the rack indifferently on all questions,
whether we have any previous knowledge of them or not, we have adopted
the easier method of suspending the use of our faculties altogether, and
settling tedious controversies by means of ‘four champions fierce—hot,
cold, moist and dry,’ who with a few more of the retainers and
hangers-on of matter determine all questions relating to the nature of
man and the limits of the human understanding very learnedly. That which
we seek however, namely, the nature of the mind and the laws by which we
think, feel, and act, we must discover in the mind itself or not at all.
The mind has laws, powers, and principles of its own, and is not the
mere puppet of matter. This general bias in favour of mechanical
reasoning and physical experiment, which was the consequence of the
previous total neglect of them in matters where they were strictly
necessary, was strengthened by the powerful aid of Hobbes, who was
indeed the father of the modern philosophy. His strong mind and body
appear to have resisted all impressions but those which were derived
from the downright blows of matter: all his ideas seemed to lie like
substances in his brain: what was not a solid, tangible, distinct,
palpable object was to him nothing. The external image pressed so close
upon his mind that it destroyed the power of consciousness, and left no
room for attention to any thing but itself. He was by nature a
materialist. Locke assisted greatly in giving popularity to the same
scheme, as well by espousing many of Hobbes’s metaphysical principles as
by the doubtful resistance which he made to the rest. And it has been
perfected and has received its last polish and roundness in the hands of
some French philosophers, as Condillac and others. It has been generally
supposed that Mr. Locke was the first person who, in his ‘Essay on the
Human Understanding’ established the modern metaphysical system on a
solid and immoveable basis. This is a great mistake. The system, such as
it is, existed entire in all its general principles in Hobbes before
him; this was never unequivocally or explicitly avowed by the author of
the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding.’ Locke merely endeavoured to
accommodate Hobbes’s leading principle to the more popular opinions of
the time; and all that succeeding writers have done to improve upon his
system, and clear it of inconsistent and extraneous matter, has only
tended to reduce it back to the purity and simplicity in which it is to
be found in Hobbes. The immediate and professed object of both these
writers is indeed the same, namely, to account for our ideas and the
formation of the human understanding from sensible impressions. But in
the execution of this design, Mr. Locke has deviated widely and at
almost every step from his predecessor. This difference would almost
unavoidably arise from the natural character of their minds, which were
the most opposite conceivable. Hobbes had the utmost reliance on
himself, and was impatient of the least doubt or contradiction. He saw
from the beginning to the end of his system. He is always therefore on
firm ground, and never once swerves from his object. He is at no pains
to remove objections, or soften consequences. Granting his first
principle, all the rest follows of course. There is an air of grandeur
in the stern confidence with which he stands alone in the world of his
own opinions, regardless of his contemporaries, and conscious that he is
the founder of a new race of thinkers. Locke, on the other hand, was a
man, who without the same comprehensive grasp of thought had a greater
deference for the opinions of others, and was of a much more cautious
and circumspect turn of mind. He could not but meet with many things in
the peremptory assertions of Hobbes that must make him pause, that he
would be at a loss to reconcile to an attentive observation of what
passed in his own mind, and that would equally shock the prevailing
notions both of the learned and the ignorant. He was therefore led to
consider the different objections to the system which had been left
unanswered and unnoticed, to make a compromise between the received
doctrines, and the violent paradoxes contained in the ‘Leviathan’ and
the ‘Treatise of Human Nature,’ or to admit these last with so many
qualifications, with so much circumlocution and preparation, and after
such an appearance of the most mature and candid examination, and of
willingness to be convinced on the other side of the question, as to
obviate the offensive and harsh effect which accompanies the abrupt
dogmatism of the original author. It was perhaps necessary that the
opinions of Hobbes should undergo this sort of metamorphosis before they
could gain a hearing: as the direct rays of the sun must be blunted and
refracted by passing through some denser medium in order to be borne by
common eyes. So sheathed and softened, their sharp, unpleasant points
taken off, his doctrines almost immediately met with a favourable
reception, and became popular. The general principle being once
established without its particular consequences, and the public mind
assured, it was soon found an easy task to point out the inconsistency
of Mr. Locke’s reasoning in many respects, and to give a more decided
tone to his philosophical system. Berkeley was one of the first who
tried the experiment of pushing his principles into the verge of paradox
on the question of abstract ideas, which he has done with admirable
dexterity and clearness, but without going beyond the explicitness of
Hobbes on the same question. Subsequent writers added different chapters
to supply the deficiencies of the Essay, which, with scarcely a single
exception, may be found essentially comprized in that institute and
digest of modern philosophy, our author’s ‘Leviathan.’
In thus giving the praise of originality and force of mind to Hobbes,
and regarding Locke merely as his follower, I may be thought to venture
on dangerous ground, or to lay unhallowed hands on a reputation which is
dear to every lover of truth. But if something is due to fame, something
is also due to justice. I confess however, that having brought this
charge against the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding,’ I am bound to
make it good in the fullest manner; otherwise, I shall be inexcusable.
What I therefore propose in the remainder of the present Essay is to
show that Mr. Locke was not really the founder of the modern system of
philosophy as it respects the human mind; and I shall think that I have
sufficiently established this point, if I can make it appear, both that
the principle itself on which that system rests, and all the striking
consequences which have been deduced from it, are to be found in the
writings of Hobbes, more clearly, decidedly, and forcibly expressed than
they are in the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding.’ When I speak of the
principle of the modern metaphysical system, I mean the assumption that
the operations of the intellect are only a continuation of the impulses
existing in matter, or that all the thoughts and conceptions of the mind
are nothing more nor less than various modifications of the original
impressions of things on a being endued with sensation or simple
perception. This system considers ideas merely as they are caused by
external objects, acting on the organs of sense, and tries to account
for them on that hypothesis solely. It is upon this principle of
excluding the understanding as a distinct faculty or power from all
share in its own operations, that the whole of Hobbes’s reasoning
proceeds. Let us see what he makes of it.
The first part of the ‘Leviathan,’ entitled ‘Of Man,’ begins in this
manner:
CHAPTER I.—OF SENSE.—‘Concerning the thoughts of man, I will consider
them, first singly, and afterwards in train, or dependence upon one
another. Singly, they are every one a representation or appearance of
some quality or other accident of a body without us; which is commonly
called an _object_: Which object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other
parts of man’s body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of
appearances.
‘The Original of them all is that which we call SENSE: For there is no
conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts,
been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that
original.
‘The cause of sense is the external body or object which presseth the
organ proper to each sense, either immediately as in the taste and
touch, or mediately as in seeing, hearing, and smelling: which pressure
by the mediation of nerves, and other strings and membranes of the body,
continued inwards to the Brain and Heart, causeth there a resistance or
counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver itself: which
endeavour, because _outward_, seemeth to be some matter without. And
this seeming or fancy is that which men call sense: and consisteth to
the eye, in a light or colour figured; to the ear, in a sound; to the
nostril, in an odour; to the tongue and palate, in a savour, and to the
rest of the body in heat, cold, hardness, softness, and such other
qualities, as we discern by feeling. All which qualities called
_sensible_ are in the object that causeth them but so many several
motions of the matter by which it presseth our organs diversely. Neither
in us that are pressed are they any thing else but divers motions; for
motion produceth nothing but motion. But their appearance to us is
fancy, the same waking as dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or
striking the eye maketh us fancy a light, and pressing the ear produceth
a din, so do the bodies also we see or hear produce the same by their
strong, though unobserved action. For if those colours and sounds were
in the bodies or objects that cause them, they could not be severed from
them, as by glasses and in echoes by reflection we see they are: where
we know the thing we see is in one place, the appearance in another, and
though at some certain distance, the real and very object seems invested
with the fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the
image or fancy is another. So that sense in all cases is nothing else
but original fancy; caused, as I have said, by the pressure, that is, by
the motion of external things upon our eyes, ears, and other organs
thereunto ordained.
‘But the Philosophy-schools, through all the universities of
Christendom, grounded upon certain texts of Aristotle, teach another
doctrine; and say, For the cause of vision, that the thing seen sendeth
forth on every side a _visible species_, (in English) _a visible show_,
_apparition_, _aspect_, or _being seen_; the receiving whereof into the
eye, is _seeing_. And for the cause of _hearing_, that the thing heard
sendeth forth an _audible species_, that is, an _audible aspect_, or
_audible being seen_; which entering at the ear, maketh _hearing_. Nay,
for the cause of _understanding_ also, they say the thing understood
sendeth forth an _intelligible species_, that is an _intelligible being
seen_; which coming into the understanding, makes us understand. I say
not this as disapproving the use of universities: but because I am to
speak hereafter of their office in a commonwealth, I must let you see on
all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst
which the frequency of insignificant speech is one.’—_Leviathan_, p. 4.
Thus far our author. It is evident that in this account he has laid the
foundation of Berkeley’s ideal system, though he does not seem any where
to have gone the whole length of that doctrine. He has entered more at
large into this point in the ‘Discourse of Human Nature,’ published in
1640, ten years before the ‘Leviathan’; and as the subject is curious,
and treated in a very decisive way, I will quote the concluding passage,
which is a recapitulation of the rest.
‘As colour is not inherent in the object, but an effect thereof upon us,
caused by such motion in the object as hath been described; so neither
is sound in the thing we hear, but in ourselves. One manifest sign
thereof is, that as a man may see, so also he may hear double or treble,
by multiplication of echoes, which echoes are sounds as well as the
original, and not being in one and the same place, cannot be inherent in
the body that maketh them. And to proceed to the rest of the senses, it
is apparent enough that the smell and taste of the same thing are not
the same to every man, and therefore are not in the thing smelt or
tasted, but in the men. So likewise the heat we feel from the fire is
manifestly in us, and is quite different from the heat which is in the
fire: for our heat is pleasure or pain, according as it is great or
moderate; but in the coal there is no such thing. By this the fourth and
last proposition is proved; viz. That as in vision, so also in
conceptions that arise from other senses, the subject of their inherence
is not in the object, but in the sentient. And from hence also it
followeth that whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us
think there be in the world, they be not there, but are seeming and
apparitions only: the things that really are in the world without us,
are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the
great deception of sense, which also is to be by sense corrected: for as
sense telleth me, when I see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in
the object; so also sense telleth me when I see by reflection, that
colour is not in the object.’—_Human Nature_, chap. ii. p. 9.
The second chapter of the ‘Leviathan’ contains an account of the manner
in which our ideas are generated, and is as follows:
‘That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie
still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of. But that when a thing
is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat else stay
it, though the reason be the same (namely, that nothing can change
itself) is not so easily assented to. For men measure not only other
men, but all other things by themselves; and because they find
themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, think every thing
else grows weary of motion, and seeks repose of its own accord; little
considering whether it be not some other motion wherein that desire of
rest they find in themselves consisteth. From hence it is, that the
Schools say, heavy bodies fall downward out of an appetite to rest, and
to conserve their nature in that place which is most proper for them:
ascribing appetite and knowledge of what is good for their conservation
(which is more than man has) to things inanimate, absurdly.
‘When a body is once in motion, it moveth (unless something else hinder
it) eternally: and whatsoever hindereth it, cannot in an instant, but in
time and by degrees quite extinguish it. And as we see in the water,
though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time
after; so also it happeneth in that motion which is made in the internal
parts of a man then, when he sees, hears, &c. For after the object is
removed or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen,
though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it the Latins call
_imagination_, from the image made in seeing; and apply the same, though
improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it _fancy_;
which signifies appearance, and is as proper to one sense, as to
another. Imagination is therefore nothing but _decaying sense_; and is
found in man and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as
waking.
‘The decay of sense in men waking is an obscuring of it in such manner
as the light of the sun obscureth the light of the stars, which stars do
no less exercise their virtue by which they are visible in the day than
in the night. But because amongst many strokes, which our eyes, ears,
and other organs receive from external bodies, the predominant only is
sensible, therefore the light of the sun being predominant, we are not
affected with the action of the stars. And any object being removed from
our eyes, though the impression it made in us remain; yet other objects
more present succeeding, and working on us, the imagination of the past
is obscured, and made weak; as the voice of a man is in the noise of the
day. From whence it follows, that the longer the time is, after the
sight or sense of any objects the weaker is the imagination. For the
continual change of man’s body destroys in time the parts which in sense
were moved: so that distance of time and of place hath one and the same
effect in us. For as at a great distance of place, that which we look at
appears dim, and without distinction of the smaller parts, and as voices
grow weak and inarticulate, so also after great distance of time, our
imagination of the past is weak; and we lose (for example) of cities we
have seen many particular streets, and of actions, many particular
circumstances. This decaying sense, when we would express the thing
itself (I mean fancy itself) we call Imagination, as I said before: but
when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading,
old and past, it is called _Memory_. So that imagination and memory are
but one thing which for divers considerations hath divers names. Much
memory or memory of many things is called Experience.
‘Again, imagination being only of those things which have been formerly
perceived by sense, either all at once, or by parts at several times,
the former (which is the imagining the whole object as it was presented
to the sense) is _simple imagination_; as when one imagineth a man or
horse which he hath seen before. The other is _compounded_, as when from
the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive
in our mind a centaur. So when a man compoundeth the image of his own
person with the image of the actions of another man; as when a man
conceives himself a Hercules or an Alexander (which happeneth often to
them which are much taken with the reading of Romaunts) it is a compound
imagination, and properly but a fiction of the mind.
‘There be also other imaginations that rise in man, (though waking) from
the great impression made in sense: as from gazing upon the sun, the
impression leaves an image of the sun before our eyes a long time after;
and from being long and vehemently attent upon geometrical figures, a
man shall in the dark (though awake) have the image of lines and angles
before his eyes: which kind of fancy hath no particular name; as being a
thing that doth not commonly fall into men’s discourse.
‘The imaginations of them that sleep are those we call dreams: and these
also (as all other imaginations) have been before, either totally or by
parcels in the sense, and because the brain and nerves, which are the
necessary organs of sense, are so benumbed in sleep, as not easily to be
moved by the action of external objects, there can happen in sleep no
imagination; and therefore no dream but what proceeds from the agitation
of the inward parts of man’s body; which inward parts, for the connexion
they have with the brain and other organs, when they be distempered, do
keep the same in motion; whereby the imaginations there formerly made,
appear as if a man were waking; saving that the organs of sense being
now benumbed, so as there is no new object, which can master and obscure
them with a more vigorous impression, a dream must needs be more clear
in this silence of sense, than are our waking thoughts. And hence it
cometh to pass, that it is a hard matter, and by many thought
impossible, to distinguish exactly between sense and dreaming. For my
part, when I consider that in dreams I do not often, nor constantly
think of the same persons, places, subjects, and actions that I do
waking; nor remember so long a train of coherent thoughts dreaming, as
at other times; and because waking I often observe the absurdity of
dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts,—I am
well satisfied, that being awake, I know I dream not; though when I
dream, I think myself awake.’—_Leviathan_, pp. 4, 5, 6.
The concluding paragraph of this Chapter is remarkable.
‘The imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature endued
with the faculty of imagining) by words or other voluntary signs, is
that we generally call _Understanding_: and is common to man and beast.
For a dog by custom will understand the call or rating of his master,
and so will many other beasts. That understanding which is peculiar to
man, is the understanding not only his will, but his conceptions and
thoughts, by the sequel and contexture of the names of things into
affirmations, negations, and other forms of speech; and of this kind of
understanding I shall speak hereafter.’—Page 8.
As in the first two chapters Mr. Hobbes endeavours to show that all our
thoughts, considered singly or in themselves, have their origin in
sensation, so in the next chapter, he resolves all their combinations or
connexions one with another into the principle of association, or the
coexistence of their sensible impressions.
‘By consequence or train of thoughts,’ he says, ‘I understand that
succession of one thought to another, which is called (to distinguish it
from discourse in words) _mental discourse_.’
‘When a man thinketh on any thing whatsoever, his next thought after it
is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to
every thought succeeds indifferently. But as we have no imagination,
whereof we have not formerly had sense in whole or in parts; so we have
no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the
like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are
motions within us, reliques of those made in sense: and those motions
that succeeded one another in the sense, continue also together after
sense: insomuch as the former coming again to take place, and be
predominant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in
such manner, as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part
of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense to one and the same
thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another succeedeth, it
comes to pass in time, that in the imagining of any thing, there is no
certainty what we shall imagine next. Only this is certain, it shall be
something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.’—Page
9.
The comprehension and precision with which the law of association is
here unfolded as the key to every movement of the mind, and as
regulating every wandering thought, cannot be too much admired; it is
enough to say that Hartley, who certainly understood more of the power
of association than any other man, has added nothing to this short
passage, as far as relates to the succession of ideas. He has indeed
extended its application in unravelling the fine web of our affections
and feelings, by showing how one idea transfers the feeling of pleasure
or pain to others associated with it, which is not here noticed. Whether
this principle really has all the extent and efficacy ascribed to it by
either of these writers will be made the subject of a future inquiry.
How well our author understood the question, and how much it had assumed
a consistent and systematic form in his mind will appear from the
instances he brings in illustration of this intricate and at the time
almost unthought-of subject.
‘The train of thoughts or mental discourse is of two sorts. The first is
unguided, without design and inconstant; wherein there is no passionate
thought to govern and direct those that follow to itself as the end and
scope of some desire or other passion; in which case the thoughts are
said to wander and seem impertinent one to another as in a dream. Such
are commonly the thoughts of men, that are not only without company, but
also without care of any thing: though even then their thoughts are as
busy as at other times, but without harmony, as the sound which a lute
out of tune would yield to any man, or in tune to one that could not
play. And yet in this wild ranging of the mind, a man may ofttimes
perceive the way of it, and the dependence of one thought upon another.
For in a discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more
impertinent than to ask (as one did) what was the value of a Roman
penny? Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For the thoughts of
the war introduced the thought of the delivering up the king to his
enemies; the thought of that brought in the thought of the delivering up
of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty pence, which was the
price of that treason: and thence easily followed that malicious
question; and all this in a moment of time; for thought is quick.
‘The second’ [that is the second sort of association] ‘is more constant,
as being regulated by some desire, and design. For the impression made
by such things as we desire or fear, is strong and permanent, or, if it
cease for a time, of quick return; so strong it is sometimes as to
hinder and break our sleep. From desire ariseth the thought of some
means we have seen produce the like of what we aim at: and from the
thought of that, the thought of means to that mean, and so continually
till we come to some beginning within our own power.’
He adds,—‘This train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds: one, when of
an effect imagined, we seek the causes or means that produce it; and
this is common to man and beast. The other is when imagining anything
whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it be produced:
that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it when we have it. Of
which I have not at any time seen any sign but in man only; for this is
a curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living creature that
has no other passion but sensual, such as are hunger, thirst, lust, and
anger. In sum, the discourse of the mind when it is governed by design,
is nothing but seeking or the faculty of invention, which the Latins
call _sagacitas_ and _solertia_, a finding out of the causes of some
effect, present or past; or of the effects of some present or past
cause. Sometimes a man desires to know the event of an action; and then
he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after
another; supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that
foresees what will become of a criminal, re-cons what he has seen follow
on the like crime before; having this order of thoughts, the crime, the
officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows, which kind of thoughts
is called foresight, and prudence or providence; and sometimes wisdom;
though such conjecture, through the difficulty of observing all
circumstances, be very fallacious. But this is certain; by how much one
man has more experience of things past than another; by so much also he
is more prudent; and his expectations the seldomer fail him. The present
only has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only,
but things to come have no being at all; the future being but a fiction
of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that
are present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most
experience; but not with certainty enough, and though it be called
prudence when the event answereth our expectation, yet in its own nature
it is but presumption; for the foresight of things to come, which is
providence, belongs only to him by whose will they are to come: from him
only, and supernaturally, proceeds prophecy. The best prophet naturally
is the best guesser; and the best guesser, he that is most versed and
studied in the matters he guesses at; for he hath most signs to guess
by.’—Page 10.
After this account he immediately adds,—
‘There is no other act of man’s mind that I can remember, naturally
planted in him, so as to need no other thing to the exercise of it but
to be born a man, and live with the use of his five senses. Those other
faculties, of which I shall speak by and by, and which seem proper to
man only, are acquired, and increased by study and industry; and of most
men learned by instruction and discipline; and proceed all from the
invention of words and speech: for besides sense and thoughts, and the
train of thoughts, the mind of man has no other motion, though by the
help of speech and method, the same faculties may be improved to such a
height, as to distinguish men from all other living creatures.’—Page 11.
The conclusion of this chapter in which the author treats of the limits
of the imagination is too important, and has laid the foundation of too
many speculations, to be passed over. ‘Whatsoever we imagine is finite.
Therefore there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call infinite.
No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive
infinite swiftness, infinite time, or infinite force, or infinite power.
When we say any thing is infinite, we signify only that we are not able
to conceive the ends and bounds of the thing named; having no conception
of the thing, but of our own inability: and therefore the name of God is
used, not to make us conceive him (for he is incomprehensible and his
greatness and power are inconceivable) but that we may honour him. And
because whatsoever we conceive has been perceived first by sense, either
all at once, or by parts, a man can have no thought, representing any
thing, not subject to sense. No man, therefore, can conceive any thing,
but he must conceive it in some place, and indued with some determinate
magnitude, and which may be divided into parts; not that any thing is
all in this place, and all in another place at the same time; nor that
two or more things can be in one and the same place at once: for none of
these things ever have, nor can be incident to sense; but are absurd
speeches, taken upon credit (without any signification at all), from
deceived philosophers, and deceived, or deceiving schoolmen.’—Page 11.
By the extracts which I shall next borrow from his account of language
and reasoning, it will appear that our author not only threw out the
first hints of the modern system, which reduces all reasoning and
understanding to the mechanism of language, but that by a very high kind
of abstraction, he carried it to perfection at once. The whole race of
plodding commentators, or dashing paradox-mongers since his time have
not advanced a step beyond him. I shall give this part somewhat at
large, both because the question is intricate in itself, and as it will
serve as a specimen of his general mode of writing, in which dry
sarcasm, keen observation, extensive thought, and the most rigid logic
conveyed in a concise and masterly style, are all brought to bear upon
the same object.
‘The invention of printing,’ he says, ‘though ingenious, compared with
the invention of letters is no great matter. But who was the first that
found the use of letters, is not known. He that first brought them into
Greece, men say, was Cadmus, the son of Agenor, King of Phœnicia. A
profitable invention for continuing the memory of time past, and the
conjunction of mankind, dispersed into so many and distant regions of
the earth; and withal difficult, as proceeding from a watchful
observation of the divers motions of the tongue, palate, lips, and other
organs of speech, whereby to make as many differences of characters to
remember them; but the most noble and profitable invention of all other,
was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their
connections; whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they
are past, and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and
conversation; without which there had been amongst men, neither
commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst
lions, bears, and wolves. The first author of speech was God himself,
that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his
sight; for the scripture goeth no farther in this matter. But this was
sufficient to direct him to add more names, as the experience and use of
the creatures should give him occasion; and to join them in such manner
by degrees, as to make himself understood, and so by succession of time,
so much language might be gotten, as he had found use for; though not so
copious as an orator or philosopher has need of: for I do not find any
thing in the scripture, out of which, directly or by consequence can be
gathered, that Adam was taught the names of all figures, numbers,
measures, colours, sounds, fancies, relations; much less the names of
words and speech, as, general, special, affirmative, negative,
interrogative, optative, infinitive, all which are useful; and least of
all, of entity, intentionality, quiddity, and other insignificant words
of the school.
‘The manner how speech serveth to the remembrance of the consequence of
causes and effects, consisteth in the imposing of names, and the
connexion of them. Of names, some are proper, and singular to one only
thing; as _Peter_, _John_, _this man_, _this tree_: and some are common
to many things; _man_, _horse_, _tree_; every of which though but one
name, is nevertheless the name of divers particular things; in respect
of all which together, it is called an universal; there being nothing in
the world universal but names; for the things named are every one of
them individual and singular. One universal name is imposed on many
things for their similitude in some quality, or other accident: and
whereas a proper name bringeth to mind one thing only, universals recall
any one of those many. By this imposition of names, some of larger, some
of stricter signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of
things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the consequences of
appellations. For example: a man that hath no use of speech at all, that
is born and remains perfectly deaf and dumb, if he set before his eyes a
triangle, and by it two right angles (such as are the corners of a
square figure,) he may by meditation compare and find, that the three
angles of that triangle are equal to those two right angles that stand
by it: but if another triangle be shown him different in shape from the
former, he cannot know without a new labour, whether the three angles of
that also be equal to the same. But he that hath the use of words, when
he observes that such equality was consequent, not to the length of the
sides, nor to any other particular thing in his triangle but only to
this, that the sides were straight, and the angles three and that that
was all for which he named it a triangle, will boldly conclude
universally that such equality of angles is in all triangles whatsoever,
and register his invention in these general terms: every triangle hath
its three angles equal to two right angles. And thus the consequence
found in one particular, comes to be registered and remembered as an
universal rule; discharges our mental reckoning of time and place;
delivers us from all labour of the mind, saving the first, and makes
that which was found true here, and now, to be true in all times and
places. But the use of words in registering our thoughts, is in nothing
so evident as in numbering. A natural fool that could never learn by
heart the order of numeral words, as _one_, _two_, and _three_, may
observe every stroke of the clock, and nod to it, or say _one_, _one_;
but can never know what hour it strikes. And it seems, there was a time
when those names of number were not in use, and men were fain to apply
their fingers of one or both hands to those things they desired to keep
account of; and that thence it proceeds, that now our numeral words are
but ten, in any nation, and in some but five, and then they begin again.
And he that can tell ten, if he recite them out of order, will lose
himself, and not know when he hath done: much less will he be able to
add, and subtract, and perform all other operations of arithmetic. So
that without words there is no possibility of reckoning of numbers; much
less of magnitudes, of swiftness, of force, and other things, the
reckoning whereof is necessary to the being, or well-being of
mankind.’—_Leviathan_, chap. iv., pp. 12, 14.
The same train of reasoning occurs in the ‘Discourse of Human Nature,’
with some variation in the expression.
‘By the advantage of names it is that we are capable of science, which
beasts for want of them are not; nor man, without the use of them; for
as a beast misseth not one or two out of her many young ones, for want
of those names of order, _one_, _two_, and _three_, and which we call
_number_; so neither would a man without repeating orally or mentally
those words of number, know how many pieces of money or other things lie
before him. Seeing there be many conceptions of one and the same thing,
and that for every conception we give it a several name, it followeth
that for one and the same thing, we have many names or attributes; as to
the same man we give the appellations of _just_, _valiant_, _strong_,
_comely_, &c. And again, because from divers things we receive like
conceptions, many things must needs have the same appellations: as to
all things we _see_ we give the name of _visible_. Those names we give
to many, are called universal to them all: as the name of _man_ to every
particular of mankind. Such appellations as we give to one only thing,
we call individual, or singular; as _Socrates_ and other proper names,
or by circumlocution, _He that writ the Iliads_, for _Homer_.
‘The universality of one name to many things hath been the cause that
men think the _things_ are themselves universal: and so seriously
contend that besides Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that
are, have been, or shall be in the world, there is yet something else
that we call man, viz. _Man in general_, deceiving themselves by taking
the universal or general appellation for the thing it signifieth. For if
one should desire the painter to make him the picture of a man, which is
as much as to say of a man in general, he meaneth no more but that the
painter should choose what man he pleaseth to draw, which must needs be
some of them that are or have been or may be, none of which are
universal. But when he would have him to draw the king or any particular
person, he limiteth the painter to that one person he chooseth. It is
plain therefore there is nothing universal but names, which are
therefore called indefinite, because we limit them not ourselves, but
leave them to be applied by the hearer: whereas a singular name is
limited and restrained to one of the many things it signifieth, as when
we say, _This man_, pointing to him, or giving him his proper name, or
in some such way.’—_Human Nature_, chap. v. pp. 25, 26.
We shall have occasion to see, in the course of this inquiry, how
exactly Berkeley’s account of the process of abstraction, in
contradiction to Locke’s opinion, corresponds in every particular with
this passage of our author. To return to his account of truth, reason,
&c.
‘When two names are joined together into a consequence or affirmation,
by the help of this little verb, _is_, as thus: _a man is a living
creature_; if the latter name, _living creature_, signify all that the
former name, _man_, signifieth, then the affirmation or consequence is
true; otherwise false. For True and False are attributes of speech, not
of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor
falsehood. Error there may be, as when we expect that which shall not
be, or suspect what has not been: but in neither case can a man be
charged with untruth.
‘Seeing, then, that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in
our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember
what every name he uses stands for, and to place it accordingly: or else
he will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twigs. And
therefore in Geometry (which is the only science that it has pleased God
hitherto to bestow on mankind) men begin at settling the significations
of their words, which settling of significations they call definitions,
and place them in the beginning of their reckoning. By this it appears
how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge to
examine the definitions of former authors, and either to correct them
when they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the
errors of definition multiply themselves according as the reckoning
proceeds; and lead men into absurdities which they at last see, but
cannot avoid without reckoning anew from the beginning. From whence it
happens that they which trust to books do as they that cast up many
little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little
sums were rightly cast up or not, and at last finding the error visible,
and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear
themselves, but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that
entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber,
flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to
consider which way they came in. So that in the right definition of
names, lies the first use of speech, which is the acquisition of
science, and in wrong or no definitions lies the first abuse, from which
proceed all false and senseless tenets; which make them that take their
instruction from the authority of books and not from their own
meditations, to be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men
endued with true science are above it. For between true science and
erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. Natural sense and
imagination are not subject to absurdity. Nature itself cannot err; and
as men abound in copiousness of language, so they become more wise or
more mad than ordinary. Nor is it possible without letters for any man
to become either excellently wise or (unless his memory be hurt by
disease or ill constitution of organs) excellently foolish. For words
are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the
money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a
Cicero, a Thomas Aquinas, or any other doctor whatsoever.
‘Subject to names is whatsoever can enter into, or be considered in an
account, and be added one thing to another to make a sum, or subtracted
one from another and leave a remainder. The Latins called accounts of
money _rationes_, and accounting, _ratiocinatio_, and that which we in
bills or books of accounts call _items_, they call _nomina_, or names;
and thence it seems to proceed that they extended the word _ratio_ to
the faculty of reckoning in all other things. The Greeks have but one
word, λογος for both speech and reason, not that they thought there was
no speech without reason, but no reason without speech: and the act of
reasoning they call syllogism, which signifieth summing up (or putting
together) the consequences of one saying to another. For reason is
nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the
consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying
of our thoughts; I say marking them, when we reckon by ourselves, and
signifying them, when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings to other
men.
‘And as in arithmetic, unpractised men must, and professors themselves
may, often err, and cast up false, so also in any other subject of
reasoning, the ablest, most attentive, and most practised men may
deceive themselves, and infer false conclusions: not but that reason
itself is always right reason, as well as arithmetic is a certain and
infallible art. But no one man’s reason, nor the reason of any number of
men makes the certainty: no more than an account is therefore well cast
up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And,
therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties
must by their own accord set up for right reason the reason of some
arbitrator or judge, so it is in all debates of what kind soever: and
when men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamour and demand
right reason for judge, yet seek no more but that things should be
determined by no other men’s reason but their own, it is as intolerable
in the society of men as it is in play, after trump is turned, to use
for trump on every occasion that suit whereof they have most in their
hand. For they do nothing else that will have every of their passions,
as it comes to bear sway in them, to be taken for right reason, and that
in their own controversies, betraying their want of right reason by the
claim they lay to it.
‘When a man reckons without the use of words, which may be done in
particular things (as when upon the sight of any one thing, we
conjecture what was likely to have preceded, or is likely to follow upon
it), if that which he thought likely to have preceded it, hath not
preceded it, this is called error, to which even the most prudent men
are subject. But when we reason in words of general signification, and
fall upon a general inference which is false, though it be commonly
called error, it is indeed an absurdity or senseless speech. For error
is but a deception in presuming that somewhat is past, or to come, of
which, though it were not past, or not to come, yet there was no
impossibility discoverable. But when we make a general assertion, unless
it be a true one, the possibility of it is inconceivable. And words
whereby we conceive nothing but the sound, are those we call absurd,
insignificant, and nonsense. And, therefore, if a man should talk to me
of _a round quadrangle_, or _accidents of bread in cheese_, or
_immaterial substances_, or _of a free subject_, a _free-will_, or any
_free_ but free from being hindered by opposition; I should not say he
were in an error, but that his words were without meaning, that is to
say, absurd.’—Chap. iv. v., pp. 15, 18, &c.
The account of the passions and affections which follows next in order,
is the same in almost every particular as that which is given in modern
treatises on this subject, except that Mr. Hobbes seems to make
curiosity or the desire of knowledge, an original passion of the mind,
peculiar to man. From this part I shall only quote two passages, and
then proceed to his treatise on the ‘Doctrine of Necessity,’ which will
conclude my account of this author.
The first passage is the one from which Locke has copied his famous
definition of the difference between wit and judgment. After observing
(Chap. viii.) that the difference of men’s talents does not depend on
natural capacity, which, he says, is nothing else but sense, wherein men
differ so little from one another, or from brutes, that it is not worth
the reckoning, he goes on:
‘This difference of quickness in imagining is caused by the difference
of men’s passions, that love and dislike, some one thing, some another,
and therefore some men’s thoughts run one way, some another, and are
held to and observe differently the things that pass through their
imagination. And whereas in this succession of thoughts there is nothing
to observe in the things they think on, but either in what they be like
one another or in what they be unlike—those that observe their
similitudes, in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others,
are said to have a good wit, by which is meant on this occasion a good
fancy. But they that observe their differences and dissimilitudes, which
is called distinguishing and discerning and judging between thing and
thing, in case such discerning be not easy, are said to have a good
judgment; and particularly, in matter of conversation and business,
wherein times, places, and persons are to be discerned, this virtue is
called discretion. The former, that is, fancy, without the help of
judgment, is not commended for a virtue, but the latter which is
judgment or discretion, is commended for itself, without the help of
fancy.’ p. 32. This definition, which Locke took entire from our author
without acknowledgment, and which has been so often referred to, is
evidently false, for as Harris, the author of ‘Hermes,’ has very well
observed, the finding out the equality of the three angles of a triangle
to two right ones would upon the principle here stated, be a piece of
wit instead of an act of the understanding or judgment, and ‘Euclid’s
Elements’ a collection of epigrams.[5] The other passage which I
proposed to quote chiefly as an instance of our author’s power of
imagination, is as follows. In speaking of the degree of madness, as in
fanatics and others, he says:
‘Though the effect of folly in them that are possessed of an opinion of
being inspired be not always visible in one man, by any very extravagant
action that proceedeth from such passion, yet when many of them conspire
together, the rage of the whole multitude is visible enough. For what
greater argument of madness can there be than to clamour, strike, and
throw stones at our best friends? Yet this is somewhat less than such a
multitude will do. For they will clamour, fight against, and destroy
those, by whom, all their lifetime before, they have been protected and
secured from injury. And if this be madness in the multitude, it is the
same in every particular man. For as in the midst of the sea, though a
man perceive no sound of that part of the water next him, yet he is well
assured that part contributes as much to the roaring of the sea as any
other part of the same quantity, so also though we perceive no great
unquietness in one or two men, yet we may be well assured that their
singular passions are parts of the seditious roaring of a troubled
nation.’ Even Mr. Burke did not disdain to borrow one of Hobbes’s
images. The author of the ‘Leviathan’ compares those who attempt to
reform a decayed commonwealth to ‘the foolish daughters of Pelias who
desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit father did by the counsel
of Medea cut him in pieces and boil him, together with strange herbs,
but made not of him a new man.’
I think this is better expressed than the same allusion in Burke, which
is I dare say well known to my readers.
I shall not here enter into the doctrine of Liberty and Necessity, which
Hobbes has stated with great force and precision as a general question
of cause and effect, and without any particular reference to his
mechanical theory of the mind, as I shall fully investigate this subject
in my next Essay.
I have thus taken a review of the metaphysical writings of Hobbes, as
far as was necessary to establish what I at first proposed, namely, the
general conformity, and almost entire coincidence between his opinions,
and the principles of the modern system of philosophy. The praise of
originality at least, of boldness and vigour of mind, belongs to him.
The strength of reason which his application of a general principle to
explain almost all the phenomena of human nature implies, can hardly be
surpassed. The truth of the system is another question, which I shall
hereafter proceed to consider.
I will first, however, distinctly enumerate the leading principles of
his philosophy, as they are to be found in Hobbes, and in the latest
writers of the same School. They are, I conceive, as follows:
1. That all our ideas are derived from external objects, by means of the
senses alone.
2. That as nothing exists out of the mind but matter and motion, so it
is itself with all its operations nothing but matter and motion.
3. That thoughts are single, or that we can think of only one object at
a time. In other words, that there is no comprehensive power or faculty
of understanding in the mind.
4. That we have no general or abstract ideas.
5. That the only principle of connexion between one thought and another
is association, or their previous connexion in sense.
6. That reason and understanding depend entirely on the mechanism of
language.
7 and 8. That the sense of pleasure and pain is the sole spring of
action, and self-interest the source of all our affections.
9. That the mind acts from a mechanical or physical necessity, over
which it has no controul, and consequently is not a moral or accountable
agent.—The manner of stating and reasoning upon this point is the only
circumstance of importance in which modern writers differ from Hobbes.
10. That there is no difference in the natural capacities of men, the
mind being originally passive to all impressions alike, and becoming
whatever it is from circumstances.
All of these positions it is my intention to oppose to the utmost of my
ability. Except the first, they are most or all of them either denied or
doubtfully admitted by Locke. And as it is his admission of the first
principle which has opened a door, directly or indirectly, to all the
rest, I shall devote the Essay next but one to an examination of the
account which he gives of the origin of our ideas from sensation.
It may perhaps be thought, that the neglect into which Hobbes’s
metaphysical opinions have fallen was originally owing to the obloquy
excited by the misanthropy and despotical tendency of his political
writings. But it seems to me that he has been almost as hardly dealt
with in the one case as in the other.
As to his principles of government, this may at least be said for them,
that they are in form and appearance very much the same with those
detailed long after in Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract,’ and evidently
suggested the plan of that work, which has never been considered as a
defence of tyranny. The author indeed requires an absolute submission in
the subject to the laws, but then it is to be in consequence of his own
consent to obey them. Every man is at least _supposed_ to be his own
lawgiver.
Secondly, as to the misanthropy with which he is charged, for having
made fear the actual foundation and cement of civil society, he has I
think made his own apology very satisfactorily in these words:
‘It may seem strange to some man that hath not well weighed these
things, that nature should thus dissociate and render men apt to invade
and destroy one another; and he may therefore, not trusting to the
inference made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same
confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself—when
taking a journey he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when
going to sleep he locks his doors; when even in his house, he locks his
chests, and this when he knows there be laws and public officers, armed
to revenge all injuries that shall be done him;—what opinion I say, he
has of his fellow subjects when he rides armed, of his fellow citizens
when he locks his doors, and of his children and servants, when he locks
his chests. Does he not then accuse mankind as much by his actions as I
do by my words? Yet neither of us accuse man’s nature in
it.’—_Leviathan_, p. 62.
It is true the bond of civil government according to his account, is
very different from Burke’s ‘_soft collar of social esteem_,’ and takes
away the sentimental part of politics. But I confess I see nothing
liberal in this ‘order of thoughts,’ as Hobbes elsewhere expresses it,
‘the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge and the gallows,’ which
is nevertheless a good description of the nature and end of political
institutions.
The true reason of the fate which this author’s writings met with was
that his views of things were too original and comprehensive to be
immediately understood, without passing through the hands of several
successive generations of commentators and interpreters. Ignorance of
another’s meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear produces
hatred: hence arose the rancour and suspicion of his adversaries, who,
to quote some fine lines of Spenser,
——‘Stood all astonied like a sort of steers
’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race
Unwares is chanced, far straying from his peers:
So did their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.’
ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY
In this Essay I shall give the best account I can of the question
concerning liberty and necessity from the writings of others, and
afterwards add a few remarks of my own on the explanation of the terms
employed in this controversy. Of Mr. Hobbes’s discourse on this subject,
I should be nearly disposed to say with Gassendi, when another work of
his, ‘De Cive,’ was presented to him, ‘This treatise, though small in
bulk, is in my judgment the very marrow of philosophy.’ In order to give
a clear and satisfactory view of the question, I shall be obliged to
repeat some things I have before stated, for which the importance of the
subject as well as other circumstances will, I hope, be a sufficient
excuse.
The doctrine of necessity is stated by this author with great force and
precision as a general question of cause and effect, and with scarcely
any particular reference to his mechanical theory of the mind. From this
naked simple view of the matter, I cannot consistently with truth
withhold my full and entire assent. The ground-work, the pure basis of
the doctrine is in my opinion incontestable; it cannot be denied without
overturning all the rules of science, as well as the plainest dictates
of the understanding: whoever attacks it there in its stronghold, will
only injure the cause he espouses. It is that rock upon which whoever
falls will be dashed to pieces. But though I cannot pretend to undermine
the foundation, yet I may attempt to shake some parts of the
superstructure, and to clear away the crust of materialism which has
grown over it. In my opinion, the representations which have commonly
been given of the subject by the writers on both sides of the argument
are almost equally erroneous, and their opposite conclusions built on an
equal misconception of the true principle of necessity. By the principle
of moral or philosophical necessity is meant then that the mind is
invariably governed by certain laws which determine all its operations;
or in other words, that the regular succession of cause and effect is
not confined to mere matter, while the impulses of the will are left
quite unaccounted for, self-caused, perfectly contingent and
fantastical. We in general attribute those things to chance the causes
of which we do not understand, both in mind and matter. But as there is
a greater latitude and inconstancy in the one than in the other,
insomuch that we can hardly ever predict with certainty the effect of
particular motives on the mind, the opinion of chance, arbitrary
inclination, or self-determination had gained much deeper root with
respect to the operations of mind than to those of matter. The fallacy
of this opinion Hobbes has exposed in a masterly, and I think
unanswerable manner, and without running into those paradoxical
conclusions from the first position which later necessarians have
deduced from it. He affirms that necessity is perfectly consistent with
human liberty; that is, that the most strict and inviolable connexion of
cause and effect does not prevent the full, free, and unrestrained
development of certain powers in the agent, or take away the distinction
between the nature of virtue and vice, praise and blame, reward and
punishment, but is the foundation of all moral reasoning. Except Dr.
Jonathan Edwards, he is the only professed necessarian that I know of
who has not been led, by the customary use of language, to quit the
original definition of the term, and to slide from a philosophical into
a vulgar and practical necessity. But I will state his reasoning in his
own words, which are the best. They are as follows:
‘My opinion about Liberty and Necessity.
‘_First_, I conceive that when it cometh into a man’s mind to do or not
to do some certain action, if he have no time to deliberate, the doing
it or abstaining necessarily follows the present thought he hath of the
good or evil consequences thereof to himself; as, for example, in sudden
anger the action shall follow the thought of revenge; in sudden fear,
the thought of escape; also when a man hath time to deliberate, but
deliberateth not, because never any thing appeared that could him make
doubt of the consequence, the action follows his opinion of the goodness
or harm of it. These actions I call voluntary, because these actions
that _follow immediately_ the last appetite are voluntary, are here:
where is only one appetite that one is the last.
‘_Secondly_, I conceive when a man deliberates whether he shall do a
thing or not do it, that he does nothing else but consider whether it be
better for himself to do it or not to do it; and to consider an action,
is to imagine the consequences of it both good and evil; from whence is
to be inferred, that deliberation is nothing else but alternate
imagination of the good and evil sequels of an action, or (which is the
same thing) alternate hope and fear, or alternate appetite to do or quit
the action of which he deliberateth.
‘_Thirdly_, I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all
alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we
call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action,
or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to
do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are
called intentions, and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one
will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the
intentions change often.
‘_Fourthly_, I conceive that those actions which a man is said to do
upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done upon choice and
election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election
is the same thing; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say,
he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating.
‘_Fifthly_, I conceive liberty to be rightly defined in this manner:
liberty is the absence of all the impediments to action that are not
contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent, as for
example, the water is said to descend freely, or to have liberty to
descend by the channel of the river, because there is no impediment that
way, but not across, because the banks are impediments, and though the
water cannot ascend, yet men never say it wants the liberty to ascend,
but the faculty or power, because the impediment is in the nature of the
water, and intrinsical. So also we say, he that is tied wants the
liberty to go, because the impediment is not in him, but in his bands;
whereas we say not so of him that is sick or lame, because the
impediment is in himself.
‘_Sixthly_, I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but
from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that,
therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to
which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his
will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own
disposing; so that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary
actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the
will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it
followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and
therefore are necessitated.
‘_Seventhly_, I hold that to be a sufficient cause, to which nothing is
wanting that is needful to the producing of the effect. The same also is
a necessary cause. For if it be possible that a sufficient cause shall
not bring forth the effect, then there wanteth somewhat which was
needful to the producing of it, and so the cause was not sufficient; but
if it be impossible that a sufficient cause should not produce the
effect, then is a sufficient cause a necessary cause (for that is said
to produce an effect necessarily that cannot but produce it;) hence it
is manifest, that whatsoever is produced, is produced necessarily: for
whatsoever is produced hath had a sufficient cause to produce it, or
else it had not been; and therefore also voluntary actions are
necessitated.
‘_Lastly_, I hold that the ordinary definition of a free agent, namely,
that a free agent, is that, which, when all things are present which are
needful to produce the effect, can nevertheless not produce it, implies
a contradiction, and is nonsense; being as much as to say, the cause may
be sufficient, that is to say necessary, and yet the effect shall not
follow.
‘MY REASONS.—For the first five points, wherein it is explicated—1. what
spontaneity is; 2. what deliberation is; 3. what will, propension and
appetite are; 4. what a free agent is; 5. what liberty is; there can no
other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on
himself, and remembering what he himself meaneth when he saith an action
is spontaneous: a man deliberates: such is his will: that agent or that
action is free. Now he that reflecteth so on himself, cannot but be
satisfied, that deliberation is the consideration of the good or evil
sequels of an action to come; that by spontaneity is meant inconsiderate
action (or else nothing is meant by it); that will is the last act of
our deliberation; that a free agent is he that can do if he will, and
forbear if he will; and that liberty is the absence of external
impediments. But, to those that out of custom speak not what they
conceive, but what they hear, and are not able, or will not take the
pains to consider what they think when they hear such words, no argument
can be sufficient; because experience and matter of fact is not verified
by other men’s arguments, but by every man’s own sense and memory. For
example, how can it be proved that to love a thing and to think it good
is all one, to a man that hath not marked his own meaning by those
words? or how can it be proved that eternity is not _nunc stans_ to a
man that says those words by custom, and never considers how he can
conceive the thing in his mind? Also the sixth point, that a man cannot
imagine any thing to begin without a cause, can no other way be made
known, but by trying how he can imagine it; but if he try, he shall find
as much reason (if there be no cause of the thing) to conceive it should
begin at one time as another, that he hath equal reason to think it
should begin at all times, which is impossible, and therefore he must
think there was some special cause why it began then, rather than sooner
or later, or else that it began never, but was eternal.
‘For the seventh point, which is, that all events have necessary causes,
it is there proved in that they have sufficient causes. Further, let us
in this place also suppose any event never so casual, as the throwing
(for example) “ames ace” upon a pair of dice, and see if it must not
have been necessary before it was thrown. For seeing it was thrown, it
had a beginning, and consequently a sufficient cause to produce it,
consisting partly in the dice, partly in outward things, as the posture
of the parts of the hand, the measure of force applied by the caster,
the posture of the parts of the table, and the like. In sum, there was
nothing wanting which was necessarily requisite to the producing of that
particular cast, and consequently the cast was necessarily thrown; for
if it had not been thrown, there had wanted somewhat requisite to the
throwing of it, and so the cause had not been sufficient. In the like
manner it may be proved that every other accident, how contingent soever
it seem, or how voluntary soever it be, is produced necessarily. The
same may be proved also in this manner. Let the case be put, for
example, of the weather: ’tis necessary that to-morrow it shall rain or
not rain. If, therefore, it be not necessary it shall rain, it is
necessary it shall not rain, otherwise there is no necessity that the
proposition, it shall rain or not rain, should be true. I know there be
some that say, it may necessarily be true that one of the two shall come
to pass, but not, singly that it shall rain, or that it shall not rain,
which is as much as to say, one of them is necessary, yet neither of
them is necessary; and therefore to seem to avoid that absurdity, they
make a distinction, that neither of them is true _determinate_, but
_indeterminate_, which distinction either signifies no more but this,
one of them is true, but we know not which, and so the necessity
remains, though we know it not; or if the meaning of the distinction be
not that, it hath no meaning, and they might as well have said, one of
them is true _titirice_, but neither of them, _tu patulice_.
‘The last thing in which also consisteth the whole controversy, namely,
that there is no such thing as an agent, which when all things requisite
to action are present, can nevertheless forbear to produce it; or (which
is all one) that there is no such thing as freedom from necessity, is
easily inferred from that which hath been before alleged. For if it be
an agent it can work, and if it work there is nothing wanting of what is
requisite to produce the action, and consequently the cause of the
action is sufficient, and if sufficient, then also necessary, as hath
been proved before. And thus you see how the inconveniences, which it is
objected must follow upon the holding of necessity, are avoided, and the
necessity itself demonstratively proved. To which I could add, if I
thought it good logic, the inconvenience of denying necessity, as that
it destroyeth both the decrees and the prescience of God Almighty; for
whatsoever God hath purposed to bring to pass by man, as an instrument,
or foreseeth shall come to pass; a man, if he have liberty as hath been
affirmed from necessitation, might frustrate, and make not to come to
pass, and God should either not foreknow it, and not decree it, or he
should foreknow such things shall be, as shall never be, and decree that
which shall never come to pass. This is all that hath come into my mind
touching this question since I last considered it.’
The letter from which the foregoing extract is taken is addressed to the
Marquis of Newcastle, and dated at Rouen in 1651, twenty years before
the publication of Spinoza’s most exact and beautiful demonstration of
the same principle. Some of Hobbes’s antagonists had charged him with
having borrowed his arguments from Marsennus, a French author; to which
in one of his controversial tracts Hobbes replies with some contempt,
that this Marsennus had heard him talk on the subject when he was in
Paris, and had borrowed them from him. Dr. Priestley has done justice to
Hobbes on this question of necessity, and I suspect more than justice in
denying that the Stoics were acquainted with the same principle. At any
rate, the modern commentators on the subject (and Dr. Priestley among
them) have added nothing to it but absurdities, from which our author’s
logic protected him; for he seldom reasoned wrong but when he reasoned
from wrong premises. As this question is one of the most interesting in
the history of philosophy, I shall perhaps be excused for adding one
more extract (of considerable length) to prove that Hobbes is not, in
this instance, chargeable with the practical inferences which have been
made from his doctrine. In answer to the objections of Bishop Bramhall,
with whom he had a controversy on the subject, he says:
‘Of the arguments from reason, the first is that which his Lordship
saith is drawn from Zeno’s beating of his man, which is therefore called
_Argumentum Baculinum_, that is to say, a wooden argument. The story is
this: Zeno held that all actions were necessary: his man therefore being
for some fault beaten, excused himself upon the necessity of it: to
avoid this excuse, his master pleaded likewise the necessity of beating
him. So that not he that maintained, but he that derided the necessity
was beaten, contrary to that his Lordship would infer.
‘The second argument is taken from certain inconveniences which his
Lordship thinks would follow such an opinion.
‘The first inconvenience, he says, is this, that the laws which prohibit
any action will be unjust.
‘2. That all consultations are vain.
‘3. That admonitions to men of understanding are of no more use than to
children, fools, and madmen.
‘4. That praise, dispraise, reward and punishment are in vain.
‘5 and 6. That counsels, arts, arms, books, instruments, study, tutors,
medicines are in vain.’
Hobbes’s answer to these conclusions is I think quite satisfactory. He
says—
‘To which arguments his Lordship, expecting I should answer by saying,
“the ignorance of the event were enough to make us use the means,” adds
(as it were a reply to my answer foreseen) these words, “_Alas! how
should our not knowing the event be a sufficient motive to make us use
the means?_” Wherein his Lordship says right: but my answer is not that
which he expecteth. I answer:
‘First, that the necessity of an action doth not make the laws that
prohibit it unjust. To let pass that not the necessity, but the will to
break the law maketh the action unjust, because the law regardeth the
will and no other antecedent cause of action, and to let pass that no
law can possibly be unjust, inasmuch as every man maketh (by his
consent) the law he is bound to keep, and which consequently must be
just, unless a man can be unjust to himself;—I say, what necessary cause
soever precede an action, yet if the action be forbidden, he that doth
it willingly may be justly punished. For instance, suppose the law on
pain of death prohibit stealing, and that there be a man who by the
strength of temptation is necessitated to steal, and is thereupon put to
death, does not this punishment deter others from stealing? Is it not a
cause that others steal not? Doth it not frame and make their wills to
justice? To make the law is therefore to make a cause of justice, and to
necessitate justice, and consequently ’tis no injustice to make such a
law. The intention of the law is not to grieve the delinquent for what
is past and not to be undone; but to make him and others just that else
would not be so; and respecteth not the evil act past, but the good to
come. Insomuch as without the good intention for the future, no past act
of a delinquent would justify his killing in the sight of God.
‘Secondly, I deny that it maketh consultations to be vain. ’Tis the
consultation that causeth a man and necessitateth him to choose to do
one thing rather than another: so that unless a man say that that cause
is in vain which necessitateth the effect, he cannot infer the
superfluousness of consultation out of the necessity of the election
proceeding from it. But it seemeth his Lordship reasons thus: “If I must
do this rather than that, I shall do it though I consult not at all;”
which is a false proposition and a false consequence, and no better than
this: “If I shall live till to-morrow, I shall live till to-morrow,
though I run myself through with a sword to-day.” If there be a
necessity that an action shall be done, or that any effect shall be
brought to pass, it does not therefore follow that there is nothing
necessarily requisite as a means to bring it to pass; and therefore when
it is determined that one thing shall be chosen before another, ’tis
determined also for what cause it shall be chosen, which cause for the
most part is deliberation or consultation; and therefore consultation is
not in vain, and indeed the less in vain by how much the election is
more necessitated, if _more_ and _less_ had any place in necessity.
‘The same answer is to be given to the third supposed inconvenience,
namely, that admonitions are in vain: for admonitions are parts of
consultation, the admonitor being a counsellor for the time to him that
is admonished.
‘The fourth pretended inconvenience is, that praise, dispraise, reward
and punishment will be in vain. To which I answer, that for praise and
dispraise, they depend not at all on the necessity of the action praised
or dispraised. For what is it else to praise, but to say a thing is
good; good, I say, for me or for some body else, or for the state and
commonwealth? And what is it to say an action is good, but to say it is
as I would wish, or as another would have it, or according to the will
of the state, that is to say, according to the law. Does my Lord think
that no action can please me or him or the commonwealth, that should
proceed from necessity? Things may therefore be necessary, and yet
praiseworthy, as also necessary, and yet dispraised, and neither of them
both in vain, because praise and dispraise, and likewise reward and
punishment, do by example make and conform the will to good and evil. It
was a very great praise in my opinion that Velleius Paterculus gives
Cato, when he says that he was good by nature, _et quia aliter esse non
potuit_.
‘To the last objection, that counsels, arts, arms, instruments, books,
study, medicines, and the like would be superfluous, the same answer
serves as to the former, that is to say, that this consequence, _if the
effect shall come to pass, then it shall come to pass without its
causes_, is a false one, and those things named counsels, arts, arms,
&c. are the causes of those effects.’—Page 291.
‘His Lordship’s third argument consisteth in other inconveniences, which
he saith will follow, namely, impiety, and negligence of religious
duties, as repentance and zeal to God’s service, &c. To which I answer
as to the rest, that they follow not. I must confess, if we consider the
greatest part of mankind, not as they should be, but as they are, that
is, as men whom either the study of acquiring wealth or preferment, or
whom the appetite of sensual delights or the impatience of meditation,
or the rash embracing of wrong principles have made unapt to discuss the
truth of things; I must, I say, confess that the dispute of this
question will rather hurt than help their piety, and therefore if his
Lordship had not desired this answer, I should not have written it, nor
do I write it but in hopes your Lordship and his will keep it private.
Nevertheless in very truth, the necessity of events does not of itself
draw with it any impiety at all. For piety consisteth only in two
things: one that we honour God in our hearts, which is, that we think as
highly of his power as we can, (for to honour any thing is nothing else
but to think it to be of great power). The other is that we signify that
honour and esteem by our words and actions, which is called _cultus_, or
worship of God. He therefore that thinketh that all things proceed from
God’s eternal will, and consequently are necessary, does he not think
God omnipotent? Does he not esteem of his power as highly as is
possible, which is to honour God as much as may be in his heart? Again,
he that thinketh so, is he not more apt by external acts and words to
acknowledge it, than he that thinketh otherwise? Yet is this external
acknowledgment the same thing which we call worship; so that this
opinion fortifies piety in both kinds, external and internal, and
therefore is far from destroying it. And for repentance, which is
nothing else but a glad returning into the right way, after the grief of
being out of the way, though the cause that made him go astray were
necessary, yet there is no reason why he should not grieve; and, again,
though the cause why he returned into the way were necessary, there
remaineth still the cause of joy. So that the necessity of the acting
taketh away neither of those parts of repentance—grief for the error,
and joy for returning.’—_Tripos_, p. 292.
The author afterwards properly defines a moral agent to be one that acts
from deliberation, choice, or will, not from indifference; and, speaking
of the supposed inconsistency between choice and necessity, adds:
‘Commonly when we see and know the strength that moves us, we
acknowledge necessity; but when we see not or mark not the force that
moves us, we then think there is none, and that it is not causes but
liberty that produceth the action. Hence it is that they think he doth
not choose this that of necessity chooses it, but they might as well
say, fire doth not burn, because it burns of necessity.’
The general question is thus stated by Mr. Hobbes in the beginning of
his treatise: the point is not, he says, ‘whether a man can be a free
agent; that is to say, whether he can write or forbear, speak or be
silent, according to his will, but whether the will to write, and the
will to forbear, come upon him according to his will, or according to
any thing else in his own power. I acknowledge this liberty, that I can
do if I will; but to say—I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd
speech. In fine, that freedom which men commonly find in books, that
which the poets chaunt in the theatres, and the shepherds on the
mountains, that which the pastors teach in the pulpits, and the doctors
in the universities, and that which the common people in the markets,
and all mankind in the whole world do assent unto, is the same that I
assent unto, namely, that a man hath freedom to do if he will, but
whether he hath freedom to will is a question neither the bishop nor
they ever thought on.’
All in which I differ from Hobbes is, that I think there is a real
freedom of choice and will, as well as of action, in the sense of the
author, that is, not a freedom from necessity or causes in either case,
but a liberty in any given agent to exert certain powers without being
controlled or impeded in their exercise by another agent.
Helvetius says, ‘It is true we can form a tolerably distinct idea of the
word _liberty_, understood in a common sense. A man is free who is
neither loaded with irons, nor confined in prison, nor intimidated like
the slave by the dread of chastisement: in this sense, the liberty of a
man consists in the free exercise of his power: I say of his power,
because it would be ridiculous to mistake for a want of liberty the
incapacity we are under to pierce the clouds like the eagle, to live
under the water like the whale, or to become king, emperor, or pope. We
have so far a sufficiently clear idea of the word. But this is no longer
the case when we come to apply liberty to the will. What must this
liberty then mean? We can only understand by it a free power of willing
or not willing a thing: but this power would imply that there may be a
will without motives, and consequently an effect without a cause. A
philosophical treatise on the liberty of the will would be a treatise of
effects without a cause.’—_Helvetius on the Mind_, p. 44.
Now I cannot perceive why there is any more difficulty in annexing a
meaning to the word liberty, as it relates to the faculties of the mind
than as it relates to those of the body, or why a treatise of the one
should be a treatise of effects without a cause any more than of the
other. If the distinction between liberty and necessity is lost in this
case, it is not because liberty but because necessity can have no place
in the will, or because we cannot easily put a padlock on the mind. If
the prisoner who has his chains struck off, walks or runs, dances or
leaps, is this an instance of an effect without a cause, because it is
an effect of liberty, or of what Helvetius calls the free exercise of
his power? Not that he can exert this power without means or motives,
that is, without ground to move on, or limbs to move with, or breath to
draw, or will to impel him, but ‘with all these means and appliances to
boot’ he has a power to do certain things which his chains deprived him
of the liberty of doing, but which the striking them off restores to him
again. Why then, if liberty does not in its common sense signify an
effect without a cause, but the free exercise of a power, did it not
signify the same thing or something similar as applied to the mind? Has
the mind no powers, or are they necessarily impeded and hindered from
operating? My notion of a free agent, I confess, is not that represented
by Mr. Hobbes, namely, one that when all things necessary to produce the
effect are present can nevertheless not produce it; but I believe a free
agent of whatever kind, is one which where all things necessary to
produce the effect are present, can produce it; its own operation not
being hindered by any thing else. The body is said to be free when it
has the power to obey the direction of the will: so the will may be said
to be free when it has the power to obey the dictates of the
understanding. The absurdity of the libertarians is in supposing that
liberty of action, and liberty of will have the same identical source,
viz. the will; or that as it is the will that moves the body, so it is
the will that moves itself in order to be free.
Mr. Locke’s chapter ‘On Power,’ in the first volume of the Essay,
contains his account of liberty and necessity, and has been more found
fault with than any other part of his work; I think without reason. He
seems evidently to have admitted the definition of necessity, though he
has avoided the name, which is not much to be wondered at, considering
the misconception to which it is liable, and which can scarcely be
separated from it in the closest reasoning, much less as a term of
general signification. In other words, he denies the power of the mind
to act without a cause or motive, or, in any manner in any
circumstances, from mere indifferency and absolute self motion; but he
at the same time rejects the inference which has been drawn from this
principle, that the mind is not an agent at all, but entirely subject to
external force or blind impulse. What he has said is little more than an
expansion of Hobbes’s general description of practical liberty, ‘that it
is a power to do, if we will.’ Thus, according to Mr. Locke, it would
not be so absurd to give a restive horse the spur or the whip to make
him go straight forward on a plain road, as it would be in order to make
him leap up a precipice a hundred feet high. The one the horse has a
power or liberty to do if he will, the other he has no power to do at
any rate. That is, here are two sorts of impediments, one that may be
overcome, and which it is right to take means to overcome, and another
which cannot be overcome, and which it is therefore absurd to meddle
with. To say that these two necessities are in effect the same, is an
abuse of language; yet for not lumping them together in the dashing
style of our modern wholesale dealers in paradox, Mr. Locke has been
made the subject of endless abuse and contumely. The difference between
them, as stated by this author with great force and earnestness of
feeling, in truth constitutes all that men in general mean when they
talk of freedom of will, and make it, as in this sense it is, the
ground-work of morality. There are certain powers which the mind has of
governing not only the actions of the body, but of regulating its own
thoughts and desires, and it is to make us exert these powers that all
the distinctions, rules and sanctions of morality have been established.
It must be ridiculous to attempt to make us do, what upon the face of
the thing it was known we could not do; yet it is on this literal and
unqualified interpretation of the term, as implying a flat impossibility
of the contrary, an utter incapacity and helplessness in the mind, a
concurrence of causes foreign to the will itself, and irresistible in
their effect, and with which it must therefore be in vain to contend,
that most of the consequences from the doctrine of necessity have been
built; such as that reward and punishment are absurd and improper, that
virtue and vice are words without a meaning, that the assassin is no
more a moral or accountable agent than the dagger which he uses, and
many others of the same stamp. The sword and the assassin would be
equally moral and accountable agents, if they were both equally
accessible to moral motives, that is, to reward and punishment, praise
and blame, &c.; but they are not. This seems to be a distinction of
great pith and moment. It is said to be a mere difference of words; at
least it makes all the difference whether such motives as reward and
punishment, praise and blame, should be applied or not, and this one
should think was a difference of practice. It is objected, indeed, that
still both are equally necessary agents. But this appears to me to be a
confusion of words. It is in vain to exhort flame not to burn, or to be
angry with poison for working: and it would be equally in vain to exhort
men to certain actions or to resent others, if exhortation and
resentment had no more effect upon them, that is, if they were really
governed by the same sort of blind, physical, unreasoning, unresisting
necessity. In fact, the latest necessarians have abandoned the true,
original, philosophical meaning of the term, in which it implies no more
than the connection between cause and effect, and have substituted for
it the prejudiced notion of their adversaries, who confound it with
mechanical necessity, ‘fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,’ or the
unconditional _fiat_ of omnipotence.
The following extracts which I shall condense as much as I can
consistently with the nature of the argument, will shew the view which
Mr. Locke has taken of this subject. I would only observe, by the by,
that I so far agree with Hobbes and differ from Mr. Locke, in thinking
that liberty in the most extended and abstract sense is applicable to
material as well as voluntary agents; moral liberty, _i.e._ freedom of
will evidently is not, because such agents have no such faculty.
‘All the actions that we have any idea of,’ says my author, ‘reducing
themselves to these two, _viz._ thinking and moving, so far as a man has
a power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to
the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free.
Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s
power, wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the
preference of his mind, directing it, there he is not free, though
perhaps the action may be voluntary. Where any particular action is not
in the power of the agent, to be produced by him according to his
volition, there he is not at liberty; that agent is under necessity. So
that liberty cannot be where there is no thought, no volition, no will;
but there may be thought, there may be volition, there may be will,
where there is no liberty. A little consideration of an obvious instance
or two may make this clear.
‘A tennis-ball, whether in motion by the stroke of a racket, or lying
still at rest, is not by any one taken to be a free agent. If we inquire
into the reason, we shall find it is because we conceive not a
tennis-ball to think; and consequently not to have any volition, or
preference of motion to rest or _vice versâ_; and therefore has not
liberty, is not a free agent, but both its motion and rest come under
our idea of necessity, and are so called. Likewise a man falling into
the water (a bridge breaking under him) has not herein liberty, is not a
free agent. For though he has volition, though he prefers his not
falling to falling, yet the forbearance of that motion not being in his
power, the stop or cessation of that motion follows not upon his
volition; and therefore therein he is not free. So a man striking
himself or his friend by a convulsive motion of his arm, no body thinks
he has in this liberty, every one pities him as acting by necessity and
constraint.’
Here I will just stop to observe that the stanch sticklers for
necessity, who make up by an excess of zeal for their want of knowledge,
would read this passage with a smile of self-complacent contempt, and
remark profoundly that whether the man struck his friend on purpose, or
from a convulsive motion, he was equally under necessity, and the object
of pity. Now whether he is an object of pity, I shall not dispute; but I
conceive he is also an object of anger in the one case which he is not
in the other, because anger will prevent a man’s striking you again, but
will not cure him of St. Vitus’s dance. It is to this sort of
indiscriminate, blind, senseless necessity which neutralizes all things
and actions, and under the pretence of establishing the operation of
causes, destroys the distinction between the different degrees and kinds
of necessity, to which I do not profess myself a convert.
To return.—‘As it is in the motions of the body,’ proceeds Mr. Locke,
‘so it is in the thoughts of our minds: where any one is such, that we
have power to take it up or lay it by, according to the preference of
the mind, there we are at liberty. Yet some ideas to the mind, like some
motions to the body, are such as in certain circumstances it cannot
avoid, nor obtain their absence by the utmost effort it can use. A man
on the rack is not at liberty to lay by the idea of pain, and divert
himself with other contemplations. And sometimes a boisterous passion
hurries our thoughts, as a hurricane does our bodies, without leaving us
the liberty of thinking on other things which we would rather choose.
But as soon as the mind regains the power to stop or continue, begin or
forbear any of these motions of the body without, or of the mind within,
according as it thinks fit to prefer either to the other, we then
consider the man as free again.’
‘But freedom,’ says my author, ‘unless it reaches farther than this,
will not serve the turn; and it passes for a good plea that a man is not
free at all, if he is not as free to will, as he is to act what he
wills. Concerning a man’s liberty, there yet therefore is raised this
farther question, whether a man be free to will? And as to that I
imagine that a man in respect of willing, when any action in his power
is once proposed to his thoughts as presently [that is, immediately] to
be done, cannot be free. The reason whereof is very manifest; for it
being unavoidable that the action depending on his will should exist or
not exist, and its existence or non-existence following perfectly the
determination of his will, he cannot avoid willing the existence or
non-existence of that action; it is absolutely necessary that he will
the one, or the other, _i.e._ prefer the one to the other, since one of
them must necessarily follow.’—Page 246.
This seems to be the weak part of Mr. Locke’s reasoning, and is the only
place, as I remember, where he has considered the certainty of the event
as inconsistent with the practical liberty for which he contends. At
this rate, it must be given up altogether: there can be no such thing as
liberty. For in all cases whatever, one determination must happen rather
than another. In all cases whatever, we must choose either one way or
another, or suspend our choice. Suspense and deliberation, as Helvetius
and others have justly remarked, are in this sense equally necessary
with precipitation of judgment. The actual or final event is in both
cases the necessary consequence of preceding causes, but that does not
destroy freedom of choice in either case, if the event depends upon the
exercise of choice, whether the time allowed for the mind to choose in,
be longer or shorter. If by liberty be meant the uncertainty of the
event, then liberty is a nonentity: but if it be supposed to relate to
the concurrence of certain powers of an agent in the production of that
event, then it is as true and as real a thing as the necessity to which
it is thus opposed, and which consists in the exclusion of certain
powers possessed by an agent from operating in the producing of any
event. At the same time it must be granted, that the power of
deliberation is the most valuable privilege of our rational nature, and
the great enlargement of the discursive faculty of the will. Mr. Locke
seems only to have erred in mistaking a difference of degree or extent
for one of kind. The practical truth of the distinction is undeniable.
His words are:—
‘The mind having in most cases, as is evident from experience, a power
to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so
all, one after another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them,
examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the
liberty man has; and from the not using of it right comes all that
variety of mistakes, errors, and faults, which we run into in the
conduct of our lives, and our endeavours after happiness: whilst we
precipitate the determination of our wills, and engage too soon before
due examination. For during the suspension of any desire, before the
will be determined to action, we have an opportunity to examine, view,
and judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do; and when upon
due examination we have judged, we have done our duty, all that we can
or ought to do, in pursuit of our happiness; and it is not a fault, but
a perfection of our nature, to desire, will, and act, according to the
last result of a fair examination. This seems to me the source of all
liberty; in this seems to consist that which is (I think improperly)
called _free-will_.’—_Essay_, vol. i. p. 264.
Moral liberty, it should seem then, all the liberty which a man has or
which he wants, does not after all consist in a power of indifferency,
or in a power of choosing, without regard to motives, but in a power of
exciting his reason and of obeying it. There are two general positions
advanced by the author in the course of this inquiry, to neither of
which I can agree; namely, that action always proceeds from uneasiness,
and that we are perfect judges of present good and evil. With respect to
the first, it is true indeed that nothing can be an object of desire
till we suffer uneasiness from the want of it, but it is just as true,
that the want of any thing does not cause uneasiness in the mind, unless
it is first an object of desire, or unless the prospect of it gives us
pleasure. As to the second position, that we cannot be deceived in
judging of our actual sensations, it would be true, if the sensation and
the judgment formed upon it were the same, but they neither are nor can
be. Let any person smell to a rose, and look at a beautiful prospect or
hear a fine piece of music at the same instant, and try to determine
which of them gives him most pleasure. If he has the least doubt or
hesitation, the principle laid down by Mr. Locke cannot pass for an
axiom. From not accurately distinguishing between sensation and
judgment, some writers have been led to confound good and evil with
pleasure and pain. Good or evil is properly that which gives the mind
pleasure or pain on reflection, that is, which excites rational
approbation or disapprobation. To consider these two things as either
the same or in any regular proportion to each other, is I think to
betray a very superficial acquaintance with human nature. Yet in
defiance of the necessary distinction between the faculties by which we
feel and by which we judge, these moralists have laid it down as a
fundamental rule that all pleasures which are so in themselves are
equally good and commendable; yet as these ideas relate solely to the
reflex impression made by certain things on the understanding, to insist
that we shall judge of them by an appeal to the senses, is unwisely to
overturn the principle of the division of labour among our faculties,
and to force one to do the office of another. For this there seems no
more reason than for attempting to hear with our fingers, to see a
sound, or feel a colour.
‘Oh! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind;
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind.’
Yet the absurdity of the attempt arises only from the inaptitude of the
organ to the object.
Among simple ideas Mr. Locke reckons that of power. It were to be wished
that he had given it as simple a source as possible, viz. the feeling we
have of it in our own minds, which he sometimes seems half inclined to
do, instead of referring it to our observation of the successive changes
which take place in matter. It is by this means alone, that is, by
making it an original idea derived from within, like the sense of
pleasure or pain, and quite distinct from the visible composition and
decomposition of other objects, that we can avoid being driven into an
absolute scepticism with regard to cause and effect. For Hume has, I
think, demonstrated that in the mere mechanical series of sensible
appearances, there is nothing to suggest this idea, or point out the
indissoluble connection of one event with another, any more than in the
flies of a summer. We get this idea solely from the exertion of muscular
or voluntary power in ourselves: whoever has stretched forth his hand to
an object, must have the idea of power. Under the idea of power I
include all that relates to what we call force, energy, weakness,
effort, ease, difficulty, impossibility, &c. Accordingly, I should
conceive that no man of strong passions, or great muscular activity
would ever give up the idea of power. Hume, who seems to have discarded
it with the least compunction, was an easy, indolent, good-tempered man,
who did not care to stir out of his arm-chair; a languid, Epicurean
philosopher, of a reasonable corpulency, who was hurried away by no
violent passions, or intense desires, but looked on most things with the
same eye of listlessness and indifference. He was one of the subtlest
and most metaphysical of all metaphysicians. And perhaps he was so for
the reason here stated. The Scotch in general are not metaphysicians:
they have in fact always a purpose, they aim at a particular point, they
are determined upon something beforehand. This gives a hardness and
rigidity to their understandings, and takes away that tremulous
sensibility to every slight and wandering impression which is necessary
to complete the fine balance of the mind, and enable us to follow all
the infinite fluctuations of thought through their nicest distinctions.
To return to the doctrine of necessity. I shall refer to the authority
of but one more writer, who has indeed exhausted the subject, and
anticipated what few remarks I had to offer upon it: I mean Jonathan
Edwards, in his treatise on the Will. This work, setting aside its
Calvinistic tendency with which I have nothing to do, is one of the most
closely reasoned, elaborate, acute, serious, and sensible among modern
productions. No metaphysician can read it without feeling a wish to have
been the author of it. The gravity of the matter and the earnestness of
the manner are alike admirable. His reasoning is not of that kind, which
consists in having a smart answer for every trite objection, but in
attaining true and satisfactory solutions of things perceived in all
their difficulty and in all their force, and in every variety of
connexion. He evidently writes to satisfy his own mind and the minds of
those, who like himself are intent upon the pursuit of truth for its own
sake. There is not an evasion or ambiguity in his whole book, nor a wish
to produce any but thorough conviction. He does not therefore lead his
readers into a labyrinth of words, or entangle them among the forms of
logic, or mount the airy heights of abstraction, but descends into the
plain, and mingles with the business and feelings of mankind, and
grapples with common sense, and subdues it to the force of true reason.
All philosophy depends no less on deep and real feeling than on power of
thought. I happen to have Edwards’s ‘Inquiry concerning Freewill,’ and
Dr. Priestley’s ‘Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity,’ bound up in
the same volume: and I confess that the difference in the manner of
these two writers is rather striking. The plodding, persevering,
scrupulous accuracy of the one, and the easy, cavalier, verbal fluency
of the other, form a complete contrast. Dr. Priestley’s whole aim seems
to be to evade the difficulties of his subject, Edwards’s to answer
them. The one is employed according to Berkeley’s allegory, in flinging
dust in the eyes of his adversaries, while the other is taking true
pains in digging into the mine of knowledge. All Dr. Priestley’s
arguments on this subject are mere hackneyed common-places. He had in
reality no opinion of his own, and truth, I conceive, never takes very
deep root in those minds on which it is merely engrafted. He uniformly
adopted the vantage ground of every question, and borrowed those
arguments which he found most easy to be wielded, and of most service in
that kind of busy intellectual warfare to which he was habituated. He
was an able controversialist, not a philosophical reasoner.
Dr. Priestley states in his ‘Illustrations’ and in his letter to Dr.
Horsley, that the difference between physical and moral necessity is
merely verbal. He says, speaking of the connexion between cause and
effect in the mind, ‘Give me the thing and I will readily give up the
name.’ It appears to me that Dr. Priestley was quite as much attached to
the name as to the thing, and that the philosophical principle of
necessity, without its unpopular title, would have afforded him but
little satisfaction. Now the obnoxiousness of the name, and in my
opinion, almost all the difficulty and repugnance which the generality
of men find in admitting the doctrine arises from the ambiguity lurking
under the term necessity, which includes both kinds of necessity, moral
and physical, and with which Dr. Priestley delights to probe the
prejudices of his adversaries, thinking the differences of moral and
physical necessity a mere question of words, and that provided there are
any laws or any causes operating upon the mind, it is of no sort of
consequence what those laws or causes are. It is the same inability to
distinguish between one cause and another which creates the vulgar
prejudice against necessity, and which is exposed in a very satisfactory
manner by the author of the ‘Inquiry into the Will.’ He says, in a
letter written expressly to vindicate himself from having confounded
moral with physical necessity, ‘On the contrary, I have largely declared
that the connexion between antecedent things and consequent ones which
takes place with regard to the acts of men’s wills, which is called
moral necessity, is called by the name of _necessity_ improperly; and
that all such terms as _must_, _cannot_, _impossible_, _unable_,
_irresistible_, _unavoidable_, _invincible_, &c. when applied here, are
not applied in their proper signification, and are either used
nonsensically, and with perfect insignificance, or in a sense quite
diverse from their original and proper meaning, and their use in common
speech; and that such a necessity as attends the acts of men’s wills, is
more properly called _certainty_ than _necessity_. I think it is
evidently owing to a strong prejudice in persons’ minds, arising from an
insensible habitual perversion and misapplication of such-like terms,
that they are ready to think that to suppose a certain connexion of
men’s volitions without any foregoing motives or inclinations, is truly
and properly to suppose such a strong irrefragable chain of causes and
effects as stands in the way of, and makes utterly vain, opposite
desires and endeavours, like immovable and impenetrable mountains of
brass; and impedes our liberty like walls of adamant, gates of brass,
and bars of iron: whereas all such representations suggest ideas as far
from the truth, as the East is from the West. I know it is in vain to
endeavour to make some persons believe this, or at least fully and
steadily to believe it: for if it be demonstrated to them, still the old
prejudice remains, which has been long fixed by the use of the terms
_necessary_, _must_, &c. the association with these terms of certain
ideas, inconsistent with liberty, is not broken, and the judgment is
powerfully warped by it; as a thing that has been long bent and grown
stiff, if it be straightened, will return to its former curvity again
and again.’
The reasoning in the ‘Inquiry’ to which the author here refers, in
justification of himself, is as follows:
‘Men in their first use of such phrases as these, _must_, _cannot_,
_unavoidable_, _irresistible_, &c. use them to signify a necessity of
constraint or restraining a natural necessity or impossibility, or some
necessity that the will has nothing to do in. A thing is said to be
_necessary_, when we cannot help it, let us do what we will. So any
thing is said to be _impossible_ to us, when we would do it, or would
have it brought to pass and endeavour it, but all our desires and
endeavours are in vain. And that is said to be _irresistible_, which
overcomes all our opposition, resistance and endeavour to the contrary.
And we are said to be _unable_ to do a thing, when our utmost supposable
desires and endeavours to do it are insufficient. All men find, and
begin to find in early childhood, that there are innumerable things
which cannot be done which they desire to do; and innumerable things,
which they are averse to, that must be; they cannot avoid them, whether
they choose them or no. It is to express this necessity which men so
soon and so often find, and which so greatly affects them in innumerable
cases, that such terms and phrases are first formed; and it is to
signify such a necessity that they are first used, and that they are
most constantly used in the common affairs of life; and not to signify
any such metaphysical, speculative and abstract notion as that connexion
[between cause and effect] in the nature and course of things, to
signify which they who employ themselves in philosophical inquiries into
the first origin and metaphysical relations and dependencies of things,
have borrowed those terms, for want of others. But we grow up from our
cradles in a use of such phrases entirely different from this, or from
the one in which they are used in the controversy about liberty and
necessity. And it being a dictate of the universal sense of mankind,
evident to us as soon as we begin to think, that the necessity signified
by these terms in the sense in which we first learn them, does excuse
persons, and free them from all fault or blame, hence our idea of
excusableness or faultlessness is tied to these phrases by a strong
habit, which grows up with us;—or if we use the words as terms of art in
another sense, yet unless we are exceeding circumspect and wary, we
shall insensibly slide into the vulgar use of them, and so apply the
words in a very inconsistent manner: this habitual connexion of ideas
will deceive and confound us in our reasonings and discourses whenever
we pretend to use the terms in that manner.’—Pages 20, 21, 290, &c.
‘It follows that when the aforesaid terms are used in cases wherein no
opposition, or insufficient will or endeavour is or can be supposed, but
the very nature of the supposed case (as that of willing or choosing)
excludes any such opposition, will, or endeavour, these terms are then
not used in their proper signification, but quite beside their use in
common speech.’—Pages 21, 22.
The author has, I think, in these passages, laid open the source of most
of the confusion on the subject in question. For this double meaning
lurking under the word necessity has been the chief reason why persons,
who were guided more by their own feelings and the customary
associations of language than by formal definitions, have altogether
rejected the doctrine; while persons of a more logical turn, who could
not deny the truth of the abstract principle, have yet in their
explanations of it, and inferences from it, fallen into the same vulgar
error as their opponents. The partisans for necessity have given up
their common sense, as they supposed, to their reason, while the
advocates for liberty rejected a demonstrable truth from a dread of its
consequences; and both have been the dupes of a word. I have been the
more ready to appeal to this writer’s authority, because he is allowed
on all hands to be one of the most strict, severe, and logical of all
necessarians. What he has said on the subject of free-will, as
consisting in perfect contingence, independent of all motive, or as
implying an absolute beginning of action without any precedent
determining cause might, one would imagine, have been sufficient, even
if Hobbes’s reasonings had not, to banish that opinion out of the world.
He has followed it through all its windings, and detected it in all its
varying shades, with equal patience and sagacity. He sums up the
absurdities of this notion of liberty, or of mere absolute self-will, in
these words:
‘The following things are all essential to it, viz. that an action
should be necessary, and not necessary; that it should be from a cause
and no cause; that it should be the fruit of choice and design, and not
the fruit of choice and design; that it should be the beginning of
motion and exertion, and yet be consequent on previous exertion; that it
should be before it is; that it should spring immediately out of
indifference and equilibrium, and yet be the effect of preponderation;
that it should be self-originated, also have its original from something
else; that it is what the mind causes itself, of its own will, and can
produce or prevent, according to its choice, or pleasure, and yet what
the mind has no power to prevent, precluding all previous choice in the
affair. So that an act of the will [determining itself by its own
free-will], according to their metaphysical account of it, is something
of which there is no idea, it is nothing but a confusion of the mind,
excited by words without any distinct meaning. If some learned
philosopher, who had been abroad, in giving an account of the curious
observations he had made in his travels, should say, “He had been in
Tierra del Fuego, and there had seen an animal, which he calls by a
certain name, that begat and brought forth itself, and yet had a sire
and a dam distinct from itself; that it had an appetite and was hungry
before it had a being; that his master, who led him, and governed him at
his pleasure, was always governed by him, and driven by him where he
pleased: that when he moved, he always took a step before the first
step; that he went with his head first, and yet always went tail
foremost; and this though he had neither head nor tail;” it would be no
impudence at all to tell such a traveller, though a learned man, that he
himself had no notion or idea of such an animal as he gave an account
of, and never had, nor ever would have.’—Page 281, of the _Inquiry_.
The author seems to have hit upon the source of this erroneous account
of free-will, with his usual truth of feeling. He says, almost
immediately after:—‘The thing which has led men into this inconsistent
notion of action, when applied to volition, as though it were essential
to this internal action that the agent should be self-determined in it,
and that the will should be the cause of it, was probably this: that
according to the sense of mankind, and the common use of language, it is
so with respect to men’s external actions; which are what originally,
and according to the vulgar use and most proper sense of the word, are
called _actions_. Men in these are self-directed, self-determined, and
their wills are the cause of the motions of their bodies, and the
external things that are done; so that unless men do them voluntarily,
and of choice, and the action be determined by their antecedent
volition, it is no action or doing of theirs. Hence some metaphysicians
have been led unwarily, but exceeding absurdly, to suppose the same
concerning volition itself, _that_ that also must be determined by the
will; which is to be determined by antecedent volition, as the motion of
the body is; not considering the contradiction it implies.’—_Ibid._,
page 286.
I shall proceed to state as briefly as I can my own notions of liberty
and necessity, as far as they any way differ from the foregoing account.
First, then, I conceive that if by necessity be understood and only
understood the connexion of cause and effect, or the constant dependence
of one thing on another, in the human mind as well as in matter, that
according to this interpretation all things are equally certain and
necessary. On the other hand, if by liberty be meant any thing opposite
to this connexion of cause and effect: that is, a positive beginning of
any action or motion out of nothing, or out of a state of indifference,
or from itself, I believe that there is no such thing as liberty in the
mind any more than in matter. All things have their preceding
determining causes, and nothing is, but what must be in the precise
given circumstances. This has been demonstrated over and over again, and
the contrary supposition reduced to a manifest absurdity in every
possible way by Hobbes, Hume, Hartley, Edwards, Priestley, and others.
But, secondly, I conceive that the question does not stop here, because
certain ideas have been annexed to these terms of liberty and necessity,
both by the learned and by common men, which have nothing at all to do
with the affirmation or denial of the simple connexion between cause and
effect. What I shall therefore attempt will be to point out a few
instances of the misapplication of the term to prove a necessity not
included in the certainty of the event, and to disprove liberty in a
sense in which it does not interfere with that certainty, or with
philosophical necessity: that is, I shall attempt to show in what sense,
in conformity with the general law to which all things are by their
nature subject, man is an agent, a free agent, a moral and accountable
agent; that is, deserving of reward and punishment, praise and blame,
&c. Now by an agent I mean any thing that acts or has a power to
operate, that is, to produce effects; by a free agent I mean one that is
not hindered from acting; by a moral and accountable agent I mean one
that acts from will, and is influenced by motives; by reward and
punishment I mean what every one does; by praise and blame I mean our
approbation or disapprobation of any agent that is conscious of our
sentiments towards him, or that is capable of reflecting on his own
conduct, and of being affected by what others think of it. If by an
agent be meant the beginner of action, or one that produces an effect of
itself, there can be no such thing; but if by an agent be meant one that
contributes to an effect, there is such a thing as an agent; and the
more any thing contributes to an effect and determines it to be this or
that, the more it is an agent. If by freedom be meant a freedom from
causes, or necessity in the abstract, there can be no freedom in this
sense, but there may be and is a freedom from certain causes and from
certain kinds and degrees of necessity; that is, from physical causes,
or compulsion, and from absolute, unconditional necessity. If all things
are equally necessary, that do not spring out of nothing, then indeed
the distinction between liberty and necessity must be in all cases
absurd. Again, by free-will I do not mean the power or liberty to act
without motives, but with motives. The mind cannot act without an
occasion or ground for acting, but this does not shew that it is no
agent at all, or that it is not a free agent; that is, that its action
is restrained or hindered by the action of anything else. The
intellectual and voluntary powers are free, just as the corporeal are,
namely, when they are free to produce certain effects, which, if
excited, they can produce, as the body is free when it can move in
consequence of the mind’s direction; it is no longer free when though
the same reason exists for its moving, it is hindered by something else
from obeying the impulse. In short, liberty is this: the power in any
agent in given circumstances to operate in a certain manner, if left to
itself; or perhaps more unequivocally, opportunity given to any agent to
exert certain powers to produce an effect, when nothing but those powers
and the absence of impediments is wanting to produce it. To be free is
to possess all the requisites for acting in one’s-self, and in the
circumstances, and not to be counteracted. Again if moral good and evil
are supposed to be something self-created, then they are merely fictions
of the mind; but if we suppose an agent to be entitled to praise or
blame, reward or punishment, not because he is a self-willed, but a
voluntary agent, that is to say, a being possessing certain powers and
habitually and with determination exerting them to certain purposes,
then there will be a foundation for this distinction in nature. To the
idea of moral responsibility, it is not necessary that the agent should
be the sole or absolutely first cause of the evil, for example, but that
he should be one real, determining cause of it, and while he remains
what he is, the same effects will follow. An agent is the author of any
evil, when without him, that is, without something peculiar and
essential to his disposition and character, it would not exist.
1. Every thing is an agent that is any way necessary or conducing to an
effect. The doctrine of second causes does not destroy agency. It no
more proves that those causes do not act because something has acted
before them, than that they do not exist, because something has existed
before them. The theological writers on this side of the question
affirm, I think improperly, that God or the first cause is the sole
agent in the universe, to which all second causes are to be referred as
instruments, having no real efficacy of their own. If so, all events are
produced immediately by the divine agency, that is, all second causes
are parts of the divine essence, and in all that we see or hear or feel,
we must conceive of something far more deeply interfused, a spirit and a
motion that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and
breathes through all things. This doctrine is that of Spinoza: but upon
this supposition second causes, as the immediate operation of the Deity
are and must be real and efficient. On the other hand, if to exclude
this system of pantheism, we consider the things and appearances about
us as merely natural, still what are called second causes must be real
and efficient causes, or they could not produce their effects. If
nothing can operate but the first cause, then whatever produces effects
is the Deity: but if this conclusion be thought objectionable, then we
must allow other causes of events to be really and truly such in
themselves: for from that which is no cause, which has no power, any
more than nothing, nothing can follow. All second causes, that is, all
things that exist are, therefore, either parts of the Deity or parts of
nature, and in neither case can they be absolutely insignificant,
worthless, null, and of no account. Dr. Priestley is for having men
refer all the good in the universe to God as the author of it, and all
the evil that takes place to man or to second causes. I cannot think
that this is sound philosophy nor practical wisdom. The necessarians
have evidently borrowed their notions of agency and second causes from
the advocates for liberty: for taking up the same unfounded assumption
of the libertarians, that action is the absolute beginning of motion,
and that any thing short of this is no action at all, and finding that
the will was not a cause in the absurd sense supposed by their
adversaries, they have concluded that it was no cause at all; not
considering whether a cause might not be more properly defined that
which produces an effect in consistency with other things than that
which produces it independently of them. Action then in any sense of the
word is the same as co-operation. It may be asked, whether this account
does not destroy the distinction between active and passive. I answer
that it does, if by active be meant unconnected action, and by passive
connected action; but not else. That is, if by action be understood the
positive determinate tendency or the additional impulse to the
production of any effect, and by passiveness an indifference in any
agent to this or that motion, except as it is acted upon by, and
transmits the efficacy of other causes, this distinction will remain as
broad and palpable as ever. Any thing is so far active as it modifies
and re-acts upon the original impulse; it is passive in as far as it
neither adds to, nor takes from that original impulse, but merely has a
power of receiving and continuing it. This I take to be the practical
and philosophical meaning of the terms. This distinction therefore,
applies equally to matter and mind. The explosion of gunpowder cannot be
attributed entirely or principally to the spark which ignites it,
because the effect is increased a thousand-fold by the inherent
qualities of the gunpowder. The motion communicated by one body to
another in void space is considered as the mere passive result of the
former, because the effect in the second agent is simply the
continuation of what it was in the first. So it is in the mind. Motives
do not act upon it simply or absolutely; but according to the dictates
of the understanding or the bias of the will. At one time we yield to
any idle inclination that happens to prevail, and at others resist to
the utmost the strongest motives. That is, the mind is itself an agent,
one chief determining cause of our volitions. It is on the view taken by
the mind of motives, on our disposition to attend to or neglect them, to
compare and weigh them, that their effect depends. But the necessarians
have always delighted to illustrate the operations of the mind in
volition by referring to the impulse communicated by one billiard-ball
to another, or to different weights in a pair of scales. Both which
illustrations are as little applicable as possible, because in neither
of them is there supposed to be the least activity of action; that is,
the least capacity to resist or increase or alter the impressed force in
the thing acted upon. That is, the mind in these similes is requisite as
a merely passive agent, by which I mean a thing perfectly indifferent
and nugatory, a mere cypher without any character of its own, that is
neither good nor bad, neither deserving of praise nor blame; a cameleon,
colourless kind of thing, the sport of external impulses and accidental
circumstances, or of a necessity in which it has itself no share. Thus
the responsibility of the mind has been taken from it, and transferred
to outward circumstances, and all characters in themselves rendered
alike indifferent. This is the necessary consequence of abstracting the
influence of motives from the mind on which and by which they act. I
prefer exceedingly to the modern instances of a couple of
billiard-balls, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysophus, the
stoic in Cicero, who says, ‘Ille igitur qui protrusit cylindrum dedit ei
principium motionis, volubilitatem autem non dedit: sic visum objectum
imprimet quidem et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem, sed assensio
erit in potestate nostrâ.’ That is, suppose I push against a heavy body;
if it be square it will not move: if it be cylindrical it will. What the
difference of form is to the stone, the difference of disposition is to
the mind. In fact, the necessarians, to maintain this doctrine of the
nullity of second causes, have been forced to consider every thing as a
succession of simple impulses passing from hand to hand: so that there
being no fixed point, no resting-place for the imagination, we are
perpetually obliged to shift the cause from one object to another: every
thing has to be accounted for, and referred back to something else, and
in this ceaseless whirl of fleeting causes all ideas of power or agency
seem to slide from under us. Lest the mind should prove refractory, to
the laws ascribed to it, they thought it most prudent to deprive it of
all activity and power of resistance. They were very absurdly afraid
that without this their whole scheme might be overturned, as if though
the mind were freed from being the servile drudge of external impulses,
it would not still follow the bent of its own nature. The above
distinction will, I conceive, set the mind free from one of the shackles
imposed on it by the necessarians, namely, that imbecility,
helplessness, and indifference, which they have superadded to the
regular connexion of cause and effect, though it makes no essential part
of it. The mind, according to the advocates for free-will, is a
perfectly detached, unconnected, independent cause: according to the
necessarians, it is no cause at all: neither branch of the antithesis is
true.
2. According to the definition of liberty above given, freedom, that is
free agency, is applicable to mind as well as to matter. Free-will does
not, because will does not, belong to it. By a free agent, I understand,
with Hobbes, one that is not hindered from acting according to his
natural or determinate bias. The body is free when it can obey the
impulse of the mind; so also a billiard-ball might be said to be free
while it is not fixed to the table, or hindered from being impelled by
the stroke of the mace. In the same sense, the water, as Mr. Hobbes
observes, is said to descend freely along the channel of the river,
while no obstacle intercepts its progress. But though necessarians allow
liberty to the body, and to inanimate things, they deny that it is in
any sense applicable to the mind or will.
ON LOCKE’S ESSAY ON THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
This work owes its present rank among philosophical productions, to its
embodiment of the great principle first brought forward by Hobbes. All
its author’s attempts to modify this principle or reconcile it to common
notions have been gradually exploded, and have given place to the more
severe and logical deductions of Hobbes from the same general principle.
Mr. Locke took the faculties of the mind as he found them in himself and
others, and endeavoured to account for them on _a new principle_. By
this compromise with candour and common sense, he prepared the way for
the introduction of the principle, which being once established, very
soon overturned all the trite opinions and vulgar prejudices which were
improperly associated with it. There was in fact no place for them in
the new system.
The great defect with which the ‘Essay on the Human Understanding’ is
chargeable is, that there is not really a word about the nature of the
understanding in it, nor any attempt to show what it is or whether it is
or is not any thing, distinct from the faculty of simple perception. The
operations of thinking, comparing, discerning, reasoning, willing, and
the like, which Mr. Locke ascribes to it, are the operations of nothing,
or of I know not what. All the force of his mind seems to have been so
bent on exploding innate ideas, and tracing our thoughts to their
external source, that he either forgot or had not leisure to examine
what the internal principle of all thought is. He took for his basis a
bad simile—that the mind is like a blank sheet of paper, originally void
of all characters whatever; for this, though true as far as relates to
innate ideas, that is, to any impressions actually existing in it, is
not true of the mind itself, which is not like a sheet of paper, the
passive receiver and retainer of the impressions made upon it. The
inference from this simile has however been that the understanding is
nothing in itself, nor the cause of any thing; never acting, but always
acted upon; that it is but a convenient repository for the straggling
images of things, a sort of empty room into which ideas are conveyed
from without through the doors of the senses, as you would carry goods
into an unfurnished lodging; and hence it has been found necessary by
succeeding writers to get rid of those different faculties and
operations which Mr. Locke elsewhere allows to belong to the mind, but
which are in truth only compatible with the active powers and
independent nature of the understanding. I will first state Mr. Locke’s
account of the origin of our ideas in his own words, and will then
endeavour to show in what that account is defective; that is, what other
act or faculty of the mind I conceive to be necessary to the formation
of our ideas, besides sensation or simple perception. After employing
eighty pages in a very laborious, and for the most part sensible
refutation of the doctrine of innate ideas, which was popular at the
time, but which Hobbes has not deigned to notice, their impossibility
being implied in the general principle that all our ideas are derived
from the senses, Mr. Locke proceeds in the second book to treat of
Ideas, and their origin. He then says:
‘Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks, and that which his
mind is applied about whilst thinking being the ideas that are there, it
is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas, such are those
expressed by the words, _whiteness_, _hardness_, _sweetness_,
_thinking_, _motion_, _man_, _elephant_, _army_, _drunkenness_, and
others: it is in the first place then to be inquired how he comes by
them. I know it is a received doctrine that men have native ideas and
original characters stamped upon their minds in their very first being.
This opinion I have at large examined already: but I suppose what I have
said will be much more easily admitted when I have shewn whence the
understanding may get all the ideas it has, and by what ways and degrees
they may come into the mind, for which I shall appeal to every one’s own
observation and experience. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we
say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: how comes
it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy
and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, in an almost endless
variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To
this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE: in that all our knowledge
is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself....
‘First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do
convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according
to those various ways, wherein those objects do affect them; and thus we
come by those ideas we have of _yellow_, _white_, _heat_, _cold_,
_soft_, _hard_, _bitter_, _sweet_, and all those which we call sensible
qualities, which when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean,
they from external objects convey into the mind what produces there
those perceptions. This great source of most of the ideas we have,
depending wholly upon our senses, and derived by them to the
understanding, I call SENSATION.
‘Secondly, the other fountain from whence experience furnisheth the
understanding with ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own
mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got: which
operations when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish
the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had from
things without: and such are _perception_, _thinking_, _doubting_,
_believing_, _reasoning_, _knowing_, _willing_, and all the different
actings of our own minds; which we being conscious of, and observing in
ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct
ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas
every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having
nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might
properly enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other
sensation, so I call this REFLECTION; the ideas it affords being such
only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within
itself.... These two I say, _viz._ external, material things, as the
objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds within as the
objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our
ideas take their beginnings. The term _operations_ here I use in a large
sense, as comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its
ideas, but some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is
the satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.’
‘The understanding,’ proceeds Mr. Locke, ‘seems to me not to have the
least glimmering of any ideas, which it doth not receive from one of
these two. External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible
qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us;
and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own
operations. These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their
several modes, combinations, and relations, we shall find to contain all
our whole stock of ideas: and that we have nothing in our minds, which
did not come in one of these two ways.’—_Essay_, vol. I. p. 84.
Again, page 150, he says:
‘I pretend not to teach but to inquire, and therefore cannot but confess
here again, that external and internal sensation are the only passages
that I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far
as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark
room. For methinks the understanding is not much unlike a closet, wholly
shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external
visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: would the pictures
coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be
found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a
man in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.’
This account of the origin of every thing that exists in the mind
differs from the simplicity of Hobbes’s system, and of the modern
philosophy, in supposing that there is another distinct source of ideas,
besides sensation, namely, reflection on the operations of our own
minds. I confess this addition appears to me to be very awkwardly and
inartificially made. For, in the first place, it is obvious to remark
that in most at least, if not all the instances enumerated by the
author, the operations themselves are the proper and immediate sources
of our ideas, not this kind of reflection on them, which seems to be
nothing but the repetition or recollection of the first conscious
impression, the perception of a perception. For example, Mr. Locke
includes among operations of our own minds ‘some sort of passions
arising from our ideas,’ _i.e._ as he explains it, the sense of pleasure
and pain. Now it is surely a little preposterous to make, not the
original feeling itself, but the after consideration or reflection on
that feeling, the source of our idea of pleasure or pain. In this sense,
reflection must be the source of all our ideas, whether of external
objects, or the operations of our own minds, for in the same sense it
may be argued, that the first impression of a sensible object is not the
source of the idea we have of it, till the soul comes to reflect on and
consider that original impression. But it might be said with equal
propriety, that we have one source of ideas, viz., sensation, and
another source of ideas, viz. ideas. From the view which Mr. Locke has
here taken of the subject, though the passions, or the satisfaction and
uneasiness attending certain things are ranked among the operations of
the mind, yet it is not quite clear whether we are supposed to have any
consciousness of them or not; whether they are not as remote from any
thing like perception, as the lifeless objects without us, till coming
to be afterwards reflected on and taken notice of by the mind, they
furnish the understanding with a new set of ideas. The same reasoning
may be applied to the other operations of perception, thinking, &c. for
it seems to me that the original act of perceiving or thinking is the
source of my idea of those mental operations, just as the first
impression of any sensible object is the source of my idea of that
object. Not sensation and reflection, therefore, but sensation and the
operations of our own minds are more properly the sources of our ideas,
that is, these two furnish materials for our reflection. I should not
have dwelt so long upon this distinction, which may be thought of little
importance in itself, but that I believe it has led to most of the
errors of the ‘Essay.’ For in consequence of separating the operations
of the mind in a manner from the mind itself, and making them exist only
as objects for its contemplation, Mr. Locke has been satisfied with
considering those operations as acting upon the mind like external
things, not as emanating from it. Thus, by a general formula, all our
ideas of every kind are represented as communicated to the mind by
something foreign to it, instead of growing out of, and being a part of
its own nature and essence.
Secondly, another objection to this division of our ideas into those of
sensation and reflection is, that it does not differ in any decisive
manner from the more simple statement of Hobbes and others, who derive
all our ideas from sensation. For by sensation these writers do not
understand merely the external image, but the perception or feeling
which accompanies it, and they contend that all our other ideas are
continuations, modifications, or different arrangements of the original
impressions, produced by objects on the senses. Now there is nothing in
the extract above given to disprove this statement: and if so, the
original hypothesis will remain in its full force. Indeed Mr. Locke
himself does not seem to have made up his mind, whether it were so or
not. For though he speaks of the mind as furnishing the understanding
with ideas, and with the materials of reason and knowledge, and
enumerates and explains the several operations of the mind in comparing,
distinguishing, &c. yet he elsewhere speaks of ideas as existing in the
understanding like pictures in a gallery, or as if the whole process of
the intellect were resolvable into the power of receiving, retaining,
carrying, and transposing the gross materials furnished by the senses.
In this case, I think the simplest way at once is to make sensation the
foundation of all our other ideas and faculties. For my own part, the
reason why I cannot assent to this doctrine is, that I believe there is
another act or faculty of the mind implied in all our ideas, for which
neither sensation nor any of its modes can ever account, and which I
shall here proceed to explain.
The principle which I shall attempt to prove is, that ideas are the
offspring of the understanding, not of the senses. By a sensation is
meant the perception produced by the impression of the several parts of
an outward object, each by itself, on the correspondent parts of an
organised sentient being: by an idea I mean the conception produced by a
number of these together on the same conscious principle. Besides the
succession or juxtaposition of different sensible impressions, I suppose
that there is a common principle of thought, a superintending faculty,
which alone perceives the relations of things, and enables us to
comprehend their connexions, forms, and masses. This faculty is properly
the understanding, and it is by means of this faculty that man indeed
becomes a reasonable soul. What has led more than any thing else to the
exclusion of the understanding as a distinct faculty of the mind, and to
the principle of resolving the acts of judging, reasoning, &c., into
mere association, or succession of ideas, has been the considering ideas
themselves, or those particular objects which are marked by one name, or
strike at once upon the senses, as _simple things_. Mr. Locke, it is
true, has avoided this error as far as relates to our ideas of
substances, but he reckons among simple ideas of the qualities of things
several ideas, which are evidently complex, such as extension, figure,
motion, and number. Hence, having laid in a certain stock of ideas
without the necessity of the understanding, it was thought an easy
matter to build up the whole structure of the human mind without it, as
we build a house with stones. The method, therefore, which I shall take
to establish the point I have in view, will be by showing that there is
no one of these simple ideas, or ideas of particular things, which are
made the foundation of all the rest, that is not itself an aggregate of
many things, or that can subsist a moment but in the understanding. I
can conceive of a being endued with the power of sensation, or simple
perception, so as to receive the direct impressions of things, and also
with memory, so as to retain them for any length of time, as they were
severally and unconnectedly presented, yet without the smallest degree
of understanding, or without ever having so much as a single thought.
The state of such a being would be that of animal life, and something
more with the addition of memory, but it would not amount to intellect;
which implies, besides actual, living impressions, the power of
perceiving their relations to one another, of comparing and contrasting
them, and of regarding the different parts of any object as making one
whole. Without this ‘discourse of reason,’ this surrounding and forming
power, we could never have the idea of a single object, as of a table or
a chair, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand. Every one of these
includes a certain configuration, hardness, colour, &c., _i.e._ ideas of
different things, received by different senses, which must be put
together by the understanding before they can be referred to any
particular thing, or considered as one idea. Without this faculty, all
our ideas would be necessarily decomposed, and crumbled down into their
original elements and fluxional parts. We could assuredly never carry on
a chain of reasoning on any subject, for the very links of which this
chain must consist would be ground to powder. There would be an infinite
divisibility in the impressions of the mind, as well as in the objects
of matter. There would be a total want of union, fellowship, and mutual
intelligence between them, for each impression must remain absolutely
simple and distinct, unknown to, and unconscious of the rest, shut up in
the narrow cell of its own individuality. No two of these atomic
impressions could ever club together to form even a sensible point, much
less should we be able to arrive at any of the larger masses, or nominal
descriptions of things. The most that sensation could possibly do for
us, would be to furnish us with the ideas of what Mr. Locke calls the
simple qualities of objects, as of colour or pressure, though not as a
general notion or diffused feeling; for it is certain that no one idea
could ever contain more than the tinge of a single ray of light, or the
puncture of a single particle of matter. Let us, however, for a moment
suppose that the several parts of objects are to be considered as
individual things, or ideal units; and then see whether, without the
cementing power of the understanding, we shall be able to conceive of
them as forming a complete whole, or any one entire object. Thus we may
have a notion of the legs and arms of a chair as so many distinct,
positive things; but without the power of perceiving them together in
their several proportions and situations, we could not have the idea of
a chair as one thing, or as a piece of furniture, intended for a
particular use. It is the mind (if I may be allowed such an expression)
that makes up the idea of the chair, and fits it together: that is in
this case the cabinet-maker, who unites the loose, disjointed parts, and
makes them one firm and well-compacted object. I might instance to the
same purpose a statue. Will any one say, that if the head and limbs and
different parts of a fine statue were to be taken asunder, broken in
pieces, and strewed about the floor, and first shown to him in that
state, he would have the same idea of the beauty, proportions, posture,
and effect of the whole, as if he had seen it in its original state? But
the idea which such a person might have of the statue in this way would
be completeness and harmony itself, compared with any idea which could
result from the sensible impression of the several parts. For he might
still in fancy piece together the broken, mutilated fragments, prop up
the limbs, set the head upon the shoulders, and make out a crazy image
of the whole; but without the understanding reacting on the senses, and
informing the eye with judgment and knowledge, there would be no
possibility whatever of comparing the different impressions received: no
one part could have the slightest reference to any other part or to the
whole; there would be no principle of cohesion left: we might have an
infinite number of microscopic impressions and fractions of ideas, but
there being nothing to unite them together, the most perfect grace and
symmetry would be only one mass of unmeaning, unconscious confusion. All
nature, all objects, all parts of all objects would be equally ‘without
form and void.’ _The mind alone is formative_, to use the expression of
a great German writer; or it is that alone which by its pervading and
elastic energy unfolds and expands our ideas, that gives order and
consistency to them, that assigns to every part its proper place, and
fixes it there, and that frames the idea of the whole. Or, in other
words, it is the understanding alone that perceives relation, but every
object is made up of relation. In short, there is no object or idea
which does not consist of a number of parts arranged in a certain
manner, but of this arrangement the parts themselves cannot be sensible.
To make each part conscious of its relation to the rest is to suppose an
infinite number of intellects instead of one; and to say that a
knowledge or perception of each part separately, without a reference to
the rest, can produce a conception of the whole; that is, that a
knowledge where no two impressions are or ever can be compared, can
include a comparison between them and many others, is a contradiction
and an absurdity.
It may be said perhaps, that not the sensation excited by any of the
parts of an object separately, but the sum of our sensations, excited by
all the parts, produces our idea of the whole. But it is not possible
that in a given number of impressions, where the mind never has
perception of more than a single part, there should be contained
notwithstanding a view of the whole at once. For as a single part cannot
of itself represent the whole object, so neither can this part by being
actually joined to others, which by the supposition are never perceived
to be joined with it, produce that idea, any more than if those other
parts had no existence. If the impression of the parts of an object,
absolutely and individually considered, were the same thing as the idea
of the object, any number of actual impressions, arranged in any manner
whatever, would necessarily be the same object. But this is contrary to
all fact. For then a curve line, consisting of the same number of
points, would not be distinguishable from a straight one, nor a square
from a triangle of the same dimensions, and so on. In a being endued
only with a power of sensation, and supposed to be simple and undivided,
there could be no room for more than an individual impression at once.
Our sensations must always succeed each other. One thought must have
completely passed away, before another could supply its place. Our ideas
would leave no traces of themselves, like the bubbles that rise and
disappear on the water, or the snow that melts as it falls. There would
be nothing in their fugitive, momentary existence to bind them together.
Ere we could stop to compare any one impression with any other, it would
be lost for ever in the dark abyss of time. Nothing could be connected
with any thing else, either coexisting with it, or going before or after
it. If on the other hand, we suppose any merely sentient being to be
extended and compounded, or to be capable of receiving more than one
impression at once, we shall yet gain little by it. Such a sentient
being will be nothing but a number of distinct sentient beings. For as
in the former instance, no two impressions could co-exist together, so
in the latter, though they existed together, there could be no sort of
communication between them. They would be absolutely cut off from and
exclusive of each other. The mind in attending to any one must be wholly
absorbed by it, and insensible of the rest. Our sensations would to
every rational purpose be placed as completely out of the sphere of each
other’s consciousness, as if they were parcel of another intellect, or
floated in the region of the moon. That any number of detached,
unconnected, actual sensations, impressed on different sentient beings,
would not of themselves imply a conception of any one entire object is
what every one is ready to grant:—it would be equally clear, that this
idea could not arise from the impression of the different parts of an
object on the different parts of the same organized, extended, sentient
substance, but that in this case we involuntarily transfer our own
consciousness to a being incapable of it, and identify these distinct
sensible impressions in the same common intellect.
It is strange that Mr. Locke should rank among simple ideas that of
number, which he defines to be the idea of unity repeated. But how this
idea of successive or distinct units can ever give the idea of
repetition unless the former instances are borne in mind, I cannot
conceive. There might be a transition from one unit to another, but no
addition or aggregate formed. As well might we suppose that a body of an
inch diameter by shifting from place to place might enlarge its
dimensions to a foot or a mile, as that a succession of units, perceived
separately, should produce the complex idea of number. The natural fool
that Mr. Hobbes speaks of, may be supposed to observe every stroke of
the clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one: but he could never know
what hour it strikes, according to Mr. Hobbes, without the use of those
names of order, one, two, three, &c. nor according to my notion, without
the help of that orderly understanding which first invented those names,
and comprehends their meaning. On the material hypothesis, the mind can
have but one idea at a time, and the idea of number could never enter
into it.
Though Mr. Locke constantly supposes the mind to perceive relations, and
explains its operations in reasoning, comparing, &c. on this principle,
there is but one place in his work, in which he seems to have been upon
the point of discovering that this principle is at the bottom of all our
ideas whatever. He says, in the beginning of his chapter on Power, which
he classes among simple ideas, and which in my opinion has a much more
simple source than that which he assigns to it,—‘I confess power
includes in it _some kind of relation_ (a relation to action or change),
as indeed which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively
considered, does not? For our ideas of extension, duration, and number,
do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure
and motion have something relative in them much more visibly: and
sensible qualities, as colours and smells, what are they but the powers
of different bodies in relation to our perception? and if considered in
the things themselves, do they not depend on the bulk, figure, texture,
and motion of the parts? All which include some kind of relation in
them. Our idea therefore of power I think may well have a place amongst
other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them, being one of those
that make a principal ingredient in our complex ideas of
substances.’—_Essay_, vol. i. p. 234. That is to say, in other words,
the idea of power, which is confessedly complex according to Mr. Locke,
as depending on the changes we observe produced in one thing by another,
is to pass for a simple idea, because it has as good a right to this
denomination as other complex ideas, which are usually classed as simple
ones. It is thus that the inquiring mind seems to be always hovering on
the brink of truth, but that timidity or indolence, or prejudice, which
is both combined, makes us shrink back, unwilling to trust ourselves to
the fathomless abyss.
I have thus endeavoured to give some account of what I mean by the
understanding, as the principle which is the foundation not only of
judgment, reason, choice, and deliberate action, but is included in
every idea of the mind, or conception even of sensible objects. I am
aware that what I have said may be looked upon as rhapsody and
extravagance by the strictest sect of those who are called philosophers.
The understanding has been set aside as an awkward incumbrance, since it
was conceived practicable to carry on the whole business of thought and
reason by a succession of external images and sensible points. The fine
network of the mind itself, the cords that bind and hold our scattered
perceptions together, and form the means of communication between them,
are dissolved and vanish before the clear light of modern metaphysics,
as the gossamer is dissipated by the sun. The adepts in this system
smile at the contradictions involved in the supposition of perceiving
the relations between different things, and say that this implies the
absurdity that the mind may have two ideas at once, which is with them
impossible. Now I shall only contend that if the mind cannot have two
ideas at the same time, it can never have any, since all the ideas we
know of consist of more than one: and though the consciousness we have
of attending to different objects at once, when we compare, judge,
reason, will, &c., has been resolved into a deception of the mind in
mistaking a rapid succession of objects for one general impression, yet
it will hardly be pretended that we deceive ourselves in thinking we
have any ideas at all. Mr. Horne Tooke, who is certainly one of the
ablest commentators on the doctrines of that school, says that it is as
absurd to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star, meaning that our
ideas are as perfectly distinct from, and have as little to do with one
another, as the stars that compose a constellation. Other writers, to
avoid the seeming contradiction of supposing the mind to divide its
attention between different objects, have suggested the instant of its
passing from one to the other as the true point of comparison between
them; or that the time when it had an idea of both together, was the
time when it had an idea of neither. As it was evident that while the
mind was entirely taken up with one idea, it could not have any
knowledge of another which did not yet exist, or had passed away, and as
both impressions cannot be supposed to co-exist in the same conscious
understanding (for on this system there is no such faculty), this short,
precious interval, this moment of leisure from both, this lucky vacancy
of thought, is pitched upon as that in which the mind performs all its
functions, and contemplates its various ideas in their absence, as from
some vantage ground the traveller stops to survey the country on both
sides of him. To such absurdities are ingenious men driven by setting up
argument against fact, and denying the most obvious truths for which
they cannot account, like the sophist who denied the existence of
motion, because he could not understand its nature. It might be deemed a
sufficient answer to those who build systems and lay down formal
propositions on the principle that the mind can comprehend but one idea
at a time, to say that they consequently can have no meaning in what
they write, since when they begin a sentence they cannot have the least
idea of what will be the end of it, and by the time they get to the end
of it must totally forget the beginning. ‘Peace to all such!’
To show, however, that I am not quite singular in my notions on this
subject of consciousness, and to remove, as I think, every shadow of
doubt upon it, I beg leave to refer my readers to two passages, the one
in Rousseau, and the other in Abraham Tucker, in support of the almost
obsolete prejudice which I have here endeavoured to defend. The one is
an argument to prove that judgment and sensation are not the same, in
the Vicar’s profession of faith in ‘Emilius,’ and the other is the
chapter on the independent existence of mind in the ‘Light of Nature
Pursued.’
The passage in Rousseau seems evidently to have been intended as an
answer to the maxim of Helvetius that _to feel is to judge_, and to his
reasoning on this maxim, which is as follows:—
‘The question being reduced within these limits, I shall examine at
present whether the act of the mind in judging is any thing more than a
sensation. When I judge of the size or colour of the objects around me,
it is evident that the judgment formed of the different impressions,
which these objects make upon my senses, is properly only a sensation:
that I may say indiscriminately, either I _judge_, or I _feel_, that of
two objects, the one which I call _a yard_ makes upon me a different
impression from another which I call _a foot_: that the colour called
_red_, produces a different effect upon the sight from that which I call
_yellow_; and I conclude that in this case to judge is only to feel or
perceive by the senses. But it may be said, let us suppose that any one
desires to know whether strength of body is preferable to mere bulk; are
we certain that we can decide this point by means of the senses alone?
Most undoubtedly, I reply: for in order to my coming to a decision on
the subject, my memory must first retrace to me successively the
different situations in which I may happen most frequently to find
myself in the course of my life. In this case, then, to judge is to see
that in these different situations strength will be oftener an advantage
to me than size. But it may be retorted, when the question is to decide
whether in a king justice is preferable to mercy, is it conceivable that
the conclusion here formed depends entirely on sensation? The
affirmative has undoubtedly at first sight the air of a paradox:
nevertheless, in order to establish its truth, we will presuppose in any
one a knowledge of what is meant by good and evil, and also of the
principle that one action is worse than another, according as it is more
injurious to the well-being of society. On this supposition, what method
ought the orator or poet to take, in order to show most clearly that
justice, preferable in a king to mercy, preserves the greatest number of
citizens to the state?
‘The orator will present three several pictures to the imagination of
his supposed hearer: in the first he will represent a just king, who
condemns and gives orders for the execution of a criminal; in the
second, will be seen the good king, who opens the doors of his dungeon,
and strikes off the chains of the same criminal; in the third picture,
the criminal himself will be the principal figure, who, armed with a
poniard, on his escape from his cell hastens to assassinate fifty of his
fellow-citizens. But who is there that at the sight of these three
pictures will not instantly perceive that justice which, by the death of
a single individual, saves the lives of fifty persons, is preferable to
mercy? Nevertheless, this judgment is really nothing but a sensation. In
fact, if from the habit of connecting certain ideas with certain words,
the sound of these words may, as experience demonstrates, excite in us
almost the same sensations which we should feel from the actual presence
of the objects, it is evident that from the contemplation of these three
pictures, to judge that in a king justice is preferable to mercy, is to
feel and see that in the first picture a single citizen is sacrificed,
while in the third fifty are massacred; whence I conclude that every act
of the judgment is only a sensation.’—_Helvetius on the Mind_, p. 12.
On this statement I may be permitted to remark that as the author
affirms that sensation is the same thing as judgment, so he seems to
conceive that the assertion of any proposition is the same thing as the
proof of it. He supposes three several pictures to be presented to a man
of understanding, and that from an attentive contemplation and
comparison of the different objects and events contained in them, he
comes to a judgment or conclusion, _viz._ _That justice is preferable to
mercy_. ‘Nevertheless,’ he says, ‘this judgment is really nothing but a
sensation.’ This is all the proof he brings; and perhaps, considering
the language and country in which this celebrated author wrote, it is
reasoning good enough. Do I say this with any view to throw contempt on
that lively, ingenious, gay, social, and polished people? No; but
philosophy is not their _forte_: they are not in earnest in these remote
speculations. In order duly to appreciate their writings, we must
consider them not as the dictates of the understanding, but as the
effects of constitution. Otherwise we shall do them great injustice.
They pursue truth, like all other things, as far as it is agreeable;
they reason for their amusement; they engage in abstruse questions to
vary the topics of conversation. Whatever does not answer this purpose
is banished out of books and society as a morose and cynical philosophy.
To obtrude the dark and difficult parts of a question, or to enter into
an elaborate investigation of them, is considered as a piece of
ill-manners. Those writers, therefore, have been the most popular among
the French who have supplied their readers with the greatest number of
dazzling conclusions founded on the most slight and superficial
evidence, whose reasonings could be applied to every thing, because they
explained nothing, and who most effectually kept out of sight every
thing true or profound or interesting in a question. Who would ever
think of plunging into abstruse, metaphysical inquiries concerning the
nature of the understanding, when he may with entire ease to himself and
satisfaction to others solve all the phenomena of the mind by repeating
in three words, _Juger est sentir_. As it was the object of the
school-philosophy, by a jargon of technical distinctions, to sharpen the
eagerness of debate and give birth to endless verbal controversies, so
the modern system, transferring philosophy from the cloistered hall to
the toilette and the drawing-room, is calculated, by a set of portable
phrases, as familiar and as current as the forms of salutation, to
silence every difference of opinion, and to produce an euthanasia of all
thought. I have made these remarks not to prejudice the question, but to
prevent the prejudice arising on the other side, from seeing the writers
of a whole nation, not deficient in natural talents or in acquired
advantages, agree in delivering the most puerile absurdities as profound
and oracular truths.
The train of thought into which the author has fallen in the passage
above cited is pretty obvious. Having undertaken to prove that the ideas
of justice and mercy are mere sensations, and that the conclusion that
justice is preferable to mercy is also a mere sensation, in order to
shew the possibility of this he conjures up the ideas of a good and a
bad king, of a criminal, a prison, chains, a dagger, and fifty citizens
massacred before the eyes of the spectator, which form the subject of
three imaginary pictures, and which are in general considered as so many
sensible objects. All these sensible objects he supposes to be implied
in, and to be the materials out of which we frame the judgment or
conclusion, that justice is better than mercy; and therefore he infers
that there is nothing else implied in or necessary to that judgment, and
that consequently it is nothing but a sensation. Having succeeded in
resolving the compound and general ideas of justice and mercy, good and
evil, into a number of sensible appearances, his imagination is entirely
occupied with the novelty of the objects before him, and he drops
altogether the consideration, whether the combination and comparison of
these several objects or sensations which is absolutely necessary to
their forming the moral ideas or inference spoken of, is not the act of
some other faculty. In short, the principle that a judgment is nothing
but a sensation, is not only a perfectly gratuitous assertion, but an
assertion either without meaning, or a palpable contradiction. For the
single objects presented in the foregoing metaphysical pictures, and
which are supposed to constitute the judgment, are not one sensation,
but many. Now if it be meant that these single objects, as they are
perceived separately, or successively, one by one, without the
intervention of any reflex act of the mind combining and comparing them
together, constitute of themselves the judgment, ‘that justice is
preferable to mercy,’ this is to say, in so many words, that the mind
forms a comparison between things without comparing them, and judges of
their relations without perceiving them. On the other hand, if it be
meant to include the acts of the mind in comparing, judging, inferring,
&c. in the term _sensation_, then the proposition that judgment or
sensation are the same, will be nothing but an idle and insignificant
abuse of words, and will only prove that if to the sensation, or
perception of particular objects we add the faculty of comparing and
judging, nothing farther will be necessary for it to compare and judge.
I shall therefore dismiss this well known maxim as no better than a
misnomer, as an attempt to shorten the labour of thought by the
interposition of an unmeaning phrase, and to confound all the
distinctions of the understanding by an equivoque.
It will not be amiss in this place to transcribe a passage from the
Logic of the Abbé Condillac (a work which may be regarded as the
quintessence of slender thought, and of the art of substituting words
for things) to show how far the doctrine of the origin of all our ideas
from sensation may be carried, and what an imbecility it produces in the
mind, and deadness to any but external objects. The design of the
passage is to prove that morality is a visible thing. This however is a
work of supererogation, even on the principle supposed: for it is not
necessary to refer morality to any thing visible or audible, or to any
other of the senses, but the sense of pleasure and pain; our feelings of
this kind being allowed to come from, and make a part of our original
sensations. But this system is not an improvement on reason, but a
progression in superficiality and absurdity, a vast vacuity, where
‘fluttering its pennons vain, the mind drops down ten thousand fathoms
deep.’
‘Moral ideas,’ says my author, ‘seem to elude the senses: they at least
elude the senses of those philosophers who deny that our knowledge
proceeds from sensation. They would gladly know of what colour virtue
is, or of what colour vice is. I answer that virtue consists in the
habitual performance of good actions, as vice consists in the habitual
performance of bad ones. Now these habits and these actions are visible.
‘What, then, is the morality of actions a thing which falls under the
cognizance of the senses! Wherefore should it not? Morality depends
solely on the conformity between our actions and the laws; but these
actions are visible, and the laws are so equally, since they are certain
conventions made by men.
‘But it will be said, if the laws are only things of convention, they
must be altogether arbitrary. They may indeed be sometimes arbitrary;
there are but too many such laws; but those which determine whether our
actions are good or bad, are not so, nor can they be so. They are the
work of man, it is true, because they are conventions which we have
made; nevertheless, we alone have not made them: nature made them as
well as we, she dictated them to us, and it was not in our power to make
others. The wants and the faculties of man being given, the laws which
are to regulate his conduct must necessarily follow: and though we
enacted them, God who has created us with such wants and such faculties,
is in truth our sole legislator. In obeying the laws which are
conformable to our nature, we render obedience to him who is the author
of our nature; and this is that which perfects the morality of
actions.’—Page 56.
For a work entitled Logic, there are a pleasant number of contradictions
in this passage. To pass over many of them, if the laws here spoken of
are such merely in consequence of their being visible, then all visible
objects are laws, and all laws are equally moral. But no! there are some
arbitrary laws. Now if the goodness of the law depends on their
conformity to our wants and faculties, neither of these are visible, any
more than God who is said to be our only lawgiver. So that ‘the latter
end of this system of law and divinity forgets the beginning.’ That
those actions are moral which are conformable to a moral law, and that
those laws are moral, which are agreeable to our nature and wants, may
be readily admitted: but I cannot myself think that this conformity is
an object of the senses, or that the true features of morality can ever
be discerned but by the eye of the understanding. The friends of
morality, it seems, according to our author, are not to despair, or to
suppose that the distinctions of right and wrong are banished entirely
out of the material system. They only become more clear and legible than
ever; we are still right in asserting virtue to have a real existence,
namely, on paper, and in supposing that we have some idea of it, as
consisting of the letters of the alphabet. Almost in the same manner,
Mr. Horne Tooke very gravely defines the essence of _law_ and _just_,
from the etymology of these words, to consist in their being something
_laid down_, and something _ordered_ (_jussum_); and when pressed by the
difficulty that there are many things laid down and ordered which are
neither laws nor just, he makes answer that their obligation depends on
a higher species of law and justice, to wit, a law which is no where
laid down, and a justice which is no where ordered, except indeed by the
nature of things, on which the etymology of these two words does not
seem to throw any light.
On all the other points of the modern metaphysical system, such as the
nature of abstraction, judgment and reasoning, the materiality of the
soul, free-will, the association of ideas, &c. Mr. Locke either halts
between two opinions, or else takes the common-place side of the
question. The motion of the system, which bears his name and which by
this very delay gained all that it wanted to become popular, was
retrograde in him, not progressive. The extracts I am about to give from
his work will I think establish this point. They will at the same time
show him to be a man of strong practical sense, of much serious thought
and inquiry, and considerable freedom of opinion, and a real lover of
truth, though not so bold and systematic a reasoner, or so great a
dealer in paradoxes as some others. Moderation, caution, a wish to
examine every side of a question, and an unwillingness to decide till
after the most mature and circumspect investigation, and then only
according to the clearness of the evidence, seem to have been the
characteristics of his mind, none of which denote the daring innovator,
or maker of a system. What there is of system in his work is Hobbes’s,
as I have already shown: the deviations from its common sense and
general observation are his own. There is throughout his reasoning the
same contempt for the schoolmen, and the same preference of native,
rustic reason to learned authority: the same notion of the necessity for
reforming the system of philosophy, and of the possibility of doing this
by a more exact use of words: there is the same dissatisfaction with the
prevailing system, but he at the same time entertained doubts of his
own. What he wanted was confidence and decision. The prolixity and
ambiguity of his style seem to have arisen from this source: for he is
never weary of examining and re-examining the same objection, and he
states his arguments with so many limitations and with such a variety of
expression to prevent misapprehension, that it is often difficult to
guess at his real meaning. There is it must be confessed a sort of
heaviness about him, a want of clearness and connection, which in spite
of all his pains, and the real plodding strength of his mind he was
never able to overcome. To return to his account of complex ideas: the
beginning of his observations on this subject is as follows:
‘We have hitherto considered those ideas, in the reception whereof the
mind is only passive, which are those simple ones received from
sensation and reflection before mentioned, whereof the mind cannot make
one to itself, nor have any idea which does not consist wholly of them.
But as the mind is wholly passive in the reception of all its simple
ideas, so it exerts several acts of its own, whereby out of its simple
ideas, as the materials and foundations of the rest, the other are
framed. The acts of the mind wherein it exerts its power over its simple
ideas, are chiefly these three.
‘1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all
complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether
simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another, so as to
take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one; in which way
it gets all its ideas of _relations_. 3. The third is separating them
from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence; this
is called _abstraction_: and thus all its general ideas are made. This
shows man’s power to be much about the same in the material and
intellectual world: for the materials in both being such as he has no
power over, either to make or destroy, all that man can do is either to
unite them together, or to set them by one another, or wholly to
separate them.’—Vol. i. p. 151.
The first great point which Mr. Locke labours to prove in his Essay, is
that there are no innate ideas, which he seems to have established very
fully and clearly, if indeed so obvious a truth required any formal
demonstration. His chief proofs are from the case of a man born blind,
who has no idea of colours, and from the ignorance which children and
idiots have of those first principles and universal maxims, which some
philosophers and theologians, confounding the faculties of the mind with
actual impressions, had supposed to be legibly engraven on the mind by
the hand of its author. For the supposing the understanding to be a
distinct faculty of the mind no more proves our ideas to be innate, than
the allowing perception to be a distinct original faculty of the mind,
which everybody does, proves that there must be innate sensations. These
two positions have, however, been sometimes considered as convertible by
the partisans on both sides of the question; the one arguing from the
existence of the soul and the power of thought to the positive
perception of certain truths, and the others concluding that by denying
any original inherent impressions, they had overturned the supposition
of the different faculties and powers which must be in the mind, to
account for the first production or subsequent modification of sensation
or of thought. For instance, it has been made a consequence of the
doctrine that there were no innate ideas, that there could be no such
thing as genius, or an original difference of capacity; as if the
capacity were not perfectly distinct from the actual impressions by the
very theory itself, and as if there might not be a difference in the
capacity of acquiring ideas as all experience shows, though none in the
knowledge acquired, because this capacity had never yet been exerted. As
well might we argue that of two houses that are just built one is as
commodious and capacious as the other, as well fitted for the reception
of guests and the disposal of furniture, because at present neither of
them is furnished or inhabited.
The following passages will show the manner in which our author treats
this part of his subject:
‘The child certainly knows that the nurse that feeds it is neither the
cat it plays with, nor the blackamoor it is afraid of: that the wormseed
or mustard it refuses is not the apple or sugar it cries for; this it is
certainly and undoubtedly assured of: but will any one say it is by
virtue of this principle, _That it is impossible for the same thing to
be and not to be_, that it so firmly assents to these and other parts of
its knowledge? Or that the child has any notion or apprehension of that
proposition at an age, wherein yet, it is plain, it knows a great many
other truths? He that will say, children join these several abstract
speculations with their sucking bottles and their rattles, may perhaps
with justice be thought to have more passion and zeal for his opinion,
but less sincerity and truth than one of that age. Though therefore
there be several general propositions that meet with constant and ready
assent as soon as proposed to men grown up, who have attained the use of
more general and abstract ideas, and names standing for them, yet they
not being to be found in those of tender years, who nevertheless know
other things, they cannot pretend to universal assent of intelligent
persons, and so by no means can be supposed innate: it being impossible,
that any truth which is innate (if there were any such) should be
unknown, at least to any one who knows any thing else. Since if they are
innate truths, they must be innate thoughts; there being nothing a truth
in the mind which it has never thought on.
‘That the general maxims we are discoursing of, are not known to
children, idiots, and a great part of mankind, we have already
sufficiently proved. But there is this farther argument against their
being innate, that these characters, if they were native and original
impressions, should appear fairest and clearest in those persons in whom
yet we find no footsteps of them. And it is in my opinion a strong
presumption that they are not innate, since they are least known to
those in whom if they were innate, they must need exert themselves with
most force and vigour. For children, idiots, savages, and illiterate
people being of all others the least corrupted by custom or borrowed
opinion, learning or education having not cast their native thoughts
into new moulds, nor by superinducing foreign and studied doctrines,
confounded those fair characters nature had written there; one might
reasonably imagine that in their minds these innate notions should lie
open fairly to every one’s view, as it is certain the thoughts of
children do. One would think according to these men’s principles that
all these native beams of light (were there any such) should in those
who have no reserves, no acts of concealment, shine out in their full
lustre, and leave us in no more doubt of their being there than we are
of their love of pleasure and abhorrence of pain. But alas, amongst
children, idiots, savages, and the grossly illiterate, what general
maxims are to be found? What universal principle of knowledge? Their
notions are few and narrow, borrowed only from those objects they have
had most to do with, and which have made upon their senses the
frequentest and strongest impressions. A child knows his nurse and his
cradle, and by degrees the playthings of a little more advanced age; and
a young savage has perhaps his head filled with love and hunting,
according to the fashion of his tribe. But he that from a child
untaught, or a wild inhabitant of the woods will expect these abstract
maxims and reputed principles of science, will I fear find himself
mistaken. Such kind of general propositions [as that which is, is; and
that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be] are seldom
mentioned in the huts of Indians, much less are they to be found in the
thoughts of children, or any impressions of them on the minds of
naturals. They are the language and business of the schools and
academies of learned nations, accustomed to that sort of conversation or
learning, where disputes are frequent: these maxims being suited to
artificial argumentation, and useful for conviction, but not much
conducing to the discovery of truth, or advancement of knowledge.’
I do not know that Mr. Locke has sufficiently distinguished between two
things which I cannot very well express otherwise than by a turn of
words, namely, an innate knowledge of principles, and innate principles
of knowledge. His arguments seem to me conclusive against the one, but
not against the other, for I think that there are certain general
principles or forms of thinking, something like the moulds in which any
thing is cast, according to which our ideas follow one another in a
certain order, though the knowledge, _i.e._, perception of what these
principles are, and the forming them into distinct propositions is the
result of experience. It is true, the child distinguishes between its
nurse and the blackamoor, between bitter and sweet: what hinders it from
confounding them? The ideas of _same_ and _different_ are not included
in these ideas themselves, nor are they peculiar to any of them, but
general terms. What then determines the child to annex them uniformly to
certain things and not to others? It is plain then, that our ideas are
not at liberty to run into clusters as they please or as it happens, but
are regulated by certain laws, to which they must conform; or that the
manner in which we conceive of things does not depend simply on the
particular nature of the things, but on the general nature of the
understanding. Mr. Locke is clear for certain innate practical
principles or general tendencies regulating all our actions, namely, the
love of pleasure, and aversion to pain. He does not however admit, as I
can find, of any thing similar to the operations of the understanding.
The analogy, notwithstanding, holds exactly the same in both cases. For
the child is no more conscious of any such general practical principle
regulating all his desires, than of any speculative principle regulating
his notion of things: he gets the idea of both from experience of their
effects; but I think that if there were no such principles in the mind
itself, previous to the actual impression of objects, and merely
developed or called into action by them, we must be perfectly
indifferent both to the reception of pleasure and pain, as we should
feel no more repugnance to admit one conclusion than another, however
absurd or contradictory. The necessity we are under of perceiving
certain agreements or disagreements between our ideas is as much, and in
the same sense, the foundation of judgment and reasoning, as the general
desire of happiness and aversion to misery is the foundation of
morality.
This property of the understanding, by which certain judgments,
naturally follow certain perceptions, and are followed by other
judgments, is the faculty of reason, of order and proportion in the
mind, and is indeed nothing but the understanding acting by rule or
necessity. The long controversy between Locke and Leibnitz with respect
to innate ideas turned upon the distinction here stated, innate ideas
being thus referred not to the actual impressions of objects, but to the
forms or moulds existing in the mind, and in which those impressions are
cast. Leibnitz contended that there was a germ or principle of truth, a
pre-established harmony between its innate faculties and its acquired
ideas, implied in the essence of the mind itself. According to the one
it was like a piece of free stone, which the mason hews with equal ease
in all directions, and into any shape, as circumstances require:
according to the other, it resembles a piece of marble strongly
ingrained, with the figure of a man, or other animal, inclosed in it,
and which the sculptor has only to separate from the surrounding mass.
I will add one more passage to draw the attention of my readers to this
intricate subject, and to show that the difficulties surrounding it were
not completely cleared up or even apprehended by the author of the
‘Essay.’
‘Hath a child,’ he says, ‘an idea of impossibility and identity, before
it has of white or black, sweet or sour? Or is it from the knowledge of
this principle that it concludes that wormwood rubbed on the nipple hath
not the same taste that it used to receive from thence? Is it the actual
knowledge of _Impossibile est idem esse et non esse_ that makes a child
distinguish between its mother and a stranger, or that makes it fond of
the one, and fly the other? Or does the mind regulate itself and its
assent by ideas that it never had? Or the understanding draw conclusions
from principles which it never yet knew or understood? The names
_impossibility_ and _identity_ stand for two ideas, so far from being
innate, or born with us, that I think it requires great care and
attention to form them right in our understandings. They are so far from
being brought into the world with us, so remote from the thoughts of
infancy and childhood, that I believe upon examination it will be found
that many grown men want them.
‘If identity (to instance in that alone) be a native impression, and
consequently so clear and obvious to us that we must needs know it even
from our cradles; I would gladly be resolved by one of seven or seventy
years old, Whether a man, being a creature consisting of soul and body,
be the same man when his body is changed? Whether Euphorbus and
Pythagoras, having had the same soul, were the same man, though they
lived several ages asunder? Nay, whether the cock too, which had the
same soul, were not the same with both of them? Whereby perhaps it will
appear that our idea of sameness is not so settled and clear as to
deserve to be thought innate in us. For if those innate ideas are not so
clear and distinct as to be universally known and naturally agreed on,
they cannot be subjects of universal and undoubted truths, but will be
the unavoidable occasion of perpetual uncertainty. For I suppose every
one’s idea of identity will not be the same that Pythagoras and thousand
others of his followers have: and which then shall be true, which
innate? Or are these two different ideas of identity both innate?’—Page
60.
Two things are obvious to remark on this passage. First, it seems clear
that the child, before it can pronounce that one thing is or is not the
same as another, must have the idea of what _same_ is, _i.e._ of
identity: or it would be impossible for it to know what is or is not the
same. This idea, then, is necessarily included in or the result of the
first comparison it is able to make between any two of its impressions
as alike or unlike. Secondly, the difficulty of determining the question
proposed by Mr. Locke does not arise from the meaning of the word
_identity_, but of the word _man_. For if this is once clear and
settled, there will be no great effort of the understanding required to
determine whether a man is the same or not. They define him to be a
creature consisting of body and soul, and it is plain that if one of
these, the body, is altered, the man is not the same. The whole
question, therefore, here seems to turn on deciding what qualities are
essential to the idea of man, so that by keeping or leaving out some, he
will or will not retain his identity, in the practical and moral sense
of the term. It is the complex and general idea of man that the child
wants, not that of identity or sameness which is reflected to it from
every object it meets, and which it perceives to agree or disagree with
some other.
In a note to one of the chapters on Innate Ideas, there is some account
of the controversy between our author and the Bishop of Worcester
(Stillingfleet) on the question whether the idea of a God be innate and
universal. The Bishop is anxious to have the universal belief in a Deity
understood in a strict sense, while Mr. Locke thinks it must be reduced
to a very great and decided majority, there being instances of whole
nations without this idea. ‘This,’ he says ‘is all the universal consent
which truth of matter-of-fact will allow; and therefore all that can be
made use of to prove a God. I would crave leave to ask your lordship,
were there ever in the world any atheists or no? For if any one deny a
God, such a perfect universality of consent is destroyed, and if nobody
does deny a God, what need of arguments to convince atheists?’—Page 63.
This is the acutest turn he has any where given to an argument.
The concluding passage of his account of innate ideas is worth quoting.
It is a good description of the true spirit of philosophy, inclining a
little too much to self-opinion, from which, perhaps, it is not easily
separable:
‘What censure doubting thus of innate principles may deserve from men
who will be apt to call it pulling up the old foundations of knowledge
and certainty, I cannot tell; I persuade myself at least that the way I
have pursued, being conformable to truth, lays those foundations surer.
This I am certain, I have not made it my business to quit or follow any
authority in the ensuing discourse; truth has been my only aim; and
wherever that has appeared to lead, my thoughts have impartially
followed without minding whether the footsteps of any other lay that way
or no. Not that I want a due respect to other men’s opinions; but after
all the greatest reverence is due to truth; and I hope it will not be
thought arrogance to say, that perhaps we should make greater progress
in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought
it in the fountain, _in the consideration of things themselves_, and
made use rather of our own thoughts than other men’s to find it. For I
think we may as rationally hope to see with other men’s eyes, as to know
by other men’s understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and
comprehend of truth and reason, so much we possess of real and true
knowledge. The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us
not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in
them was science, is in us but opiniatrety, whilst we give up our assent
only to reverend names, and do not, as they did, employ our own reason
to understand those truths which gave them reputation. Aristotle was
certainly a knowing man; but nobody ever thought him so, because he
blindly embraced and confidently vented the opinions of another. And if
the taking up of another’s principles, without examining them, made not
him a philosopher, I suppose it will hardly make any body else so. In
the sciences, every one has so much as he really knows and comprehends:
what he believes only and takes upon trust, are but shreds, which
however well in the whole piece, make no considerable addition to his
stock who gathers them. Such borrowed wealth, like fairy money, though
it were gold in the hand from which he received it, will be but leaves
and dust when it comes to use.’—Page 80.
In treating of the origin of our ideas, Mr. Locke labours to prove that
men think not always:—thinking, according to him, being to the soul what
motion is to the body; not its essence, but one of its operations. In
this opinion he may, as far as I know, be right: but I think his proof
of it drawn from the effects of sleep fails. The reason why I think so
is that I was never awakened suddenly but I found myself dreaming,
though in the interval required to awake gradually from sleep we
frequently forget our dreams before we are quite awake, the impressions
which objects have time to make upon our bodies taking place of and
obliterating the faint traces of our sleeping thoughts. The common
notion that the mind is then most awake when the body is asleep,
deserves the contempt with which Mr. Locke treats it. It is one of the
absurdities of _common sense_, which is not entirely free from them any
more than philosophy. Those who can find any argument in favour of the
immaterial nature and independent powers of the soul in the sublime
flights which it takes when emancipated from the intrusion of sensible
objects must have finer dreams than I have. It would be well for this
opinion if we could regularly forget the next morning the smart
repartees, magnificent sentiments and profound remarks we so often dream
we make. The singular significance which in sleep we attach to absolute
nonsense seems to arise from the very impotence of our efforts, as we
fancy that we can fly because we cannot move at all. In sleep, indeed,
the forms of imagination assume the appearance of reality, but this
advantage they seem to owe chiefly to what Hobbes calls the silence of
sense. That sleep, however, consists wholly in this silence of sense
(not affecting the mind itself) is so far from being true, that it is
not even necessary to it. Persons who walk in their sleep, as I know
from experience, get out of bed with their eyes open, see and feel the
objects about them, open the window, and leisurely survey the opposite
trees and houses, long before they recollect where they are, or before
the fresh air and the regular succession of known objects dispel the
drowsy phantoms of the night. The only essential difference between our
sleeping and waking thoughts I believe is, that in sleep the
comprehensive faculty flags and droops; so that being unable to consider
many things at once or to retain a succession of ideas in mind, we
confound things together, and pass from one object to another without
order or connexion, any single circumstance in which they agree being
sufficient to make us associate them together or substitute one for the
other. Our thoughts are, as it were, disentangled from the circumstances
and consequences which at other times clog their motions: they are let
loose, and left at liberty to wander in any direction that chance
presents. The greatest singularity observable in dreams is the faculty
of holding a dialogue with ourselves, as if we were really and
effectually two persons. We make a remark, and then expect the answer,
which we are to give ourselves, with the same gravity of attention, and
hear it with the same surprise as if it were really spoken by another
person. We are played upon by puppets of our own moving. We are
staggered in an argument by an unforeseen objection, or alarmed at a
sudden piece of information of which we have no apprehension till it
seems to proceed from the mouth of some one with whom we fancy ourselves
conversing. We have in fact no idea of what the question will be that we
put to ourselves, till the moment of its birth.
Mr. Locke in treating of our sensations as effects of the impressions of
the qualities of things, distinguishes these qualities according to the
usual opinion into primary and secondary. The former he considers as
really and in themselves the same as they appear to our senses: the
other as merely the effects produced by certain objects on the mind and
not existing out of it. As this question forms one of the common-places
of metaphysical inquiry, I shall give some account of it in his own
words.
‘The qualities that are in bodies, rightly considered, are of three
sorts.
‘First, The bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of their
solid parts; these are in them whether we perceive them or no; and we
have by these an idea of the thing as it is in itself: these I call
primary qualities.
‘Secondly, The power that is in any body by reason of its insensible
primary qualities to operate after a peculiar manner on any of our
senses, and thereby produce in us the different ideas of several
colours, sounds, smells, tastes, &c. These are usually called sensible
qualities.
‘Thirdly, The power that is in any body, by reason of the particular
constitution of its primary qualities, to make such a change in the
bulk, figure, texture, and motion of another body, as to make it operate
on our senses differently from what it did before. Thus the sun has a
power to make wax white, and fire to make lead fluid. These are usually
called powers.
‘The first of these, as has been said, I think, may be properly called,
real, original, or primary qualities, because they are in the things
themselves, whether they are perceived or no: and upon their different
modifications it is that the secondary qualities depend. The other two
are only powers to act differently upon other things, which powers
result from the different modifications of those primary qualities.
‘But though these two latter sorts of qualities are powers barely, and
nothing but powers, relating to several other bodies, and resulting from
the different modifications of the original qualities, yet they are
generally thought otherwise of. For the second sort, viz., the powers to
produce several ideas in us by our senses, are looked upon as real
qualities in the things thus affecting us: but the third sort are called
and esteemed barely powers. For example, the ideas of heat or light,
which we receive by our eye or touch from the sun are commonly thought
real qualities, existing in the sun, and something more than mere powers
in it. But when we consider the sun in reference to wax which it melts
or blanches, we look on the whiteness and softness produced in the wax,
not as qualities in the sun, but effects produced by _powers_ in it:
whereas, if rightly considered, these qualities of light and warmth,
which are perceptions in me when I am warmed or enlightened by the sun,
are no otherwise in the sun than the changes made in the wax, when it is
blanched or melted, are in the sun. They are all of them equally powers
in the sun, depending on its primary qualities: whereby it is enabled in
the one case so to alter the bulk, figure, texture, or motion of some of
the insensible parts of my eyes or hands, as thereby to produce in me
the idea of light or heat; and in the other, it is able so to alter the
bulk, figure, texture, or motion of the insensible parts of the wax, as
to make them fit to produce in me the distinct ideas of white and fluid.
The reason why the one are ordinarily taken for real qualities, and the
other only for bare powers, seems to be, because the ideas we have of
distinct colours, sounds, &c., containing nothing at all in them of
bulk, figure, or motion, we are not apt to think them the effects of
those primary qualities which appear not to our senses to operate in
their production, and with which they have not any apparent congruity or
conceivable connexion. Hence it is that we are so forward to imagine
that those ideas are the resemblances of something really existing in
the objects themselves. But in the other case, in the operation of
bodies, changing the qualities, one of another, we plainly discover that
the quality produced hath commonly no resemblance with any thing in the
thing producing it; wherefore we look on it as a bare effect of power.
For though receiving the idea of heat or light from the sun, we are apt
to think it is a perception and resemblance of such a quality _in_ the
sun, yet when we see wax or a fair face receive change of colour from
the sun, we cannot imagine that to be the perception or resemblance of
any thing in the sun, because we find not those different colours in the
sun itself. For our senses being able to observe a likeness or
unlikeness of sensible qualities in two different external objects, we
forwardly enough conclude the production of any sensible quality in any
subject to be an effect of bare power, and not the communication of any
quality, which was really in the efficient, when we find no such
sensible quality in the thing that produced it. But ourselves not being
able to discover any unlikeness between the idea produced in us and the
quality of the object producing it, we are apt to imagine that our ideas
are resemblances of some thing in the objects, and not the effects of
certain powers placed in the modification of their primary qualities,
with which primary qualities the ideas produced in us have no
resemblance.’ Vol. i. page 127.
From the secondary qualities later writers, as Hume and Berkeley, have
proceeded to the primary ones, and have endeavoured to shew that they
have not a real existence out of the mind, any more than the others.
Hume says, ‘The fundamental principle of the modern philosophy is the
opinion concerning colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat and cold,’ &c.;
and Bishop Berkeley has made use of the same principle to banish the
least particle of matter out of the universe. What Hume has said is
merely taken from Berkeley, from whom his opinions are generally
borrowed. As I do not know that I shall have a better opportunity, I
will here state Berkeley’s arguments against the existence of these
primary qualities, or his _ideal_ system, in his own words. I will only
first observe, on the argument against the existence of the secondary
qualities of things, from their different effects in different
circumstances and on different persons, which Hume considers as the only
solid one, but which Berkeley thinks more doubtful, seems to me no
argument at all; for that an object changes its colour, or food its
taste, is in consequence of distance or of the interposition of another
object, or of the indisposition of the organ, and does not prove that
the object has not a particular colour, or the food a particular taste,
but that colour is combined with and altered by the colour of the air,
and that taste is combined with and altered by another taste in the
mouth or stomach. The logical inference is merely that one object has
not the same sensible qualities as another, or, as Berkeley has
remarked, that we do not know what the true or natural qualities of any
object are.
‘It is evident,’ says Bishop Berkeley, ‘to any one who takes a survey of
the objects of Human Knowledge, that they are either ideas actually
imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to
the passions and operations of the mind, or, lastly, ideas formed by
help of memory and imagination; either compounding, dividing, or barely
representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. By sight
I have the ideas of light and colours, with their several degrees and
variations. By touch I perceive hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and
resistance, &c. and of all these more and less, either as to quantity or
degree. Smelling furnishes me with odours: the palate with tastes; and
hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and
composition. And as several of these are observed to accompany each
other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one
thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure, and
consistence, having been observed to go together, are accounted one
distinct thing, signified by the name _apple_. Other collections of
ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things;
which, as they are pleasing or disagreeable, excite the passions of
love, hatred, joy, grief, &c.
‘2. But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of
knowledge, there is likewise something which knows and perceives them,
and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering, &c.
about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call _mind_,
_spirit_, _soul_, or _myself_. By which words I do not denote any one of
my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist,
or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived, for the
existence of an idea consists in being perceived.
‘3. That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the
imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow; and
to me it is no less evident that the various sensations or ideas
imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together, (that is,
whatever objects they compose,) cannot exist otherwise than in a mind
perceiving them. I think an intuitive knowledge may be obtained of this,
by any one that shall attend to what is meant by the term _exist_, when
applied to sensible things. The table I write on, I say, exists; _i.e._
I see and feel it, and if I were out of my study, I should say it
existed, meaning thereby, that if I was in my study I might perceive it,
or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There was an odour,
_i.e._ it was smelt; there was a sound, _i.e._ it was heard; a colour or
figure, and it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can
understand by these and the like expressions. For as to what is said of
the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to
their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their
_esse_ is _percipi_, nor is it possible they should have any existence,
out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.
‘4. It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing among men, that houses,
mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence
natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the
understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever
this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find
in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it
to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned
objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what, I pray you, do we
perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? And is it not plainly
repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should
exist unperceived?
‘5. If we thoroughly examine this tenet, it will, perhaps, be found at
bottom to depend on the doctrine of _abstract ideas_. For can there be a
nicer strain of abstraction than to distinguish the existence of
sensible objects from their being perceived, so as to conceive them
existing unperceived? Light and colours, heat and cold, extension and
figures, in a word, the things we see and feel, what are they but so
many sensations, notions, ideas, or impressions on the sense; and is it
possible to separate, even in thought, any of these from perception? For
my part, I might as easily divide a thing from itself. I may, indeed,
divide in my thoughts, or conceive apart from each other, those things
which, perhaps, I never perceived by sense so divided. Thus I imagine
the trunk of a human body without the limbs, or conceive the smell of a
rose without thinking on the rose itself. So far I will not deny I can
abstract, if that may be properly called _abstraction_ which extends
only to the conceiving separately such objects as it is possible may
really exist or be actually perceived asunder. But my conceiving or
imagining power does not extend beyond the possibility of real existence
or perception. Hence, as it is impossible for me to see or feel any
thing without an actual sensation of that thing, so it is impossible for
me to conceive in my thoughts any sensible thing or object distinct from
the sensation or perception of it. In truth, the object and the
sensation are the same thing, and cannot therefore be extracted from
each other.
‘6. Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man
need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to
be, viz. that all the choir of heaven, and furniture of the earth, in a
word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have
not any subsistence without a mind, that their _esse_ is to be perceived
or known; that consequently, so long as they are not actually perceived
by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit,
they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind
of some eternal spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving
all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of
them an existence independent of a spirit. To make this appear with all
the light and evidence of an axiom, it seems sufficient if I can but
awaken the reflection of the reader, that he may take an impartial view
of his own meaning, and turn his thoughts upon the subject itself, free
and disengaged from all embarrass of words and prepossession in favour
of received mistakes.
‘7. From what has been said, it is evident there is not any other
substance than spirit, or that which perceives. But for the fuller
demonstration of this point, let it be considered, the sensible
qualities are colour, figure, motion, smell, taste, &c.; _i.e._ the
ideas perceived by sense. Now, for an idea to exist in an unperceiving
thing is a manifest contradiction; for to have an idea is all one as to
perceive; that, therefore, wherein colour, figure, &c. exist must
perceive them. Hence it is clear there can be no unthinking substance or
_substratum_ of those ideas.
‘8. But, say you, though the ideas themselves do not exist without the
mind, yet there may be things like them whereof they are copies or
resemblances, which things exist without the mind, in an unthinking
substance. I answer, an idea can be like nothing but an idea, a colour
or figure, can be like nothing but another colour or figure. If we look
but never so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for
us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas. Again, I ask
whether those supposed originals, or external things, of which our ideas
are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or no? If
they are, then they are ideas, and we have gained our point; but if you
say they are not, I appeal to any one whether it be sense to assert a
colour is like something which is invisible: hard or soft, like
something which is intangible, and so of the rest.
‘9. Some there are who make a distinction between _primary_ and
_secondary_ qualities; by the former, they mean extension, figure,
motion, rest, solidity or impenetrability, and number; by the latter,
they denote all other sensible qualities, as colours, sounds, tastes,
&c. The ideas we have of these they acknowledge not to be the
resemblances of any thing existing without the mind, or unperceived, but
they will have our ideas of the primary qualities to be patterns or
images of things which exist without the mind, in an unthinking
substance, which they call _matter_. By matter, therefore, we are to
understand an inert, useless substance, in which extension, figure,
motion, &c. do actually subsist. But it is evident from what we have
already shewn, that extension, figure, and motion are only ideas
existing in the mind, and that consequently neither they nor their
archetypes can exist in an unperceiving substance. Hence it is plain
that the very notion of what is called _matter_ or _corporeal substance_
involves a contradiction in it, insomuch that I should not think it
necessary to spend more time in exposing its absurdity; but because the
tenet of the existence of matter seems to have taken so deep a root in
the minds of philosophers, and draws after it so many ill consequences,
I choose rather to be thought prolix and tedious, than omit any thing
that might conduce to the full discovery and extirpation of that
prejudice.
‘10. They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or
original qualities do exist without the mind, in unthinking substances,
do at the same time acknowledge that colours, sounds, heat, cold, &c. do
not, which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that
depend on, and are occasioned by the different size, texture, motion,
&c. of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted
truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now if it be
certain that those original qualities are inseparably united with the
other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being
abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the
mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any
abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body,
without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently
that it is not in my power to form an idea of a body extended and
moving, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality,
which is acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension,
figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are
inconceivable. Where, therefore, the other sensible qualities are, there
must these be also, _i.e._ in the mind, and no where else.
‘11. Again, _great_ and _small_, _swift_ and _slow_, are allowed to
exist nowhere without the mind, being entirely relative, and changing as
the frame or position of the organs of sense varies. The extension,
therefore, which exists without the mind, is neither great nor small,
the motion neither swift nor slow; that is, they are nothing at all.
But, say you, they are extension in general and motion in general. Thus
we see how much the tenet of extended, moveable substances, existing
without the mind, depends on that strange doctrine of _abstract ideas_.
And here I cannot but remark, how nearly the vague and indeterminate
description of matter, or corporeal substance, which the modern
philosophers are run into by their own principles, resembles that
antiquated and so much ridiculed notion of _materia prima_, to be met
with in Aristotle and his followers. Without extension, solidity cannot
be conceived; since, therefore, it has been shown that extension exists
not in an unthinking substance, the same must also be true of solidity.
‘12. That number is entirely the creature of the mind, even though the
other qualities be allowed to exist without it, will be evident to
whoever considers that the same thing bears a different denomination of
number, as the mind views it with different aspects. Thus the same
extension is one, or three, or thirty-six, according as the mind
considers it with reference to a yard, a foot, or an inch. Number is so
visibly relative, and dependent on men’s understandings, that it is
strange to think how any one should give it an absolute existence
without the mind. We say _one_ book, _one_ page, _one_ line, &c., all
these are equally units, though some contain several of the others; and
in each instance it is plain the unit relates to some particular
combination of ideas arbitrarily put together by the mind.
‘13. Unity, I know, some will have to be a simple or uncompounded idea,
accompanying all other ideas into the mind. That I have any such idea
answering the word _unity_ I do not find, and if I had, methinks I could
not miss finding it; on the contrary, it should be the most familiar to
my understanding, since it is said to accompany all other ideas, and to
be perceived by all the ways of sensation and reflection.[6] To say no
more, it is an _abstract idea_.
‘14. I shall farther add, that after the same manner as modern
philosophers prove colours, tastes, &c., to have no existence in matter,
or without the mind, the same thing may be likewise proved of all other
sensible qualities whatever. Thus for instance, it is said, that heat
and cold are affections only of the mind, and not at all patterns of
real beings existing in the corporeal substances which excite them, for
that the same body which appears cold to one hand, seems warm to
another. Now, why may we not as well argue, that figure and extension
are not patterns or resemblances of qualities existing in matter,
because to the same eye at different stations, or eyes of a different
texture at the same station, they appear various, and cannot therefore
be the images of any thing settled and determinate without the mind?
Again, ’tis proved that sweetness is not really in the sapid thing,
because the thing remaining unaltered, the sweetness is changed into
bitter, as in case of a fever, or otherwise vitiated palate. Is it not
as reasonable to say, that motion is not without the mind, since if the
succession of ideas in the mind become swifter, the motion, it is
acknowledged, shall appear slower without any external alteration.
‘15. In short, let any one consider those arguments which are thought
manifestly to prove that colours, tastes, &c. exist only in the mind,
and he will find they may with equal force be brought to prove the same
thing of extension, figure, and motion. Though it must be confessed this
method of arguing does not so much prove that there is no extension,
colour, &c. in an outward object, as that we do not know by sense which
is the true extension or colour of the object. But the foregoing
arguments plainly show it to be impossible that any colour or extension
at all, or other sensible quality whatsoever, should exist in an
unthinking subject without the mind, or in truth, that there should be
any such thing as an outward object.’—_Principles of Human Knowledge_,
pp. 54, &c.
Again, he says, page 58:—
‘But though it were possible that solid, figured movable substances may
exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies,
yet how is it possible for us to know this? Either we must know it by
sense or by reason. As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge
only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately
perceived by sense, call them what you will; but they do not inform us
that things exist without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which
are perceived. This the materialists themselves acknowledge. It remains,
therefore, that if we have any knowledge at all of external things, it
must be by reason, inferring their existence from what is immediately
perceived by sense. But I do not see what reason can induce us to
believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive,
since the very patrons of matter themselves do not pretend there is any
necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas. I say it is granted on
all hands (and what happens in dreams, frenzies, and the like, puts it
beyond dispute) that it is possible we might be affected with all the
ideas we have now, though there were no bodies existing without
resembling them. Hence it is evident the supposition of external bodies
is not necessary for the producing our ideas, since it is granted they
are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always, in the
same order we see them in at present, without their concurrence. But
though we might possibly have all our sensations without them, yet
perhaps it may be thought easier to conceive and explain the manner of
their production, by supposing external bodies in their likeness rather
than otherwise, and so it might be at least probable there are such
things as bodies that excite their ideas in our minds. But neither can
this be said, for though we give the materialists their external bodies,
they, by their own confession, are never the nearer knowing how our
ideas are produced, since they own themselves unable to comprehend in
what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it should
imprint any idea in the mind. Hence it is evident the production of
ideas or sensations in our minds, can be no reason why we should suppose
matter or corporeal substances, since that is acknowledged to remain
equally inexplicable with, or without this supposition. If therefore it
were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do
so, must needs be a very precarious opinion; since it is to suppose,
without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that
are entirely useless, and serve to no manner of purpose.
‘But say what we can, some one perhaps might be apt to reply, he will
still believe his senses, and never suffer any arguments, how plausible
soever, to prevail over the certainty of them. Be it so, assert the
evidence of sense as high as you please, we are willing to do the same.
That what I see and hear, and feel, doth exist, _i.e._ is perceived by
me, I no more doubt than I do of my own being: but I do not see how the
testimony of sense can be alleged as a proof for the existence of any
thing which is not perceived by sense. We are not for having any man
turn sceptic, and disbelieve his senses; on the contrary, we give them
all the stress and assurance imaginable, nor are there any principles
more opposite to scepticism than those we have laid down, as shall be
hereafter clearly shown. Secondly, it will be objected that there is a
great difference between real fire, for instance, and the idea of fire,
betwixt dreaming or imagining oneself burnt and actually being so: if
you suspect it to be only the idea of fire which you see, do but put
your hand into it, and you’ll be convinced with a witness. This and the
like may be urged in opposition to our tenets. To all which the answer
is evident from what hath been already said, and I shall only add in
this place, that if real fire be very different from the idea of fire,
so also is the real pain that it occasions very different from the idea
of the same pain, and yet nobody will pretend that real pain either is,
or can possibly be, in an unperceiving thing or without the mind, any
more than its idea.’
Now with regard to this system, whatever we may think of the solidity of
the foundation, the superstructure is as light and elegant as possible.
There is a peculiar character in the metaphysical writings of Berkeley
which is to be found no where else. With all the closeness and subtilty
of the deepest reflection, they combine the ease and vivacity of a
common essay: so that the most violent paradoxes and elaborate
distinctions are rendered familiar by the simplicity of the style. His
writings show that he had thought with the utmost intensity on almost
every subject, yet he has the same careless freedom of manner as if he
had never thought at all. He is never entangled in the labyrinth of his
own thoughts, and the buoyancy of his spirit surmounts every objection
with a singular felicity, as if his mind had wings. It is perhaps worth
remarking that the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ were published in
1710, at a time when the author was only five-and-twenty, as was the
‘Essay on Vision,’ the greatest by far of all his works, and the most
complete example of elaborate analytical reasoning and particular
induction joined together that perhaps ever existed. It is also
generally free from that air of paradox and fanciful hypothesis which
runs through his other writings.[7] I mention this the more because I
believe that the greatest efforts of intellect have almost always been
made while the passions are in their greatest vigour, and before hope
loses its hold on the heart, and is the elastic spring which animates
all our thoughts.
On the reasoning I have just quoted I will make one or two remarks
without pretending to enter into the real difficulties of the question.
First, it seems to me that the argument against the existence of the
secondary qualities, drawn from the various effects produced by them on
different minds or in different circumstances, which Hume mentions as
the only solid one, and which Berkeley thinks more doubtful, is no
argument at all. That an object at a distance, for example, does not
look like the same object near is in consequence of the interposition of
the air, which gives it a different hue; the logical inference merely is
that one object has not the same sensible qualities as another, or as
Berkeley has remarked, since the effect depends upon the combination and
reaction of a number of things that we do not know what the true or
natural qualities of each object are.
2. The proof of the non-existence of the primary qualities or of matter
altogether, as inconceivable by the mind, goes upon the supposition that
what is different cannot be the same. ‘An idea,’ says Berkeley, ‘can be
like nothing but an idea, a perception like nothing but a perception.’
But it might be proved in this manner that a print cannot resemble a
picture, because that which has colour cannot be represented by any
thing without colour. That as far as our ideas are perceptions they do
not resemble any thing in matter is true, but no one ever supposed that
in this respect there was any resemblance between them, or that matter
thought. That they cannot be alike in any thing does not seem to me
proved by this mode of reasoning: for that our ideas of things are not
mere perceptions is evident from this, that they are different among
themselves, that is, have other distinguishing qualities besides being
perceived.
3. Berkeley’s argument against the existence of matter not merely as the
object or archetype, but as the cause of our sensations, is founded on
the notion that we have a right to reject every general conclusion in
which there is the least flaw or difficulty. Common sense is brought to
the bar, like an old offender, and condemned upon the slightest shadow
of evidence. If the vulgar system is vulnerable in any part, it is taken
for granted that it ought to be discarded, to make room for a perfectly
rational and philosophical account, the sufficiency of the understanding
being never once doubted. But all this severe logic and scrutiny into
the perfect connexion of our ideas vanishes, when the author comes to
explain the cause of our external impressions, or to find a substitute
for matter. This, he says, is God or an all-powerful spirit, and yet he
affirms that we have no more idea of spirit than of matter, and
consequently the one ought upon this theory to pass for a nonentity as
much as the other.
‘We perceive a continual succession of ideas, some are anew excited,
others are changed or totally disappear. There is therefore some cause
of those ideas, whereon they depend, and which produces and changes
them. That this cause cannot be any quality or idea or combination of
ideas, is clear from what has been said. It must therefore be a
substance, but it has been shewn that there is no corporeal or material
substance. It remains therefore that the cause of ideas is an
incorporeal active substance or spirit.
‘A spirit is one simple, undivided, active being: as it perceives ideas,
it is called the understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates
about them, it is called the will. Hence there can be no idea formed of
a soul or spirit. For all ideas whatever being passive and inert, they
cannot represent unto us by way of image or likeness that which acts.
Such is the nature of spirit or that which acts, that it cannot be
itself perceived, but only by the effects which it produceth. If any man
shall doubt of the truth of what is here delivered, let him but reflect
and try if he can frame the idea of any power or active being. A little
attention will make it plain to any one, that to have an idea which
shall be like that active principle of motion and change of ideas, is
absolutely impossible.’ That is to say, matter is here excluded from
being the cause or in any way the occasion of our ideas, because we know
not what it is, and the inference is, that the cause of our ideas must
be spirit, of which we are equally ignorant. The reasoning might have
been reversed. But it is thus that philosophy seems to be in general
nothing else but ‘reason pandering will.’ The literal conclusion from
the foregoing argument is, that there is nothing in the universe but
oneself, nor even that, but only the present idea: all other words must
signify nothing.
To return to Mr. Locke. He has treated on the same question in the
second volume, but without advancing any thing remarkable on it, and it
is the only place in which he loses his temper, and substitutes ridicule
for argument.
In the chapter on Perception, there are some observations on the manner
in which our judgments alter the impressions of sensible objects, which
are well worth notice, and show that the author was well acquainted with
what may be called the practical processes of the human mind.
He says, p. 130, ‘We are farther to consider concerning perception, that
the ideas we receive by sensation are often in grown people altered by
the judgment without our taking notice of it. When we set before our
eyes a round globe of any uniform colour, _e.g._ gold, alabaster, or
jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a
flat circle, variously shadowed with several degrees of light and
brightness coming to our eyes. But we having by use been accustomed to
perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us,
what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference
of the sensible figures of bodies, the judgment presently, by an
habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes; so that from
that which truly is variety of shadow or colour, collecting the figure,
it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the
perception of a convex figure and an uniform colour, when the idea we
receive from thence is only a plane variously coloured; as is evident in
painting. To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very
ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and
worthy Mr. Molineux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some
months since: and it is this: “Suppose a man born blind, and now adult,
and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of
the same metal and nigh of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt
the one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then
the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man made to see:
Quere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now
distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?” To which the
acute and judicious proposer answers, “No. For though he has obtained
the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has
not yet attained the experience that what affects his touch so or so,
must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube
that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in
the cube.” I agree’ (says Mr. Locke) ‘with this thinking gentleman, whom
I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this his problem; and am
of opinion that the blind man at first sight, would not be able with
certainty to say, which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only
saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and
certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt. This
I have set down, and leave with my reader as an occasion for him to
consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and
acquired notions, where he thinks he has not the least use of, or help
from them, and the rather, because this observing gentleman farther
adds, that having upon the occasion of my book, proposed this to divers
very ingenious men, he hardly ever met with one that at first gave the
answer to it which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were
convinced.’ Mr. Locke then adds other instances to the same effect, as
‘That a man who reads or hears with attention and understanding takes
little notice of the characters or sounds, but of the ideas that are
excited in him by them. How frequently do we in a day cover our eyes
with our eyelids, without at all perceiving that we are in the dark! Men
that by custom have got the use of a by-word do almost in every sentence
pronounce sounds, which though taken notice of by others, they
themselves neither hear nor observe: and therefore it is not so strange
that our mind should often change the idea of its sensation into that of
its judgment, and make one serve only to excite the other without our
taking notice of it.’
On the problem above stated, which has been often made a subject of
dispute, I shall only remark that the answer given to it, with which Mr.
Locke agrees, is directly repugnant to his doctrine of the real
existence of the primary qualities of matter, namely figure and
extension. For it is plain, that if there is any thing in external
objects answering to their ideas in our minds, the ideas we have of
those qualities and which are conveyed by different senses, must be like
one another. If the ideas of figure as a visible and tangible thing have
no resemblance to themselves, it is ridiculous to suppose that they can
coincide with any thing out of them in nature. Secondly, it appears to
me that the mind must recognise a certain similarity between the
impressions of different senses in this case. For instance, the sudden
change or discontinuity of the sensation, produced by the sharp angles
of the cube, is something common to both ideas, and if so, must afford a
means of comparing them together. Berkeley, in his ‘Essay on Vision,’
goes so far as to deny that there is any intuitive analogy between the
ideas of number as conveyed by different senses, and asserts that the
distinction between the two legs of a statue, for instance, as perceived
by the touch or by the sight would not imply any idea of like or same. I
grant this consequence to be true, on the principle maintained by him
that there are no abstract ideas in the mind, for on this principle
there can be no idea answering to the words _same_ or _different_, but
then this argument would destroy all kind of coincidence not only
between ideas of different senses, but between repeated impressions of
the same sense. The ‘Essay on Vision,’ of which I have already spoken,
apparently originated in the problem here inserted, and is a more
complete exemplification of the effects of association with respect to
objects of sight than is to be found even in Hartley’s account of this
subject.
Mr. Locke’s account of the distinction between wit and understanding I
have already noticed; his explanation of the difference between idiots
and madmen has been often referred to, and is as follows:
‘The defect in naturals seems to proceed from want of quickness,
activity, and motion in the intellectual faculties, whereby they are
deprived of reason: whereas madmen, on the other side, seem to suffer by
the other extreme. For they do not appear to me to have lost the faculty
of reasoning; but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they
mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from
wrong principles: for, by the violence of their imaginations, having
taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them.
Thus you shall find a distracted man, fancying himself a king, with a
right inference require suitable attendance, respect, and obedience:
others, who have thought themselves made of glass, have used the caution
necessary to preserve such brittle bodies. Hence it comes to pass, that
a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other
things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam, if either
by any sudden very strong impression, or long fixing his fancy upon one
sort of thoughts, incoherent ideas have been cemented together so
powerfully as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness, as of
folly; the disorderly jumbling together of ideas is in some more, and
some less. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots
and madmen: that madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong
propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very
few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.’
Mr. Locke’s account of Liberty and Necessity, contained in his chapter
‘On Power,’ has been commented upon in the previous Essay. As is there
remarked, it is one which has been more found fault with than any other
part of his work, I think without reason. He seems evidently to have
admitted the definition of necessity, but not the name, which is not
much to be wondered at, considering the improper use to which it is
liable, and which can scarce be separated from it in the closest
reasoning, much less as a term of general signification: in other words,
he denies the power of the mind to act without a cause or motive, or, in
any manner, in any circumstances, from mere indifference and absolute
self motion; but he at the same time denies the inference which has been
drawn from this principle, that the mind is not an agent at all, but
altogether subject to external force, or blind impulse.
Mr. Locke, in treating of complex ideas, divides them into three sorts,
those of modes, substances, and relations.
First, ‘Modes,’ he says, ‘I call such complex ideas, which, however
compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by
themselves, but are considered as dependences on, or affections of
substances: such are the ideas signified by the words _triangle_,
_gratitude_, _murder_, &c. Of these modes there are two sorts. 1. There
are some which are only variations or different combinations of the same
simple idea, without the mixture of any other, as a _dozen_ or _score_,
which are nothing but the ideas of so many distinct units added
together, and these I call simple modes. 2. There are others, compounded
of simple ideas of several kinds put together, to make one complex one;
_e.g._ _beauty_, consisting of a certain composition of colour and
figure, causing delight in the beholder; _theft_, which being the
concealed change of the possession of any thing, without the consent of
the proprietor, contains, as is visible, a combination of several ideas
of several kinds, and these I call _mixed modes_.’
With respect to modes, the author endeavours to shew, I think
improperly, that as they are put together arbitrarily by the mind,
according to circumstances, that they have no real existence in nature,
and that the ideas we form of them are always correct. Neither of these
consequences will be found to follow: _i.e._ the circumstances and
actions which constitute theft do actually exist without the mind and
are necessary to that idea, though it is arbitrary in me according to
the occasion or the purpose in view, to think of that collection of
ideas or another, which shall constitute robbery; that is, I may add or
leave out the circumstance of violence, as it happens; secondly, I may,
without being aware of it, add or leave out some circumstance necessary
to the combination of ideas spoken of, and thus confuse one idea with
another, and not merely miscal, as Mr. Locke supposes, but misconceive
the mode in question. We then merely miscal when though we give a wrong
name to a thing, the idea is kept perfectly distinct and clear from
other ideas, otherwise we confound both names and things. But it will
not be contended, that the ideas of theft, robbery, and fraud, for
instance, are always kept clear in every one’s mind, so that he is at no
loss ever to define them, or can immediately in all cases refer any
action to the class to which it belongs. Every collection of ideas which
the mind puts together is undoubtedly that collection and no other; but
in forming the ideas of mixed modes, the mind does something more than
this, or it supposes one collection of ideas to be the same as another
which it has had at a former time, and gives a certain name to, and in
this supposition it often errs.
On this subject, the author is a good deal puzzled with the question,
how it is possible for the mind ever to confound one idea with another?
It is indeed a puzzling question, but the answer which he gives to it in
resolving it into a mistake of words, is very unsatisfactory. For there
is no more reason why we should mistake one name or sign of an idea for
another, than why we should mistake the ideas themselves. If every
circumstance belonging to our ideas was necessarily clear and
self-evident to the mind, the sign affixed to it, which is one of those
circumstances, would be so too, and we find that in those things with
which we have a thorough acquaintance, we never confound one name with
another, or if we should, it does not disturb the idea, and is of no
consequence.
Among the second sort of complex ideas Mr. Locke classes those of
substances. These, he says, are such combinations of simple ideas as are
taken to represent distinct, particular things, subsisting by
themselves, in which the supposed or confused idea of substance, such as
it is, is always the first or chief. Thus, if to substance be joined the
simple idea of a certain dull whitish colour, with certain degrees of
weight, hardness, ductility and fusibility, we have the idea of lead;
and a combination of the ideas of a certain sort of figure, with the
power of motion, thought, and reasoning, joined to substance, make the
ordinary idea of a man. Now of substances also there are two sorts of
ideas; one of single substances, as they exist separately, as of a man
or a sheep; the other of several of those put together, as an army of
men or a flock of sheep: which collective ideas of several substances
are as much each of them one single idea as that of a man or an unit.’
He then adds, ‘and the third sort of complex ideas is that which we call
relative, which consists in the consideration and comparing one idea
with another.’ This last sort of ideas seems to me the only ones that
are perfectly simple and indivisible: things themselves are always
complex. Mr. Locke considers rightly that we know nothing of the nature
of substance, and that we can only define it as an abstract idea of some
thing, that supports accidents or connects different sensible qualities
together. For this modest confession of his own ignorance he was however
called to a very severe account by the learned of the time, Bishop
Stillingfleet and others, who thought they knew more of the matter, and
could penetrate the essence of things. The ‘Essay on the Human
Understanding’ is swelled out with repeated and long extracts from this
controversy, and they are not the least valuable part of the work, as
they show to what shifts men can be driven, to defend systematically not
truth but their own opinion, who become blind and obstinate by implicit
faith, and who by adhering to every established prejudice drive others
into all the absurdities of paradox.
Mr. Locke’s own account of our ideas of substance is a good deal spun
out, and is enriched with as many illustrations from the qualities of
gold, as if he had been candidate for the place of assay-master of the
mint. The chapter ‘On Identity’ is perhaps the best reasoned and the
most full of thought and observation of any in the Essay: though the
author sets out with an observation which seems to augur differently.
For after explaining identity as it relates to individuality, or implies
that a thing is the same with itself, he says, ‘From what has been said
it is easy to discover what is so much inquired after, the _principium
individuationis_: and that, it is plain, is existence itself, which
determines a being of any sort to a particular time and place,
incommunicable to two beings of the same kind.’ He then, very wisely
quitting this principle which would certainly be of no use to him,
proceeds directly to account for the identity of different things from a
continuance, not of the same substance, but of the same essence, or of
the characteristic properties of any thing, carried on in succession; as
a river is the same while it flows through the same channel, or an oak
while it retains the same organization, and a man while he retains the
same life and continued consciousness.
In the chapter entitled ‘Of true and false Ideas,’ the author supposes
truth to depend on some mental or verbal proposition, and does not, like
Hobbes and the modern metaphysical writers, make it consist entirely in
a form of words. In the last chapter of the first volume he treats of
the association of ideas. This chapter was added after the first edition
of the work, and he confesses, that the subject was something new to
him. He has treated it in that mixed way of observation and reasoning,
in which the peculiar force of his mind lay. The account he has given of
it does not form a system, but the fragments of a system, something like
the French memoirs that are to serve for the materials of a history. He
does not appear to have laid down any general theorem on the subject, or
to have been aware of the possibility of applying this principle to
account in a plausible manner for the whole chain of our thoughts and
feelings, as Hobbes and Hartley have done. Sound, practical, good sense,
and a kind of discursive observation, neither grovelling in vulgar
common place, nor soaring into the regions of paradox, are in fact the
general characteristics of his mind, which has not been understood by
his admirers and commentators. A short passage will suffice to show his
manner of considering this doctrine of association.
‘Many children,’ he says, ‘imputing the pain they endured at school to
their books they were corrected for, so join those ideas together that a
book becomes their aversion, and they are never reconciled to the study
and use of them all their lives after: and thus reading becomes a
torment to them, which otherwise possibly they might have made the great
pleasure of their lives. There are rooms convenient enough that some men
cannot study in, and fashions of vessels, which though ever so clean and
commodious they cannot drink out of, and that by reason of some
accidental ideas which are annexed to them, and make them offensive: and
who is there that has not observed some man to flag at the appearance,
or in the company of some certain person, not otherwise superior to him,
but because having once on some occasion got the ascendant, the idea of
authority and distance goes along with that of the person? And he that
has been thus subjected is not able to separate them. Instances of this
kind are so plentiful every where, that if I add one more, it is only
for the pleasant oddness of it: it is of a young gentleman, who having
learned to dance, and that to great perfection, there happened to stand
an old trunk in the room where he learned: the idea of this remarkable
piece of household stuff had so mixed itself with all the turns and
steps of his dances, that though in that chamber he could dance
exceedingly well, yet it was only whilst that trunk was there; nor could
he perform well in any other place, unless that, or some such other
trunk had its due position in the room.’
The following passage approaches the nearest to the statement of a
general principle:
‘This strong combination of ideas, not allied by nature, the mind makes
in itself either voluntarily or by chance: and hence it comes in
different men to be very different, according to their different
inclinations, educations, interests, &c. Custom settles habits of
thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining in the will,
and of motions in the body: all which seems to be but trains of motion
in the animal spirits, which once set agoing continue in the same steps
they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth
path, and the motion in it becomes easy, and as it were natural. As far
as we can comprehend thinking, thus ideas seem to be produced in our
minds; or if they are not, this may serve to explain their following one
another in an habitual train when once they are put into that track, as
well as it does to explain such motions of the body. A musician used to
any tune will find, that let it but once begin in his head, the ideas of
the several notes of it will follow one another orderly in his
understanding, without any care or attention, as regularly as his finger
moves orderly over the keys of the organ to play out the tune he has
begun, though his inattentive thoughts be elsewhere a wandering. Whether
the natural cause of these ideas, as well as of that regular dancing of
the fingers, be the motion of his animal spirits, I will not determine,
how probable soever by this instance it appears to be so; but this may
help us a little to conceive of intellectual habits, and of the tying
together of ideas. That there are such associations of them made by
custom in the minds of most men, I think nobody will question, who has
well considered himself or others; and to this perhaps might be justly
attributed most of the sympathies and antipathies observable in men,
which work as strongly and produce as regular effects as if they were
natural, and are therefore called so, though they at first had no other
original but the accidental connexion of two ideas, which either the
strength of the first impression or future indulgence so united, that
they always afterwards kept company together in that man’s mind, as if
they were but one idea. I say, most of the antipathies, I do not say
all; for some of them are truly natural, depend upon our original
constitution, and are born with us; but a great part of those which are
counted natural, would have been known to be from unheeded though
perhaps early impressions, or wanton fancies at first, which would have
been acknowledged the original of them, if they had been warily
observed.’
The former part of this passage, relating to the dancing of the animal
spirits, the Abbé Condillac in his ‘Logic’ has paraphrased with a
self-sufficiency, an assumption of originality, and a smoothness of
flippancy, peculiar almost to himself.
On the subject of materialism, Mr. Locke seems to have had two opinions;
the first, that as far as we can discern, the properties of mind and
matter are utterly distinct and irreconcileable; the second, that God
might for aught we know be able to superadd to matter a faculty of
thinking: either the one or the other of these opinions must be without
meaning. In speaking of the difficulties attending both sides of this
question, he has, however, offered one of the best moral cautions
against precipitancy of judgment and impatience of inquiry to be found
in any author. He says, (vol. ii. p. 203:) ‘He that considers how hardly
sensation is in our thoughts reconcilable to extended matter, or
existence to any thing that hath no extension at all, will confess that
he is very far from certainly knowing what his soul is. It is a point
which seems to me to be put out of the reach of our knowledge: and he
who will give himself leave to consider freely, and look into the dark
and intricate part of each hypothesis, will scarce find his reason able
to determine him fixedly for or against the soul’s materiality. Since on
which side soever he views it, either as an unextended substance, or a
thinking extended matter, the difficulty to conceive either, will,
whilst either alone is in his thoughts, still drive him to the contrary
side. An unfair way which some men take with themselves; who because of
the unconceivableness of some thing they find in one, throw themselves
violently into the contrary hypothesis, though altogether as
unintelligible to an unbiassed understanding. This serves not only to
show the weakness and scantiness of our knowledge, but the insignificant
triumph of such sort of arguments, which drawn from our own views may
satisfy us that we can find no certainty on one side of the question;
but do not at all thereby help us to truth, by running into the opposite
opinion, which on examination will be found clogged with equal
difficulties.’
Mr. Locke has not, I think, himself enough attended to this admirable
caution in his adoption of the common argument to demonstrate the
existence of God _à priori_, towards which I conceive not the slightest
advances can be made in this method. For the axiom that every thing must
have a cause can never be made to infer the existence of a first cause,
that is, of something without a cause. It is equally impossible for the
human mind to conceive of the beginning of existence, or to pass from
nothing to something, either by the help of an infinite series of finite
existences, or by the infinite duration of one simple, absolute
existence. Those who wish to see how far human ingenuity can push a
complete confusion of ideas into the verge of the strictest logical
demonstration and self-evident truth, may find all that they want in Dr.
Clarke’s celebrated work on the ‘Attributes,’ which contains more
logical acuteness and more power of scholastic disputation than any
other work that I know of in modern times. Hartley has lost himself in
the same endless labyrinth of finite and infinite series. And Locke’s
statement of this question is only better, because it is shorter, and
goes straight forward, without stopping to answer difficulties.
ON TOOKE’S ‘DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY’
I would class the merits of Mr. Tooke’s work under three heads: the
etymological, the grammatical, and the philosophical. The etymological
part is excellent, the grammatical part indifferent, and the
philosophical part to the last degree despicable; it is downright,
unqualified, unredeemed nonsense. As Mr. Tooke himself says that all
metaphysical reasoning is nonsense, it is scarcely rude to say that
_his_ metaphysical reasoning is so. It appears to me to be ‘mere
midsummer madness.’ He ought not indeed to have meddled with logic or
metaphysics after such a declaration; he ought to have supposed that he
laboured under some natural defect in this respect, as a man who finds
no harmony in any tune that is played to him, may without much modesty
conclude that he has no ear for music.
The opinion which I have here advanced of this writer’s merits as a
general reasoner may seem a bold one; but the proof of it is not
difficult; it is as easy as transcribing. I have only to take a few
passages in which he has applied etymology to the illustration of moral
and metaphysical truth, to make his undistinguishing admirers blush, not
for their idol, but for the weakness and bounded faculties of human
nature.
Mr. Tooke lays it down as a maxim, that the mind has neither complex nor
abstract ideas. He was in some things a zealot, and his zeal had led him
to believe that his system of etymology would in some way or other
establish this metaphysical principle, and overturn the established
notions of law, morality, philosophy, and divinity. The full development
and execution of this project is reserved for a future volume, but there
are perpetual hints and intimations of it in the two first, something
like the aerial music and flying noises in Prospero’s island. The author
seems constantly in his own mind on the point of detecting all imposture
and delusion with the Ithuriel spear of etymology, but he as constantly
draws back, and postpones his triumph. The second volume of the
‘Diversions’ consists chiefly of about two thousand instances of the
etymology of words, to prove that there can be no abstract ideas:
scarcely one of which two thousand meanings is anything else but a more
abstract idea than the word was in general supposed to convey: for
example, the word _loaf_ commonly stands for a pretty substantial,
solid, tangible kind of an idea, and is not suspected of any latent,
very refined, abstracted meaning. The author shows, on the contrary,
that the word has no such palpable, positive meaning, as the particular
object to which we apply it, but merely signifies something, any thing,
raised or _lifted_ up. A singular method, surely, of reducing all
general and abstract signs to individual, physical objects! Yet we find
this tiresome catalogue of derivations concluded in this manner.
‘And on this subject of _subaudition_ I will at present exercise your
patience no farther: for my own begins to flag. You have now instances
of my doctrine in, I suppose, about a thousand words. Their number may
be easily increased. But I trust these are sufficient to discard that
imagined operation of the mind, which has been termed _abstraction_: and
to prove that what we call by that name, is merely one of the
contrivances of language, for the purpose of more speedy
communication.’—Page 396, vol. ii.
How a thousand instances of words, signifying a common quality or
abstract idea, with something understood (_subauditum_), can be supposed
to discard that imagined operation of the mind called abstraction, or in
what subaudition differs from abstraction, or whether there is not
something _subintellectum_, as well as _subauditum_,—that is, certain
circumstances left out by the mind for the necessary progress of
thought, as well as in language, for its more speedy communication,—it
is not easy to guess. This farcical mummery, this inexplicable dumb
show, this emphatical insignificance, neither admits nor deserves any
answer.
The only places in the work in which this wary reasoner has fairly
committed himself, and given an intelligible explanation of his mode of
applying his system to general questions, are in his account of the
words, _right and wrong_, _just and unjust_, in his list of metaphysical
nonentities, demonstrated to be such because they are expressed by the
past participles of certain verbs, and in his definition of Truth.
These, therefore, I shall give as specimens, and I hope they will be
quite satisfactory. The ‘Diversions of Purley,’ it should be observed,
is supposed to be carried on in a dialogue between the author and Sir
Francis Burdett.
‘Enough, enough,’ says Burdett, ‘innumerable instances of the same may,
I grant you, be given from all our ancient authors. But does this import
us any thing?’
‘TOOKE. Surely, much, if it shall lead us to the clear understanding of
the words we use in discourse. For as far as we “know not our own
meaning,” as far as “our purposes are not endowed with words to make
them known,” so far we “gabble like things most brutish.” But the
importance rises higher, when we reflect upon the application of words
to metaphysics. And when I say metaphysics, you will be pleased to
remember that all general reasoning, all politics, law, morality, and
divinity, are merely metaphysics.’ [What is this general reasoning of
Mr. Tooke’s?]
‘Well,’ replies his pupil, ‘you have satisfied me that wrong, however
written, whether wrang, wrong or wrung, like the Italian _torto_ and the
French _tort_, is merely the past tense or participle of the verb to
wring; and has merely that meaning.
‘TOOKE. True; it means wrung or wrested from the _right_ or _ordered_
line of conduct. Right is no other than _rectum_, the past participle of
the Latin verb _regere_. The Italian _dritto_, and the French _droit_,
are no other than the past participle _directum_. In the same manner our
English word _just_ is the past participle of the verb _jubere_
(_jussum_).
‘BURDETT. What, then, is law?
‘TOOKE. It is merely the past participle _lag_, of the Gothic and
Anglo-Saxon verb _legan_, _ponere_; and it means something or anything
_laid down_ as a rule of conduct. Thus when a man demands his _right_,
he only asks that which it is _ordered_ he shall have. A _right_ conduct
is that which is ordered. A _right_ line is that which is ordered or
directed, not a random extension, but the shortest between two points. A
_right_ and _just_ action is such a one as is ordered and commanded. The
right hand is that which custom, and those who have brought us up, have
ordered or directed us to use in preference, when one hand only is
employed, and the left hand is that which is _lieved_ or left.
‘BURDETT. Surely the word _right_ is sometimes used in some other sense.
And see, in this newspaper before us, M. Portalis, contending for the
_concordat_, says:—“The multitude are much more impressed with what they
are _commanded_ to obey, than with what is proved to them to be _right_
and _just_.” This will be complete nonsense, if _right_ and _just_ mean
_ordered_ and _commanded_.
‘TOOKE. I will not undertake to make sense of the arguments of M.
Portalis. The whole of his speech is a piece of wretched mummery,
employed to bring back again to France the more wretched mummery of pope
and popery. Writers on such subjects are not very anxious about the
meaning of their words. Ambiguity and equivocation are their
strongholds. Explanation would undo them.
‘BURDETT. Well, but Mr. Locke uses the word in a manner hardly to be
reconciled with your account of it. He says:—“God has a right to do it,
we are his creatures.”
‘TOOKE. It appears to me highly improper to say, that God has a right,
as it is also to say that God is just. For nothing is ordered, directed,
or commanded concerning God. The expressions are inapplicable to the
Deity: though they are common, and those who use them have the best
intentions. They are applicable only to men, to whom alone language
belongs, and of whose sensations only words are the representations; to
men, who are by nature the subjects of orders and commands, and whose
chief merit is obedience.
‘BURDETT. Every thing, then, that is ordered and commanded is right and
just.
‘TOOKE. Surely; for that is only affirming that what is ordered and
commanded is—ordered and commanded.
‘BURDETT. These sentiments do not appear to have made you very
conspicuous for obedience. There are not a few passages, I believe, in
your life, where you have opposed what was ordered and commanded. Upon
your own principles, was that _right_?
‘TOOKE. Perfectly.
‘BURDETT. How now! was it ordered and commanded that you should oppose
what was ordered and commanded? Can the same thing be at the same time
both right and wrong?
‘TOOKE. Travel back to the island of Melinda, and you will find the
difficulty most easily solved. A thing may be at the same time both
_right_ and _wrong_, as well as _right_ and _left_. It may be commanded
to be done, and commanded not to be done. The law, _i.e._ that which is
laid down, may be different by different authorities.
‘I have always been most obedient when most taxed with disobedience. But
my right hand is not the right hand of Melinda. The right I revere is
not the right adored by sycophants, the _jus vagum_, the capricious
command of princes or ministers. I follow the law of God (which is laid
down by him for the rule of my conduct) when I follow the laws of human
nature: which, without any testimony, we know must proceed from God, and
upon these are founded the rights of man, or what is ordered for man.’
On this passage I will observe that I think it would be difficult for
Mr. Tooke himself to find a more precious instance of unmeaning jargon
in the writings of any school-divine. Mr. Tooke first pretends gravely
to define the essence of _law_ and _just_ from the etymology of those
words, by saying that they are something _laid down_ and something
_ordered_; and when pressed by the difficulty that there are many things
laid down and many things ordered which are neither ‘law’ nor ‘just,’
makes answer that their obligation depends on a higher species of law
and justice, to wit, a law which is no where laid down, and a justice
which is no where ordered, except indeed by the nature of things, on
which the etymology of these two words does not seem to throw much
light. At one time, it seems quite demonstrable that the essence of all
law, right, and justice consists in its being ordered or communicated by
words: the very idea is absurd, unless we conceive of it as some thing
either spoken or written in a book; and yet the very next moment this
fastidious reasoner sets up the unwritten, uncommunicated law of God,
which he says must conform to the laws of human nature, as the rule of
his conduct, and as paramount to all other positive orders and commands
whatever. What is this original law of God or nature, which Mr. Tooke
sets up as the rule of right? Is it the good of the whole, or
self-interest? Is it the voice of reason, or conscience, or the moral
sense? Here then we have to set out afresh in our pursuit, and to grope
our way as well as we can through the old labyrinth of morality,
divinity, and metaphysics. This new-invented patent lamp of etymology
goes out just as it is beginning to grow dark, and as the path becomes
intricate.
Neither can I at all see why our author should quarrel with M. Portalis
for using these words in their common sense. He affirms that the whole
of this gentleman’s speech is a piece of wretched mummery, that his
distinction between what is right and what is commanded is a senseless
ambiguity, and that explanation would undo him. Yet he himself, two
pages after, discovers that this distinction has a real meaning in it,
and that he has acted upon it all his life. ‘The one,’ he says, ‘is the
_jus vagum_, the capricious command of princes; the other is the law of
God and nature.’ It is not impossible but M. Portalis might have given
quite as profound an explanation of his own meaning. Junius’s sarcasm
did not, it seems, entirely cure Mr. Tooke ‘of the little sneering
sophistries of a collegian.’
Mr. Tooke next makes strange havoc with a whole host of metaphysical
agents; like Sir Richard Blackmore,
‘Undoes creation at a jerk,
And of redemption makes damn’d work.’
‘Rebelling angels, the forbidden tree,
Heaven, hell, earth, chaos, all’—
are weighed in the balance and found wanting. We cannot say with
Marvell, that the argument
‘Holds us a while misdoubting his intent,
That he would ruin (for I saw him strong)
The sacred truths to fable and old song.
(So Sampson groped the temple’s posts in spite)
The world o’erwhelming to revenge his sight.’
For Mr. Tooke leaves us in no doubt about his intent. All these sacred
truths are, according to him, so many falsehoods, which by taking
possession of certain adjectives and participles, have palmed themselves
upon the world as realities, but which, by spelling their names
backwards, he proposes to exorcise and reduce to their original
nothingness again. Here follows a list of them which he has strung
together, as a warning to all other pseudo-substantives. It is rather
strange, by the bye, that the author should have resorted to this mode
of argument, since he affirms that adjectives are the names of things,
as well as substantives; and laughs at Dr. South for saying that they
are the names of nothing.
‘These words, these participles and adjectives,’ says Mr. Tooke, ‘not
understood as such, have caused a metaphysical jargon and a false
morality, which can only be dissipated by etymology. And when they come
to be examined you will find that the ridicule which Dr. Conyers
Middleton has so justly bestowed upon the papists for their absurd
coinage of saints, is equally applicable to ourselves and to all other
metaphysicians; whose moral deities, moral causes, and moral qualities
are not less ridiculously coined and imposed upon their followers.
Fate
Destiny
Luck
Lot
Chance
Accident
Heaven
Hell
Providence
Prudence
Innocence
Substance
Fiend
Angel
Apostle
Saint
Spirit
True
False
Desert
Merit
Fault. &c. &c.
as well as _just_, _right_, and _wrong_, are all merely participles
poetically embodied and substantiated by those who use them.
‘So Church, for instance (_Dominicum aliquid_) is an adjective; and
formerly a most wicked one: whose misinterpretation caused more
slaughter and pillage of mankind than all the other cheats together.’
Sir Francis says, ‘Something of this sort I can easily perceive, but not
to the extent you carry it. I see that those sham deities, Fate and
Destiny, aliquid _fatum_, quelque chose _destinée_, are merely the past
participles of _fari_ and _destiner_. That Chance (“high arbiter,” as
Milton calls him) and his twin-brother Accident are merely the
participles of _escheoir_, _cheoir_, and _cadere_. And that to say, it
befell me by chance or by accident, is absurdly saying it befell me by
falling.
‘I agree with you, that Providence, Prudence, Innocence, Substance, and
all the rest of that tribe of qualities (in _ence_ and _ance_) are
merely the neuter plurals of the present participles of _ordere_,
_nocere_, _stare_, &c. &c. That Angel, Saint, Spirit, are the past
participles αγγελλειυ, sanciri, spirare. That the Italian _cucolo_, a
cuckoo, gives us the verb to cucol, and its past participle cuckold.’
And what if it does: will Mr. Tooke therefore pretend to say that there
is no such thing? This is indeed turning etymology to a good account. It
is clearing off old scores with a vengeance, and establishing morality
on an entirely new basis. For my own part, I can only say of the whole
of the reasoning of this author, with Voltaire’s Candide, ‘_la tête me
tourne: on ne sait ou l’on est_.’ Whether any or all of those
metaphysical beings enumerated by Mr. Tooke do or do not exist, what
their nature or qualities are, whether modes, relatives, substances, I
shall not here undertake to determine, but I do conceive that none of
these questions can be resolved in any way by inquiring whether the
names denoting them are not the past participles of certain verbs. A
shorter method would I think be to say at once that all metaphysical and
moral terms, whether participles or not, are but names, that names are
not things, and that therefore the things themselves have no existence.
It is upon this philosophical principle that the heroical Jonathan Wild
proceeds in his definition of the word Honour, for after losing himself
to no purpose in the common metaphysical jargon on the subject, and in
moral causes and qualities, he comes at last to this clear and
unembarrassed conclusion,—‘That honour consists in the word _honour_,
and nothing else.’
I will only give one instance more of this reformed system of logic and
metaphysics.
‘BURDETT. I still wish for an explanation of one word more: which on
account of its extreme importance ought not to be omitted. What is
Truth? You know when Pilate had asked the same question, he went out and
would not stay for an answer, and from that time to this no answer has
been given. And from that time to this mankind have been wrangling and
tearing each other to pieces for the truth, without once considering the
meaning of the word.’
‘TOOKE. This word will give us no trouble. Like the other words, _true_
is also a past participle of the Saxon verb _treowan_, confidere, to
think, to believe firmly, to be thoroughly persuaded of, to trow.
_True_, as we now write it, or _trew_, as it was formerly written, means
simply and merely that which is trowed, and instead of its being a rare
commodity upon earth, except only in words, there is nothing but truth
in the world.
‘That every man, in his communication with others, should speak that
which he troweth, is of so great importance to mankind, that it ought
not to surprise us, if we find the most extravagant and exaggerated
praises bestowed upon truth. But truth supposes mankind; for whom and by
whom alone the word is formed, and to whom only it is applicable. If no
man, no truth. There is therefore no such thing as eternal, immutable,
everlasting truth; unless mankind, such as they are at present, be also
eternal, immutable, and everlasting. Two persons may contradict each
other, and yet both speak truth. For the truth of one person may be
opposite to the truth of another. To speak truth may be a vice as well
as a virtue; for there are many occasions when it ought not to be
spoken. If you reject my explanation, find out if you can some other
possible meaning of the word, or content yourself with Johnson, by
saying that _true_ is not false, and _false_ is—not true. For so he
explains the words.’—Vol. ii. p. 407.
In a note the author adds, ‘Mr. Locke, in the second book of his Essay,
chapter xxxii., treats of _true_ and _false_ ideas, and is much
distressed throughout the whole chapter, because he had not in his mind
any determinate meaning of the word _true_. If that excellent man had
himself followed the advice which he gave to his disputing friends
concerning the word _liquor_; if he had followed his own rule,
previously to writing about _true_ and _false_ ideas, and had determined
what meaning he applied to _true_, _being_, _thing_, _real_, _right_,
_wrong_, he could not have written the above chapter, which exceedingly
distresses the reader, who searches for a meaning where there is none to
be found.’
Whether Mr. Locke would have been satisfied with Mr. Tooke’s account of
these words, I cannot say. I know that I am not. I do not think it the
true one. It is therefore not the true one. Mr. Tooke thinks it is, and
therefore it is the true one. Which of us is right? That what a man
thinks, he thinks, and that if he speaks what he thinks, he speaks truth
in one principal sense of the word, is what does not require much
illustration; but whether what he thinks is true or false, whether his
opinion is right or wrong, or whether there is not another possible and
actual meaning of the terms besides that given by Mr. Tooke, is the old
difficulty, which remains just where it was before, in spite of
etymology.
The application of the theory of language to the philosophy of the mind,
Mr. Tooke has reserved for a volume by itself: the principle, however,
which he means to establish, he has very explicitly laid down in the
beginning of his first volume. ‘The business of the mind,’ he says, ‘as
far as it concerns language, appears to me to be very simple. It extends
no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have sensations or
feelings. What are called its operations, are merely the operations of
language. The greatest part of Mr. Locke’s Essay, that is, all which
relates to what he calls the _composition_, _abstraction_, _complexity_,
_generalization_, _relation_, &c. of ideas, does indeed merely concern
language. If he had been sooner aware of the inseparable connexion
between words and knowledge, he would not have talked of the composition
of ideas; but would have seen that the only composition was in the
terms; and consequently that it was as improper to talk of a complex
idea as of a complex star. It is an easy matter, upon Mr. Locke’s own
principles and a physical consideration of the senses and the mind, to
prove the impossibility of the composition of ideas; and that they are
not ideas, but merely terms which are general and abstract.’—Vol. i. pp.
39, 51, &c.
Now I grant that Mr. Locke’s own principles, and a physical
consideration of the mind, do lead to the conclusion here stated, that
is, to an absurdity; and it is from thence I have endeavoured to show
more than once that those principles, and the considering the mind as a
physical thing, are themselves absurd. How a term can be complex
otherwise than from the complexity of its meaning, that is, of the idea
attached to it, is difficult to understand.
As to the other position, that we have no general ideas, but that it is
the terms only that are general and abstract, Mr. Tooke has borrowed
this piece of philosophy from Mr. Locke, who borrowed it from Hobbes.
‘Universality’ says Mr. Locke, as quoted by our author, ‘belongs not to
things, which are all of them particular in their existence. When,
therefore, we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only
creatures of our own; their general nature being nothing but the
capacity they are put into of signifying or representing many
particulars.’ I have, however, before shown how very loose, uncertain,
and wavering, Mr. Locke’s reasoning on this subject is, though I cannot
agree with Mr. Tooke that it is therefore ‘_very different from that
incomparable author’s usual method of proceeding_.’ There is one
question which may be asked with respect to this statement, which, if
fairly answered, will perhaps, decide the point in dispute: _viz._ if
there is no general nature in things, or if we have no general idea of
what they have in common or the same, how is it that we know when to
apply the same general terms to different particulars, which on this
principle will have nothing left to connect them together in the mind?
For example, take the words, _a white horse_. Now say they, it is the
terms which are general or common, but we have no general or abstract
idea corresponding to them. But if we had no general idea of _white_,
nor any general idea of _a horse_, we should have nothing more to guide
us in applying this phrase to any but the first horse, than in applying
the terms of an unknown tongue to their respective objects. For it is
the idea of something general or common between the several objects,
which can alone determine us in assigning the same name to things which,
considered as particulars, or setting aside that general nature, are
perfectly distinct and independent. Without this link in the mind, this
general perception of the qualities of things, the terms _a white horse_
could no more be applied, and would, in fact, be no more applicable to
animals of this description generally, than to any other animal. In
short, what is it that ‘puts the same common name into a capacity of
signifying many particulars,’ but that those particulars are, and are
conceived to be of the same kind? That is, general terms necessarily
imply a class of things and ideas. Language without this would be
reduced to a heap of proper names: and we should be just as much at a
loss to name any object generally, from its agreement with others, as to
know whether we should call the first man we met in the street by the
name of John or Thomas. The existence and use of general terms is alone
a sufficient proof of the power of abstraction in the human mind; nor is
it possible to give even a plausible account of language without it. But
Mr. Tooke has on all possible occasions sacrificed common sense to a
false philosophy and epigrammatic logic. In opposition to this author’s
assertion, that we have neither complex nor abstract ideas, I think it
may be proved to a demonstration that we have no others. If our ideas
were absolutely simple and individual, we could have no idea of any of
those objects which in this erring, half-thinking philosophy are called
individual, as a table or a chair, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand.
For every one of these includes a certain configuration, hardness,
colour, &c. _i.e._ ideas of different things, and received by different
senses, which must be put together by the understanding before they can
be referred to any particular thing, or form one idea. Without the
cementing power of the mind, all our ideas would be necessarily
decomposed and crumbled down into their original elements and flexional
parts. We could indeed never carry on a chain of reasoning on any
subject, for the very links of which this chain must consist, would be
ground to powder. No two of these atomic impressions could ever club
together to form even a sensible point, much less should we be able ever
to arrive at any of the larger masses, or nominal descriptions of
things. All nature, all objects, all parts of all objects would be
equally ‘without form and void.’ _The mind alone is formative_, to
borrow the expression of a celebrated German writer, or it is that alone
which by its pervading and elastic energy unfolds and expands our ideas,
that gives order and consistency to them, that assigns to every part its
proper place, and that constructs the idea of the whole. Ideas are the
offspring of the understanding, not of the senses. In other words, it is
the understanding alone that perceives relation, but every object is
made up of a bundle of relations. In short, there is no object or idea
which does not consist of a number of parts arranged in a certain
manner, but of this arrangement the parts themselves cannot be
conscious. A ‘physical consideration of the senses and the mind’ can
never therefore account for our ideas, even of sensible objects. Mr.
Locke’s own principles do indeed exclude all power of understanding from
the human mind. The manner in which Hobbes and Berkeley have explained
the nature of mathematical demonstration upon this system shows its
utter inadequacy to any of the purposes of general reasoning, and is a
plain confession of the necessity of abstract ideas. Mr. Hume considers
the principle that abstraction is not an operation of the mind, but of
language, as one of the most capital discoveries of modern philosophy,
and attributes it to Bishop Berkeley. Berkeley has however only adopted
the arguments and indeed almost the very words of Hobbes. The latter
author in the passage which has been already quoted says, ‘By this
imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter signification, we
turn the reckoning of the consequences of things imagined in the mind
into a reckoning of the consequences of appellations. For example, a man
that hath no use of speech at all, such as is born and remains perfectly
deaf and dumb, if he set before his eyes a triangle, and by it two right
angles, (such as are the corners of a square figure) he may by
meditation compare and find that the three angles of that triangle are
equal to those two right angles that stand by it. But if another
triangle be shewn him different in shape from the former, he cannot know
without a new labour, whether the three angles of that also be equal to
the same. But he that hath the use of words, when he observes that such
equality was consequent not to the length of the sides, nor to any other
particular thing in his triangle, but only to this, that the sides were
straight and the angles three, and that that was all for which he named
it a triangle, will boldly conclude universally, that such equality of
angles is in all triangles whatsoever; and register his invention in
these general terms: _Every triangle hath its three angles equal to two
right ones_. And thus the consequence found in one particular, comes to
be registered and remembered as an universal rule; and discharges our
mental reckoning of time and place, and delivers us from all labour of
the mind saving the first, and makes that which was found true _here_
and _now_ to be true _in all times_ and _places_.’—_Leviathan_, p. 14.
Bishop Berkeley gives the same view of the nature of abstract reasoning
in the introduction to his ‘Principles of Human Knowledge.’ ‘But here,’
he says, ‘it will be demanded how we can know any proposition to be true
of all particular triangles, except we have first seen it demonstrated
of the abstract idea of a triangle, which agrees equally to all. To
which I answer, that though the idea I have in view, whilst I make the
demonstration be, for instance, that of an isosceles rectangular
triangle, whose sides are of a determinate length, I may nevertheless be
certain it extends to all other rectilinear triangles of what sort or
bigness soever. And that because neither the right angle nor the
equality nor the determinate length of the sides are at all concerned in
the demonstration. ’Tis true, the diagram I have in view includes all
these particulars, but then there’s not the least mention made of them
in the proof of the proposition. It is not said the three angles are
equal to two right ones, because one of them is a right angle, or
because the sides comprehending it are of the same length; which
sufficiently shows that the right angle might have been oblique and the
sides unequal, and for all that the demonstration have held good. And
for this reason it is that I conclude that to be true of any oblique
angular or scalenon, which I had demonstrated of a particular right
angled equicrural triangle, and not because I demonstrated the
proposition of the abstract idea of a triangle.’—Page 34.
This answer does not appear to me satisfactory. It amounts to this, that
though the diagram we have in view includes a number of particular
circumstances, not applicable to other cases, yet we know the principle
to be true generally, because _there is not the least mention made of
these particulars in the proof of the proposition_.
When it is asserted that we must necessarily have the idea of a
particular size whenever we think of a man in general, all that is
intended I believe is that we must think of a particular height. This
idea it is supposed must be particular and determinate, just as we must
draw a line with a piece of chalk, or make a mark with the slider of a
measuring instrument in one place and not in another. I think it may be
shown that this view of the question is also extremely fallacious and an
inversion of the order of our ideas. The height of the individual is
thus resolved into the consideration of the lines terminating or
defining it, and the intermediate space of which it properly consists is
entirely overlooked. For let us take any given height of a man, whether
tall, short, or middle-sized, and let that height be as visible as you
please, I would ask whether the actual length to which it amounts does
not consist of a number of other lengths, as if it be a tall man, the
length will be six feet, and each of these feet will consist of as many
inches, and those inches will be again made up of decimals, and those
decimals of other subordinate and infinitesimal parts, which must be all
distinctly perceived and added together before the sum total which they
compose can be pretended to be a distinct, particular, or individual
idea. In any given visible object we have always a gross, general idea
of something extended, and never of the precise length; for this precise
length as it is thought to be is necessarily composed of a number of
lengths too many, and too minute to be separately attended to or jointly
conceived by the mind, and at last loses itself in the infinite
divisibility of matter. What sort of distinctness or individuality can
therefore be found in any visible image or object of sense, I cannot
well conceive: it seems to me like seeking for certainty in the dancing
of insects in the evening sun, or for fixedness and rest in the motions
of the sea. All particulars are nothing but generals, more or less
defined according to circumstances, but never perfectly so. The
knowledge of any finite being rests in generals, and if we think to
exclude all generality from our ideas of things, as implying a want of
perfect truth and clearness, we must be constrained to remain in utter
ignorance. Let any one try the experiment of counting a flock of sheep
driven fast by him, and he will soon find his imagination unable to keep
pace with the rapid succession of objects; and his idea of a particular
number slide into the general notion of multitude: not that because
there are more objects than he can possibly count he will think there
are none, or that the word _flock_ will present to his mind a mere name
without any idea corresponding to it. Every act of the attention, every
object we see or think of, offers a proof of the same kind.
The application of this view of the subject to explain the difference
between the synthetical and analytical faculties, between generalization
and abstraction in the proper acceptation of this last word, between
common sense or feeling and understanding or reason, demands a separate
essay.
I do not think it possible ever to arrive at the truth upon these, or to
prove the existence of general or abstract ideas, by beginning in Mr.
Locke’s method with particular ones. This faculty of abstraction or
generalization (to use the words indifferently) is indeed by most
considered as a sort of artificial refinement upon our other ideas, as
an excrescence, no ways contained in the common impressions of things,
nor scarcely necessary to the common purposes of life; and is by Mr.
Locke altogether denied to be among the faculties of brutes. It is the
ornament and top-addition of the mind of man which proceeding from
simple sensation upwards, is gradually sublimed into the abstract
notions of things: ‘so from the root springs lighter the green stalk,
from thence the leaves more airy, last the bright consummate flower.’ On
the other hand, I imagine that all our notions from first to last are,
strictly speaking, general and abstract, not absolute and particular,
and that this faculty mixes itself more or less with every act of the
mind, and in every moment of its existence.
Lastly, I conceive that the mind has not been fairly dealt with in this
and other questions of the same kind. The difficulty belonging to the
notion of abstraction or comprehension it is perhaps impossible ever to
clear up: but that is no reason why we should discard those operations
from the human mind any more than we should deny the existence of
motion, extension, or curved lines in nature, because we cannot explain
them. Matter alone seems to have the privilege of presenting
difficulties and contradictions at any time, which pass current under
the name of _facts_; but the moment any thing of this kind is observed
in the understanding, all the petulance of logicians is up in arms. The
mind is made the mark on which they vent all the modes and figures of
their impertinence; and metaphysical truth has in this respect fared
like the milk-white hind, the emblem of pure faith, in Dryden’s fable,
which
‘Has oft been chased
With Scythian shafts and many winged wounds
Aimed at her heart, was often forced to fly,
And doomed to death, though fated not to die.’
ON SELF-LOVE
The modern system of philosophy has one great advantage, which makes it
difficult to attack it with any hopes of success, namely, that it is not
founded on any of the prevailing opinions or natural feelings of
mankind. It rests upon a single principle—its boasted superiority over
all prejudice. Unsupported by facts or reason, it is by this
circumstance alone enabled to trample upon every dictate of the
understanding or feeling of the heart, as weak and vulgar prejudices. In
this alone it is secure and invulnerable. To this it owes its giant
power and dreaded name. Let the contradictions and fallacies contained
in the system be proved over and over again, still the answer is
ready:—all the objections made to it are resolved into _prejudice_.
Destitute of every other support, it staggers our faith in received
opinions by the hardihood of its assertions, and derives its claim to
implicit credence by the boldness of its defiance of all established
authority. Common sense is brought to the bar like an old offender, and
condemned without a hearing. Under the shelter of this presumption there
is no absurdity so great as not to be advanced with impunity. There is
no hypothesis, however gratuitous, however inadequate, or however
unfounded, that is not held up as the true one, if it is but contrary to
all observation and experience. The grossest credulity succeeds to the
most extravagant scepticism. From being the slaves of authority we
become the dupes of paradox. Every opinion which is so absurd as never
to have been affirmed before is converted into an undeniable truth.
Whoever dares to question it, unawed by the authority on the one hand,
and undazzled by the novelty on the other, is considered as a person of
a narrow and bigoted understanding, and as relinquishing all claim to
the exercise of his reason. We are effectually deterred from protesting
against any of these ‘wise saws and modern instances’ by the dread of
being mixed up with the vulgar, and we dare not avoid the common
feelings of humanity lest we should be ridiculed as the dupes of
self-love, or of the whining cant of moralists. There is however no
bigotry so blind as that which is founded on a supposed exemption from
all prejudice. The mind in this case identifies every opinion of its own
with reason itself: and regarding the objections made to it as
proceeding from a jaundiced and distorted view of the case, it converts
them into the strongest confirmations of the depth and comprehensiveness
of its own views. There are accordingly no people so little capable of
reasoning as those who make the loudest pretensions to it: and having
assumed the name of Philosophers, are astonished that any one should
call their title in question.
I have been led to make these observations from reading
Helvetius’s account of self-love, which is nothing but a series of
misrepresentations and assumptions of the question, and which can
only have imposed upon his readers from that tone of confidence
and alertness which men always have in attacking a received and
long-established principle, and a tacit and involuntary feeling
that boldness of opinion implies strength and independence of
mind. A few examples will show that this censure is well-founded.
‘What,’ says this author in the beginning of his view of the
question,—‘what is the human understanding? It is the assemblage
of his ideas. To what sort of understanding do we give the name of
talent? To the understanding concentrated upon a single subject;
that is to say to a large assemblage of ideas of the same kind.
‘Now if there are no innate ideas, human understanding and genius are
only acquired; and both one and the other have the following faculties
for their principles:
‘1. Physical sensibility; without which we could receive no sensations.
‘2. Memory, that is to say, the faculty of recalling the sensations
received.
‘3. The interest which we have in comparing our sensations together,
that is to say, in observing with attention the resemblances and
differences, the agreements and disagreements of several objects amongst
them. It is this interest which fixes the attention, and in minds
commonly well-organised, is the efficient cause of understanding.’
It is added in a note, ‘To judge, according to M. Rousseau, is not to
feel. The proof of his opinion is that we have a faculty or power which
enables us to compare objects. Now this power according to him cannot be
the effect of physical sensibility. But,’ continues Helvetius, ‘if
Rousseau had more profoundly considered the question, he would have
perceived that this power (or faculty of understanding) is no other than
the interest itself which we have to compare these objects, and that
this interest takes its rise in the feeling of self-love, which is the
immediate effect of physical sensibility.’ This is the author’s account
of the understanding. It is bold and decided, but it is not on that
account either more or less true. It comes to this; that the faculty or
power of understanding is owing to the use we have for such a faculty;
or that we have a power of comparing our sensations, because we have an
interest in comparing them, and that therefore this power is nothing but
the effect of physical sensibility. So that a man before he has any
understanding, feeling the want of it, supplies himself with this very
necessary faculty by an act of the will, and out of pure friendly regard
to himself. The interest or desire to fly might at this rate supply us
with a pair of wings, or an effort of curiosity might furnish us with a
new sense, or an effort of self-interest might enable a man to be in two
places at once. All these consequences might very easily follow, if we
were only satisfied to believe any extravagance of assertion, and to use
words systematically without either connexion or meaning.
The whole of this writer’s argument against the existence of a
benevolent principle in the mind is founded either on a play of words,
or an arbitrary substitution of one feeling for another. He has
confounded, and does not even seem to have been aware of the distinction
between, self-love, considered as a rational principle of action, or the
voluntary and deliberate pursuit of our own good as such, and that
immediate interest or gratification which the mind may have in the
pursuit of any object either relating to ourselves or others. He
sometimes evidently considers the former of these, that is, a
deliberating, calculating, conscious selfishness, as the only rational
principle of action, and treats all other feelings as romance and folly,
or even denies their existence; while at other times he contends that
the most disinterested generosity, patriotism, and love of fame, are
equally and in the strictest sense self-love, because the pursuit of
these objects is connected with and tends immediately and intentionally
to the gratification of the individual who has an attachment to them.
After stating the sentiment of Rousseau, that without an innate and
abstract sense of right and wrong we should not see the just man and the
true citizen consult the public good to his own prejudice, Helvetius
goes on thus:—‘No one, I reply, has ever been found to promote the
public good when it injured his own interest. The patriot who risks his
life to crown himself with glory, to gain the public esteem, and to
deliver his country from slavery, yields to the feeling which is most
agreeable to him. Why should he not place his happiness in the exercise
of virtue, in the acquisition of public respect, and in the pleasure
consequent upon this respect? For what reason, in a word, should he not
expose his life for his country, when the sailor and soldier, the one at
sea, and the other in the trenches, daily expose theirs for a shilling?
The virtuous man who seems to sacrifice his own good to that of the
public is only governed by a sentiment of noble self-interest. Why
should M. Rousseau deny here that interest is the exclusive and
universal motive of action, when he himself admits it in a thousand
places of his work?’ The author then quotes the following passage from
Rousseau’s ‘Emilius’ in support of his doctrine:—‘A man may indeed
pretend to prefer my interest to his own: however plausibly he colours
over this falsehood, I am quite sure it is one.’ But I would ask why, on
the principle just stated by Helvetius, he should not prefer another to
himself, ‘if it is agreeable to him?’ Why should he not place his
happiness in the exercise of friendship? Why should he not risk his life
for his friend, as well as the patriot for his country, or as the
soldier or sailor for a shilling a day? What is become, all of a sudden,
of that noble self-interest which identifies us with our country and our
kind? Is it quite forgot? Has it evaporated with a breath? Is there
nothing of it left? When any instances are brought, or supposed, of the
sacrifice of private interest to principle, or virtue, or passion, it is
immediately pretended that these instances are not at all inconsistent
with the grand universal principle of self-interest, which embraces all
the sentiments and affections of the human mind, even the most heroical
and disinterested. But the moment these instances are out of sight and
the evasion is no longer necessary, this expansive principle shrinks
into its own natural littleness again; and excludes all regard to the
good of others as romantic and idle folly. All those instances of virtue
which are at one moment perfectly compatible with this ‘universal
principle of action’ are the next moment said to be incompatible with
it, and the author after his little rhetorical glozings on the extensive
views and generous sacrifices of self-interest, immediately descends
into the vulgar proverb that ‘the misfortunes of others are but a
dream.’ To proceed: Helvetius says, (p. 14):
‘What we understand by goodness or the moral sense in man, is his
benevolence towards others: and this benevolence we always find in
proportion to the utility they are of to him. I prefer my
fellow-citizens to strangers, and my friend to my fellow-citizens. The
welfare of my friend is reflected upon me. If he becomes more rich and
more powerful, I partake of his riches and his power. Benevolence
towards others is nothing, then, but the effect of love to ourselves.’
The inference here stated, that benevolence is merely a reflection from
self-love, is founded on the assumption that we always feel for others
in proportion to the advantage they are of to us, and this assumption is
a false one. That the habitual or known connexion between our own
welfare and that of others, is one great source of our attachment to
them, one bond of society, is what I do not wish to deny: the question
is whether it is the only one in the mind, or whether benevolence has
not a natural basis of its own to rest upon, as well as self-love. Grant
this, and the actual effects which we observe in human life will follow
from both principles combined: but to say that our attachment to others
is in the exact ratio of our obligations to them, is contrary to all we
know of human nature. I would ask whether the affection of a mother for
her child is owing to the good received or bestowed; to the child’s
power of conferring benefits, or its standing in need of assistance? Are
not the fatigues which the mother undergoes for the child, its helpless
condition, its little vexations, its sufferings from ill health or
accidents, additional ties upon maternal tenderness, which by increasing
the attention to the wants of the child and anxiety to supply them,
produce a proportionable interest in an attachment to its welfare?
Helvetius justly observes that we prefer a friend to a stranger, but the
reason which he assigns for it, that our interests and pleasures are
more closely allied, is not the only one. We participate in the
successes of our friends, it is true, but we also participate in their
distresses and disappointments, and it is not always found that this
lessens our regard for them. Benevolence, therefore, is not a mere
physical reflection from self-love. His account of friendship agrees
exactly with that which the grave historian of Jonathan Wild has given
of the friendship between his hero and Count La Ruse: ‘Mutual interest,
the greatest of all purposes, was the cement of this alliance, which
nothing of consequence but superior interest was capable of dissolving.’
The mechanical principle of association, understood in a strict sense,
will not account for the multifarious and mixed nature of our
affections, and if we do not understand it in a strict sense, it will
then only be another name for sympathy, imagination, or any thing else.
‘What then in truth,’ proceeds this author, ‘is the natural goodness, or
moral sense, so much extolled by the English? What distinct idea can we
form of such a sense, or on what evidence found its existence? If we
allow a moral sense, why not allow an algebraical or chemical sense?
Nothing is more absurd than this theological philosophy of Shaftesbury,
and yet most of the English are as much delighted with it as the French
formerly were with their music. It is not the same with other nations.
No foreigner can understand the one or hear the other. It is a film on
the eye of the English, which it is necessary to remove in order that
they may see.
‘According to their philosophy, a man in a state of indifference sitting
in his elbow chair, desires the good of others: but in as far as he is
indifferent, man desires and can desire nothing. A state of desire and
indifference is incompatible. These philosophers repeat in vain that the
moral sense is implanted in man, and makes him at a certain time
disposed to compassionate the sufferings of his fellows. This system is
in fact nothing more than the system of innate ideas overturned by
Locke. For my part, I can form an idea of my five senses, and of the
organs which constitute them: but I confess that I have no more idea of
a moral sense than of a moral elephant and castle. The enthusiasts for
“moral beauty” are ignorant of the contempt in which these nations are
held by all those who, either in the character of statesmen, officers of
police, or men of the world, have an opportunity of knowing what human
nature is.’—Page 15.
In reply to the dogmatical question with which this passage begins—‘What
distinct idea can be given of the moral sense?’—I answer for myself, the
following very explicit one: namely, that it is the natural preference
of good to evil, arising from the conception or idea formed of them in
the understanding. Those who assert a moral sense, affirm that there is
a faculty of some sort or other inseparable from the nature of a
rational and intelligent being, that enables us to form a conception of
good and evil, or of the feelings of pleasure and pain generally
speaking, which ideas so formed have a natural tendency to excite
certain affections and actions.
Those, on the other hand, who deny a moral sense, or any thing
equivalent to it, must affirm either that we can form no idea whatever
of the feelings of others, or of good and evil generally speaking, or
that these ideas have no possible influence over the mind, except from
their connexion with physical impressions, memory, habit, self-interest,
or some other motive, quite distinct from the ideas themselves. But I
have already shown that without the co-operation of rational motives,
there could be neither habit, nor self-interest, nor voluntary action of
any kind. The moral is therefore nothing but the application of the
understanding to the feelings or ideas of good. The question,
consequently, whether there is a moral sense, is reducible to this;
whether the mind can understand or conceive, or be affected by any thing
beyond its own physical or mechanical feelings. If it can, then there is
something in man besides his five senses and the organs which compose
them, for these can give him no thought, conception, or sympathy with
any thing beyond himself, or even with himself beyond the present
moment. The actions, and events, and feelings of human life, the
passions and pursuits of men, could no more go on without the
interference of the understanding than without an original principle of
physical sensibility. Neither the one nor the other explains the whole
economy of our moral nature, but that is no reason why both are not
essential and integrant parts of it. The five senses and the organs
which compose them will not account for the science of morality, let it
be as imperfect as it may, any more than for the science of algebra or
chemistry in the different degrees in which they are possessed by
different men. The point is not whether reason is furnishing us with a
perfect and infallible rule of action, absolute over any other motive or
passion, but whether it is any rule at all, whether it has any possible
influence over our moral feelings. According to Helvetius, the moral
sense is either a word without meaning, or it must signify one of our
five senses: that is, impressions not actually affecting one or other of
these are to him absolutely nothing. It is strange that after this he
should propose to take the film from the eyes of those who ridiculously
fancy that they have other ideas. It is as if a blind man should
undertake to undeceive those who can see, with respect to certain
chemical notions, called objects of sight. In confirmation of his
theory, he refers the romantic admirers of moral beauty to the opinion
of certain classes and professions of men, whose visual ray has been
purged, and who, it should seem, possess a sort of second sight into
human nature, namely, ministers of state, officers of police, and men of
business. Either this argument is a satire on these characters, or on
the understanding of his readers. If these respectable, and, I dare say,
very well-meaning persons, are by the narrowness of their occupations
and views, precluded from any general knowledge of human nature, or the
virtues of the human heart, it is an uncivil irony to propose them as
consummate judges of the abstract nature of man. If, on the other hand,
in spite of their employment, they retain the same notions and
liberality of feeling as other men, there is no reason to suppose that
they would subscribe to the sentiment of our author, that morality ‘is
an affair of the five senses:’ a proposition which any minister of
state, or police officer, or man of the world, possessed of the least
common sense, would treat with as much contempt and incredulity as
Shaftesbury or Hutcheson. Our author’s observation, that the notion of a
moral sense or natural disposition to sympathise with others, is only
the doctrine of innate ideas in disguise, is another misconception of
the nature of the question. The actual feeling of compassion is not, as
he says, innate; but this no more proves that the disposition to
compassion or benevolence is not innate, than the fact that the ideas or
feelings of pleasure and pain are not innate and born with us, proves
that physical sensibility is not an original faculty of the mind. Moral
sensibility, or the capacity of being affected by the ideas of certain
objects, is as much a part of our nature as physical sensibility, or the
capacity of being affected in a certain manner by the objects
themselves. Helvetius says, physical sensibility is the only quality
essential to the nature of man: I answer, that physical sensibility is
_not_ the only quality essential to the nature of man. To show how
senseless and insignificant is this kind of reasoning, I will refer back
to Helvetius’s concise profession of his metaphysical faith, which is
that he can form an idea of the five senses and of the organs of them,
but of nothing else. Now, I may ask, how he comes by this _idea_? Which
of his senses or which of the organs of them is it that gives him an
idea of the other four? Has the eye an action of words, or the ear of
colours, or either of the impressions of taste, smell, or feeling? Which
of them is the common sense? or if none, must we not suppose some
superintending faculty to which all the other impressions are subject,
and which alone can give him an idea of his own senses or their organs?
Another instance of the utter want of logical and consecutive reasoning
which characterizes the French philosophers, might be given in their
singular proof of the selfishness of the human mind from the
incompatibility of a state of desire and a state of indifference. The
English philosophers are charged with representing a man in a state of
indifference, ‘seated in his arm-chair,’ as desiring the good of others.
This arm-chair it should seem, no less than his state of indifference,
presents certain insurmountable barriers to his desires, which they
cannot pass so as to affect him with the slightest concern for any thing
beyond it. So far as a man is indifferent to every thing, he cannot it
is true desire any thing. All that follows from this is, that so far as
he desires the good of others he is not in a state of indifference.
That a man cannot desire an object and not desire it at the same time
requires no proof. But what ought to have been proved, and what was
meant to be so, is that a man in a state of indifference to the welfare
of others on his own account, cannot desire it for their sake, and this
is what is not proved by the truism mentioned. The general maxim, that I
cannot desire any object as long as I am indifferent to it, cannot be
made to show that self-interest is the only motive that can make me pass
from the one state into the other. By indifference, as used by the
writers here ridiculed, in a popular sense, is evidently meant the want
of personal or physical interest in any object, and to say that this
necessarily implies the want of every other kind of interest in it, of
all rational desire of the good of others, is a meagre assumption of the
point in dispute. It is strange that these pretenders to philosophy
choose to insult the English writers for daring to wear the plain,
homely, useful, national garb of philosophy, while their most glossy and
most fashionable suits are made up of the shreds and patches stolen from
our countryman Hobbes, disguised with a few spangles, tinselled lace,
and tagged points of their own.
Helvetius’s paraphrase of Hobbes’s maxim, that ‘pity is only another
name for self-love,’ is as follows:
‘What then do I feel in the presence of an object of compassion? A
strong emotion. What causes this emotion? The recollection of the
sufferings to which man is subject, and to which I am myself liable.
It is this consideration that disturbs, that torments me, and so long
as the unfortunate sufferer continues in my presence I am affected
with melancholy sensations. Have I relieved him,—do I no longer see
him? A calm is insensibly restored to my breast, because in proportion
to the distance to which he is removed, the remembrance of the evils
which his sight recalled is gradually effaced. When I was concerned
for him, then, I was concerned only for myself. What are, in fact, the
sufferings which I compassionate the most? They are those not only
which I have felt myself, but those which I may still feel. Those
evils the more present to my memory impress me more strongly. My
sympathy with the sufferings of another is always in exact proportion
to my fear of being exposed to the same sufferings myself. I would
willingly, if it were possible, destroy the very germ of my own
sufferings in him, and thus be released from the apprehension of the
like evils to myself in time to come. The love of others is never any
thing more in the human mind than the effect of love to ourselves, and
consequently of our physical sensibility.’—Vol. ii. page 20.
To this I answer as follows:—What do I feel in the presence of an object
of compassion? A strong emotion. What causes this emotion? Not,
certainly, the general recollection of the sufferings to which man in
general is subject, or to which I myself may be exposed. It is not this
remote and accidental reflection, which has no particular reference to
the object before me, but a strong sense of the sufferings of the
particular person, excited by his immediate presence, which affects me
with compassion, and impels me to his relief. The relief I afford him,
or the absence of the object, lessens my uneasiness, either by the
contemplation of the diminution of his sufferings, to which I have
contributed, or by diverting my mind from the consideration of his
sufferings. Neither the relief afforded, nor the absence of the object
could produce this effect, if the strong emotion which I experience did
not relate to the particular object. It is the fate of the individual,
and of him only, which I am contemplating, and my sympathy accordingly
rises and falls with it, or as my attention is more or less fixed upon
it. A total alteration in the situation of the individual produces a
total change in my feelings with respect to him, which could not be the
case, if my compassion depended wholly on my sense of my own security,
or the general condition of human nature. In feeling compassion for
another, therefore, it was not for myself that I was concerned, but for
the sufferer: my feelings were, in a manner, bound up with his, and I
forgot for the moment both myself and others. But do I not compassionate
most those evils which I have felt myself? Yes; because from my own
knowledge of them I have a more lively sense of what others must suffer
from them: just in the same manner I dread those evils most with respect
to myself in time to come. For those evils which I have not experienced,
I feel, for that reason, less sympathy in respect to others, and less
dread with reference to myself in time to come. Neither do I always feel
for others in proportion as I dread the same feelings myself. The memory
of my past sufferings cannot excite my disposition to relieve those of
others, and the imaginary apprehension of my own _future_ sufferings can
only tend to produce voluntary action on the same principle as my
imagination of those or others. I do not wish to prevent their
sufferings as the germ or cause of mine, but because they are of the
same nature as mine. Benevolence, therefore, is not the effect of self
love, though it is the effect of our physical sensibility, combined with
our other faculties. I will in this place insert the reply of Bishop
Butler (a true philosopher) to the same argument in Hobbes, in a note to
one of his sermons.
‘If any person can in earnest doubt whether there be such a thing as
good-will in one man towards another (for the question is not concerning
either the degree or extensiveness of it, but concerning the affection
itself,) let it be observed, that _whether man be thus or otherwise
constituted, what is the inward frame in this particular_ is a mere
question of fact or natural history, not proveable immediately by
reason. It is therefore to be judged of and determined in the same way
other facts or historical matters are; by appealing to the external
senses, or inward perceptions, respectively, as the matter under
consideration is cognizable by one or the other; by arguing from
acknowledged facts and actions, inquiring whether these do not suppose
and prove the matter in question so far as it is capable of proof. And,
lastly, by the testimony of mankind. Now that there is some degree of
benevolence amongst men, may be as strongly and plainly proved in all
these ways, as it could possibly be proved, supposing there was this
affection in our nature. And should any one think fit to assert, that
resentment in the mind of man was absolutely nothing but reasonable
concern for our own safety, the falsity of this, and what is the real
nature of that passion, could be shown in no other ways than those in
which it may be shown, that there is such a thing in _some degree_ as
_real_ good-will in man towards man.
‘There being manifestly this appearance of men’s substituting others for
themselves, and being carried out and affected towards them as towards
themselves; some persons, who have a system which excludes every
affection of this sort, have taken a pleasant method to solve it; and
tell you it is _not another_ you are at all concerned about, but your
_self only_, when you feel the affection called compassion; _i.e._ there
is a plain matter of fact, which men cannot reconcile with the general
account they think fit to give of things; they therefore, instead of
_that_ manifest fact, substitute _another_, which is reconcilable to
their own scheme. For does not every body by compassion mean an
affection the object of which is another in distress? Instead of this,
but designing to have it mistaken for this, they speak of an affection
or passion, the object of which is ourselves, or danger to ourselves.
Suppose a person to be in real danger, and by some means or other to
have forgot it; any trifling accident, any sound might alarm him, recall
the danger to his remembrance, and renew his fears: but it is almost too
grossly ridiculous (though it is to show an absurdity) to speak of that
sound or accident as an object of compassion; and yet, according to Mr.
Hobbes, our greatest friend in distress is no more to us, no more the
object of compassion or of any affection in our heart. Neither the one
nor the other raises any emotion in our mind, but only the thoughts of
our liableness to calamity, and the fear of it: and both equally do
this.
‘There are often three distinct perceptions or inward feelings upon
sight of persons in distress: real sorrow and concern for the misery of
our fellow-creatures; some degree of satisfaction from a consciousness
of our freedom from that misery; and, as the mind passes on from one
thing to another, it is not unnatural from such an occasion to reflect
upon our own liableness to the same or other calamities. The two last
frequently accompany the first, but it is the first _only_ which is
properly compassion, of which the distressed are the object, and which
directly carries us with calmness and thought to their assistance. Any
one of these, from various and complicated reasons, may in particular
cases prevail over the other two; and there are, I suppose, instances
where the bare _sight_ of distress, without our feeling any compassion
for it, may be the occasion of either or both of the two latter.’
I shall proceed to examine the objection to the doctrine of benevolence,
on the supposition that our sympathy when it exists is really a part of
our interest. This objection was long ago stated by Hobbes,
Rochefoucault, and Mandeville, and has been adopted and glossed over by
Helvetius. It is pretended, then, that in wishing to relieve the
distresses of others we only desire to remove the uneasiness which pity
creates in our mind; that all our actions are unavoidably selfish, as
they all arise from the feeling of pleasure or pain existing in the mind
of the individual, and that whether we intend our own good or that of
others, the immediate gratification connected with the idea of any
object is the sole motive which determines us to the pursuit of it.
First, this objection does not at all affect the main question in
dispute. For if it is allowed that the idea of the pleasures or pains of
others excites an immediate interest in the mind, if we feel sorrow and
anxiety for their imaginary distresses exactly in the same way that we
do for our own, and are impelled to action by the same principle,
whether the action has for its object our own good, or that of others;
in a word, if we sympathise with others as we do with ourselves, the
nature of man as a voluntary agent must be the same, whether we choose
to call this principle self-love, or benevolence, or whatever
refinements we may introduce into our manner of explaining it. The
relation of man to himself and others as a moral agent is plainly
determined, whether a rational pursuit of his own future welfare and
that of others is the real or only the ostensible motive of his actions.
Were it not that our feelings are so strongly attached to names, the
rest would be a question more of speculative curiosity than practice.
All that, commonly speaking, is meant by the most disinterested
benevolence is this immediate sympathy with the feelings of others, as
by self-love is meant the same kind of attachment to our own future
interests. For if by self-love we understand any thing beyond the
impulse of the present moment, any thing different from inclination, let
the object be what it will, this can no more be a mechanical thing than
the most refined and comprehensive benevolence. Self-love, used in the
sense which the above objection implies, must therefore mean some thing
very different from an exclusive principle of deliberate, calculating
selfishness, rendering us indifferent to every thing but our own
advantage, or from the love of physical pleasure or aversion to physical
pain, which could produce no interest in any but sensible impressions.
In a word, it expresses merely any inclination of the mind be it to what
it will, and does not at all determine or limit the object of pursuit.
Supposing, therefore, that our most generous feelings and actions were
so far equivocal, the object only bearing a show of disinterestedness,
the secret motive being always selfish, this would be no reason for
rejecting the common use of the term _disinterested benevolence_, which
expresses nothing more than an immediate reference of our actions to the
good of others, as self-love expresses a conscious reference of them to
our own good as means to an end. This is the proper meaning of the
terms. If we denominate our actions not from the object in view, but
from the inclination of the individual, there will be an end at once,
both of ‘selfishness’ and ‘benevolence.’
But farther, I deny that there is any foundation for the objection
itself, or any reason for resolving the feelings of compassion or our
voluntary motives in general into a principle of mechanical self-love.
That the motive to action exists in the mind of the person who acts, is
what no one can deny, or I suppose ever meant to deny. The passion
excited and the impression producing it must necessarily affect the
individual. There must always be some one to feel and act, or there
could evidently be no such thing as feeling or action. If therefore it
had ever been implied as a condition in the love of others, that this
love should not be felt by the person who loves them, this would be to
say that he must love them and not love them at the same time, which is
too palpable an absurdity to be thought of for a moment. It could never,
I say, be imagined that in order to feel for others, we must in reality
feel nothing, or that benevolence, to exist at all, must exist no where.
This kind of reasoning is therefore the most arrant trifling. To call my
motives or feelings selfish, because they are felt by myself, is an
abuse of all language: it might just as well be said that my idea of the
monument is a selfish idea, or an idea of myself, because it is I who
perceive it. By a selfish feeling must be meant, therefore, a feeling,
not which belongs to myself (for that all feelings do, as is understood
by every one) but which _relates_ to myself, and in this sense
benevolence is not a selfish feeling. It is the individual who feels
both for himself and others; but by self-love is meant that he feels
only for himself; for it is presumed that the word _self_ has some
meaning in it, and it would have absolutely none at all, if nothing more
were intended by it than any object or impression existing in the mind.
It therefore becomes necessary to set limits to the meaning of the
terms. If we except the burlesque interpretation of the word just
noticed, self-love can mean only one of these three things. 1. The
conscious pursuit of our own good as such; 2. The love of physical
pleasure and aversion to physical pain; 3. The gratification derived
from our sympathy with others. If all our actions do not proceed from
one of these three principles, they are all resolvable into self-love.
First, then, self-love may properly signify, as already explained, the
love or affection excited by the idea of our own interest, and the
conscious pursuit of it as a general, remote, ideal object. In this
sense, that is, considered with respect to the proposed end of our
actions, I have shown sufficiently that there is no exclusive principle
of self-love in the human mind which constantly impels us, as a set
purpose, to pursue our own advantage and nothing but that.
Secondly, any being would be strictly a selfish agent, all whose
impulses were excited by mere physical pleasure or pain, and who had no
sense or imagination, or anxiety about any thing but its own bodily
feelings. Such a being could have no idea beyond its actual, momentary
existence, and would be equally incapable of rational self-love or
benevolence. But it is allowed on all hands that the wants and desires
of the human mind are not confined within the limits of his bodily
sensations.
Thirdly, it is said that though man is not merely a physical agent, but
is naturally capable of being influenced by imagination and sympathy,
yet that this does not prove him to be possessed of any degree of
disinterestedness or real good-will to others; since he pursues the good
of others only from its contributing to his own gratification; that is,
not for their sakes, but for his own, which is still selfishness. That
is, the indulgence of certain affections necessarily tends, without our
thinking of it, to our own immediate gratification, and the impulse to
prolong a state of pleasurable feeling and put a stop to whatever gives
the mind the least uneasiness, is the real spring and over-ruling
principle of our actions. If our benevolence and sympathy with others
arose out of and was entirely regulated by this principle of
self-gratification, then these might indeed be with justice regarded as
the ostensible accidental motives of our actions, as the form or vehicle
which served only to transmit the efficacy of any other hidden
principle, as the mask and cover of selfishness. But the supposition
itself is the absurdest that can well be conceived. Self-love and
sympathy are inconsistent. The instant we no longer suppose man to be a
physical agent, and allow him to have ideas of things out of himself and
to be influenced by them, that is, to be endued with sympathy at all, he
must necessarily cease to be a merely selfish agent. The instant he is
supposed to conceive and to be affected by the ideas of other things, he
cannot be wholly governed by what relates to himself. The terms
‘selfish’ and ‘natural agent’ are a contradiction. For the one
expression implies that the mind is actuated solely by the impulse of
self-love, and the other that it is in the power and under the control
of other motives. If our sympathy with others does not always originate
in the pleasure with which it is accompanied to ourselves, or does not
cease the moment it becomes troublesome to us, then man is not entirely
and necessarily the creature of self-love. He is under another law and
another necessity, and in spite of himself is forced out of the direct
line of his own interest, both future and present, by other principles
inseparable from his nature as an intelligent being. Our sympathy
therefore is not the servile, ready tool of our self-love, but this
latter principle is itself subservient to and over-ruled by the former;
that is, an attachment to others is a real independent principle of
human action. What I wish to state is this: that the mind neither
constantly aims at nor tends to its own individual interest. That in
benevolence, compassion, friendship, &c. the mind does aim at its good,
is what every one must acknowledge. The only sense then in which our
sympathy with others can be construed into self-love, must be that the
mind is so constituted that without forethought or any reflection in
itself, or when seeming most occupied with others, it is still governed
by the same universal feeling of which it is wholly unconscious; and
that we indulge in compassion, &c. only because and in as far as it
coincides with our own immediate gratification. If it could be shown
that the current of our desires always runs the same way, either with or
without knowledge, I should confess that this would be a strong
presumption of what has been called the falsity of human virtue. But it
is not true that such is the natural disposition of the mind. It is not
so constructed as to receive no impressions but those which gratify its
desire of happiness, or to throw off every the least uneasiness relating
to others, like oil from water. It is not true that the feelings of
others have no natural hold upon the mind but by their connexion with
self-interest. Nothing can be more evident than that we do not on any
occasion blindly consult the interest of the moment; there is no
instinctive unerring bias to our own good, which in the midst of
contrary motives and doubtful appearances, puts aside all other impulses
and guides them but to its own purposes. It is against all experience to
say that in giving way to the feelings of sympathy, any more than to
those of rational self-interest (for the argument is the same in both
cases), I always yield to that impulse which is accompanied with most
pleasure at the time. It is true that I yield to the strongest impulse,
but not that my strongest impulse is to pleasure. The idea, for
instance, of the relief I may afford to a person in extreme distress, is
not necessarily accompanied by a correspondent degree of pleasurable
sensation to counterbalance the painful sensation his immediate distress
occasions in my mind. It is certain that sometimes the one and sometimes
the other may prevail without altering my purpose in the least. I am led
to persevere in it by the idea of what are the sufferings, and that it
is in my power to alleviate them: though that idea is not always the
most agreeable contemplation I could have. Those who voluntarily perform
the most painful duties of friendship or humanity do not do them from
the immediate gratification arising therefrom; it is as easy to turn
away from a beggar as to relieve him; and if the mind were not actuated
by a sense of truth, and of the real consequences of its actions, we
should uniformly listen to the distresses of others with the same sort
of feeling as we go to see a tragedy, only because we calculate that the
pleasure is greater than the pain. But I appeal to every one whether
this is a true account of human nature. There is indeed a false and
bastard kind of feeling commonly called sensibility, which is governed
altogether by this reaction of pity on our own minds, and which instead
of disproving only serves more strongly to distinguish the true. Upon
the theory here stated the mind is supposed to be imperceptibly attached
to or to fly from every idea or impression simply as it affects it with
pleasure or pain: all other impulses are carried into effect or remain
powerless according as they touch this great spring of human affection,
which determines every other movement and operation of the mind. Why
then do we not reject at first every tendency to what may give us pain?
Why do we sympathise with the distresses of others at all?
‘The jealous God at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.’
Why does not our self-love in like manner, if it is so perfectly
indifferent and unconcerned a principle as it is represented,
immediately disentangle itself from every feeling or idea which it finds
becoming painful to it? It should seem we are first impelled by
self-love to feel uneasiness at another’s sufferings, in order that the
same principle of tender concern for ourselves may afterwards impel us
to get rid of that uneasiness by endeavouring to remove the suffering
which is the cause of it. In desiring to relieve the distress of
another, it is pretended that our only wish is to remove the uneasiness
it occasions us: do we also feel this uneasiness in the first instance
for the same reason, or from regard to ourselves! It is absurd to say
that in compassionating others I am only occupied with my own pain or
uneasiness, since this very uneasiness arises from my compassion. It is
to take the effect for the cause. One half of the process, namely, our
connecting the sense of pain with the idea of it, has evidently nothing
to do with self-love: nor do I see any more reason for ascribing the
active impulse which follows to this principle, since it does not tend
to remove the idea of the object as it gives _me_ pain, or as it
actually affects _myself_, but as it is supposed to affect another.
Self, mere positive self, is entirely forgotten, both practically and
consciously. The effort of the mind is not to remove the idea or the
immediate feeling of pain as an abstract impression of the individual,
but as it represents the pain which another feels, and is connected with
the idea of another’s pain. So long then as this imaginary idea of what
another feels excites my sympathy with him, as it fixes my attention on
his sufferings, however painful, as it impels me to his relief, and to
employ the necessary means for that purpose, at the expense of my ease
and satisfaction, that is, so long as I am interested for others, it is
not true that my only concern is for myself, or that I am governed
solely by the principles of self-interest. Abstract our sympathy as it
were from itself, and resolve it into another principle, and it will no
longer produce the effects which we constantly see it produce wherever
it exists. Let us suppose, for a moment, that the sensations of others
were embodied by some means or other with our own, that we felt for them
exactly as for ourselves, would not this give us a real sympathy in
them, and extend our interest and identity beyond ourselves? Would the
motives and principles by which we are actuated be the same as before?
But the imagination, though not in the same degree, produces the same
effects: it modifies and overrules the impulses of self-love, and binds
us to the interests of others as to our own. If the imagination gives us
an artificial interest in the welfare of others, if it determines my
feelings and actions, and if it even for a moment draws them off from
the pursuit of an abstract principle of self-interest, then it cannot be
maintained that self-love and benevolence are the same. The motives that
give birth to our social affections are by means of the understanding as
much regulated by the feelings of others as if we had a real
communication and sympathy with them, and are swayed by an impulse
altogether foreign to self-love. If it should be said, that after all we
are as selfish as we can be, and that the modifications and restrictions
of the principle of self-love are only a necessary consequence of the
nature of a thinking being, I answer, that this is the very point I wish
to establish; or that it is downright nonsense to talk of a principle of
entire selfishness in connexion with a power of reflection, that is,
with a mind capable of perceiving the consequences of things beyond
itself, and of being affected by them.
Should any desperate metaphysician persist in affirming that my love of
others is still the love of myself, because the impression exciting my
sympathy must exist in my mind, and so be a part of myself, I would
answer that this is using words without affixing any distinct meaning to
them. The love or affection excited by any general idea existing in my
mind, can no more be said to be the love of myself, than the idea of
another person is the idea of myself, because it is I who perceive it.
This method of reasoning, however, will not go a great way to prove the
doctrine of an abstract principle of self-interest; for, by the same
rule, it would follow that in hating another person I hate myself.
Indeed, upon this principle, the whole structure of language is a
continued absurdity. It is pretended by a violent assumption, that
benevolence is only a desire to prolong the idea of another’s pleasure
in one’s own mind, because the idea exists there: malevolence must,
therefore, be a disposition to prolong the idea of pain in one’s own
mind for the same reason, that is, to injure oneself, for by this
philosophy no one can have a single idea which does not refer to, nor
any impulse which does not originate in, self. But the love of others
cannot be built on the love of self, considering this last as the effect
of ‘physical sensibility;’ and the moment we resolve self-love into the
rational pursuit of a remote object, it has been shown that the same
reasoning applies to both, and that the love of others has the same
necessary foundation in the human mind as the love of ourselves.
I have endeavoured to prove that there is no real, physical, or
essential difference between the motives by which we are naturally
impelled to the pursuit of our own welfare and that of others. The truth
of this paradox, great as it seems, may be brought to a very fair test:
namely, the being able to demonstrate that the doctrine of
self-interest, as it is commonly understood, is in the nature of things
an absolute impossibility; and, the being able to account for that
hypothesis,—that is, for the common feeling and motives of men from
habits, and a confused association of ideas aided by the use of
language. If others cannot answer my reasons, and if I can account for
their prejudices, I should not be justified in hastily relinquishing my
opinion, merely on account of its singularity. It may not be improper
briefly to recapitulate the former argument as far as it proceeded. I am
far from denying that there is a difference between real or physical
impulses and ideal motives, but I contend that this distinction is quite
beside the present purpose. For self-love properly relates to action,
and all action relates to the future, and all future objects are ideal,
and the interest we take in all such objects, and the motives to the
pursuit of them are ideal too. The distinction between self-love and
benevolence, therefore, as separate principles of action, cannot be
founded on the difference between real and imaginary objects, between
physical and rational motives, inasmuch as the motives and objects of
the one and the other are equally ideal things. Whether we voluntarily
pursue our own good or that of another, we must inevitably pursue that
which is at a distance from us, something out of ourselves, abstracted
from the being that acts and wills, and that is incompatible always with
our present sensation or physical existence. Self-love, therefore, as
the actuating principle of the mind, must imply the efficacy and
operation of the imagination of the remote ideas of things, as connected
with voluntary action, and the most refined benevolence, the greatest
sacrifices of natural affection, of sincerity, of friendship, or
humanity, can imply nothing more. The notion of the necessity of actual
objects or impressions as the motives to action could not so easily have
gained ground as an article of philosophical faith, but from a perverse
distinction of the use of the idea to abstract definitions or external
forms, having no reference to the feelings or passions; and again from
associating the word _imagination_ with merely fictitious situations and
events such as never have a real existence, and which consequently do
not admit of action. If then self-love, even the most gross and
palpable, can only subsist in a rational and intellectual nature, not
circumscribed within the narrow limits of animal life, or of the
ignorant present time, but capable of giving life and interest to the
forms of its own creatures, to the unreal mockeries of future things, to
that shadow of itself which the imagination sends before; is it not the
height of absurdity to stop here, and poorly and pitifully to suppose
that this pervading power must bow down and worship this idol of its own
making, and become its blind and servile drudge, and that it cannot
extend its creatures as widely around it, as it projects them forward,
that it cannot breathe into all other forms the breath of life, and
endow even sympathy with vital warmth, and diffuse the soul of morality
through all the relations and sentiments of human life? Take away the
real, physical, mechanical principle of self-interest, and it will have
no basis to rest upon, but that which it has in common with every
principle of natural justice or humanity. That there is no real,
physical, or mechanical principle of selfishness in the mind, has been
abundantly proved. All that remains is, to show how the continued
identity of the individual with himself has given rise to the notion of
self-interest, which after what has been premised will not be a very
difficult task. What I shall attempt to show will be, that individuality
expresses not either absolute unity or real identity, but properly such
a particular relation between a number of things as produces an
immediate or continued connexion between them, and a correspondent
marked separation between them and other things. Now, in coexisting
things, one part may by means of this communication mutually act and be
acted upon by others, but where the connexion is continued, or in
successive identity of the individual, though what follows may depend
intimately on what has gone before, that is, be acted upon by it, it
cannot react upon it; that is, the identity of the individual with
itself can only relate practically to its connexion with its past, and
not with its future self.
Every human being is distinguished from every other human being both
numerically and characteristically. He must be numerically distinct by
the supposition, or he would not be another individual, but the same.
There is, however, no contradiction in supposing two individuals to
possess the same absolute properties: but then these original properties
must be differently modified afterwards from the necessary difference of
their situations, unless we conceive them both to occupy the same
relative situation in two distinct systems, corresponding exactly with
each other. In fact, every one is found to differ essentially from every
one else; if not in original qualities, in the circumstances and events
of their lives, and consequently in their ideas and characters. In
thinking of a number of individuals, I conceive of them all as differing
in various ways from one another as well as from myself. They differ in
size, in complexion, in features, in the expression of their
countenances, in age, in occupation, in manners, in knowledge, in
temper, in power. It is this perception or apprehension of their real
differences that first enables me to distinguish the several individuals
of the species from each other, and that seems to give rise to the most
obvious idea of individuality, as representing, first, positive number,
and, secondly, the sum of the differences between one being and another,
as they really exist, in a greater or less degree in nature, or as they
would appear to exist to an impartial spectator, or to a perfectly
intelligent mind. But _I_ am not in reality more different from others
than any one individual is from any other individual, neither do I in
fact suppose myself to differ really from them otherwise than as they
differ from each other. What is it then that makes the difference seem
greater _to me_, or that makes me feel a greater change in passing from
my own idea to that of another person, than in passing from the idea of
another person to that of any one else? Neither my existing as a
separate being, nor my differing from others, is of itself sufficient to
account for the idea of self, since I might equally perceive others to
exist and compare their actual differences without ever having this
idea.
Farther, individuality is sometimes used to express not so much the
absolute difference or distinction between one individual and another,
as a relation or comparison of that individual with itself, whereby we
tacitly affirm that it is in some way or other the same with itself, or
one idea. Now in one sense it is true of all existences whatever that
they are literally the same with themselves; that is, they are what they
are, and not something else. Each thing is itself, is that individual
thing, and no other; and each combination of things is that combination,
and no other. So also each individual conscious being is necessarily the
same with himself; or in other words, that combination of ideas which
represents any individual person is that combination of ideas, and not a
different one. This literal and verbal is the only true and absolute
identity which can be affirmed of any individual; which, it is plain,
does not arise from a comparison of the different parts or successive
impressions composing the general idea one with another, but each with
itself or all of them taken together with the whole. I cannot help
thinking that some idea of this kind is frequently at the bottom of the
perplexity which is felt by most people who are not metaphysicians (not
to mention those who are), when they are told that man is not always the
same with himself, their notion of identity being that he must always be
what he is. He is the same with himself, in as far as he is not another.
When they say that the man is the same being in general, they do not
really mean that he is the same at twenty that he is at sixty, but their
general idea of him includes both these extremes, and therefore the same
man, that is, the same collective idea, is both the one and the other.
This however is but a rude logic. Not well understanding the process of
distinguishing the same individual into different metaphysical sections,
to compare, collate, and set one against the other (so awkwardly do we
at first apply ourselves to the analytical art), to get rid of the
difficulty the mind produces a double individual, part real and part
imaginary, or repeats the same idea twice over; in which case it is a
contradiction to suppose that the one does not correspond exactly with
the other in all its parts. There is no other absolute identity in the
case. All individuals (or all that we name such) are aggregates, and
aggregates of dissimilar things. Here, then, the question is not how we
distinguish one individual from another, or a number of things from a
number of other things, which distinction is a matter of absolute truth,
but how we come to confound a number of things together, and consider
many things as the same, which cannot be strictly true. This idea must
then merely relate to such a connexion between a number of things as
determines the mind to consider them as one whole, each part having a
much nearer and more lasting connexion with the rest than with any thing
else not included in the same collective idea. (It is obvious that the
want of this close affinity and intimate connexion between any number of
things is what so far produces a correspondent distinction and
separation between one individual and another.) The eye is not the same
thing as the ear; it is a contradiction to call it so. Yet both are
parts of the same body, which contains these and infinite other
distinctions. The reason of this is, that all the parts of the eye have
evidently a distinct nature, a separate use, a greater mutual dependence
on one another than on those of the ear; at the same time that there is
a considerable connexion between the eye and the ear, as parts of the
same body and organs of the same mind. Similarity is in general but a
subordinate circumstance in determining this relation. For the eye is
certainly more like the same organ in another individual, than the
different organs of sight and hearing are like one another in the same
individual. Yet we do not, in making up the imaginary individual,
associate our ideas according to this analogy, which would answer no
more purpose than the things themselves would, so separated and so
united; but we think of them in that order in which they are
mechanically connected together in nature, and in which alone they can
serve to any practical purpose. However, it seems hardly possible to
define the different degrees or kinds of identity in the same thing by
any general rule. The nature of the thing will best point out the sense
in which it is to be the same. Individuality may relate either to
absolute unity, to the identity or similarity of the parts of any thing,
or to an extraordinary degree of connexion between things neither the
same, nor similar. This last sense principally determines the positive
use of the word, at least with respect to man and other organized
beings. Indeed, the term is hardly ever applied in common language to
other things.
To insist on the first circumstance, namely, absolute unity, as
essential to individuality, would be to destroy all individuality; for
it would lead to the supposition of as many distinct individuals as
there are thoughts, feelings, actions, and properties in the same being.
Each thought would be a separate consciousness, each organ a different
system. Each thought is a distinct thing in nature; but the individual
is composed of numberless thoughts and various faculties, and
contradictory passions, and mixed habits, all curiously woven, and
blended together in the same conscious being.
But to proceed to a more particular account of the origin of the idea of
self, which is the connexion of a being with itself. This can only be
known in the first instance from reflecting on what passes in our own
minds. I should say that individuality in this sense does not arise
either from the absolute simplicity of the mind, or from its identity
with itself, or from its diversity from other minds, which are not in
the least necessary to it, but from the peculiar and intimate connection
which subsists between the several faculties and perceptions of the same
thinking being constituted as man is; so that, as the subject of his own
reflection or consciousness, the same things impressed on any of his
faculties produce a quite different effect upon him from what they would
do, if they were impressed in the same way on any other being. The sense
of personality seems then to depend entirely on the particular
consciousness which the mind has of its own operations, sensations, or
ideas. Self is nothing but the limits of the mind’s consciousness; as
far as that reaches it extends, and where that can go no further, it
ceases. The mind is one, from the confined sphere in which it acts; or
because it is not all things. It is nearer and more present to itself
than to other minds. What passes within it, what acts upon it
immediately from without, of this it cannot help being conscious; and
this consciousness is continued in it afterwards, more or less
perfectly. All that does not come within this sphere of personal
consciousness, all that has never come within it, is equally without the
verge of self; for that word relates solely to the difference of the
manner, or the different degrees of force and certainty with which, from
the imperfect and limited nature of our faculties, certain things affect
us as they act immediately upon ourselves, and are supposed to act upon
others. Hence it is evident that personality itself cannot extend to
futurity; for the whole of this idea depends on the peculiar force and
directness with which certain impulses act upon the mind. It is by
comparing the knowledge I have of my own impressions, ideas, feelings,
powers, &c. with my knowledge of the same or similar impressions, ideas,
&c. in others, and with this still more imperfect conception that I form
of what passes in their minds when this is supposed to be entirely
different from what passes in my own, that I acquire the general notion
of self. If I could form no idea of any thing passing in the minds of
others, or if my ideas of their thoughts and feelings were perfect
representations, _i.e._ mere conscious repetitions of them, all personal
distinction would be lost either in pure sensation or in perfect
universal sympathy. In the one case it would be impossible for me to
prefer myself to others, as I should be the sole object of my own
consciousness; and in the other case I must love all others as myself,
because I should then be nothing more than a part of a whole, of which
all others would be equally members with myself. This distinction,
however, subsists as necessarily and completely between myself and those
who most nearly resemble me, as between myself and those whose
characters and properties are the very opposite to mine. Indeed, the
distinction itself becomes marked and intelligible in proportion as the
objects or impressions themselves are intrinsically the same, as then it
is impossible to mistake the true principle on which it is founded,
namely, the want of any direct communication between the feelings of one
being and those of another. This will shew why the difference between
ourselves and others appears greater to us than that between other
individuals, though it is not really so.
Considering mankind in this twofold relation, as they are to themselves,
or as they appear to one another, as the subjects of their own thoughts,
or the thoughts of others, we shall find the origin of that wide and
absolute distinction which the mind feels in comparing itself with
others, to be confined to two faculties, viz., sensation, or rather
consciousness, and memory. To avoid an endless subtilty of distinction,
I have not given here any account of consciousness in general; but the
same reasoning will apply to both. The operation of both these faculties
is of a perfectly exclusive and individual nature, and so far as their
operation extends (but no farther) is man a personal, or if you will, a
selfish being. The sensation excited in me by a piece of red-hot iron
striking against any part of my body is simple, absolute, terminating as
it were in itself, not representing any thing beyond itself, nor capable
of being represented by any other sensation, or communicated to any
other being. The same kind of sensation may be indeed excited in another
by the same means, but this sensation will not imply any reference to,
or consciousness of mine; there is no communication between my nerves
and another’s brain, by which he can be affected with my sensations as I
am myself. The only notice or perception which another can have of this
sensation in me, or which I can have of a similar sensation in another,
is by means of the imagination. I can form an imaginary idea of that
pain as existing out of myself; but I can only feel it as a sensation
when it is actually impressed on myself. Any impression made on another
can neither be the cause nor object of sensation to me. Again, the
impression or idea left in my mind by this sensation, and afterwards
excited either by seeing iron in the same state, or by any other means,
is properly an idea of memory. This recollection necessarily refers to
some previous impression in my own mind, and only exists in consequence
of that impression, or of the continued connexion of the same mind with
itself: it cannot be derived from any impression made on another. My
thoughts have a particular mechanical dependence only on my own previous
thoughts or sensations. I do not remember the feelings of any one but
myself. I may, indeed, remember the objects which must have caused such
and such feelings in others, or the outward signs of passion which
accompanied them. These, however, are but the recollections of my own
immediate impressions of what I saw, and I can only form an idea of the
feelings themselves by means of the imagination. But, though we take
away all power of imagination from the human mind, my own feelings must
leave behind them certain traces, or representations of themselves
retaining the same general properties, and having the same intimate
connexion with the conscious principle. On the other hand, if I wish to
anticipate my own future feelings, whatever these may be, I must do so
by means of the same faculty by which I conceive of those of others,
whether past or future. I have no distinct or separate faculty on which
the events and feelings of my future being are impressed before hand,
and which shows, as in an enchanted mirror, to me, and me alone, the
reversed picture of my future life. It is absurd to suppose that the
feelings which I am to have hereafter, should excite certain
correspondent impressions of themselves before they have existed, or act
mechanically upon my mind by a secret sympathy. The romantic sympathies
of lovers, the exploded dreams of judicial astrology, the feats of
magic, do not equal the solid, substantial absurdity of this doctrine of
self-interest, which attributes to that which is not and has not been, a
mechanical operation and a reality in nature. I can only abstract myself
from this present being, and take an interest in my future being, in the
same sense and manner in which I can go out of myself entirely, and
enter into the minds and feelings of others. In short, there neither is
nor can be any principle belonging to the individual that antecedently
identifies his future events with his present sensation, or that
reflects the impression of his future feelings backwards with the same
kind of consciousness that his past feelings are transmitted forward
through the channels of memory. The size of the river as well as its
taste depends on the water that has already fallen into it. I cannot
roll back its course, nor is the stream next the source affected by the
water which falls into it afterwards, yet we call both the same river.
Such is the nature of personal identity. It is founded on the continued
connexion of cause and effect, and awaits their gradual progress, and
does not consist in a preposterous and wilful unsettling of the natural
order of things. There is an illustration of this argument, which,
however quaint or singular it may appear, I rather choose to give than
omit any thing which may serve to make my meaning clear and
intelligible. Suppose then a number of men employed to cast a mound into
the sea. As far as it has gone, the workmen pass backwards and forwards
on it: it stands firm in its place, and though it advances further and
further from the shore, it is still joined to it. A man’s personal
identity and self-interest have just the same principle and extent, and
can reach no farther than his actual existence. But if any man of a
metaphysical turn, seeing that the pier was not yet finished, but was to
be continued to a certain point, and in a certain direction, should take
it into his head to insist that what was already built, and what was to
be built were the same pier, that the one must therefore afford as good
footing as the other, and should accordingly walk over the pier-head on
the solid foundation of his metaphysical hypothesis—he would act a great
deal more ridiculously, but would not argue a whit more absurdly than
those who found a principle of absolute self-interest on a man’s future
identity with his present being. But, say you, the comparison does not
hold in this, that a man can extend his thoughts (and that very wisely
too), beyond the present moment, whereas in the other case he cannot
move a single step forwards. Grant it. This will only show that the mind
has wings as well as feet, which is a sufficient answer to the selfish
hypothesis.
If the foregoing account be true (and for my part, the only perplexity
that crosses my mind in thinking of it arises from the utter
impossibility of conceiving of the contrary supposition), it will follow
that those faculties which may be said to constitute self, and the
operations of which convey that idea to the mind, draw all their
materials from the past and present. But all voluntary action, as I have
before largely shown, must relate solely and exclusively to the future.
That is, all those impressions or ideas with which selfish, or more
properly speaking, personal feelings must be naturally connected are
just those which have nothing to do at all with the motives to action in
the pursuit either of our own interest, or that of others. If indeed it
were possible for the human mind to alter the present or the past, so as
either to recal what was past, or to give it a still greater reality, to
make it exist over again, and in some more emphatical sense, then man
might, with some pretence of reason, be supposed naturally incapable of
being impelled to the pursuit of any _past_ or _present_ object but from
the mechanical excitement of personal motives. It might in this case be
pretended that the impulses of imagination and sympathy are of too
light, unsubstantial, and remote a creation to influence our real
conduct, and that nothing is worthy of the concern of a wise man in
which he has not this direct, unavoidable, and homefelt interest. This
is, however, too absurd a supposition to be dwelt on for a moment. The
only proper objects of voluntary action are (by necessity) future
events: these can excite no possible interest in the mind but by the aid
of the imagination; and these make the same direct appeal to that
faculty, whether they relate to ourselves or to others, as the eye
receives with equal directness the impression of our own external form
or that of others. It will be easy to perceive by this train of
reasoning how, notwithstanding the contradiction involved in the
supposition of a generally absolute self-interest, the mind comes to
feel a deep and habitual conviction of the truth of this principle.
Finding in itself a continued consciousness of its past impressions, it
is naturally enough disposed to transfer the same sort of identity and
consciousness to the whole of its being. The objects of imagination and
of the senses are, as it were, perpetually playing into one another’s
hands, and shifting characters, so that we lose our reckoning, and do
not think it worth while to mark where the one ends and the other
begins. As our actual being is constantly passing into our future being,
and carries the internal feeling of consciousness along with it, we seem
to be already identified with our future being in this permanent part of
our nature, and to feel by a mutual impulse the same necessary sympathy
with our future selves that we know we shall have with our past selves.
We take the tablets of memory, reverse them, and stamp the image of self
on that which as yet possesses nothing but the name. It is no wonder
then that the imagination, constantly disregarding the progress of time,
when its course is marked out along the straight unbroken line of
individuality, should confound the necessary differences of things, and
convert a distant object into a present reality. The interest which is
hereafter to be felt by this continued conscious being, this indefinite
unit, called _me_, seems necessarily to affect me in every state of my
existence,—‘thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line.’ In the
first place we abstract the successive modifications of our being, and
_particular_ temporary interests, into one simple nature and general
principle of self-interest, and then make use of this nominal
abstraction as an artificial medium to compel those particular actual
interests into the closest affinity and union with each other, as
different lines meeting in the same centre must have a mutual
communication with each other. On the contrary, as I always remain
perfectly distinct from others (the interest which I take in their
former or present feelings being like that which I take in their future
feelings, never any thing more than the effect of imagination and
sympathy), the same illusion and transposition of ideas cannot take
place with regard to these; namely, the confounding a physical impulse
with the rational motives to action. Indeed the uniform nature of my
feelings with regard to others (my interest in their welfare having
always the same source and sympathy) seems by analogy to confirm the
supposition of a similar simplicity in my relation to myself, and of a
positive, natural, absolute interest in whatever belongs to that self,
not confined to my actual existence, but extending over the whole of my
being. Every sensation that I feel, or that afterwards recurs vividly to
my memory strengthens the sense of self, which increased strength in the
mechanical feeling is indirectly transferred to the general idea, and to
my remote, future, imaginary interest; whereas our sympathy with the
feelings of others being always imaginary, standing only on its own
basis, having no sensible interest to support it, no restless mechanical
impulse to urge it on, the ties by which we are bound to others hang
loose upon us: the interest we take in their welfare seems to be
something foreign to our own bosoms, to be transient, arbitrary, and
directly opposed to that necessary, unalienable interest we are supposed
to have in whatever conduces to our own well-being.
There is another consideration (and that probably the principal one) to
be taken into the account in explaining the origin and growth of our
selfish habits, which is perfectly consistent with the foregoing theory,
and evidently arises out of it. There is naturally, then, no essential
difference between the motives by which I am impelled to the pursuit of
my own good or that of others: but though there is not a difference in
kind, there is one in degree. We know better what our own future
feelings will be than what those of others will be in a like case. We
can apply the materials afforded us by experience with less difficulty
and more in a mass in making out the picture of our future pleasures and
pains, without frittering them away or destroying their original
sharpnesses: in a word, we can imagine them more plainly, and must
therefore be more interested in them. This facility in passing from the
recollection of my former impressions to the anticipation of my future
ones makes the transition almost imperceptible, and gives to the latter
an apparent reality and presentness to the imagination, to a degree in
which the feelings of others can scarcely ever be brought home to us. It
is chiefly from this greater readiness and certainty with which we can
look forward into our own minds than out of us into those of other men,
that that strong and uneasy attachment to self, which often comes at
last to overpower every generous feeling, takes its rise; not, as I
think I have shown, from any natural and impenetrable hardness of the
human heart, or necessary absorption of all its thoughts and purposes in
a blind exclusive feeling of self-interest. It confirms this account,
that we constantly are found to feel for others in proportion as we know
from long acquaintance with the turn of their minds, and events of their
lives, ‘the hair-breadth scapes’ of their travelling history, or ‘some
disastrous stroke which their youth suffered,’ what the real nature of
their feelings is; and that we have in general the strongest attachment
to our immediate relatives and friends, who from this intercommunity of
thoughts and feelings may more truly be said to be a part of ourselves
than from even the ties of blood. Moreover, a man must be employed more
usually in providing for his own wants and his own feelings than those
of others. In like manner he is employed in providing for the immediate
welfare of his family and connexions much more than in providing for the
welfare of those who are not bound by any positive ties. And we
accordingly find that the attention, time, and pains bestowed on these
several objects give him a proportionable degree of anxiety about, and
attachment to his own interest, and that of those connected with him;
but it would be absurd to conclude that his affections are therefore
circumscribed by a natural necessity within certain impassable limits,
either in the one case or the other. It should not be forgotten here
that this absurd opinion has been very commonly referred to the effects
of natural affection as it has been called, as well as of self-interest;
parental and filial affection being supposed to be originally implanted
in the mind by the ties of nature, and to move round the centre of
self-interest in an orbit of their own, within the circle of our
families and friends. This general connexion between the habitual
pursuit of any object and our interest in it, will account for the
well-known observation, that the affection of parents to children is the
strongest of all others, frequently overpowering self-love itself. This
fact does not seem easily reconcilable to the doctrine that the social
affections are all of them ultimately to be deduced from association, or
the reputed connexion of immediate selfish gratification with the idea
of some other person. If this were strictly the case we must feel the
strongest attachment to those from whom we had received, instead of
those to whom we had done, the greatest number of kindnesses, or where
the greatest quantity of actual enjoyment had been associated with an
indifferent idea. Junius has remarked that friendship is not conciliated
by the power of conferring benefits, but by the equality with which they
are received and may be returned.
I have hitherto purposely avoided saying any thing on the subject of our
physical appetites and the manner in which they may be thought to affect
the principle of the foregoing reasonings. They evidently seem at first
sight, to contradict the general conclusion which I have endeavoured to
establish, as they all of them tend either exclusively or principally to
the gratification of the individual, and at the same time refer to some
future or imaginary object, as the source of this gratification. The
impulse which they give to the will is mechanical, and yet this impulse,
blind as it is, constantly tends to and coalesces with the pursuit of
some rational end. That is, here is an end aimed at, the desire and
regular pursuit of a known good, and all this produced by motives
evidently mechanical, and which never impel the mind but in a selfish
direction: it makes no difference in the question whether the active
impulse proceed directly from the desire of positive enjoyment, or a
wish to get rid of some positive uneasiness. I should say then that,
setting aside what is of a purely physical nature in the case, the
influence of appetite over our volitions may be accounted for
consistently enough with the foregoing hypothesis, from the natural
effects of a particularly irritable state of bodily feeling, rendering
the idea of that which will heighten and gratify its susceptibility of
pleasurable feeling, or remove some painful feeling, proportionably
vivid, and the object of a more vehement desire than can be excited by
the same idea, when the body is supposed to be in a state of
indifference, or only ordinary sensibility to that particular kind of
gratification. Thus the imaginary desire is sharpened by constantly
receiving supplies of pungency, from the irritation of bodily feeling,
and its direction is at the same time determined according to the bias
of this new impulse; first, indirectly by having the attention fixed on
our own immediate sensation; secondly, because that particular
gratification, the desire of which is increased by the pressure of
physical appetite, must be referred primarily and by way of distinction
to the same being, by whom the want of it is felt, that is, to myself.
As the actual uneasiness which appetite implies can only be excited by
the irritable state of my own body, so neither can the desire of the
correspondent gratification subsist in that intense degree, which
properly constitutes appetite, except when it tends to relieve that very
same uneasiness by which it was excited, as in the case of hunger. There
is in the first place the strong mechanical action of the nervous and
muscular systems co-operating with the rational desire of my own belief,
and forcing it its own way. Secondly, this state of uneasiness grows
more and more violent, the longer the relief which it requires is
withheld from it: hunger takes no denial, it hearkens to no compromise,
is soothed by no flattery, tired out by no delay. It grows more
importunate every moment, its demands become larger the less they are
attended to. The first impulse which the general love of personal ease
receives from bodily pain will give it the advantage over my disposition
to sympathise with others in the same situation with myself, and this
difference will be increasing every moment, till the pain is removed.
Thus, if I at first, either through compassion or by an effort of the
will, am regardless of my own wants, and wholly bent upon satisfying the
more pressing wants of my companions, yet this effort will at length
become too great, and I shall be incapable of attending to any thing but
the violence of my own sensations, or the means of alleviating them. It
would be easy to show from many things that mere appetite (generally, at
least, in reasonable beings) is but the fragment of a self-moving
machine, but a sort of half organ, a subordinate instrument even in the
accomplishment of its own purposes; that it does little or nothing
without the aid of another faculty to inform and direct it. Before the
impulses of appetite can be converted into the regular pursuit of a
given object, they must first be communicated to the understanding, and
modify the will through that. Consequently, as the desire of the
ultimate gratification of the appetite is not the same with the appetite
itself, that is mere physical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its
communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of
appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force
and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and we
accordingly find that the same cause which irritates the desire of
selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and
gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and
where the violence of the physical impulse does not overpower every
other consideration.
MADAME DE STAËL’S ACCOUNT OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE.
_The Morning Chronicle._] [_Feb. 3, 1814._
The most interesting part of Madame De Staël’s very ingenious and
elegant work on Germany is undoubtedly (to literary readers) that in
which she has sketched with so much intelligence and grace, the present
state of opinions with respect to philosophy and taste in that country.
I have not yet seen any satisfactory abstract of her reasonings on
either of these subjects. The article in _The Edinburgh Review_ touches
but lightly and incidentally on them, from the variety and pressure of
other topics of a more lively and general interest. I shall attempt to
supply this deficiency, and at the same time to offer some farther
thoughts on each subject. The two points on which I wish to enlarge are
the view which Madame De Staël takes of German poetry, as contrasted
with the French, and secondly of the spirit and principles of the German
philosophy, that of Professor Kant, as opposed to the French system of
philosophy which is not indeed peculiar to them as a nation, but common
to the age. I shall begin with the last first, not only because it is
perhaps the most important, but because I think that as the English were
the first to propagate the latter system (for the French have only
adopted it from us, carrying its practical and popular application
farther), we ought not to be the last to disclaim and explode it. It may
not be uninteresting as a branch of national literature, to take a
general view of the rise and progress of their philosophy, before we
come to examine Madame De Staël’s account of the system which Kant has
opposed to it, and to shew in what that system is well-founded, and
where it fails.
According to the prevailing system,—I mean the material or modern
philosophy, as it has been called, all thought is to be resolved into
sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into
mechanical impulse. These three propositions taken together, embrace
almost every question relating to the human mind, and in their different
ramifications and intersections form a net, not unlike that used by the
enchanters of old, which, whosoever has once thrown over him, will find
all farther efforts vain, and his attempts to reason freely on any
subject in which his own nature is concerned, baffled and confounded in
every direction.
This system, which first rose at the suggestion of Lord Bacon, on the
ruins of the school-philosophy, has been gradually growing up to its
present height ever since, from a wrong interpretation of the word
_experience_, confining it to a knowledge of things without us; whereas
it in fact includes all knowledge, relating to objects either within or
out of the mind, of which we have any direct and positive evidence. We
only know that we ourselves exist, the most certain of all truths, from
the experience of what passes within ourselves. Strictly speaking, all
other facts of which we are not immediately conscious, are such in a
secondary and subordinate sense only. Physical experience is indeed the
foundation and the test of that part of philosophy which relates to
physical objects: farther, physical analogy is the only rule by which we
can extend and apply our immediate knowledge, or infer the effects to be
produced by the different objects around us. But to say that physical
experiment is either the test, or source, or guide of that other part of
philosophy which relates to our internal perceptions, that we are to
look in external nature for the form, the substance, the colour, the
very life and being of whatever exists in our minds, or that we can only
infer the laws which regulate the phenomena of the mind from those which
regulate the phenomena of matter, is to confound two things entirely
distinct. Our knowledge of mental phenomena from consciousness,
reflection, or observation of their correspondent signs in others is the
true basis of metaphysical inquiry, as the knowledge of _facts_,
commonly so called, is the only solid basis of natural philosophy. To
assert that the operations of the mind and the operations of matter are
in reality the same, so that we should always regard the one as symbols
or exponents of the other, is to assume the very point in dispute, not
only without any evidence, but in defiance of every appearance to the
contrary.
Lord Bacon was undoubtedly a great man, indeed one of the greatest that
have adorned this or any other country. He was a man of a clear and
active spirit, of a most fertile genius, of vast designs, of general
knowledge, and of profound wisdom. He united the powers of imagination
and understanding in a greater degree than almost any other writer. He
was one of the most remarkable instances of those men, who, by the rare
privilege of their nature, are at once poets and philosophers, and see
equally in both worlds—the individual and sensible, and the abstracted
and intelligible forms of things. The Schoolmen and their followers
attended to nothing but names, to essences and species, to laboured
analyses and artificial deductions. They seem to have alike disregarded
all kinds of experience, whether relating to external objects, or to the
observation of our own internal feelings. From the imperfect state of
knowledge, they had not a sufficient number of facts to guide them in
their experimental researches; and intoxicated with the novelty of their
vain distinctions, learnt by rote, they were tempted to despise the
clearest and most obvious suggestions of their own minds. Subtle,
restless, and self-sufficient, they thought that truth was only made to
be disputed about, and existed no where but in their demonstrations and
syllogisms. Hence arose their ‘logomachies’—their everlasting
word-fights, their sharp debates, their captious, bootless
controversies. As Lord Bacon expresses it, ‘they were made fierce with
dark keeping,’ signifying that their angry and unintelligible contests
with one another were owing to their not having any distinct objects to
engage their attention. They built altogether on their own whims and
fancies; and, buoyed up by their specific levity, they mounted in their
airy disputations in endless flights and circles, clamouring like birds
of prey, till they equally lost sight of truth and nature. This great
man, therefore, intended an essential service to philosophy, in wishing
to recall the attention to facts and experience which had been almost
entirely neglected; and thus, by incorporating the abstract with the
concrete, and general reasoning with individual observation, to give to
our conclusions that solidity and firmness which they must otherwise
always want. He did nothing but insist on the necessity of experience,
more particularly in natural science; and from the wider field that is
open to it there, as well as the prodigious success it has met with,
this latter application of the word, in which it is tantamount to
physical experiment, has so far engrossed the whole of our attention,
that mind has, for a good while past, been in some danger of being
overlaid by matter. We run from one error into another, and as we were
wrong at first, so in altering our course, we have passed into the
opposite extreme. We despised experience altogether before: now we would
have nothing but experience, and that of the grossest kind. We have, it
is true, gained much by not consulting the suggestions of our own minds
in questions where they inform us of nothing, namely, on the particular
laws and phenomena of the material world; and we have hastily concluded
(reversing the rule) that the best way to arrive at the knowledge of
ourselves also, was to lay aside the dictates of our own consciousness,
thoughts, and feelings, as deceitful and insufficient guides, though
they are the only means by which we can obtain the least light upon the
subject. We seem to have resigned the natural use of our understandings,
and to have given up our own existence as a nonentity. We look for our
thoughts and the distinguishing properties of our minds in some image of
them in matter as we look to see our faces in a glass. We no longer
decide physical problems by logical dilemmas, but we decide questions of
logic by the evidence of the senses. Instead of putting our reason and
invention to the rack indifferently on all questions, whether we have
any previous knowledge of them or not, we have adopted the easier method
of suspending the use of our faculties altogether, and settling tedious
controversies by means of ‘four champions fierce—hot, cold, moist and
dry,’ who with a few more of the retainers and hangers on of matter
determine all questions relating to the nature of man and the limits of
the human understanding very learnedly. But the laws by which we think,
feel, and act, we must discover in the mind itself, or not at all.
This original bias in favour of mechanical reasoning and physical
analogy was confirmed by the powerful aid of Hobbes, who was, indeed,
the father of the modern philosophy. His strong mind and body appear to
have resisted all impressions, but those which were derived from the
downright blows of matter: all his ideas seemed to lie like substances
in his brain: what was not a solid, tangible, distinct, palpable object,
was to him nothing. The external image pressed so close upon his mind
that it destroyed the power of consciousness, and left no room for
attention to any thing but itself. He was by nature a materialist. Locke
assisted greatly in giving popularity to the same scheme, as well by
espousing the chief of Hobbes’s metaphysical principles as by the
doubtful resistance which he made to the rest. And it has been perfected
and has received its last polish and roundness in the hands of some
French philosophers, as Condillac and others.
The modern metaphysical system assumes as its basis that the operations
of the intellect are only a continuation of the impulses existing in
matter; or that all the thoughts and conceptions of the mind are nothing
more than various modifications of the original impressions of things on
a being endued with sensation or simple perception. This system
considers ideas merely as they are caused by outward impressions acting
on the organs of sense, and excludes the understanding as a distinct
faculty or power from all share in its own operations.
The following is a summary of the general principles of this philosophy
as they are expressly laid down by Hobbes, and by the latest writers of
the French school.
1. That our _ideas_ are copies of the impressions made by external
objects on the senses.
2. That as nothing exists out of the mind but matter and motion, so it
is itself with all its operations nothing but matter and motion.
3. That thoughts are single, or that we can think of only one object at
a time.
4. That we have no general nor abstract ideas.
5. That the only principle of connection between one thought and another
is association, or their previous connection in sense.
6. That reason and understanding depend entirely on the mechanism of
language.
7 and 8. That the sense of pleasure and pain is the sole spring of
action, and self-interest the source and centre of all our affections.
9. That the mind acts from a mechanical or physical necessity, over
which it has no controul, and consequently is not a moral or accountable
agent.—_The manner of reasoning upon this last question is the only
circumstance of importance in which Hobbes differs decidedly from modern
writers._
10. That there is no difference in the natural capacities of men, the
mind being originally passive to all impressions alike, and becoming
whatever it is from circumstances.
Except the first, all of these positions are either denied or doubtfully
admitted by Mr. Locke. It is, however, his admission of the first
principle, which has opened a door directly or indirectly to all the
rest. The system of Kant is a formal and elaborate antithesis to that
which bears the name of Locke, and it is built on ‘the _sublime_
restriction (as Madame de Staël expresses it) added by Leibnitz to the
well-known axiom _nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu_—NISI
INTELLECTUS IPSE.’
It is in the manner of proving this restriction, and of explaining this
word, _the intellect_, that the whole question depends, and to this I
shall devote another letter.
AN ENGLISH METAPHYSICIAN.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Morning Chronicle._] [_Feb. 17, 1814._
The principle that _all the ideas, operations, and faculties of the mind
may be traced to, and ultimately accounted for, from simple sensation_,
is all that remains of Mr. Locke’s celebrated Essay, and that to which
it owes its present rank among philosophical productions. His various
attempts to modify this principle, or reconcile it to common notions
have been gradually exploded, and have given place, one by one, to the
more severe and logical deductions of Hobbes from the same general
principle. Mr. Locke took the faculties of the mind as he found them in
himself and others, and instead of levelling the structure, was
contented to place it on a new foundation. By this compromise with
prudence and candour, he prepared the way for the introduction of the
principle, which being once established, very soon overturned all the
trite opinions, and vulgar prejudices, which had been improperly
associated with it. There was in fact, no place for them in the new
system. I confess it strikes some degree of awe into the mind, and makes
it feel, that fame, even the best, is not a substantial thing, but the
uncertain shadow of real excellence, when we reflect that the immortal
renown, which attends the name of Locke as the great luminary of the age
in which he lived, is but a dim and borrowed lustre from the writings of
one, whom he himself calls, and who has been universally considered as
‘a justly decried author.’ The sentence of the poet is as applicable
here as it ever was—
‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies;
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove!’
The great defect with which the Essay on Human Understanding is
chargeable, is that there really is not a word about the understanding
in it, nor any attempt to shew what it is, or whether it is, or is not
any thing, distinct from the faculty of simple perception. The
operations of thinking, comparing, discerning, reasoning, willing, and
the like, which Mr. Locke generally ascribes to it, are the operations
of nothing, or of we know not what. All the force of his mind seems to
have been so bent on exploding innate ideas, and tracing our thoughts to
their external source, that he either forgot, or had not leisure to
examine what the internal principle of all thought is. He took for his
basis a bad simile, namely, that the mind is like a blank sheet of
paper, originally void of all characters, and merely passive to the
impressions made upon it: for this, though true as far as relates to
innate ideas, that is, to any impressions previously existing in the
mind, is not true of the mind itself, or of the manner in which it forms
its ideas of the objects actually impressed upon it. The obvious
tendency of this simile was to convert the understanding into the mere
passive receiver and retainer of physical impressions, a convenient
repository for the straggling images of things, or a sort of empty room
into which ideas are conveyed from without through the doors of the
senses, as you would carry goods into an unfurnished lodging. And hence,
again, it has been found necessary, by subsequent writers, to get rid of
those different faculties and operations, which Mr. Locke elsewhere
supposes to belong to the mind, but which are in truth only compatible
with the active powers, and independent nature of the mind itself. It
was to remedy this deficiency that Leibnitz proposed to add to the maxim
of Locke, _that there is nothing in the understanding which was not
before in the senses_—‘that sublime restriction,’ so much applauded by
Madame de Staël—‘EXCEPT THE UNDERSTANDING ITSELF:’ and it is to the
establishment and development of this distinction, that the whole of the
Kantean philosophy appears to be directed. In what manner, and in what
success (judging from the representations we have received of it)
remains to be shewn.
The account which Madame de Staël has given of this system is full of
the graces of imagination and the charm of sentiment: it passes slightly
over many of the difficulties, and softens the abruptness of the
reasoning by the harmony of the style. It is therefore the most popular
and pleasing account which has been given of the system of the German
Philosopher: but after all, it will be better to take his own statement,
though somewhat ‘harsh and crabbed’ as the most tangible, authentic, and
satisfactory.
‘The following,’ says his translator Willich, ‘are the elements of his
_Critique of Pure Reason_, the first of Kant’s systematical works, and
the most remarkable for profound reasoning and the striking
illustrations, with which it throughout abounds.
‘We are in possession of certain notions _à priori_[8] which are
absolutely independent of all experience, although the objects of
experience correspond with them, and which are distinguished by
necessity, and strict universality. To these are opposed empirical
notions, or such as are only possible _à posteriori_, that is, through
experience. Besides these, we have certain notions, with which no
objects of experience ever correspond, which rise above the world of
sense, and which we consider as the most sublime, such as God, liberty,
immortality. There is always supposed in every empirical notion, or
impression of external objects, a pure perception _à priori_, a form of
the sensitive faculty, _viz._ space and time. This form first renders
every actual appearance of objects possible. By the sensitive faculty we
are able to form perceptions; by the understanding we form general
ideas. By the sensitive faculty we experience impressions, and objects
are given to us; by the understanding we bring representations of these
objects before us: we think of them. Perceptions and general ideas are
the elements of all our knowledge. Without the sensitive faculty, no
object could be given (proposed to) us; without the understanding none
would be thought of by us. These two powers are really distinct from one
another; but neither of the two without the other can produce a
_notion_. In order to obtain a distinct notion of any one thing, we must
present to our general ideas objects in perception, and reduce our
perceptions to, or connect them with, these general ideas. As the
sensitive faculty has its determined forms, so has our understanding
likewise forms _à priori_. These may be properly termed _categories_;
they are pure ideas of the understanding, which relate, _à priori_, to
the objects of perception in general. The objects of experience,
therefore, are in no other way possible; they can in no other way be
thought of by us, and their multiplied diversity can only be reduced to
one act of judgment, or to one act of consciousness, by means of these
categories of sense. Hence, the categories have objective reality. They
are either categories of
1. _Quantity_, as unity, number, totality; or,
2. Of _Quality_, as reality, negation, limitation; or,
3. Of _Relation_, as substance and accident, cause and effect; or,
4. Of _Modality_, as possibility and impossibility, existence and
non-existence, necessity and contingency.
‘The judgment is the capacity of applying the general ideas of the
understanding to the information of experience. The objects of
experience are regulated according to these ideas; and not, _vice
versâ_, our ideas according to the objects.’
Such is the outline of this author’s account of the intellect, which,
after all, appears to be rather dogmatical than demonstrative. He is
much more intent on raising an extensive and magnificent fabric, than on
laying the foundations. Each part does not rest upon its own separate
basis, but, like the workmanship of some lofty arch, is supported and
rivetted to its place by the weight and regular balance of the whole.
Kant does not appear to trouble himself about the evidence of any
particular proposition, but to rely on the conformity and mutual
correspondence of the different parts of his general system, and its
sufficiency, if admitted, to explain all the phenomena of the human
intellect with consistency and accuracy;—in the same manner as the
decypherer infers that he has found the true key of the hieroglyphic
hand-writing, when he is able to solve every difficulty by it. However
profound and comprehensive we may allow the views of human nature
unfolded by this philosopher to be, his method is necessarily defective
in simplicity, clearness, and force. His reasoning is seldom any thing
more than a detailed, paraphrased explanation of his original statement,
instead of being (what it ought to be) an appeal to known facts, or a
deduction from acknowledged principles, or a detection of the
inconsistencies of other writers. The extreme involution and
technicality of his style proceed from the same source; that is, from
the necessity of adapting a conventional language to the artificial and
arbitrary arrangement of his ideas. The whole of Kant’s system is
evidently an elaborate antithesis or contradiction to the modern
philosophy, and yet it is by no means a real approximation to popular
opinion. Its chief object is to oppose certain fundamental principles to
the _empirical_ or mechanical philosophy, and it either rejects or
explains away the more common and established notions, except so far as
they coincide with the rigid theory of the author. He sets out with a
preconceived hypothesis; and all other facts and opinions are made to
bend to a predominant purpose.
The founder of the _transcendental_ philosophy very properly insists on
the distinction between the sensitive and the intellectual faculties,
and makes this division the ground-work of his entire system. He
considers the joint operation of these different powers as necessary to
all our knowledge, and enumerates with scrupulous formality the
different ideas which originate in this complex progress, and points out
the share which each has in each. The author conceives of certain
general ideas, as _substance_ and _accident_, _cause_ and _effect_,
_totality_, _number_, _quantity_, _relation_, _possibility_,
_necessity_, etc. as pure ideas of the understanding; and he classes
_space_ and _time_ as primary forms of the sensitive faculty.[9] All
this may be very true; but the proof may also be required, and it is not
given. Yet modern metaphysicians are not likely, either as sceptical
inquirers after truth, or as lovers of abstruse paradoxes, to be
satisfied with the bare assumption of a common prejudice. They will say,
either that all these ideas have no real existence in the mind, that
they are mere abstract terms which owe their force and validity to the
mechanism of language; or admitting their existence in the mind, they
will contend with Locke, that they are only general, reflex, and
compound ideas, originally derived from sensation. ‘Whence do all the
ideas and operations of the mind proceed?’ _From experience_, is the
answer given by the modern philosophy—_From experience and from the
understanding_, is the answer given by Kant. The former solution has the
advantage of simplicity; and the logical proof is wanting to the latter.
To compare grave things with gay, the display which this celebrated
philosopher makes of his categories, his forms of the sensitive faculty,
his pure ideas, and _à priori_ principles, somewhat resembles the method
taken by Sir Epicure Mammon in _The Alchymist_ to persuade his sceptical
friend that he is about to discover the philosopher’s stone by
overpowering his imagination with the description of the fine things he
will do when he has it:—‘And all this I will do with the stone.’ ‘But
will all this give you the stone?’ says Pertinax Surly, who ‘will not
believe antiquity’ any more than our modern sceptics.
I think that the truth may be got at much more simply, and without all
this parade of words. The business of the mind is twofold—to receive
impressions and to perceive their relations; without which there can be
no ideas. Now the first of these is the office of the senses, and is the
only original function of the mind, according to the prevailing system.
The second is properly the office of the understanding, and is that, the
nature or existence of which is the great point in debate between the
contending parties. The more complex and refined operations of this
faculty, such as judging, reasoning, abstraction, willing, etc. are
either totally denied, or at best resolved into simple ideas of
sensation by modern metaphysical writers. I know of no better way,
therefore, to establish the contrary hypothesis than to take these
simple ideas of the moderns, and shew that they contain the same
necessary principles of the understanding, the same operations of
judging, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, which they discard with
so much profound contempt, or treat as accidental and artificial results
of some higher faculty. If it can be proved that the understanding, in
the strict and exclusive sense, is necessary to our having any _ideas_
whatever,—that the very terms are synonymous and inseparable—that in the
first original conception of the simplest object of nature there is
implied the same principle, a power of perceiving the relations of
different things, which is only exerted in a more perfect and
comprehensive manner in the most complex and difficult processes of the
human intellect, one would think that there must be an end of the
question.
AN ENGLISH METAPHYSICIAN.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Morning Chronicle._] [_March 3, 1814._
‘For men to have recourse to subtleties in raising difficulties, and
then to complain that they should be taken off by minutely examining
these subtleties, is a strange kind of proceeding.’
I cannot better explain the modern theory of the understanding (which it
will be the object of this letter to consider) than in the words of one
of the best and ablest commentators of that school, Mr. Horne Tooke.
‘The business of the mind,’ he says ‘appears to me to be very simple. It
extends no farther than to receive impressions, that is, to have
sensations or feelings. What are called its operations are merely the
operations of language. The greatest part of Mr. Locke’s Essay, that is,
all which relates to what he calls _the composition_, _abstraction_,
_complexity_, _generalization_, _relation_, etc. of ideas, does indeed
merely concern language. If he had been sooner aware of the inseparable
connection between words and knowledge, he would not have talked of the
composition of ideas, but would have seen that the only composition was
in the terms, and consequently, that it was as improper to talk of a
complex idea as of a complex star! I will venture to say that it is an
easy matter, upon Mr. Locke’s own principles and a physical
consideration of the senses and the mind, to prove the impossibility of
the composition of ideas, and that they are not ideas, but merely terms,
which are general and abstract.’—Diversions of Purley, Vol. i. p. 39,
51, &c.[10]
Now this is very explicit, and, I also conceive, very logical. For I am
ready to grant that ‘Mr. Locke’s own principles and a physical
consideration of the mind’ do lead to the conclusions here stated; and
it is on that account that I shall attempt to shew that those principles
and the consideration of the mind, as a physical thing, are in
themselves absurd. These writers taking up the principle, that to have
sensations or feelings was the only real faculty of the mind, and
perceiving that the having sensations merely was a different thing from
having an idea or consciousness of their relations (inasmuch as no
sensation as such can include a knowledge of or reference to any other)
have inferred very rationally that all the operations of the mind
founded on a principle of general consciousness or common understanding,
_viz._ _compounding_, _comparing_, _discerning_, _judging_, _reasoning_,
etc. were excluded from their physical theory of sensation, and must be
referred to some trick or deception of the mind, the mechanism of
language or habitual association of ideas. According to this theory,
besides the sensible impressions of individual objects, and their
distinct traces left in the memory—the rest is merely words. In
supposing that we combine these different impressions together, that we
compare different objects, that we reason upon them, it seems we only
deceive ourselves, and mistake a rapid and mechanical transition from
one idea to another for the actual perception of the relations between
them. Thus have these philosophers sacrificed all the known facts and
conscious operations of the mind to a literal deduction from a gross
verbal fallacy. For what are these single objects or individual ideas,
of which the senses are competent to take cognizance, and beyond which
the understanding can never advance a step? Neither more nor less than
complex and general ideas, which imply all the same intellectual
impossibilities of comparing, judging, distinguishing, &c. _i.e._ of
perceiving a number of diversified relations, of connecting the MANY
into the ONE, which are objected to the more deliberate and formal acts
of understanding and reason. The mind, say they, can perceive but one
idea at a time, that is, it may perceive a square or a triangle, but it
cannot compare them together, or perceive their proportions, because to
do this, it must attend to different ideas at once. Yet what is this
individual idea of a square, for instance, but an idea of given lines,
their direction, equality, connection, &c. all which must be combined
together in the mind, before it can possibly form any idea of the
object? Mr. Tooke says, the complexity is in the term. I should say, the
individuality is in the term, that is, in the application of one name to
a collective idea, which superficial reasoners, at once the slaves of
idle paradox and vulgar prejudice, have therefore imagined to be one
thing. The whole error of this system has, indeed, arisen from
considering ideas themselves, or those particular objects, which are
marked by a single name, or strike at once, and in a mass, upon the
senses, as simple things. But there is no one of these particular ideas,
as they are called, which is not an aggregate of many things, or that
can subsist for a moment but in the understanding. By destroying the
composition of ideas, all ideas as well as all combinations of ideas,
would be completely and for ever banished from the mind; which would be
left a mere _tabula rasa_, a blank, indeed, or would at all times
strictly resemble what Mr. Locke describes it to be in its original
state, ‘a dark closet with a little glimmering of light let in through
the loop-holes of the senses.’
Writers, in general, who have maintained the existence of a distinct
faculty besides the senses, have applied themselves to shew that,
besides particular ideas or objects, it was necessary to admit the
understanding to explain the perception of the relations between them.
My purpose is to shew that the same perception of relation, the same
understanding is implied in the very ideas or objects themselves. To
have sensations is not to compare them, that is, sensation and
understanding are not the same thing. To have ideas, it is necessary to
compare our sensations, that is, ideas and understanding are the same
thing.
I can conceive then of a being endued with the power of sensation, so as
to receive the direct impressions of outward objects, and also with
memory, so as to retain them for any length of time, as they were
severally and unconnectedly presented, yet without any signs of
understanding. The state of such a being would be that of animal life,
and something more (with the addition of memory), but it would not
amount to intellect. As this distinction is rather difficult to be
explained, I hope I may be allowed to express it in any way I can, and
without sacrificing to the graces. Suppose a number of animalculæ, as a
heap of mites in a rotten cheese, lying as close together as they
possibly can (though the example should be of something more ‘drossy and
divisible’ of something less reasonable, approaching nearer to pure
sensation than we can conceive of any creature that exercises the
functions of the meanest instinct). No one will contend that in this
heap of living matter there is any idea or intimation of the number,
position, or intricate involutions of that little, lively, restless
tribe. This idea is evidently not contained in any of the parts
separately, nor is it contained in all of them put together. That is,
the aggregate of many actual sensations is, we here plainly see, a
totally different thing from the collective idea, comprehension or
consciousness of those sensations, as connected together into one whole,
or of any of their relations to each other. We may go on multiplying
sensations to the end of time, without ever advancing one step in the
other process, or producing a single thought. But in what, I would ask,
does this supposition differ from that of many distinct particles of
matter, full of animation, tumbling about, and pressing against each
other, in the same brain, except that we make use of this brain as a
common medium to unite their different desultory actions in the same
general principle of thought or consciousness—that is, understanding?
Or, if this comparison should be thought not courtly enough, let us
imagine one of Mrs. Salmon’s full faced, comely wax figures, sitting in
its chair of state, to be suddenly endued with life and physical
organization but nothing more. Such an unaccountable _lusus naturæ_
would answer exactly to the theory of modern metaphysicians, or would be
capable of receiving feelings or impressions by its different organs,
but would be totally void of any reflection upon them. It would be only
a bloated mass of listless sensation, a sordid compound of proud flesh
and irritable humours, a mere animal existence, a living automation,
crawling all over with morbid feelings, but without the least ray of
understanding, or any knowledge of itself or of the things around,
incapable of consistency of character or purpose, of foresight,
deliberation, sympathy, and of all that distinguishes human reason or
dignifies human nature!
Besides actual, sensible impressions, I suppose that there is a common
principle of thought, a superintending faculty, which alone perceives
the relations of things and enables us to comprehend their connections,
forms, and masses. This faculty is properly the understanding, and it is
by means of this faculty that man indeed becomes a reasonable soul.
Without this surrounding and forming power, we could never conceive the
idea of any one object, as of a table or a chair, a blade of grass or a
grain of sand. Every one of these includes a certain configuration,
hardness, colour, size, &c. _i.e._ impressions of different things,
received by different senses, which must be put together by the
understanding before they can be referred to any particular object, or
considered as one idea. Without this faculty, all our ideas would be
necessarily decomposed, and crumbled down into their original elements
and fluxional parts. We could assuredly in this case never connect the
different links in a chain of reasoning together, for the very links of
which this chain must consist would be ground to powder. We could
neither form any comparison between our ideas, nor have any ideas to
compare. There would be an infinite divisibility in the impressions of
the mind, as well as in the parts of material objects. Each separate
impression must remain absolutely simple and distinct, unknown to and
unconscious of the rest, shut up in the narrow cell of its own
individuality. No two of these atomic impressions could ever club
together to form even a sensible point, much less should we be able to
arrive at any of the larger masses or nominal descriptions of things.
The most that sensation could possibly do for us would be to furnish the
mind with ideas of some of those which Mr. Locke calls the simple
qualities of objects, as of colour or pressure, though not as a general
notion or diffused feeling, for it is certain that no one impression
could ever contain more than the tinge of a single ray of light, or the
puncture of a single particle of matter. Perhaps we might in this way be
supposed to possess an infinite number of microscopic impressions and
fractions of ideas, but there being nothing to arrange or bind them
together, the whole would present only a disjointed mass of blind,
unconscious confusion. All nature, all objects, all parts of all
objects, would be equally ‘without form and void.’ _The mind alone is
formative_, to use the expression of Kant; or it is that which by its
pervading and elastic energy unfolds and expands our ideas, that gives
order and consistency to them, that assigns to every part its proper
place, and fixes it there, and that frames the idea of the whole. Or in
other words, it is the understanding alone that perceives relation, but
every object is made up of a bundle of relations. In short, there is no
object or idea which does not consist of a number of parts arranged in a
certain manner, but of this arrangement the parts themselves cannot be
sensible. To make each part conscious of its relation to all the rest is
to suppose an infinite number of intellects instead of one; and to say
that a knowledge or perception of each part separately _without_ a
reference to the rest can produce a conception of the whole, is a
contradiction in terms.
Ideas then are the offspring of the understanding, not of the senses. An
idea necessarily implies, not only a number of distinct positive
impressions, but some bond of union between them, some internal
conscious principle to which they are alike communicated, and which
grasps, overlooks, and comprehends the whole. The idea of a square, for
example, is not the same thing with the compound impression made by the
figure on the senses. For the immediate impression of any one of the
sides cannot, as a mere sensation, be accompanied with an additional
knowledge or reflex image of the remaining three sides, but is a
perfectly distinct, physical thing; neither can the actual coexistence
of all these impressions be accompanied with a consciousness of their
mutual relations to each other, _i.e._ with an idea of the whole,
without supposing some general representative faculty, to which these
distinct impressions are referred.
Otherwise, different impressions made on the same organized or sentient
being would no more produce the slightest continuity of thought or idea
of the same object than different physical impressions conveyed to
different organized beings would produce an immediate consciousness of
these different objects or of the relations between them. If to have
sensations were the same thing as to compare them, then different
persons seeing different objects might without any communication make an
exact comparison between them. If to have the sensible impression of the
different parts of an object were the same thing as to form an idea of
it, then different persons looking at the two halves of any object would
be able to compound an idea of the whole between them, though each of
them was perfectly unconscious of what was passing in the other’s mind.
Unless we suppose some faculty of this sort which opens a direct
communication between our perceptions, so that the same thinking
principle is at the same time cognisant of different impressions, and of
their relations to each other, it seems a thing impossible to conceive
how any comparison can take place between different impressions existing
at the same time, or between our past and present impressions, or ever
to explain what is meant by saying, ‘_I_ perceive such and such objects,
_I_ remember such and such events,’ since these different impressions
are evidently referred to the same conscious being, which very idea of
individuality could never have been so much as conceived of, if there
were no other connection between our perceptions, than that which arises
from the juxtaposition of the particles of matter on which they are
actually impressed, or from ‘a physical consideration of the senses and
the mind.’ The mind in this case consisting of nothing more than a
succession of material points, each part would be sensible of the
corresponding part of any object which might be impressed upon it, but
could certainly know nothing of the impression which was made on any
other part of the same organic substance, except by its communication to
the same general principle of understanding. Ideas would exist in the
mind, like tapestry figures or pictures in a gallery, without a
spectator. On this hypothesis, I perfectly agree with Mr. Horne Tooke,
that it would be as absurd to talk of a complex idea as of a complex
star; for each impression or sensation must be as perfectly distinct
from, and unconnected with the rest, as the stars that compose a
constellation. One idea or impression would have no more connection with
any other, than if it were parcel of another intellect, or floated in
the region of the moon.[11]
It is strange that Mr. Locke should rank among simple ideas that of
number, which he defines to be the idea of unity repeated. But how the
impression of successive or distinct units should ever give the idea of
repetition, unless the former instances are borne in mind, I have not
the slightest conception. There might be an endless transition from one
unit to another, but no addition made or ideal aggregate formed. As well
might we suppose, that a body of an inch diameter, by shifting from
place to place, may enlarge its dimensions to a foot or a mile, as that
a succession of units, perceived separately, should produce the complex
idea of multitude. On the mechanical hypothesis, the mind can receive or
attend to but one impression at a time, and the idea of number would be
too mighty for it. Though Mr. Locke constantly supposes the mind to
perceive relations, and explains its common operations on this
principle, there is but one place in his work in which he seems to have
been upon the point of discovering that this principle lies at the
foundation of, and is absolutely necessary to all our ideas whatever. He
says, in the beginning of his chapter on Power, which he classes among
simple ideas, ‘I confess power includes in it _some kind of relation_ (a
relation to action or change), as, indeed, which of our ideas, of what
kind soever, when attentively considered, does not? For our ideas of
extension, duration, and number, do they not all contain in them a
secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have something relative
in them much more visibly; and sensible qualities, as colours and
smells, what are they but the powers of different bodies in relation to
our perception? And if considered in the things themselves, do they not
depend on the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of the parts? All which
include some kind of relation in them. Our idea, therefore, of power, I
think, may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be
considered as one of them, being one of those that make a principal
ingredient in our complex ideas of substances.’—Essay on Human
Understanding, vol. i. p. 234.
That is to say, in other words, the idea of power, though confessedly
complex, according to Mr. Locke, as depending on the changes we observe
produced by one thing on another, is to pass for a simple idea, because
it has as good a right to this denomination as other complex ideas,
which are usually classed as simple ones. It is thus that the inquiring
mind seems to be always hovering on the brink of truth: but timidity, or
indolence, or prejudice, makes us shrink back, unwilling to trust
ourselves to the fathomless abyss.
I have thus given the best account which it is in my power to give of
the understanding, as that conscious, comprehensive principle, which is
the source not only of judgment and reasoning, but which is implied in
every possible idea of the mind, or conception even of sensible objects.
Every such object, it has been shewn, is made up of a number of
individual impressions, yet how these perfectly detached, and desultory
impressions should of themselves contain or produce a knowledge of their
relations to each other, of their order, number, likeness, distances,
limits, &c. by which alone they can be connected into one whole—without
being first communicated to the same conscious principle of thought, to
one diffusive, and yet self-centered intellect, one undivided active
spirit, co-extended with the object, and yet ever present to itself,
that
‘Thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line,’
it is difficult to imagine. There is no idea that is not evolved from
this coinstantaneous power in the mind. The activity which Shakespeare
ascribes to _Ariel_ is not greater than that which is necessary to the
production of the meanest thought. ‘Jove’s light’nings more momentary
and sight-outrunning are not!’
AN ENGLISH METAPHYSICIAN.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED (ON ABSTRACTION)
_The Morning Chronicle._] [_April 8, 1814._
I am aware that the long digression on the formation of our ideas, with
which I troubled you in my last, will be looked upon as rhapsody and
extravagance by the strictest sect of those who are called philosophers.
The understanding has been set aside by these ingenious persons as an
awkward incumbrance, since they conceived it practicable to carry on the
whole business of thought and reason by a succession of individual
images and sensible points. The fine network of the mind, the
intellectual cords that bind and hold our scattered perceptions
together, and form the living line of communication between them, are
dissolved and vanish before the clear light of modern metaphysics, as
the gossamer is dissipated by the sun. The adepts in this system smile
at the contradictions involved in the supposition of perceiving the
relations between different things, and say that the common theory of
the understanding leads to the absurdity that the mind may attend to two
ideas at once, which is with them impossible. What I have endeavoured to
establish, is, that if the mind cannot have more than one idea at a
time, it can never have any, since all the ideas we know of consist of
more than one; and though the conviction we have of attending to
different impressions at once, when we compare, distinguish, judge,
reason, &c. has been gratuitously resolved into a deception of the mind,
mistaking a rapid succession of objects for a joint conception of them,
yet it will hardly be pretended that we deceive ourselves in thinking we
have any ideas at all. Whether the advocates for this hypothesis will
sit down contented under the total dissipation of all thought, the utter
privation of all ideas, to which, by their own arguments, they will have
reduced themselves, it remains for them to determine. We have seen that
Mr. Tooke resolves the complexity of our ideas into the complexity of
the terms made use of. How a term can be complex, otherwise than from
the complexity of its meaning, that is, of the idea attached to it, is
by no means easy to understand. Other writers, to avoid the seeming
contradiction of supposing the mind to divide its attention between
different objects, have suggested the instant of its passing from one to
the other as the true point of comparison between them; or that the time
when it had the idea of both together, was the time when it had an idea
of neither. To such absurdities are ingenious men driven by setting up
argument against fact, and denying the most obvious truths for which
they cannot account, like the sophist who denied the existence of
motion, because he could not understand its nature. It might perhaps be
deemed a sufficient answer to those who build systems and lay down
learned propositions on the principle that the mind can comprehend but
one idea at a time, to say that they consequently can have no meaning in
what they write, since when they begin a sentence, they cannot have the
least idea what will be the end of it, and by the time they get there,
must totally forget the beginning.—‘Peace to all such.’[12]
Mr. Horne Tooke justly complains of the uncertainty, confusion, and
laxity of Mr. Locke’s reasoning on the subject of abstract ideas, though
I cannot agree with him that it is therefore ‘very different from that
incomparable author’s usual method of proceeding.’—See Essay on Human
Understanding, vol. ii. p. 15, &c.
I am quite at a loss to determine, from Mr. Locke’s various statements,
whether he really supposed the abstraction to be in the ideas, or merely
in the terms. There is none of this wavering and perplexity in the minds
of his French commentators, none of this suspicion of error, and anxious
desire to correct it; no unforeseen objections arise to stagger their
natural confidence in themselves; it is all the same light, airy,
self-complacency, not a speck is seen to sully the clear sky of their
philosophy, not a wrinkle disturbs the smooth and smiling current of
their thoughts. In the Logic of the Abbé Condillac, that manual of the
modern sciolist, the question of abstract ideas is settled and cleared
from all difficulties, past, present, and to come, with as little
expence of thought, time, and trouble, as possible. The Abbé
demonstrates with ease.
‘But what in truth,’ he asks, ‘is the reality which a general and
abstract idea has in the mind? It is nothing but a name; or if it is any
thing more, it necessarily ceases to be abstract and general. If in
thinking of _a man_ in general I contemplate anything in this word,
besides the mere denomination, it can only be by representing to myself
some one man; and a man can no more be a man in the abstract in my mind
than in nature. Abstract ideas are therefore only denominations. This
confirms what we have already demonstrated, how necessary words are to
us; for if we had no general terms, we should have no abstract ideas; if
we had no abstract ideas, we should have neither _genera_ nor _species_;
and without _genera_ and _species_, we could reason upon nothing. To
speak, to reason, to form general and abstract ideas, are then in fact
the same thing; and this truth, simple as it is, might pass for a
discovery. Certainly, men in general have not even had a notion of
it.’—Logic, p. 136.
Now, in order to prevent these _genera_ and _species_, and all rational
ideas along with them, from being precipitated into the empty abyss of
words prepared for them by these philosophers, it may be proper to ask
one question, viz. if we have no idea of _genera_ and _species_, or of
what different things have in common or alike, that is, if the idea is
nothing but the name, how is it that we know when to apply the same
general name to different particulars, which on this principle can have
nothing left to connect them in the mind? For example, take the words,
_a white horse_. Now, say they, it is the terms which are general or
common, but we have no general or abstract idea corresponding to them.
But if we have no general idea of _white_, nor any general idea of _a
horse_, what have we left to guide us in applying the phrase to any but
the first horse, any more than in applying the terms of an unknown
tongue to their respective objects? In short, what is it that ‘puts the
same common name into a capacity of signifying many particulars,’ but
that common nature or kind which is conceived to belong to them?
Condillac says, that without general terms, there would be no general
ideas; it appears to me, that without general ideas there could be no
general terms. Language without this would be reduced to a heap of
proper names, and we should be as completely at a loss to class any
object generally from its agreement with others, or to say at sight,
this is a man, this is a horse, as to know whether we should call the
first man we accidentally met in the street by the name of John or
Thomas. The very existence of language is alone a sufficient proof of
the power of abstraction in the human mind.
It is so far from being true, according to the modern philosophy, that
we have neither complex nor general ideas, that, I think, it may be
proved to a demonstration that we have and can have no others. I must
premise, however, that I do not believe it possible ever to arrive at
general or abstract ideas by beginning in Mr. Locke’s method with
particular images. This faculty of abstraction is by most writers
considered as a sort of artificial refinement upon our other ideas, as
an excrescence no ways contained in the common impressions of things,
nor necessary to the common purposes of life; and is by Mr. Locke
altogether denied to be among the faculties of brutes. It is described
as the ornament and top-addition of the mind of man, which proceeding
from simple sensations upwards is gradually sublimed into the abstract
notions of things:—
‘So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More airy, last the bright consummate flower.’
On the contrary, I conceive that all our notions, from first to last,
are (strictly speaking) general and abstract, not absolute or
particular; and that to have a perfectly distinct idea of any one
individual object or concrete existence, either as to the parts of which
it is composed, or the differences belonging to it, or the circumstances
connected with it, would require an unlimited power of comprehension in
the human mind, which is impossible. All particular things consist of,
and even lead to, an infinite number of other things. Abstraction is
therefore a necessary consequence of the limitation of the comprehensive
faculty, and mixes itself, more or less, with every act of the
understanding, of whatever kind, during every moment of its existence.
The same fallacy has led to the rejection of abstract and general ideas
which has led to the rejection of complex ones, viz. that of supposing
sensible images to be perfectly simple or individual things. But the
truth is, that there is no one idea of an individual object which is any
thing more than a general and imperfect notion of it: for as there is no
such idea which does not relate to a number of complicated impressions
and their connections, so we can conceive the whole of no one object.
Again, there is no idea of a particular quality of any object, which is
perfectly simple and definite, but the result of a number of sensible
impressions of the same sort, classed together by the mind under the
abstract notion of likeness, or of something common between them,
without attending to their difference in other respects.
This view of the subject is not, I confess, very obvious at first sight,
and requires strong and clear proof, but it also admits of it. The only
way to defend our common sense against the sophisms of the moderns is to
retort their own analytical distinctions upon them.
In looking at any object, as at St. James’s Palace, for example, it is
taken for granted that the impression I have of it is a perfectly
distinct, precise, and definite idea, in which abstraction or
generalisation has no concern. Now it appears to me an easy matter to
shew that this sensible image of a particular building is itself but a
vague and confused notion, not one precise, individual impression, or
any number of impressions, distinctly perceived. For I would demand of
any one who thinks his senses furnish him with these infallible and
perfect images of things, free from all contradiction and perplexity,
what is the amount of the knowledge which he has of the object before
him? For instance, is the knowledge which he has that St. James’s Palace
is larger than the houses which are near it, owing to his perceiving,
with a glance of the eye, all the bricks of which the front is composed,
or can he not tell that it contains a number of windows of different
sizes, without distinctly counting them? Let us even suppose that he has
this exact knowledge, yet this will not be enough unless he has also a
distinct perception of the number and size of the panes of glass in each
window, and of every mark, stain, or dent in each brick, otherwise, his
idea of each of these particulars will still be general, and his most
substantial knowledge built on shadows, that is, composed of a number of
parts, of the parts of which he has no knowledge. In the same manner
that I form an idea of St. James’s Palace, I can form an idea of
Pall-Mall, of the adjoining streets, of Westminster, and London, of
Paris, of France, and England, and of the different cities and kingdoms
of the world. At least, I do not see the point of separation in this
progressive scale of our ideas. May I not be able, in looking out of my
window, to distinguish, first, a certain object in the distance, then
that it is a man, then that it is a person whom I know, and all this
before I can distinguish his particular features; and after I can
distinguish those features, what do I know or see of them, except their
general form, expression, and effect? Little or nothing. Let any one,
who is not an artist, or let any one who is, attempt to give an outline
from memory of the features of his most intimate friend, and he will
feel the truth of this remark. Yet though he does not know the exact
turn of any one feature, he will instantly, and without fail, recognise
the person the moment he meets him in the street, and that often, merely
from catching a glimpse of some part of his dress, or from peculiarity
of motion, though he may be quite at a loss to define in what this
peculiarity consists, or to account for its impression on him. We may be
said to have a particular knowledge of things, in proportion to the
number of parts which we distinguish in them. But the real ultimate
foundation of all our knowledge is and must be general, that is, made up
of masses, not of points, a mere confused result of a number of
impressions, not analysed by the mind, since there is no object which
does not consist of an infinite number of parts, and we have not an
infinite number of distinct ideas, answering to them. The knowledge of
every finite being rests in generals, and if we think to exclude all
generality from our ideas of things, as implying a want of perfect truth
and clearness, it will be impossible for the mind to form an idea of any
one object whatever. Let any person try the experiment of counting a
flock of sheep driven fast by him, and he will soon find his imagination
unable to keep pace with the rapid succession of objects, and his idea
of a positive number slide into the general notion of multitude. But
because there are more objects passing before him than he can possibly
count, he will not, therefore, think that there are none, nor will the
word, _flock_, present to his mind a mere name without any idea
corresponding to it. Every act of the attention, every object we see or
think of, offers a proof of the same kind.
These remarks will be found to contain the answer to the common argument
used on this subject, that in thinking of a man in general, we must
always conceive of a man of a particular size and figure. Now if it be
meant that when we pronounce the word _man_, we have either no idea at
all, or a distinct and perfect one of an entire figure of a man with all
its parts and proportions, it would amount to a knowledge, which no
sculptor or painter ever had of any one figure of which he was the most
thorough master, and which he had immediately before him. Or if it be
only meant that we think of a particular height, which must be a
precise, positive, determinate idea, even this supposition may in the
same way be shewn to be exceedingly fallacious, and an inversion of the
natural order of our ideas. For take any given height of a man, whether
tall, short, or middle-sized, and let that height be as visible as you
please, yet the actual height to which it amounts must be made up of the
length of the different parts, the head, the face, the neck, the body,
limbs, &c. all which must be distinctly added together by the mind,
before the sum total which they compose can be pretended to be a
precise, definite, individual idea. In the impression then of a given
visible object, we have only a general idea of something more or less
extended, and never of the precise length itself, for this precise
length (as it is thought to be) is necessarily composed of a number of
subordinate lengths, too many and too minute to be separately attended
to, or jointly conceived by the mind, and at last loses itself in the
infinite divisibility of matter. What sort of absolute certainty can
therefore be found in any such image or ideas, I cannot well conceive:
it seems to me like seeking for distinctness in the dancing of insects
in the evening sun, or for fixedness and rest in the motion of the sea.
All particulars are nothing but generals, more or less defined according
to circumstances, but never perfectly so.
Lastly, as the ideas of sensible objects can only be general notions, so
the ideas of sensible qualities are properly abstract ideas of likeness
or of something common between a number of sensible impressions of the
same class or sort. For example, the idea I have of the whiteness of a
marble statue is not the idea of a point, nor of any number of points,
with all their differences and circumstances, but a relative idea of the
colour of the whole statue. Now in arriving at this general result, or
in classing its sensible impressions together as of the same sort or
quality, the mind certainly is not conscious of every stain in the
colour of the marble, or streak that may happen to vary it, or of its
shape or size, or of every difference of light and shade, arising from
inequality of surface, &c. Yet if the idea falls any thing short of this
minute and absolute knowledge, it can only be an imperfect and abstract
one. The idea of whiteness in the same object (or as a sensible quality)
necessarily implies the same power of _abstracting from particulars_ in
the mind, as the general idea of whiteness taken from different objects,
from a white horse, a white cloud, a white wall, a white lily, or from
all the other white objects I have ever seen. The precise differences of
form, size, and every other actual circumstance in these particular
images, are as little necessary to be attended to in forming the general
idea of whiteness, as the differences of shape, size, and colour in
every particle of the statue of white marble are to the general
impression of colour in the whole object.
I will only add, that the mind has not been fairly dealt with in this
and other questions of the same sort. The difficulties belonging to the
abstraction, complexity, generalization, &c. of our ideas, it is,
perhaps, impossible ever to clear up; but that is no reason why we
should discard these operations from the human mind, any more than we
should deny the existence of motion, of extension, or of curve lines,
because we cannot explain them. Matter alone seems to have the privilege
of presenting difficulties and contradictions at every turn, which pass
current under the name of _facts_: but the moment any thing of this kind
is observed in the understanding, all the petulance of logicians is up
in arms against it. The mind is made the mark on which they vent all the
moods and figures of their impertinence; and metaphysical truth has, in
this respect, fared like the milk-white hind, the emblem of pure faith,
in Dryden’s fable, which ‘had oft been chased—
With Scythian shafts, and many winged wounds
Aimed at her heart, was often forced to fly,
And doomed to death, though fated not to die.’
AN ENGLISH METAPHYSICIAN.
FINE ARTS. BRITISH INSTITUTION
_The Morning Chronicle._] [_February 5, 1814._
The exhibition of this year is, we think, upon the whole, inferior to
the one or two last exhibitions; for though the historical department is
quite as respectably filled, there is not the same proportion of
pleasing representations of common life, and natural scenery. In spite
of certain classical prejudices, we should be sorry to see this which
has been the most successful walk of the modern English school,
neglected for the pursuit of prize-medals and _epic mottos_, which look
well in the catalogue. There is indeed a greater difference between an
historical picture, and a picture of an historical subject, than even
some eminent painters seem to have imagined. But we are, we confess, so
little refined in our taste, as to prefer a good imitation of common
nature to a bad imitation of the highest, or rather to an imitation of
nothing. Many of the pictures exhibited by young artists at this
Institution, have shewn a capacity for correct and happy delineation of
actual objects and domestic incidents, perhaps only inferior to the
master-pieces of the Dutch school, from the use of a less perfect
vehicle, and the want of long practice, steadily and uniformly directed
to the same object. But in the higher, and what is rather affectedly
called the epic style of art,—in giving the movements of the loftier and
more violent passions, this country has not a single painter to boast,
who has made even a faint approach to the excellence of the great
Italian painters. We have indeed a good number of specimens of the
clay-figure, the bones and muscles of the man, the anatomical mechanism,
the regular proportions measured by a two-foot rule—large canvasses
covered with stiff figures arranged in decent order, with the characters
and story correctly expressed by uplifted eyes or hands, according to
old receipt-books for the passions, and with all the hardness and
inflexibility of figures carved in wood, and painted over in good strong
body colours, that look as if some of nature’s journeymen had made them,
and not made them well. But we still want a Prometheus to give life to
the cumbrous mass, to throw an intellectual light over the opaque image,
to embody the inmost refinements of thought to the outward eye, to lay
bare the very soul of passion. That picture is of little comparative
value, which can be completely _translated_ into another language, of
which the description in a common catalogue is as good, and conveys all
that is expressed by the picture itself; for it is the excellence of
every art to give what can be given by no other, in the same degree.
Much less is that picture to be esteemed which only injures and defaces
the idea already existing in the mind’s eye, which does not come up to
the conception which the imagination forms of the subject, and
substitutes a dull reality for high sentiment; for the art is in this
case an incumbrance, not an assistance, and interferes with, instead of
adding to, the stock of our pleasurable sensations. But we should be at
a loss to point out (we will not say any English picture, but certainly)
any English painter, who in heroic and classical composition, has risen
to the height of his subject, and answered the expectation of the
well-informed spectator, or excited the same impression by visible means
as had been excited by words, or by reflection. That this inferiority in
English art is not owing to a deficiency of genius, imagination, or
passion, is proved sufficiently by the works of our poets and dramatic
writers, which, in loftiness and force, are certainly not surpassed by
those of any other nation. But whatever may be the depth of internal
thought and feeling in the English character, it seems to be _more
internal_, and (whether this is owing to climate, habit, or physical
constitution) to have, comparatively, a less immediate and powerful
communication with the organic expression of passion, which exhibits the
thoughts and feelings in the countenance, and furnishes matter for the
historic muse of painting. The English artist is instantly sensible that
the flutter, grimace, and extravagance of the French physiognomy, are
incompatible with high history; and we are at no loss to explain in this
way, that is, from the defect of existing models, why the productions of
the French school are marked with all the affectation of national
caricature, or sink into tame and lifeless imitations of the antique.
May we not account satisfactorily for the general defects of our own
historic productions in a similar way,—from a certain inertness and
constitutional phlegm, which does not habitually impress the workings of
the mind by correspondent traces on the countenance, and which may also
render us less sensible of these outward and visible signs of passion,
even when they are so impressed there? The irregularity of proportion
and want of symmetry in the structure of the national features, though
it certainly enhances the difficulty of infusing natural grace and
grandeur into the works of art, rather accounts for our not having been
able to attain the exquisite refinements of Grecian sculpture, than for
our not having rivalled the Italian painters in expression.
The strongest exception to these general remarks in the present
collection, is certainly _Mr. Bird’s Picture of Job_, surrounded by his
friends. Many of the heads and figures in this very able composition
have a strong and deeply infused tincture of true history. The best of
them are in a mixed style, which reminds us at the same time of Annibal
Caracci, and N. Poussin. The three finest figures are undoubtedly those
of Job, and the man and woman seated on each side of him. The
countenance of Job displays a noble firmness with a mixture of
suppressed feeling, not, perhaps, sufficiently marked for the character
or for the interest of the subject. The full grey drapery which
envelopes his whole figure, has an admirable effect, and seems in a
manner to shroud him from the attacks of external misfortune, in the
consolations of his own mind. The action of the man on his right hand,
pointing with his finger, and indeed the whole figure, are equally
appropriate and striking. The posture of the man leaning on a marble
slab, is also natural and picturesque, though it has too great an
appearance of ease and indifference for the occasion. The drapery of
this last figure is remarkably loose and flimsy, or what the painters,
we believe, call _woolly_. There are several other good heads in the
picture; but both the countenance and attitude of the man behind the
messenger, and the face of the figure between Job and the front figure
in red, are mean and vulgar—mere low life, without sense or dignity. The
expression in the countenance of the messenger, who comes to inform Job
of the last calamity that has befallen him, is neither intelligent nor
beautiful; and the whole of the figure, both by its situation and the
quantity of light thrown upon it, assumes a prominence disproportioned
to its importance, and throws the rest of the composition into a kind of
half back-ground. The story is illustrated (whether with chronological
propriety or not we leave to the critics) by a group of figures just
behind the circle of Job and his friends, carrying off the dead body of
one of his children. The great fault of this picture, which displays
much sense, character, study, and invention, is the heaviness and
monotony of the colour. It is of one uniform leaden tone, as if it had
been smeared over with putty, except where a sudden transition to a
glaring red or yellow, or the introduction of a spotty light, not at all
accounted for, serves, instead of relieving, to add greater weight to
that mechanic gloom, which affects, not the imagination, but the eye. We
think it right to notice a defect which may be more easily remedied by
attention, viz. that the extremities of Mr. Bird’s figures are in
general very ill made out.
Mr. Allston’s large picture of _the dead man restored to life by
touching the bones of Elisha_, deserves great praise both for the choice
and originality of the subject, the judicious arrangement of the general
composition, and the correct drawing and very great knowledge of the
human figure throughout. The figure of the revived soldier in the
foreground is noble and striking; the drapery about him is equally well
imagined and well executed. There is also a very beautiful head of a
young man in a blue drapery with his hands lifted together, and in the
act of attention to another, who is pointing out the miracle, which has
much of the simple dignity and pathos of Raphael. With respect to the
general colour and expression of this picture, we think it has too much
of the look of a French composition. The faces are in the school of Le
Brun’s heads—theoretical diagrams of the passions—not natural and
profound expressions of them; forced and overcharged, without precision
or variety of character. The colouring, too, is without any strongest
contrasts or general gradations, and is half-toned and half-tinted away,
between reddish brown flesh and wan-red drapery, till all effect, union,
and relief, is lost. It would be unjust not to add, that we think Mr.
Allston’s picture demonstrates great talents, great professional
acquirements, and even genius; but we suspect that he has paid too
exclusive an attention to the instrumental and theoretical parts of his
art. The object of art is not merely to display knowledge, but to give
pleasure.
There is a small picture of _Diana bathing_, by this gentleman, which we
think equally admirable for the character and drawing. The knowledge of
the human figure in this pleasing composition might be opposed with
advantage to the utter ignorance of it in some Musidora sketches, in
which the limbs seem to have been kneaded in paste, and are thrown
together like a bundle of drapery.
Of Mr. Hilton’s picture of _Mary Magdalen anointing the feet of our
Saviour_, we have little more to say, than that the figures are much
larger than life, and that, we understand, it has been purchased by the
Institution for 500 guineas.
Mr. West’s picture of _Lot and his Family_ is one of those highly
finished specimens of _metallurgy_ which too often proceed from the
President’s hardware manufactory. As to the subject, we conceive it has
been often enough treated in a country famed for ‘pure religion
breathing household laws.’ We do not mean to lay it down as a rule, that
the sublimity of the execution may not redeem the deformity of the
subject of a composition, as there is a great and acknowledged
difference between Shakspeare and the Newgate Calendar; but this of Mr.
West’s is a mere furniture picture, and offers no palliation from the
genius displayed by the artist. Having touched unawares on this very
delicate subject of the ethics of painting, we shall just notice, that
the picture of ‘Venus weeping over the dead body of Adonis,’ seems to
have been painted _tout expres_, for the purpose of being bought up by
some member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Mr. Turner’s grand landscape of _Apullius_ and _Apullia_ has one
recommendation, which must always enhance the value of this most able
artist’s productions, that the composition is taken _verbatim_ from Lord
Egremont’s picture of ‘Jacob and Laban.’ The beautiful arrangement is
Claude’s; the powerful execution is his own. From this specimen of
parody, and from his never-enough-to-be-admired picture of ‘Mercury and
Herse,’ we could almost wish that this gentleman would always work in
the trammels of Claude or N. Poussin. All the taste and all the
imagination being borrowed, his powers of eye, hand, and memory, are
equal to any thing. In general, his pictures are a waste of morbid
strength. They give pleasure only by the excess of power triumphing over
the barrenness of the subject. The artist delights to go back to the
first chaos of the world, or to that state when the waters were merely
separated from the dry land, and no creeping thing nor herb bearing
fruit was seen upon the face of the land. The figures in the present
picture are execrable. Claude’s are flimsy enough; but these are
impudent and obtrusive vulgarity. The utter want of a capacity to draw a
distinct outline with the force, the depth, the fulness, and precision
of this artist’s eye for colour, is truly astonishing. There is only one
part of the colouring of Mr. Turner’s landscape which did not please us:
it is the blue of the water nearest the foreground, immediately after
the dark brown shadow of the trees.
The picture of the _Favourite Lamb_, by Collins, has exquisite feeling.
The groupe of children surrounding the little victim, and arresting him
in his progress to the butcher’s cart, has a degree of natural pathos
and touching simplicity, which we have never seen surpassed in any
picture of the kind. It may easily draw tears from eyes, at all used to
the melting mood.
THE STAGE.
_The Morning Chronicle_] [_February 24, 1814._
The manner in which Shakespeare’s plays have been generally altered, or
rather mangled, by modern mechanists, is in our opinion a disgrace to
the English Stage. The patch-work _Richard_ which is acted under the
sanction of his name, is a striking example of this remark. The play
itself is undoubtedly one of the finest effusions of Shakespeare’s
genius. It is as truly _Shakespearian_—that is, it has as much of the
author’s mind, of passion, character, and interest, with as little alloy
of the peculiarities of the age, or extraneous matter, as almost any
other of his productions. Wherever Shakespeare relied upon himself, and
did not appeal to the taste of his audience, he outstripped all
competition, and this he did as often as he had a motive in his subject
to do so; he had none in his vanity, or in the affectation of conforming
to certain critical rules. The winds blow as they list; and the golden
tide of passion no sooner rises in his breast, than it swells and bears
down every thing in its mighty course.
The ground-work of the character of _Richard_,—that mixture of
intellectual vigour with moral depravity, in which Shakespeare delighted
to shew his strength,—gave full scope as well as temptation to the
exertion of his genius. The character of his hero is almost everywhere
predominant, and marks its lurid track throughout. The original play is,
however, too long for representation, and there are some few scenes
which might be better spared than preserved and by omitting which, it
would remain a complete whole. The only rule, indeed, for altering
Shakespeare, is to retrench certain passages which may be considered
either as superfluous or obsolete, but not to add or transpose any
thing. The arrangement and developement of the story, and the mutual
contrast and combination of the _dramatis personæ_, are in general as
finely managed as the developement of the characters or the expression
of the passions.
This rule has not been adhered to in the present instance. Some of the
most important and striking passages in the principal character have
been omitted, to make room for tedious and misplaced extracts from other
plays; the only intention of which seems to have been, to make the
character of _Richard_ as odious and disgusting as possible. A bugbear
seems to have been always necessary to the English nation, and—give them
but this to vent their spleen upon—they will, either in matters of taste
or opinion, ‘as tenderly be led by the nose as asses are.’ It is
apparently for no other purpose than to make _Gloucester_ stab _King
Henry_ on the stage, that the fine abrupt introduction of this character
in the opening of the play is lost in the tedious whining morality of
the uxorious King (taken from another play);—we say _tedious_, because
it interrupts the business of the scene, and loses its beauty and effect
by having no intelligible connection with the previous character of the
mild and well-meaning monarch. The passages which Mr. Wroughton has to
recite are in themselves exquisitely pathetic, but they have nothing to
do with the world that _Richard_ has to ‘bustle in.’ In the same spirit
of vulgar caricature is the scene between _Richard_ and _Lady Anne_
(when his wife)—interpolated, merely to gratify this favourite
propensity to disgust and loathing. With the same perverse consistency,
_Richard_, after his last fatal struggle, is raised up by some Galvanic
process, to utter the imprecation, without any motive but pure
malignity, which is so finely put into the mouth of _Northumberland_ on
hearing of _Percy’s_ death. We hope that Mr. Kean, when he acts
_Macbeth_, will die as Shakespeare makes him, and not with four lines of
canting penitence (a common-place against ambition) in his mouth. To
make room for these needless additions and interpolations, many of the
most striking passages in the real play have been omitted by the foppery
and ignorance of the prompt-book critics. We do not mean to insist
merely on passages which are fine as poetry and to the reader, such as
_Clarence’s_ dream, &c. but those which are important to the
developement of the character, and peculiarly adapted for stage effect.
We give the following as instances among many others.
The first is the scene where _Richard_ enters abruptly to the Queen and
her friends, to defend himself:
_Enter_ GLOUCESTER.
_Glo._ They do me wrong, and I will not endure it.
Who are they that complain unto the King,
That I, forsooth, am stern, and love them not?
By holy Paul, they love his Grace but lightly,
That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours;
Because I cannot flatter, and look fair,
Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abused
With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks
_Gray._ To whom in all this presence speaks your Grace?
_Glo._ To thee, that hast nor honesty nor grace;
When have I injured thee? When done thee wrong?
Or thee? or thee? or any of your faction?
A plague upon you all!
What can be more characteristic than the turbulent pretensions to
meekness and simplicity in this address?
Again, the versatility and adroitness of _Richard_ is admirably
described in the following ironical answer to Brakenbury:—
_Brakenbury._ I beseech your graces both to pardon me,
His Majesty hath straitly given in charge,
That no man shall have private conference,
Of what degree soever, with your brother.
_Glo._ E’en so, and please your worship, Brakenbury,
You may partake of any thing we say:
We speak not reason, man—we say the King
Is wise and virtuous, and his noble Queen
Well strook in years, fair, and not jealous.
We say that Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot,
A cherry lip, a passing pleasing tongue:
That the Queen’s kindred are made gentle folks.
How say you, Sir? Can you deny all this?
_Brak._ With this, my Lord, myself have nought to do.
_Glo._ What, fellow, nought to do with Mistress Shore?
I tell you, Sir, he that doth nought with her,
Excepting one, were best to do it secretly alone.
_Brak._ What one, my Lord?
_Glo._ Her husband, knave—wouldst thou betray me?
The feigned reconciliation of Gloucester with the Queen’s kinsmen, is
also a master-piece. One of the finest features in the play, and which
serves to shew, as much as any thing, the deep duplicity of _Richard_,
is the unsuspecting security of _Hastings_, at the very time when the
former is plotting his death.
Perhaps the two most beautiful passages in the original, are the
farewell apostrophe of the _Queen_ to the Tower, where her children are
shut up from her, and _Tyrrel’s_ description of their death. We will
finish our quotations with them:—
_Queen._ Stay, yet look back with me, unto the Tower;
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes,
Whom envy hath immured within your walls;
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones;
Rude, rugged nurse, old sullen playfellow,
For tender princes!
The other passage is the account of their death by _Tyrrel_:—
Dighton and Forrest, whom I did suborn
To do this piece of ruthless butchery,
Albeit they were flesh’d villains, bloody dogs,
Wept like to children in their death’s sad story:
O thus! quoth Dighton, lay the gentle babes;
Thus, thus! quoth Forrest, girdling one another,
Within their innocent alabaster arms;
Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,
And in that summer-beauty kiss’d each other;
A book of prayers on their pillow lay,
Which once, quoth Forrest, almost changed my mind.
But Oh the Devil!—there the villain stopped:
When Dighton thus told on—we smothered
The most replenished sweet work of nature,
That from the prime creation ere she framed.
These are those wonderful bursts of feeling, done to the very height of
nature which our Shakespeare alone could give. We do not insist on the
repetition of these last passages as proper for the stage; we should
indeed be loth to trust them with almost any actor; but we should wish
them to be retained, at least in preference to the fantoccini exhibition
of the young Princes, bandying childish wit with their uncle.
We have taken the present opportunity to offer these remarks on the
necessity of acting the plays of our great Bard, in spirit and
substance, instead of burlesquing them, because we think the stage has
acquired in Mr. Kean an actor capable of doing singular justice to many
of his finest delineations of character.
FINE ARTS—THE LOUVRE
_The Morning Chronicle_] [_March 24, 1814._
‘If Blücher, if the Cossacks, get to Paris,—to Paris, the seat of
Bonaparte’s pride and insolence,—what mercy will they shew to it, or why
should they shew it any mercy? Will they spare the precious works of
art, to decorate the palace of a monster whom they justly detest? Will
they treat the Thuileries more tenderly than the French Officers, only
eight months ago, openly threatened to treat Berlin? Is Paris,
Bonaparte’s Paris, more sacred than Moscow? or are the slaves of the
Corsican more inviolable than the brave and virtuous citizens of
Hamburgh? No, no; the indignant warriors will cry,—
“Away to Heav’n respective Lenity,
And fire-eyed Fury be my conduct now.”
‘There is no other mode by which the Parisians can disarm the vengeance
which now so closely impends over them, than by disclaiming for ever him
whose crimes have been the just cause of that vengeance. Paris under the
white standard, returning to loyalty and virtue, may be spared by a
generous conqueror;—but Paris, identified with Bonaparte, must partake
all the vindictive sentiments which are attached to that hateful name.
[Yet some time ago this writer assured us that if the French people
identified themselves with Bonaparte, they ought not to be separated
from him.]
‘In what momentous times do we live! Perhaps, the famous city of which
we speak may even now be laid in ashes! Perhaps and more welcome be the
omen, it may have returned to its allegiance, and proclaimed its native
Sovereign, and set a price on the head of that wicked rebel who still
dares to call himself the Emperor of France.’—_Times_, March 17.
‘Nay, if you mouth, I’ll rant as well as you!’
It is a pity to spoil this morsel of Asiatic eloquence, so worthy of the
subject and the sentiments; but the evident meaning of it is, that the
French must expect to do penance in sack-cloth and ashes, or consent to
put on the old livery jackets, made up for them by our army-agents long
ago, and which have unfortunately lain on hand ever since. If so, they
must needs be ‘pigeon-liver’d, and lack gall.’ Yet we hardly know what
to say to the chivalrous and classical politicians of the Stock
Exchange. They are not driven to the extremity of Gothic rage by the
ranking inveteracy, and old unsatisfied grudge of the Pitt-school. Yet
surely no pitiable enthusiast that
‘Scrawls
With desperate charcoal on his darken’d walls,’
can be more incorrigible to reason. They are always setting out on their
way to Paris from Moscow, while the Pitt-school studiously return to
join Lord Hawkesbury in the year 1793, or they think the whole ceremony
incomplete! The treaty of Pilnitz does not stand between our modern
popular incendiaries and their just revenge! They live only in ‘this
present ignorant time!’ They see the white standard of the Bourbons
waving over the walls of Paris, unspotted with the blood of millions of
Frenchmen! They do not seem ever to have known, or (with our
poet-laureat) they forget, that the same standard to which our milky
politicians advise the French people, sick of destruction, and panting
for freedom, to fly for deliverance and repose, is that very standard,
which, for twenty years, hovering round them, now seen like a cloudy
speck in the distance—now spreading out its drooping lilies wide, has
been the cause of that destruction—has robbed them at once of liberty
and of repose!
Moscow is, however, the watch-word of the renegados of _The Times_. It
seems to them just that Paris should be sacrificed to revenge the
setting fire to Moscow by the Russians, and that the monuments of art in
the Louvre ought to be destroyed because they are Bonaparte’s. No; they
are ours as well as his;—they belong to the human race; he cannot
monopolize all genius and all art. But these madmen would, if they
could, blot the Sun out of heaven, because it shines upon France. They
verify the old proverb, ‘Tell me your company, and I’ll tell you your
manners!’ They, no more than their friends the Cossacks, can perceive
any difference between the Kremlin and the Louvre. There is at least one
difference, that the one may be built up again, and the other cannot.
For there, in the Louvre, in Bonaparte’s Louvre, are the precious
monuments of art—the sacred pledges which human genius has given to time
and nature;—there ‘stands the statue that enchants the world;’ there is
the _Apollo_, the _Laocoon_, the _Dying Gladiator_, the _Head of the
Antinous_, _Diana with her Fawn_, and all the glories of the antique
world;—
‘There is old Proteus coming from the sea,
And wreathed Triton blows his winding horn.’
There, too, are the two _St. Jeromes_, Correggio’s and Dominichino’s;
there is Raphael’s _Transfiguration_, the _St. Mark_ of Tintoret, Paul
Veronese’s _Marriage of Cana_, the _Deluge_ of Nicholas Poussin, and
Titian’s _St. Peter Martyr_;—all these, and more than these, of which
the world is scarce worthy. Yet all these amount to nothing in the eyes
of those virtuosos the Cossacks, and their fellow-students of _The
Times_! ‘What’s Hecuba to them, or they to Hecuba?’ But we must be
allowed to see with our own eyes, and to have certain feelings of our
own. We will not be brayed by these quacks _like fools in a mortar_. We
too, as Mr. Burke expresses it, have ‘real feelings of flesh and blood
beating in our bosoms.’ ‘We look up with awe to Kings; with affection to
parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and
with respect to nobility.’ But all this is a machine that goes on of
itself, and may be repaired if out of order. We bow willingly to Lords
and Commoners, though we know that ‘breath can make them as a breath has
made.’ Blücher, Wittgenstein, Winzingerode, and Ktzichigoff, are true
heroes; their names become the mouth well, and rouse the ear as the
sound of a trumpet; but they are the heroes of a day, and all that they
have done might be as well done by others to-morrow. But here it is:
once destroy the great monuments of art, and they cannot be replaced.
Those mighty geniuses, who have left their works behind them an
inheritance to mankind, live but once to do honour to themselves and
their nature. ‘But once put out their light, and there is no Promethean
heat that can their light relumine.’ Nor ought it ever to be re-kindled,
to be extinguished a second time by the harpies of the human race. What
have ‘the worshippers of cats and onions’ to do with those triumphs of
human genius, which give the eternal lie to their creed? We would
therefore recommend these accomplished pioneers of civilisation and
social order, after they have done their work at the Louvre, to follow
the river-side, and they will come to a bare inclosure, surrounded by
four low walls. It is the place where the Bastille stood: let them rear
that, and all will be well. And then some whiffling poet who celebrated
the fall of that monument of mild paternal sway—that sacred ark of the
confidence of Kings—that strong bulwark of ‘time-hallowed laws,’ and
precious relic of ‘the good old times,’ in an ode, may hail its
restoration in a sonnet!
WILSON’S LANDSCAPES, AT THE BRITISH INSTITUTION
_The Champion._] [_July 17, 1814._
The landscapes of this celebrated artist may be divided into three
classes;—his Italian landscapes, or imitations of the manner of Claude,
his copies of English scenery, and his historical compositions.
The first of these are, in our opinion, by much the best; and of the
pictures of this class in the present collection, we should, without any
hesitation, give the preference to the _Apollo and the Seasons_, and to
the _Phaeton_. The figures are of course out of the question—(Wilson’s
figures are as uncouth and slovenly as Claude’s are insipid and
finical)—but the landscape in both pictures is delightful. In looking at
them we breath the very air which the scene inspires, and feel the
genius of the place present to us. In the first, there is all the cool
freshness of a misty spring morning: the sky, the water, the dim horizon
all convey the same feeling. The fine grey tone, and varying outline of
the hills, the graceful form of the retiring lake, broken still more by
the hazy shadows of the objects that repose on its bosom; the light
trees that expand their branches in the air, and the dark stone figure
and mouldering temple, that contrast strongly with the broad clear light
of the rising day, give a charm, a truth, a force and harmony to this
landscape, which produce the greater pleasure the longer it is dwelt
on.—The distribution of light and shade resembles the effect of light on
a globe.
The _Phaeton_ has the dazzling fervid appearance of an autumnal evening;
the golden radiance streams in solid masses from behind the flickering
clouds; every object is baked in the sun;—the brown foreground, the
thick foliage of the trees, the streams shrunk and stealing along behind
the dark high banks, combine to produce that richness, and
characteristic propriety of effect, which is to be found only in nature,
or in art derived from the study and imitation of nature. The glowing
splendour of this landscape reminds us of the saying of Wilson, that in
painting such subjects, he endeavoured to give the effect of insects
dancing in the evening sun. His eye seemed formed to drink in the light.
These two pictures, as they have the greatest general effect, are also
more carefully finished in the particular details than the other
pictures in the collection. This circumstance may be worth the attention
of those who are apt to think that strength and slovenliness are the
same thing.
_Cicero at his Villa_ is a clear and beautiful representation of nature.
The sky is admirable for its pure azure tone. Among the less finished
productions of Wilson’s pencil, which display his great knowledge of
perspective, are _A Landscape with figures bathing_, in which the
figures are wonderfully detached from the sea beyond; and _A View in
Italy_, with a lake and a little boat, which appear at an immeasurable
distance below:—the boat is diminished to
‘A buoy almost too small for sight.’
_A View of Ancona_; _Adrian’s Villa at Rome_; a small blue greenish
landscape; _The Lake of Neimi_; a small, richly-coloured landscape of
the banks of a river; and a landscape containing some light and elegant
groups of trees, are masterly and interesting sketches. _A View on the
Tiber_, near Rome, a dark landscape which lies finely open to the sky;
and _A View of Rome_, are successful imitations of N. Poussin. _A View
of Sion House_, which is hung almost out of sight, is remarkable for the
clearness of the perspective, particularly in the distant windings of
the River Thames, and still more so for the parched and droughty
appearance of the whole scene. The air is adust, the grass burned up and
withered: and it seems as if some figures, reposing on the level, smooth
shaven lawn on the river’s side, would be annoyed by the parching heat
of the ground. We consider this landscape, which is an old favourite, as
one of the most striking proofs of Wilson’s genius, as it conveys not
only the image, but the feeling of nature, and excites a new interest
unborrowed from the eye, like the fine glow of a summer’s day. There is
a sketch of the same subject, called _A View on the Thames_.
_A View near Llangollen, North Wales_; _Oakhampton Castle, Devonshire_;
and _The Bridge at Llangollen_, are the principal of Wilson’s English
landscapes. They want almost every thing that ought to recommend them.
The subjects are not fit for the landscape-painter, and there is nothing
in the execution to redeem them. Ill-shaped mountains, or great heaps of
earth, trees that grow against them without character or elegance,
motionless water-falls, a want of relief, of transparency, and
distance,—without the imposing grandeur of real magnitude (which it is
either not within the province of the art to give, or which is certainly
not given here), are the chief features and defects of these
pictures.—The same general objections apply to _Solitude_, and to one or
two pictures near it, which are masses of common-place confusion. In
near scenes, the effect must depend almost entirely on the difference in
the execution, and the details: for the difference of colour alone is
not sufficient to give relief to objects placed at a small distance from
the eye. But in Wilson there are commonly no details; all is loose and
general; and this very circumstance, which assisted him in giving the
massy contrasts of light and shade, deprived his pencil of all force and
precision within a limited space. In general, air is necessary to the
landscape-painter: and for this reason, the lakes of Cumberland and
Westmoreland afford few subjects for landscape-painting. However
stupendous the scenery of that country is, and however powerful and
lasting the impression which it must always make on the imagination, yet
the effect is not produced merely through the eye of the spectator, but
arises chiefly from collateral and associated feelings. There is the
knowledge of the distance from which we have seen the objects, in the
midst of which we are now placed,—the slow, improgressive motion which
we make in traversing them,—the abrupt precipice,—the torrent’s
roar,—the dizzy rapture and boundless expanse of the prospect from the
highest mountains,—the difficulty of their ascent,—their loneliness, and
silence;—in short, there is a constant sense and superstitious awe of
the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of
nature, on which from the beginning of time the hand of man has made no
impression, and which by the lofty reflections they excite in him, give
a sort of intellectual sublimity even to his sense of physical weakness.
But there is little in all these circumstances that can be translated
into the picturesque, which depends not on the objects themselves, so
much as on the symmetry and relation of these objects to one another. In
a picture a mountain shrinks to a molehill, and the lake that expands
its broad bosom to the sky, seems hardly big enough to launch a fleet of
cockle-shells.
Wilson’s historical landscapes, the two _Niobes_, _Celadon and Amelia_,
_Meleager and Atalanta_, do not, in our opinion, deserve the name; that
is, they do not excite feelings corresponding with the scene and story
represented. They neither display true taste nor fine imagination; but
are affected and violent exaggerations of clumsy, common nature. They
are all made up of the same mechanical materials, an overhanging rock,
bare shattered trees, black rolling clouds, and forked lightning. The
scene of _Celadon and Amelia_, though it may be proper for a
thunder-storm, is not a place for lovers to walk in. The _Meleager and
Atalanta_ is remarkable for nothing but a castle at a distance, very
much ‘resembling a goose-pye.’ The figures in the two other pictures are
not like the children of _Niobe_, punished by the Gods, but like a
groupe of rustics, crouching from a hail-storm. In one of these,
however, there is a fine break in the sky worthy of the subject. We
agree with Sir J. Reynolds, that Wilson’s mind was not, like N.
Poussin’s, sufficiently imbued with the knowledge of antiquity to
transport the imagination two thousand years back, to give natural
objects a sympathy with preternatural events, and to inform rocks, and
trees, and mountains with the presence of a God.[13]
The writer of the Preface to the Catalogue of the British Gallery,
says—‘Few artists have excelled Wilson in the tint of air, perhaps the
most difficult point of attainment for the landscape-painter: every
object in his pictures keeps its place, because each is seen through its
proper medium. _This excellence alone_ gives a charm to his pencil, and
by judicious application may be turned to the advantage of the British
artist.’—This praise is equivocal: if it be meant that ‘the tint of air’
is the only excellence of Wilson’s landscapes, the observation is not
true. He had also great truth, harmony, and richness of local colouring:
he had a fine feeling of the proportions and conduct of light and shade;
and, in general, an eye for graceful form, as far as regards the bold
and varying outlines of indefinite objects—as may be seen in his
foregrounds, hills, etc.—where the mind is left to chuse according to an
abstract principle, as it is filled or affected agreeably by certain
combinations,—and is not tied down to an imitation of characteristic and
articulate forms. In his figures, trees, cattle, buildings and in every
thing which has a determinate and regular form, Wilson’s pencil was not
only deficient in accuracy of outline, but even in perspective and
actual relief. His trees, in particular, seem pasted on the canvas, like
botanical specimens.
We shall close these remarks with observing, that we cannot subscribe to
the opinion of those who assert that Wilson was superior to Claude as a
man of genius: nor can we discern any other grounds for this opinion,
than those which lead to the general conclusion, that the more slovenly
the performance, the finer the picture; and that that which is imperfect
is superior to that which is perfect. It might as well be said, that a
sign-painting is better than the reflection of a landscape in a mirror;
and the only objection that can be made in the latter case cannot be
made to the landscapes of Claude, for in them the Graces themselves
have, with their own hands, assisted in disposing and selecting every
object.—Is the general effect in his pictures injured by the details? Is
the truth inconsistent with the beauty of the imitation? Are the scope
and harmony of the whole destroyed by the exquisite delicacy of every
part? Does the perpetual profusion of objects and scenery, all perfect
in themselves, interfere with the simple grandeur, and immense extent of
the whole? Does the precision with which a plant is marked in the
foreground, take away from the air-drawn distinctions of the blue,
glimmering distant horizon? Is there any want of that endless airy
space, where the eye wanders at liberty under the open sky, explores
distant objects, and returns back as from a delightful journey? There is
no comparison between him and Wilson. The landscapes of Claude have all
that is exquisite and refined in art and nature. Every thing is moulded
into grace and harmony; and at the touch of his pencil, shepherds with
their flocks, temples and groves, and winding glades, and scattered
hamlets, rise up in never-ending succession, under the azure sky, and
the resplendent sun, ‘while universal Pan,
‘Knit with the Graces, and the hours in dance
Leads on the eternal spring.’—
There is a fine apostrophe in a sonnet of Michael Angelo’s to the
earliest Poet of Italy:
‘Fain would I to be what our Dante was,
Forego the happiest fortunes of mankind;’
What landscape-painter does not feel this of Claude![14]
ON GAINSBOROUGH’S PICTURES
_The Champion._] [_July 31, 1814._
There is an anecdote connected with the reputation of Gainsborough’s
Pictures, which rests on pretty good authority. Sir Joshua Reynolds, at
one of the Academy dinners, speaking of Gainsborough, said to a friend,
‘He is undoubtedly the best English landscape-painter.’ ‘No,’ said
Wilson, who overheard the conversation, ‘he’s not the best English
landscape-painter, but he is the best portrait-painter in England.’ They
were certainly both wrong; but the story is creditable to the variety of
Gainsborough’s talents.
Of his portraits, in the present collection at the British Gallery, the
only fine one is _A Portrait of a Youth_. This picture is from Lord
Grosvenor’s collection, where it used to look remarkably well, and has
been sometimes mistaken for a Vandyke. There is a spirited glow of youth
about the face, and the attitude is striking and elegant. The drapery of
blue satin is admirably painted. The _Portrait of Garrick_ is
interesting as a piece of biography. He looks much more like a gentleman
than in Reynolds’s tragi-comic representation of him.—There is a
considerable lightness and intelligence in the expression of the face,
and a piercing vivacity about the eyes, to which the attention is
immediately directed. Gainsborough’s own portrait, which has, however,
much truth and character, and makes a fine print, seems to have been
painted with the handle of his brush. There is a portrait of _The Prince
Regent leading a horse_, in which it must be confessed the man has the
advantage of the animal.
Gainsborough’s landscapes are of two classes, or periods; his early and
his later pictures. The former are, we imagine, the best. They are
imitations of nature, or of painters who imitated nature;—such as a
_Woody Scene_; another, which is a fine imitation of Ruysdale; and a
_Road Side, with figures_, which has great truth and clearness. His
later pictures are flimsy caricatures of Rubens, who himself carried
inattention to accuracy of detail to the utmost limit that it would
bear. Lord Bacon says, that ‘distilled books are, like distilled waters,
flashy things.’ The same may be said of pictures.—Gainsborough’s latter
landscapes are bad water-colour drawings, washed in by mechanical
movements of the hand, without any communication with the eye. The truth
seems to be, that Gainsborough found there was something wanting in his
‘_early manner_,’—that is, something beyond mere literal imitation of
natural objects, and he seems to have concluded, rather hastily, that
the way to arrive at that _something more_, was to discard truth and
nature altogether. He accordingly ran from one extreme into the other.
We cannot conceive anything carried to a greater excess of slender
execution and paltry glazing, than _A Fox hunted with grey-hounds_, _A
romantic Landscape with Sheep at a Fountain_, and many others. We were,
however, much pleased with an upright landscape, with figures, which has
a fine, fresh appearance of the open sky, with a dash of the wildness of
Salvator Rosa; and also with _A Bank of a River_, which is remarkable
for the elegance of the forms and the real delicacy of the execution. _A
Group of Cattle in a warm Landscape_ is an evident imitation of Rubens,
but no more like to Rubens than ‘I to Hercules.’ _Landscape with a
Waterfall_ should be noticed for the sparkling clearness of the
distance. _Sportsmen in a Landscape_ is copied from Teniers with much
taste and feeling, though very inferior to the original picture in Lord
Radnor’s collection.
Of the fancy pictures, on which Gainsborough’s fame chiefly rests, we
are disposed to give the preference to his _Cottage Children_. There is,
we apprehend, greater truth, variety, force, and character, in this
groupe, than in any other. The colouring of the light-haired child is
particularly true to nature, and forms a sort of natural and innocent
contrast to the dark complexion of the elder sister, who is carrying it.
_The Girl going to the Well_ is, however, the general favourite. The
little dog is certainly admirable. His hair looks as if it had been just
washed and combed. The attitude of the _Girl_ is also perfectly easy and
natural. But there is a consciousness in the turn of the head, and a
sentimental pensiveness in the expression, which is not taken from
nature, but intended as an improvement on it. There is a regular
insipidity, a systematic vacancy, a round, unvaried smoothness, to which
real nature is a stranger, and which is only an idea existing in the
painter’s mind. We think the gloss of art is never so ill bestowed as on
subjects of this kind, which ought to be studies of natural history. It
is perhaps the general fault of Gainsborough, that he presents us with
an ideal common life, whereas it is only the reality that is here good
for any thing. His subjects are softened and sentimentalised too much,
it is not simple, unaffected nature that we see, but nature sitting for
her picture. Gainsborough, we suspect, from some of the pictures in this
collection, led the way to that masquerade style, which piques itself on
giving the air of an Adonis to the driver of a hay-cart, and models the
features of a milk-maid on the principles of the antique. The _Girl and
Pigs_ is hardly liable to this objection. There is a healthy glow in the
girl’s face, which seems the immediate effect of the air blowing upon
it. The expression is not quite so good. The _Fox-dogs_ are admirable.
The young one is even better than the old one, and has undeniable
hereditary pretensions. The _Shepherd Boys_ are fine. We do not like the
_Boys with Dogs fighting_. We see no reason why the one should be so
handsome and the other so ugly, why the one should be so brown and the
other so yellow, or why their dogs should be of the same colour as
themselves: nor why the worst-looking of the two should be most anxious
to part the fray. The sketch of the _Woodman_, the original of which was
unfortunately burned, fully justifies all the reputation it has
acquired. It is a really fine study from nature. There is a picture of
Gainsborough’s somewhere of _A Shepherd Boy in a Storm_, of which we
many years ago saw an indifferent copy in a broker’s shop, but in which
the unconscious simplicity of the boy’s expression, looking up with his
hands folded, and with timid wonder, the noisy chattering of a magpye
perched above him, and the rustling of the coming storm in the branches
of the trees, produced a romantic pastoral impression, which we have
often recalled with no little pleasure since that time. We have always,
indeed, felt a strong prepossession in favor of Gainsborough, and were
disappointed at not finding his pictures in the present collection, all
that we had wished to find them.
He was to be considered, perhaps, rather as a man of taste, and of an
elegant and feeling mind, than as a man of genius; as a lover of the
art, rather than an artist. He pursued it, with a view to amuse and
sooth his mind, with the ease of a gentleman, not with the severity of a
professional student. He wished to make his pictures, like himself,
amiable; but a too constant desire to please almost necessarily leads to
affectation and effeminacy. He wanted that vigour of intellect, which
perceives the beauty of truth; and thought that painting was to be
gained, like other mistresses, by flattery and smiles. It is an error
which we are disposed to forgive in one, around whose memory, both as a
man and an artist, many fond recollections, many vain regrets must
always linger. Peace to his shade![15]
MR. KEMBLE’S PENRUDDOCK
_The Champion._] [_Nov. 20, 1814._
Mr. Kemble lately appeared at this theatre in the character of
Penruddock, and was received (not indeed with waving handkerchiefs, and
laurel garlands thrown on the stage, but what is much better) with
heart-felt approbation and silent tears. His delineation of the part is
one of his most correct and interesting performances, and one of the
most perfect on the modern stage. The deeply rooted, mild, pensive
melancholy of the character, its embittered recollections and dignified
benevolence, were given by Mr. Kemble with equal truth, elegance, and
feeling. This admirable actor appeared to be the unfortunate, but
amiable individual whom he represented; and the expression of the
sentiments, the look, the tone of voice, exactly true to nature, struck
a correspondent chord in every bosom.—The range of characters, in which
Mr. Kemble shines, and is superior to every other actor, are those which
consist in the developement of some one sentiment or exclusive passion.
From a want of rapidity, of scope, and variety, he is often deficient in
expressing the bustle and complication of different interests, nor does
he possess the faculty of overpowering the mind by sudden and
irresistible bursts of passion. But in giving the habitual workings of a
predominant feeling, as in Penruddock, Coriolanus, and some others,
where all the passions move round a central point, and have one master
key, he stands unrivalled. In Penruddock, he broods over the
recollection of disappointed hope, till it becomes a part of himself, it
sinks deeper into his mind the longer he dwells upon it, and his whole
person is moulded to the character. The weight of sentiment which
oppresses him never seems suspended, the spring at his heart is never
lightened, his regrets only become more profound as they become more
durable. So in Coriolanus, he exhibits the ruling passion with the same
continued firmness, he preserves the same haughty dignity of demeanour,
the same energy of will, and unbending sternness of temper throughout.
He is swayed by a single impulse. His tenaciousness of purpose is only
irritated by opposition: he turns neither to the right nor to the left:
but the vehemence with which he moves forward increases every instant,
till it hurries him to the catastrophe. In Leontes, in the Winter’s
Tale, the growing jealousy of the king, and the exclusive possession
which it at length obtains of his mind, are marked in the finest manner,
particularly where he exclaims—
‘Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh, a note infallible
Of breaking honesty? horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours minutes? the noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why then the world and all that’s in ‘t is nothing.
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, if this be nothing.’
In the course of this enumeration every proof tells harder, his
conviction becomes more rivetted at every step of his progress, and at
the end his mind is wound up to a frenzy of despair. In such characters,
Mr. Kemble has no occasion to call in the resources of invention, or the
tricks of the art; his excellence consists entirely in the increasing
intensity with which he dwells on a given feeling or enforces a
predominant passion. In Hamlet, on the contrary, Mr. Kemble unavoidably
fails from a want of flexibility, or of that quick sensibility, which
yields to every motive, and is borne away with every breath of fancy,
which is distracted by the multiplicity of its reflections, and lost in
its own purposes. There is a perpetual undulation of feeling in the
character of Hamlet (though it must be confessed, much of this, which is
the essence of the play, is left out on the stage), but in Mr. Kemble’s
acting ‘there is no variableness nor shadow of turning.’ He plays it
like a man in armour, with a determined inveteracy of purpose, in one
undeviating strait line, which is as remote from the natural grace and
easy susceptibility of the character, as the sharp angles and abrupt
starts to produce an effect, which Mr. Kean introduces into it. Mr.
Kean’s Hamlet is, in our opinion, as much too ‘splenetic and rash,’ as
Mr. Kemble’s is too deliberate and formal. In Richard, Mr. Kemble has
not that tempest and whirlwind of the passions, that life and spirit,
and dazzling rapidity of motion, which, as it were, fills the stage, and
burns in every part, which Mr. Kean displayed in it till he was worn out
by the managers. Mr. Kean’s acting, in general, strongly reminds us of
the lines of the poet, when he describes
‘The fiery soul that working out its way
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o’erinformed the tenement of clay.’
Mr. Kemble’s manner on the contrary has always something dry, hard and
pedantic in it. ‘You shall relish him more in the scholar than the
soldier.’ But his monotony does not fatigue, his formality does not
displease, because there is always sense and feeling in what he does.
The fineness of Mr. Kemble’s figure has perhaps led to that statue-like
appearance which his acting is sometimes too apt to assume; as the
diminutiveness of Mr. Kean’s person has probably forced him to bustle
about too much, and to attempt to make up for the want of dignity of
form by the violence and contrast of his attitudes. If Mr. Kemble were
to remain in the same posture for half an hour, his figure would only
produce admiration—if Mr. Kean were to stand still only for a moment,
the contrary effect would be produced.
To return to Penruddock and the Wheel of Fortune. The only novelties
were Miss Foote in Emily Tempest, and her lover, Mr. Farley, as Sir
David Daw. The latter, who is a Welch Adonis of five-and-twenty, from
the natural advantages of his person, and the artificial improvements
which were added to it, was a very admirable likeness, on a reduced
scale, of the Prince Regent. We do not know whether the burlesque was
intended, but it had a laughable effect. We acknowledge that Mr. Farley
is one of those persons whom we always welcome heartily when we see him.
What with laughing at him and laughing with him, we hardly know a more
comic personage. Miss Foote played and looked the part of Emily Tempest
very naturally and very prettily, but without giving to the character
either much interest or much elegance. Her voice is in itself as sweet
as her person, and when she exerts it, she articulates with ease and
clearness: but we should add, that she has a habit of tripping in her
common speaking, that is, of dropping her voice so low, except where a
particular emphasis is to be laid, as to make it difficult for the ear
to follow the sense.
INTRODUCTION TO AN ACCOUNT OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS’S DISCOURSES
_The Champion._] [_Nov. 27, 1814._
The general merit of these Discourses is so well established that it
would be needless to enlarge on it here. The graces of the composition
are such, that scholars have been led to suspect that it was the style
of Burke (the first prose-writer of our time) carefully subdued, and
softened down to perfection: and the taste and knowledge of the subject
displayed in them are so great, that this work has been, by common
consent, considered as a text-book on the subject of art, in our English
school of painting, ever since its publication. Highly elegant and
valuable as Sir Joshua’s opinions are, yet they are liable (so it
appears to us) to various objections; and it becomes more important to
state these objections, because, as it generally happens, the most
questionable of his precepts are those which have been the most eagerly
adopted, and carried into practice with the greatest success. The
errors, if they are such, which we shall attempt to point out, are not
casual, but systematic. There is a finespun metaphysical theory, either
not very clearly understood, or not very correctly expressed, pervading
Sir Joshua’s reasoning; and which appears to have led him in several of
the most important points to conclusions, either false or only true in
part.[16] The rules thus laid down, as general and comprehensive maxims,
are in fact founded on a set of half principles, which are true only as
far as they imply a negation of the opposite errors, but contain in
themselves the germ of other errors just as fatal: which, if strictly
and literally understood, cannot be defended, and which by being taken
in an equivocal sense, of course leave the student as much to seek as
ever. The English school of painting is universally reproached by
foreigners with the slovenly and unfinished state in which they send
their productions into the world, with their ignorance of academic rules
and neglect of the subordinate details; in other words, with aiming at
_effect_ only in all their works of art: and though it is by no means
necessary that we should adopt the defects of the French and German
painters, yet we might learn from them to correct our own. There was no
occasion to encourage our constitutional indolence and impatience by
positive rules, or to incorporate our vicious habits into a system. Or
if our defects were to be retained, at least they ought to have been
tolerated only for the sake of certain collateral and characteristic
excellencies out of which they might be thought to spring. Thus a
certain degree of precision or regularity might be sacrificed rather
than impair that boldness, vigour, and originality of conception, in
which the strength of the national genius might be supposed to lie. But
the method of instruction pursued in the Discourses seems calculated for
neither of these objects. Without endeavouring to overcome our habitual
defects, which might be corrected by proper care and study, it damps our
zeal, ardour, and enthusiasm. It places a full reliance neither on art
nor nature, but consists in a kind of fastidious tampering with both.
Both genius and industry are put out of countenance in turn. The height
of invention is made to consist in compiling from others, and the
perfection of imitation in not copying from nature. We lose the
substance of the art in catching at a shadow, and are thought to embrace
a cloud for a Goddess!
That we may not seem to prejudge the question, we shall state at once,
and without further preface, the principal points in the Discourses
which we deem either wrong in themselves, or liable to misconception and
abuse. They are the following:—
1. _That genius or invention consists chiefly in borrowing the ideas of
others, or in using other men’s minds._
2. _That the great style in painting depends on leaving out the details
of particular objects._
3. _That the essence of portrait consists in giving the general
character, rather than the individual likeness._
4. _That the essence of history consists in abstracting from
individuality of character and expression as much as possible._
5. _That beauty or ideal perfection consists in a central form._
6. _That to imitate nature is a very inferior object in art._
All of these positions appear to require a separate consideration, which
we shall give them in the following articles on this subject.
ON GENIUS AND ORIGINALITY
_The Champion._] [_December 4, 1814_
It is a leading and favourite position of the Discourses that genius and
invention are principally shewn in borrowing the ideas, and imitating
the excellences of others. Differing entirely from those ‘who have
undertaken to write on the art of painting, and have represented it as a
kind of _inspiration_, as a _gift_ bestowed upon peculiar favourites at
their birth,’ Sir Joshua proceeds to add, ‘I am, on the contrary,
persuaded, that by imitation only,’ (that is, of former masters,)
‘variety and even originality of invention is produced. I will go
further! even genius, at least what is generally called so, is the child
of imitation.’ ‘There can be no doubt but that he who has most materials
has the greatest means of invention; and if he has not the power of
using them, it must proceed from a feebleness of intellect.’ ‘Study is
the art of using other men’s minds.’ ‘It is from Raphael’s having taken
so many models, that he became himself a model for all succeeding
painters; always imitating, and always original.’ Vol. i. p. 151, 159,
169, &c. All that Sir Joshua says on this subject, is either vague and
contradictory, or has an evident bias the wrong way. That genius either
consists in, or is in any proportion to, the knowledge of what others
have done, in any branch of art or science, is a paradox which hardly
admits serious refutation. The answer is indeed so obvious and so
undeniable, that one is almost ashamed to give it. As it happens in all
such cases, an advantage is taken of the old-fashioned simplicity of
truth to triumph over it. It is another of Sir Joshua’s theoretical
opinions, often repeated, and almost as often retracted in his lectures,
that there is no such thing as genius in the first formation of the
human mind. That is not the question here, though perhaps we may recur
to it. But, however a man may come by the faculty which we call
_genius_, whether it is the effect of habit and circumstances, or the
gift of nature, yet there can be no doubt, that what is meant by the
term, is a power of original observation and invention. To take it
otherwise, is a solecism in language, and a misnomer in art. A work
demonstrates genius exactly as it contains what is to be found no where
else, or in proportion to what we add to the ideas of others from our
own stores, and not to what we receive from them. It may contain also
what is to be found in other works, but it is not that which stamps it
with the character of genius. The contrary view of the question can only
tend to deter those who have genius from using it, and to make those who
are without genius, think they have it. It is attempting to excite the
mind to the highest efforts of intellectual excellence, by denying the
chief ground-work of all intellectual distinction. It is from the same
general spirit of distrust of the existence or power of genius that Sir
Joshua exclaims with confidence and triumph, ‘There is one precept,
however, in which I shall only be opposed by the vain, the ignorant, and
the idle. I am not afraid that I shall repeat it too often. You MUST
HAVE NO DEPENDENCE ON YOUR OWN GENIUS. If you have great talents,
industry will improve them. If you have but moderate abilities, it will
supply their deficiency. Nothing is denied to well directed labour;
nothing can be obtained without it. Not to enter into metaphysical
discussions on the nature and essence of genius, I will venture to
assert, that assiduity unabated by difficulty, and a disposition eagerly
directed to the object of its pursuit, will produce effects similar to
those which some call the _result of natural powers_.’ P. 44, 45. Yet so
little influence had the metaphysical theory, which he wished to hold
_in terrorem_ over the young enthusiast, on Sir Joshua’s habitual
unreflecting good sense, that he afterwards, in speaking of the
attainments of Carlo Maratti, which, as well as those of Raphael, he
attributes to his imitation of others, says, ‘It is true there is
nothing very captivating in Carlo Maratti; but this proceeded from a
want which cannot be completely supplied, that is, _want of strength of
parts. In this, certainly, men are not equal_; and a man can bring home
wares only in proportion to the capital with which he goes to market.
Carlo, by diligence, made the most of what he had: but there was
undoubtedly a heaviness about him, which extended itself uniformly to
his invention, expression, his drawing, colouring, and the general
effect of his pictures. The truth is, he never equalled any of his
patterns in any one thing, and he added little of his own.’ P. 172. Poor
Carlo, it seems, then, was excluded from the benefit of the sweeping
clause in this general charter of dulness, by which all men are declared
to be equal in natural powers, and to owe their superiority only to
superior industry. What is here said of Carlo Maratti is, however, an
exact description of the fate of all those, who, without any genius of
their own, pretend to avail themselves of the genius of others. Sir
Joshua attempts to confound genius and the want of it together, by
shewing, that some men of great genius have not disdained to borrow
largely from their predecessors, while others, who affected to be
entirely original, have really invented little of their own. This is
from the purpose. If Raphael, for instance, had only copied his figure
of St. Paul from Massacio, or his groupe, in the sacrifice of Lystra,
from the ancient bas-relief, without adding other figures of equal force
and beauty, he would have been considered as a mere plagiarist. As it
is, the pictures here referred to, would undoubtedly have displayed more
genius, that is, more originality, if those figures had also been his
own invention. Nay, Sir Joshua himself, in giving the preference of
genius to Michael Angelo, does it on this very ground, that ‘Michael
Angelo’s works seem to proceed from his own mind entirely, and that mind
so rich and abundant, that he never needed, or seemed to disdain to look
abroad for foreign help;’ whereas, ‘Raffaelle’s materials are generally
borrowed, though the noble structure is his own.’ On the justice of this
last statement, we shall remark presently. Perhaps Reynolds’s general
account of the insignificance of genius, and the all-sufficiency of the
merits of others, may be looked upon as an indirect apology for the
gradual progress of his own mind, in selecting and appropriating the
beauties of the great artists who went before him: he appears anxious to
describe and dignify the process, from which he himself derived such
felicitous results, but which, as a general system of instruction, can
only produce mediocrity and imbecility. It is a lesson which a well-bred
drawing-master might with great propriety repeat by rote to his
fashionable pupils, but which a learned professor, whose object was to
lead the aspiring mind to the heights of fame, ought not to have offered
to the youth of a nation. ‘You must have no dependence on your own
genius,’ is, according to Sir Joshua, the universal foundation of all
high endeavours, the beginning of all true wisdom, and the end of all
true art. Would Sir Joshua have given this advice to Michael Angelo, or
to Raphael, or to Correggio? Or would he have given it to Rembrandt, or
Rubens, or Vandyke, or Claude Lorraine, or to our own Hogarth? Would it
have been followed, or what would have been the consequence, if it
had?—That we should never have heard of any of these personages, or only
heard of them as instances to prove that nothing great can be done
without genius and originality! We are at a loss to conceive where, upon
the principle here stated, Hogarth would have found the materials of his
Marriage a la Mode? or Rembrandt his Three Trees? or Claude Lorraine his
Enchanted Castle, with that one simple figure in the foreground,—
‘Sole sitting by the shores of old romance?’
Or from what but an eye always intent on nature, and brooding over
‘beauty, rendered still more beautiful’ by the exquisite feeling with
which it was contemplated, did he borrow his verdant landscapes and his
azure skies, the bare sight of which wafts the imagination to Arcadian
scenes, ‘thrice happy fields, and groves, and flowery vales,’ breathing
perpetual youth and freshness? If Claude had gone out to study on the
banks of the Tyber with Sir Joshua’s first precept in his mouth,
‘Individual nature produces little beauty,’ and had returned poring over
the second, which is like unto it, ‘You must have no dependence on your
own genius,’ the world would have lost one perfect painter.[17] Rubens
would have shared the same fate, with all his train of fluttering
Cupids, warriors and prancing steeds, panthers and piping Bacchanals,
nymphs, fawns and satyrs, if he had not been reserved for ‘the tender
mercies’ of the modern French critics, David and his pupils, who think
that the Luxembourg gallery ought to be destroyed, to make room for
their own execrable performances. Or we should never have seen that fine
landscape of his in the Louvre, with a rainbow on one side, the whole
face of nature refreshed after the shower, and some shepherds under a
group of trees piping to their heedless flocks, if instead of painting
what he saw and what he felt to be fine, he had set himself to solve the
learned riddle proposed by Sir Joshua, whether _accidents in nature_
should be introduced in landscape, since Claude has rejected them. It is
well that genius gets the start of criticism; for if these two great
landscape painters, not being privileged to consult their own taste and
inclinations, had been compelled to wait till the rules of criticism had
decided the preference between their different styles, instead of having
both, we should have had neither. The folly of all such comparisons
consists in supposing that we are reduced to a single alternative in our
choice of excellence, and the true answer to the question, ‘Which do you
like best, Rubens’s landscapes or Claude’s?’ is the one which was given
on another occasion—both. If it be meant which of the two an artist
should imitate, the answer is, the one which he is likely to imitate
best. As to Rembrandt, he would not have stood the least chance with
this new theory of art. But the warning sounds, ‘you must have no
dependence on your own genius,’ never reached him in the little study
where he watched the dim shadows cast by his dying embers on the wall,
or at other times saw the clouds driven before the storm, or the blaze
of noon-day brightness bursting through his casement on the mysterious
gloom which surrounded him. What a pity that his old master could not
have received a friendly hint from Sir Joshua, that getting rid of his
vulgar musty prejudices, he might have set out betimes for the regions
of _virtù_, have scaled the ladder of taste, have measured the antique,
lost himself in the Vatican, and after ‘wandering through dry places,
seeking he knew not what, and finding nothing,’ have returned home as
great a critic and painter as so many others have done! Of Titian,
Vandyke, or Correggio we shall say nothing here, as we have said so much
in another place.
A theory, then, by which these great artists could have been lost to
themselves and to the art, and which explains away the two chief
supports and sources of all art, _nature_ and _genius_, into an
unintelligible jargon of words, cannot be intrinsically true. The
principles thus laid down may be very proper to conduct the machinery of
a royal academy, or to precede the distribution of prizes to the
students, or to be the topics of assent and congratulation among the
members themselves at their annual exhibition dinner: but they are so
far from being calculated to foster genius or to direct its course, that
they can only blight or mislead it, wherever it exists, and ‘lose more
men of talents to this nation,’ by the dissemination of false
principles, than have been already lost to it by the want of any.
But it may be said, that though the perfection of portrait or landscape
may be derived from the immediate study of nature, yet higher subjects
are not to be found in it; that there we must raise our imaginations by
referring to artificial models; and that Raphael was compelled to go to
Michael Angelo and the antique. Not to insist that Michael Angelo
himself, according to Sir Joshua’s account, formed an exception to this
rule, it has been well observed on this statement, that what Raphael
borrowed was to conceal or supply his natural deficiencies: what he
excelled in was his own. Raphael never had the grandeur of form of
Michael Angelo, nor the correctness of form of the antique. His
expression was perfectly different from both, and perhaps better than
either, certainly better than what we have seen of Michael Angelo in the
prints from him compared with those from Raphael in the Vatican. In
Raphael’s faces, particularly his women, the expression is superior to
the form; in the antique statues, the form is evidently the principal
thing. The interest which they excite is in a manner external, it
depends on a certain grace and lightness of appearance, joined with
exquisite symmetry and refined susceptibility to voluptuous emotions,
but there is no pathos; or if there is, it is the pathos of present and
physical distress, rather than of sentiment. There is not that deep
internal interest which there is in Raphael; which broods over the
suggestions of the heart with love and fear till the tears seem ready to
gush out, but that they are checked by the deeper sentiments of hope and
faith. What has been remarked of Leonardo da Vinci, is still more true
of Raphael, that there is an angelic sweetness and tenderness in his
faces peculiarly adapted to his subjects, in which natural frailty and
passion are purified by the sanctity of religion. They answer exactly to
Milton’s description of the ‘human face divine.’ The ancient statues are
finer objects for the eye to contemplate: they represent a more perfect
race of physical beings, but we have no sympathy with them. In Raphael,
all our natural sensibilities are raised and refined by pointing
mysteriously to the interests of another world. The same intensity of
passion appears also to distinguish Raphael from Michael Angelo. Michael
Angelo’s forms are grander, but they are not so full of expression.
Raphael’s, however ordinary in themselves, are full of expression even
to o’erflowing: every nerve and muscle is impregnated with feeling, or
bursting with meaning. In Michael Angelo, on the contrary, the powers of
body and mind appear superior to any events that can happen to them, the
capacity of thought and feeling is never full, never tasked or strained
to the utmost that it will bear. All is in a lofty repose and solitary
grandeur which no human interests can shake or disturb. It has been said
that Michael Angelo painted _man_, and Raphael _men_; that the one was
an epic, the other a dramatic painter. But the distinction we have made
is perhaps truer and more intelligible, _viz._ that the former gave
greater dignity of form, and the latter greater force and refinement of
expression. Michael Angelo borrowed his style from sculpture, which
represented in general only single figures, (with subordinate
accompaniments,) and had not to express the conflicting actions and
passions of a multitude of persons. He is much more picturesque than
Raphael. The whole figure of his Jeremiah droops and hangs down like a
majestic tree surcharged with showers. His drawing of the human figure
has all the characteristic freedom and boldness of Titian’s
landscapes.[18]
To return to Sir Joshua. He has given one very strange proof that there
is no such thing as genius, namely, that ‘the degrees of excellence
which proclaims genius is different in different times and places.’ If
Sir Joshua had aimed at a confutation of himself, he could not have done
it more effectually. For what is it that makes the difference but that
which originates in a man’s self, _i.e._, is first done by him, is
genius, and when it is no longer original, but borrowed from former
examples, it ceases to be genius, since no one can establish this claim
by following the steps of others, but by going before them? The test of
genius may be different, but the thing itself is the same,—a power at
all times to do or to invent what has not before been done or invented.
It is plain from the passage above cited what influenced Sir Joshua’s
mind in his views on this subject. He quarrelled with genius from being
annoyed with premature pretensions to it. He was apprehensive that if
genius were allowed to stand for any thing, industry would go for
nothing in the minds of ‘the vain, the ignorant, and the idle.’ But as
genius will do little without labour in an art so mechanical as
painting, so labour will do still less without genius. Indeed, wherever
there is true genius, there will be true labour, that is, the exertion
of that genius in the field most proper for it. Sir Joshua, from his
unwillingness to admit one extreme, has fallen into the other, and has
mistaken the detection of an error for a demonstration of the truth.
‘The human understanding,’ says Luther, ‘resembles a drunken clown on
horseback; if you set it up on one side, it tumbles over on the other.’
ON THE IMITATION OF NATURE
_The Champion._] [_December 25, 1814._
The imitation of nature is the great object of art. Of course, the
principles by which this imitation should be regulated, form the leading
topic of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s lectures. It is certain that the
mechanical imitation of individual objects, or the parts of individual
objects, does not always produce beauty or grandeur; or, generally
speaking that _the whole of art does not consist in copying nature_.
Reynolds seems hence disposed to infer, that the whole of art consists
in _not_ imitating individual nature. This is also an error, and an
error on the worst side.
Sir Joshua’s general system may be summed up in two words,—‘_That the
great style in painting consists in avoiding the details, and
peculiarities of particular objects_.’ This sweeping principle he
applies almost indiscriminately to portrait, history, and landscape;—and
he appears to have been led to the conclusion itself, from supposing the
imitation of particulars to be inconsistent with general truth and
effect.
It will not be unimportant to inquire how far this opinion is
well-founded: for it appears to us, that the highest perfection of the
art depends, not on the separation, but on the union (as far as
possible) of general truth and effect with individual distinctness and
accuracy.
First, it is said that the great style in painting, as it relates to the
immediate imitation of external nature, consists in avoiding the details
of particular objects.
It consists neither in giving nor avoiding them, but in something quite
different from both. Any one may avoid the details. So far, there is no
difference between the Cartoons, and a common sign-painting. Greatness
consists in giving the larger masses and proportions with truth;—this
does not prevent giving the smaller ones too. The utmost grandeur of
outline, and the broadest masses of light and shade, are perfectly
compatible with the greatest minuteness and delicacy of detail, as may
be seen in nature. It is not, indeed, common to see both qualities
combined in the imitations of nature, any more than the combination of
other excellences; nor are we here saying to which the principal
attention of the artist should be directed; but we deny, that,
considered in themselves, the absence of the one quality is necessary or
sufficient to the production of the other.
If, for example, the form of the eyebrow is correctly given, it will be
perfectly indifferent to the truth or grandeur of the design, whether it
consist of one broad mark, or is composed of a number of hair-lines,
arranged in the same order. So, if the lights and shades are disposed in
fine and large masses, the _breadth_ of the picture, as it is called,
cannot possibly be affected by the filling up of those masses with the
details;—that is, with the subordinate distinctions which appear in
nature. The anatomical details in Michael Angelo, the ever-varying
outline of Raphael, the perfect execution of the Greek statues, do not
assuredly destroy their symmetry or dignity of form;—and in the finest
specimens of the composition of colour, we may observe the largest
masses combined with the greatest variety in the parts, of which those
masses are composed.
The _gross_ style consists in giving no details,—the _finical_ in giving
nothing else. Nature contains both large and small parts,—both masses
and details; and the same may be said of the most perfect works of art.
The union of both kinds of excellence, of strength with delicacy, as far
as the limits of human capacity and the shortness of human life would
permit, is that which has established the reputation of the greatest
masters. Farther,—their most finished works are their best. The
predominance, however, of either excellence in these masters, has, of
course, varied according to their opinion of the relative value of these
different qualities,—the labour they had the time or patience to bestow
on their works,—the skill of the artist, or the nature and extent of his
subject. But, if the rule here objected to,—that the careful imitation
of the parts injures the effect of the whole,—be at once admitted,
slovenliness would become another name for genius, and the most
unfinished performance would necessarily be the best. That such has been
the confused impression left on the mind by the perusal of Sir Joshua’s
discourses, is evident from the practice as well as the conversation of
many (even eminent) artists. The late Mr. Opie proceeded entirely on
this principle. He left many admirable studies of portraits,
particularly in what relates to the disposition and effect of light and
shade. But he never finished any of the parts, thinking them beneath the
attention of a great man. He went over the whole head the second day as
he had done the day before, and therefore made no progress. The picture
at last, having neither the lightness of a sketch, nor the accuracy of a
finished work, looked coarse, laboured, and heavy.
‘Would you then have an artist finish like Denner?’ is the triumphant
appeal which is made as decisive against all objections. To which, as it
is an appeal to authority, the proper answer seems to be,—‘No; but we
would have him finish like Titian or Correggio.’ Denner is an example of
finishing not to be followed, but shunned, because _he did nothing but
finish_; because he finished ill, and because he finished to excess;—for
in all things there is a certain proportion of means to ends. He pored
into the littlenesses of objects, till he lost sight of nature, instead
of imitating it. He represents the human face, perhaps, as it might
appear through a magnifying glass, but certainly not as it ever appears
to us. It is the business of painting to express objects as they appear
naturally, not as they may be made to appear artificially. His flesh is
as blooming and glossy as a flower or a shell. Titian’s finishing, on
the contrary, is equally admirable, because it is engrafted on the most
profound knowledge of effect, and attention to the character of what he
represents. His pictures have the exact look of nature, the very tone
and texture of flesh. The endless variety of his tints is blended into
the greatest simplicity. There is a proper degree both of solidity and
transparency. All the parts hang together: every stroke tells, and adds
to the effect of the rest.
To understand the value of any excellence, we must refer to the use
which has been made of it, not to instances of its abuse. If there is a
certain degree of ineffectual microscopic finishing, which we never find
united with an attention to other higher and more indispensable parts of
the art, we may suspect that there is something incompatible between
them, and that the pursuit of the one diverts the mind from the
attainment of the other. But this is the real point to stop at—where
alone we should limit our theory or our efforts. Wherever different
excellences have been actually united to a certain point of perfection,
to that point (abstractedly speaking) we are sure that they may, and
ought to be united again. There is no occasion to add the incitements of
indolence, affectation, and false theory, to the other causes which
contribute to the decline of art!
Sir Joshua seems, indeed, to deny that Titian finished much, and says
that he produced, by two or three strokes of his pencil, effects which
the most laborious copyists would in vain attempt to equal. It is true
that he availed himself, in a considerable degree, of what is called
_execution_, to facilitate his imitation of nature, but it was to
facilitate, not to supersede it. By the methods of scumbling or glazing,
he often broke the masses of his flesh,—or by laying on lumps of colour
produced particular effects, to a degree that he could not otherwise
have reached without considerable loss of time. We do not object to
execution: it saves labour, and shews a mastery both of hand and eye.
But then there is nothing more distinct than execution and _daubing_.
Indeed, it is evident, that the only use of execution is to give the
details more compendiously, and sometimes, even more happily. Leave out
all regard to the details, reduce the whole into crude unvarying masses,
and it becomes totally useless; for these can be given just as well
without execution as with it. Titian, however, made a very moderate,
though a very admirable use of this power; and those who copy his
pictures will find, that the simplicity is in the results, not in the
details.
The other Venetian painters made too violent a use of execution, unless
their subjects formed an excuse for them. Vandyke successfully employed
it in giving the last finishing to the details. Rembrandt employed it
still more, and with more perfect truth of effect.—Rubens employed it
equally, but not so as to produce an equal resemblance of nature. His
pencil ran away with his eye.—To conclude our observations on this head,
we will only add, that while the artist thinks that there is any thing
to be done, either to the whole or to the parts of his picture, which
can give it still more the look of nature, if he is willing to proceed,
we would not advise him to desist.—This rule is still more necessary to
the young student, for he will relax in his attention as he grows older.
And again, with respect to the subordinate parts of a picture, there is
no danger that he will bestow a disproportionate degree of labour upon
them, because he will not feel the same interest in copying them, and
because a much less degree of accuracy will serve every purpose of
deception;—the nicety of our habitual observations being always in
proportion to our interest in the objects.—Sir Joshua somewhere objects
to the attempt to deceive by painting; and his reason is, that wax-work,
which deceives most effectually, is a very disagreeable as well as
contemptible art. It might be answered, first, that nothing is much more
unlike nature than such figures generally are, and farther, that they
only produce the appearance of prominence and relief, by having it in
reality,—in which they are just the reverse of painting.
Secondly, with regard to EXPRESSION, we can hardly agree with Sir Joshua
that ‘_the perfection of imitation consists in giving the general idea
or character, not the peculiarities of individuals_.’—We do not think
this rule at all well-founded with respect to portrait-painting, nor
applicable to history to the extent to which Sir Joshua carries it. For
the present, we shall confine ourselves to the former of these.
No doubt, if we were to chuse between the general character and the
peculiarities of feature, we ought to prefer the former. But they are so
far from being incompatible with, that they are not without some
difficulty distinguishable from, each other. There is indeed a general
look of the face, a predominant expression arising from the
correspondence and connection of the different parts, which it is always
of the first and last importance to give; and without which no
elaboration of detached parts, or marking of the peculiarity of single
features, is worth any thing; but which at the same time, is certainly
not destroyed, but assisted, by the careful finishing, and still more by
giving the exact outline of each part.
It is on this point that the French and English schools differ, and (in
my opinion) are both wrong. The English seem generally to suppose, that,
if they only leave out the subordinate parts, they are sure of the
general result. The French, on the contrary, as idly imagine, that by
attending to each separate part, they must infallibly arrive at a
correct whole,—not considering that, besides the parts, there is their
relation to each other, and the general character stamped upon them by
the mind itself, which to be seen must be felt,—for it is demonstrable
that all expression and character are perceived by the mind, and not by
the eye only. The French painters see only lines, and precise
differences;—the English only general masses, and strong effects. Hence
the two nations constantly reproach one another with the difference of
their styles of art; the one as dry, hard and minute, the other as
gross, gothic, and unfinished; and they will probably remain for ever
satisfied _with each other’s defects_, which afford a very tolerable
fund of consolation on either side.
There is something in the two styles, which arises, perhaps, from
national countenance as well as character:—the French physiognomy is
frittered away into a parcel of little moveable compartments and
distinct signs of intelligence,—like a telegraphic machinery. The
English countenance, on the other hand, is too apt to sink into a
lumpish mass, with very few ideas, and those set in a sort of stupid
stereotype.
To return to the proper business of portrait-painting. We mean to speak
of it, not as a lucrative profession, nor as an indolent amusement, (for
we interfere with no man’s profits or pleasures), but as a _bona fide_
art, the object of which is to exercise the talents of the artist, and
to add to the stock of ideas in the public. And in this point of view,
we should imagine that that is the best portrait which contains the
fullest representation of individual nature.
Portrait-painting is the biography of the pencil, and he who gives most
of the peculiarities and details, with most of the general
character,—that is of _keeping_,—is the best biographer, and the best
portrait-painter. What if Boswell (the prince of biographers) had not
given us the scene between Wilkes and Johnson at Dilly’s table, or had
not introduced the little episode of Goldsmith strutting about in his
peach-coloured coat after the success of his play,—should we have had a
more perfect idea of the general character of those celebrated persons
from the omission of these particulars? Or if Reynolds had not painted
the former as ‘_blinking Sam_,’ or had given us such a representation of
the latter as we see of some modern poets in some modern magazines, the
fame of that painter would have been confined to the circles of
fashion,—where they naturally look for the same selection of beauties in
a portrait, as of topics in a dedication, or a copy of complimentary
verses!
It has not been uncommon that portraits of this kind, which professed to
admit all the peculiarities, and to heighten all the excellences of a
face, have been elevated by ignorance and affectation, to the dignified
rank of historical portrait. But in fact they are merely _caricature
transposed_: that is, as the caricaturist makes a mouth wider than it
really is, so the painter of _flattering likenesses_ (as they are
termed) makes it not so wide, by a process just as mechanical, and more
insipid. Instead, however, of objecting captiously to common theory or
practice, it will perhaps be better to state at once our own conceptions
of historical portrait. It consists, then, in seizing the predominant
form or expression, and preserving it with truth throughout every part.
It is representing the individual under one consistent, probable, and
striking view; or shewing the different features, muscles, etc. in one
action, and modified by one principle. A face thus painted, is
_historical_;—that is, it carries its own internal evidence of truth and
nature with it; and the number of individual peculiarities, as long as
they are true to nature, cannot lessen, but must add to the general
strength of the impression.
To give an example or two of what we mean. We conceive that the common
portrait of Oliver Cromwell would be less valuable and striking if the
wart on the face were taken away. It corresponds with the general
roughness and knottiness of the rest of the face;—or if considered
merely as an accident, it operates as a kind of circumstantial evidence
of the genuineness of the representation. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait
of Dr. Johnson has altogether that sluggishness of outward
appearance,—that want of quickness and versatility,—that absorption of
faculty, and look of purblind reflection, which were characteristic of
his mind. The accidental discomposure of his wig indicates his habits.
If, with the same felicity and truth of conception, this portrait (we
mean the common one reading) had been more made out, it would not have
been less historical, though it would have been more like and natural.
Titian’s portraits are the most historical that ever were painted; and
they are so for this reason, that they have most consistency of form and
expression. His portraits of Hippolito de Medici, and of a young
Neapolitan nobleman in the Louvre, are a striking contrast in this
respect. All the lines of the face in the one;—the eyebrows, the nose,
the corners of the mouth, the contour of the face,—present the same
sharp angles, the same acute, edgy, contracted expression. The other
face has the finest expansion of feature and outline, and conveys the
most exquisite idea possible of mild, thoughtful sentiment. The harmony
of the expression constitutes as great a charm in Titian’s portraits, as
that of colour. The similarity sometimes objected to them, is partly
national, and partly arises from the class of persons whom he painted.
He painted only Italians; and in his time none but persons of the
highest rank, senators or cardinals, sat for their pictures.
Sir Joshua appears to have been led into several errors by a false use
of the terms _general_ and _particular_. Nothing can be more different
than the various application of both these terms to different things,
and yet Sir Joshua constantly uses and reasons upon them as invariable.
There are three senses of the expression _general character_, as applied
to ideas or objects. In the first, it signifies the general appearance
or aggregate impression of the whole object, as opposed to the mere
detail of detached parts. In the second, it signifies the class, or what
a number of such objects have in common with one another, to the
exclusion of their characteristic differences. In this sense it is
tantamount to _abstract_. In the third it signifies what is usual or
common, in opposition to mere singularity, or accidental exceptions to
the ordinary course of nature. The general idea or character of a
particular face, _i.e._ the aggregate impression resulting from all the
parts combined, is surely very different from the abstract idea, or what
it has in common with several others. If on giving the former all
character depends; to give nothing but the latter is to take away all
character. The more a painter _comprehends_ of what he sees, the more
valuable his work will be: but it is not true that his excellence will
be the greater, the more he _abstracts_ from what he sees.—There is an
essential distinction which Sir Joshua has not observed. The details and
peculiarities of nature are only inconsistent with abstract ideas, and
not with general or aggregate effects. By confounding the two things,
Sir Joshua excludes the peculiarities and details not only from his
historical composition, but from an enlarged view and comprehensive
imitation of individual nature.
We have here attempted to give some account of what should be meant by
the _ideal_ in portrait-painting: in our next and concluding article on
this subject, we shall attempt an explanation of this term, as it
applies to historical painting.
ON THE IDEAL.
_The Champion._] [_January 8, 1815._
‘For I would by no means be thought to comprehend those writers of
surprising genius, the authors of immense romances, or the modern novel
and Atalantis writers, who, without any assistance from nature or
history, record persons who never were, or will be, and facts which
never did, nor possibly can happen: whose heroes are of their own
creation, and their brains the chaos whence all their materials are
collected. Not that such writers deserve no honour; so far from it, that
perhaps they merit the highest. One may apply to them what Balzac says
of Aristotle, that they are _a second nature_; for they have no
communication with the first, by which authors of an inferior class, who
cannot stand alone, are obliged to support themselves, as with
crutches.’—FIELDING’S _Joseph Andrews_, vol. ii.
What is here said of certain writers of romance, would apply equally to
a great number of painters of history. These persons, not without the
sanction of high authority, have come to the conclusion that they had
only to quit the vulgar path of truth and reality, in order that they
‘might ascend the brightest heaven of invention,’—and that to get rid of
nature was all that was necessary to the loftiest flights of art, as the
soul disentangled from the load of matter soars to its native skies. But
this is by no means the truth. All art is built upon nature; and the
tree of knowledge lifts its branches to the clouds, only as it has
struck its roots deep into the earth. He is the greatest artist, not who
leaves the materials of nature behind him, but who carries them with him
into the world of invention;—and the larger and more entire the masses
in which he is able to apply them to his purpose, the stronger and more
durable will his productions be. Sir Joshua Reynolds admits that the
knowledge of the individual forms and various combinations of nature, is
necessary to the student, but it is only in order that he may _avoid_
them, and steering clear of all representation of things as they
actually exist, wander up and down in the empty void of his own
imagination, having nothing better to cling to, than certain shadowy
middle forms, made up of an abstraction of all others, and containing
nothing in themselves. Stripping nature of substance and accident, he is
to exhibit a decompounded, disembodied, vague, ideal nature in her
stead, seen through the misty veil of metaphysics, and covered with the
same fog and haze of confusion, while
‘Obscurity her curtain round him draws,
And siren sloth a dull quietus sings.’
The concrete, and not the abstract, is the object of painting, and of
all the works of imagination. History-painting is _imaginary_
portrait-painting. The portrait-painter gives you an individual, such as
he is in himself, and vouches for the truth of the likeness as a matter
of fact: the historical painter gives you the individual such as he is
likely to be,—that is, approaches as near to the reality as his
imagination will enable him to do, leaving out such particulars as are
inconsistent with the preconceived idea,—as are merely trifling and
accidental,—and retaining all such as are striking, probable, and
consistent. Because the historical painter has not the same immediate
data to go upon, but must connect individual nature with an imaginary
subject, is that any reason why he should discard individual nature
altogether, and thus leave nothing for his imagination, or the
imagination of the spectator to work upon? Portrait and history differ
as a narration of facts or a probable fiction differ; but abstraction is
the essence of neither. That is not the finest historical head which has
least the look of nature, but which has most the look of nature, if it
has the look of history also. But it has the look of nature, _i.e._ of
striking and probable nature,—as it has a marked and decided character,
and not a character of indifference: and as the features and expression
are consistent with themselves, not as they are common to others. The
ideal is that which answers to the idea of something, and not to the
idea of any thing, or of nothing. Any countenance strikes most upon the
imagination, either in a picture or in reality, which has most
distinctness from others, and most identity with itself. The keeping in
the character, not the want of character, is the essence of history.
Without some such limitation as we have here given, on the general
statement of Sir Joshua, we see no resting-place where the painter or
the poet is to make his stand, so as not to be pushed to the utmost
verge of naked common-place inanity,—nor do we understand how there
should be any such thing as poetry or painting tolerated. A _tabula
rasa_, a verbal definition, the bare name, must be better than the most
striking description or representation;—the argument of a poem better
than the poem itself,—or the catalogue of a picture than the original
work. Where shall we stop in the easy down-hill pass of effeminate,
unmeaning insipidity? There is one circumstance, to be sure, to
recommend the system here objected to, which is, that he who proposes
this ideal perfection to himself, can hardly fail to succeed in it. An
artist who paints on the infallible principle of not imitating nature,
in representing the meeting of Telemachus and Calypso, will not find it
difficult to confound all difference of sex or passion, and in
pourtraying the form of Mentor, will leave out every distinctive mark of
age or wisdom. In representing a Grecian marriage he will refine on his
favourite principles till it will be possible to transpose the features
of the bridegroom and the bride without the least violation of
propriety; all the women will be like the men; and all like one another,
all equally young, blooming, smiling, elegant, and insipid. On Sir
Joshua’s theory of the _beau ideal_, Mr. Westall’s pictures are perhaps
the best that ever were painted, and on any other theory, the worst; for
they exhibit an absolute negation of all expression, character, and
discrimination of form and colour.
We shall endeavour to explain our doctrine by some examples which appear
to us either directly subversive of, or not very obviously included in,
Sir J. Reynolds’s theory of history painting, or of the principles of
art in general. Is there any one who can possibly doubt that Hogarth’s
pictures are perfectly and essentially _historical_?—or that they convey
a story perfectly intelligibly, with faces and expressions which every
one must recognise? They have evidently a common or general character,
but that general character is defined and modified by individual
peculiarities, which certainly do not take away from the illusion or the
effect any more than they would in nature. There is, in the polling for
votes, a fat and a lean lawyer, yet both of them are lawyers, and
lawyers busy at an election squabble. It is the same with the voters,
who are of all descriptions, the lame, the blind, and the halt, yet who
all convey the very feeling which the scene inspires, with the greatest
variety and the greatest consistency of expression. The character of
_Mr. Abraham Adams_ by Fielding, is somewhat particular, and even
singular: yet it is not less intelligible or striking on that account;
and his lawyer and his landlady, though copied from individuals in real
life, had yet, as he himself observes, existed four thousand years, and
would continue to make a figure in the world as long as certain passions
were found united with certain situations, and operating on certain
dispositions.
It will, we suppose, be objected that this, though history and
invention, is not high history, or poetical invention. We would answer
then at once by appealing to Shakespeare. It will be allowed that his
characters are poetical as well as natural; yet the individual portrait
is almost as striking as the general expression of nature and passion.
It is this and this only which distinguishes him from the French school.
Dr. Johnson, proceeding on the same theoretical principles as his friend
Sir Joshua, affirms, that the excellence of Shakespeare’s characters
consists in their generality. We grant in one sense it does; but we will
add that it consists in their particularity also. Are the admirable
descriptions of the kings of Thrace and Inde in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,
less poetical or historical, or ideal, because they are distinguished by
traits as characteristic as they are striking;—in their lineaments,
their persons, their armour, their other attributes, the one black and
broad, the other tall, and fair, and freckled, with yellow crisped locks
that glittered as the sun. The four white bulls, and the lions which
accompany them are equally fine, but they are not fine because they
present no distinct image to the mind. The effect of this is somehow
lost in Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite, and the poetry is lost with it.
Much more is it necessary to combine individuality with the highest
works of art in painting, ‘whose end and use both at the first, now is,
and was, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature.’ The painter gives
the degree and peculiarity of expression where words in a manner leave
off, and if he does not go beyond mere abstraction, he does nothing. The
cartoons of Raphael, and his pictures in the Vatican, are sufficiently
historical, yet there is hardly a face or figure in any of them which is
anything more than fine and individual nature finely disposed. The late
Mr. Barry, who could not be suspected of a prejudice on this side of the
question, speaks thus of them,—‘In Raphael’s pictures (at the Vatican)
of the Dispute of the Sacrament and the School of Athens, one sees all
the heads to be entirely copied from particular characters in nature,
nearly proper for the persons and situation which he adapts them to; and
he seems to me only to add and take away what may answer his purpose in
little parts, features, &c.: conceiving, while he had the head before
him, ideal characters and expressions, which he adapts these features
and peculiarities of face to. This attention to the particulars which
distinguish all the different faces, persons and characters, the one
from the other, gives his pictures quite the verity and unaffected
dignity of nature, which stamp the distinguishing differences betwixt
one man’s face and body and another’s.’
If any thing is wanting to the conclusiveness of this testimony, it is
only to look at the pictures themselves, particularly the Miracle of the
Conversion, and the Assembly of Saints, which are little else than a
collection of divine portraits, in natural and expressive
attitudes,—full of the loftiest thought and feeling, and as varied as
they are fine. It is this reliance on the power of nature, which has
produced those master-pieces by the prince of painters, in which
expression is all in all;—where one spirit—that of truth—pervades every
part, brings down heaven to earth, mingles cardinals and popes with
angels and apostles, and yet blends and harmonises the whole by the true
touches and intense feeling of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It
is no wonder that Sir Joshua, when he first saw Raphael’s pictures in
the Vatican, was at a loss to discover any great excellence in them, if
he was looking out for his theory of the ideal, of neutral character and
middle forms.
Another authority, which has been in some measure discovered since the
publication of Sir Joshua’s Discourses, is to be found in the Elgin
Marbles, taken from the Acropolis, and supposed to be the works of the
celebrated Phidias. The process of fastidious refinement, and flimsy
abstraction, is certainly not visible there. The figures have all the
ease, the simplicity, and variety of nature, and look more like living
men turned to stone than any thing else. Even the details of the
subordinate parts, the loose folds in the skin, the veins under the
belly or on the sides of the horses, more or less swelled as the animal
is more or less in action, are given with scrupulous exactness. This is
true nature, and true history. In a word, we can illustrate our position
here better than we could with respect to painting, by saying that these
invaluable remains of antiquity are precisely like casts taken from
nature.—Michael Angelo and the antique may still be cited against us,
and we wish to speak on this subject with great diffidence. We confess,
they appear to us much more artificial than the others, but we do not
think that this is their excellence. For instance, it strikes us that
there is something theatrical in the air of the _Apollo_, and in the
_Hercules_ an ostentatious and over-laboured display of the knowledge of
the muscles. Perhaps the fragment of the _Theseus_ at Lord Elgin’s has
more grandeur as well as more nature than either of them. The form of
the limbs, as affected by pressure or action, and the general sway of
the body, are better preserved in it. The several parts in the later
Greek statues are more balanced, made more to tally like modern periods;
each muscle is more equally brought out, and highly finished, and is so
far better in itself, but worse as a part of a whole. If these wonderful
productions have a fault, it is the want of simplicity, of a due
subordination of parts, which sometimes gives them more a look of
perfect lay-figures put into attitudes, than of real imitations of
nature. The same objection may be urged against the works of Michael
Angelo, and is indeed the necessary consequence either of selecting from
a number of different models, or of proceeding on a scientific knowledge
of the structure of the different parts; for the physical form is
something given and defined, but motion is various and infinite. The
superior symmetry of form, common to the ancient statues, we have no
hesitation in attributing to the superior symmetry of the models in
nature, and to the superior opportunity for studying them.
In general, we would be understood to mean, that the ideal is not a
voluntary fiction of the brain, a fanciful piece of patch-work, a
compromise between the defects of nature, or an artificial balance
struck between innumerable deformities, (as if we could form a perfect
idea of beauty though we never had seen any such thing,) but a
preference of what is fine in nature to what is less so. There is
nothing fine in art but what is taken almost immediately and entirely
from what is finer in nature. Where there have been the finest models in
nature, there have also been the finest works of art. The Greek statues
were copied from Greek forms. Their portraits of individuals were often
superior to their personifications of their gods; the head of the
_Antinous_, for example, to that of the _Apollo_. Raphael’s expressions
were taken from Italian faces; and we have heard it observed, that the
women in the streets of Rome seem to have walked out of his pictures in
the Vatican.
If we are asked, then, what it is that constitutes historic expression
or ideal beauty, we should answer, not (with Sir Joshua) abstract
expression or middle forms, but consistency of expression in the one,
and symmetry of form in the other.
A face is historical, which is made up of consistent parts, let those
parts be ever so peculiar or uncommon. Those details or peculiarities
only are inadmissible in history, which do not arise out of any
principle, or tend to any conclusion,—which are merely casual,
insignificant, and unconnected,—which do not _tell_; that is, which
either do not add to, or which contradict the general result,—which are
not integrant parts of one whole, however strange or irregular that
whole may be. That history does not require or consist in the middle
form or central features is proved by this, that the antique heads of
fauns and satyrs, of _Pan_ or _Silenus_, are perfectly grotesque and
singular; yet are as undoubtedly historical, as the Apollo or the Venus,
because they have the same predominant, intelligible, characteristic
expression throughout. _Socrates_ is a person whom we recognise quite as
familiarly, from our general acquaintance with human nature, as
_Alcibiades_.[19] The simplicity or the fewness of the parts of a head
facilitates this effect, but is not necessary to it. The head of a
negro, a mulatto, &c. introduced into a picture is always historical,
because it is always distinct from the rest, and uniform with itself.
The face covered with a beard is historical for the same reason, because
it presents distinct and uniform masses. Again, a face, not so in
itself, becomes historical by the mere force of passion. The same strong
passion moulds the features into the same emphatic expression, by giving
to the mouth, the eyes, the forehead, etc., the same expansion or
contraction, the same voluptuous movement or painful constraint. All
intellectual and impassioned faces are historical;—the heads of
philosophers, poets, lovers, and madmen. Passion sometimes produces
beauty by this means, and there is a beauty of form, the effect entirely
of expression; as a smiling mouth, not beautiful in common, becomes so
by being put into that action.
Sir Joshua was probably led to his opinions on art in general by his
theory of beauty, which he makes to consist in a certain central form,
the medium of all others. In the first place, this theory is
questionable in itself: or if it were not so, it does not include many
other things of much more importance in historical painting (though
perhaps not so in sculpture[20]) namely, character, which necessarily
implies individuality; expression, which is the excess of thought or
feeling, strength or grandeur of form, which is excess also.—There
seems, however, to be a certain symmetry of form, as there is a certain
harmony of sounds or colours, which gives pleasure, and produces beauty,
independently of custom. Custom is undoubtedly one source or condition
of beauty, but it appears to be rather its limit than its essence; that
is, there are certain given forms and proportions established by nature
in the structure of each thing, and sanctioned by custom, without which
there can only be distortion and incongruity, but which alone do not
produce beauty. One kind is more beautiful than another; and the objects
of the same kind are not beautiful merely as we are used to them. The
rose or lily is more beautiful than the daisy, the swan than the crow,
the greyhound than the beagle, the deer than the wild goat; and we
invariably prefer the Greek to the African face, though our own inclines
more to the latter. We admire the broad forehead, the straight nose, the
small mouth, the oval chin. Regular features are those which record and
assimilate most to one another. The Greek face is made up of smooth
flowing lines, and correspondent features; the African face of sharp
angles and projections. A row of pillars is beautiful for the same
reason. We confess, on this subject of beauty, we are half-disposed to
fall into the mysticism of Raphael Mengs, who had some notion about a
principle of _universal harmony_, if we did not dread the censure of an
eminent critic.
CHARLEMAGNE: OU L’ÉGLISE DÉLIVRÉE.
_The Champion_] [_December 18, 1814._
It seldom happens that the same family produces an emperour and an epic
poet. So it is, however, in the present instance. The brother of
Buonaparte may be allowed to take his rank among poets, as Buonaparte
himself has done among kings. But the historian of Charlemagne does not
appear to us to present quite the same formidable front to the
established possessors of the seats of the muses, as the imitator of
Charlemagne did to the hereditary occupiers of thrones. A self-will
without controul, an ambition without bounds, a gigantic daring which
built its confidence of success on the contempt of danger, were the
means by which Buonaparte obtained and lost his portentous power; and by
which he would probably have lost it on the borders of the Ganges, or
among the sands of the Red Sea, if he had not been prevented by the
snows of Russia.
Our poet is not the same monster of genius that his brother was of
power. In the career of fame, he does not risk the success of his
reputation by the unlimited extravagance of his pretensions. His muse
does not disdain to borrow the conceptions of others, or to submit to
the rules of art; and the boldest flights of his imagination seldom pass
the bounds of a well-regulated enthusiasm. _Charlemagne_ is the work of
a very clever man, rather than a great poet; it displays more talent
than genius, more ingenuity than invention. It is more artificial than
original. In saying this, we would not be understood to mean, that it is
without considerable novelty, either of description or sentiment. Far,
very far from it: almost every page presents examples of both, equally
striking and elegant, which it would be difficult to refer immediately
to any similar passages in other authors. But the whole wants character:
it does not bear the stamp of the same presiding mind: no new world of
imagination is opened to the view: we do not feel the presence of a
power which we have never felt before, and which we can never forget.
The stanzas are all equally or proportionably good: but they are as good
separately, as taken together: they do not run into one another; they do
not make a poem. There is no strong impulse given, no overpowering
grandeur of effect. In scarcely any part of the story does the mind look
back with terror and delight at what is past, or hurry on with eager
curiosity to what is to come. The art is too apparent. The author is too
busy in managing his materials, in selecting, adorning, varying, and
amplifying them to the best advantage: but they seem something external
to him. His subject has not taken entire possession of his mind, and
therefore he does not take full possession of his readers. Yet it is
certain that all the materials of poetry are here;—imagery, incident,
character, passion, thought, and observation—all but the divine
enthusiasm of the poet, which can alone communicate true warmth and
enthusiasm to others.
There is one praise which we most willingly bestow on this poem, which
is, that it is not _French_. It is not another HENRIADE:—that is, it is
not poetry devoid of all imagination, and of every thing like
imagination. On the contrary, it abounds with variety and distinctness
of conception, and is evidently written on the model of Italian poetry.
We were a little surprised to find that the author had not adopted the
common heroic French verse, but has borrowed the Italian Stanza with
varying rhymes, and a little half verse in the middle, which has an
agreeable effect enough in the lighter parts of the poem, but does not
accord so well with the more serious and impressive. The following
stanzas will give our readers an idea of the metre, and of the general
style of description.—They represent Charlemagne traversing the Alps the
night before a battle.
‘Au dessus du mont Jove, un mont plus escarpé
S’élance dans la nue, et sa cime effrayante
N’offre point des sentiers la trace rassurante.
Par les vents orageux sans cesse il est frappé.
Ici, plus de forêts, plus de germe de vie:
Sur la surface unie
L’ardente canicule en vain darde ses feux:
Des glaçons entassés (piramide éternelle!)
Etouffent la nature; et dans ces tristes lieux,
A sa fécondité la terre est infidèle.
C’est par là qu’aujourd’hui Charles s’ouvre un passage,
Les coursiers délaissés errent dans le vallon:
Et par mille détours le terrible escadron
Avance lentement sur la pente sauvage.
L’astre des nuits suivait son cours silencieux;
Les vents impétueux
Entrechoquant par fois les lances formidables,
S’opposaient vainement à ces audacieux,
Qui suivant de leur chef les pas infatigables,
Touchent enfin le sol du piton sourcilleux.
En cercles resserrés près du fils de Pepin,
Ses dignes compagnons au loin jettent la vue
Sur une ténébreuse et profonde étendue
De mobiles vapeurs, de nuages sans fin.
Appuyés sur leur glaive ils dominent la sphere
Où le bruyant tonnerre
S’allume par le choc des principes divers.
Le barde peint ainsi les ombres eclatantes
D’Oscar et de Fingal errant au haut des airs,
Et brandissant encor leurs lances flamboyantes.
Tels, auprès d’Ilion, les dieux enfants d’Homère,
Franchissant de l’Ida les sommets ébranlés,
Près du fils de Saturne en foule rassemblés,
Sont décrits préparant les destins de la terre.
Ces fantômes divins furent jadis des preux:
Les siècles ténébreux,
Osant de Jéhova dénaturer l’image,
Dressèrent des autels aux héros fabuleux:[21]
Et de l’idolatrie affirmissant l’ouvrage,
De ces guerriers obscurs[21] Homère fit de dieux
Ainsi les paladins, environnant leur roi,’ etc.
_Chant huitieme._
We might refer to many other passages equally picturesque, though
perhaps to none so poetical. Such as the comparison of Roland taken from
the scene of combat by Oliver, to a lion led off by an African, that
still roars as he follows his well-known guide;—the first appearance of
Armelie, the death of Wilfred at the altar, the vanishing of Adelard
from the sight of Charlemagne, the forest of Eresbourg, the Druidical
sacrifice, and the funeral rites of Orlando in the valley of
Ronscevalles.
The language of the poem often bears a striking resemblance to the
language of painting, or seems like a detailed description of some _chef
d’œuvre_ of the art, rather than the creation of the poet’s fancy. We
should have little doubt that the solitary church in the valley of
Ronscevalles is copied from that in the back-ground of Titian’s _St.
Peter Martyr_, and the massacre at the altar in the first canto is
certainly taken from some picture of Raphael!
In the sentiments of this poem there is more feebleness, a greater
number of Gallicisms, than in the imagery. We meet with such courtly
expressions as these:
‘Les Francs à chaque instant voient de nouveaux guerriers
_Solliciter l’honneur d’embrasser leur defense_!’
The devil addresses the deity with the following piece of high-flown
sentimentality:
‘Pour braver les remords, et la gêne et la flamme,
Je ne demande rien _qu’un seul rayon d’espoir_.’
We know, indeed, from whence the allusion is taken, and we wonder the
more at the affectation implied in the alteration. It is like some of
Pope’s refinements on Isaiah. In giving an account of the sorrow which
prevails in heaven at the disasters of the church of Christ, the author
has expressed a trite theological sentiment with more felicity than we
recollect to have seen it expressed before:
‘On entend à ces mots toutes les voix célestes
D’une douce tristesse exhaler les soupirs.
La harpe ainsi murmure au souffle des zéphirs.
Les habitants du ciel n’ont point ces sons funestes—
Qu’ici-bas les malheurs arrachent aux humains.
Aux peines, aux chagrins,
Aux passions du monde ils ne sont plus en proie;
D’un amour sans mélange ils goûtent la douceur:
Leurs maux sont moins amers, plus purs que notre joie;
Et leur tristesse à peine altère leur bonheur.’
The conception of his Heaven is much more just than that of Hell, though
the execution is (almost as a matter of course) less powerful. The two
figures of Adam and Moses, in the former, are particularly fine:
‘Le père des humains voit sa nombreuse race,
Et calcule, pensif, le nombre des élus!
Moïse près de lui, d’un seul regard embrasse
Les enfants d’Israël en tous lieux répandus.’
Our poet has, very good-naturedly, (and we hope with the approbation of
his holiness the Pope, to whom this work is dedicated,) set aside two
stanzas for the secret conveyance of the souls of virtuous heathens and
of little children, into the abodes of the blest.
The author of _Charlemagne_ has constructed his hell upon an entirely
new and fanciful theory. We see no sort of reason why Satan should not,
in strict propriety, sit upon a throne; nor why his followers should be
degraded from the rank of fallen angels into modern French
revolutionists. We like Milton’s account much better in all respects;
and our author himself, as is the natural consequence of all
affectation, flounders into contradiction in the very next verse, where
he gives a most superb account of Lucifer. In the same spirit, he has
made a more enlightened distribution of crimes and punishments; and
established an entire new set of regulations and bye-laws in the regions
of the damned. Alexander and the two Brutuses figure there with Cain and
other murderers, while ‘the noble Cæsar’ is exempted. Now we have no
notion of such a philosophical hell as our poetical casuist would carve
out. This celebrated place is, we think, of all others the least liable
to plans of reform. It is almost the oldest establishment upon record,
and placed quite out of the reach of the progress of reason and
metaphysics. We hate disputes in poetry, still more than in religion. At
least, whatever appeals to the imagination, ought to rest on undivided
sentiment, on one undisputed tradition, one catholic faith.[22] Besides,
the whole account of the infernal regions is an excrescence, equally
misplaced and improbable. None of the heroes of the poem descend there,
but as Satan is brought thence to appear to Charlemagne in the shape of
a lying priest, this opportunity is taken to describe the geography of
the place according to the latest discoveries. There is one point in
which we agree with the poet, _viz._ in his indignation against tyrants
and their flatterers, though he does not go so far as honest Quevedo,
who, when his hero wonders to see so few kings in hell, makes his guide
reply sullenly, ‘Here are all that ever reigned.’
We shall conclude our remarks on this part of the poem with the author’s
description of the punishment of Cain, which we think the most striking.
‘Ici rugit Cain, les cheveux hérissés,
Et portant sur son front la marque sanguinaire.
“Cain, Cain, réponds: qu’as-tu fait de ton frère?”
A cette voix du Ciel tous ses sens sont glacés;
Cain croit voir Abel éclatant de lumière;
Et d’un bras téméraire,
Il ose encor frapper l’objet de son courroux:
Il voudrait le priver d’une seconde vie:
Mais l’ombre glorieuse échappant à ses coups,
Redouble dans son cœur les tourments de l’envie.’
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Champion._] [_December 25, 1814._
The story of a poem is seldom worth a long description. It may be
sufficient to say in the present case, that the danger to which the
church was exposed, and from which it was afterwards delivered, arose
from the second marriage of _Charlemagne_ with _Armelie_, the daughter
of _Didier_, the King of the Lombards, who was exerting himself to
depose Pope Adrian. Charlemagne had divorced his first wife, _Adelinde_,
but he is warned in a vision to take her again to his bosom. He does so,
and _Didier_ and his daughter consequently become the enemies of this
Christian Emperor, who takes arms to defend the Holy See. After the
usual casualties and fluctuations of fortune, the son of Pepin finally
triumphs.
On a more careful examination, we see no reason to alter our first
opinion of this poem. It has given us no strong impulse, nor left any
permanent trace on our minds. It opens no new and rich vein of poetry,
though certainly great talents are shewn in the use which is made of
existing materials. Perhaps it may be said that this is all that can be
done in a modern poem: if so, that _all_ is hardly worth the doing.
There is no one who has borrowed his materials more than Milton, or who
has made them more completely his own: there is hardly a line which does
not breathe the same lofty spirit, hardly a thought or image which he
has not clothed with the majesty of his genius. It is the same in
reading other great poets. The informing mind is every where present to
us. Who is there that does not know and feel sensibly the majestic
copiousness of Homer, the polished elegance of Virgil, enamoured of its
own workmanship,—the severe grandeur of Dante, the tender pathos of
Tasso, the endless voluptuousness of Spenser, and the unnumbered graces
of Ariosto? Even the mysterious solemnity of Ossian, and the wild
romantic interest of Walter Scott, are something gained to the
imagination. But in the present instance, we do not feel the same
participation with the author’s mind, nor accession of strength to our
own. So little is it in the power even of the most accomplished art to
counterfeit nature. The true Florimel did not differ more from the
Florimel which was made for the witches’ son, than true genius from the
most successful and elaborate imitation of it.
We shall close these remarks with extracting two passages which in the
opinion of our readers will perhaps be thought to amount to a complete
refutation of our objections. The first is the description of the
funeral rites of Orlando, in the thirteenth canto.
‘Gaiffre a suivi son guide au fond du précipice,
Un clocher solitaire a frappé ses regards:
Dans les jours du repos, les fidèles épars
Accourent au signal du divin sacrifice.
Ici du haut des monts descendent les pasteurs.
La vierge des douleurs
De ces mortels obscurs y reçoit la prière:
Sur un autel de bois on a sculpté ses traits;
Les nombreux ex-voto de la divine mère
Dans ces lieux écartés attestant les bienfaits.
Un son plaintif et sourd vient de frapper les airs;
C’est l’airain qui gémit pour les pompes funèbres.
Dans le temple le jour a fait place aux ténèbres;
Des signes de la mort les parois sont couverts.
Un saint pontife offrait la victime ineffable;
Et sa voix secourable
Invoquait pour nos preux le céleste repos.
Un simple sarcophage au milieu de l’enceinte
Retrace à tous les yeux la tombe du héros,
Et répand dans les cœurs une tristesse sainte.
Le prêtre des hameaux, suivant l’antique usage,
Dans l’Eglise chrétienne en tout temps révéré,
Trois fois avec l’eau sainte et l’encensoir sacré
Fait solennellement le tour du sarcophage.
“Dans le sein de ton Dieu sois heureux à jamais:
Roland, repose en paix.”
Du pontife telle est la fervente prière.
Ces mots ont terminé le sacrifice saint;
Et la foule se rend dans le champ funéraire
Ou gît, sous une croix, le corps du paladin.’
In the nineteenth canto, Lawrence and her children, after their escape
from Bourdeaux, arrive at the castle of Melaric, an old christian
knight, when the following example of perfect description occurs:—
‘La nuit envellopait les champs & les remparts;
Sur les murs menaçants de la salle gothique
Une teinte plus sombre & plus mélancholique
Couvrait les boucliers, les glaives, & les dards;
Le vent du soir soufflait des gorges du Pyrène;
Et sa fougueuse halcine
Des armures des preux entrechoquait l’airain.
Les lances, les cimiers rendent des sons funèbres:
Leur murmure plaintif ressemble au cri lointain
D’un guerrier qui succombe au milieu des ténèbres.’
The author in his notes gives us to understand that he is about another
epic poem, the hero of which is Isolier, a native of Corsica, and which
is to bear the same relation to Charlemagne, that the Odyssey does to
the Iliad.
LUCIEN BUONAPARTE’S COLLECTION, ETC.
_The Champion._] [_January 22, 1815._
We have been able to obtain access to the almost inaccessible collection
of the Prince of Canino. The liberality with which the collections of
foreign princes are thrown open to strangers and the public is often
boasted of; but this liberality, we suppose, ceases when the same
collections are exposed in this country for sale. The pictures of Lucien
Buonaparte, which are valued at £40,000, are kept in most ‘vile
durance’; and even the ticket of admission, which we presented to a
person who seems placed at the door to keep persons out, and not to let
them in, was inspected and objected to with the same scrupulous jealousy
as if it had been a bank-note presented in payment of the purchase-money
of the collection. A cursory glance round the room was sufficient to
explain the source of so much mystery and caution. The pictures are in
general mere trash. Nor is the general dearth of attraction relieved by
even a few examples of first-rate excellence. The only exception to
these remarks which struck us was an exquisite female head by Leonardo
da Vinci. It is one of the finest specimens we have seen of that great
master, both for expression, drawing, the spirit and delicacy of the
execution, and the preservation of the tone of colouring. There is in
Leonardo’s female heads a grace and charm of expression, which is
peculiar to himself—a character of natural sweetness and playful
tenderness, mixed up with the pride of conscious intellect, and with the
graceful reserve of personal dignity. He blends purity with
voluptuousness; and the expression of his women is equally
characteristic of ‘the mistress or the saint!’ His pictures are always
worked up to the utmost height of the idea he had conceived, with an
elaborate felicity. No painter made more a religion of his art! His
fault is, that his style of execution is too mathematical; that is, his
pencil does not follow the graceful variety of nature, but substitutes
certain refined gradations both of form and colour, producing equal
changes in equal distances, with a mechanical uniformity. Leonardo was a
man of profound learning as well as genius; and perhaps transferred too
much of the formality of science to his favourite art. In making this
objection, we have had in our eye two of the most celebrated pictures,
the _Jocunda_ in the Louvre, and the _St. John_ in the possession of Mr.
Hope. The picture in the present collection has more flexibility and
variety; as well as greater heightening of colour; and perhaps the
latter effect may be the cause of the former. It is not impossible that
a certain degree of monotony may have been sometimes produced by the
rubbing off of the higher tints and finishing touches of the pencil, so
as to leave little more of the picture than the general ground-work.
To return to the collection before us. The only remaining pictures which
can excite any interest are, some curious specimens of the early
masters, Ghirlandaio, Bellino, and others;—some small sketches of
Titian; a finely coloured Holy Family by the same master; a portrait by
Sebastian del Piombo; a sketch of Diana and Acteon, by A. Caracci; a
landscape by Ruysdael; and a transfiguration, said to be by Vasari.
Besides these, there is a Frenchified Salvator Rosa, coloured pink and
blue, a copy of Domenichino’s head of St. Jerome, one or two pretended
Claudes, and some _amatory_ pictures of the modern French school. To
these shall we add the picture of Lucien Buonaparte himself? Nothing
certainly can go beyond it in its way. It is the very _priggism_ of
portrait-painting.
We have already said something of the French style of portraits, and we
shall here add a few remarks in explanation, though we are aware that
any hints of a want of refinement will be thrown away on a nation so
entirely _spirituel_ as the French, and we are also afraid that some of
our own artists may take credit to themselves for as many excellences,
as we may charge their neighbours with defects.
The French systematically paint all objects as they would paint _still
life_; and hence they in general never paint any thing _but still life_.
It is not possible to paint that which has life and motion by the same
mechanical process by which that which has neither life nor motion may
be represented. Thus it is not possible to imitate the human
countenance, which is moveable and animated, as you would imitate a
piece of drapery, or a chair, or a table, in which the physical
appearance is every thing, and that appearance always remains the same.
The industry of the eye and hand will go a great way in giving the
effect of a number of parts of any external object, arranged in the same
order; but to give truth of effect to that which is always varying, and
always expressive of more than strikes the senses, imagination and
feeling are absolutely required. Whenever there is life and motion, life
and motion become the principal things; and any attempt to give these,
without a distinct operation or feeling of the mind as to what
constitutes their essence, by a mere attention to the physical form, or
particular details, must necessarily destroy all appearance both of one
and the other. To instance in expression only. This can only be given by
being felt. Take for instance the outline of part of a face, and let it
be so placed as to form part of the outline of a rock, or any other
inanimate object. A copy of this, done with tolerable care, will seem to
be the same thing: but let it be known that this is really a part of a
human countenance, and then it will probably be found to be quite
different _from the difference of expression_. We distinguish all
objects more or less by habitual knowledge; and this knowledge is always
acute in proportion to the interest excited, that is, to the intensity
of the feeling or passion which is combined with the immediate
impression on the senses. Expression is therefore only caught by
sympathy; and it has been received as a maxim, that no painter can
succeed in giving an expression which is totally foreign to his own
character. There are some painters who cannot paint a wise man, and
others who cannot paint a fool: some who cannot give strength, and
others softness to their works. It is the want of character, of
flexibility, and transient expression, which is the great defect of
French portraits. Without the indications of the mind breathed into the
countenance and moulding the features, the whole must appear stiff,
hard, mean, unconnected, and lifeless—like the mask of a face, not like
the face itself—forced, affected, and unnatural. Another consequence of
this mode of copying the letter and leaving out the spirit of all
objects, is that the face in general looks the least finished part of
the picture, for while the other parts remain the same, this necessarily
varies, and the only way to make up for the want of literal exactness,
must be by seizing the force and animation of the expression. A head
that does not look like life, cannot look like any thing else.—The
portrait of Lucien Buonaparte is a striking confirmation of these
remarks. We do not know how to describe it otherwise than by saying that
it looks as if the artist had first modelled the face in wax, oiled it
over, painted the lips purple, stuck on a pair of artificial eyebrows,
and inserted a pair of dark blue glass eyes, and then set to work to
copy every part of this perverse misrepresentation, with tedious and
disgusting accuracy. In a portrait of the author of Charlemagne, one has
a right to expect some refinement of intellect and feeling, if not the
marks of elevated genius. No such thing. The picture has just the
appearance of a spruce holiday mechanic, with all the hardness,
littleness, and vulgarity of expression which is to be found in nature,
where the countenance has not been expanded by thought and sentiment,
and in art, where this expression has been entirely overlooked. The
French artists themselves, both men and women, seem to be aware of the
dilemma to which they are reduced, and prefer copying from plaster
casts, or lay figures, to painting from the life; which baffles the
mechanical minuteness and ‘laborious foolery’ of their style of art.
They set about painting a face as they would about engraving a picture.
This cannot possibly answer. From the general idea of the liveliness and
volatility of the French character one would be apt to suppose, that
instead of the method here described, their artists would have adopted
the happier mode proposed by Pope in describing his characters of women:
‘Come, then, the colours and the ground prepare,
Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air,
Chuse a firm cloud, before it falls, and in it
Catch, ere the change, the Cynthia of a minute!’
But the days of Watteau are over, and the plodding gravity of the Dutch
has succeeded to the natural levity of French art. It is no wonder: for
both proceed from a want of real concentration and force of
intellect.[23]
There is another picture in this collection which we would recommend to
the attention of all _whom it may concern_, as a most instructive lesson
of the vanity of human pretensions, and the capriciousness of national
taste. It is the historical picture of the return of Marcus Sextus, by
Guerin, one of the most admired painters of the modern French school.
This picture combines all the vices of that school in their most
confirmed and aggravated state, and yet it drew, at the time when it was
first exhibited in Paris, crowds of admirers, whose raptures were
excited exactly in proportion as it flattered their habitual prejudices,
and outraged every principle of common sense. It consists of three
figures, that of the husband standing in front of the bed, the wife who
lies dead upon it being behind him, and the daughter kneeling at his
feet. Now all these figures seem as if they had been cut out of
pasteboard, smeared over with putty to represent the shadows, and then
stuck flat against the canvass to make a picture. This is not truth, nor
invention, nor art, nor nature: but it is the French style of painting.
Their pictures are sections of statues, or architectural elevations of
the human figure. They have the effect neither of painting nor
sculpture; for painting has colour, and the appearance of substance,
sculpture has real substance without colour; but these have neither
colour, substance, nor the appearance of it, but consist of mere lines.
Whatever they may do, we cannot think this the highest style of history:
because proceeding on arithmetical principles only, it wants two out of
three of the physical requisites of the art of painting. The picture of
Guerin is painted in strong contrast of light and shade, and ought to
have proportionable prominence and relief. But from the habit of
attending only to lines and detached parts, that is, of never combining
the lesser masses into larger ones, or of contemplating the general
appearance of nature, the whole effect is frittered away, and neither
the prominent parts stand out, nor do the receding ones fall back. The
same flat, imbecile, and dingy effect is produced, as by smearing white
streaks upon a black ground, without knowledge or design, or reference
to any actual object in nature. The drawing in this picture is equally
characteristic of the general French style, and equally repulsive. It is
not easy to explain the elaborate absurdity of the process: but it is in
reality this. The painter has taken the figure of an antique statue for
the figure of his hero. But finding that the position would not answer
his purpose; he therefore gets a lay-figure made from a cast of this
statue, and distorting it into the attitude he wants, places it against
some object which props it up, with the two feet stretched out before
it, as if it could neither move nor stand; and this the artist calls
painting history, and copying the ancients. This is what no other nation
dare attempt. The expression which is given to these mockeries of art
and nature, is of a piece with the rest. It is either copied tamely,
servilely, and without effect, from the model before them, or if any
thing is added to it, all grace and feeling is instantly lost in the
extravagance of grimace and affectation. The ambition of these refiners
on nature is like that of Pygmalion to give life and animation to a
stone, but no miracle has yet come to their assistance.[24] The French
are incapable of painting true history, for they are a people
essentially without imagination, and without a knowledge of the passions
that belong to it. All that is powerful in them, is immediate
sensation—the rest is either levity, or formality, or distortion. Take
the picture of the deluge by Girodet. In this, a daughter is represented
clinging to her mother by the hair of her head, the mother is clinging
to the husband, he is at the same time supporting his father with his
other arm, and is enabled to support the whole of this exquisite family
groupe by taking hold of the branch of a tree which has just broken off
by the weight. This effort of imagination almost equals the exploit of
the clown in the pantomime, who contrives to balance a dozen men on one
another’s shoulders. If Poussin or Raphael had been fortunate enough to
study in the central schools of Paris, what a difference would this new
principle of grouping have introduced into their pictures of the Deluge
and the Incendio del Borgo.
Before we quit this subject of French art, we would notice that there
are two pictures of the Emperor Napoleon to be seen at present, one in
Leicester-fields, which is very bad, and another in the Adelphi, by
Lefebre, which is tolerably good. The last is one of the best French
portraits we have ever seen. The effect however is only good, very near,
and is best when each part is seen through a magnifying glass. There is
considerable character, firmness of drawing, and prominence in the
features. Still it does not convey an adequate idea of the man. It is
heavy, perplexed, and sullen, without sufficient fierceness or energy,
and indeed without either the high or the bad qualities of the original.
It has, notwithstanding, the appearance of being what is understood by a
faithful likeness, and only wants that full developement of the workings
of the mind, which every portrait ought to have, and which, in a
portrait like the present, would be invaluable.
BRITISH INSTITUTION
_The Champion._] [_February 5, 1815._
The Exhibition of this year, which opens to the public on Monday, is
said to be inferior to the last:—that was said to be inferior to the one
before it,—that to the preceding one, and so on. This is the common cant
respecting all Exhibitions; and the reason is obvious enough. We are
naturally less struck by pictures of the same degree and class of
excellence, by the same artists, on repetition than at first sight; and
the art appears to be retrograde, only because it is not progressive.
Perhaps, however, there is some foundation for the objection in the
present instance. At least, we think there is a falling off in the
historical department: though that is the department of the art which
would least bear any kind of retrenchment. We do not know whether to lay
the blame of the deficiency on those artists, who have been away this
summer on their visit to the French capital, or on those who have
remained behind. The picture in this branch of the art which pleased us
the most on looking into it, and which we conceive has decidedly the
greatest number of excellent parts, though the general effect is very
far from striking, is ‘_Brutus exhorting the Romans to revenge the Death
of Lucretia_,’ by C. L. Eastlake. The artist will excuse us, if we say
that we think the principal figure, that of _Brutus_, by much the worst
part of the picture. A more theatrical, and less impressive figure we
have seldom seen. He is quite an orator of the modern stamp, and has
nothing of the ‘antique Roman’ about him. He is not a bit better than
any of the blustering, canting, vapid, Canning school, and is evidently
an orator to be disposed of. We would advise Mr. Eastlake to take a hint
from a high quarter, and get rid of him, at any rate. The effect of the
attitude of this figure, which is represented pointing with a sword to
the body of _Lucretia_, behind him, is almost entirely lost by the want
of distinct foreshortening and prominent relief.[25] The figure of
_Brutus_ seems in a line with that of _Lucretia_. Indeed, the same
defect pervades the whole picture, which is laid-in like mosaic, and the
general pale, stone-colour appearance of the drapery, and of the flesh,
adds to this effect. No one figure comes out before the rest to the eye,
till by tracing it down to the feet, you find where it stands. The dead
figure of _Lucretia_ herself is a complete piece of marble. We wish to
notice more particularly, because it is an excellence very rare in an
English artist, that the attention to costume in the decorations of the
bier on which the dead body lies, and in the other ornaments in the
back-ground of the picture, gives an additional air of truth and
consequently of interest to the scene. The peculiar merit of this
composition is the great variety of distinct faces and characteristic
expressions to be found in it. These, if not of a very high order, are
at least much better than the pompous nonentities to which we are
accustomed. There is very little of passion or emotion given or
attempted, but we think the expression of attention in the surrounding
audience is varied very happily, and with great truth of nature. The
most picturesque and interesting part of the picture is the groupe in
which a girl with a back-figure is supporting (we suppose) the mother of
_Lucretia_. The expression of the countenance in the latter reminded us
of Annibal Caracci, and we are always glad to be reminded of him.
Certainly the same effect was not produced upon our minds by the boy in
the foreground, with sandy hair and weak eyes, who is crying so
piteously: still less did we like the figure of a man in the right hand
corner, who is explaining the story to another with his fists clenched,
and in a boxing attitude. The model for a Roman warrior is as little to
be sought in a Fives Court, as of a Roman patriot in a debating society,
or even (with leave be it spoken) in an English House of Commons. We
have dwelt the longer on this picture, because its immediate effect on
the eye is by no means in proportion to its real merit. The
drab-coloured quakerism of the tone conceals it from observation almost
as much as if it had a veil over it. We do not really understand the
object of these sickly half-tints, which all French artists, and some of
our own, affect. Nicolas Poussin, who had no relief of light and shade,
had strong contrasts of colour: or even if he had had neither, the great
distinctness of his outline, and his striking manner of telling the
story, might still have formed a sufficient excuse for him. In short,
the style of colouring adopted in this picture may, for aught we know,
accord very well with some more artificial and recondite style of
historical composition; but we are sure, it has nothing to do with
natural expression, or immediate effect.
It has been said, that ‘a great book is a great evil.’ We think the same
thing might be applied to pictures: or at least we should not instance
the large picture in this collection of _The Burial of our Lord_, by C.
Coventry, as an exception to the rule. We admit, however, that the face,
dress, and figure of the old man holding the drapery over Christ, are
picturesque, and in the fine manner of Rembrandt. The attitude and
action of this figure are exactly the same as those of a similar figure
in Mr. Bird’s picture of the same subject. This is rather a singular
coincidence in two pictures exhibited at the same time, and which it is
therefore improbable to suppose could have been copied one from the
other. The other figures about Christ we cannot bring ourselves to
admire: they resemble painted wood. The colour of the Christ is a livid
purple, the worst of all possible colours. The women are better; though
the fine turn in the waist of one of them is not in the best style of
history, which does not profess to exhibit women of fashion.
Mr. Bird’s picture of _The Entombment of Christ_, is, we conceive, very
inferior to his picture last year of _Job and his Friends_. The
colouring is equally bad, and the composition is not equally good. There
is one pretty figure of a girl, but her prettiness is not an advantage
to the subject. In all things, ‘It is place which lessens and sets off.’
Mr. Bird constantly introduces the extremities of the hands and feet
into his pictures, only to show how ill he can paint them. The picture
of _The Surrender of Calais_ has been already before the public.
Among the historical pictures, we suppose from its name, we must rank
that of the _Prophet Ezra_, by G. Hayter, though it does not appear to
us to belong to the class. It is a fine, rich, and strongly painted
picture of a man reading a book. The being able to copy nature with
truth and effect is not history, though we think it is the first step to
it. In this picture, which we believe is a first essay, Mr. Hayter has
not redeemed the pledge he gave in his miniatures. If we could paint
such miniatures as he does, we would do nothing but paint miniatures
always; and laugh at the advertisements of great historical pictures in
the newspapers. The _St. Bernard_, by the same artist, is very
indifferent.
Mr. Harlowe’s _Hubert and Arthur_ is the greatest piece of coxcombry and
absurdity we remember to have seen. We do not think that any one who
pleases has a right to paint a libel on Shakspeare.
The generality of the historical pictures in the gallery are such as
have been always painted, and as will always be painted, in spite of all
that can be said to the contrary, and therefore it is as well to say
nothing about them.
Miss Jackson’s _Mars subdued by Peace_ is a very pleasing composition.
Both the face and expression of the figure of _Peace_ are those of a
very beautiful and interesting girl, though from the tender pensiveness
of the features she seems rather as if sending _Mars_ out to battle than
disarming him; and as to the God of War himself, he does not look like
one whom ‘deep scars of thunder have intrenched,’ but as if he had been
kept a long time at home in a lady’s chamber. The Cupids (when Ladies
imagine Cupids, what can they be less?) are very nice, little, chubby
fellows.
There are two pictures of _The Sick Pigeon_ and _The Favourite Kitten_
by Miss Geddes, both of which we like, gallantry out of the question.
The kitten in the last is exquisitely painted. You may almost hear it
_purring_.
Among the foreign contributors to this department we ought to mention
_Music_, by M. Messora, in the manner of the early Italian masters, and
_Devotion_, a small picture by J. Laschallas, which is hung almost out
of sight, and which, if it were hung a little lower, we suspect, would
be found to be ‘a good picture and a true.’
To the scene from the _Marriage of Figaro_, by Chalon, no praise of ours
could add the slightest grace or lustre. We wonder where he got the
figure of his _Susan_, or how he dared to paint her!
In the domestic scenes, and views of interiors, &c. this exhibition is
much like the former ones, except that we miss Collins, and find no one
to replace him.
Of the landscapes, Burnett’s, Fielding’s, Nasmyth’s, Hofland’s, and
Glover’s are the best. In Mr. Glover’s large picture of _Jacob and
Laban_ (which we believe was exhibited and much admired in Paris), there
is a want of harmony and lightness in the whole: but there is a groupe
of trees in the foreground, which Claude himself would not have
disdained to borrow. Mr. Hofland’s landscapes, without being much
finished, have the look, the tone, and freshness of nature. The _View of
Edinburgh_ is, we think, the best. Some of the others are too much
abstractions of aerial perspective: they are naked and cold, and
represent not the objects of nature so much as the medium through which
they are seen. We will only add, in our professional capacity, that this
gentleman’s pictures shew themselves, and that he need not be at the
trouble of shewing them. Nasmyth’s pictures are not too much finished,
but they want a certain breadth, which nature always adds to perfect
finishing. Fielding is a new and most promising artist, of whom we mean
to say more. Of the two Burnetts, we shall only remark at present, that
they have made no addition to their live-stock since last year, which
consisted then, as it does now, of one black, one yellow, and one
spotted cow.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Champion._] [_February 12, 1815._
_Cottage Child at Breakfast_, W. Collins, A.R.A. This is a pleasing
little picture, but inferior to Mr. Collins’s general performances. The
shadow cast on the wall is like plaster of a darker colour, nor should
we have suspected it to be meant for shadow, had it not been pointed out
to us. _Reapers_, by the same artist, is a still greater falling off.
The mixture of minute finishing and slovenliness in the execution, and
of blues and yellows in the colouring of this picture is to us very
unaccountable.
_Devotion_, J. Laschallas. We wish that we could conjure this little
picture out of its frame to have a nearer view. The drawing, expression,
tone, and composition appear to us admirable.
_A Scolding Wife; her Husband having spent all his Money at the Fair_,
L. Cossé. This is not a very pleasant subject, nor very pleasantly
treated. The little child blowing the trumpet is the pretty part of the
picture. There is one figure of a woman in a blue stuff gown, sitting by
the fire-side, in an attitude of yawning, which both for the truth of
the colouring and the action, is inimitable.
_A Country Scene_, by the same, has the hard brickdusty tone which there
is in the faces of the other picture; but the expression is natural and
good.
_A Colour-Grinder_, R. T. Bone, is a spirited and faithful imitation of
nature.
_A Study from Nature_, J. Harrison, is a well-painted head. At the same
time, there is something about it very unpleasant to us.
_Hebe_ and _Sunrise_, by H. Howard, R.A., were, we believe, in last
year’s Exhibition at Somerset-house. There is a certain grace and
elegance in both of them. The fantastic, playful lightness of the
figures in the last is perhaps carried to a degree of affectation. The
faces of the Pleiades are very pretty and very insipid.
_Conrade and Gulnare_, H. Singleton. We could neither understand this
picture nor the lines from Lord Byron’s _Corsair_, which are intended to
explain the subject of it.
_Brutus exhorting the Romans to revenge the Death of Lucretia._ Of this
composition we find we have already said quite enough.
_View of Arthur’s Seat near Edinburgh_, P. Nasmyth, is a very nicely
painted landscape. We like all this gentleman’s landscapes, except _A
View of Edinburgh_, which is just like a painting on a tea-board.
_Breaking the Ice_, by James Burnett, is a very delightful picture. It
has the effect of walking out in a fine winter’s morning. Many
incidental associations are very happily introduced; the pigeons
collected on the thatch of a shed, and the robin-redbreast perched in a
window of an out house. The pigeons are, however, too small, and the
colour on the breast of the robin is on fire. Perhaps these objections
are too minute. The pigeon-house looks suspended in the air, and the sky
and branches of the trees seen against it are painted with admirable
brilliancy. _Peasants going to Market_, by the same artist, is of equal
merit. The skirt of the drapery of the peasant girl looks as if the sun
shone directly upon it. The docks in the foreground of the picture are
very highly finished, and touched with great spirit, but we never saw
this kind of plant of the lightish green colour, which is here given to
it.
_Milking_, by John Burnett, is a very brilliant little picture. The red
dress of the girl at the milk-pail is as rich as possible. The trees at
a little distance are too much in sharp points and touches. The cattle
in the landscapes of both the painters of this name are too much in
heavy masses, and form too violent a contrast to the lightness of the
landscape about them.
_The Watering Place_, P. H. Rogers, deserves considerable praise, both
for the colouring and composition.
_Banks of the Thames_, J. Wilson, is a very clever picture. The
foreground and the distance are equally well painted; but they do not
appear in keeping. The one is quite clear, and the other covered with
haze.
_Morning_, and _View from Rydal Woods_, by C. V. Fielding, are both
masterly performances. The last, in particular, is a rich, mellow
landscape, and presents a fine, woody, and romantic scene, which in some
degree calls off our admiration from the merit of the artist to the
beauties of nature. This is a sacrifice of self-love which many of our
artists do not seem willing to make. They too often chuse their
subjects, not to exhibit the charms of nature, but to display their own
skill in making something of the most barren subjects.
We think this objection applies to Mr. Hofland’s landscapes in general.
The scene he selects is represented with great truth and felicity of
pencil, but it is, generally speaking, one we should neither wish to
look at, nor to be in. In his _Loch-Lomond_ and _Stirling Castle_, the
effect of the atmosphere is finely given; but this is all. We wish to
enter our protest against this principle of separating _the imitation_
from _the thing imitated_, particularly as it is countenanced by the
authority of the ablest landscape painter of the present day, of whose
landscapes some one said, that ‘they were pictures of nothing, and very
like!’
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Champion._] [_February 19, 1815._
_Battle-piece_, B. Barker, is a spirited sketch, harmoniously coloured.
In force of drawing and expression, it is inferior to _The Standard_, by
Ab. Cooper. There is too violent an opposition of white and black in the
horses in this picture; and the eye does not immediately connect the
heads of the animals with the rest of their bodies. This picture,
however, displays great knowledge of the subject, and considerable
strength of composition. _A Study from Nature_, by the same artist, Ab.
Cooper, is a masterly little picture. _Birds_, from nature, and
_Plovers_, from nature, by M. Chantry, are both excellent in their kind.
_View of Richmond, Yorkshire_, by W. Westall, A.R.A. is deficient in
perspective and in other respects. The river below seems to be on a
level with the high foreground from which it is seen. The representing
declivities by means of aerial perspective is, we believe, one of the
difficulties of the art, and we do not remember any successful instances
of it, except in some of Wilson’s landscapes.
_A Boy lamenting the Death of his Favourite Rabbit_, W. Davison, is a
very pleasing composition in the style of Gainsborough. The landscape
has too much the blue greenish hue and slender execution of
Gainsborough’s back-grounds. The boy is well painted. There is a picture
of this kind by Murillo in the collection at Dulwich, which we would
earnestly recommend to every painter of such subjects. Or we might as
well, in other words, recommend them to look at nature.
_Forest Scene_, by J. Stark, is painted with great truth of colour and
effect.
_Stacking Hay_, P. Dewint, has great merit.
_Jacob taking charge of the Flocks and Herds of Laban_, J. Glover. We
have already spoken of this picture. The group of tall green trees in
the foreground is excellent, but there is a leaden tone spread over the
rest of the picture, which is neither gratifying to the eye, nor true to
nature.
_The Emperor Alexander, in his Droschi_, by A. Sauerweide, is like all
the other pictures, busts, &c. we have seen of him, and not at all like
the descriptions we have heard of his fine person and countenance.
_The Duke of Wellington attacking the Rear of Marshal Soult’s Army on
the Pont de Miserali over the Great fall of Salamondi, and pursuing them
through the Passes of the Sierra Morone in Portugal, 1809_, from a
sketch by Major-general Hawker, by Perry Nursey. This is not a good
picture; but it gives one a good idea of the sport which is to be found
in this sort of royal game. In looking at it we have something like
ocular demonstration of the truth of what Cowper, the poet, says—
‘War is a game, which were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at!’
ON MR. WILKIE’S PICTURES
_The Champion._] [_March 5, 1815._
In one of Archbishop Herring’s letters, written during a tour in Wales,
is the following very picturesque description of a scene at an inn. ‘I
set out upon this adventurous journey on a Monday morning, accompanied
(as bishops usually are) by my chancellor, my chaplain, secretary, two
or three friends, and our servants. The first part of our road lay
across the foot of a long ridge of rocks, and was over a dreary morass,
with here and there a small dark cottage, a few sheep and more goats in
view, but not a bird to be seen, save, now and then, a solitary hern,
watching for frogs. At the end of four of their miles, we got to a small
village, where the view of things mended a little, and the road and the
time were beguiled by travelling for three miles along the side of a
fine lake, full of fish, and transparent as glass. That pleasure over,
our work became very arduous, for we were to mount a rock, and in many
places of the road, over natural stairs of stone. I submitted to this,
which, they told me, was but a taste of the country, and to prepare me
for worse things to come. However, worse things did not come that
morning, for we dined soon after out of our own wallets; and though our
inn stood in a place of the most frightful solitude, and the best formed
for the habitation of monks (who once possessed it) in the world, yet we
made a cheerful meal. The novelty of the thing gave me spirits, and the
air gave me appetite, much keener than the knife I ate with. We had our
music too; for there came in a harper, who soon drew about us a group of
figures, that Hogarth would give any price for. The harper was in his
true place and attitude; a man and a woman stood before him, singing to
his instrument wildly, but not disagreeably; a little dirty child was
playing with the bottom of the harp; a woman, in a sick night-cap,
hanging over the stairs; a boy with crutches, fixed in a staring
attention, and a girl carding wool in the chimney, and rocking a cradle
with her naked feet, interrupted in her business by the charms of the
music; all ragged and dirty, and all silently attentive. These figures
gave us a most entertaining picture, and would please you, or any man of
observation; and one reflection gave me particular comfort, that the
assembly before us demonstrated, that, even here, the influential sun
warmed poor mortals, and inspired them with love and music.’
The figures in this description form a very striking group, and we
should like much to see them transferred to the canvass. Those of the
girl with naked feet rocking the cradle, the little child playing with
the bottom of the harp, and the man and woman singing wildly before it
are the most beautiful. There is one observation made by the writer to
which we do not assent, that the figures are such as Hogarth would have
given any price for. We doubt whether he would have meddled with them at
all, for there was no one who understood his own powers better, or more
seldom went out of his way. His _forte_ was satire, he painted the
follies or vices of men, and we do not know that there is a single
picture of his, containing a representation of merely natural or
domestic scenery. The subject described in the passage we have given
above would have exactly suited an excellent painter of the present day,
we mean Mr. Wilkie; and would indeed form a very delightful companion to
his Blind Fiddler. With all our admiration of this last-mentioned
composition, we think the story described by the bishop clearly has the
poetry on its side.
The highest authority on art in this country, we understand, has
pronounced that Mr. Wilkie united the excellences of Hogarth to those of
Teniers. We demur to this decision, in both its branches; but in
demurring to authority, it is necessary to give our reasons. We conceive
that this excellent and deservedly admired artist has certain essential,
real, and indisputable excellences of his own; and we think it,
therefore, the less important to clothe him with any vicarious merits,
which do not belong to him.
Mr. Wilkie’s pictures, generally speaking, derive almost their whole
merit from their _reality_, or the truth of the representation. They are
works of pure imitative art, and the test of this style of composition
is to represent nature, faithfully and happily, in its simplest
combinations. It may be said of an artist, like Mr. Wilkie, that
_nothing human is indifferent to him_. His mind takes an interest in,
and it gives an interest to, the most familiar scenes and transactions
of life. He professedly gives character, thought, and passion in their
lowest degrees, and every-day forms. He selects the commonest events and
appearances of nature for his subjects; and trusts to their very
commonness for the interest and amusement he is to excite. Mr. Wilkie is
a serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts, and his pictures may be
considered as diaries, or minutes of what is passing constantly about
us. Hogarth, on the contrary, is essentially a comic painter; his
pictures are not indifferent, unimpassioned descriptions of human
nature, but rich, exuberant satires upon it. He is carried away by a
passion for the _ridiculous_. His object is ‘to shew vice her own
feature, scorn her own image.’ He is so far from contenting himself with
still life, that he is always on the verge of caricature, though without
ever falling into it. He does not represent folly or vice in its
incipient, or dormant, or _grub_ state, but full grown, with wings,
pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, ostentatious, and
extravagant. Folly is there seen at the height—the moon is at the
full—it is ‘the very error of the time.’ There is a perpetual collision
of eccentricities—a tilt and tournament of absurdities—the prejudices
and caprices of mankind are let loose, and set together by the ears, as
in a bear-garden. Hogarth paints nothing but comedy, or tragicomedy.
Wilkie paints neither one nor the other. Hogarth never looks at any
object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect. Wilkie never looks
at any object but to see that it is there. Hogarth’s pictures are a
perfect jest-book from one end to the other. We do not remember a single
joke in Wilkie’s, except one very bad one of the boy in The Blind
Fiddler, scraping the gridiron, or fire-shovel, we forget which.[26] In
looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing at
the unaccountable jumble of odd things, which are brought together: you
look at Wilkie’s pictures with a mingled feeling of curiosity and
admiration at the accuracy of the representation. For instance, there is
a most admirable head of a man coughing in The Rent-Day: the action, the
keeping, the choaked sensation are inimitable: but there is nothing to
laugh at in a man coughing. What strikes the mind is the difficulty of a
man’s being painted coughing, which here certainly is a master-piece of
art. But turn to the blackguard cobler in the Election Dinner, who has
been smutting his neighbour’s face over, and who is lolling his tongue
out at the joke with a most surprising obliquity of vision, and
immediately ‘your lungs begin to crow like chanticleer.’ Again, there is
the little boy crying in The Cut Finger, who only gives you the idea of
a cross, disagreeable, obstinate child in pain: whereas the same face in
Hogarth’s Noon, from the ridiculous perplexity it is in, and its
extravagant, noisy, unfelt distress at the accident of having let fall
the pye-dish, is quite irresistible. Mr. Wilkie in his picture of the
Ale-house door, we believe, painted Mr. Liston as one of the figures,
without any great effect. Hogarth would have given any price for such a
subject, and would have made it worth any money. We have never seen any
thing, in the expression of comic humour, equal to Hogarth’s pictures,
but Liston’s face!
We have already remarked that we did not think Hogarth a fit person to
paint a romantic scene in Wales. In fact, we know no one who had a less
pastoral imagination. Mr. Wilkie paints interiors: but still you always
connect them with the country. Hogarth, even when he paints people in
the open air, represents them either as coming from London, as in the
polling for votes at Brentford, or as returning to it, as the dyer and
his wife at Bagnigge Wells. In this last picture he has contrived to
convert a common rural image into a type and emblem of city cuckoldom.
He delights in the thick of St. Giles’s or St. James’s. His pictures
breathe a certain close greasy tavern air. The fare he serves up to us
consists of high-seasoned dishes, ragouts and olla podridas, like the
supper in Gil Blas, which it requires a strong stomach to digest. Mr.
Wilkie presents us with a sort of lenten fare, very good and wholesome,
but rather insipid than overpowering.[27]
As an artist, Mr. Wilkie is not at all equal to Teniers. Neither in
truth and brilliant clearness of colouring, nor in facility of
execution, is there any comparison. Teniers was a perfect master in both
these respects, and our own countryman is positively defective,
notwithstanding the very laudable care with which he finishes every part
of his pictures. There is an evident smear and dragging of the paint,
which is also of a bad purple, or puttyish tone, and which never appear
in the pictures of the Flemish artist, any more than in a looking-glass.
Teniers, probably from his facility of execution, succeeded in giving a
more local and momentary expression to his figures. They seem each going
on with his particular amusement or occupation; while Wilkie’s have in
general more a look of sitting for their pictures. Their compositions
are very different also: and in this respect, perhaps, Mr. Wilkie has
the advantage. Teniers’s boors are usually amusing themselves at
skittles, or dancing, or drinking, or smoking, or doing what they like
in a careless desultory way; and so the composition is loose and
irregular. Wilkie’s figures are all drawn up in a regular order, and
engaged in one principal action, with occasional episodes. The story of
the Blind Fiddler is the most interesting, and the best told. The two
children before the musician are delightful. The Card-players is the
best coloured of his pictures, if we are not mistaken. The Politicians,
though excellent as to character and composition, is inferior as a
picture to those which Mr. Wilkie has since painted. His latest
pictures, however, do not appear to us to be his best. There is
something of manner and affectation in the grouping of the figures, and
a pink and rosy colour spread over them, which is out of place. The hues
of Rubens and Sir Joshua do not agree with Mr. Wilkie’s subjects. The
picture which he has just finished of Distraining for Rent is very
highly spoken of by those who have seen it. We must here conclude this
very general account; for to point out the particular beauties of any
one of our artist’s pictures, would require a long article by itself.
ON ROCHEFOUCAULT’S MAXIMS.
_The Examiner._] [_October 23, 1814._
The celebrated maxims of Rochefoucault contain a good deal of truth
mixed up with more falsehood. They might in general be easily reversed.
The whole artifice of the author consists in availing himself of the
_mixed_ nature of motives, so as to detect some indirect or sinister
bias even in the best, and he then proceeds to argue as if they were
_simple_, that is, had but one principle, and that principle the worst.
By the same extreme mode of reasoning which he adopts, that is, by
taking the exception for the rule, it might be shewn that there is no
such thing as selfishness, pride, vanity, revenge, envy, &c. in our
nature, with quite as much plausibility as he has attempted to shew that
there is no such thing as love, friendship, gratitude, generosity, or
true benevolence. If the slightest associated circumstance, or latent
impulse connected with our actions, is to be magnified into the whole
motive, merely by the microscopic acuteness which discovered it, why not
complete the paradox, by resolving our vices into some pretence to
virtue, which almost always accompanies and qualifies them? Or is it to
be taken for granted that our vices are sincere, and our virtues only
hypocrisy and affectation? Shakespeare has given a much simpler and
better account of the matter, when he says, ‘The web of our life is of a
mingled yarn: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them
not; and our vices would despair, if they were not cherished by our
virtues.’ The most favourable representations of human nature are not
certainly the most popular. The character of _Sir Charles Grandison_ is
insipid compared with that of _Lovelace_, as _Satan_ is the hero of
_Paradise Lost_; and Mandeville’s _Fable of the Bees_ is read with more
interest and avidity than the _Practice of Piety_ or Grove’s _Ethics_.
Whatever deviates from the plain path of duty, or contradicts received
opinions, seems to imply a strength of will, or a strength of
understanding, which seizes forcibly on the attention. Whether it is
fortitude or cowardice, or both, there is a strong propensity in the
human mind, if its suspicions are once raised, _to know the worst_. It
is the same in speculation as in practice. When once the fairy dream in
which we have lulled our senses or imagination is disturbed, we only
feel ourselves secure from the delusions of self-love by distrusting
appearances altogether, and revenge ourselves for the cheat which we
think has been put upon us, by laughing at the credulity of those who
are still its dupes.[28] Even the very love of virtue makes the mind
proportionably impatient of every thing like doubt respecting it, and
prompts us to escape from tormenting suspense in total indifference, as
jealousy cures itself by destroying its object. The _Fable of the Bees_,
the _Maxims of Rochefoucault_, the _Treatise on the Falsity of Human
Virtues_, and the book _De l’Esprit_ have owed much of their popularity
to the consolation they afforded to disappointed hope. However this may
be, a collection of amiable paradoxes on the other side of the question,
would have but few readers. There would be less point and satire, though
there would not be less truth nor, as far as the analytical process is
concerned, less ingenuity, in exalting our bad qualities into virtues,
than in debasing our good ones into vices. I will give an example or two
of what I mean.
Thus, it might be argued that there is no such thing as envy: or that
what is called by that name, does not (if strictly examined) arise from
a hatred of real excellence, but from a suspicion that the excellence is
not real, or not so great as it is supposed to be, and consequently that
the preference given to others is an act of injustice done to ourselves.
For whenever all doubt is removed of the reality of the excellence,
either from our own convictions, or from the concurrent opinion of
mankind in general, envy ceases. This is the reason why the reputation
of the dead never excites this passion, because it has been fully
established by the most unequivocal testimony, it has received a
sanction which fills the imagination and gains the assent at once, and
the fame of the great men of past times is placed beyond the reach of
envy, because it is placed beyond the reach of doubt. We feel no
misgivings as to the solidity of their pretensions, nor any apprehension
that our admiration or praise will be thrown away on what does not
deserve it. No one envies Shakespeare or Rubens, because no one
entertains the least doubt of their genius. We are as prodigal of our
admiration of universally acknowledged excellence, making a sort of
religious idolatry of it, as we are niggardly and cautious in fixing the
stamp of our approbation on that which may turn out to be only
counterfeit. It is not because we are competitors with the living and
not with the dead: but because the claims of the one are fully
established, and of the other not. Why else indeed are we competitors
with the one and not with the other? Accordingly, where living merit is
so clear as to bring immediate and entire conviction to the mind, we are
no longer disposed to stint or withhold our applause, any more than to
dispute the light of the sun. For instance, who ever felt the least
difficulty in acknowledging the merits of Wilkie or Turner, merely
because these artists are now living? If immediate celebrity has not
always been the reward of extraordinary genius, this has been owing to
the incapacity of the public to judge of the highest works of art. There
is no want of instances where the popular opinion has outstripped the
claims of justice, whenever the merits of the artist were on a level
with the common understanding, and of an obvious character. Sir Joshua
Reynolds had his full share of popularity in his lifetime. Raphael Mengs
was cried up by his countrymen and contemporaries as equal to Raphael;
and Mr. West at present stands as high in the estimation of the public
as he does in his own. On the other hand, and in opposition to what was
said above (though the exception still confirms the rule), the French
hate Shakespeare and Rubens, for no other reason than because there is
nothing in their minds which really enables them to understand or relish
either. The admiration which they hear others express of this great
painter and greater poet, appears to them a delusion, an instance of
false taste, and a bigoted preference of that which is full of faults to
that—_which is without beauties_. The disputes and jealousies of
different nations respecting each other’s productions, arise chiefly
from this source. We despise French painting, French poetry, and French
philosophy, not because they are French, but because they appear to us
to want the essential requisites of genius, feeling, and common sense.
We do not feel any reluctance to admire Titian or Rembrandt, or Phidias
or Homer, or Boccace or Cervantes, merely because they were not English.
They speak the universal language of truth and nature. Our national and
local prejudices for the most part operate only as a barrier against
national and local absurdities. To the same purpose, I might mention
some modern poets and critics who are actuated by nearly as intolerant
feelings towards Pope and Dryden, as if they had been their
contemporaries.[29] They are not their cotemporaries, but the
explanation is obvious. From the want of congeniality of mind, and a
taste for their peculiar excellencies, the space which those writers
occupy in the eyes of the world seems comparatively disproportionate to
their merits; and hence the irritation and gall which follows. The
highest reputation and the highest excellence almost always destroy
envy; whereas, on the common supposition, we ought to feel the greatest
envy, where there is the greatest superiority, and the greatest
admiration of it in others. If we never become entirely free from it in
modern works, it is because with respect to them we can never ‘make
assurance double sure,’ by having our own feelings confirmed by the
united voices of ages and nations. True genius and true fame seize our
admiration, and our admiration, when once excited, becomes a passion,
and we take a delight in exaggerating the excellences of our idol as if
they were our own. On the contrary, we all envy that reputation which is
acquired by trick or cunning, or by mere shewy accomplishments, as when
with moderate talents, dexterously applied, or an appeal to ignorant
credulity, a man ‘gets the start of the majestic world,’ and obtains the
highest character for qualities which he does not possess. It becomes an
imposture and an insult, which we resent as such.
The jealousy and uneasiness produced in the mind by a pedantic or
dazzling display of useless accomplishments may be traced to a similar
source. Hence the old objection, _materiam superabat opus_. True warmth
and vigour communicate warmth and vigour: and we are no longer inclined
to dispute the inspiration of the oracle, when we feel the ‘presens
Divus’ in our own bosoms. But when without gaining any new light or
heat, we only find our ideas thrown into confusion and perplexity by an
art that we cannot comprehend, this is a kind of superiority which must
always be painful, and can never be cordially admitted. It is for this
reason that the extraordinary talents of the late Mr. Pitt were always
viewed, except by those of his own party, with a sort of jealousy, and
grudgingly acknowledged: while those of his more popular rivals were
admitted by all parties in the most unreserved manner, and carried by
acclamation. Mr. Burke was scouted only by the common herd of
politicians, who did not understand him. So on the stage, we imagine
Mrs. Siddons could hardly have excited envy or jealousy in the breast of
any person, not totally devoid of common sensibility: because her
talents bore down all opposition, and filled the mind at once with
delight and awe. Mr. Kean has a strong and most absurd party against
him: but we will venture to say that if his figure, or his voice, or his
judgment, were better, that is, if he had fewer defects, he would have
fewer detractors from his excellencies. Any peculiar defects excite
ridicule and enmity by bringing the whole claim to our applause into
question. A perfect actor would not be an object of envy even to some
newspaper critics. Perfect beauty excites this feeling less among women
than half pretensions to it. In the same manner, upstart wealth or newly
acquired honours produce contempt rather than respect, from not being
accompanied with any strong or permanent associations of pleasure or
power. There is nothing more apt to occasion the feeling of envy than
the sudden and unexpected rise of persons we have long known under
different circumstances, not from the immediate comparison with
ourselves (the extravagant admiration of each other’s talents among
friends is an answer to this supposition) so much as from the disbelief
of the reality of their pretensions, and our inability to overcome our
previous prejudice against them. It is the same where striking mental
inequalities exist, or where the moral properties render us averse to
acknowledge merit of a different kind, or where the countenance or
manner does not denote genius. Every such incongruity increases the
difficulty of connecting hearty admiration with ideas so opposite to it.
I have known artists whose physiognomy was so much against them, that no
one would ever think highly of them, though they were to paint like
Raphael; and I once heard a very sensible man say, that if Sir Isaac
Newton had lisped, he could not have fancied him to be a great man. I
myself have felt a jealousy of pretensions which I thought inferior to
my own, but I never knew what envy of great talents was. I do not indeed
like to be put down by persons I despise, or to seem to myself less than
nothing. In a word, we feel the same jealousy and irritation at seeing
others surpassed, whom we have been accustomed to admire; and what is
more, grow jealous of our own approximation to an equality with them.
Every ingenuous mind shrinks from a comparison of itself, with what it
looks up to, and is ashamed of any advantage it may gain over those whom
it regards as having higher powers and pretensions. The idea of fame is
too pure and sacred to be mingled with our own. Our admiration of others
is stronger than our vanity. Poor indeed is that mind which has no other
idol but self. It is the want of all real imagination and enthusiasm, or
that little glittering halo of personal conceit which surrounds every
Frenchman, and does not suffer him to see or feel any thing beyond it,
that makes the French perhaps the most contemptible people in the world.
ON THE PREDOMINANT PRINCIPLES AND EXCITEMENTS IN THE HUMAN MIND
‘The web of our lives is of a mingled yarn.’
_The Examiner._] [_February 26, 1815._
‘Anthony Codrus Urceus, a most learned and unfortunate Italian, born
1446, was a striking instance’ (says his biographer) ‘of the miseries
men bring upon themselves by setting their affections unreasonably on
trifles. This learned man lived at Forli, and had an apartment in the
palace. His room was so very dark, that he was forced to use a candle in
the day time; and one day, going abroad without putting it out, his
library was set on fire, and some papers which he had prepared for the
press were burned. The instant he was informed of this ill news, he was
affected even to madness. He ran furiously to the palace, and, stopping
at the door of his apartment, he cried aloud, “Christ Jesus! what mighty
crime have I committed? whom of your followers have I ever injured, that
you thus rage with inexpiable hatred against me?” Then turning himself
to an image of the Virgin Mary near at hand, “Virgin” (says he) “hear
what I have to say, for I speak in earnest, and with a composed spirit.
If I shall happen to address you in my dying moments, I humbly entreat
you not to hear me, nor receive me into heaven, for I am determined to
spend all eternity in hell.” Those who heard these blasphemous
expressions endeavoured to comfort him, but all to no purpose; for, the
society of mankind being no longer supportable to him, he left the city,
and retired, like a savage, to the deep solitude of a wood. Some say he
was murdered there by ruffians; others that he died at Bologna, in 1500,
after much contrition and penitence.’
Almost every one may here read the history of his own life. There is
scarcely a moment in which we are not in some degree guilty of the same
kind of absurdity, which was here carried to such a singular excess. We
waste our regrets on what cannot be recalled, or fix our desires on what
we know cannot be attained. Every hour is the slave of the last; and we
are seldom masters either of our thoughts or of our actions. We are the
creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or
even of self-interest. Rousseau, in his Emilius, proposed to educate a
perfectly reasonable man, who was to have passions and affections like
other men, but with an absolute control over them. He was to love and to
be wise. This is a contradiction in terms. Even in the common
transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim,
caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a tea-cup puts us out of
temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a
gown may end only with our lives.
‘Friends now fast sworn,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity. So fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep,
To take the one the other, by some chance
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends,
And interjoin their issues.’
We are little better than humoured children to the last, and play a
mischievous game at cross-purposes with our own happiness and that of
others.
We have given the above story as a striking contradiction to the
prevailing doctrine of modern systems of morals and metaphysics, that
man is purely a sensual and selfish animal, governed solely by a regard
either to his immediate gratification or future interest. This doctrine
we mean to oppose with all our might, whenever we meet with it. We are,
however, less disposed to quarrel with it, as it is opposed to reason
and philosophy, than as it interferes with common sense and observation.
If the absurdity in question had been confined to the schools, we should
not have gone out of our way to meddle with it: but it has got abroad in
the world, has crept into ladies’ toilettes, is entered in the
common-place of beaux, is in the mouth of the learned and ignorant, and
forms a part of popular opinion. It is perpetually applied as a false
measure to the characters and conduct of men in the common affairs of
the world, and it is therefore our business to rectify it if we can. In
fact, whoever sets out on the idea of reducing all our motives and
actions to a simple principle, must either take a very narrow and
superficial view of human nature, or make a very perverse use of his
understanding in reasoning on what he sees. The frame of our minds, like
that of our bodies, is exceedingly complicated. Besides mere sensibility
to pleasure and pain, there are other original independent principles,
necessarily interwoven with the nature of man as an active and
intelligent being, and which, blended together in different proportions,
give their form and colour to our lives. Without some other essential
faculties, such as will, imagination, &c., to give effect and direction
to our physical sensibility, this faculty could be of no possible use or
influence; and with those other faculties joined to it, this pretended
instinct of self-love will be subject to be everlastingly modified and
controlled by those faculties, both in what regards our own good and
that of others; that is, must itself become in a great measure dependent
on the very instruments it uses. The two most predominant principles in
the mind, besides sensibility and self-interest, are imagination and
self-will, or (in general) the love of strong excitement, both in
thought and action. To these sources may be traced the various passions,
pursuits, habits, affections, follies and caprices, virtues and vices of
mankind. We shall confine ourselves in the present article, to give some
account of the influence exercised by the imagination over the feelings.
To an intellectual being, it cannot be altogether arbitrary what ideas
it shall have, whether pleasurable or painful. Our ideas do not
originate in our love of pleasure, and they cannot therefore depend
absolutely upon it. They have another principle. If the imagination were
‘the servile slave’ of our self-love, if our ideas were emanations of
our sensitive nature, encouraged if agreeable, and excluded the instant
they became otherwise, or encroached on the former principle, then there
might be a tolerable pretence for the Epicurean philosophy which is here
spoken of. But for any such entire and mechanical subserviency of the
operations of the one principle to the dictates of the other, there is
not the slightest foundation in reality. The attention which the mind
gives to its ideas is not always owing to the gratification derived from
them, but to the strength and truth of the impressions themselves,
_i.e._ to their involuntary power over the mind. This observation will
account for a very general principle in the mind, which cannot, we
conceive, be satisfactorily explained in any other way, we mean _the
power of fascination_. Every one has heard the story of the girl who
being left alone by her companions, in order to frighten her, in a room
with a dead body, at first attempted to get out, and shrieked violently
for assistance, but finding herself shut in, ran and embraced the
corpse, and was found senseless in its arms.
It is said that in such cases there is a desperate effort made to get
rid of the dread by converting it into the reality. There may be some
truth in this account, but we do not think it contains the whole truth.
The event produced in the present instance does not bear out the
conclusion. The progress of the passion does not seem to have been that
of diminishing or removing the terror by coming in contact with the
object, but of carrying this terror to its height from an intense and
irresistible impulse, overcoming every other feeling.
It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge of
a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without being in
danger of throwing themselves down; not we presume from a principle of
self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea having taken
possession of the mind, from which it cannot well escape, which absorbs
every other consideration, and confounds and overrules all self-regards.
The impulse cannot in this case be resolved into a desire to remove the
uneasiness of fear, for the only danger arises from the fear. We have
been told by a person, not at all given to exaggeration, that he once
felt a strong propensity to throw himself into a cauldron of boiling
lead, into which he was looking. These are what Shakespear calls ‘the
toys of desperation.’ People sometimes marry, and even fall in love on
this principle—that is, through mere apprehension, or what is called a
fatality. In like manner, we find instances of persons who are as it
were naturally delighted with whatever is disagreeable,—who catch all
sorts of unbecoming tones and gestures,—who always say what they should
not, and what they do not mean to say,—in whom intemperance of
imagination and incontinence of tongue are a disease, and who are
governed by an almost infallible instinct of absurdity.
The love of imitation has the same general source. We dispute for ever
about Hogarth, and the question can never be decided according to the
common ideas on the subject of taste. His pictures appeal to the love of
truth, not to the sense of beauty; but the one is as much an essential
principle of our nature as the other. They fill up the void of the mind;
they present an everlasting succession and variety of ideas. There is a
fine observation somewhere made by Aristotle, that the mind has a
natural appetite of curiosity or desire to know; and ‘most of that
knowledge which comes in by the eye, for this presents us with the
greatest variety of differences.’ Hogarth is relished only by persons of
a certain strength of mind and penetration into character; for the
subjects in themselves are not pleasing, and this objection is only
redeemed by the exercise and activity which they give to the
understanding. The great difference between what is meant by a severe
and an effeminate taste or style, depends on the distinction here made.
Our teasing ourselves to recollect the names of places or persons we
have forgotten, the love of riddles and of abstruse philosophy, are all
illustrations of the same general principle of curiosity, or the love of
intellectual excitement. Again, our impatience to be delivered of a
secret that we know; the necessity which lovers have for confidants,
auricular confession, and the declarations so commonly made by criminals
of their guilt, are effects of the involuntary power exerted by the
imagination over the feelings. Nothing can be more untrue, than that the
whole course of our ideas, passions, and pursuits, is regulated by a
regard to self-interest. Our attachment to certain objects is much
oftener in proportion to the strength of the impression they make on us,
to their power of rivetting and fixing the attention, than to the
gratification we derive from them. We are perhaps more apt to dwell upon
circumstances that excite disgust and shock our feelings, than on those
of an agreeable nature. This, at least, is the case where this
disposition is particularly strong, as in people of nervous feelings and
morbid habits of thinking. Thus the mind is often haunted with painful
images and recollections, from the hold they have taken of the
imagination. We cannot shake them off, though we strive to do it: nay,
we even court their company; we will not part with them out of our
presence; we strain our aching sight after them; we anxiously recal
every feature, and contemplate them in all their aggravated colours.
There are a thousand passions and fancies that thwart our purposes and
disturb our repose. Grief and fear are almost as welcome inmates of the
breast as hope or joy, and more obstinately cherished. We return to the
objects which have excited them, we brood over them, they become almost
inseparable from the mind, necessary to it; they assimilate all objects
to the gloom of our own thoughts, and make the will a party against
itself. This is one chief source of most of the passions that prey like
vultures on the heart, and embitter human life. We hear moralists and
divines perpetually exclaiming, with mingled indignation and surprise,
at the folly of mankind in obstinately persisting in these tormenting
and violent passions, such as envy, revenge, sullenness, despair, &c.
This is to them a mystery; and it will always remain an inexplicable
one, while the love of happiness is considered as the only spring of
human conduct and desires.
We shall resume this subject in a future paper.[30]
THE LOVE OF POWER OR ACTION AS MAIN A PRINCIPLE IN THE HUMAN MIND AS
SENSIBILITY TO PLEASURE OR PAIN
_The Examiner._] [_April 9, 1815._
The love of power or action is another independent principle of the
human mind, in the different degrees in which it exists, and which are
not by any means in exact proportion to its physical sensibility. It
seems evidently absurd to suppose that sensibility to pleasure or pain
is the only principle of action. It is almost too obvious to remark,
that sensibility alone, without an active principle in the mind, could
never produce action. The soul might lie dissolved in pleasure, or be
agonised with woe; but the impulses of feeling, in order to excite
passion, desire, or will, must be first communicated to some other
faculty. There must be a principle, a fund of activity somewhere, by and
through which our sensibility operates; and that this active principle
owes all its force, its precise degree and direction, to the sensitive
faculty, is neither self-evident nor true. Strength of will is not
always nor generally in proportion to strength of feeling. There are
different degrees of activity as of sensibility in the mind; and our
passions, characters, and pursuits, often depend no less upon the one
than on the other. We continually make a distinction in common discourse
between sensibility and irritability, between passion and feeling,
between the nerves and muscles; and we find that the most voluptuous
people are in general the most indolent. Every one who has looked
closely into human nature must have observed persons who are naturally
and habitually restless in the extreme, but without any extraordinary
susceptibility to pleasure or pain, always making or finding excuses to
do something,—whose actions constantly outrun the occasion, and who are
eager in the pursuit of the greatest trifles,—whose impatience of the
smallest repose keeps them always employed about nothing,—and whose
whole lives are a continued work of supererogation. There are others
again who seem born to act from a spirit of contradiction only, that is,
who are ready to act not only without a reason, but against it,—who are
ever at cross-purposes with themselves and others,—who are not satisfied
unless they are doing two opposite things at a time,—who contradict what
you say, and if you assent to them, contradict what they have said,—who
regularly leave the pursuit in which they are successful to engage in
some other in which they have no chance of success,—who make a point of
encountering difficulties and aiming at impossibilities, that there may
be no end of their exhaustless task: while there is a third class whose
_vis inertiæ_ scarcely any motives can overcome,—who are devoured by
their feelings, and the slaves of their passions, but who can take no
pains and use no means to gratify them,—who, if roused to action by any
unforeseen accident, require a continued stimulus to urge them on,—who
fluctuate between desire and want of resolution,—whose brightest
projects burst like a bubble as soon as formed,—who yield to every
obstacle,—who almost sink under the weight of the atmosphere,—who cannot
brush aside a cobweb in their path, and are stopped by an insect’s wing.
Indolence is want of will—the absence or defect of the active
principle—a repugnance to motion; and whoever has been much tormented
with this passion, must, we are sure, have felt that the inclination to
indulge it is something very distinct from the love of pleasure or
actual enjoyment. Ambition is the reverse of indolence, and is the love
of power or action in great things. Avarice, also, as it relates to the
acquisition of riches, is, in a great measure, an active and
enterprising feeling; nor does the hoarding of wealth, after it is
acquired, seem to have much connection with the love of pleasure. What
is called niggardliness, very often, we are convinced from particular
instances that we have known, arises less from a selfish principle than
from a love of contrivance, from the study of economy as an art, for
want of a better, from a pride in making the most of a little, and in
not exceeding a certain expense previously determined upon; all which is
wilfulness, and is perfectly consistent, as it is frequently found
united, with the most lavish expenditure and the utmost disregard for
money on other occasions. A miser may in general be looked upon as a
particular species of _virtuoso_. The constant desire in the rich to
leave wealth in large masses, by aggrandising some branch of their
families, or sometimes in such a manner as to accumulate for centuries,
shews that the imagination has a considerable share in this passion.
Intemperance, debauchery, gluttony, and other vices of that kind, may be
attributed to an excess of sensuality or gross sensibility; though even
here, we think it evident that habits of intoxication are produced quite
as much by the strength as by the agreeableness of the excitement; and
with respect to some other vicious habits, curiosity makes many more
votaries than inclination. The love of truth, when it predominates,
produces inquisitive characters, the whole tribe of gossips,
tale-bearers, harmless busy bodies, your blunt honest creatures, who
never conceal what they think, and who are the more sure to tell it you
the less you want to hear it,—and now and then a philosopher.
Our passions in general are to be traced more immediately to the active
part of our nature, to the love of power, or to strength of will. Such
are all those which arise out of the difficulty of accomplishment, which
become more intense from the efforts made to attain the object, and
which derive their strength from opposition. Mr. Hobbes says well on
this subject:
‘But for an utmost end, in which the ancient philosophers placed
felicity, and disputed much concerning the way thereto, there is no such
thing in this world nor way to it, than to Utopia; for while we live, we
have desires, and desire presupposeth a further end. Seeing all delight
is appetite, and desire of something further, there can be no
contentment but in proceeding, and therefore we are not to marvel, when
we see that as men attain to more riches, honour, or other power, so
their appetite continually groweth more and more; and when they are come
to the utmost degree of some kind of power, they pursue some other, as
long as in any kind they think themselves behind any other. Of those
therefore that have attained the highest degree of honour and riches,
some have affected mastery in some art, as Nero in music and poetry,
Commodus in the art of a gladiator; and such as affect not some such
thing, must find diversion and recreation of their thoughts in the
contention either of play or business, and men justly complain as of a
great grief that they know not what to do. Felicity, therefore, by which
we mean continual delight, consists not in having prospered, but in
prospering.’
This account of human nature, true as it is, would be a mere romance, if
physical sensibility were the only faculty essential to man, that is, if
we were the slaves of voluptuous indolence. But our desires are kindled
by their own heat, the will is urged on by a restless impulse, and,
without action, enjoyment becomes insipid. The passions of men are not
in proportion only to their sensibility, or to the desirableness of the
object, but to the violence and irritability of their tempers, and the
obstacles to their success. Thus an object, to which we were almost
indifferent while we thought it in our power, often excites the most
ardent pursuit or the most painful regret, as soon as it is placed out
of our reach. How eloquently is the contradiction between our desires
and our success described in Don Quixote where it is said of the lover,
that ‘he courted a statue, hunted the wind, cried aloud to the desert!’
The necessity of action to the mind, and the keen edge it gives to our
desires, is shewn in the different value we set on past and future
objects. It is commonly and we might almost say universally supposed,
that there is an essential difference in the two cases. In this
instance, however, the strength of our passions has converted an evident
absurdity into one of the most inveterate prejudices of the human mind.
That the future is really or in itself of more consequence than the
past, is what we can neither assent to nor even conceive. It is true,
the past has ceased to be and is no longer any thing, except to the
mind; but the future is still to come, and has an existence in the mind
only. The one is at an end, the other has not even had a beginning; both
are purely ideal: so that this argument would prove that the present
only is of any real value, and that both past and future objects are
equally indifferent, alike nothing. Indeed, the future is, if possible,
more imaginary than the past; for the past may in some sense be said to
exist in its consequences; it acts still; it is present to us in its
effects; the mouldering ruins and broken fragments still remain; but of
the future there is no trace. What a blank 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_. Neither in reality, then, nor
as a subject of general contemplation, has the future any advantage over
the past; but with respect to our own passions and pursuits it has. We
regret the pleasures we have enjoyed, and eagerly anticipate those which
are to come; we dwell with satisfaction on the evils from which we have
escaped, and dread future pain. The good that is past is like money that
is spent, which is of no use, and about which we give ourselves no
farther concern. The good we expect is like a store yet untouched, 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? Because the one is in our power, and the other
not; because the efforts of the will to bring an object to pass or to
avert it strengthen our attachment to or our aversion from that object;
because the habitual pursuit of any purpose redoubles the ardour of our
pursuit, and converts the speculative and indolent interest we should
otherwise take in it into real passion. Our regrets, anxiety, and
wishes, are thrown away upon the past, but we encourage our disposition
to exaggerate the importance of the future, as of the utmost use in
aiding our resolutions and stimulating our exertions.
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, are regardless of the
past, for it does not contribute 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 of the
other. The season of hope comes to 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_ dwell upon the future; it is only amidst the
innocence of shepherds, in the simplicity of the pastoral ages, that a
tomb was found with this inscription—‘I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN!’
We feel that some apology is necessary for having thus plunged our
readers all at once into the middle of metaphysics. If it should be
asked what use such studies are of, we might answer with Hume, _perhaps
of none, except that there are certain persons who find more
entertainment in them than in any other_. An account of this matter,
with which we were amused ourselves, and which may therefore amuse
others, we met with some time ago in a metaphysical allegory, which
begins in this manner:—
‘In the depth of a forest, in the kingdom of Indostan, lived a monkey,
who, before his last step of transmigration, had occupied a human
tenement. He had been a Bramin, skilful in theology, and in all abstruse
learning. He was wont to hold in admiration the ways of Nature, and
delighted to penetrate the mysteries in which she was enrobed; but in
pursuing the footsteps of philosophy, he wandered too far from the abode
of the social Virtues. In order to pursue his studies, he had retired to
a cave on the banks of the Jumna. There he forgot society, and neglected
ablution; and therefore his soul was degraded to a condition below
humanity. So inveterate were the habits which he had contracted in his
human state, that his spirit was still influenced by his passion for
abstruse study. He sojourned in this wood from youth to age, regardless
of everything, _save cocoa-nuts and metaphysics_.’ For our own part, we
should be content to pass our time much in the same way as this learned
savage, if we could only find a substitute for his cocoa-nuts! We do not
however wish to recommend the same pursuit to others, nor to dissuade
them from it. It has its pleasures and its pains—its successes and its
disappointments. It is neither quite so sublime nor quite so
uninteresting as it is sometimes represented. The worst is, that much
thought on difficult subjects tends, after a certain time, to destroy
the natural gaiety and dancing of the spirits; it deadens the elastic
force of the mind, weighs upon the heart, and makes us insensible to the
common enjoyments and pursuits of life.
‘Sithence no fairy lights, no quick’ning ray,
Nor stir of pulse, nor objects to entice
Abroad the spirits; but the cloyster’d heart
Sits squat at home, like pagod in a niche
Obscure.’
Metaphysical reasoning is also one branch of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. The study of man, however, does, perhaps, less harm
than a knowledge of the world, though it must be owned that the
practical knowledge of vice and misery makes a stronger impression on
the mind, when it has imbibed a habit of abstract reasoning. Evil thus
becomes embodied in a general principle, and shews its harpy form in all
things. It is a fatal, inevitable necessity hanging over us. It follows
us wherever we go: if we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it
is there: whether we turn to the right or the left, we cannot escape
from it. This, it is true, is the disease of philosophy; but it is one
to which it is liable in minds of a certain cast, after the first order
of expectation has been disabused by experience, and the finer feelings
have received an irrecoverable shock from the jarring of the world.
Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all
things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to
whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into
whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been ‘hurt
by the archers,’ nor has the iron entered their souls. They live in the
midst of arrows and of death, unconscious of harm. The evil things come
not nigh them. The shafts of ridicule pass unheeded by, and malice loses
its sting. The example of vice does not rankle in their breasts, like
the poisoned shirt of Nessus. Evil impressions fall off from them like
drops of water. The yoke of life is to them light and supportable. The
world has no hold on them. They are in it, not of it; and a dream and a
glory is ever around them!
ESSAY ON MANNERS
_The Examiner._] [_September 3, 1815._
Nothing can frequently be more striking than the difference of style or
manner, where the _matter_ remains the same, as in paraphrases and
translations. The most remarkable example which occurs to us is in the
beginning of the _Flower and Leaf_ by Chaucer, and in the modernisation
of the same passage by Dryden. We shall give an extract from both, that
the reader may judge for himself. The original runs thus:—
‘And I that all this pleasaunt sight see,
Thought sodainly I felte so sweet an aire
Of the elgentere, that certainely
There is no herte I deme, in such dispaire,
Ne with thoughts froward and contraire
So overlaid, but it should soone have bote,
If it had ones felt this savour sote.
And as I stood and cast aside mine eie,
I was of ware the fairest medler tree,
That ever yet in all my life I see,
As full of blossomes as it might be,
Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile
Fro bough to bough, and as him list he eet,
Here and there of buds and floures sweet.
And to the herber side was joyning
This faire tree of which I have you told;
And at the last the bird began to sing,
When he had eaten what he eat wold,
So passing sweetly, that by manifold
It was more pleasaunt than I could devise;
And when his song was ended in this wise,
The nightingale with so mery a note
Answered him, that all the wood rang
So sodainly, that as it were a sote,
I stood astonied, so was I with the sang
Thorow ravished, that till late and lang,
I ne wist in what place I was, ne where,
And aye me thought she sang even by mine ear.
Wherefore I waited about busily
On every side, if I her might see,
And at the last I gan full well espie
Where she sat in a fresh green laurer tree,
On the further side even right by me,
That gave so passing a delicious smell,
According to the eglentere full well.
Whereof I had so inly great pleasure;
That as me thought I surely ravished was
Into Paradise, where my desire
Was for to be and no further to passe,
As for that day, and on the sote grasse
I sat me downe, for as for mine intent,
The birdes song was more convenient,
And more pleasaunt to me by manifold,
Than meat or drinke, or any other thing,
Thereto the herber was so fresh and cold,
The wholesome savours eke so comforting,
That as I deemed, sith the beginning
Of the world was never seene or then
So pleasaunt a ground of none earthly man.
And as I sat, the birdes harkening thus,
Me thought that I heard voices sodainly,
The most sweetest and most delicious
That ever any wight I trow truly
Heard in their life; for the harmony
And sweet accord was in so good musike,
That the voices to angels most was like.’
In this passage the poet has let loose the very soul of pleasure. There
is a spirit of enjoyment in it, of which there seems no end. It is the
intense delight which accompanies the description of every object, the
fund of natural sensibility it displays, which constitutes its whole
essence and beauty. Now this is shewn chiefly in the manner in which the
different objects are anticipated, and the eager welcome which is given
to them; in his repeating and varying the circumstances with a restless
delight; in his quitting the subject for a moment, and then returning to
it again, as if he could never have his fill of enjoyment. There is
little of this in Dryden’s paraphrase. The same ideas are introduced,
but not in the same manner, nor with the same spirit. The imagination of
the poet is not borne along with the tide of pleasure—the verse is not
poured out, like the natural strains it describes, from pure delight,
but according to rule and measure. Instead of being absorbed in his
subject, he is dissatisfied with it, tries to give an air of dignity to
it by factitious ornaments, to amuse the reader by ingenious allusions,
and divert his attention from the progress of the story by the artifices
of the style.
‘The painted birds, companions of the spring,
Hopping from spray to spray, were heard to sing;
Both eyes and ears received a like delight,
Enchanting music, and a charming sight:
On Philomel I fixed my whole desire,
And listen’d for the queen of all the quire:
Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing,
And wanted yet an omen to the spring.
Thus as I mus’d, I cast aside my eye
And saw a medlar tree was planted nigh:
The spreading branches made a goodly show,
And full of opening blooms was every bough:
A goldfinch there I saw with gaudy pride
Of painted plumes, that hopp’d from side to side,
Still pecking as she pass’d; and still she drew
The sweets from every flow’r, and suck’d the dew;
Suffic’d at length, she warbled in her throat,
And tun’d her voice to many a merry note,
But indistinct, and neither sweet nor clear,
Yet such as sooth’d my soul, and pleas’d my ear.
Her short performance was no sooner tried,
When she I sought, the nightingale, replied:
So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung,
That the grove echo’d, and the vallies rung:
And I so ravish’d with her heavenly note,
I stood entranc’d, and had no room for thought;
But all o’erpower’d with ecstasy of bliss,
Was in a pleasing dream of paradise:
At length I wak’d; and looking round the bower,
Search’d every tree, and pry’d on every flower,
If any where by chance I might espy
The rural poet of the melody:
For still methought she sung not far away;
At last I found her on a laurel spray.
Close by my side she sat, and fair in sight,
Full in a line, against her opposite;
Where stood with eglantine the laurel twin’d;
And both their native sweets were well conjoin’d.
On the green bank I sat, and listen’d long;
(Sitting was more convenient for the song)
Nor till her lay was ended could I move,
But wish’d to dwell for ever in the grove.
Only methought the time too swiftly pass’d,
And every note I fear’d would be the last.
My sight, and smell, and hearing were employ’d,
And all three senses in full gust enjoy’d.
And what alone did all the rest surpass
The sweet possession of the fairy place;
Single, and conscious to myself alone
Of pleasures to th’ excluded world unknown:
Pleasures which no where else were to be found,
And all Elysium in a spot of ground.
Thus while I sat intent to see and hear,
And drew perfumes of more than vital air,
All suddenly I heard the approaching sound
Of vocal music, on th’ enchanted ground:
An host of saints it seem’d, so full the quire,
As if the blest above did all conspire
To join their voices, and neglect the lyre.’
Compared with Chaucer, Dryden and the rest of that school were merely
_verbal poets_. They had a great deal of wit, sense and fancy; they only
wanted truth and depth of feeling. But we shall have to say more on this
subject, when we come to consider the old question which we have got
marked down in our list, whether Pope was a poet?
To return to the subject of our last Number, Lord Chesterfield’s
character of the Duke of Marlborough is a good illustration of his
general theory. He says:—‘Of all the men I ever knew in my life (and I
knew him extremely well) the late Duke of Marlborough possessed the
graces in the highest degree, not to say engrossed them; for I will
venture (contrary to the custom of profound historians, who always
assign deep causes for great events) to ascribe the better half of the
Duke of Marlborough’s greatness and riches to those graces. He was
eminently illiterate: wrote bad English, and spelt it worse. He had no
share of what is commonly called parts; that is, no brightness, nothing
shining in his genius. He had most undoubtedly an excellent good plain
understanding with sound judgment. But these alone would probably have
raised him but something higher than they found him, which was page to
King James II.’s Queen. There the graces protected and promoted him; for
while he was Ensign of the Guards, the Duchess of Cleveland, then
favourite mistress of Charles II., struck by these very graces, gave him
five thousand pounds; with which he immediately bought an annuity of
five hundred pounds a year, which was the foundation of his subsequent
fortune. His figure was beautiful, but his manner was irresistible by
either man or woman. It was by this engaging, graceful manner, that he
was enabled during all his wars to connect the various and jarring
powers of the grand alliance, and to carry them on to the main object of
the war, notwithstanding their private and separate views, jealousies,
and wrong headedness. Whatever court he went to (and he was often
obliged to go himself to some resty and refractory ones) he as
constantly prevailed, and brought them into his measures.’[31]
Grace in woman has often more effect than beauty. We sometimes see a
certain fine self-possession, an habitual voluptuousness of character,
which reposes on its own sensations, and derives pleasure from all
around it, that is more irresistible than any other attraction. There is
an air of languid enjoyment in such persons, ‘in their eyes, in their
arms, and their hands, and their face,’ which robs us of ourselves, and
draws us by a secret sympathy towards them. Their minds are a shrine
where pleasure reposes. Their smile diffuses a sensation like the breath
of spring. Petrarch’s description of Laura answers exactly to this
character, which is indeed the Italian character. Titian’s pictures are
full of it: they seem sustained by sentiment, or as if the persons whom
he painted sat to music. There is one in the Louvre (or there was) which
had the most of this expression, we ever remember. It did not look
downward; ‘it looked forward, beyond this world.’ It was a look that
never passed away, but remained unalterable as the deep sentiment which
gave birth to it. It is the same constitutional character (together with
infinite activity of mind) which has enabled the greatest man in modern
history to bear his reverses of fortune with gay magnanimity, and to
submit to the loss of the empire of the world with as little
discomposure as if he had been playing a game at chess.
After all, we would not be understood to say that manner is every
thing.[32] Nor would we put Euclid or Sir Isaac Newton on a level with
the first _petit-maître_ we might happen to meet. We consider _Æsop’s
Fables_ to have been a greater work of genius than Fontaine’s
translation of them; though we are not sure that we should not prefer
Fontaine for his style only, to Gay, who has shewn a great deal of
original invention. The elegant manners of people of fashion have been
objected to us to shew the frivolity of external accomplishments, and
the facility with which they are acquired. As to the last point, we
demur. There are no class of people who lead so laborious a life, or who
take more pains to cultivate their minds as well as persons, than people
of fashion. A young lady of quality who has to devote so many hours a
day to music, so many to dancing, so many to drawing, so many to French,
Italian, &c., certainly does not pass her time in idleness; and these
accomplishments are afterwards called into action by every kind of
external or mental stimulus, by the excitements of pleasure, vanity and
interest. A Ministerial or Opposition Lord goes through more drudgery
than half a dozen literary hacks; nor does a reviewer by profession read
half the same number of publications as a modern fine lady is obliged to
labour through. We confess, however, we are not competent judges of the
degree of elegance or refinement implied in the general tone of
fashionable manners. The successful experiment made by _Peregrine
Pickle_, in introducing his strolling mistress into genteel company,
does not redound greatly to their credit. In point of elegance of
external appearance, we see no difference between women of fashion and
women of a different character, who dress in the same style.
KEAN’S BAJAZET AND ‘THE COUNTRY GIRL’
_The Examiner._] [_November 12, 1815._
The lovers of the drama have had a very rich theatrical treat this week,
Mr. Kean’s first appearance in _Bajazet_, two new _Miss Peggys_ in the
_Country Girl_, and last, though not least, Miss Stephens’s reappearance
in _Polly_. Of Mr. Kean’s _Bajazet_ we have not much to say, without
repeating what we have said before. The character itself is merely
calculated for the display of physical passion and external energy. It
is violent, fierce, turbulent, noisy, and blasphemous, ‘full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing.’ Mr. Kean did justice to his author, or
went the whole length of the text. A viper does not dart with more
fierceness and rapidity on the person who has just trod upon it than he
turns upon _Tamerlane_ in the height of his fury. An unslaked thirst of
vengeance and blood has taken possession of every faculty, like the
savage rage of a hyaena, assailed by the hunters. His eyeballs glare,
his teeth gnash together, his hands are clenched. In describing his
defeat, his voice is choked with passion; he curses, and the blood
curdles in his veins. Never was the fiery soul of barbarous revenge,
stung to madness by repeated shame and disappointment, so completely
displayed. This truth of nature and passion in Mr. Kean’s acting carries
every thing before it. He was the only person on the stage who seemed
alive. The mighty _Tamerlane_ appeared no better than a stuffed figure
dressed in ermine, _Arpasia_ moaned in vain, and _Moneses_ roared out
his wrongs unregarded, like the hoarse sounds of distant thunder.
Nothing can withstand the real tide of passion once let loose; and yet
it is pretended, that the great art of the tragic actor is in damming it
up, or cutting out smooth canals and circular basons for it to flow
into, so that it may do no harm in its course. It is the giving way to
natural and strong impulses of the imagination that floats Mr. Kean down
the stream of public favour with all his faults—‘a load to sink a navy.’
The only wonder was to see this furious character suffered to go about
and take the whole range of the palace of _Tamerlane_, without the least
let or impediment. It shewed a degree of magnanimity in Mr. Pope, which
is without any parallel, even in modern times. It is understood that the
play was originally written by the whig poet Rowe, and regularly acted
on the anniversary of our whig revolution, as a compliment to King
William, and a satire on Louis XIV. For any thing we know, the
resemblance of _Tamerlane_ to King William may be sufficiently strong,
there the historian and the poet may agree tolerably well; but what
traits the Tartar Chieftain and the French Monarch had in common, it
would be difficult to find out. If any more recent allusion was intended
in its revival, it fell still wider of the mark. The play of _Tamerlane_
may be divided into two heads—cant and rant. _Tamerlane_ takes the first
part, and _Bajazet_ the second. This last hurls defiance at both gods
and men. He is utterly regardless of consequences, and rushes upon his
destruction like a wild beast into the toils. He utters but one striking
sentiment, when he defends ambition as the hunger of noble minds.
_Bajazet’s_ character is energy without greatness. He is blind to every
thing but the present moment, and insensible to every thing but the
present impulse. True greatness is the reverse of this. It shews all the
energy of courage, but none of the impatience of despair. It struggles
with difficulty, but yields to necessity. It does every thing, and
suffers nothing. It sees events with the eye of history, and makes Time
the Judge of Fortune. Courage with calmness constitutes the perfection
of the heroic character, as the effeminate and sentimental unite the
extremes of activity and irritability. We never saw Mr. Kean look
better. His costume and his colour had a very picturesque effect. The
yellow brown tinge of the Tartar becomes him much better than the tawny
brick-dust complexion of the Moor in _Othello_.
Now for our two Country Girls. We have seen both without any great
effort of our patience: to confess a truth, we had rather see the
_Country Girl_ two nights running than _Tamerlane_; as we would rather
have been Wycherley than Rowe. The comedy of the _Country Girl_ is taken
from Moliere’s _School for Wives_. It is however a perfectly free
imitation, or rather an original work, founded on the same general plot,
with additional characters, and in a style wholly different. Scarcely a
line is the same. The long, speechifying dialogues in the French comedy
are cut down into a succession of smart conversations and lively scenes:
there is indeed a certain pastoral sweetness or sentimental naivete in
the character of _Agnes_, which is lost in _Miss Peggy_, who is however
the more natural and mischievous little rustic of the two. The incident
of her running up against her guardian as she is running off with her
gallant in the park, and the contrivance of the second letter which she
imposes on her jealous fool as _Alithea’s_, are Wycherley’s. The
characters of _Alithea_, _Harcourt_, and of the fop _Sparkish_, who
appears to us so exquisite, and to others so insipid, are additional
portraits from the reign and court of Charles II. Those who object to
the scenes between this gentleman and his mistress as unnatural, can
never have read the _Memoirs of the Count de Grammont_,—an authentic
piece of English history, in which we trace the origin of so many noble
families. What an age of wit and folly, of coxcombs and coquets, when
the world of fashion led purely ornamental lives, and their only object
was to make themselves or others ridiculous. Happy age, when the utmost
stretch of a morning’s study went no further than the choice of a sword
knot, or the adjustment of a side curl; when the soul spoke out in all
the persuasive eloquence of dress; when beaux and belles, enamoured of
themselves in one another’s follies, fluttered like gilded butterflies
in giddy mazes through the walks of St. James’s Park! The perfection of
this gala out-of-door comedy is in Etherege, the gay Sir George! Then
comes Wycherley, and then Congreve, who hands them into the
drawing-room. Congreve is supposed to have been the inventor of the
epigrammatic, clenched style of comic dialogue; but there is a great
deal of this both in Wycherley and Etherege, with more of a _janty_ tone
of flippant gaiety in the latter, and more incident, character, and
situation in the former. The _Country Girl_ holds unimpaired possession
of the stage to this day, by its wit, vivacity, nature, and ingenuity.
Nothing can be worse acted, and yet it goes down, for it supplies the
imagination with all that the actors want. Mr. Bartley had some merit as
_Moody_, Mr. Fawcet none. Barrymore, at Covent Garden played _Harcourt_
well. We have seen him in better company, and he reminded us of it. He
was much of the gentleman, and as much at home on the stage (from long
practice) as if he had been in his own apartments. As to the two _Miss
Peggys_, we hardly know how to settle their pretensions. If Mrs. Mardyn
overacts her part to that degree that she seems only to want a
skipping-rope to make it complete, Mrs. Alsop is so stiff and queer that
she seems to have only just escaped from a back-board and steel monitor.
If Mrs. Alsop has the clearest voice, Mrs. Mardyn has the brightest
eyes. Mrs. Alsop has most art, Mrs. Mardyn has most nature. If Mrs.
Mardyn is too profuse of natural graces, too young and buoyant and
exuberant in all her movements, the same fault cannot be found with Mrs.
Alsop, whose smiles give no pleasure, and whose frowns give unmingled
pain. Mrs. Alsop’s _Peggy_ is a clever recitation of the character,
without being the thing; and Mrs. Mardyn’s is a very full development of
her own person, which is the thing itself. Mrs. Alsop is the best
actress, though not worth a pin, and Mrs. Mardyn is the most desirable
woman, which is always worth something. We may apply to these two ladies
what Suckling said of one of his mistresses—
‘I take her body, you her mind,—
Which has the better bargain.’
DOCTRINE OF PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY
_The Examiner._] [_December 10, 1815_
——‘For I had learnt a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
Perhaps, the doctrine of what has been called philosophical necessity
was never more finely expressed than in these lines of a poet, who, if
he had written only half of what he has done, would have deserved to be
immortal. There can be no doubt that all that exists, exists by
necessity; that the vast fabric of the universe is held together in one
mighty chain, reaching to the ‘threshold of Jove’s throne’; that
whatever has a beginning, must have a cause; that there is no object, no
feeling, no action, which, other things being the same, could have been
otherwise; that thought follows thought, like wave following wave; that
chance or accident has no share in any thing that comes to pass in the
moral or the physical world; that whatever is, must be; that whatever
has been, must have been; that whatever is to be will be necessarily.
I never could doubt for a moment of the truth of this general principle,
and I never could comprehend the inferences which have commonly been
drawn from it, both by friends and foes. All the moral consequences
which have been attributed to it appear to me mere idle prejudices
against it on one side, and equally gratuitous concessions on the other.
The doctrine of necessity leaves morality just where it found it. It
does not destroy goodness of disposition or energy of character, any
more than it destroys beauty or strength of person. It does not take
away the powers of the mind any more than the use of the limbs. That
every thing is by necessity, no more proves that there is no such thing
as good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong, in the moral world,
than it proves that there is no such thing as day or night, heat or
cold, sweet or sour, food or poison, in the physical. Merit and demerit,
that is to say, praise and blame, reward and punishment, have no place
in the physical world, but that is because they have no effect there;
and for the same reason they have a place in the moral, because they
have an effect there. All the practical conclusions which have been
ascribed to the difference between liberty and necessity, may be equally
accounted for (as they really had their rise) from the difference
between moral and physical necessity.
Man acts from a cause; and so far he resembles a stone; but he does not
act from the same cause, and herein he differs from it. There is a print
which I have seen from a picture by Ludovico Caracci, in which a female
figure, with a lion by her side, is represented striking a flame of fire
at her feet with a drawn sword. I do not very well understand the
allegory, but it appears to me to furnish a very tolerable illustration
of the difference between moral and physical necessity: for whether this
figure strikes the flame with the flat or the sharp side of the sword,
it divides and rises again equally; it is incapable of punishment for it
has no sense of pain, nor does it apprehend a repetition of the blow. Is
it the same with the human mind? No; for it has both the sense of pain
and the sense of consequences, which render it liable to punishment, by
making that punishment one effectual and necessary means of influencing
its conduct. A man differs from a stone in that he has feeling and
understanding; and it is this difference that makes him a moral and
responsible agent in the true meaning of the terms, by connecting his
present impulses with their future consequences. It may be said that
animals have feeling, and a certain degree of understanding: and so far
they are liable to correction and punishment. A dog or a horse is
terrified at the whip or the spur as well as encouraged by kindness. We
very properly, therefore, threaten them with the one and allure them
with the other, though we neither preach to them of heaven nor hell,
because they have no notion about either. As far as they have
understanding, they have free-will, for these two words mean one and the
same thing. Man is the only religious animal, because he alone (from a
greater power of imagination) extends his views of consequences into
another state of being.—The application of praise or blame, as well as
of reward and punishment, is proper, wherever it is likely to have an
effect. We do not talk to the deaf: we do not shew pictures to the
blind; we do not reason with a wild beast; we do not quarrel with a
stone. Because it would be useless. But we _do_ talk to those who can
hear; we shew pictures to those who can see; we reason with prejudice;
we quarrel with ill-nature. The human mind differs from an inanimate
substance or an automaton, inasmuch as it is actuated by sympathy as
well as by necessity. We indeed praise a flower, a statue, or a
beautiful face, because they give us pleasure: we praise a virtuous
action, as an additional incentive to virtue. ‘Praise and blame, reward
and punishment’ (says Mr. Hobbes) ‘are just and proper, because they
fashion the will to justice.’
Merit, in the scholastic sense, means something self-caused, and
independent of motives. This sense of the term is flat nonsense, for
there is nothing without a cause—nothing which is not owing to some
other thing. The whole theory of merit may be said to turn upon the
capacity of any person or thing to mould itself according to the opinion
entertained of it. A stone has not this capacity; and therefore there is
no merit in a stone. If you tell a country girl that she is handsome or
well made, her answer generally will be, that ‘She is as God made her.’
This however does not prove that she is not well made. It is only meant
to shew, that as she has had no hand in her own shape, and can do
nothing to mend it, the merit is so far none of hers. But if you praise
the neatness of her dress, she has not the same evasion left, but thinks
the flattery well bestowed, for she is conscious that this depends upon
herself; that she can stay a longer or a shorter time at her glass as
she pleases; and that the pains she has taken have been with a view to
the good opinion you express of her. The difference between natural and
acquired graces is an obvious dictate of common sense; unless we adopt
the opinion of the Clown, that ‘a good favour is the effect of study,
but reading and writing come by nature.’ It is a piece of brutality and
ill-nature to point at a hump-backed man, and call him My Lord: but
there is no great harm in laughing at a person with an aukward slovenly
gait, for the ridicule may remedy the defect. A person has it in his
power to turn his toes out instead of in, whenever he chuses: he cannot
get rid of a natural deformity by any effort of will. Beauty and power
of every kind excite our love and admiration, whether in nature, in
morals, or in art; but still with a difference. St. Paul’s is a much
nobler as well as larger building than St. Dunstan’s. We accordingly
admire the one much more than the other; but we allow no more merit to
the one than the other. All the difference of merit we ascribe to the
architect, and not to the building. Why so? Because all the vanity
belongs to the architect, and not to the building.—St. Paul’s stands
where it does; it lifts its majestic dome to the skies, whether it is
seen or not, whether it is admired or not. It has (familiarly speaking)
done nothing to deserve our good opinion, for it has done nothing with a
view to it. Now for the same reason that the building has not, the
builder _has_ merited our good opinion, for he did what he has done with
that very view; was sensible to that good opinion, and stimulated to
exertion by it. It is evident that the admiration we bestow on any work
of art, as an actual object, is involuntary; it makes no difference in
the object whether we bestow it or not; we therefore do not make a point
of bestowing it: the praise we give to the artist is voluntary, and
merited in this farther sense, that we are bound to bestow it as a means
to an end: we indulge it not merely as a sentiment naturally excited by
the contemplation of excellence, but the expression of which is a reward
due to the pains taken by the artist, and to the encouragement of
genius. Disapprobation and punishment on the other hand necessarily give
pain to the person who is the object of them, but it is to produce a
remote good. However, it equally follows in either case, that our love
and hatred of what is amiable or odious in conscious agents must be
different from our feeling towards unconscious ones, from the sense of
the difference of the consequences. The lever, the screw, and the wedge,
are the great instruments of the mechanical world: opinion, sympathy,
praise and blame, reward and punishment, are the lever, the screw, and
the wedge, of the moral world. A house is built of stones; human
character depends on motives. Is there therefore no difference between
one character and another? As well might it be said that there is no
difference between one building and another. If merit means something in
character, independent of motives and of all other things, then there
can be no such thing as merit: but if by merit we mean something which
excites our approbation of one character more than another, and which
something is still farther entitled to our approbation, because it
depends upon it for its motive and encouragement, then undoubtedly this
word has a rational meaning in it. To deny praise or blame, reward or
punishment, to actions, because they are produced by motives, is to take
away the prop from a house, because it supports it.—Necessity only
supersedes merit by superseding the operation of motives. It is
pretended, that if any action is not perfectly gratuitous, if it can be
traced to any other cause, the merit must be transferred to that other
cause, and so on without end. This infinite series may be cut short by
observing, that any action is entitled to our good opinion which is
affected by it. If our opinion had no influence on the actions of
others, there would so far be no merit. If any one going up Holborn-hill
is pushed by a stronger man against a window and breaks it, who is the
responsible person? The one who pushed the other, and not the one who
broke the glass. Because punishment or correcting the moral sense will
not prevent a weak man from being pushed against a window by a strong
one, but it will prevent the strong man from pushing him against it. It
makes no difference that this person did not act at first without a
motive; the point is, that here is another motive which will counteract
the former one. The true cause of any thing in the practical and moral
sense, is that, by removing which the effect ceases. A man is a moral
agent only in so far as he can do what he will: for motives can only
operate on the will. A man in chains or held by force is not accountable
for what he does, for blame or praise him ever so much, and he will do,
not what you wish him, but what others force him to do. You may
reasonably exhort a man not to throw himself over Westminster Bridge,
but it is in vain, after he has thrown himself over, to call out to him
to stop. Morality means that we have the power to do certain things, _if
we will_, or help them, _if we please_.
Merit is moral energy. It is the sense of merit which is the great
stimulus of exertion. One thing is more difficult, requires a greater
effort than another. The sense of merit is in proportion to the sense of
difficulty. The highest praise is given to the highest exertions, the
greatest rewards are due where the greatest sacrifices have been made.
The degree of merit depends then on the degree of voluntary power
exerted: for exertion deserves every kind of encouragement and
assistance as it becomes difficult. We give a boy sixpence for going a
mile; a shilling for going two. We need not offer rewards and largesses
to vice and indolence; for all the sanctions of religion and morality
are not sufficient to correct them. The admiration with which the story
of Marvell and his leg of mutton is read has not prevented the facility
of some modern patriots in commencing courtiers; but if it should only
save us from a single birthday ode, it will be something. The phlegmatic
Dutchman, in playing at skittles, follows his bowl with his eye, writhes
his body to make it turn right, and cheers it with his voice. If the
bowl had sympathy so as to bend with his body, and to be encouraged to
go a little farther by his praising it, there would be some sense in his
doing so. Amphion is said to have raised the walls of Thebes with the
sound of his lyre: in one sense the fable might be true, for he might
have drawn together and civilized his followers by the power of song.
The words which Madame de Staël some time ago addressed to the Germans,
_Allemagne, tu es une nation, et tu pleurs_, were not without their
effect. Neither perhaps would the same words be so now, addressed to her
own country—_France, tu es une nation, et tu pleurs!_
We have been led to these remarks by receiving an epistle from an
elderly maiden lady, who complains that she has spent her whole life in
censuring and back-biting her neighbours, and that by what we let fall
some time ago, about there being no such thing as merit and demerit, we
had debarred her of the only use of her tongue and pleasure of her life.
We are sorry to have interrupted her, and hope she will now proceed. We
have a good deal left to say on the subject:—
‘But there is matter for a second rhyme,
And we to this must add another tale.’
PARALLEL PASSAGES IN VARIOUS POETS
_The Examiner._] [_December 24, 1815._
Being very busy or very indolent this week (it is no matter which), we
have had recourse to our common-place book (the first or last resource
of authors), and there find the following instances of parallel
passages, which are at the service of the critics. The conclusion of
Voltaire’s tragedy of _Zaire_ is the speech of _Orosman_, who has killed
his mistress, to her brother, _Nerestan_:—
[‘Et toi, guerrier infortuné,’ &c. to
‘Dis que je l’adorais, et que l’ai vengé.’]
This will probably remind our readers, as it did us, of _Othello’s_
farewell speech:—
[‘Soft you; a word or two before you go,’ &c.]
After transcribing the above passage, we were looking about for the
traces of the former one, which had ‘vanished into thin air,’ and were
beginning to suspect that our parallel had totally failed, till in
looking into the lucubrations of Mr. William Wade, who has tried to pick
a hole in Shakespear, we learnt that the French translator of our poet
had _bona fide_ translated the passage into legitimate French verse, and
that Voltaire had in consequence, with singular modesty, complained that
Ducis had improved upon the original and stolen the whole turn of the
passage from him. To be sure, there is a wide difference in the two
passages. There is nothing in the French poet of the ‘No more of that,’
that fine natural interruption to the gasconade which his distress had
just extorted from him; there is nothing of ‘One that loved not wisely,
but too well,’ there is nothing of Indian pearls or Arabian gums, nor is
there any allusion to Aleppo, nor description of ‘a malignant and a
turbaned Turk’; nor any thing like that fine return upon himself, and
transition from the depth of a dejected spirit to the recollection of
former acts of daring defiance, while in his despair he inflicts on
himself the blow with which he formerly chastised an insolent foe. These
circumstances are given ‘as over-measure’ in Shakespear, and would be
considered as superfluous and extravagant by the French critics; yet
they are exactly the circumstances which the Moor _Othello_ must have
been best acquainted with, and which, as some of the most striking
circumstances of his past life, would be forcibly recalled to his memory
in parting with it. Voltaire has not invented any thing of the same sort
for his dying hero; his speech (though a very good one of its kind) is,
as Susannah says to Trim, ‘as flat as the palm of one’s hand;’ it has
nothing objectionable in it; it is just such a speech as any crowned
head might make in any of the four quarters of the globe.—May we be
allowed to add (in passing), that Mr. Kean does not act this scene well?
He gnashes his teeth, and strikes the dagger into his bosom, as if he
had taken some particular enmity against his own flesh. But this is not
so in Shakespear. The feeling of _Othello_ is a lofty absence of mind,
in which he throws himself back from the present into the past; the
image he recalls furnishes not only the precedent but the consolation of
his present act; and the pang which he inflicts on himself is relieved,
and unconsciously confounded with the recollection of former acts of
grandeur, and elevation of soul. But to proceed.—
In the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, is a very beautiful description of the
signal fires that were to announce the destruction of Troy, thus
translated by Potter:—
[‘What speed could be the herald of this news,’ &c. to
‘Giv’n by my Lord t’announce the fall of Troy.’]
In Drayton’s _Polyolbion_ (Song 30) this idea is finely varied:—
[‘Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,’ &c. to
‘Did mightly commend old Copland for her song.’]
Again, in a poem of Mr. Wordsworth we find the following lines:—
[‘When I had gazed perhaps two minutes’ space,’ &c. to
‘That there was a loud uproar in the hills.’]
We have been urged several times to take up the subject of Mr.
Wordsworth’s Poems, in order to do them justice. In doing this, we
should satisfy neither his admirers nor his censurers. We have once
already attempted the thankless office, and it did not succeed. Indeed
we think all comment on them superseded by those lines of Withers, which
are a complete anticipation of Mr. Wordsworth’s style, where, speaking
of poetry, he says,—
‘In my former days of bliss
Her divine skill taught me this,
That from every thing I saw
I could some invention draw;
And raise pleasure to her height
Through the meanest object’s sight;—
By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough’s rustling,
By a daisy whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature’s beauties can
In some other wiser man.’
MR. LOCKE A GREAT PLAGIARIST
_The Examiner._] [_February 25, 1816._
Mr. Locke has at this day all over Europe the character of one of the
most profound and original thinkers that ever lived, and he is perhaps,
without any exception, the most barefaced, deliberate, and bungling
plagiarist, that ever appeared in philosophy. The reputation which he
has acquired, as the founder of the new system in philosophy, or of any
part of that system, is a pure imposition. Hobbes was the undoubted
founder of the system; and he not only laid the foundation, but he
completed the building. Every one of the principles of the modern,
material philosophy of the mind, is to be found in his works, perfect
and entire, as it is in the latest commentators of the French school. He
not only took for his basis the principle that there is no other
original faculty in the mind but sensation: he also pushed this
principle into all its consequences, with a severe, masterly, and honest
logic, of which there is scarcely any other example. By thus shewing the
full extent of his system, ‘the very head and front of his offending,’
without any disguise, he only got himself an ill name, and his system
was consigned to infamy or oblivion. Mr. Locke adopted the first
principle, with a clumsy addition to it, but so as to secure himself the
reputation of an original thinker; and at the same time, by not
following it in a bold and decided manner into any one of its necessary
consequences, he avoided giving the alarm to popular apprehension, and
made a temporary compromise with the common sense and prejudices of his
readers. The door being however opened to the introduction of this
philosophy, by the admission of the general principle, all the rest by
degrees followed as a matter of course; and it has been the business of
the ablest metaphysicians ever since to clear what has been considered
as the philosophy of Locke, from the inconsistences and imperfections
which he had suffered to creep into it: all which improvements on
Locke’s Essay are only a recurrence to the principles laid down by
Hobbes, in the most explicit and unequivocal manner. To shew how little
this last writer has been read, even by professed metaphysicians, Hume
attributes the doctrine, that there are no abstract ideas, to Berkeley
as an original discovery, though the arguments used by Berkeley are
almost word for word taken from those used by Hobbes on the same
subject. Yet Locke, in order we suppose to prevent inquiry into the
originality of his own claims, calls Hobbes ‘a justly exploded author.’
This question is curious (philosophy apart) as a branch of literary
history. It is, we know, dangerous to tamper with established
reputation; nor should we perhaps have ventured to hazard the accusation
we have here made, if we had not been supported by the authority of so
well informed, candid, and respectable a writer as Dugald Stewart, whose
testimony is of the more value, as he does not seem to be aware of the
general propensity of Mr. Locke to appropriate the ideas of others to
his own use, without disguise or acknowledgement. To any one who takes
the trouble to peruse Professor Stewart’s very elegant Dissertation just
published, on the rise and progress of modern Metaphysics, it will be
evident that every one of those original discoveries, to which the
author of the Essay on Human Understanding owes his celebrity, and on
which he particularly plumed himself, is taken in substance and almost
in words from writers of whom he does not once make mention; for
example, his proposed division of the sciences, brought forward with
great parade and formality, into Physics, Ethics, and Logic, which is
the old division of the Greek philosophy; his definition of words which
are definable or not definable, which is taken expressly from Descartes;
his account of the origin of our ideas, that of association, of the
social compact, etc. which are borrowed from Hobbes; his distinction of
the properties of matter into primary and secondary, and his theory of
consciousness or reflection as a distinct source of ideas, which belong
to Descartes; his hypothesis about animal spirits, as the medium of
association of ideas, adopted from Malbranche; his account of judgment
and wit, which is to be found in Hobbes, &c. &c. If it be asked, whether
Mr. Locke has not had the merit of combining the materials thus derived
from other sources into a complete and masterly system, the answer would
be, that his work is one of the most confused, undigested, and
contradictory, that has been published on the subject. There is no one
to whom those lines of the poet were ever more applicable.
‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.’
We should hope that Mr. Stewart will examine into and state his
conviction on this question fully and clearly in the account of Mr.
Locke’s Essay, which he has promised in the continuation of his work. If
he would lend the sanction of his name to shew the real foundation on
which Mr. Locke’s reputation rests, it would not be the least service he
has rendered to philosophy. ‘To trace an error to its source is often
the only way to refute it.’ The task is no doubt an invidious, but it is
a necessary one. The name of Locke is in a manner dear to every lover of
truth; but truth itself should be still dearer.
It will perhaps be amusing to the reader (though not initiated in such
studies) to see the manner in which an idea is bandied about, in these
speculations, from author to author, to no sort of purpose. ‘In one of
Mr. Locke’s most noted remarks,’ (says the learned Professor) ‘he has
been anticipated by Malbranche, on whose clear yet concise statement he
does not seem to have thrown much new light by his very diffuse and
wordy commentary.’—‘If in having our ideas in the memory ready at hand,
consists quickness of parts; in this of having them unconfused, and
being able nicely to distinguish one thing from another, where there is
but the least difference, consists, in a great measure, the exactness of
judgment and clearness of reason; which is to be observed in one man
above another. And hence perhaps may be given some reason of that common
observation, that men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories,
have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason. For Wit, lying
most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with
quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or
congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in
the fancy: Judgment on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in
separating carefully one from another, ideas wherein can be found the
least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by
affinity to take one thing for another.’—_Essay_, _etc._ B. ii. c. xi. §
2.
‘Il y a donc des esprits de deux sortes. Les uns remarquent aisément les
différences des choses, et ce sont les bons esprits. Les autres
imaginent et supposent de la ressemblance entr’elles, et ce sont les
esprits superficielles.’—_Recherche de la Vérité._
‘At an earlier period, Bacon had pointed out the same cardinal
distinction in the intellectual characters of individuals.
“The greatest and as it were radical distinction of geniuses, in respect
of philosophy and science, is this; that some are more able and apt at
noting the differences of things; others at noting their similitudes.
For steady and acute minds can fix their contemplations, and remain and
dwell on every subtlety of distinction; whereas more lofty and
discursive imaginations recognize and compound even the slightest and
commonest resemblances of things.”
‘_That strain I heard was of a higher mood!_—It is evident that Bacon
has here seized, in its most general form, the very important truth
perceived by his two ingenious successors in particular cases. _Wit_,
which Locke contrasts with _Judgment_, is only one of the various
talents connected with what Bacon calls the _discursive genius_; and
indeed a talent very subordinate in dignity to most of the
others.’—_Note to the Dissertation_, p. 116.
Mr. Locke, by Wit, in the passage here referred to, evidently means
ingenuity or fancy generally speaking; for in the last hundred years,
the use of this term has undergone a great alteration. He however
borrowed his definition immediately from ‘that exploded author,’ Hobbes,
who says in the _Leviathan_, p. 32,—‘Whereas, in the succession of
thoughts, there is nothing to observe in the things we think on, but
either in what they be like one another, or in what they be
unlike;—those that observe their similitudes, in case they be such as
are but rarely observed by others, are said to have a good wit, by which
is meant on this occasion a good fancy. But they that observe their
differences and dissimilitudes, which is called distinguishing and
discerning and judging between thing and thing, in case such discerning
be not easy, are said to have a good judgment; and particularly in
matters of conversation and business, wherein times, places, and
persons, are to be discerned, this virtue is called Discretion.’
What is most remarkable in this traditional definition of wit and
judgment, is, that it is altogether unfounded; for as Harris, the author
of _Hermes_, has very well observed, the finding out the equality of the
three angles of a triangle to two right ones, would, upon the principles
here stated, be a sally of wit, instead of an act of the understanding,
and Euclid’s Elements a collection of _bon mots_.
It may be said in explanation, that wit discovers false resemblances
only. But neither is this true. Wit consists in an illustration of an
idea by some lucky coincidence or contrast, which idea may be either
false or true, as it happens. But the best wit is always the truest.
When the French punsters the other day changed the title of some loyal
order from _Compagnons du Lys_ into _Compagnons d’Ulysse_, the wit lost
none of its efficacy, because there was a lurking suspicion in the mind
that the insinuation was true. When Mr. Grattan, some years ago, said,
that the only resources of Ministers were ‘the guinea or the gallows,’
the alliteration proved nothing, but neither did it disprove any thing.
When the late ingenious Professor Porson, in reply to some enthusiast of
the modern school of poetry, who was exclaiming ‘that some contemporary
bards would be admired when Homer and Virgil were forgotten,’ made
answer,—‘And not till then,’—he shewed more wit, and perhaps not less
judgment, than his antagonist. Besides, the wit here consisted in the
distinction.
We shall shortly go more into this subject in three papers, which we
propose to write, on Imagination, Wit, and Judgment, when we shall
endeavour to shew that these faculties, though not the same, nor always
found together, are not so incompatible as dullness on the one hand, and
folly on the other, would lead the world to suppose. The most sensible
man of our acquaintance is also the wittiest; and the most extravagant
blockhead the dullest matter-of-fact man. The greatest poet that ever
lived, had the most understanding of human nature and affairs. Martinus
Scriblerus contains the best commentary on the Categories; and we
shrewdly suspect that Voltaire and Moliere were two as wise men, that
is, knew as many things that were true and useful, as Malbranche and
Descartes. It would have been hard to persuade either of those laughing
philosophers that they saw all things in God, or that animals were
machines. These are ‘the laborious fooleries’ of the understanding.
Mr. Stewart has interspersed his history of the progress of opinions
with some interesting biographical sketches. Of Anthony Arnaud, the
author of the _Port Royal Logic_, we learn, that ‘he lived to the age of
eighty-three, continuing to write against Malbranche’s opinions
concerning _Nature and Grace_, to his last hour.’ He died, says his
biographer, in an obscure retreat at Brussels, in 1692, without fortune,
and even without the comfort of a servant; he, whose nephew had been a
minister of state, and who might himself have been a cardinal. The
pleasure of being able to publish his sentiments was to him a sufficient
recompense. Nicole, his friend and companion in arms, worn out at length
with these incessant disputes, expressed a wish to retire from the
field, and to enjoy repose. ‘_Repose!_’ replied Arnaud; ‘won’t you have
the whole of eternity to repose in?’—An anecdote which is told of his
infancy, when considered in connection with his subsequent life, affords
a good illustration of the force of impressions received in the first
dawn of reason. He was amusing himself one day with some childish sport,
in the library of the Cardinal du Perron, when he requested of the
Cardinal to give him a pen:—And for what purpose? said the Cardinal.—To
write books, like you, against the Huguenots. The Cardinal, it is added,
who was old and infirm, could not conceal his joy at the prospect of so
hopeful a successor: and, as he was putting the pen into his hand, said,
‘I give it to you as the dying shepherd Damaetas bequeathed his pipe to
the little Corydon.’ Of the celebrated metaphysician Descartes, it
appears that he was ‘a bold campaigner’ in his youth; that he served in
Holland under Prince Maurice of Nassau; in Germany, under Maximilian of
Bavaria, in the thirty years’ war; in Hungary, and at the siege of
Rochelle, as a volunteer against the English. He passed his life in
camps till the age of five-and-twenty, when he retired to spend the
remainder of it—in proving his own existence! What then, it may be asked
after all, is the use of such studies and pursuits? Of the same use as
pursuing gilded butterflies, or any other toy that amuses the mind. Mr.
Hume fixed his residence, while composing his Treatise of _Human
Nature_, at the village of La Flèche, where Descartes was brought up.
This is an interesting trait in the life of a philosopher, who was by no
means of the romantic cast. We do not very well understand the lenity or
rather the respect with which the memory of Mr. Hume is always treated
by our author, who is so hard upon Hobbes and others. There is also too
much notice taken of Adam Smith, who, whatever might be his merits as a
political economist, was of a very subordinate class as a philosopher—
‘The tenth transmitter of a foolish creed.’
May we add, that the distinctions of Metaphysics and Geography have
nothing in common, nor is truth of any particular country.
The learned Professor makes too little account of the German philosopher
Kant, whose maxim that ‘the mind alone is formative,’ is the only lever
by which the modern philosophy can be overturned. He has indeed overlaid
this simple principle by his logical technicalities, his categories and
stuff, as Locke has confounded all common sense with his ideas of
sensation and ideas of reflection. Nothing can be done towards a true
theory of the mind, till philosophers are convinced that all ideas are
ideas of the understanding; and that it requires all the same faculties
to have the _idea_ of the stud of a brass nail in an old arm-chair, that
is, the perception of connection, limits, form, difference, aye, and of
abstraction, in this simple object, as in the highest speculations of
theological or metaphysical science. The modern philosophers contend
that the mind has no idea of any thing but sensible images: the way to
turn the tables upon them is then to prove, that in the idea of every
one of these sensible objects, there is necessarily involved the
exercise of all those faculties, of which they deny the existence, and
which are exerted, only in a different degree, in the most simple or the
most refined operations of the understanding.
SHAKESPEAR’S FEMALE CHARACTERS
_The Examiner._] [_July 28, 1816._
Shakespear’s women (we mean those who were his favourites, and whom he
intended to be the favourites of the reader) exist almost entirely in
the relations and charities of domestic life. They are nothing in
themselves, but every thing in their attachment to others. We think as
little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into
the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are too much
interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by
stealth and at intervals. We catch their beauties only sideways as in a
glass, but we everywhere meet their hearts coming at us,—_full butt_, as
_Miss Peggy_ meets her husband in the Park. No one ever hit the true
perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the
strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear—no one
ever so well painted natural tenderness free from all affectation and
disguise, that
‘Calls true love acted simple modesty’—
no one else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, urged to an
extremity, grow romantic and extravagant, for the romance of his
heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the common
prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant
to their affections, and taught by the force of their feelings when to
forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women are in
this respect exquisite logicians, for they argue from what they feel,
and that is a sure game, when the stake is deep. They know their own
minds exactly. High imagination springs from deep habit; and
Shakespear’s women only followed up the idea of what they liked, of what
they had sworn to with their tongues, and what was engraven on their
hearts, into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little
set of martyrs and confessors on record.
We have almost as great an affection for _Imogen_ as she had for
_Posthumus_; and she deserves it rather better. Of all Shakespear’s
women she is perhaps the most touching, the most tender, and the most
true. As to _Desdemona_, who was alone a match for her in good faith and
heroic self-devotion, she had her faults, and she suffered for them.
_Imogen’s_ incredulity as to her husband’s infidelity is much the same
as _Desdemona’s_ backwardness to believe Othello’s jealousy. Her answer
to the most distressing part of the picture is only, ‘my Lord, I fear,
has forgot Britain.’ Her readiness to pardon _Iachimo’s_ falsehoods, and
his designs upon her virtue, is a good lesson to prudes; and shews (as
perhaps Shakespear intended it, or nature for him) that where there is a
strong attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an
outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The morality of Shakespear in
this way is great; but it is not to be found in the four last lines of
his plays, in the form of extreme unction. The scene in which _Pisanio_
gives _Imogen_ her husband’s letter accusing her of incontinency, is as
fine as anything could be:—
‘_Pisanio._ What cheer, Madam?
_Imogen._ False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there, and to think on him?
To weep ’twixt clock and clock! If sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him,
And cry myself awake? That’s false to ’s bed, is it?
_Pisanio._ Alas, good lady!
_Imogen._ I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo,
Thou didst accuse him of incontinency,
Thou then look’dst like a Villain: Now methinks,
Thy favour’s good enough. Some Jay of Italy,
Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him:
Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,
And for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,
I must be ript; to pieces with me. Oh,
Men’s vows are women’s traitors. All good seeming
By thy revolt, oh Husband, shall be thought
Put on for villainy: not born where ‘t grows,
But worn a bait for Ladies.
_Pisanio._ Good Madam, hear me—
_Imogen._ Talk thy tongue weary, speak:
I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear,
Therein false struck, can take no greater wound,
Nor tent to bottom that.’——
When _Pisanio_, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a
way to live, she says—
‘Why, good fellow,
What shall I do the while? Where bide? How live?
Or in my life what comfort, when I am
Dead to my Husband?’
Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy’s clothes, and
suggests ‘a course pretty and full in view,’ by which she may ‘happily
be near the residence of _Posthumus_,’ she exclaims—
‘Oh, for such means,
Though peril to my modesty, not death on ‘t,
I would adventure.’
And when _Pisanio_, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must
change—
——‘Fear and niceness,
The handmaids of all women, or more truly,
Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage,
Ready in gibes, quick answer’d, saucy, and
As quarellous as the weazel’—
She interrupts him hastily:—
‘Nay, be brief:
I see unto thy end, and am almost
A man already.’
In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and
her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully,—
——‘My dear Lord,
Thou art one of the false ones: now I think on thee,
My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was
At point to sink for food.’
She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of _Posthumus_, and
engages herself as a foot-boy to serve a Roman Officer, when she has
done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master:
——‘And when
With wild wood-leaves and weeds I ha’ strewed his grave,
And on it said a century of pray’rs,
Such as I can, twice o’er, I’ll weep and sigh,
And leaving so his service, follow you,
So please you entertain me.’
Now this is the very religion of love. Is it not? All this, which is the
essence of the character, is free from every thing like personal
flattery or laboured description. She relies little on her personal
charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of
Italy; she relies only on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of
her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is
excited as it were with as little consciousness as possible on her part.
There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is
asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. _Arviragus_ thus addresses
her:
——‘With fairest flowers,
While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,
I’ll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack
The flow’r that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azure’d hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander,
Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.’
The yellow _Iachimo_ gives another thus, when he steals into her
bed-chamber:
——‘Cytherea,
How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily,
And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch—
But kiss, one kiss—’Tis her breathing that
Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ th’ taper
Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids
To see th’ enclosed lights now canopied
Under the windows, white and azure, laced
With blue of Heav’n’s own tinct—on her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’
There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich
surfeit of the fancy,—as that well-known passage beginning, ‘Me of my
lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance,’ sets a
keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and
self-denial. _Desdemona_ is another instance (almost to a proverb) of
the devotedness of the sex to a favourite object. She is ‘subdued even
to the very quality of her lord,’ and to _Othello’s_ ‘honours and his
valiant parts her soul and fortunes consecrates.’ The lady protests as
much herself, and she is as good as her word. There is not a set
description of her in any part of the play; and the only thing that
tends that way is the equivocal and somewhat luscious dialogue that
takes place between _Iago_ and _Cassio_ as an accompaniment to the
ceremonies of the wedding-night. We see her visage in her mind: her
character every where predominates over her person:
‘A maiden, never bold;
Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion
Blush’d at itself.’
She is not a painted idol, carved out of the poet’s brain, but is
herself a worshipper at the shrine of duty. As Milton dashes the
luxurious effect of his descriptions by a moral, Shakespear qualifies it
by the interest of the story, as in the scene where _Othello_ takes
_Desdemona_ by the hand. The truth of conception, with which timidity
and boldness are united in the same character, is marvellous. The
extravagance of her actions, the pertinacity of her affections, in a
manner arises out of the gentleness of her nature. It is an unreserved
reliance on the purity of her intentions, a surrender of her fears to
her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) to the fate of another.
Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical
and self-willed (though that may be accounted for in the same way from
an inability to resist a rising inclination) her whole character
consists in having no will of her own, no prompter but her obedience.
Her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic and practical
part of her disposition; and instead of following _Othello_ to Cyprus,
she would rather have remained at home, ‘a moth of peace,’ if her
husband could have staid with her. Her resignation and angelic sweetness
of nature do not desert her at the last. The scenes in which she laments
and tries to account for _Othello’s_ harsh usage of her are exquisitely
managed. After he has struck her and called her names, she says:
——‘Alas, Iago,
What shall I do to win my lord again?
Good friend, go to him; for by this light of Heaven,
I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel;
If e’er my will did trespass ’gainst his love,
Either in discourse, or thought, or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense
Delighted them on any other form;
Or that I do not, and ever did,
And ever will, though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me. Unkindness may do much,
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love....
_Iago._ I pray you be content: ’tis but his humour.
The business of the state does him offence.
_Desdemona._ If ’twere no other.’——
The scene which follows with her maid and the song of the Willow are
equally beautiful, and shew Shakespear’s extreme power of varying the
expression of passion, in all its moods and in all circumstances.
One of the finest passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems is that where he
has given us his opinion of _Desdemona_:
‘Books, dreams, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good,
Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness may grow;
· · · · ·
Matter wherein right voluble I am,
Two let me mention dearer than the rest,
The gentle lady wedded to the Moor,
And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.’
We have said enough to explain our idea of the general turn of
Shakespear’s female characters. We need not mention _Ophelia_ or
_Cordelia_, both of which admit of little external decoration, and which
it would seem impossible to treat in any other way than as Shakespear
has represented them, abstracted from every thing but their
heart-breaking ties to others, if Tate had not adorned the person of
_Cordelia_ with a number of beauties, and finished her story with a
lover. _Cleopatra_, who has certainly a personal identity of her own,
and who is described in all the glowing pomp of eastern luxury, is not
an exception to what we have said, for she is not intended as a model of
her sex. What we best recollect of _Cressida_, is _Pandarus’s_
description of her after bringing her to the tent, where he says,—‘And
her heart beats like a new-ta’en sparrow’—which must be allowed to be
quite Shakesperian. _Miranda_ appears to be the most conscious of her
charms of any of his favourites (perhaps from the very solitude in which
she had lived), a sort of miracle of her father’s island, and the
goddess of her new-found lover’s idolatry. _Perdita_ is a very pretty
low-born lass, the Queen of curds and cream—but she makes us think of
other things more than of her face. There is one passage in which the
poet has, we suspect, very artfully rallied the indifference of the sex
to abstract reasoning:
‘_Perdita._ Sir, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season
Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,
Which some call Nature’s bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.
_Polixenes._ Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?
_Perdita._ For I have heard it said,
There is an art which, in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
_Polixenes._ Say, there be,
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so o’er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes: you see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scyon to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
_Perdita._ So it is.
_Polixenes._ Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers,
And do not call them bastards.
_Perdita._ _I’ll not put
The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them_,’ etc.
Here the lady gives up the argument, but keeps her opinion. We had
forgot one charming instance to our purpose, which is the character of
_Helen_ in _All’s Well that Ends Well_; and this also puts us in mind
that Shakespear probably borrowed his female characters from the Italian
novelists, and not from English women.
MISS O’NEILL’S WIDOW CHEERLY
_The Examiner._] [_January 12, 1817._
We have few idols, and those few we do not like to lose. But the warmth
of our idolatry of Miss O’Neill will be brought to a much lower
temperature if she goes on playing comedy at this rate. We cannot form
any compromise in our imagination between _Belvidera_ and the _Widow
Cheerly_. To speak our minds plainly, Miss O’Neill is by far the best
tragic actress we ever saw, with one great exception, and she is the
worst comic actress we remember, without any exception at all. Her
comedy is cast in lead, and sad _doleful dumps_ she makes of it. It is
tragedy in low-heeled shoes. Her spirit is boisterousness; her
playfulness languid affectation; her familiarity oppressive; her gaiety
lamentable. There never was such labour in vain. A smile trickles down
her cheek like a tear, and her voice whines through a repartee in as
many winding bouts of mawkish insinuation as through the most pathetic
address. We cannot bear all this evident condescension; it overpowers
us. In one scene she was very much applauded: it is that in which the
_Widow Cheerly_ gives a characteristic description of her former
husband’s introduction of her to his bottle-companions: ‘This is _my_
wife,’ etc. Now it cannot be denied that she mimicked the airs and
manner of the fox-hunting squire very well, and her voice fairly gave
the house a box on the ear. But we do not wish to see Miss O’Neill in
the part of _Squire Western_. We conceive that this delightful actress
cannot descend lower than the soldier’s daughter, except by playing the
sailor’s daughter, and giving the word of command in a striped blue
jacket and trowsers instead of a striped green gown. In these tom-boy
hectoring heroines Mrs. Charles Kemble, whom, to the best of our belief,
she imitates, beats her out and out; and Mrs. Mardyn, besides being
taller and handsomer, has really more of the _vis comica_. But we will
have done with this ungrateful subject. The comedy itself, of _The
Soldier’s Daughter_, is the _beau ideal_ of modern comedy. It contains
the whole theory and practice of sentimentality, of which a bank-note
offered and declined is the circulating medium, and a white cambric
pocket-handkerchief, that catches the crystal tear in the eye of
sensibility ere it falls, the visible emblem. _Mr._ and _Mrs. Melford_
are an amiable young couple in lodgings and in great distress, but you
do not learn how they got into one any more than the other. They utter
their complaints, but are too delicate to touch upon the cause, and you
sympathise with their sorrows, not with their misfortunes. They have a
little girl, who has a little doll, which she christens ‘Miss Good
Gentleman,’ after a person whose name she does not know. This is a very
palpable hit, and tells amazingly. The unknown benefactor of these
unfortunates _incognito_ is a young _Mr. Heartall_, a wild, giddy
character, that is, in the modern sense, a person who never stands still
on the stage—who is always running into scrapes, which he walks out of
without leaving any apology or account behind him. Then there is the
_Widow Cheerly_, in the same house with the _Melfords_, whose heart and
whose _ridicule_ are ever open to the distressed, and who makes a match
with _Young Heartall_, because he makes her an offer, it not being
consistent with the gallantry of a soldier’s daughter to decline a
challenge of that sort. Then there is _Old Heartall_, uncle to _Young
Heartall_, and an East Indian Governor, who says one thing and does
another; calls his nephew a scoundrel, and throws his arms round his
neck. He is not a character, but a contradiction. Then there is a Mr.
Ferret, who commits all sorts of unaccountable villainies through the
piece, without any ostensible motives, and at the end of it you find
that he has acted upon an abstract principle of avarice.
‘If,’ he says, ‘there had been no such thing as avarice, I had not been
a villain.’ This is a very edifying confession of faith; and so not
finding this principle answer, he repents upon an abstract principle of
repentance, and also at the instigation of his old benefactor, (just
arrived from the East and accordingly a great moralist), who reads him a
great moral lecture, and advises him to give up his ill-gotten gains. As
_Mr. Ferret_ submits to his advice backed by the law, _Old Heartall_ is
prevailed on to forgive his designs upon the lives, characters, and
fortunes of his acquaintance, from an amiable weakness of heart, and
because the _Widow Cheerly_, who intercedes for him, ‘has roguish eyes.’
Mr. Liston plays a foolish servant in the _Heartall_ family, whose name
is _Timothy_. The name of _Timothy_ is one of the jokes of this part:
Mr. Liston’s face is the other, and the best of the two.
The whole tone of this play reminded us strongly of a very excellent
criticism which we had read a short time before on the _cant_ of Modern
Comedy, in one of the notes to Mr. Lamb’s Specimens of Early Dramatic
Poetry:—
‘The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down
would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled
with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile
goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and
virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present
us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences,
the quarrels, the animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral
feeling, no less than in the iteratively inculcated duties of
forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical meekness. A
reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd and unnatural)
is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be
complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable
characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition
between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which
a writer may be supplied, without the trouble of copying it from
originals within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour—to be
judiciously valiant—to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness
in the angry swellings of youth—to esteem life as nothing when the
sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and
tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is
found to be frail and tottering—to feel the true blows of a real
disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed
false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately—to do, or to
imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral
sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right
and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences
about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a
common-place against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now
a days in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious
honour; and he would be considered as a far better teacher of morality
than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.’
PENELOPE AND THE DANSOMANIE.
_The Examiner._] [_January 19, 1817._
KING’S THEATRE.
This theatre was opened for the present season under very favourable
auspices; and we congratulate the public on the prospect of the
continuance of this addition to the stock of elegant amusement. Though
the opera is not among the ordinary resources of the lovers of the
drama, it is a splendid object in the _vista_ of a winter’s evening, and
we should be sorry to see it mouldering into decay, its graceful columns
and Corinthian capitals fallen, and its glory buried in Chancery. We
rejoice when the Muses escape out of the fangs of the law, nor do we
like to see the Graces arrested—in a _pas de trois_. We do not ‘like to
see the unmerited fall of what has long flourished in splendour; any
void produced in the imagination; any ruin on the face of Art.’ At
present we hope better things from the known tastes and talents of the
gentleman who is understood to have undertaken the management of the
principal department, and from what we have seen of the performances
with which the company have commenced their career. The pieces on
Saturday and Tuesday were the Opera of _Penelope_ by Cimarosa, and the
inimitable comic Ballet, _The Dansomanie_. The first is, what it
professes to be, a Grand Serious Opera: but it is somewhat heavy and
monotonous. It introduced to the English Stage several actors of
considerable eminence abroad. The principal were Mad. Camporese as
_Penelope_, Madame Pasta as _Telemachus_, and Signor Crivelli as
_Ulysses_. The last of these appears to be as good an actor as a singer.
His gestures have considerable appropriateness and expression, besides
having that sustained dignity and studied grace, which are essential to
the harmony of the Opera; and his tones in singing are full, clear, and
so articulate, that any one at all imbued with the Italian language can
follow the words with ease. Madame Camporese performed _Penelope_, and
drew down the frequent plaudits of the house by the sweetness of her
voice, and the flexibility of execution which she manifested in some of
the most difficult and impassioned passages. If we were to express our
opinion honestly, we should say that we received most pleasure from
Madame Pasta’s _Telemachus_. There is a natural eloquence about her
singing which we feel, and therefore understand. Her dress and figure
also answered to the classical idea we have of the youthful
_Telemachus_. Her voice is good, her action is good: she has a handsome
face, and _very_ handsome legs. The ladies, we know, think otherwise:
this is the only subject on which we think ourselves better judges than
they.—Of the _Dansomanie_ we will say nothing, lest we should be
supposed to have caught the madness which it ridicules so sportively and
gracefully. The whole is excellent, but the Minuet de la Cour is
sublime: and the Gavot which succeeds it, is as good. Madame Leon was
exquisite, and she had a partner worthy of her.
‘Such were the joys of our dancing days.’
Really when we see these dances, and hear the music, which our old
fantastical dancing master used to scrape upon his kit, played in full
orchestra, we do not know what to make of it; we wish we were old
dancing-masters, or learning to dance; or that we had lived in the time
of Henry IV. The tears do not come in our eyes; that source is dry: but
we exclaim with the Son of Fingal,
‘Roll on, ye dark-brown years! ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian.’
OROONOKO.
_The Examiner._] [_January 26, 1817._
DRURY-LANE.
Southern’s tragedy of _Oroonoko_, which has not been acted, we believe,
for some years, has been brought forward here to introduce Mr. Kean as
the Royal Slave. It was well thought of. We consider it as one of his
best parts. It is also a proof to us of what we have always been
disposed to think, that Mr. Kean, when he fully gives up his mind to it,
is as great in pure pathos as in energy of action or discrimination of
character. In general, he inclines to the violent and muscular
expression of passion, rather than to that of its deep, involuntary,
heart-felt workings. If he does this upon any theory of the former style
of expression being more striking and calculated to produce an immediate
effect, we think the success of his _Richard II._ and of this play alone
(not to mention innumerable fine passages in his other performances),
might convince him of the perfect safety with which he may trust himself
in the hands of the audience, whenever he chuses to indulge in ‘the
melting mood.’ We conceive that the range of his powers is greater in
this respect than he has yet ventured to display, and that if the taste
of the town is not yet ripe for the change, he has genius enough to lead
it, wherever truth and nature point the way. His performance of
_Oroonoko_ was for the most part decidedly of a mild and sustained
character; yet it was highly impressive throughout, and most so, where
it partook least of violence or effort. The strokes of passion which
came unlooked for and seemed to take the actor by surprise, were those
that took the audience by surprise, and only found relief in tears. Of
this kind was the passage in which, after having been harrowed up to the
last degree of agony and apprehension at the supposed dishonourable
treatment of his wife, and being re-assured on that point, he falls upon
her neck with sobs of joy and broken laughter, saying, ‘I knew they
could not,’ or words to that effect. The first meeting between him and
_Imoinda_ was also very affecting; and the transition to tenderness and
love in it was even finer than the expression of breathless eagerness
and surprise. There were many other passages in which the feelings,
conveyed by the actor, seemed to gush from his heart, as if its inmost
veins had been laid open. In a word, Mr. Kean gave to the part that
glowing and impetuous, and at the same time deep and full expression,
which belongs to the character of that burning zone, which ripens the
souls of men, as well as the fruits of the earth! The most striking part
in the whole performance was in the uttering of a single word.
_Oroonoko_, in consequence of his gentle treatment, and the flattering
promises that are held out to him of safe conduct to his own country, of
the restoration of his liberty and his beloved _Imoinda_, thinks well of
the persons into whose hands he has fallen; and it is in vain that
_Aboam_ (Mr. Rae) tries to work him up to suspicion and revenge by
general descriptions of the sufferings of his countrymen, or of the
cruelty and treachery of their white masters: but at the suggestion of
the thought, that if they remain where they are, _Imoinda_ will become
the mother, and himself, a prince and a hero, the father of a race of
slaves, he starts and the manner in which he utters the ejaculation
‘Hah!’ at the world of thought which is thus shewn to him, like a
precipice at his feet, resembles the first sound that breaks from a
thunder-cloud, or the hollow roar of a wild beast, roused from its lair
by hunger and the scent of blood. It is a pity that the catastrophe does
not answer to the grandeur of the menace; and that this gallant
vindicator of himself and his countrymen fails in his enterprise,
through the treachery and cowardice of those whom he attempts to set
free, but ‘who were by nature slaves!’ The story of this _servile war_
is not without a parallel elsewhere: it reads ‘a great moral lesson’ to
Europe, only changing _black_ into _white_; and the manner in which
_Oroonoko_ is prevailed on to give up his sword, and his treatment
afterwards, by a man in British uniform, seems to have been the model of
the Convention of Paris. It only required one thing to have made it
complete, that the Governor, who is expected in the island, should have
arrived in time to break the agreement, and save the credit of his
subaltern. The political allusions throughout, that is, the appeals to
common justice and humanity, against the most intolerable cruelty and
wrong, are so strong and palpable, that we wonder the piece is not
prohibited. There is that black renegade _Othman_, who betrays his
country in the hopes of promotion, and the favour of his betters: how
like he is to many a white-faced loon, but that ‘the devil has not
damned them black!’ Politics apart—_Oroonoko_ is a very interesting
moral play. It is a little tedious sometimes, and a little common-place
at all times, but it has feeling and nature to supply what it wants in
other respects. The negroes in it (we could wish them out of it, but
then there would be no play) are very _ugly customers_ upon the stage.
One blackamoor in a picture is an ornament, but a whole cargo of them is
more than enough. This play puts us out of conceit with both colours,
theirs and our own; the sooty slave’s, and his cold, sleek, smooth-faced
master’s.—Miss Somerville was a great relief to the natural and moral
deformity of the scene. She looked like the _idea_ of the poet’s mind.
Her resigned, pensive, unconscious look and attitude, at the moment she
is about to be restored to the rapturous embrace of her lover, was a
beautiful dramatic picture. She is an acquisition to the milder parts of
tragedy. She interests on the stage, for she is interesting in herself.
She cannot help being a heroine, if she but shews herself. She was as
elegantly dressed in _Imoinda_, for an Indian maid, in light, flowered
drapery, as she was in _Imogine_, for a lady of old romance, in trains
of lead-coloured satin. Her voice is sweet, but lost in its own
sweetness; and we who hear her at some distance, can only catch ‘the
music of her honey-vows,’ like the indistinct murmur of a hive of bees.
Mr. Bengough does not improve upon us by acquaintance. All that we have
of late discovered in him is that he has grey eyes. Little Smith made an
excellent representative of the coasting Guinea captain. John Bull could
not desire to have better justice done to his mind or his
body.—Southern, the author of _Oroonoko_, was also the author of
_Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage_, in both of which ‘he often has
beguiled us of our tears.’ He died at the age of eighty-six, in 1746.
Gray, the poet, speaks thus of him in a letter, dated from Burnham, in
Buckinghamshire, 1737. ‘We have here old Mr. Southern, at a gentleman’s
house a little way off: he is now seventy-seven years old, and has
almost wholly lost his memory: but is as agreeable as an old man can be:
at least I persuade myself so, when I look at him, and think of
_Isabella_ and _Oroonoko_.’
‘THE PANNEL’ AND ‘THE RAVENS’
_The Examiner._] [_February 2, 1817._
There has been little new this week. A new after-piece or melo-drame has
been brought forward at Covent-garden, and the old farce of the _Pannel_
revived at Drury-Lane. We can say but little in praise of the former,
except the excellence of the acting and the manner in which it is got
up. The strength of the house is mustered in a second-rate production,
and from the list of names in the play-bills, the public go to see the
performers, if not the performance, and come away at least half
satisfied. They manage these things differently at Drury-lane, and not
so well. We deny that the comic strength of the two houses is so unequal
as is sometimes supposed. For instance, at Drury-lane, they have Munden,
Dowton, Oxberry, and Knight; Harley is droll too; and in women, they
beat them out and out, for they have Miss Kelly. To be sure, they have
not Liston; so they must kick the beam. Mr. Liston is the greatest comic
genius of the age. If we were very dull and sad indeed, we should avoid
going to any farce or comedy in which he did not appear, as only
tantalising to our feelings, and promising relief without affording it:
but we must be dull indeed, if we did not bite at the bait of Mr.
Liston’s _Lubin Log_. His comic humour is a sort of oil or ‘balsam of
fierabras’ for all imaginary wounds that are not a foot deep. His laugh
might tickle royalty itself after the howling of the rabble, or make one
of the wax figures at Mrs. Salmon’s relax from the inflexibility of its
state. Then there is Miss Stephens at Covent-garden, and there are the
three Miss Dennets—like ‘Circe and the Sirens three.’ We always see the
Miss Dennets at the theatre, and they sometimes glide before our
imagination at other times; but we seldom hear Miss Stephens now. We
want to see her again in _Mandane_, in which we have seen her eight
times already, and to hear her sing _If o’er the cruel tyrant Love_,
which we could hear her sing for ever. We want to see her in _Polly_ for
the seventh time, and in _Rosetta_ for the fifth, we believe it will be,
when we see her in it again, which will be when she next plays in it.
Pray how long will it be first, Mr. Fawcett? We suppose not till Miss
O’Neill is tired of tiring the audience in _Mrs. Oakley_, or ‘the ravens
are hoarse that croak over Mr. Emery’s head’ in the Pangs of Conscience.
_Something new, always something new._ That is the taste of Covent
Garden, and the town. It is not our’s. We are for something old.
_Toujours perdrix._ We like to read the same books, and to see the same
plays, and the same faces over again—_always provided_ we liked them at
first. Now there is one face which we never liked, and never shall like,
which is the face of Tyranny, and the older it gets, the uglier it gets
in our eyes, and in this, as a matter of taste, we differ entirely with
Mr. Canning, though he has been declared by a classical authority to be
‘the most elegant mind since Virgil.’ We differ with him
notwithstanding.—_The Ravens, or the Pangs of Conscience_, is a
melo-drame taken from the French, of the same breed, but an inferior
specimen, as the _Maid and Magpie_, and the _Family of Anglade_. It is a
kind of renewal of the age of augury adapted to the modern theories of
probability, by being reduced within the limits of natural history.
These pieces take for their text the lines,
‘And choughs and magpies shall bring forth
The secret’st man of blood.’
In the _Pangs of Conscience_, as in the _Maid of Palisseau_, there is a
robbery, a trial of persons innocently suspected of it, and a discovery
of the real perpetrators, just at the critical moment, by the
intervention of two of the feathered creation. Just as sentence has been
pronounced on the supposed criminals (Terry and Blanchard) by the Judge,
(Barrymore, who really performed this character admirably) two Ravens
fly in upon the stage, the same who had hovered over the scene of the
murder and robbery in the adjacent forest, and by their silent but
dreadful appeal to the conscience of _Jacques du Noir_ (Emery), who is
not like his cousin _Bruno du Noir_ (poor Farley) a hardened, but a
conscientious villain, reveal the mystery of the whole transaction, by
which the guilty are punished, and the innocent miraculously
escape.—There was some fine and powerful acting by Emery in the part of
the repentant assassin. _Bruno_ in vain endeavours to appease and quiet
him, but he still roars out lustily to give vent both to the pangs of
his conscience and the ‘grief of a wound’ which he has got in the
encounter from an old rusty fowling-piece of Fawcett’s, whom they
plunder and kill. The greatest part of this romantic fiction is tedious,
and the whole of it improbable, but from the goodness of the acting, and
some strokes of interest in the situations, it went off with applause.
Of the _Pannel_, we have only room to add that we think _Beatrice_, who
is the subordinate heroine of the piece, the best specimen of Mrs.
Alsop’s acting. We saw it from a remote part of the house, and her
_voice and manner_ at this distance sometimes reminded us of her
mother’s.
JOHN GILPIN
_The Examiner._] [_May 4, 1817._
DRURY-LANE.
When Mr. Dowton advertised for his benefit that he was to appear in the
after-piece as _John Gilpin_, and to ride for that night only, we
immediately felt tempted to go as the self-appointed executors and
residuary legatees of the original author of the story, who concludes
his account with these two lines—
‘And when he next does ride abroad,
May we be there to see.’
So we took upon us to fulfil Cowper’s wish, and went to see, not _John
Gilpin_, nor, as we are credibly informed, even Mr. Dowton, but
something very laughable, and still more absurd, which had however a
certain charm about it, from the very name of the hero of the piece. We
have an interest in _John Gilpin_; aye, almost as great an interest as
we have in ourselves; for we remember him almost as long. We remember
the prints of him and his travels hung round a little parlour where we
used to visit when we were children—just about the time of the beginning
of the French Revolution. While the old ladies were playing at whist,
and the young ones at forfeits, we crept about the sides of the room and
tracked _John Gilpin_ from his counter to his horse, from his own door
to the turnpike, and far beyond the turnpike gate and the bell at
Edmonton, with loss of wig and hat, but with an increasing _impetus_ and
reputation, the farther he went from home.
‘The turnpike men their gates wide open threw,
He carries weight, he rides a race,
’Tis for a thousand pounds.’
What an impression was here made, never to be effaced! What a thing it
is to be an author, and how much better a thing it is to be a reader,
with all the pleasure and without any of the trouble—but without any of
the fame, you will say. That is not worth two-pence. And yet true fame
is something, the fame, for instance, of Cowper or of Thomson—not to
live in the mouths of pedants, and coxcombs, and professional men, but
in the heart and soul of every living being, to mingle with every
thought, to beat in every pulse, to be hailed with transport by those
who are young, and to be remembered with regret by those who are old, to
be ‘first, last, and midst’ in the minds of others. True fame is like a
Lapland sun, that never goes down; it rises with us in the morning, and
rolls round and round till our night of life. Why, look here, what a
thing it is to be an author! _John Gilpin_ delighted us when we were
children, and were we to die to-morrow, the name of _John Gilpin_ would
excite a momentary sense of pleasure. The same feeling of delight, with
which at ten years old we read the story, makes us thirty years after
go, laughing, to see the play. In all that time, the remembrance has
been cherished at the heart, like the pulse that sustains our life.
‘That ligament, fine as it was, was never broken!’ and yet it was nearly
broken the other night, in the after-piece of this name, and would have
been quite so for the evening, if it had not been for Mr. Munden, who,
as a subordinate agent, prevented Mr. Dowton from breaking his neck in
the principal character. We differed from the audience on this occasion,
who did not much relish Mr. Munden in his part of a cockney: we relished
him altogether and mightily. His speech, his countenance, and his dress,
were in high costume and keeping. There was a greatness of gusto about
_Timothy Brittle_, _Mrs. Gilpin’s_ favourite but unfortunate son-in-law.
It might be said of Mr. Munden in this character, that not only did his
dress appear to have come fresh from the shop-board, his coat, his
pantaloons, his waistcoat—but his speech was clipped and snipped as with
a pair of sheers, and his face looked just as if the tailor’s goose had
gone over it. It was a fine and inimitable piece of acting, but it was
damned.—Dowton, in _The Rivals_, played _Mrs. Malaprop_, and Mrs. Sparks
played _Sir Anthony Absolute_. We cannot say much of these
transformations, for the performers themselves remained just the same,
breeches and petticoats out of the question; nothing was transformed or
ridiculous but their dress. Dowton was as blunt and bluff, and Mrs.
Sparks was as keen, querulous, and scolding, as in any of their usual
characters. The effect was flat after the first _entrée_, and the whole
play was, in other respects, very poorly got up;—quite in the comic
_negligé_ of _Drury-lane_.—We ought to say something of Mrs. Hill, who
came out on Tuesday evening as _Lady Macbeth_. She is neither a good nor
a bad actress. She has, however, a sentimental drawl in her voice and
manner which is very little to our taste, and not at all in character as
_Lady Macbeth_. The King never dies. Why should Mrs. Siddons ever die?
Why, because Kings are fictions in law: Mrs. Siddons was one of nature’s
greatest works.
DON GIOVANNI AND KEAN’S EUSTACE DE ST. PIERRE
_The Examiner._] [_May 18, 1817._
The last time we saw the Opera of _Don Giovanni_ was from a distant part
of the house: we saw it the other evening near; and as the impression
was somewhat different, we wish to correct one or two things in our
former statement. Madame Fodor sings and acts the part of _Zerlina_ as
charmingly as ever, but she does not _look_ it so well near as at a
greater distance. She has too much _em bon point_, is too broad-set for
the idea of a young and beautiful country girl: her mouth is laughing
and good-natured, but does not answer to Spenser’s description of
_Belphebe_,—and it cannot be concealed that _Zerlina_, the delightful
Zerlina, has a cast in her eyes. Her singing, however, made us forget
all these defects, and after the second line of _La ci darem_, we had
quite recovered from our disappointment. On the whole, we at present
prefer the air of _Vedrai Carino_, which she sings to _Masetto_ to
comfort him, even to the duet with _Don Giovanni_. There was some
uncertainty about _encoring_ her in this song,—not, we apprehend,
because the audience were afraid of tiring the actress, but because they
were tired themselves. Madame Fodor was _encored_ in all her songs
throughout the piece.—This might be thought hard upon her; we dare say
she would have thought it harder if she had not. Signor Ambrogetti’s
acting as _Don Giovanni_ improves upon a nearer acquaintance. There is a
softness approaching to effeminacy in the expression of his face, which
accords well with the character, and an insinuating archness in his eye,
which takes off from the violent effect of his action. The serenade of
_Don Giovanni_ was omitted. As to Naldi, he is in too confirmed
possession of the stage to be corrigible to advice. He is one of those
old birds that are not to be caught with chaff. The sly rogue,
_Leporello_, seems to have grown grey in the service of iniquity, and
hangs his nose over the stage with a formidable _bravura_ aspect, as if
he could suspend the orchestra from it. Angrisani is an admirable, and
we might say, first-rate comic actor. He has fine features; a manly,
rustic voice; and we never saw disdain, impatience, the resentment and
relenting of the jealous lover, better expressed than in the scene
between him and Madame Fodor, where she makes that affecting appeal to
his forgiveness in the song of _Batte, Batte, Masetto_. It was
inimitably acted on both sides.
DRURY-LANE.
Mr. Kean has appeared in _Eustace de St. Pierre_ in the _Surrender of
Calais_. He has little to do in it; and he might as well not have
appeared in the character, for he does not look well in it. He was badly
dressed in a doublet of green baize, and in villainous yellow hose. It
was like the player’s description of Hecuba—
‘A clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood: and for a robe
A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up.’
But we shall not, ‘though we have seen this, with tongue in venom
steep’d, pronounce treason against fortune’s state,’ or against the
Managers of Drury-lane. Mr. Kean shewed his usual talents in this part;
but it afforded less scope and fewer opportunities for them than any
part in which we have ever seen him. We are not sorry, however, that he
has got into the part, as a kind of truce with tragedy. Why should he
not, like other actors, sometimes have a part to walk through? Must we
for ever be expecting from him, as if he were a little _Jupiter tonans_,
‘thunder, nothing but thunder?’ It is too much for any mortal to play
_Othello_ and _Sir Giles_ in the same week—we mean, as Mr. Kean plays
them. He is, we understand, to appear in a new character, and sing a new
song, for his benefit to-morrow week.
CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY PEOPLE
_The Examiner._] [_July 18, 1819._
‘Here be truths.’—_Dogberry._
First, there is an old woman in the neighbouring village, fifty-six
years old, with a wooden leg, who never saw a leg of mutton roasted, or
a piece of beef put into the pot; and who regards any person who has not
lived all his life on rusty bacon as a non-descript or ‘mountain
foreigner.’ Yet this venerable matron, who now officiates as cook to a
lady ‘retired from public haunts’ into a remote part of the country,
kept her father’s house, who was a little farmer, for twenty years; so
that she ranks, in the scale of rural existence, above her neighbours.
What then must the notions of most of them be of the _savoir vivre_? Is
this the sum and substance of all our boasts of the roast-beef of old
England?—The truth is, that the people in this part of the country (I do
not know how it is in others) have neither food nor cloathing wherewith
to be content; nor are they content without them, nor with those that
have them. Any one dressed in a plain broad-cloth coat is in their eyes
a sophisticated character, as outlandish a figure as my _Lord
Foppington_. A smock-frock, and shoes with hob-nails in them, are an
indispensable part of country etiquette; and they hoot at or pelt any
one, who is presumptuous enough to depart from this appropriate costume.
This, if we may believe a philosophical poet of the present day, is the
meaning of the phrase in Shakespear, ‘pelting villages,’ he having been
once set upon in this manner by ‘a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,’
who disliked him for the fantastic strangeness of his appearance. Even
their tailors (of whom you might expect better things) hate decency, and
will spoil you a suit of clothes, rather than follow your directions.
One of them, the little hunch-backed tailor of P—tt—n, with the handsome
daughter, whose husband ran away from her and went to sea, was ordered
to make a pair of brown or snuff-coloured breeches for my friend C——
L——;—instead of which the pragmatical old gentleman (having an opinion
of his own) brought him home a pair of ‘lively Lincoln-green,’ in which
I remember he rode in triumph in Johnny Tremain’s cross-country caravan
through Newberry, and entered Oxford, ‘fearing no colours,’ the abstract
idea of the jest of the thing prevailing in his mind (as it always does)
over the sense of personal dignity.
If a stranger comes to live among country people, they have a bad
opinion of him at first; and all he can do to overcome their dislike,
only confirms them in it. It is in vain to attempt to conciliate them:
the more you strive to persuade them that you mean them no harm, the
more they are determined not to be convinced. They attribute any
civility or kindness you shew them to a design to cajole them. They are
not to be taken in by appearances. They are _feræ naturæ_, and not to be
tamed by art. In proportion as you give them no cause of offence, they
summon their whole stock of prejudice, impudence, and cunning, to aid
their tottering opinion; and hate you the more for the injustice they
seem to do you. They had rather you did them an injury that they might
keep their original opinion of you. If there is the smallest
circumstance or insinuation to your prejudice, their rancour against
you, and self-complacency in their own sagacity, eagerly seizes hold of
it; fans their suspicions into a flame, and breaks out into open insult
and all the triumph of brutal derision. On the contrary, if they find
you, after all, a quiet, inoffensive person, they think you a fool, and
so have you that way. Used to contempt, they have not much respect to
spare for other people. Finding themselves none the better for them,
they have not much faith in your demonstrations of good-will towards
them. Prepared for repulses and hard treatment, the expression of their
gratitude is not very spontaneous or sincere.—An aged Sybil of this
place, having gone to a lady, who had just settled here, with a doleful
tale of distress, and an empty bottle, received a shilling instead of
having her bottle replenished with liquor; when being met on her return
by one of her gossips coming on the same errand, and being asked her
success, she held up her empty bottle in sign of scorn, saying, ‘Look
here!’ Such is the _beau ideal_ of unsophisticated human nature in her
obscure retreats, about which there have been so many ‘songs of delight
and rustical roundelays.’
Is it strange that these people who know nothing, hate all that they do
not understand? Their rudeness, intolerance, and conceit, are in exact
proportion to their ignorance: for as they never saw or scarcely heard
of any thing out of their own village, every thing else appears to them
odd and unaccountable, and they cannot suspect that their own notions
are wrong, when they are totally unacquainted with any others. We
naturally despise whatever baffles our comprehension, and dislike what
contradicts our prejudices, till we are taught better by a liberal
course of study; but these people are no better taught than fed. It is a
rule which they act upon as self-evident, and from which you will not
get them to flinch in a hurry—to scout every proceeding which differs
from their own, and to consider every person, of whose birth, parentage,
and education, they do not know the several particulars, as a suspicious
character. They have no knowledge of literature or the fine arts; which,
if once banished from the city and the court, would soon ‘be trampled in
the mire under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ A mischievous wag of
the present day undertook to read some pastoral and lyrical effusions,
(remarkable for their simplicity) to a collection of Cumberland
peasants, to see if they would recognise the sentiments put into their
mouths; and they only (which was what he expected) laughed at him for
his pains. ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and the free
maids that weave their thread with bones,’ may indeed relieve the
welcome pedlar of his wares, his laces, his true love-knots, or
penny-Ballads, but they will have nothing to say to the Lyrical ballads,
nor will the united counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, and Durham,
subscribe to lighten the London warehouses of a single copy of the
_Excursion_. The hewers of wood and drawers of water know nothing of
poetry, and they hate the very look of a poet. They like a painter as
little. An artist who was making a sketch of a fine old yew tree in a
romantic situation, was asked by a _knowing hand_, if he could tell how
many foot of timber it contained? _Falstaff_ asks as a question not to
be answered—‘May I not take mine ease at mine inn?’ But this was in
East-Cheap. I cannot do so in the country; for while I am writing this,
I hear a fellow disputing in the kitchen, whether a person ought to live
(as he expresses it) by pen and ink; and the landlord the other day (in
order, I suppose, the better to prepare himself for such controversies)
asked me if I had any object in reading through all those books which I
had brought with me, meaning a few odd volumes of old plays and novels.
The people born here cannot tell how an author gets his living or passes
his time; and would fain hunt him out of the place as they do a strange
dog, or as they formerly did a conjuror or a witch. Ask the first
country clown you meet, if he ever heard of Shakespear or Newton, and he
will stare in your face: and I remember our laughing a good deal at
W——’s old Molly, who had never heard of the French Revolution, ten years
after it happened. Oh worse than Gothic ignorance!
They have no books, nor ever feel the want of them. How indeed should
they?[33] They have no works of poetry or fiction, to ‘fleet the golden
time carelessly;’ but they do not therefore want for fabulous resources.
Necessity is the mother of invention; and their talent for lying and
scandal is nourished by the very lack of materials.[34] They live not by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of their mouths. They
are employed, like the Athenians of old, in hearing or telling some new
thing. The draw-well is the source from which they pump up idle rumours,
and the blacksmith’s shop is the place at which they forge the proofs,
and turn them to shape, ‘giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a
name.’ They lie like devils through thick and thin. They tell and
believe all incredible things; and the greater the improbability, the
more readily and greedily is it swallowed, for it imposes more on the
imagination. _To elevate and surprise_ is the great rule for producing a
theatrical or pastoral effect. People in a state of nature believe any
thing for want of something to divert the mind, as they plot mischief
for want of better employment. Credulity and imposture are two of the
strongest propensities of the human mind. Men are as prone to deceive
themselves as others, without any other temptation than the exercise it
affords to the imagination. It is a false test of historical evidence,
that it is necessary to assign a motive why men should consent to be
dupes or undertake to be cheats. Curiosity is the source of
superstition; for we must have objects to occupy the attention, and fill
up the craving void of knowledge; and in the absence of truth, falsehood
is called in to supply its place, and with the gross and ignorant,
supplies it much better. To ask why the untutored savage believes every
marvellous story that is told him, in the dearth of all real knowledge,
is to ask why he slakes his thirst at the first fountain that he meets,
or devours the prey he has just taken. With all their tendency to
bigotry and superstition, country people have scarcely any idea of
religion. They have as little divine as human learning. The Bible is the
only book they have, but that they do not read, except with spectacles,
when they grow old and half-blind. They are to a man and woman of _Mrs.
Quickly’s_ opinion—‘But I told him a’ should not think of God yet.’ They
go to church, to be sure, as a matter of course, and from not knowing
what else to do with themselves on Sundays; but they never think of what
they hear, from one week’s end to another. Heaven and Hell are
out-of-the-way places, not accessible to the apprehensions of those
whose ideas cannot get beyond the parish where they were born; and their
joys or sorrows indifferent to an imagination, taken up with the wants
of the belly. An old woman, who lived in a cottage by herself, on
hearing the account of the Crucifixion, said it was a sad thing, but she
hoped it was not true, as it happened so far off and such a long time
ago. A servant girl, hearing a Sermon read in which there was a striking
account of the Resurrection and the Day of Judgment, was very much
alarmed, and said she hoped it would not be in her time. The Decalogue
has no terrors, and the Book of Revelations no charms for them. They
will be damned, but they will steal and lie, and bear false witness
against each other; or if they do not, it is the fear of being hanged,
or whipped, or summoned before the Justice of the Peace, and not of
being called to account in another world, that prevents them. They are
of the earth, earthy. They take thought only for the morrow; or rather,
conform to the text—‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ There
is not a greater mistake, or a more wilful fallacy, than the common
observation, that the lower orders are kept in order (and can only be
so) by their faith in religion. They have no more belief in it
practically than most of their betters, who propose to keep them in
order by it, have speculatively. The ignorant and destitute are
restrained from certain things by the fear of the law, or of what will
be said of them by their neighbours; and as to other things which are
denounced by Scripture, but to which no penalty attaches here, they
think if they have a mind to do them, and chuse to go to hell for it,
they have a right to do so. That is their phrase. It is nobody’s
business but their own. It is (generally speaking) the absence of
temptation or opportunity, and not an excess of religious apprehension,
that keeps them within the pale of salvation. Their self-will balances
their fear of the Devil, and when it comes to the push, the present
motive turns the scale, and the flesh proves too hard for the spirit.
Burns’s old man in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ must pass for a very
poetical character, at least in this part of the country. We see
constant accounts in the papers, in the case of malefactors that have
come to an untimely end, that it was owing in the first instance to the
want of religion, to the habit of swearing and Sabbath-breach. The same
account would hold equally true of those who are not hanged: for if all
but the godly and sober among the lower classes came to the gallows, the
population would soon be thinned to a surprising degree.
‘’Twould thin the land
Such numbers to string on Tyburn tree.’
As to the regular church-going peasantry, there can be no great
difference as to religious light and feelings between them and their
forefathers in the time of Popery, when the service was performed in
Latin, as it is at present in most foreign countries. The only religious
people (except as a matter of outward shew and ceremony) are sectaries;
for the instant religion becomes a subject for serious thought and
private reflection, it produces differences of opinion, which branch out
into as many speculative fancies and forms of worship, as there are
differences of temper or accidents of education.[35] This, however, is
the exception, not the rule, in the present state of things—now that
zeal is no longer kindled at the fires of persecution, and that Acts of
Uniformity no longer throw the whole country into a ferment of
opposition. The missionaries and fanatics sometimes indeed set up a
methodist chapel, where the staid inhabitants go in an evening to spite
the parson of the parish, or to while away an hour or so; or perhaps a
melancholy mechanic has a serious call and holds forth, or a pining
spinster, moved by the spirit to listen to him—
‘Anon as patient as the female dove,
The whilst her golden couplets are disclos’d,
Awhile sits drooping:’
but the younger and healthier sort make a sport of it as of any other
fantastical innovation; throw owls and skeletons of kites and carrion
crows into the place of worship; and make a violent noise all the time
the parson is preaching, to drown the nasal twang of evangelical
glad-tidings, and the comfortable groans of the faithful.—All this while
there is no end of the bastard-getting and swearing: and a girl, after
having had three or four children by the same man, or by different men
(as it happens), and who is as big as she can tumble again, is at length
asked in church, without much scandal or offence to the community. It is
a new topic for the village, and is excused on that account. It is,
besides, an evidence quashed; and whatever others may take it into their
heads to do, she need not talk. Liberality flourishes; a good example is
set; and the species is propagated with as little trouble and formality
as possible. The parson gets something by the christening, and the
apothecary has a finger in the pie. This is a state of things which
ought to be reformed—but how or when?
MR. MACREADY’S MACBETH.
_The Examiner._] [_June 25, 1820._
Mr. Macready’s _Macbeth_, which he had for his benefit, and which he has
played once or twice since, is a judicious and spirited performance. But
we are not in the number of those who think it his finest character.
Sensibility, not imagination, is his _forte_. Natural expression, human
feeling, seems to woo him like a bride; but the _ideal_ and
preternatural beckon him only at a distance and mock his embraces. He
sees no dim, portentous visions in his mind’s eye; his acting has no
shadowy landscape back-ground to surround it; he is not waited on by
spirits of the deep or of the air; neither fate nor metaphysical aid are
in league with him; he is prompter to himself, and treads within the
circle of the human heart. The machinery in _Macbeth_ is so far lost
upon him: there is no secret correspondence between him and the Weird
Sisters. The poet has put a fruitless sceptre in his hand,—a curtain is
between him and the ‘air-drawn dagger with its gouts of blood’; he does
not cower under the traditions of the age, or startle at ‘thick-coming
fancies.’ He is more like a man debating the reality, or questioning the
power of the grotesque and unimaginable forms that hover round him, than
one hurried away by his credulous hopes, or shrinking from intolerable
fears. There is not a weight of superstitious terror loading the
atmosphere and hanging over the stage when Mr. Macready plays the part.
He has cast the cumbrous slough of Gothic tragedy, and comes out a mere
modern, agitated by common means and intelligible motives. The
preternatural agency is no more than an accompaniment, the pretended
occasion, not the indispensable and all-powerful cause. It appears to us
then, that this excellent and able actor, _struck short_ of the higher
and imaginative part of the character, and consequently was deficient in
the human passion, which is the mighty appendage to it. We thought Mr.
Macready in a manner conscious of this want of entire possession of the
character. He was looking out for new readings, transposing attitudes
and stage effects, trying substitutes and experiments, studying passages
instead of reciting them, rehearsing _Macbeth_, not _being_ it. His
performance of it was critical and fastidious: you would say that he was
considering how he should act the part, so as to avoid certain errors or
produce certain effects—not that he ever flung himself into the subject,
and swam to shore, safe from carping objection, and above the reach of
all praise. Mr. Macready does not often imitate other actors, but he
endeavours not to imitate them, and that’s almost as bad. He should
think of nothing but his part, and rely on nothing but his own powers.
Singularity is not excellence. If to follow in the track of others shews
a servile genius and pitiful ambition, neither is it right to go out of
the strait road merely because others travel in it—‘but still to follow
nature is the rule’—John Kemble was the best _Macbeth_ (upon the whole)
that we have seen. There was a stiff, horror-stricken stateliness in his
person and manner, like a man bearing up against supernal influences;
and a bewildered distraction, a perplexity and at the same time a
rigidity of purpose, like one who had been stunned by a blow from fate.
Mr. Kean is great only in one scene, that after the murder of _Duncan_;
his acting also consists only in the direct embodying of human passion,
and is entirely ‘docked and curtailed’ of the sweeping train of poetical
imagination. On the evening we saw Mr. Macready’s _Macbeth_ Mrs. Faucit
played _Lady Macbeth_, and acted up to that arduous part with great
spirit and self-possession; and Mr. Terry was the representative of
_Macduff_. The only fault of this gentleman’s acting is its slowness.
The words fall from his lips, like pendent drops from icicles. A speech,
as he gives it, is equal to ‘twa lang Scotch miles.’ This not only
causes a stagnation and heaviness in the sentiments, but often cuts the
sense in two. Thus in the exclamation which _Macduff_ utters on hearing
of the slaughter of his children, ‘Oh Hell-Kite, all?’ Mr. Terry paused
at the hyphen, as if to take time to think, and by this means made it
like an apostrophe to ‘Hell,’ adding the other syllable of the word,
which determined the meaning and direction of his thoughts, afterwards.
Mr. Egerton as usual played _Banquo_, and makes as solid a Ghost as we
would wish to encounter of a winter’s eve.
David Rizzio we have not been able to get a peep at: but a friend
whispered us that it was poor, and we see it is praised in the _New
Times_!
On Friday Miss Stephens had a bumper for her benefit. The entertainments
were the _Lord of the Manor_, a Concert, and the _Libertine_. In the
first, Mr. Duruset from indisposition, and after making one feeble
effort, omitted the songs, by the indulgence of the audience; after
that, we do not see why he should be required to go through the rest of
the part, for he has not ‘a speaking face.’ Jones’s _Mr. Contrast_ is a
striking, fulsome fop. But he makes foppery not only an object of
laughter, but of disgust; and perhaps this is going beyond the mark
intended. We would recommend to our readers to go and see Mr. Liston’s
_Moll Flagon_ by all means. It is irresistible. We may say of it with
the poet—
‘Let those laugh now who never laugh’d before,
And those who still have laugh’d now laugh the more.’
Mrs. Salmon’s singing in the Concert was ‘d’une pathétique à faire
fendre les rochers,’—and Miss Stephens’s Echo song seemed sung by a
Spirit or an enchantress. We were glad to hear it, for we have an
attachment to Miss Stephens on account of ‘auld lang syne’ (we like old
friendships better than new), and do not wish that little murmuring
syren Miss Tree to wean us from our old and artless favourite.—Those
were happy days when first Miss Stephens began to sing! When she came
out in _Mandane_, in _Polly_, and in _Rosetta_ in _Love in a Village_!
She came upon us by surprise, but it was to delight and charm us. There
was a new sound in the air, like the voice of Spring; it was as if Music
had become young again, and was resolved to try the power of her
softest, simplest, sweetest notes. Love and Hope listened, as her clear,
liquid throat poured its delicious warblings on the ear, and at the
close of every strain, still called on Echo to prolong the sound. They
were the sweetest notes we ever heard, and almost the last we ever heard
with pleasure! For since then, other events not to be named lightly
here, but ‘thoughts of which can never from the heart’—‘with other notes
than to the Orphean lyre,’ have stopped our ears to the voice of the
charmer. But since the voice of Liberty has risen once more in Spain,
its grave and its birth place, and like a babbling hound has wakened the
echos in Galicia, in the Asturias, in Castile and Leon, and Estremadura,
why, we feel as if we ‘had three ears again’ and the heart to use them,
and as if we could once more write with the same feelings (the tightness
removed from the breast, and the pains smoothed from the brow) as we did
when we gave the account of Miss Stephens’s first appearance in the
_Beggar’s Opera_. Life might then indeed ‘know the return of
spring,’—and end, as it began, with faith in human kind!—
GUY FAUX
_The Examiner._] [_November 11, 1821._
Guy Faux is made into the figure of a scare-crow, a fifth of November
bugbear, in our history. Now that Mr. Hogg’s _Jacobite Relics_ have
dissipated the remains of an undue horror at Popery, it may seem the
time to undertake the defence of so illustrious a character, who has
hitherto been the victim of party-prejudice and national spite. Guy Faux
was a Popish Priest in the reign of James I., and for his unsuccessful
attempt to set fire to the House of Lords, and blow up the English
Monarchy, the Protestant Religion, and himself, at one stroke, has had
the honour to be annually paraded through the streets, and burnt in
effigy in every town and village in England from that time to this—that
is, for the space of two hundred years and upwards. It is sometimes
doubtful, indeed, from the coincidence of dates and other circumstances,
whether this annual ceremony, accompanied as it is with the ringing of
bells, the firing of guns, and the preaching of sermons, is intended
more to revive the formidable memory of ‘poor Guy,’ or in celebration of
the glorious landing of William III., who came to deliver us from Popery
and Slavery a hundred years afterwards—two things which Mr. Hogg treats
as mere _bagatelles_ in his _Jacobite Relics_, though they do not appear
so in the History of England; and to which the same writer assures us,
as an agreeable piece of court-news that the present Family are by no
means averse in their hearts!
Guy Faux was a fanatic, but he was no hypocrite. He ranks among _good
haters_. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but
those of an infuriated and bigotted faith; but he was a true son of the
Catholic Church, a martyr and a confessor, for all that. He who can
prevail upon himself to devote his life for a cause, however we may
condemn his opinions or abhor his actions, vouches at least for the
honesty of his principles and the disinterestedness of his motives. He
may be guilty of the worst practices, but he is capable of the greatest.
He is no longer a slave, but free. The contempt of death is the
beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gun-Powder Plot was, if you will, a
fool, a madman, an assassin; call him what names you please: still he
was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the
Parliament and come off, scot-free, himself: he shewed that he valued
his own life no more than theirs in such a cause—where the integrity of
the Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at
stake. He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice which he was about
to achieve: he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire: he was the
Church’s chosen servant and her blessed martyr. He comforted himself as
‘the best of cut-throats.’ How many wretches are there that would have
undertaken to do what he intended for a sum of money, if they could have
got off with impunity! How few are there who would have put themselves
in Guy Faux’s situation to save the universe! Yet in the latter case we
affect to be thrown into greater consternation than at the most
unredeemed acts of villany, as if the absolute disinterestedness of the
motive doubled the horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of
mankind are in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such
examples are held up for imitation,) and they make a fearful outcry
against the violation of every principle of morality, lest they too
should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices—lest they in
their turn should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty.
_Charity begins at home_, is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts
of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at
the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to
ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is well,
when an individual shrinks from the face of an enemy, and purchases his
own safety by striking a blow in the dark: but how the charge of
cowardly can be applied to the public assassin, who, in the very act of
destroying another, lays down his life as a pledge and forfeit of his
sincerity and boldness, I am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous
prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he
who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself, can no more
be branded with cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his
country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father
Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning hundreds of
helpless and unoffending victims to the flames or to the horrors of a
living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be
hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again;
the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his monarch, who
enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building, under
promise of strict faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it,
making sport of the cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an
instance of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless
selfishness. His plea was keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy
Faux’s too; but I am sure at least that the latter kept faith with
himself: he was in earnest in his professions. _His_ was not gay,
wanton, unfeeling depravity; he did not murder in sport; it was serious
work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole
traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his
retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among
his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death, but not yet ripe for
destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than
indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of
the human understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will,
without an equal. There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and
ready to applaud the deed when done:—there was no one but our old
fifth-of-November friend, who still flutters in rags and straw on the
occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and
unshaken faith prevailed over natural frailty. A man to undertake and
contemplate with gloomy delight this desperate task, could not certainly
in the first instance, be a man of tender sensibility, or over-liable to
‘the compunctious visitings of nature’; but he would so far only be on a
level with many others, and he would be distinguished from them by a
high principle of enthusiasm, and a disinterested zeal for truth.
Greater love than this has no one, that he shall give up his life for
the truth. We have no Guy Fauxes now:—not that we have not numbers in
whom ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ We talk indeed of
flinging the keys of the House of Commons into the Thames, by way of a
little unmeaning splutter, and a little courting of popularity and
persecution; but to fling ourselves into the gap, and blow up the system
and our own bodies to atoms at once, upon an abstract principle of
right, does not suit the _radical_ scepticism of the age!
I like the spirit of martyrdom, I confess: I envy an age that had virtue
enough in it to produce the mischievous fanaticism of a Guy Faux. A
man’s marching up to a masked-battery for the sake of company, is
nothing: but a man’s going resolutely to the stake rather than surrender
his opinion, is a serious matter. It shews that in the public mind and
feeling there is something better than life; that there is a belief of
something in the universe and the order of nature, to which it is worth
while to sacrifice this poor brief span of existence. To have an object
always in view dearer to one than one’s-self, to cling to a principle in
contempt of danger, of interest, of the opinion of the world,—this is
the true _ideal_, the high and heroic state of man. It is in fact to
have a standard of absolute and implicit faith in the mind, that admits
neither of compromise, degree, nor exception. The path of duty is one,
the grounds of encouragement are fixed and invariable. Perhaps it is
hardly possible to have such a standard, but where the certain prospect
of another world absolves us from a miserly compact with this, and the
contemplation of infinity forms an habitual counterpoise to the
illusions of time and sense. An object of the highest conceivable
greatness leads to unmingled devotion: the belief in eternal truth
embodies itself on practical principles of strict rectitude, or of
obstinate, but noble-minded error.
There was an instance that happened a little before the time of Guy
Faux, which, in a different way, has something of the same character,
with a more pleasing conclusion. I mean the story of Margaret Lambrun;
and as it is but little known, I shall here relate it as I find it:—
‘Margaret Lambrun was a Scotchwoman, and one of the retinue of Mary
Queen of Scots; as was also her husband, who dying of grief for the
tragical end of that princess, his wife took up a resolution of
revenging the death of both upon Queen Elizabeth. For that purpose she
put on a man’s habit; and assuming the name of Anthony Sparke,
repaired to the Court of the Queen of England, always carrying with
her a brace of pistols, one to kill Elizabeth, and the other to shoot
herself, in order to avoid the hands of justice; but her design
happened to miscarry by an accident, which saved the Queen’s life. One
day, as she was pushing through the crowd to come up to her Majesty,
who was then walking in her garden, she chanced to drop one of the
pistols. This being seen by the guards, she was seized in order to be
sent immediately to prison; but the Queen, not suspecting her to be
one of her own sex, had a mind first to examine her. Accordingly,
demanding her name, country, and quality, Margaret replied with an
unmoved steadiness,—“Madam, though I appear in this habit, I am a
woman; my name is Margaret Lambrun; I was several years in the service
of Queen Mary, my mistress, whom you have so unjustly put to death;
and by her death you have also caused that of my husband, who died of
grief to see so innocent a queen perish so iniquitously. Now, as I had
the greatest love and affection for both these persons, I resolved at
the peril of my life to revenge their death by killing you, who are
the cause of both.”—The Queen pardoned her, and granted her a safe
conduct till she should be set upon the coast of France.’
Fanaticism expires with philosophy, and heroism with refinement. There
can be no mixture of scepticism in the one, nor any distraction of
interest in the other. That blind attachment to individuals or to
principles, which is necessary to make us stake our all upon a single
die, wears out with the progress of society. Sandt—(the last of that
school)—was a religious fanatic—a reader of the book of Maccabees, a
repeater of the story of Jael and Sisera, a chaunter of the song of
Deborah. What lighted up the dungeon-gloom in which Guy Faux buried
himself alive? The face of Heaven open to receive him. What cheered his
undivided solitude? The full assembly of Just Men made perfect, the
Glorious Company of Apostles, the Noble Army of Martyrs, the expecting
Conclave of Sainted Popes, of Canonized Priests and Cardinals. What
nerved his steady hand, and prepared it, with temperate, even pulse, to
apply the fatal spark? The Hand of the Most High stretched out to meet
him and to welcome him into the abodes of the blest—‘Well done, thou
good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!’ In his
face we see an anticipated triumph that ‘no dim doubts alloy’; he hears
with no mortal ears the recording angels ‘quiring to the young-eyed
cherubim’; a light flashes round him, a beatific vision, from the wings
of the Shining Ones: he sits, wreathed and radiant, in the real
presence! What need he fear what men can do unto him? To a hope like
his, swallowed up in fruition, the shock that is soon to shatter his
mortal frame plays harmless as the summer-lightning: the flames that
threaten to envelope him are the wedding-garment of the Spouse. ‘This
night thou shalt sup with me in Paradise’—rings in his sleepless ears.
On this rock he builds his faith, and the gates of Hell shall not
prevail against it!—Guy Faux (poor wretch!) was as sure within himself
of the reward of his crime in the eternal salvation of his soul, as of
his intention to commit it: he no more doubted of another world than he
doubted of his own existence. A question whether his whole creed might
not be a delusion had never once crossed his mind. How should it? He had
never once heard it called in question. He believed in it as he believed
in all he had ever seen or heard, or thought or felt, or been told by
others—he believed in a future state as he believed in this, with his
senses and his understanding, and with all his heart. Poor Guy—that
miserable fifth-of-November scare-crow, that stuffed straw figure,
flaunting its own periodical disgrace—never once dreamt (oh! glorious
inheritance!) that he should die like a dog. Otherwise, James and his
parliament would have been in no jeopardy from him. He was not a person
of that refinement. He thought for certain that he would go to Heaven or
Hell; and he played a bold, but (as he fancied) a sure game, for the
former. With such objects at stake, and with his own blinded reason, and
a stifled conscience, and implicit faith, and vowed obedience, and holy
Mother Church on his side, and a fixed hatred of heresy and of all that
belonged to it, as of a strange birth in nature, that made his flesh
creep and his brain reel, and a disregard of his own person, as ‘dross
compared to the glory hereafter to be revealed,’ he acted up to his
belief: the man was what he preached to others to be—no better, no
worse. Without this belief supporting him, what would he have been? Like
the wretched straw figure, the automaton we see representing him,
‘disembowelled of his natural entrails, without a real heart of flesh
and blood beating in his bosom,’ a modern time-server, an unimpassioned
slave, a canting Jesuit, a petty, cautious, meddling priest, a safe,
underhand persecutor, an anonymous slanderer, a cringing sycophant,
promoting his own interest by taking the bread out of honest mouths, a
mercenary malignant coward, a Clerical Magistrate, a Quarterly Reviewer,
a Member of the Constitutional Association, the concealed Editor of
_Blackwood’s Magazine_!
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Examiner._] [_November 18, 1821._
The diffusion of knowledge, of inquiry, of doubt (or what Lord Bacon
calls ‘the infinite agitation of wit’) puts an end to ‘the soul of
goodness’ that there is in bigotry and superstition, and should to its
evil spirit at the same time. There is nothing so intolerable as the
union (which we see so common in modern times) of religious hypocrisy
with literary scepticism. The real bigot is a respectable as well as
enviable character. Not so the affected one. Downright, rooted,
rancorous prejudices are honest, hearty, wholesome things. They keep the
mind _in breath_. Not so the whining, hollow, designing cant, which
echoes without feeling them. The barbarous cruelties of savage tribes
are partly atoned for by the keen appetite for revenge in which they
originate: but we do not extend the same excuse to those who poison for
hire. The fires of Smithfield were kindled by a zeal that burnt as
bright and fierce as they. Our contemporaries who are in the habit of
throwing firebrands and death, do it without malice; and laugh at those
who do not understand the jest. The multiplication of sects dissipates
and tames down the rage of martyrdom. The first grand defection indeed
from an established and universal faith, creates a shock and is assailed
with a violence proportioned to the firmness with which the
parent-belief has been rooted in the public mind: but the subsequent
ramification of different schisms and modes of faith from the first
enormous heresy, tires out and neutralises the spirit of both
persecution and fanaticism. Religious controversy is a war of words, and
no longer a war of extermination. There may be the same heart-burnings,
the same jealousies of difference of opinion; but they do not lead to
the same fatal catastrophes or the same heroic sacrifices. We cannot
burn or hang one another for differing from the Catholic faith as a
crime of the most dreadful import, when hardly any two men can be found
to agree in the interpretation of the same text. All opinions, by
constant collision and attrition, become, if not equally probable,
equally familiar. Men’s minds are slowly weaned from blind idolatrous
bigotry and intolerant zeal, by the continually increasing number of
points of controversy and the frequency of dispute. Then comes the
general question as to the grounds and reasonableness of the doctrines
of religion itself; and a sceptical, dispassionate, Epicurean work, like
_Bayle’s Dictionary_ or _Hume’s Essays_, gives the finishing blow to
what little remains of dogmatical faith in established systems. After
that, a zealot is another name for an imposter. The reasons for belief
may be as good or stronger than ever; but the belief itself, as it is
more rational, is less gross and headstrong. The closest deductions of
the understanding do not act like an instinct, or warrant a mortal
antipathy; and let the philosophical believer’s convictions be what they
will, he cannot affect an ignorance that it is possible for others to
differ with him. A violent and overstrained affectation of Orthodoxy is,
after a certain time, a sure sign of insincerity: the only zeal that can
claim to be ‘according to knowledge,’ is refined, calm, and considerate.
I do not speak of this sort of mitigated, sceptical, liberalised,
enlightened belief, as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished:’ (in my
own particular, I would rather have held opinion with Guy Faux, and have
gone or sent others to the Devil for that opinion)—I speak of the common
course of human affairs. I remember once observing to Wilkie, the
celebrated artist, that Dr. Chalmers (his old friend and schoolfellow)
had started an objection to the Christian religion, in order to have the
credit of answering it. The Scottish Teniers said, that if the answer
was a good one, he thought him right in bringing forward the objection.
I did not think this remark savoured of the acuteness one would expect
from such a man as Wilkie, and only said, I apprehended those opinions
were the strongest which had been never called in question. _Reasoning
is not believing_—whatever _seeing_ may be, according to the proverb.
A devoted and incorrigible attachment to individuals, as well as to
doctrines, is weakened by the progress of knowledge and civilization. A
spirit of scepticism, of inquiry, of comparison, is introduced there
too, by the course of reading, observation, and reflection, which
strikes at the root of our disproportionate idolatry. Margaret Lambrun
did not think there was such another woman in the world as her mistress,
Queen Mary; nor could she, after her death, see any thing in it worth
living for. Had she had access to a modern circulating library, she
would have read of a hundred such heroines, all peerless alike; and
would have consoled herself for the death of them all, one after
another, pretty much in the same manner. Margaret was not one of those
who argue, according to Mr. Burke’s improved political catechism, that
‘a king is but a king; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal;
and that not an animal of the highest order.’ She had more respect of
persons than this. The truth is, she had never seen such another woman
as her mistress, and she had no means, by books or otherwise, of forming
an idea of any thing but what she saw. In that isolated state of
society, people grew together like trees, and clung round the strongest
for support, ‘as the vine curls its tendrils.’ They became devoted to
others with the same violence of attachment as they were to themselves.
Novels, plays, magazines, treatises of philosophy, Monthly Museums, and
_Belles Assemblées_, did not fly in numbers about the country and
‘through the airy region stream so bright,’ as to blot out the
impression of all real forms. The effects of habit, of sense, of
service, of affection, did not find an ideal level in general literature
and artificial models. The heart made its election once, and was fixed
till death: the eyes doated on fancied perfection, and were divorced
from every other object afterwards. There was not the same communication
of ideas; there was not the same change of place or acquaintance. The
prejudices of rank, of custom, strengthened the bias of individual
admiration; and it is no wonder, where all these circumstances were
combined, that the presence of a person, whom we had loved and served,
became a feeling, an appetite, and a passion in the mind, almost
necessary to existence. The taking our idol away (and by cruel and
treacherous means) would be taking away the prop that sustained life,
and on which all the pride of the affections leant. Its loss would be
the loss of another self; and a double loss of this kind (as in the
instance alluded to) could seek for no solace but in the death of her
who had caused it. Where the mind had become rivetted to a certain
object, where it had embarked its all in the sacred cause of friendship
and inviolable fidelity, it would be in vain to offer the consolations
of philosophy when the heart owned none. Other scenes, new friends,
fresh engagements, might be proper for others; but Margaret Lambrun’s
wounded spirit could find no relief but in looking forward to a full
revenge for a murdered mistress and husband. You might as well think of
wedding the soul to another body, as of inspiring her with other hopes
and thoughts than those which she had lost for ever:—she could not live
without those whom she had loved so well and long, and she was ready to
die for them. Life becomes indifferent to a mind haunted by a passion of
this sort. Death is not then a choice, but rather a necessity. We cannot
live, and have the desire nearest to our souls. To play the hero, it is
only necessary to be wound up to such an unavoidable interest in any
thing, as reflection, prudence, natural instinct, have no power over. To
be a hero, is, in other words, to lose the sense of our personal
identity in some object dearer to us than ourselves. He may purchase any
thing he pleases, who is ready to part with his life for it. Wherever
there is a passion or belief strong enough to blind us to consequences,
there the mind is capable of any sacrifice and of any undertaking.
The heroical is the fanaticism of common life: it is the contempt of
danger, of pain, of death, in the pursuit of a favourite idea. The rule
of honour, as of conscience, is to contemplate things in the abstract,
and never as affecting or reacting upon yourself; the hero is an
instrument in the hands of fate, as is himself impassive to its blows. A
man in a passion, or who is worked up to a certain pitch of enthusiasm,
minds nothing else. The fear of death, the love of self, is but an idea
or motive with a certain habitual strength. Raise any other idea or
feeling to a greater habitual or momentary height, and it will supplant
or overrule the first. Courage is sometimes the effect of despair.
Women, in a fit of romance, or on some sudden emergency, have been known
to perform feats of heroic daring, from which men of the stoutest nerves
might shrink with dismay. Maternal tenderness is heroic. Affection of
any kind, that doats upon a particular object, and absorbs every other
consideration in that, is in its nature heroic.[36] Passion is the great
ingredient in heroism. He who stops to reflect, to balance one thing
against another, is a coward. The better part of valour is indiscretion.
All passion is a short-lived madness, or state of intoxication, in which
some present impulse or prevailing idea gets uncontrouled possession of
the mind, and lords it there at will. A man may be (almost literally)
drunk with choler, with love, with jealousy, with revenge, as he may
with wine or strong drink. Any of these will overpower his reason and
senses, and put him beyond himself. The master-feeling will prevail,
whatever it is, and when it once gets the upper hand, will rage the more
violently in proportion to the obstacles it has to encounter. Women who
associate with robbers are cruel, as soon as they get over their first
repugnance: some of the bravest officers have been the greatest
Martinets. A man who is afraid of a blow, or tender of his person, will
yet, on being struck, feel nothing but the mortification of the affront,
and the fear of discomfiture. The pain that is inflicted, after his
blood is once up, will only aggravate his resentment, and be diverted
from the channels of fear into those of rage and shame. He whose will is
roused and holds out in this way, whose tenaciousness of purpose and
inflammability of spirit are proof against the extremity of pain, of
fatigue, and disaster, is said to have _pluck_. So a man may not be able
to reason himself into coolness at the commencement of a battle; but a
ball whizzing near him does it, by abstracting his imagination from a
thousand idle fears, and fixing it on his immediate situation and duty.
The novice in an engagement, that before was motionless with
apprehension or trembling like a leaf, after being hit, loses the sense
of possible contingencies in the grief of his wound, and fights like a
devil incarnate. He is thenceforward too busy to think of himself. He
rushes fearlessly on danger and on death. A man in a battle is indeed
emphatically _beside himself_. He ‘bears a charmed life,’ that in fancy
disarms cannon-balls and bullets of their power to hurt. They are mere
names and apparitions from which astonishment and necessity have taken
out the sting: the sense of feeling is seared and dead for the time to
‘all mortal consequences.’ The mind is sublimated to a disregard of
whatever can happen, and tempted to rush without provocation on its
fate, purely out of bravado, and as the triumph of its paramount
feeling, an exasperation of its temporary insanity. Courage is in many
such cases only a violent effort to shake off fear, a determination of
the imagination to seize on any object that may divert its present
dread. A soldier is a perfect hero but that he is a mere machine. He is
drilled into disinterestedness, and beaten into courage. He is a very
patriotic and romantic automaton. He has lost all regard for himself and
concern for others. His life, his limbs, his soul and body, are obedient
only to the word of command. ‘Set duty in one eye and death in the
other, and he can look on death indifferently.’
‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill,
Say such is royal George’s will,
And there’s the foe:
His only thought is how to kill
Twa’ at a blow.’—_Burns._
They then go at it with bayonets fixed, eyes inflamed, and tongues
lolling out with heat and rage, like wild beasts or mad dogs panting for
blood, and from the madman to Mr. Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ there is
but one step.—The true hero devotes himself in the same way, but he does
it of his own accord, and from an inward sentiment. The service on which
he is bound is perfect freedom. He is not a machine, but a free agent.
He knows his cue without a prompter. Not servile duty—
‘Within his bosom reigns another lord,
Honour, sole judge and umpire of itself.’
THE SAME SUBJECT CONCLUDED
_The Examiner_] [_November 25, 1821._
Thus a knight-errant going on adventures, and following out the fine
idea of love and gallantry in his own mind, without once thinking of
himself but as a vessel dedicated to virtue and honour, is one of the
most enviable fictions in the whole world. Don Quixote, in the midst of
its comic irony, is the finest serious developement to be found of this
character. The account of the Cid, the famous Spanish hero, of which Mr.
Southey has given an admirable prose-translation where scarcely a word
could be changed or transposed without injuring the force and clear
simplicity of the antique style he has adopted, abounds with instances
to the same purpose. His taking back the lion to its den, his bringing
his father ‘the herb that would cure him,’ his enemy’s head, and his
manner of reclaiming a recreant knight from his cowardice by heaping the
rewards and distinctions of courage upon him, are some of those that I
remember as the most striking. Perhaps the reader may not have the book
by him; yet they are worth turning to, both for the sentiment and the
expression. The first then in order is the following:—
‘At this time it came to pass that there was strife between Count Don
Gomez the Lord of Gormaz, and Diego Laynez the father of Rodrigo (the
Cid); and the Count insulted Diego and gave him a blow. Now Diego was
a man in years, and his strength had passed from him, so that he could
not take vengeance, and he retired to his home to dwell there in
solitude and lament over his dishonour. And he took no pleasure in his
food, neither could he sleep by night, nor would he lift up his eyes
from the ground, nor stir out of his house, nor commune with his
friends, but turned from them in silence as if the breath of his shame
would taint them. Rodrigo was yet but a youth, and the Count was a
mighty man in arms, one who gave his voice first in the Cortez, and
was held to be the best in the war, and so powerful, that he had a
thousand friends among the mountains. Howbeit, all these things
appeared as nothing to Rodrigo, when he thought of the wrong done to
his father, the first which had ever been offered to the blood of Layn
Calvo. He asked nothing but justice of Heaven, and of man he asked
only a fair field; and his father seeing of how good heart he was,
gave him his sword and his blessing. The sword had been the Sword of
Mudarra in former times, and when Rodrigo held its cross in its hand,
he thought within himself that his arm was not weaker than Mudarra’s.
And he went out and defied the Count and slew him, and smote off his
head, and carried it home to his father. The old man was sitting at
table, the food lying before him untasted, when Rodrigo returned, and
pointing to the head which hung from the horse’s collar, dropping
blood, he bade him look up, for there was the herb which would restore
to him his appetite; the tongue, quoth he, which insulted[37] you, is
no longer a tongue, and the hand which wronged you is no longer a
hand. And the old man arose and embraced his son and placed him above
him at the table; saying that he who brought home that head should be
the head of the house of Layn Calvo.’—_Chronicle of the Cid_, _p. 4_.
The next is of Martin Pelaez, whom the Cid made of a notable coward a
redoubtable hero:—
‘Here the history relates, that at this time Martin Pelaez the Asturian
came with a convoy of laden beasts, carrying provision to the hosts of
the Cid; and as he passed near the town, the Moors sallied out in great
numbers against him; but he, though he had few with him, defended the
convoy right well, and did great hurt to the Moors, slaying many of
them, and drove them into the town. This Martin Pelaez, who is here
spoken of, did the Cid make a right good knight of a coward, as ye shall
hear. When the Cid first began to lay siege to the City of Valencia,
this Martin Pelaez came unto him: he was a knight, a native of
Santillance in Asturias, a hidalgo, great of body and strong of limb, a
well-made man and of goodly semblance, but withal a right coward at
heart, which he had shown in many places where he was among feats of
arms. And the Cid was sorry when he came unto him, though he would not
let him perceive this; for he knew he was not fit to be of his company.
Howbeit, he thought that since he was come, he would make him brave
whether he would or not. And when the Cid began to war upon the town,
and sent parties against it twice and thrice a day, as ye have heard,
for the Cid was always upon the alert, there was fighting and tourneying
every day. One day it fell out that the Cid and his kinsmen and friends
and vassals were engaged in a great encounter, and this Martin Pelaez
was well armed; and when he saw that the Moors and Christians were at
it, he fled and betook himself to his lodging, and there hid himself
till the Cid returned to dinner. And the Cid saw what Martin Pelaez did,
and when he had conquered the Moors, he returned to his lodging to
dinner. Now it was the custom of the Cid to eat at a high table, seated
on his bench at the head. And Don Alvar Fannez and Pero Bermudez and
other precious knights ate in another part, at high tables full
honourably, and none other knights whatsoever dared to take their seats
with them, unless they were such as deserved to be there; and the others
who were not so approved in arms ate upon _estradas_, at tables with
cushions. This was the order in the house of the Cid, and every one knew
the place where he was to sit at meat, and every one strove all he could
to gain the honour of sitting to eat at the table of Don Alvar Fannez
and his companions, by strenuously behaving himself in all feats of
arms; and thus the honour of the Cid was advanced. This Martin Pelaez,
thinking that none had seen his badness, washed his hands in turn with
the other knights, and would have taken his place among them. And the
Cid went unto him and took him by the hand and said, You are not such a
one as deserves to sit with these, for they are worth more than you or
than me, but I will have you with me; and he seated him with himself at
table. And he, for lack of understanding, thought that the Cid did this
to honour him above all the others. On the morrow the Cid and his
company rode towards Valencia, and the Moors came out to the tourney;
and Martin Pelaez went out well armed, and was among the foremost who
charged the Moors, and when he was in among them he turned the reins,
and went back to his lodging; and the Cid took heed to all that he did,
and saw that though he had done badly, he had done better than the first
day. And when the Cid had driven the Moors into the town, he returned to
his lodging, and as he sate down to meat, he took this Martin Pelaez by
the hand, and seated him with himself, and bade him eat with him in the
same dish, for he had deserved more that day than he had the first. And
the knight gave heed to that saying, and was abashed; howbeit, he did as
the Cid commanded him: and after he had dined, he went to his lodging
and began to think upon what the Cid had said unto him, and perceived
that he had seen all the baseness which he had done; and then he
understood that for this cause he would not let him sit at board with
the other knights who were precious in arms, but had seated him with
himself, more to affront him than to do him honour, for there were other
knights there better than he, and he did not show them that honour. Then
resolved he in his heart to do better than he had done hitherto. Another
day the Cid and his company and Martin Pelaez rode towards Valencia, and
the Moors came out to the tourney full resolutely, and Martin Pelaez was
among the first, and charged them right boldly; and he smote down and
slew presently a good knight, and he lost there all the bad fear which
he had had, and was that day one of the best knights there: and as long
as the tourney lasted, there he remained fighting and slaying and
overthrowing the Moors, till they were driven within the gates, in such
manner that the Moors marvelled at him, and asked where that Devil came
from, for they had never seen him before. And the Cid was in a place
where he could see all that was going on, and he gave good heed to him,
and had great pleasure in beholding him, to see how well he had
forgotten the great fear which he was wont to have. And when the Moors
were shut up within the town, the Cid and all his people returned to
their lodging, and Martin Pelaez full leisurely and quietly went to his
lodging also, like a good knight. And when it was the hour of eating,
the Cid waited for Martin Pelaez, and when he came and they had washed,
the Cid took him by the hand, and said, My friend, you are not such a
one as deserves to sit with me henceforth, but sit you here with Don
Alvar Fannez, and with these other good knights, for the good feats
which you have done this day have made you a companion for them; and
from the day forward he was placed in the company of the good.’—p. 199.
* * * * *
‘There was a lion in the house of the Cid, who had grown a large one,
and strong, and was full nimble; three men had the keeping of this lion,
and they kept him in a den which was in a courtyard, high up in the
palace; and when they cleansed the court, they were wont to shut him up
in his den, and afterwards to open the door that he might come out and
eat: the Cid kept him for his pastime, that he might take pleasure with
him when he was minded so to do. Now it was the custom of the Cid to
dine every day with his company, and after he had dined, he was wont to
sleep awhile upon his seat. And one day when he had dined, there came a
man and told him that a great fleet was arrived in the port of Valencia,
wherein there was a great power of the Moors, whom King Bucar had
brought over, the sons of the Miramamolin of Morocco. And when the Cid
heard this, his heart rejoiced and he was glad, for it was nigh three
years since he had had a battle with the Moors. Incontinently he ordered
a signal to be made, that all the honourable men who were in the city
should assemble together. And when they were all assembled in the
Alcazar, and his sons-in-law with them, the Cid told them the news, and
took counsel with them in what manner they should go out against this
great power of the Moors. And when they had taken counsel, the Cid went
to sleep upon his seat, and the Infantes and the others sate playing at
tables and chess. Now at this time the men who were keepers of the lion
were cleaning out the court, and when they heard the cry that the Moors
were coming, they opened the den, and came down into the palace where
the Cid was, and left the door of the court open. And when the lion had
ate his meat, and saw that the door was open, he went out of the court
and came down into the palace even into the hall where they all were:
and when they who were there saw him, there was a great stir among them:
but the Infantes of Carrion showed greater cowardice than all the rest.
Ferrando Gonzalez having no shame, neither for the Cid nor for the
others who were present, crept under the seat whereon the Cid was
sleeping, and in his haste he burst his mantle and his doublet also at
the shoulders. And Diego Gonzalez, the other, ran to a postern door,
crying, I shall never see Carrion again! This door opened upon a
courtyard, where there was a wine-press, and he jumped out, and by
reason of the great height could not keep his feet, but fell among the
lees and defiled himself therewith. And all the others who were in the
hall wrapt their cloaks around their arms, and stood round about the
seat whereon the Cid was sleeping, that they might defend him. The noise
which they made awakened the Cid, and he saw the lion coming towards
him, and he lifted up his hand and said, What is this!... and the lion
hearing his voice stood still: and he rose up and took him by the mane,
as if he had been a gentle mastiff, and led him back to the court where
he was before, and ordered his keepers to look better to him for the
time to come. And when he had done this, he returned to the hall and
took his seat again; and all they who beheld it were greatly
astonished.’—p. 251.
The presence of mind, the manly confidence, the faith in virtue, the
lofty bearing and picturesque circumstances in all these stories, are as
fine as any thing can well be imagined.—The last of them puts me in
mind, that that heroic little gentleman, Mr. Kean, who is a Cid too in
his way, keeps a lion ‘for his pastime, that he may take pleasure with
him when he is minded so to do.’ It is, to be sure, an American lion, a
puma, a sort of a great dog. But still it shews the nature of the man,
and the spirited turn of his genius. Courage is the great secret of his
success. His acting is, if not classical, heroical. To dare and to do
are with him the same thing. ‘Masterless passion sways him to the mood
of what it likes or loaths.’ He may be sometimes wrong, but he is
decidedly wrong, and does not betray himself by paltry doubts and fears.
He takes the lion by the mane. He gains all by hazarding all. He throws
himself into the breach, and fights his way through as well as he can.
He leaves all to his feelings, and goes where they lead him; and he
finds his account in this method, and brings rich ventures home.
In reading the foregoing accounts of the Spanish author, it seems that
in those times killing was no murder. Slaughter was the order of the
day. The blood of Moors and Christians flows through the page as so much
water. The proverb uppermost in their minds was, that a man could die
but once, and the inference seemed to be, the sooner the better. In
these more secure and civilized times (individually and as far as it
depends upon ourselves) we are more chary of our lives. We are
(ordinarily) placed out of the reach of ‘the shot of accident and dart
of chance’; and grow indolent, tender, and effeminate in our notions and
habits. Books do not make men valiant,—not even the reading the
chronicle of the Cid. The police look after all breaches of the peace
and resorts of suspicious characters, so that we need not buckle on our
armour to go to the succour of distressed damsels, or to give battle to
giants and enchanters. Instead of killing some fourteen before
breakfast, like _Hotspur_, we are contented to read of these things in
the newspapers, or to see them performed on the stage. We enjoy all the
dramatic interest of such scenes, without the tragic results. Regnault
de St. Jean Angely rode like a madman through the streets of Paris, when
from the barricades he saw the Prussians advancing. We love, fight, and
are slain by proxy—live over the adventures of a hundred heroes and die
their deaths—and the next day are as well as ever, and ready to begin
again. This is a gaining concern, and an improvement on the
old-fashioned way of risking life and limb in good earnest, as a cure
for _ennui_. It is a bad speculation to come to an untimely end by way
of killing time. Now, like the heroic personages in _Tom Thumb_, we
spread a white pocket-handkerchief to prepare our final catastrophe, and
act the _sentiment_ of death with all the impunity to be desired. Men,
the more they cultivate their intellect, become more careful of their
persons. They would like to think, to read, to dream on for ever,
without being liable to any worldly annoyance. ‘Be mine to read eternal
new romances, of Marivaux and Crebillon,’ cries the insatiable adept in
this school. Art is long, and they think it hard that life should be so
short. Their existence has been chiefly theatrical, ideal, a tragedy
rehearsed in print—why should it receive its _denouement_ in their
proper persons, in _corpore vili_?—In another point of view, sedentary,
studious people live in a world of thought—in a world out of
themselves—and are not very well prepared to scuffle in this. They lose
the sense of personal honour on questions of more general interest, and
are not inclined to individual sacrifices that can be of no service to
the cause of letters. They do not see how any speculative truth can be
proved by their being run through the body; nor does your giving them
the lie alter the state of any one of the great leading questions in
policy, morals, or criticism. Philosophers might claim the privileges of
divines for many good reasons; among these, according to Spenser,
exemption from worldly care and peril was not the least in monkish lore:
‘From worldly care himself he did esloine,
And greatly shunned manly exercise:
For every work he challenged essoine,
For contemplation-sake.’
Mental courage is the only courage I pretend to. I dare venture an
opinion where few else would, particularly if I think it right. I have
retracted few of my positions. Whether this arises from obstinacy or
strength, or indifference to the opinions of others, I know not. In
little else I have the spirit of martyrdom: but I would give up any
thing sooner than an abstract proposition.
CHARACTER OF MR. CANNING
_The Examiner._] [_July 11, 1824._
Mr. Canning was the cleverest boy at Eton: he is, perhaps, the cleverest
man in the House of Commons. It is, however, in the sense in which,
according to Mr. Wordsworth, ‘the child is father to the man.’ He has
grown up entirely out of what he then was. He has merely ingrafted a set
of Parliamentary phrases and the technicalities of debate on the themes
and school-exercises he was set to compose when a boy. Nor has he ever
escaped from the trammels imposed on youthful genius: he has never
assumed a manly independence of mind. He has been all his life in the
habit of getting up a speech at the nod of a Minister, as he used to get
up a thesis under the direction of his school-master. The _matter_ is
nothing; the only question is, how he shall express himself. The
consequence has been as might be expected. Not being at liberty to chuse
his own side of the question, nor to look abroad into the world for
original (but perhaps unwelcome) observations, nor to follow up a strict
chain of reasoning into its unavoidable consequences, the whole force of
his mind has been exhausted in an attention to the ornaments of style
and to an agreeable and imposing selection of topics. It is his business
and his inclination to embellish what is trite, to gloss over what is
true, to vamp up some feeble sophism, to spread the colours of a
meretricious fancy over the unexpected exposure of some dark intrigue,
some glaring iniquity—
‘Like as the sun-burnt Indians do array
Their tawny bodies in their proudest plight
With painted plumes in goodly order dight:
· · · · ·
As those same plumes, so seemed he vain and light,
That by his gait might easily appear;
For still he fared as dancing in delight,
And in his hands a windy fan did bear,
That in the idle air he moved still here and there.’
SPENSER.
His reasoning is a tissue of glittering sophistry; his language is a
_cento_ of florid common-places. The smooth monotony of his style is
indeed as much borrowed, is as little his own, as the courtly and often
fulsome strain of his sentiments. He has no steady principles, no strong
passions, nothing original, masculine, or striking in thought or
expression. There is a feeble, diffuse, showy, Asiatic redundancy in all
his speeches—something vapid, something second-hand in the whole cast of
his mind. The light that proceeds from it gleams from the mouldering
materials of corruption: the flowers that are seen there, gay and
flaunting, bloom over the grave of humanity!—Mr. Canning never, by any
chance, reminds one of the poet or the philosopher, of the admirer of
nature, or even the man of the world—he is a mere House-of-Commons man,
or, since he was transferred there from College, appears never to have
seen or thought of any other place. He may be said to have passed his
life in making and learning to make speeches. All other objects and
pursuits seem to have been quite lost upon him. He has overlooked the
ordinary objects of nature, the familiar interests of human life, as
beneath his notice.[38] There is no allusion in any of his speeches to
anything passing out of the House, or not to be found in the classics.
Their tone is quite Parliamentary—his is the Delphin edition of Nature.
Not an image has struck his eye, not an incident has touched his heart,
any farther than it could be got up for rhetorical and stage effect.
This has an ill effect upon his speeches:—it gives them that shining and
bloated appearance which is the result of the confined and heated
atmosphere of the House. They have the look of exotics, of artificial,
hot-house plants. Their glossiness, their luxuriance, and gorgeousness
of colour are greater than their strength or _stamina_: they are forced,
not lasting, nor will they bear transplanting from the rank and noxious
soil in which they grow. Or rather, perhaps, they bear the same relation
to eloquence that artificial flowers do to real ones—alike, yet not the
same, without vital heat or the power of reproduction, printed,
passionless, specious mockeries. They are, in fact, not the growth of
truth, of nature, and feeling, but of state policy, of art, and
practice. To deny that Mr. Canning has arrived to a great perfection
(perhaps the greatest) in the manufacture of these sort of
_common-places_, elegant, but somewhat tarnished, imposing, but not
solid, would, we think, show a want of candour: to affirm that he has
ever done anything more (in his serious attempts) would, we think, show
an equal want of taste and understanding.[39]
The way in which Mr. Canning gets up the staple-commodity of his
speeches appears to be this. He hears an observation on the excellence
of the English Constitution, or on the dangers of Reform and the
fickleness and headstrong humours of the people, dropped by some Member
of the House, or he meets with it in an old Debate in the time of Sir
Robert Walpole, or in Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy, which our
accomplished scholar read, of course, as the established text-book at
the University. He turns it in his mind: by dint of memory and ingenuity
he illustrates it by the application of some well-known and
well-authenticated simile at hand, such as ‘the vessel of the state,’
‘the torrent of popular fury,’ ‘the precipice of reform,’ ‘the
thunderbolt of war,’ ‘the smile of peace,’ &c. He improves the hint by
the help of a little play upon words and upon an idle fancy into an
allegory, he hooks this on to a verbal inference, which takes you by
surprise, equally from the novelty of the premises and the flatness of
the conclusion, refers to a passage in Cicero in support of his
argument, quotes his authority, relieves exhausted attention by a
sounding passage from Virgil, ‘like the morn risen on mid-noon,’ and
launches the whole freight of wisdom, wit, learning, and fancy, on the
floor of St. Stephen’s Chapel, where it floats and glitters amidst the
mingled curiosity and admiration of both sides of the House—
‘Scylla heard,
And fell Charybdis murmur’d soft applause.’
Beneath the broad and gilded chandelier that throws its light upon ‘the
nation’s Great Divan,’ Mr. Canning piles the lofty harangue, high
over-arched with metaphor, dazzling with epithets, sparkling with
jests—take it out of doors, or examine it by the light of common sense,
and it is no more than a paltry string of sophisms, of trite truisms,
and sorry buffooneries. There is also a House-of-Commons jargon as well
as a scholastic pedantry in this gentleman’s style of oratory, which is
very displeasing to all but professional ears. ‘The Honourable and
Learned Gentleman,’ and ‘his Honourable and Gallant Friend,’ are trolled
over the tongue of the Honourable Speaker, ‘loud as a trumpet with a
silver sound,’ and fill up the pauses of the sense or the gaps in the
logic with a degree of burlesque self-complacency and pompous inanity.
Mr. Canning speaks by rote; and if the words he utters become the mouth
and round a period well, he cares little how cheaply he comes by them,
or how dear they cost the country! Such mechanic helps to style and
technical flourishes and trappings of upstart self-importance are,
however, unworthy of the meanest underling of office.
There is, notwithstanding, a facility, a brilliancy, and an elegance in
Mr. Canning’s general style, always graceful, never abrupt, never
meagre, never dry, copious without confusion, dignified without
stiffness, perspicuous yet remote from common life, that must excite
surprise in an _extempore_ speaker. Mr. Canning, we apprehend, is _not_
an _extempore_ speaker. He only makes set speeches on set occasions. He
indeed hooks them in as answers to some one that has gone before him in
the debate, by taking up and commenting on a single sentence or so, but
he immediately recurs to some old and favourite topic, launches into the
middle of the stream, or mounts upon the _high horse_, and rides it to
the end of the chapter. He never (that we are aware of) grappled with a
powerful antagonist, overthrew him on the spot, or contested the point
with him foot to foot. Mr. Canning’s replies are _evasions_. He indeed
made a capital and very deservedly admired reply to Sir John Coxe
Hippesley; but Sir John had given notice of all his motions a month
beforehand, and Mr. Canning had only to lie in ambush for him with a
whole magazine of facts, arguments, alliterations, quotations, jests,
and squibs, prepared ready to explode and blow him up into the air in an
instant. In this manner he contrives to slip into the debate and speak
to the question, as if he had lately entered the House and heard the
arguments on the other side stated for the first time in his life. He
has conned his speeches over for a week or a month previously, but he
gives these premeditated effusions the effect of witty impromptus—the
spontaneous ebullitions of the laughter or indignation or lofty
enthusiasm of the moment. His manner tells this. It is that of a person
trying to recollect a speech, and reciting it from beginning to end with
studied gesture, and in an emphatic but monotonous and somewhat affected
tone of voice, rather than of a person uttering words and thoughts that
have occurred to him for the first time, and hurried away by an
involuntary impulse, speaking with more or less hesitation, faster or
slower, and with more or less passion, according as the occasion
requires.
Mr. Canning is a _conventional_ speaker; he is an _optional_ politician.
He has a ready and splendid assortment of arguments upon all ordinary
questions: he takes that side or view of a question that is dictated by
his vanity, his interest, or his habits, and endeavours to make the best
he can of it. Truth, liberty, justice, humanity, war or peace,
civilization or barbarism, are things of little consequence, except for
him to make speeches upon them. He thinks ‘the worse the better reason,’
if he can only make it appear so to others; and in the attempt to
confound and mislead, he is greatly assisted by really perceiving no
difference himself. It is not what a thing is, but what he can say about
it, that is ever uppermost in his mind; and why should he be squeamish
or have any particular choice, since his words are all equally fine, and
delivered with equal volubility of tongue! His balanced periods are the
scale ‘that makes these odds all even.’ Our Orator does not confine
himself to any one view of a subject. He does not blind himself by any
dull prejudice: he does not tie himself down to any pedantic rules or
abstract principle. He does not listen implicitly to common sense, nor
does he follow the independent dictates of his own judgment. No, he
picks and chuses among all these, as best suits his purpose. He plucks
out the grey hairs of a question, and then again the black. He shifts
his position; it is a _ride-and-tie_ system with him. He mounts
sometimes behind prejudice, and sometimes behind reason. He is now with
the wise, and then again with the vulgar. He drivels, or he raves. He is
now wedded to antiquity, anon there is no innovation too startling for
him. At one time he is literal, at another visionary and romantic. At
one time the honour of the country sways him, at another its interest.
One moment he is all for liberty, and the next for slavery. First we are
to hold the balance of Europe, and to dictate and domineer over the
whole world; and then we are to creep into our shells and draw in our
horns; one moment resembling Don Quixote, and the next playing the part
of Sancho Panza! And why not? All these are topics, are _cues_ used in
the game of politics, are colours in the changeable coat of party, are
dilemmas in casuistry, are pretexts in diplomacy; and Mr. Canning has
them all at his fingers’ ends. What is there then to prevent his using
any of them as he pleases? Nothing in the world but feeling or
principle; and as Mr. Canning is not withheld by these from running his
heedless career, the application of his ingenuity and eloquence in all
such cases is perfectly arbitrary, ‘quite _optional_,’ as Mr. Liston
expresses it. A wise man would have some settled opinion, a good man
would wish well to some cause, a modest man would be afraid to act
without feeling sure of his ground, or to show an utter disregard of
right or wrong. Mr. Canning has the luckless ambition to play off the
tricks of a political rope-dancer, and he chuses to do it on the nerves
of humanity! He has called out for war during thirty years without
ceasing, ‘like importunate Guinea fowls, one note day and night;’ he has
made the House and the country ring with his vain clamour, and now for
the first time he is silent, ‘quite chopfallen.’ Like _Bottom_ in the
play, ‘he aggravates his voice like a sucking-dove;’ ‘he roars you an
’twere any nightingale!’ After the failure of Buonaparte’s Russian
expedition, Mr. Canning exclaimed exultingly, and with a daring
enthusiasm that seemed to come from the heart, that ‘he rejoiced that
barbarism had been the first to resist invasion, since it showed that
the love of national independence was an instinctive principle in every
country, superior even to the love of liberty.’ This plea served its
turn at the time, and we heard no more of it last year when the French
invaded Spain. In the war to restore Ferdinand, Mr. Canning echoed with
lungs of brass the roar of ‘the universal Spanish nation,’ and the words
Liberty and Humanity hung like music on his tongue; but when the feeble
Monarch was restored, and trod upon the necks of those who had restored
him, and threw down the mock-scaffold of the Constitution that had
raised him once more to the throne, we heard no more of ‘the universal
Spanish nation,’ of Liberty and Humanity. When the speeches of Mr.
Canning and the Manifestos of his friends had raised the power of France
to a gigantic height that hung like a precipice over our heads, we were
to go on, and fight out the battle of liberty and independence, though
‘we buried ourselves under the ruins of the civilized world.’ When a
monstrous claim that threatens the liberty and existence of the
civilized world is openly set up and acted upon, and a word from Mr.
Canning would arrest its progress in the direction in which it is moving
with obscene, ghastly, bloodstained strides, he courteously and with
great condescension reminds his hearers of ‘the inimitable satire of
Cervantes,’ that there is a proverbial expression borrowed from it, and
that the epithet _Quixotic_ would be eminently applicable to the conduct
of Great Britain if she interfered in the affairs of the continent at
the present juncture. And yet there are persons who persist in believing
that Mr. Canning is any thing more than a pivot on whose oily hinges
state policy turns easily at this moment, unheard, unseen, and that he
has views and feelings of his own that are a pledge for his integrity.
If all this were fickleness, caprice, forgetfulness, accident, folly, it
would be well or would not much signify; we should stand a chance of
sometimes being right, sometimes wrong; or if the ostensible motives
were the real ones, they would balance one another. At one time we
should be giving a _lift_ to liberty, at another we should be advancing
our own interests: now we should be generous to others, then we should
be just to ourselves, but always we should be doing something or other
fit to be done and to be named, and acting up to one or other of Mr.
Canning’s fine pleas of religion, morality, or social order. Is that the
case? Nothing was said for twenty years about the restoration of the
Bourbons as the object of the war. Who doubts it now? This cause skulked
behind the throne, and was not let out in any of Mr. Canning’s speeches.
The cloven foot was concealed by so much flaunting oratory, by so many
different facings and piebald patch-work liveries of ruinous policy or
perfidious principle, as not to be suspected. This is what makes such
persons as Mr. Canning dangerous. Clever men are the tools with which
bad men work. The march of sophistry is devious: the march of power is
one. Its means, its tools, its pretexts are various, and borrowed like
the hues of the camelion from any object that happens to be at hand: its
object is ever the same, and deadly as the serpent’s fang. It moves on
to its end with crested majesty, erect, silent, with eyes sunk and
fixed, undiverted by fear, unabashed by shame, and puny orators and
patriot mountebanks play tricks before it to amuse the crowd, till it
crushes the world in its monstrous folds. There is one word about which
nothing has been said all this while in accounting for Mr. Canning’s
versatility of mind and vast resources in reasoning—it is the word,
_Legitimacy_. It is the key with which you ‘pluck out the heart of his
mystery.’ It is the touchstone by which all his other eloquence is to be
tried, and made good or found wanting. It is the casting-weight in the
scale of sound policy, or that makes humanity and liberty kick the beam.
It is the secret of the Ayes and Noes: it accounts for the Majorities
and Minorities. It weighs down all other considerations, hides all
flaws, makes up for all deficiencies, removes all obstacles, is the
crown of success, and makes defeat glorious. It has all the power of the
Crown on its side, and all the madness of the people. All Mr. Canning’s
speeches are but so many different _periphrases_ for this one
word—_Legitimacy_. It is the foundation of his magnanimity and the
source of his pusillanimity. It is the watch-word equally of his oratory
or his silence. It is the principle of his interference and of his
forbearance. It makes him move forward, or retreat, or stand still. With
this word rounded closely in his ear, and with fifty evasions for it in
his mouth, he advances boldly to ‘the deliverance of mankind’—into the
hands of legitimate kings, but can do nothing to deliver them out of
their power. When the liberty and independence of mankind can be
construed to mean the cause of kings and the doctrine of divine right,
Mr. Canning is a virago on the side of humanity—when they mean the cause
of the people and the reducing of arbitrary power within the limits of
constitutional law, his patriotism and humanity flag, and he is
‘Of his port as meek as is a maid!’
This word makes his tropes and figures expand and blaze out like
phosphorus, or ‘freezes his spirits up like fish in a pond.’ It smites
with its petrific mace, it deadens with its torpedo touch, the Minister,
the Parliament, the people, and makes this vast, free, enlightened, and
enterprising country a body without a soul, an inert mass, like the
hulks of our men of war, which Mr. Canning saw and described so well at
Plymouth. It is the same word, that announcing the profanation of ‘the
golden round that binds the hollow temples of a king’ by unhallowed
hands, would fill their sails, and hurl their thunders on rebel shores.
It denounces war, it whispers peace. It is echoed by the groans of the
nations, is sanctified by their blood, bought with their treasure. It is
this that fills the time-rent towers of the Inquisition with tears and
piercing cries; and owing to this, Manzotti shrieks in Italian dungeons,
while Mr. Canning soothes the House of Commons with the soft accents of
liberty and peace! In fine, Mr. Canning’s success as an orator, and the
space he occupies in the public mind, are strong indications of the
Genius of the Age, in which words have obtained a mastery over things,
‘and to call evil good and good evil,’ is thought the mark of a superior
and happy spirit. An accomplished statesman in our day is one who extols
the Constitution and violates it—who talks about religion and social
order, and means slavery and superstition. The Whigs are always
reminding the reigning family of _the principles that raised them to the
throne_—the Tories labour as hard to substitute those _that will keep
them there_. There is a dilemma here, which is not easily got over; and
to solve the difficulty and reconcile the contradiction, was the great
problem of the late King’s reign. The doubtful lubricity of Mr.
Canning’s style was one of the rollers by which the transition was
effected, and Legitimacy shown to be a middle term between _divine
right_ and _the choice of the people_, compatible with both, and
convertible into either, at the discretion of the Crown, or pleasure of
the speaker. Mr. Canning does not disgrace his pretensions on other
questions. He is a sophist by profession, a palliator of every powerful
and profitable abuse. His shuffling, trifling speeches on Reform are
well-known. He sometimes adds the petulance of the school-boy to his
stock of worn-out invention; though his unfeeling taunt on the ‘revered
and ruptured Ogden,’ met with a reception which will make him cautious
how he tampers again with human infirmity and individual suffering, as
the subject of ribald jests and profligate alliteration.
The thing in which Mr. Canning excels most is wit; and his wit is
confined to parody. The _Rejected Addresses_ have been much and
deservedly admired; but we do not think the parodies in them, however
ingenious or ludicrous, are to be compared with those in the ‘_Poetry of
the Anti-Jacobin_,’ and some of the very best of these are by Mr.
Canning. Among others are, we believe, the _German Play_, and the
imitation of Mr. Southey’s _Sapphics_. Much as we admire, we do not
wonder at Mr. Canning’s excellence in this department. Real, original
wit, he has none; for that implies sense and feeling, and an insight
into the real differences of things; but from a want of sympathy with
anything but forms and _common-places_, he can easily let down the sense
of others so as to make _nonsense_ of it. He has no enthusiasm or
sensibility to make him overlook the meanness of a subject, or a little
irregularity in the treatment of it, from the interest it excites: to a
mind like his, the serious and affecting is a kind of natural burlesque.
It is a matter of course for him to be struck with the absurdity of the
romantic or singular in any way, to whom every thing out of the beaten
track is absurd; and ‘to turn what is serious into farce’ by
transferring the same expressions to perfectly indifferent and therefore
contemptible subjects. To make any description or sentiment ludicrous,
it is only necessary to take away all feeling from it: the ludicrous is
ready-made to Mr. Canning’s hands. The poetry, the heart-felt interest
of every thing escapes through his apprehension, like a snake out of its
skin, and leaves the slough of parody behind it. Any thing more light or
worthless cannot well be imagined.[40]
THE DANDY SCHOOL.
_The Examiner._] [_November 18, 1827._
Vivian Grey is dedicated to the Best and Greatest of men, as if the
Illustrious Person who will take this compliment to himself approved of
the sentiments contained in it. Are ushers odious to the Best and
Greatest of men? Does he hate the great mass of his subjects, and scorn
all those beyond Temple-bar? Is he King only of the Dandies, and Monarch
of the West? We scarcely believe it. This volume with its impertinent
dedication is no more expressive of the sentiments of his heart than the
_Austrian Catechism_, dedicated in like manner, would be characteristic
of the principles of his reign. Oh! Mr. Grey, you should have been more
humble—you should have inscribed your work to the best-dressed Man in
his Majesty’s dominions—or to Jack Ketch.
It was formerly understood to be the business of literature to enlarge
the bounds of knowledge and feeling; to direct the mind’s eye beyond
the present moment and the present object; to plunge us in the world
of romance, to connect different languages, manners, times together;
to wean us from the grossness of sense, the illusions of self-love;—by
the aid of imagination, to place us in the situations of others and
enable us to feel an interest in all that strikes them; and to make
books the faithful witnesses and interpreters of nature and the human
heart. Of late, instead of this liberal and useful tendency, it has
taken a narrower and more superficial tone. All that we learn from it
is the servility, egotism, and upstart pretensions of the writers.
Instead of transporting you to faery-land or into the _middle ages_,
you take a turn down Bond Street or go through the mazes of the dance
at Almack’s. You have no new inlet to thought or feeling opened to
you; but the passing object, the topic of the day (however insipid or
repulsive) is served up to you with a self-sufficient air, as if you
had not already had enough of it. You dip into an Essay or a Novel,
and may fancy yourself reading a collection of quack or fashionable
advertisements:—Macassar Oil, Eau de Cologne, Hock and Seltzer Water,
Otto of Roses, _Pomade Divine_ glance through the page in inextricable
confusion, and make your head giddy. Far from extending your
sympathies, they are narrowed to a single point, the admiration of the
folly, caprice, insolence, and affectation of a certain class;—so that
with the exception of people who ride in their carriages, you are
taught to look down upon the rest of the species with indifference,
abhorrence, or contempt. A school-master in a black coat is a
monster—a tradesman and his wife who eat cold mutton and pickled
cabbage are wretches to be hunted out of society. That is the end and
moral of it: it is part and parcel of a system. The _Dandy School_
give the finishing touch to the principles of paternal government.
First comes the political sycophant, and makes the people over to
their rulers as a property in perpetuity; but then they are to be
handled tenderly, and need not complain, since the sovereign is the
father of his people, and we are to be all one family of love. So says
the _Austrian Catechism_. Then comes the literary sycophant to finish
what the other had begun; and the poor fools of people having been
caught in the trap of plausible professions, he takes off the mask of
_paternity_, treats them as of a different species instead of members
of the same family, loads them with obloquy and insult, and laughs at
the very idea of any fellow feeling with or consideration towards
them, as the height of bad taste, weakness, and vulgarity. So say Mr.
Theodore Hook and the author of _Vivian Grey_. So says not Sir Walter.
Ever while you live, go to a man of genius in preference to a dunce;
for let his prejudices or his party be what they may, there is still a
saving grace about him, for he himself has something else to trust to
besides his subserviency to greatness to raise him from
insignificance. He takes you and places you in a cottage or a cavern,
and makes you feel the deepest interest in it, for you feel all that
its inmates feel. The _Dandy School_ tell you all that a dandy would
feel in such circumstances, viz. that he was not in a drawing-room or
at Long’s. Or if he does forfeit his character for a moment, he at
most brings himself to patronise humanity, condescends to the
accidents of common life, touches the pathetic with his pen as if it
were with a pair of tongs, and while he just deigns to notice the
existence or endure the infirmities of his fellow-creatures,
indemnifies his vanity by snatching a conscious glance at his own
person and perfections. Whatever is going on, he himself is the hero
of the scene; the distress (however excruciating) derives its chief
claim to attention from the singular circumstance of his being
present; and he manages the whole like a piece of private theatricals
with an air of the most absolute _nonchalance_ and decorum. The WHOLE
DUTY OF MAN is turned into a butt and bye-word, or like Mr. Martin’s
bill for humanity to animals, is a pure voluntary, a caprice of
effeminate sensibility: the great business of life is a kind of
masquerade or melo-drame got up for effect and by particular desire of
the Great. We soon grow tired of nature so treated, and are glad to
turn to the follies and fopperies of high life, into which the writer
enters with more relish, and where he finds himself more at home. So
Mr. Croker (in his place in the House of Commons) does not know where
Bloomsbury Square is: thus affecting to level all the houses in the
metropolis that are not at the court-end, and leaving them tenantless
by a paltry sneer, as if a plague had visited them. It is no wonder
that his _protégés_ and understrappers out of doors should echo this
official impertinence—draw the line still closer between the East and
West-end—arrest a stray sentiment at the corner of a street, relegate
elegance to a fashionable square—annihilate all other enjoyments, all
other pretensions but those of their employers—reduce the bulk of
mankind to a cypher, and make all but a few pampered favourites of
fortune dissatisfied with themselves and contemptible to one another.
The reader’s mind is so varnished over with affectation that not an
avenue to truth or feeling is left open, and it is stifled for want of
breath. Send these people across the Channel who make such a fuss
about the East and West-end, and no one can find out the
difference.[41] The English are not a nation of _dandies_; nor can
John Bull afford (whatever the panders to fashion and admirers of
courtly graces may say to the contrary) to rest all his pretensions
upon that. He must descend to a broader and more manly level to keep
his ground at all. Those who would persuade him to build up his fame
on frogged coats or on the embellishments of a snuff-box, he should
scatter with one loud roar of indignation and trample into the earth
like grasshoppers, as making not only a beast but an ass of him.
A writer of this accomplished stamp, comes forward to tell you, not how
his hero feels on any occasion, for he is above that, but how he was
dressed, and makes him a mere lay-figure of fashion with a few pert,
current phrases in his mouth. The Sir Sedley Clarendels and Meadowses of
a former age are become the real fine gentlemen of this. Then he gives
you the address of his heroine’s milliner, lest any shocking surmise
should arise in your mind of the possibility of her dealing with a
person of less approved taste, and also informs you that the quality eat
fish with silver forks. This is all he knows about the matter: is this
all they feel? The fact is new to him: it is old to them. It is so new
to him and he is so delighted with it, that provided a few select
persons eat fish with silver forks, he considers it a circumstance of no
consequence if a whole country starves: but these privileged persons are
not surely thinking all the time and every day of their lives of that
which Mr. Theodore Hook has never forgotten since he first witnessed it,
viz. that _they eat their fish with a silver fork_. What then are they
thinking of in their intervals of leisure—what are their feelings that
_we_ can be supposed to know nothing of? Will Mr. Theodore Hook, who is
‘comforted with their bright radiance, though not in their sphere,’
condescend to give us a glimpse of these, that we may admire their real
elegance and refinement as much as he does a frogged coat or silver
fork? It is cruel in him not to do so. ‘The _court_, as well as we, may
chide him for it.’ He once criticised a city feast with great minuteness
and bitterness, in which (as it appears) the side-board is ill-arranged,
the footman makes a blunder, the cook has sent up a dish too little or
too highly seasoned. Something is wanting, as Mr. Hook insinuates is
necessarily the case whenever people in the neighbourhood of Russell
square give dinners. But that something is not the manners or
conversation of gentlemen—this never enters his head—but something that
the butler, the cook or the valet of people of fashion could have
remedied quite as well (to say the least) as their masters. It is here
the cloven foot, the under-bred tone, the undue admiration of external
circumstances breaks out and betrays the writer. Mr. Hook has a
fellow-feeling with low life or rather with vulgarity aping gentility,
but he has never got beyond the outside of what he calls _good society_.
He can lay the cloth or play the buffoon after dinner—but that is the
utmost he can pretend to. We have in _Sayings and Doings_ and in _Vivian
Grey_ abundance of Lady Marys and Lady Dorothys, but they are titles
without characters, or the blank is filled up with the most trite
impertinence. So a young linen-draper or attorney’s clerk from the
country, who had gained a thirty thousand pound prize in the lottery and
wished to set up for a fine gentleman, might learn from these Novels
what hotel to put up at, what watering place to go to, what hatter,
hosier, tailor, shoemaker, _friseur_ to employ, what part of the town he
should be seen in, what theatre he might frequent; but how to behave,
speak, look, feel and think in his new and more aspiring character he
would not find the most distant hint in the gross caricatures or flimsy
sketches of the most mechanical and shallow of all schools. It is really
as if, in lieu of our royal and fashionable ‘Society of Authors,’ a
deputation of tailors, cooks, lacqueys, had taken possession of
Parnassus, and had appointed some Abigail out of place perpetual
Secretary. The Congreves, Wycherleys, and Vanbrughs of former days gave
us some taste of gentility and courtly refinement in their plays:
enchanted us with their _Millamants_, or made us bow with respect to
their _Lord Townleys_. It would seem that the race of these is over, or
that our modern scribes have not had access to them on a proper
footing—that is, not for their talents or conversation, but as
mountebanks or political drudges.
At first it appears strange that persons of so low a station in life
should be seized with such a rage to inveigh against themselves, and
make us despise all but a few arrogant people, who pay them ill for what
they do. But this is the natural process of servility, and we see all
valets and hangers-on of the Great do the same thing. The powdered
footman looks down on the rabble that dog his master’s coach as beneath
his notice. He feels the one little above him, and the other (by
consequence) infinitely below him. Authors at present would be thought
gentlemen, as gentlemen have a fancy to turn authors. The first thing a
_dandy scribbler_ does is to let us know he is dressed in the height of
the fashion (otherwise we might imagine him some miserable garretteer,
distinguished only by his poverty and learning)—and the next thing he
does is to make a supercilious allusion to some one who is not so well
dressed as himself. He then proceeds to give us a sparkling account of
his Champagne and of his box at the Opera. A newspaper hack of this
description also takes care to inform us that the people at the Opera in
general, the Mr. Smiths and the Mr. Browns, are not good enough for him,
and that he shall wait to begin his critical lucubrations, till the
stars of fashion meet there in crowds and constellations! At present, it
should seem that a seat on Parnassus conveys a title to a box at the
Opera, and that Helicon no longer runs water but champagne. Literature,
so far from supplying us with intellectual resources to counterbalance
immediate privations, is made an instrument to add to our impatience and
irritability under them, and to nourish our feverish, childish
admiration of external show and grandeur. This rage for fashion and for
fashionable writing seems becoming universal, and some stop must be put
to it, unless it cures itself by its own excessive folly and insipidity.
It is well that the Editor of the _John Bull_ wrote the _Sayings and
Doings_. It solves the problem with how small a quantity of wit a person
without character or principle may set up for a political mouthpiece.
Nothing but the dullness of the one could account for the impudence and
the effect of the other. No one who could write a line of wit or sense
could bring himself from any inducement to repeat the same nickname, the
same stale jest, for weeks and months together. If the Editor of the
_John Bull_ had any resources in himself beyond the most vulgar _slang_
and hackneyed abuse, if he had any sense of shame at resorting to the
same wretched pun or more wretched calumny, week after week, as he is
paid for it, he would be unfit for his task: he would no longer be the
complete and unequivocal organ of the dulness, prejudices, malice, and
callous insensibility of his party. No argument tells with a minister of
State like calling a man a Jacobin and a Reformer for the fortieth time:
the sleek Divine chuckles at a dirty allusion for the fortieth time with
unabated glee. Mr. Hook, among wits, might be called _the parson’s
nose_: or perhaps the title of Mr. Vivacity Dull would suit him as well.
What a dearth of invention, what a want of interest, what a fuss about
nothing, what a dreary monotony, what a pert _slipslop_ jargon runs
through the whole series of the author’s tales! But what a persevering,
unabashed confidence, what a broad-shouldered self-complacency, what
robust health, what unrelenting nerves he must possess to inflict them
on his readers! Not one ray, not one line—but all the refuse of the
_Green-room_, the locomotions of a booth at a fair, the humours of a
Margate hoy, the grimace of a jack-pudding, the sentimentalities and
hashed-up scandal of a lady’s maid, the noise and hurry of a chaise and
four, the _ennui_ and vacancy of a return post-chaise! The smart
_improvisatori_ turns out the most wearisome of interminable writers. At
a moment’s warning he can supply something that is worth nothing, and in
ten times the space he can spin out ten times the quantity of the same
poor trash. Would the public read _Sayings and Doings_? Would Mr.
Colburn print them? No, but they are known to be the work of the Editor
of the _John Bull_, of that great and anonymous abstract of wit, taste,
and patriotism, who, like a Ministerial trull, calls after you in the
street, dubs Mr. Waithman Lord Waithman, cries _Humbug_ whenever
humanity is mentioned; invades the peace of private life, out of regard
to religion and social order; cuts a throat out of good-nature, and
laughs at it; and claps his Majesty familiarly on the shoulder, as the
best of Kings! Do you wonder at the face, the gravity, the impenetrable
assurance required to do all this, and to do it not once, but once a
week? Read _Sayings and Doings_, and the wonder ceases; you see it is
because he can do nothing else! He will feel obliged to us for this
character: his patrons were beginning to forget his qualifications.
ACTORS AND THE PUBLIC
_The Examiner._] [_March 16, 1828._
We once happened to be present, and indeed to assist in the following
conversation between a young lady and an elderly gentleman pretty much
of our own standing in such matters. ‘I believe, papa, grand-papa did
not think so highly of Mr. Garrick as most people did?’ ‘Why, my dear,
your grand-papa was not one of those who liked to differ very openly
with the world; but he had an opinion of his own, which he imparted only
to a few particular friends. He really thought Mr. Garrick was a quack,
a better sort of Barthelemy-fair actor. He used to say (for he was a man
that knew the world) ‘that the real secret of Mr. Garrick’s success was,
that his friend Bate Dudley had puffed him into notice, as he afterwards
did the Prince of Wales.’ We on this observed, in our individual
capacity, that at least the dispenser of popularity had been more
successful in the one case than in the other. ‘I believe, papa, you
yourself were never a great admirer of Mrs. Siddons?’ ‘Why no, my dear,
one does not like to say those things, but she always appeared to me one
of the great impositions on the world. There was nothing in her, a mere
tragedy-queen.’—‘Pray, ma’am, have you read Sir Walter’s last
novel?’—‘Why no, I really cannot say I have. I have tried to get through
one or two, but I find them so dry I have given up the attempt. I like
“Sayings and Doings” much better. Pray, sir, can you tell me the name of
the author?’ ‘Mr. Theodore Hook.’—‘Bless me, what a pretty name; I wish
papa would invite him to dinner.’—Here we have the genealogy of modern
taste. ’Fore gad, they were all in a story—three generations in
succession thinking nothing of Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, and the author of
‘Waverley,’ and preferring Mr. Theodore Hook before the quintessence of
truth and nature. And such is the opinion of nine-tenths of the world,
if we could get at their real thoughts. The vulgar in their inmost souls
admire nothing but the vulgar; the common-place admire nothing but the
common-place; the superficial nothing but the superficial. How should it
be otherwise? The rest is cant and affectation: and as to those who know
better and have pretensions themselves, they are actuated by envy and
malice, or some preconceived theory of their own. Instead of a great
actor, for instance, they are looking for a hat and feather, are
disappointed at not finding what they fondly expect, and more
disappointed still at coming in collision with a power that shocks all
their previous sympathies, rules, and definitions. Let a great man ‘fall
into misfortune’ (like _Captain Macheath_) and then you discover the
real dispositions of the reading, seeing, believing, loving public
towards their pretended idol. See how they set upon him the moment he is
down, how they watch for the smallest slip, the first pretext to pick a
quarrel with him, how slow they are to acknowledge worth, how they never
forgive an error, how they trample upon and tear ‘to tatters, to very
rags,’ the common frailties, how they overlook and malign the
transcendant excellence which they can neither reach nor find a
substitute for! Who has praised Sir Walter, who has not had a _fling_ at
him, since he lost all that he was worth? Oh! if he would but write the
‘Life of George IV.!’ Who that had felt Kean’s immeasurable superiority
in _Othello_, was not glad to see him brought to the ordinary level in a
vulgar _crim. con_? No: a man of true genius and common observation,
instead of being disappointed at not carrying the prize by acclamation,
and exciting gratitude equal to the pleasure he gives, ought to be
thankful that he is not hooted from the stage, and torn in pieces by the
rabble, as soon as he quits his lair of solitary obscurity. Every man of
that sort is assuredly looked upon by the vulgar as having dealings with
the devil, because they do not see ‘the spells, the mighty magic he hath
used’ and they would make an _auto-da-fé_ of him if they durst, as they
formerly burnt a witch! They contrive to torture him enough, as it is.
What was it made men burn astrologers and alchemists in former times,
but the sense of power and knowledge which the illiterate hind did not
possess? Are the _reading_ different from the _unreading_ public?
Believe it not. But this power was supposed to be exercised for evil
purposes, whereas genius has a beneficial influence. _That_ doubles the
obligation, and fixes the ingratitude. The critical public view the
appearance of an original mind with the sidelong glances and the _doux
yeux_ with which the animals at Exeter-’Change regard the strange
visitants; but if any one trusting to the amiable looks and playful
gambols of the one or the other opens the door of his own folly to let
them out, he will soon see how it will fare with him. There are a
million of people in this single metropolis, each of whom would
willingly stand on the pedestal which you occupy. Will they forgive you
for thrusting them from their place, or not triumph if they see you
totter? Beware how you climb the slippery ascent; do not neglect your
footing when you are there. Such is the natural feeling; and then comes
the philosophical critic, and tells you with a face of lead and brass
that ‘no more indulgence is to be shewn to the indiscretions of a man of
genius than to any other!’ What! you make him drunk and mad with
applause and then blame him for not being sober, you lift him to a
pinnacle, and then say he is not to be giddy, you own he is to be a
creature of impulse, and yet you would regulate him like a machine, you
expect him to be all fire and air, to wing the empyrean, and to take you
with him, and yet you would have him a muck-worm crawling the earth! But
it is a Scotch critic who says this—let us pass on. If an actor is
indeed six feet high, with a face like a pasteboard mask, he may pass in
the crowd and will have the mob on his side; but if he can only boast
‘The fiery soul, that working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o’er informed the tenement of clay’—
he stands in equal peril of the unthinking many, and the fastidious few.
Or, if an actress is a foreigner, she may escape ‘the envy of less
happier lands,’ and be encouraged as a luxury for the great—be wafted to
us on a name, and take back with her our sighs and tears. Yet how frail
is the tenure of fashion! Where is Madame Catalani now? Where does the
siren’s voice flutter in the sunshine of her smiles?—
It was some time since we had seen Mr. Kean’s _Shylock_. Fourteen years
ago we were desired to go and see a young actor from the country attempt
the part at Drury-lane; and, as was expected, add another to the list of
failures. When we got there, there were about fifty people in the pit,
and there was that sense of previous damnation which a thin house
inspires. When the new candidate came on, there was a lightness in his
step, an airy buoyancy and self-possession different from the sullen,
dogged, _gaol-delivery_ look of the traditional _Shylocks_ of the stage.
A vague expectation was excited, and all went on well; but it was not
till he came to the part, when leaning on his staff, he tells the tale
of Jacob and his flock with the garrulous ease of old age and an
animation of spirit, that seems borne back to the olden time, and to the
privileged example in which he exults, that it was plain that a man of
genius had lighted on the stage. To those who had the spirit and candour
to hail the lucky omen, the recollection of that moment of startling,
yet welcome surprise, will always be a proud and satisfactory one. We
wished to see after a lapse of time and other changes, whether this
first impression would still keep ‘true touch,’ and we find no
difference. Besides the excellence of the impassioned parts of Mr.
Kean’s acting, there is a flexibility and indefiniteness of outline
about it, like a figure with a landscape back-ground—he is in Venice
with his money-bags, his daughter and his injuries, but his thoughts
take wing to the East, his voice swells and deepens at the mention of
his sacred tribe and ancient law, and he dwells delighted on any
digression to distant times and places, as a relief to his vindictive
and rooted purposes. Of all Mr. Kean’s performances, we think this the
most faultless and least _mannered_, always excepting his _Othello_,
which is equally perfect and twenty times more powerful. Mr. Kean
succeeded so well in this part in which he came out, that with the
diffidence of the abilities of others so natural to us, it was concluded
by the managers he could do nothing else, and he was kept in it so long
that he had nearly failed in _Richard_, till the dying scene bore down
all opposition by a withering spell, and as if a preternatural being had
visibly taken possession of his form, and made the enthusiasm the
greater from the uncertainty that had before prevailed. The _Sir Giles
Overreach_ stamped him with the players and the town, and _Othello_ with
the critics. He who has done a single thing that others never forget,
and feel ennobled whenever they think of, need not regret his having
been, and may throw aside this fleshly coil, like any other worn-out
part, grateful and contented!
FRENCH PLAYS
_The Examiner._] [_March 23, 1828._
Monsieur Perlet is certainly a pearl of an actor. He does every part
well, and every part varied from another. He is, however, a jewel set in
lead: the rest of the company to which he belongs are but indifferent.
He is exactly what a London _star_, engaged for a few nights to gratify
the ‘upturned eyes of wondering audiences,’ is in a tattered troop of
country-actors. Those who fancy that they see here a thorough sample of
French acting, the _elite_ of the capital of civilised society, are
mistaken; and we perhaps should not undeceive them, but that we can
assure them that they have a pleasure to come, something to look forward
to, and something to look back upon, and which (we believe) can be found
only at Paris. Oh! Paris, thou hast the Louvre, the garden of the
Thuilleries, and the _Thêatre Français_; Madame Pasta we share by turns
with you, as the sun sheds its light on either world—the rest is
barbarous and common. A friend of ours once received a letter from a
friend of his, dated ROME, with three marks of admiration after it,
which he answered by writing LONDON, with four marks of admiration after
it: ‘and why shouldn’t he, since we had St. Paul’s, the Cartoons, the
Elgin Marbles, and the Bridges?’ As to the three first, they were not
ours; and as to the fourth, the reasoning puts me a little in mind of
Sir William Curtis’s, who remarked that ‘it was very good of God, that
wherever there was a great city, he had made a river by the side of it!’
There was another proud distinction, which our patriotic friend did not
enumerate, though it was a thumping make-weight in the scale, and might
have claimed a fifth mark of admiration, which was, that he himself was
there. This is the triumphant argument in every Englishman’s
imagination,—wherever he is, is the centre of gravity; whatever he calls
his own, is the standard of excellence. It is our desire to shake off
this feeling as much as possible that makes us frequent the theatre at
the English Opera-house, and try (all we can) to ‘leave our country and
ourselves’ at the door. Why in truth should an English Nobleman be
convinced in himself and speak upon that conviction in his place in
Parliament, that because he keeps a French cook, the French have no
genius for anything but cookery? Or why, my dear Madam, should you have
taken it in your head, that because you wear a French bonnet, there is
nothing in Paris but milliners’ girls who are no better than they should
be? Nay, that is what you really imagine, however you may deny it—but be
assured, good, gentle, honest, reflecting reader of either sex, who feel
your own existence so solid that every thing else is a fable to it, or
your own virtue so clear that everything else is a spot to it, that
there are things out of England besides what are imported into it—that
French women not only make caps and bonnets, but wear them with a
peculiar grace; that they have eyes glancing from under them full of
fire and discretion; that they do not make a false step at every turn,
though they do not walk like Englishwomen, that is, as if their limbs
were an incumbrance to them; that the Chamber of Deputies think your
Lordship’s speeches dry and tasteless, for want of a little French
seasoning; that there are cities not built of bricks, faces not made of
dough, a language that has a meaning though it is not ours, and virtue
that is neither a statue nor a mask! For instance, we think good-manners
is one part of ethics, and we do wish _en passant_ that our fine
gentlemen at the play would not loll on their seats, whistle, and thrust
their sticks nearly in your face to show their superiority to the
vulgar; and that those of the other sex, who are admitted on their good
behaviour could be prevailed on not to talk and laugh so loud, not to
nod or wink, not to slap their acquaintance on the back, or shut the
doors with such violence after them, to attract admirers and shew an
independent spirit. Strange that the English notion of independence
consists in giving offence to and displaying your contempt for others!
They order these things better in France, where they consult decency of
appearance at least, and Venus is a prude in public—not a hoyden or a
bully!
‘Our Cupid is a blackguard boy,
That thrusts his link in every face.’
This brings us back to the French Theatre. As we do not approve every
thing foreign or French, we are more bound to acknowledge and do justice
to what we do like. _Imprimis_, we abhor French pictures. In the second
place, we tolerate French tragedy. Thirdly, we adore French comedy. The
characteristic of this in its best state, and as compared with our
utmost efforts in the same line, is, that it is equally perfect
throughout; and as that great philosopher of idleness (Mr. Coleridge)
once wisely and wittily observed, ‘there is something in the idea of
perfection exceedingly satisfactory to the mind of man.’ It is not as
with us at present (it was not always so—or is it the haze of time, the
tints of youth that made the difference?) where the most we can expect
is one or two actors of disproportioned excellence, and all the others
merely to fill the stage; but there all are in their place, and all are
first-rate. Oh! it is a fine thing to see one of Moliere’s comedies
acted (as they should be) at the _Thêatre Français_, with the sense of
every pregnant line fully understood and developed, with the passion and
character delineated to the life, every situation painted, and every
shade and difference of absurdity hit off and realised; and not only
this, but the whole so managed, with such studious attention to the
public and respect to the art, that not the least bit of costume is out
of place, and (what is more important) that every part is filled by an
actor or actress not only who comprehends and enters into the spirit of
it, but who seems made for it in person, gesture and features, as if
they had been cast in a dramatic mould, or kept in a glass-case for that
purpose from the first representation to the present day. Thus the long,
nasal speeches are delivered by an actor with the prominent, pasteboard
nose and arched eyebrows of the Oratory, and whose unusual height and
shambling figure serve him as it were for a rostrum; the poetical
dedicator in the _Misanthrope_ has sparkling eyes and teeth, smiling
delighted on his patron and himself; the confidante of _Celimene_, in
the same piece, is slender, fragile, timid in appearance, a contrast to
the firm precision and maturer _enbon-point_ of Mademoiselle Mars; Orgon
has a little, round, dimpled, credulous face, and easy contented
corpulence; the _Tartuffe_ has the sneaking sanctity of a monk and the
grin of a monkey. Thus you have not only the poet’s verse exactly
expressed and recited; but you have, in addition, the natural history of
the part, the drapery, the grouping. The age of Louis XIV. revives again
in all its masqued splendour; the folding-doors are thrown open, and you
see men and women playing the fool deliciously, ‘new manners and the
pomp of elder days,’ court-airs, court-dresses, the strut, the shrug,
the bow, the curtsey, the paint, the powder, the patches, the perfume,
the laced ruffles, the diamond buckle, the hoop-petticoat. Happy time!
Enviable time to think of! When vanity and folly expanded in full bloom,
and were spread out ostentatiously like the figures in a gaudy tapestry,
instead of being folded up and thrust into a corner by the hand of a
cynic and austere philosophy; when personal appearance and amorous
intrigue were all in all; when a marquis stalked the God of his own
idolatry, and _Madame la Marquise_ was held for something divine by
_Monsieur Jourdain_; when the whole creation was supposed to be
concentred in the fantastic circle of lords and ladies, and the
universal, the abstract, and the critical were held in the utter
contempt which they deserve—and which they receive at the hands both of
the ignorant and the adept! Nothing that we know of is a specific for
conjuring up this shadow of the past, and making you (if you are in the
mood) feel like a great booby school-boy, with a large _bouquet_ at your
breast, or an antiquated fop with a bag-wig and sword—but sitting at the
_Thêatre Français_ with Mademoiselle Mars and the whole _corps
dramatique_ drawn up on the stage. Then you have the very thing before
you: it glitters in your eyes; it tingles in your ears, it sinks into
the heart, and makes warm tears roll down the cheek of those, who have
ever felt either what the present or the past is! It is said to be an
ill wind that blows nobody good; and probably we owe it to the very
exclusion of French players from general society, and their being
compelled in self-defence to devote themselves wholly to their
profession, that they keep up this sort of traditional copy of the
manners, peculiarities, and tone of another age, ‘unmixed with baser
matter.’ We could wish that a certain happy-spirited writer (who first
gave the true _pine-apple_ flavour to theatrical criticism, making it a
pleasant mixture of sharp and sweet) would resume the subject of the age
of Charles II. (our nearest approach to that of Louis XIV.) and as he
has shocked the upstart petulance of _Some of his Contemporaries_,
restore in his inimitable careless manner the wit and graces of a former
period.
We expected to have seen Monsieur Perlet on Thursday evening in the
_Bourgeois Gentilhomme_; and to make sure of the ground, had read three
acts in the morning with great care and an anticipated relish of the
acting. We were therefore disappointed; and the reader must accept of a
rhapsody in lieu of a criticism. We think it bad policy to have many new
pieces; for the English part of the audience in general require to
peruse the text beforehand in order to follow the performance. We like
to know exactly what we are about; and it is both a pride and a pleasure
to have an excuse for rubbing up our acquaintance with an old and
esteemed author. The universality of the French language is not an
unalloyed advantage to them: it saves the trouble of learning any other,
but the necessity of acquiring a new language is like the necessity of
acquiring a new sense. It is an increase of knowledge and liberality. We
are proud of understanding their authors. Why do they despise ours?
Because they are ignorant of them. If they had known what ‘stuff’ we are
made of, very likely we should not have beaten them. M. Perlet played
the part of a strolling comedian in the new piece of the _Landau_, and
eats and drinks in an admirable _bravura_ style at a gentleman’s house
on the road, where he passes himself off as a great man, and with that
lively absorption in the present enjoyment and disregard of the
consequences of his imposture, which are, we suspect, national traits.
In the _Landes_ which followed, he was equally happy in a poor,
frightened servant, and expressed the surprises of fear and the tricks
and disjointed pantomime antics, to which it resorted to screen itself,
with admirable quaintness and drollery. The swagger and self-possession
of the one character was totally opposed to the imbecility and
helplessness of the other. Madame Falcoz made her first appearance in
the _Tyran Domestique_ as _Madame Valmont_. She is an elegant woman and
an interesting actress, though with too much appearance of _still-life_.
This is not the case with Madame Daudel. She has all the vivacity and
bustle of a chambermaid. She ought always to come in with a broom in her
hand; or rather, it is quite unnecessary.
FRENCH PLAYS—(_Continued_)
_The Examiner._] [_March 30, 1828._
We exhausted that subject last week, and were complimented upon it,
which we took ill. Probably advisable to be ill this week, to let our
absence be felt, or to make up with scraps and quotation. To transcribe
four different accounts of the _Tartuffe_, Sir Walter Scott’s, Mr. Leigh
Hunt’s, Monsieur Perlet’s, and one of our own, and to make it understood
that the last is the best. To remark that Monsieur Perlet, ‘that soul of
pleasure and that life of whim,’ is a provoking actor—for there is no
fault to be found with him, and to give the reader an idea of his
peculiar excellence is next to impossible. Whatever he does, his ease,
self-possession, and spirit are the same. To make it a rule not to tell
any one who asks me the plot of the _Ecole des Maris_, but to tell it
myself. Borrowers of plots are like borrowers of snuff:—every one his
own _box-keeper_. (_Ha, ha, ha!_) The laugh here comes from a friend of
ours to whom we read this, and who kept repeating the whole
evening—‘Every man his own box-keeper.’ (_Ha, ha, ha!_) Very well
indeed. _Sganarelle_ and _Ariste_ are two brothers, both of them in
years, who have two wards, _Isabelle_ and _Leonore_, whom they propose
to marry. _Sganarelle_ is an old blockhead, who brings up his intended
bride with the greatest severity, and will let her see no plays, go to
no balls, receive no visits, lest it should corrupt her manners or
divert her affection from him. He is very angry at his brother _Ariste_,
who gives full liberty to his mistress _Leonore_, and contends that
bars, bolts, female Arguses, and ill-humour are not the way to make
women in love with virtue, or to prevent their inclination from
wandering. _Sganarelle_ laughs at him, but he turns out a true prophet.
_Isabelle_, not thinking the _disagreeable_ the most _agreeable_ thing
in the world, meets with a lover (_Valere_) more to her mind than her
guardian. And here begins the interest of the plot. Having no other mode
of communication, she sends _Sganarelle_ to him, to let him know that
she is apprized of the state of his affections, and to beg him not to
persecute her with his amorous thoughts, if he has any regard for her
honour or peace of mind. He understands the hint, and sends the supposed
husband away, delighted with his confusion and repulse, who has no
sooner returned to his intended, than she desires him to go back with a
letter, which _Ariste_ has just had the assurance to send her in his
absence, full of his absurd passion. This _Sganarelle_ consents to do,
but proposes to open the letter first, which she will not allow him to
do, saying it would betray curiosity to break the seal, and no woman of
virtue should feel even a wish to know the improper sentiments
entertained towards her. Her guardian delivers the letter with an air of
triumph and pity for his rival, which _Valere_ reads, and finds it a
frank and passionate declaration of _Isabelle’s_ attachment to him. Not
satisfied with this, she informs _Sganarelle_ that he has a design to
carry her off by force, who goes to reproach him with the baseness of
his conduct and the pretended terror and uneasiness of his ward.
_Valere_ affirming that _Sganarelle_ has no authority to bring him these
disdainful messages from the lady, _Sganarelle_ brings them together in
his presence, when an admirable scene of _double-entendre_ follows:
_Isabelle_ declaring that she sees two objects before her, one which she
adores, the other which she abhors, _Sganarelle_ taking to himself the
preference which is intended for _Valere_, and the latter rapturously
kissing her hand behind his back, while her guardian affectionately
embraces her. But in recompense for her fondness, he proposes to marry
her the next day instead of at the end of eight days; and this driving
_Isabelle_ to despair, she takes the resolution to quit the house in the
middle of the night, but is met by her guardian, who asking the meaning
of this nocturnal expedition, she tells him that her sister has come to
her house, violently in love with _Valere_, whom she is going in search
of, to console her; but _Sganarelle_ not being satisfied with this
assignation, will not allow her to remain, and presently after turns his
own bride out of doors, thinking it to be his brother’s ward _Leonore_,
and goes with great glee to inform _Ariste_ of the adventure, and to
lecture him on the difference of their schemes of female education. In
the meantime _Leonore_ comes in from a ball, is scandalized at the story
that she hears told of her; and the Notary that _Sganarelle_ had sent
for to witness her elopement and the treachery of _Valere_, having
married him to _Isabelle_, she comes out from his house, and explains
the whole mystery to the delight of every one but _Sganarelle_.—The plot
is charming, and the style is profuse of sense and wit; but there is
this remark to be made here, as on other of Moliere’s plays, that
however elegant, ingenious, or natural, the scene must be laid in
France, that the whole passes under that empire of words, which is
confined to her airy limits, and that there is a credulous and
unqualified assent to verbal professions necessary to carry on the plot,
which can be found nowhere but in France. This comedy was correctly but
somewhat faintly represented. Mademoiselle Falcoz, who played
_Isabelle_, was dressed as we have an idea servants were formerly
dressed, with a full handkerchief and a black silk apron. Perhaps it was
the costume of young ladies at that period; but we suspect that this is
carrying literal correctness too far, where it shocks instead of
assisting the imagination, and instructing us at the expense of our
amusement, which is against the law of dramatic propriety. If the play
was not done quite as it might be, it received a brilliant comment from
the looks of some of the audience: and as the stage is a mirror to
nature, so these are a mirror to the stage itself. Bright eyes! Laughing
lips! Tell-tale eyebrows! spare us or we retire incontinently from the
French play,—‘To the woods, to the waves, to the winds we’ll complain’
of your inexorable cruelty and endless persecution!
THE THEATRES AND PASSION-WEEK
_The Examiner._] [_April 6, 1828._
This being _Passion-week_, there was no play. ‘Because thou art
virtuous, shall we not have cakes and ale?’ In truth, however, we have
no objection to this alternation of festivity and mourning: it mimics
the order of the natural world. We require a truce with pleasure as well
as pain, to enable us to endure the one or to enjoy the other: and we
must put a stop at some period or other to the whirl of dissipation,
unless we would grow quite stupid or giddy. One week out of the
fifty-two, in which the theatres shut their doors in your face, in which
the play-bills do not flaunt on either side of the way, and you are not
followed through the streets while the letter-bell is ringing in your
ears, with the importunate repetition of ‘A Bill for Covent Garden or
Drury Lane,’ is not amiss or out of reason; and the cry of ‘Hot-cross
buns’ fills up the vacancy, and dallies with the interval of suspense
not disagreeably. There is a large class of persons who only go to the
play during Easter: it is hard if we cannot stay away from it during
Passion-week. Our expectations and satisfaction are enhanced by the
short restraint put upon them, and outward prevarication with our
scruples. Without a little spice of hypocrisy or gravity the world would
lose its savour: and by the periodical mark of reprobation thus set upon
it, the play becomes a sort of pleasant sin all the rest of the year. As
for the holiday-folks, Passion-week is to them a kind of bleak desert,
beyond which they behold the land of promise,—a _ha-ha_, or line of
circumvallation round the enchanted castle of Pleasure, over which they
rush to storm the citadel with double eagerness and obstreperous glee,
escaping from the formal gloom of Ash-Wednesday and Good-Friday, into
the bright radiance of Easter-Sunday, as from the grave to a bridal, and
‘seizing their pleasures
‘With rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.’
We do not think the flutter of hope, the sparkle of joy, in the young or
old adventurers, on these occasions of mirth and licence, would be
complete, were it not for the sense of general restraint and privation
which precedes them, and makes the release from the dead pause, the
involuntary self-denial of the past week, a more precious achievement to
all parties concerned. At least, this inference is pretty plainly
discernible in the smiling looks and uneasy delight of the truant
visitors in the boxes, and the noise and uproar of the overflowing
galleries. To those who object to the disorderly interruptions of the
latter, and consider the being present at an Easter-play as vulgar on
that account, it may be proper to observe that there is no part of an
audience so quiet and attentive as the galleries after the curtain once
draws up, if it is not the fault of the actors or the author, who do not
make themselves heard or understood so far; and again, we conceive it
might be of service to dramatic writers sometimes to hazard their
persons or compromise their dignity in the gallery, to see what
impression their scenes make on hearts fresh from nature’s mint, instead
of stationing themselves in the dress-boxes, to overhear polite
whispers, or moulding their features in the glass of newspaper criticism
the next day. The tears shed in silence by these untutored spectators,
the breath held in, the convulsive sob, the eager gaze, the glance of
delight, would afford better hints and lessons how to revive the spirit
and the pathos of the primitive stage, than any instructions derived
from drivelling Jerdan or from ranting Croly—nay, than from our own
columns, the only ones, as modest Mr. Blackwood would say, worthy of the
least attention in such matters. As to the players themselves, we do not
know how Passion-week sits upon them. One would think it would be
welcome to them as a break in the routine of business, as a pause in the
wear-and-tear of life: but there is no saying. For they are so
‘stretched upon the rack of ecstasy,’ that almost any respite from it
may be scarcely endurable. The public eye, the public voice, becomes a
part of a man’s self, which he can hardly do without, even for an
instant. The player out of his part is like the dram-drinker without his
dram, the snuff-taker without his box. What organ is so sensitive as
that of vanity? What thirst so insatiable, so incessant, as that of
praise? The meagre days of Lent, one would argue previously, would be
‘gaudy-days’ to his Majesty’s servants, the drudges of public
recreation,—snatched from the town, and given to retirement and
oblivion,—brief interval to allay the feverish irritation of popular
applause, to soothe the smart of mortification and disappointment. But
no! the successful candidate thinks every moment lost in which he is
robbed of the need of admiration; the unsuccessful is impatient to
retrieve some error, to convince the public of theirs:—the hopeless
performer thinks it better to be hissed than not noticed at all. Even
the scene-shifters and candle-snuffers (to talk in the old style) fancy
themselves, in a full house and busy night, persons of importance; and
when left to themselves, must feel like fish out of water:—nothing else
but the want of the customary excitement could probably enable actors to
repeat their parts night after night: they stagger through them like
drunken men. Many of the most fortunate seem uneasy, listless, and
dissatisfied, when off the stage, because they do not see a thousand
faces beaming with delight, because they do not hear at every step the
shouts of Gods and men. Why do they not resort to Bartholomew-fair,
where they may act every half-hour during the day, and not get a wink of
sleep at night for the noise of cymbals and rattles? This is as if a man
could never be easy unless he saw his person reflected in a thousand
mirrors, or heard every word he utters repeated by a hundred echoes.
Contempt, poverty, pain, want, and ‘all the natural ills that flesh is
heir to,’ are preferable to this attainment of all that can be desired,
and the craving after more. The lady in _Love’s Labour Lost_ condemns
her lover _Biron_, for his excess of levity, ‘to jest a twelvemonth in
an hospital.’ For ourselves, we would impose it as a useful penance on
those who are spoiled by the admiration of friends, to take the stage to
the _Land’s End_, and return by themselves, so as to breathe for a few
days out of the atmosphere of habitual adulation; and as to actors (who
are anything more than _walking gentlemen_) we think they should be
bound over never to sing a song, or tell a story in private. Their
theatrical pulse is already at a hundred, without shining in company.
Those who have nothing to say but ‘what is set down for them,’ stand the
best chance for repose and moderation, and are also likely to make the
best actors. An actor has not to study his own part, but somebody
else’s, as a painter should not be taken up with himself, but his
sitters.
The account of the death of the late Mr. Conway, the actor, came this
week—a week of dole. It was melancholy enough, and must have occasioned
regret to some who had at any time commented freely on his acting. Yet
the original cause of it was not his fault, nor that of the critics—but
rather of those who pushed him forward to run the gauntlet of public
opinion, and attract a little momentary wonder and curiosity, without
his being prepared to stand the trial, or meet the consequences. Popular
favourites are too much like the innocent victims of superstition, led
out, garlanded with flowers, to slaughter and to sacrifice. This was, we
think, the case with Mr. Conway. He was a man of fine personal
appearance, of modesty, and merit; but his more than usual height, and
the disproportion between the shewiness of his figure and his genius for
the drama (though he was by no means devoid of passion or talent) which
at first made crowds of idle people run to look at and applaud him,
afterwards subjected him to unavoidable, though in one sense (and such
he felt it) unjust satire. It cannot be denied that he played _Jaffier_,
for instance, with considerable force and feeling; and had he been of
the ordinary stature (which is as necessary on the stage as in a group
of statuary) he would have been highly respectable in that and other
parts requiring a certain mixture of tenderness and vehemence. As it
was, those who had at first extolled him to the skies, now swelled the
cry against him; and the honey of adulation was naturally turned into
gall and bitterness. Young, enthusiastic, and sincere, he attributed to
malice and rooted enmity what was owing to accident, and the caprice and
levity of the world, who keep up the sense of self-importance and
excitement, by loading their thoughtless favourite with caresses one
moment, and treating him with every mark of obloquy the next. Poor
Conway was not prepared for this; he thought their admiration of him
lasting and invaluable, their desertion wounded him to the quick. He did
not know that the town was a hardened jilt, whose fondness or aversion
are equally suspicious. He retired from the conflict, but bore with him
the sense of ill-treatment which he had not knowingly merited, of
disappointed hopes, which only the waters of oblivion could wash out,
and which should deter others from encountering the same risk, who are
not sure of the victory, or are not armed with fortitude equally proof
against the homage or insults of mankind. Mr. Conway in his manners was
mild and unaffected, spirited in his conduct, and if not a scholar, was
distinguished by a love for reading and study.
CHARLES KEAN
_The Examiner._] [_April 13, 1828._
We went on Monday to see young Mr. Kean in _Lovers’ Vows_, with the
intention of expressing an opinion; but we have nothing to add in the
way of criticism to what we have already said. We will however in so
delicate a matter venture on two general remarks for our own
satisfaction, and we should hope for that of others. The first is, it
appears to us clear that Mr. Kean, _jun._, will never make so great an
actor as his father; and if not, he had better rest contented with his
father’s fame. The Marquis of Douro does not, we daresay, think of
fighting the battle of Waterloo over again: why then should the son of
Mr. Kean wish to lay up any hard-earned and doubtful theatrical laurels
of his own? The crammed pit of Covent-Garden is his Mount St. Jean: the
third act of _Othello_ should be his escutcheon and his hereditary
coat-of-arms. A pettifogging, cringing lawyer, a leader of a gang of
ruffians, is made a lord, and ennobles a race of ciphers: if this is
right, then why should not a man of genius reflect some of his glory on
those next to him, and leave the dower of his great name to his
immediate posterity? Because the gratitude of the public is insincere,
and nobility a mere state-trick. It is not sentiment, but servility,
that inclines us to pay respect to a long line of nobles or of princes.
Take from the Marquis of Douro his estate of Strathfieldsay, and in a
few years he might be in the King’s Bench, and the _Times_ newspaper
would not subscribe five pounds to help him out. If Mr. Kean had left a
hundred thousand pounds behind him, his son might have sat for a close
borough, or have made a ‘vulgar’ Minister of State. We _do_ think there
should be some distinctive mark, some ribbon of a Legion of Honour, with
the smallest possible reversion of independence, some Tyburn ticket of
merit, reserved for the sons of the Muses and the bastards of fortune,
to exempt them alike from starving and the office of serving the public
(which is much the same thing) for three generations. People talk of
birth as necessary to honour and to power: did not the popes, the sons
of peasants or of nobody, set their feet upon the necks of monarchs?
People talk of the upstart pretensions of authors and men of intellect
in modern times: did not the priest (the learned men of their day) come
in as the first estate between heaven and the nobles? Why then taunt the
flame of genius with being earth-born? It is the dotage of a prejudice
to do so. We repeat, the sons of celebrated men are hardly off: the
example of their parents (together with necessity) urges them to do
something: that very example, from being too near, and almost seeming to
save them the trouble of exertion, precludes the possibility of success.
Even where the genius might be the same, the imitation and also the
habitual idea of doing something extraordinary without knowing what, is
prejudicial, if not fatal; and if they wish to turn out anything, they
should strike into a path the opposite of what is always before them.
Young Kean perhaps would shine as a University-wrangler, or a
conveyancer under the bar; and the son of a philosopher should go to
court! Again, Mr. Kean is said by his friends to be a promising young
actor. We have nothing to say to that; but we will tell him one thing,
there is no such person as a promising actor. It is here, as in all
similar pursuits, performance or nothing. We do not say no great actor
improves, but no actor becomes great by improvement. The sun is seen as
soon as it appears above the horizon: there is the same glory round its
rising and its setting: so may it always be with the sun of genius,
which is the lamp of the world! Garrick fell as it were from the clouds:
Mr. Kean’s father rose at once from obscurity. The late Mr. Kemble was
the only actor that we remember to have attained to the first rank by
gradual advances; and he was sustained in his progress by great
stateliness of manner and advantages of person. In general, those who
are always improving on themselves, are surpassed by others, and
complain that, as they are about to seize the wreath of fame, it is
snatched from them by some bolder and more fortunate hand. We do not
presume to sit on Mr. Kean’s _quantum meruit_—we will not—but if he is
not likely to become a first-rate actor, his name forbids him to be
aught less. If he knows our tone in speaking when we are serious or
merely splenetic, he will know that these remarks are dictated by
anything but a feeling hostile to him.
A new melo-dramatic entertainment succeeded, called _The Dumb Savoyard
and his Monkey_. The story is in few words, as follows: The _Count
Maldecini_ having been condemned to die (we know not why—for these
inventions plunge us at once _in medias res_) his wife accompanied by
their little child appears suddenly on the stage with a pardon for him.
The ferryman at Ober Wesel, however, refuses to carry her up the river,
as the hour is too late; and she is in despair, when the Savoyard, with
the assistance of his monkey, undertakes to convey her to the place of
destination. They arrive safely at the Falls of the Grenfells, near the
salt-mine, in which her husband is confined, when they are attacked by a
band of robbers who take a number of valuable ornaments from her, and
among the rest the morocco-case, containing her husband’s pardon; but
this, at her passionate and distracted entreaty, the chief restores in a
fit of generosity, and with an appropriate speech for a German robber.
Meantime, the monkey contrives to pick the pardon out of the case, and
hide it in a crevice of the rock, on the top of which he sits grinning,
the demon of mischief and meddlesomeness. When the _Countess_ arrives at
the prison, she accordingly misses what she had built all her hopes
upon, but she deceives the jailor and escapes with her husband, also by
the aid of the Savoyard and the dextrous _Marmozette_. They are pursued
and overtaken just at the very spot where the precious document had been
lost; and as the Count is about to be shot, in conformity to his
sentence, which he reads and very sentimentally and loyally approves,
the monkey betrays the hiding-place of the pardon, which the frantic
_Countess_ eagerly rescues from his grasp, and the whole ends happily.
Mrs. W. West played the heroine, and looked forlorn and interesting.
Mrs. Barrymore was _Pipino_, the Dumb Savoyard, and made a very pretty
boy. As to the nimble _Marmozette_ (Master Wieland), if it depended on
us, we would make him skip. Our old acquaintance _Jocko_ has left a
numerous progeny behind him, and we are afraid we shall never see the
end of the breed. Why, in the midst of the beautiful and enchanting
scenery on the banks of the Rhine (so admirably represented in this
piece) must we have an artificial monster staring us in the face like an
ugly looking-glass the whole time. We have no patience on this point. We
never could bear to see that branch of the species on or off the stage,
and would shoot them like the man in Candide, even at a risk of similar
consequences. We have no need of a menagerie in a play-house; the money
taken at the door on such occasions should be a deodand to the
proprietors of Exeter-’Change. We wish the _Times_, in its gravity,
would take up the subject, and with its leaden mace drive these _lusus
naturæ_ and nauseous _double-entendres_ from the scene.—We did not
recover our equanimity till Miss Foote, as _Meggy Macgilpin_, and her
pretty Highland dress, put us into good humour; and O’Keefe’s song of
_Twang twang darillo_, between Gatty and Russell, scattered every
particle of bile in a roar of laughter.
COVENT-GARDEN.
The holiday attraction of the week has been a melodrama called
_Tuckitomba_, said to be founded on a fact which happened in Jamaica
fifty years ago. The interest turns on a black sorceress who steals her
master’s child out of revenge, on an old pirate (_Tuckitomba_) who runs
away with a mulatto-girl for love, and on the blowing up of the vessel
in which they set sail for Africa, by the carelessness of a tailor on
board (Blanchard) who sets fire to the powder-magazine with the contents
of his tobacco-pipe. There was a great deal of bustle, and a want of
interest in this piece. The prominent trait was the acting of Keeley,
who is called ‘for shortness’ Goliah. This gentleman really answers to
_Falstaff’s_ description of ‘a man made after supper of a
cheese-paring.’ He is a shred of comedy; a pocket-Liston. He is great in
little parts, and makes an amusing approach to a nonentity.—The Minor
Theatres have each had their novelties during the week, and been
tolerably successful. The critics are divided on the temper and
behaviour of John Bull at this season. Some say he was lumpish and
leaden at Drury-Lane on Monday, others, that he was in all his glory at
Covent-Garden on the same evening. It is from seeing the confusion and
uncertainty that prevail in the most authentic reports that we propose
shortly to publish two _Examiners_ a week, to set the town right in
these and such-like particulars, and to save them the trouble of
consulting the daily papers altogether. As to John’s behaviour, pleased
or sulky, drunk or sober, we never could see any difference in it. Where
we were, a man stood up on a bench in the pit, and another insisting on
his getting down, and on his refusal threatening to call him out the
next day, the first made answer—‘Aye, if your master will let
you!’—‘Master! what do you mean by that? I have no master: I come and go
where I please!’ The women now interfered, and one of them clapped her
handkerchief to her husband’s mouth to prevent further disagreeables.
All an Englishman’s ideas are modifications of his will; and it is
strange that with all his boasted independence and equality, he thinks
he has a right to insult every one who is not a better man than himself.
The reason is, he has no respect for himself, nor consequently for
others, except for some external advantage of wealth or situation; and
his ill-humour can only be bribed to keep the peace by his
self-interest. ‘Vice to be hated needs but to be seen:‘—we are sure that
this at least may be said of ill-manners.
Turn we from them to the French play, where the object is to enjoy the
scene, to be pleased with yourself, and not to insult your neighbours,
or inquire which is master and which is man. There have been several
_debûts_, all very creditable and successful, Monsieur Berteche, Madame
Beaufre, and Mademoiselle Irma. We saw the former (who is of the
Mademoiselle Mars school, and whose tongue runs faster than a
race-horse) in the _Ecole des Veillards_ with Monsieur Perlet, who plays
the jealous husband with great point and spirit: but shall we add, that
in the passionate parts, he does not _let out_ enough, there is an
interdicted and internal manner, a fidgetty and confined air, which is
probably owing to the subordinate parts in which he usually acts. In
this comedy, a gentleman pulls off his coat on the stage, which is with
us an indecorum, except in farce. We mention this to show the difference
of feeling in such matters. We missed Perlet in the _Cheats of Scapin_:
he always contrives to _cheat_ us of our favourite Moliere. But we had a
full taste of him in the _Anglaises pour rire_. And these are our fair
country-women—so they sit, speak, walk, sing, and dance, in the eyes of
foreigners! No, it is Monsieur Pelissie and Monsieur Perlet—but very
like!
SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS.
_The Examiner._] [_April 27, 1828._
The last week or two has been rich in theatricals; Miss Stephens in
_Love in a Village_, where the scene opens with those two young beauties
sitting in a bower of roses like a flower stuck in the stomacher of
beauty, and where that unconscious siren ‘warbles her native wood-notes
wild’ with such simplicity and sweetness; Charles Kemble in the
_Inconstant_, who in one glorious scene plays tragedy and comedy to the
life, and in one short moment tastes the ‘fierce extremes’ of pleasure
and agony, of life and death; and _Othello_, with bumpers and three
times three; to say nothing of Madame Vestris in the _Invincibles_, and
Mr. John Reeve in the immortal _Major Sturgeon_. Why then did we take no
notice of them? Notice we have taken, but it has been with ‘our mind’s
eye,’ in ‘our heart’s core.’ Ill will it fare with us, when we do not
cast a sidelong glance at those pregnant abridgments, the play-bills,
and when their flaunting contents, that unfold to us the map of our
life, no longer excite a smile or a sigh. Any one who pleases may then
write our epitaph, though it will not be worth writing. At such a
season, for instance, we saw Mrs. Siddons in such a part for the first
time; in such another, Kemble walked with regal air across the stage,
and his stately brow needed no diadem to set it off; in such a character
Bannister was in all his glory; in that, Suett vented his resistless
folly; here, Munden went the whole length of his face; here, Lewis was
all life and air; here, Jack Palmer was great indeed; here, King was
bitter in _Touchstone_, and Miss Pope romantic in _Audrey_; then, Mrs.
Goodall played the part of _Rosalind_, and tripped in becoming page’s
attire through the forest of Ardennes (days and years long past!); here,
Dignum warbled as _Amiens_ (before we had heard of the peace of Amiens);
and here, Mrs. Jordan’s laugh comes over the heart, and if it has grown
dry and seared, fills it with the remembrance of joy and gladness once
more. Dodd and Parsons hover in the extreme verge of the horizon, but
gay shadows, airy shapes. Then such a one took leave of the stage,
drawing a narrower circle within the natural circle of his being; then
Liston appeared in the _Finger-Post_, looking like a finger-post, with
his nose only pointing to fun; Elliston in _Wild Oats_ (will he never
sow ’em?); Matthews in the _Bee-Hive_, as busy as a bee; Miss Kelly in
chambermaids; Miss O’Neill in heroines; last, not least, Mr. Kean, the
‘bony prizer’ of the stage, who has knocked all other reputations and
his own on the head. What a host of names and recollections is here! How
many more are omitted, names that have embodied famous poets’ verse and
been the ‘fancy’s midwife,’ that have gladdened a nation and made life
worth living for, that have made the world pass in review as a gaudy
pageant, and set before us in a waking dream the bodily shapes and
circumstances of all that is most precious in joy or in sorrow! And is
it come to this, that the drama is accounted vulgar by the vulgar, and
that we are to cut our old acquaintances the players, those who have
thrown a light upon the morning, noon, and evening of our day, ‘gay
creatures of the element, that live ‘i th’ rainbow and play in the
plighted clouds,’ and who have taken us so many hundred times to sit and
laugh with them, or shed ‘tears such as angels weep,’ at a height where
we could look down at the sordid of the earth—and at a universe of
Operas, with their naked _figurantes_, and sense and soul muffled up in
sound to suit the callous taste or ranker gust of ears polite! We may
have said all this before; and here lies the misfortune of our office. A
theatrical audience is supposed to vary every night: the _reading
public_ is assumed to be always the same body. We could praise Mr.
Charles Kemble’s acting in _Young Mirabel_ every time he does it, and
are always glad to think he is going to play what does such credit to
his art and gives such pleasure to others; but we can say nothing about
it, having once expressed our opinion to that effect. An actor repeats a
favourite part till farther notice; a singer may be _encored_ in an air
as often as his friends please; thank God, we have stockpieces that
never wear out: but who ever ventured upon reviving a defunct criticism?
It might pass with the million, but some good-natured friend would
betray us. The writer’s secret would be found out, and he would be had
up as an imposter. Nevertheless, having meditated a new criticism (or
eulogy, for it is the same thing) on Mr. Kean’s _Othello_, and the
overflowing house having excluded us from the Free-List, we venture upon
borrowing an old one; and if we were to try, we do not know that we
could _mend our draught_.
‘Mr. Kean’s _Othello_ is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in the
world. It is impossible either to describe or praise it adequately. We
have never seen any actor so wrought upon—so “perplexed in the extreme.”
The energy of passion, as it expresses itself in action, is not the most
terrific part: it is the agony of his soul, shewing itself in looks and
tones of voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the
fiend-like insinuations of _Iago_, he presented the very face, the
marble aspect of Dante’s _Count Ugolino_. On his fixed eyelids “horror
sat plumed.” In another part, where a gleam of hope or of tenderness
returns to subdue the tumult of his passions, his voice broke in
faultering accents from his overcharged breast. His lips might be said
less to utter words than to distil drops of blood gushing from his
heart. An instance of this was in his pronunciation of the line—
“Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.”
The whole of this last speech was indeed given with exquisite force and
beauty. We only object to the virulence with which he delivers the last
line, and with which he stabs himself—a virulence which _Othello_ would
neither feel against himself at the moment, nor against the “turbaned
Turk” (whom he had slain) at such a distance of time. His exclamation on
seeing his wife, “I cannot think but _Desdemona’s_ honest,” was the
“glorious triumph of exceeding love,” a thought flashing conviction on
his mind, and irradiating his countenance with joy, like sudden
sunshine. In fact almost every scene or sentence in this extraordinary
exhibition is a master-piece of natural passion. The convulsed motion of
the hands, and the involuntary swelling of the veins in the forehead, in
some of the most painful situations, should not only suggest topics of
critical panegyric, but might furnish studies to the painter or
sculptor.’
After _Othello_ on Wednesday, _The Mayor of Garratt_ followed ‘with
kindliest change.’ Mr. Reeve played _Major Sturgeon_, and Mr. Keeley,
_Jerry Sneak_. Comparisons are odious: _therefore_ they are made. Mr.
Keeley’s _Jerry_ was not so good as Russell’s formerly; nor Mr. Reeve’s
_Major Sturgeon_ equal to Dowton’s. This is saying nothing, for both
those performances were of the very first water. Mr. Keeley’s person is
diminutive, and he seems the natural butt of a virago: Russell was a
goodly man of his inches; it was his spirit only that was hen-pecked,
and that submitted to buffets and blows. Dowton again was the model of a
train-band Captain in his own esteem, and never doubted of the ineffable
superiority of his own pretensions: Reeve, in the midst of his insolence
and vapouring, has a look of _quizzing_ himself, and sees through the
ridicule of his own character. He however throws much humour and
fantastic absurdity into the part, _à-la-Liston_; but his drollery is
conscious and knowing, not vacant and absolutely spontaneous, like that
of his unrivalled prototype. At the end of the farce, there was some
division of opinion whether the piece was not low, as if that which had
mainly driven such manners and characters almost from the knowledge of
the present generation was not a master-stroke of genius, and in fact an
historical drama.
THE COMPANY AT THE OPERA.
_The Examiner._] [_May 4, 1828._
COVENT-GARDEN.
There has been a new farce here (called, disagreeably enough, _The
Little Offsprings_). If Mr. Peake is one of the most amusing of our
farce writers, it is because he pretends to be nothing better. He
professes to write a _farce_, not a _genteel_ comedy; and he generally
succeeds accordingly. Our complaint against his present novelty is, that
unlike most of his previous ones, it is not quite _broad_ enough. He
himself will smile at this objection, because assuredly it is quite
broad enough where it _is_ broad. But it is not ‘as _broad_ as it is
_long_,’ which is what all farces ought to be. Young ladies as well bred
as they are well dressed, and young gentlemen ‘to match,’ are
interlopers in the region of farce. Let Mr. Peake eschew all such
amiable insipidities, and he will do well. In short, let him cultivate
the _gentilities_ of life not a step farther than they fall in with the
case (anything but genteel) of Mr. Wrench; and then he cannot go very
far wrong. Above all, let him have nothing to say to young ladies who
are a whit more like _Lady Teazle_ than Miss Kelly is. They are ticklish
handling in all cases; and in his there is no answering for the mischief
they may do.
‘Crabbed age and youth
Cannot live together’;—
and no more can the ultra-ridiculous and the flat common-place—Mr.
Keeley as a Savoyard organ-boy, and Miss Goward as a sensitive
school-girl. The contrast (so to speak) does not harmonize. _Au reste_,
the name of the new farce is the worst thing belonging to it. It
includes a fox-hunting Admiral, played, or rather worked, with great
effect by Bartley;—a bluff and blundering boatswain, which Fawcett acted
to the life, that is to say, somewhat disagreeably;—a person wearing a
white hat and pea-green pantaloons, things always enough to make the
sight of Mr. Wrench pleasant; a suppositious spinster (Mrs. Davenport),
who turns out to be the parent of one of the ‘little offsprings,’ her
brother the Admiral being similarly situated as to the other;—and
finally, the ‘offsprings’ themselves, played (as aforesaid) by Miss
Goward and Mr. Keeley, and about whom there is a good deal of ingenious
equivoque which touches upon the extreme edge where such matters are,
now-a-days, so apt to fall over. They pretty nearly did so on the above
occasion, which has, no doubt, induced Mr. Peake to make the proper
sacrifices to the suspicious delicacy of ‘some people’s ears.’
KING’S THEATRE.
_Don Giovanni_ was played at this theatre on Thursday for the benefit of
Madame Caradori, in which Mademoiselle Sontag sustained the part of
_Donna Anna_ with great truth and effect.
We said something lately on the company at the holiday theatres: we have
something to say on the company at the Opera. We have little hesitation
in stating (we speak of the pit) that in its way it is quite as bad:
from boisterous rudeness and familiarity it rises into distance and
superciliousness. If for instance at the Surrey or the Coburg you see
two fellows quarrelling which is the master and which is the man, at the
King’s Theatre you hear an elegant discourse on ‘the higher and the
lower orders.’ A critic at Covent-Garden or Drury-Lane thinks Sadler’s
Wells or the East London _low_: a critic of the self-same stamp, but one
of softer phrase, pronounces the condemnation of the drama in good set
terms as altogether exploded in the fashionable circles, and as
flourishing most in our manufacturing towns and the semi-barbarous
states of North America. You hear another take up the lamentable theme
of an interval in the succession of regular Opera-singers, as if it were
a pause in nature; and when notwithstanding he has heard Braham sing
very well in ‘_this house_,’ repeating the words as if the atmosphere at
the Haymarket wafted other sounds than common air, and music were a
geographical distinction. Thus it is that an Englishman is always
pinning his faith on places and persons; and that he cannot arrive (for
the soul of him, let him be taught and trammelled how he will) at the
contemplation of an abstract idea: and yet the booby talks of
refinement. He has no conception of anything but from the situation
where he finds it; or the figure it makes in the eyes of some one as
wise as himself; or from its being a foil to some defect in others. You
hear none of this gabble at the _Thêatre Français_, or the Italian Opera
in Paris, about those exploded authors Racine and Molière, or the low
buffoonery of the _Theatre des Varietés_, because they understand or
relish both: we, unfortunately, who understand and relish neither, are
obliged to create an artificial admiration of what is exotic out of our
contempt for what is native, and pamper our pretensions to refinement by
constantly dwelling on the vulgarity of the lower orders. Delightful it
is to hear the Frenchwomen speaking of ‘the vulgar Englishwomen’ in a
lump, as these same Englishwomen speak of all the rest of their
country-women! In France, to laugh and weep (at least with the comic or
the tragic Muse) is not held vulgar. All wit is not confined to a shake
of the toe, nor all sense to the squall of an Opera-singer, though they
dance and give concerts as well as we. But in England our object is not
the pursuit of pleasure, but to run away from the pleasures of others;
and when a taste for the drama or anything else becomes a little common,
we grow sulky and insensible by way of being spiritual and refined. We
see no other refinement in the case, unless the getting rid of thought
and feeling is a proof of refinement; and the _figurantes_ at the Opera
are an intermediate link, a soft imperceptible gradation, between the
grossness of human passion and the absence of all human sympathy. Do the
upper classes speak in recitative? Do they, in answer to a common
question, vault into the air? Perhaps a Noble Duke might make one of his
speeches intelligible by singing it, or solve the difficulties of the
Corn question by calling out the Lord Chancellor to dance a minuet with
him! We import Opera-singers, dancers, kings! Liberal land! That knows
its own deficiencies in what is refined and elevated! Happy, that it
finds others so ready to oblige it! All that they get from us, is hard
blows or hard cash: all that we get from them, is politeness and luxury!
In a word the question comes to this—_Are the English an essentially
vulgar people or not?_ If all that they have of their own is vulgar and
unworthy of the notice of the upper classes, then the unavoidable
inference is that the upper classes themselves are unworthy to see
anything better, and are the most vulgar, fashionable audience in
Europe. If we have the least possible capacity for the fine arts,
namely, dancing, music, painting, then we must be, in spite of
letters-patent of nobility, or a box at the opera, or a _chapeau-bras_,
or an opera-glass, the worst possible judges of them; and if we would be
anything at all, must set up for something else. Indeed, the effects are
plain enough. There is that little Brocard; she was at one time a model
of voluptuous, languishing grace; but it was thrown away upon the higher
orders, and she now does nothing but walk on the tips of her toes. The
little trifler, she that we have praised so often! We are after all in
such matters a Bartlemy-fair audience—or for a tumbler’s show! Is Madame
Pasta a favourite with the great vulgar? Not in the least. They hear her
fame, but not her. What piteous, vacant aspects in the fine gentleman in
the pit the first night of Mademoiselle Sontag’s appearance! And what
would they not have given (before committing themselves beyond an
applause which might be construed into a good-natured encouragement) to
know what the newspapers would say the next day! What then is the amount
of this exclusive preference and fastidious superiority of fashionable
taste? Mere arrogance and affectation. Look at the men in the pit. Are
they in raptures with the ballet or the music? They are solely occupied
in thinking how they themselves look, whether their coat is of the right
cut, their cravat properly tied, and whether their next neighbour is
good enough for them to speak to. Each opera-beau ought to have a
glass-case over him to keep him within a certain precise sphere of
_dandy_ repulsiveness and self-importance. In an O. P. row you are in
danger of being knocked down: in the _still-life_ of the Opera-house,
every one seems in fear of touching his neighbour’s elbow. The
disagreeable either in thought or action is inseparable from our fogs
and sea-coal fires. Look at the women in the boxes. Are they at their
ease? Or do they not keep one fixed attitude, or else loll, and laugh,
and stare without meaning? The great thing is not to seem to take an
interest; and this is not difficult, where none is felt. If to paint, to
dress, to intrigue, and be insensible, is the height of refinement, then
the women in the lobbies are even more refined than they. Do we then
subscribe to this total disqualification of the English character? No:
we have hearts and heads for other things besides the mechanism of the
senses. We have books, which we send through the heart of all Europe;
but our people of fashion and our parade of gentility are the
laughing-stock of the world. One service which the work on _Lord Byron
and his Contemporaries_ has done the public, one offence it has given to
the insolent few, is that it shews that even the strongest minds are not
exempt from the shallowness and pedantry of this kind of jargon. The
Noble Poet somewhere says that he and Tom Moore wrote well, because he
himself from birth, and Mr. Moore from circumstances (circumstances
indeed!) moved in the fashionable world. If this were all, we should
have some thousands of fine geniuses come out every year, ‘the mob of
gentlemen who write with ease!’ Why, instead of opening the casket to
examine the contents, are we to be always looking at the outside? Or
why, having found a jewel in it, persist that the wrapper was coarse
brown paper? When we hear all the inhabitants of this great country
whose names are not inscribed in the Red Book, or who are not crammed
into the stifling, glittering atmosphere of the King’s Theatre,
stigmatised with the sweeping epithet of ‘the lower orders,’ our
patience is a little out at elbows, and the answer, we fear, will not
come from the pen alone! What is it that my Lord-Duke brings with him
from the Continent—that he shews to his fellow-travellers as a precious
curiosity—that he folds up and unfolds with such care? Is it a cameo, a
drawing by Raphael, a bit of Claude? It is a copy of the Great Tun of
Heidelberg! When did the polite world think it allowable for the last
time to throng to the English theatre in crowds and with their
expectations excited to the utmost? To see young Mr. Kean, a boy just
come from Eton (classical reminiscence!) in the part of _Norval_! Or to
see the bottle-conjuror, or a thing born with a crown on its head, or
any other rare and striking novelty! Spare us, man of fashion, in the
name of refinement!
THE BEGGARS’ OPERA
_The Examiner._] [_May 11, 1828._
COVENT-GARDEN.
On Tuesday, the _Beggars’ Opera_ was acted here; or rather, half the
_Beggars’ Opera_ to half a house. This is as it should be: if the
Managers start and shrug up their shoulders at one half of a play, the
public will shrink from the other. It is always wrong to cry _stale
fish_. We suspect some clerical critic, some _Jeremy Collier_ of the
_Times_, has had a hand in this: what have these reverend divines to
do with profane stage-plays, any more than poets and novelists with
writing _lay-sermons_? Everything in our day is turned topsy-turvy:
nothing prevails but ‘vanity, chaotic vanity.’ The consequence of this
sort of slur and neglect thrown upon the piece is, that it is
indifferently acted. There is not, in the expressive green-room
phrase, ‘a hand in the house’: and without that, the performer has no
heart to proceed. A player can no more act with spirit unless he sees
the reflection of his excellences in the looks and satisfaction of the
audience, than a fine lady can dress without a looking-glass. He makes
a hit and it fails of effect; he is therefore thrown out, and the next
time he does wrong or he does nothing. _Filch_ (Meadows) picks a
pocket as if he was afraid of being detected by the pit: Miss Kelly is
shocked at the part of _Lucy_, and flounces and elbows through it as
if she wished to get out of it, putting a negative on an _encore_ that
is likely to detain her five minutes longer in Newgate: Miss Stephens
(the charming _Polly_) is frightened at the interest she _might_
inspire, and is loth to ‘waste her sweetness on a _blackguard_ air’:
the _Captain_ (Mr. Wood) is the only person who stands fire on the
trying occasion. This gentleman is the best _Macheath_ we have seen
for a long time (for in criticism as in law we must have our statute
of limitations)—more of a gentleman than Incledon, a better singer
than Davies, less affected than Young, less finical than Sinclair, as
‘pretty a fellow’ as Madame Vestris—good-looking, gallant, debonair,
and vocal. Bartley is too ‘splenetic and rash’ for _Lockitt_, who
should be sullen and hardened as his prison-walls; Blanchard is not
round and set enough for _Peachum_, his figure dangling and his voice
crackling like a lawyer’s parchment; Mrs. Davenport alone remained in
her original muslin apron, silk gown, and pinners (a Sybil, yet how
unlike a prophetess!) to overlook and wonder at the desolation of the
classic scene. We are more and more convinced that there is a time for
everything, and that good plays must give place to bad ones. It is not
possible (with a mixed audience) to keep alive the ridicule of manners
after the manners themselves have ceased, nor to preserve them in the
spirit of wit, or exhibit them even in mock-heroics. The stage is but
the counterpart of existing follies—
‘And when the date of Nock was out,
Off fell the sympathetic snout.’
However, the _Beggars’ Opera_ has run a century. That’s pretty well. Oh
George Colman the Younger, Messrs. Reynolds and Morton, how will you
rejoice, could you lift up your heads a hundred years hence, and see a
five-act play of yours cut down to a one-act farce! It is not that there
are not plenty of rogues and pick pockets at present; but the Muse is
averse to look that way; the imagination has taken a higher flight; wit
and humour do not flow in that dirty channel, picking the grains of gold
out of it. Instead of descending, we aspire; and the age has a sublime
front given to it to contemplate the heaven of drawing-rooms and the
milky-way of fashion. You are asked if you like Fielding, as if it were
a statuteable offence; and it was justly observed the other day in a
comparison between _De Vere_ and _Count Fathom_, that in a refined
period like ours, a rogue aims at nothing short of being Prime-Minister!
In a word, the French Revolution has spoiled all, like a great stone
thrown into a well ‘with hollow and rueful rumble,’ and left no two
ideas in the public mind but those of high and low. The jealousy of
gentility, the horror of being thought vulgar, has put an end to the
harmless _double-entendre_ of wit and humour; and the glancing lights
and shades of life (nothing without each other) are sunk into the dull
night of insipidity and affectation. So be it, and so it will be! Yet
‘we have heard the chimes at midnight’ for all this, and passed over
Hounslow and Bagshot, not without a _twinge_ of the recollection of
other times, as well as responsive to the names of Pope, of Gay, and
Queensberry’s Duchess! Nor is it so long since we have seen good company
and full houses grace the representation of Tyburn tree: we remember old
Sir John Sylvester among others (with we believe his two daughters) who
had a keen relish for an execution, and stedfastly contemplated under
black bushy eyebrows that irrefragable order of ideas (as Mr. Hobbes
calls it) ‘the thief, the judge, and the gallows;’ and Mr. Vansittart,
who smiled with conscious simplicity at the satirical allusions to
Ministers of State, might be supposed to be comparing the terseness and
point of Gay’s style with his own ‘wolds and sholds,’ and seemed to
think that nothing but an _evangelical_ housebreaker was wanting to the
perfection of the plot!—We could not stay out _A Race for Dinner_,
though invited by Mr. Wrench,—who has become as hungry as a hunter of
late,—but made the best of our way to the other house (old Drury) in
search of a criticism. We could almost fancy Covent Garden had got there
before us, for there we found nearly the whole former strength of the
rival house drawn up in battle-array before us—‘and Birnamwood was come
to Dunsinane’—through what bickerings, what strifes, what
heart-burnings, what jealousies between actors, what quarrels with
managers, what want of pay, and demands for more, is easy (though not
pleasant) to guess. They had also brought the _Poor Gentleman_ with
them; and both together brought a full house. Nothing could be better
acted. Looking at them with ‘eyes of youth’ (which we always take with
us to the theatre) we seemed as it were to witness something like a
_turn-out_ of Chelsea pensioners on the boards; and the sentiments of
the play were of a piece with this patriotic and charitable impression.
About thirty years ago, when John Bull took a particular fit of hatred
against the French, he also fell in love with himself; and the dramatic
writers of that day undertook to shew John his own face, his virtues or
vices ‘to advantage dressed’ in a succession of plays which were
properly _Dedications to the English nation_. We have the _Whole Duty of
Man_ bound up in a coarse, unattractive exterior; the Virtues in the
front of the stage, though the Graces stand a little in the back-ground;
and all the charities of private life clustering together on the stage,
as they do round the domestic hearth. We have nothing but generous
uncles, dry in their manner, but their heart and their purse overflowing
with liberality—dutiful nephews, thoughtless but well-meaning, and
falling into scrapes and love at every turn—reclaimed seducers—exemplary
young ladies—old servants surly, but honest (the English character)—a
chattering apothecary, the butt of the village and a foil to our
self-love—an old soldier, a favourite in the family, and with us, for he
has been wounded in our defence—a poor gentleman, in want of money which
he refuses by mistake from some munificent patron, in consequence of not
being so shrewd as the audience, and who is in hourly danger of a
prison, from which _we_ hope to escape. All this hits our delicate and
improved moral tastes much better than sneering at our vices or laughing
at our follies. Live sentiment, perish satire! Then there is so much
distress, which it is so delightful to sympathize with—so much money
circulating to relieve it (which it is so delightful to hear and to see;
it is almost like attending a charity-sermon, or seeing Mr. Irving
himself pawn his watch out of an excess of missionary zeal)—then there
are so many tears starting into the eye, so many squeezes of the hand,
so many friends and relations falling into one another’s arms, as cannot
but move the most obdurate—so many bailiffs in the wind, so many duels
broken off by the entrance of some antiquated spinster who is always
prying into mischief, or of some charming young creature who is the
cause of it. We hope the other actors and actresses who acquitted
themselves so admirably in their several parts,—Mr. Dowton in _Sir R.
Bramble_, Mr. Mathews in _Ollapod_, Mr. Liston in _Corporal Foss_, Mr.
Cooper in _Lieutenant Worthington_, Mr. Jones in _Frederic_, Mrs.
Davison in _Miss Mactab_,—will excuse us if we pass them over on this
occasion to pay our compliments to Miss Ellen Tree, who played _Emily
Worthington_, and who certainly comes under the description of persons
last-mentioned. Without any appearance of art, she played so well that
she seemed the character itself, with the ease and simplicity of an
innocent school-girl. Her figure is very pleasing—her voice is like her
sister’s—and she has the handsomest mouth in the world. We will not
attempt to describe it for two reasons: first, because we cannot;
secondly, because we _dare_ not. In Mr. Jones’s _School for Gallantry_
she might have been called the _bon bouche_. Amidst the chopping and
changing of the theatres, we had forgotten Mr. Jones was at Drury Lane;
and inquired after the success of his new piece at Covent Garden. We
naturally enough received an answer almost as cold as the moon which
shines through the bars of his hero’s prison-chamber. We were glad
however to find that the wit and pleasantry diffused over it, if faint,
had much of the agreeable lustre of that mild planet. We should suppose
the plot borrowed from the country where the scene is laid. Cupid seems
always on garrison-duty in the Prussian monarchy, and the spirit of
adventure and gallantry somewhat languishes and grows trifling when it
is kept (as everything there is) under lock and key. After what we have
said of Miss E. Tree, we will not forfeit our reputation for gallantry
by saying anything less obliging of Miss Love, who plays a young hussar
officer in this piece, than that we like her best when she is drest most
like herself.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND L’AVARE
_The Examiner._] [_May 18, 1828._
DRURY LANE.
The _Taming of the Shrew_ was revived here on Wednesday, with the
original words and additional songs. We however missed _Christopher
Sly_, that supreme dramatic critic, who should have sat in lordly
judgment on the piece, and given a drunken relief to it. This
representing of a play within a play (of which Shakspeare was fond)
produces an agreeable theatrical perspective—it is like painting a
picture in a picture—and intimates pointedly enough that all are but
shadows, the pageants of a dream. We also missed Mr. Liston in this
part; for we understand he has some good quips and crotchets about it.
Unless we saw him, we cannot pretend to say how he would do it; for we
consider Mr. Liston in the light of an author rather than of an actor,
and he makes his best parts out of his own head or face, in a sort of
_brown study_, with very little reference to the text. He has
nevertheless more comic humour oozing out of his features and person
than any other actor in our remembrance, or than we have any positive
evidence of since the time of Hogarth. No one is _stultified_, no one is
_mystified_ like him—no one is so deep in absurdity, no one so full of
vacancy; no one puzzles so over a doubt, or goes the whole length of an
extravagance like him—no one chuckles so over his own conceit, or is so
dismayed at finding his mistake:—the genius of folly spreads its shining
gloss over his face, tickles his nose, laughs in his eyes, makes his
teeth chatter in his head, or draws up every muscle into a look of
indescribable dulness, or freezes his whole person into a lump of ice
(as in _Lubin Log_) or relaxes it into the very thaw and dissolution of
all common sense (as in his _Lord Grizzle_). Munden’s acting (which many
prefer, and in this number may be included Mr. Liston himself) was
external, overdone, and aimed at the galleries—it was a sort of
prodigious and inspired _face-making_—Liston’s humour bubbles up of
itself, and runs over from the mere fulness of the conception. If he
does not go out of himself, he looks into himself, and ruminates on the
idea of the idle, the quaint, and the absurd, till it does his heart
good within him, and makes ‘the lungs of others crow like chanticleer.’
Munden’s expressions, if they could have been taken off on the spot,
would have made a capital set of grotesque masks: Liston’s would make a
succession of original comic sketches, as rich as they are true:—Mr.
Wilkie failed in attempting one of them—his pencil was not oily and
unctuous enough. We have seen many better comedians, that is, better
imitators of existing or supposed characters and manners—such as Emery,
Little Simmons, Dowton, and others—we know no other actor who has such a
fund of drollery in himself, or that makes one laugh in the same hearty
unrestrained manner, free from all care or controul, that we do with
_Sancho Panza_ or _Parson Adams_. We have heard a story of Mr. Liston
being prevented by some accident from attending his professional duties,
and wrapping himself up in a flannel gown and heart’s-content over a
winter fire, to read our good old English novelists for a fortnight
together. What fine marginal notes his face would make! Which would he
enjoy most, the blanket falling and discovering philosopher _Square_
behind it, or the drawing up of the curtain and the broad laugh of the
pit? We will answer that question for him. The meanest apprentice that
sees a play for the first time from the gallery, has more pleasure than
the most admired actor that ever trod the stage: there is more
satisfaction in reading one page of a sterling author with good faith
and good will, than the writer had in the composition or even the
success of all his works put together. The admiration we bestow on
others comes from the heart; but never returns back to it. Vanity closes
up the avenues, or envy poisons it. This digression is too long: without
sometimes going out of our way, we should hardly get to the end of our
task.—The revival, on the whole, went off pleasantly, though the acting
was not remarkably good, nor the music by any means enlivening. Jaques’s
recommendation to Amiens—‘Warble, warble,’—seems to be the device of
most modern composers, who think that, if they string a set of unmeaning
notes together, it must be heavenly harmony. ’Tis pitiful. We are sick
to death of this interpolated _sing-song_; nor do we think it much
mended by proceeding from the mouth of Mr. Braham, who is in such cases
a piece of operatic fleecy hosiery. He is a walking woolsack:—‘And when
the bag was opened, the voice began to sing,’ &c. We may be wrong in
this matter, and speak under correction of better judges; but we confess
that the everlasting monotonous alternation of the thunder of the
spheres and the softness of nightingales, of the notes of the trumpet
and the lute, the forked lightning and gentle moon-beams, Mr. Braham’s
thick-set person, infantine gestures and dying cadences, all together
throw us into a fit of despondency. Miss Fanny Ayton’s shrill voice and
acute features did not serve to dispel our chagrin. The rest of the
piece was tolerably cast. Wallack was the hero of it, who does not want
for spirit or confidence; and a man’s good opinion of himself is always
half-way towards deserving it, and obtaining that of others. Cooper did
not play his pretended master well: he is too grave and straight forward
an actor for these sort of sudden shifts and doubtful subterfuges. The
best-done scene was the quarrel between Russell as the tailor, and
Harley as _Petruchio’s_ man, about the gown and cap. The quaint antique
humour was happily hit off, and studiously dallied with, so as not to
slur it over, but to bring it out. Some fastidious critics may object to
the puerile conceit and tenuity of meaning that pleased our ancestors in
such idle squabbles—we think we could cite graver polemics to match it
in shabby excuses and verbal trifling in the present day. The
old-fashioned dresses recalled the image of former times; and the
scenery that of places, which can never grow old. The last scene, in
which the brides are sent for and brought in, had an excellent effect;
and the second representation was announced with every sign of
satisfaction. It may not be improper to add here, that the _Taming of
the Shrew_ is one of the pieces that have been transplanted (not without
a good deal of pruning) to the French stage, and that Mademoiselle Mars
plays the part of _Katharine_ with equal spirit and success.
(_French Play._)
M. Perlet took the _Avare_ for his benefit at this theatre last week. We
are sorry we are about to lose this excellent actor, who has given us
much pleasure and instruction. _Au revoir._ We saw him only in the
latter part of Moliere’s _Miser_: his thinness, his dress, and the keys
at his girdle fitted the character exactly. It was chiefly in the scenes
where he runs mad at losing his casket of gold, or seizes on _Anselme_
as the father of the supposed robber to demand restitution of him, that
the ruling passion and the greater actor broke out. In the first of
these scenes particularly, where he catches hold of his own arm,
thinking to arrest the thief, he shews all the rage and phrensy of the
most tragic vehemence; and in throwing himself exhausted on the ground,
bewailing his hard hap, and appealing to the pity of an imaginary
audience, whom his despair conjures up, and then lashing himself up to
impatience and fury again, proves his entire acquaintance with the ebb
and flow, the risings and sinkings of the human heart. These particular
passages appeared to us, however, like patches or excrescences on the
general texture of the performance (perhaps they are so in the play
itself, which is not one of Moliere’s best). If we may hazard a
conjecture on a subject on which we do not feel altogether _at home_, we
should say that M. Perlet’s _Miser_ was in its ordinary aspect rather
the serving-man in a half-famished house, than a personification of the
demon of selfishness, fretfulness, and avarice. It was hard and
indifferent—not gloating enough, not morbid enough, not restless and
harassed enough. Farther, we suspect there is this fault in his general
acting and in French comedy: we grant it is not gross; is it not, on the
other hand, too slight and evanescent? They charge us with over-doing;
are they not then liable to under-do, and fall short of the mark? If
there is such a thing as caricature, there is also an antithesis to it,
and not only a danger of loading a character to excess, but of giving a
profile or section of it for the whole, and not taking all the licence
that truth and nature gives. We are dreadfully afraid of being misled by
national prejudices; but (that being premised) we cannot but add our
conviction that M. Perlet’s acting, with all its purity, propriety, and
spirit, wants something of richness and breadth.—The little piece which
followed the _Avare_, _Ninette à la cour_, was delightful both in itself
and as giving Mademoiselle Fanny Vertpres an opportunity to display her
_mignon_ figure and provoking ways. There seem to be two styles of
female coquetry in France, extreme flutter and vivacity, or perfect
calmness and self-possession. The one is set in motion by everything;
the other is put out of its way by nothing. Miss Fanny Vertpres is of
the latter class. With great presence of mind and ready wit, she joins
to the symmetry the apparent coolness and indifference of a marble
statue. She takes everything in good part, and slides into a number of
ticklish adventures and situations with all the ease imaginable. She is
only troubled at being laughed at—a misfortune against which no French
patience is proof. The scenes behind the looking-glass and behind her
fan with her rustic lover (Laporte), whom she beguiles in an enchanting
feigned voice (prettier even than her own) are quite delightful, and
dispose one to believe that comedy has not yet exhausted all its
precious stores. Mademoiselle St. Ange played the _Countess_ with all
her country’s ease and grace. Monsieur Laporte strikes us as a
confirmation of the remarks we have made above on French comedy, by the
very circumstance of his being an exception to them. There is nothing
_automatic_ in his manner. He not only utters a jest, but he enjoys it
too—not that he forces it upon us either, except by the gentle violence
of sympathy. There is (so to speak) an atmosphere of humour about him,
which reflects the immediate object with kindly warmth and lustre. His
acting both in _Maître Jacques_ and in the after-piece evinced that easy
play of feeling, that transition from grave to gay, that mixture of wit
and folly, those natural varieties of laughter and tears, which mark the
master in his art and the genuine son of Momus.
We dropped in at Covent Garden to see Mr. Warde in the _Seraglio_ and
Charles Kemble in _Charles the Second_, who seems really born for the
character, and whose fine person and accomplishments are thrown away in
these degenerate days. Mr. Power makes a very passable Irish
_Rochester_: but the wit and the rake had defects enough of his own to
answer for, without having the _brogue_ added to them. The same fault
may be found with Mr. Warde, who would make a very respectable actor in
the middle walk of tragedy, could he but controul his voice within the
compass of the four seas.
MRS. SIDDONS
_The Examiner_] [_May 25, 1828._
There has been no novelty this week at any of our theatres, English or
French, except that little Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre has been
metamorphosed into a cat, and has been playing in the _Pie Voleuse_ at
the Lyceum. She played the first charmingly; the last prettily, though
we have seen it done better. There is a _calibre_, a weight of metal in
Miss Kelly’s pathos, which the French actress is without. Our lively
neighbours are doubtless ‘born to converse, to live, and _act_ with
ease’—all is set in motion like a feather, stopped like a feather.
Smiles play upon the lips, tears start into their eyes and are dried up
for nothing; an exclamation and a sigh settle the account between life
and death; all is a game at _make-believe_, thoughtless and innocent as
childhood, in the baby-house of their imagination—but if you wish to see
the heart-strings crack, go and see Miss Kelly in the _Maid of
Palisseau_; or if you would see the stately pillar of Tragedy itself
fall and crush the subjected world, then you should have witnessed Mrs.
Siddons formerly in some of her overwhelming parts. That was a flood of
tears indeed—a drinking of the brimming cup of human joys and woes to
the very last drop, the recollection of which may serve one all the rest
of one’s life. We understand that not long ago Sir Walter Scott and Mrs.
Siddons met in the same room before Mr. Martin’s picture of the _Fall of
Nineveh_—two such spectators the world cannot match again, the one by
the common consent of mankind the foremost writer of his age, the other
in the eyes of all who saw her prime or her maturity, the queen and
mistress of the tragic scene. Forgive us, gentle, ever-living shade of
Jenny Deans, agonised soul of Balfour of Burley, heroic spirit of
Rebecca of York, immortal memory of Dumbie Dikes and of a thousand more,
if we should have turned from you and from him who invented you, to bow
the knee and kiss the hem of the garment of her who represented to our
youthful gaze the Mourning Bride, Hermione, Belvidera, Beverley’s wife,
and was the Muse of Tragedy personified. We are sorry that Mrs. Siddons
has abridged _Paradise Lost_, and that Sir Walter has written a
triumphant peroration over ‘the worst, the second fall of man.’ We are
perhaps runagates and Goths; but the smell of the links that used to ply
between Covent garden and Drury lane prevails in our imagination over
all the heather-bloom of Scotland, and we declare that Mrs. Siddons
appears to us the more masculine spirit of the two. Sir Walter (when
all’s said and done) is an inspired butler, a ‘Yes and No, my Lord’
fellow in a noble family—Mrs. Siddons is like a cast from the antique,
or rather like the original, divine or more than human, from which it
was taken. Yet close to each other, within narrow space, were placed two
heads, on which glory sat plumed, beat two hearts over which had rolled
the volume of earth’s bliss or woe, were interchanged glances that had
reflected the brightness of the universe. Who would not rather see Sir
Walter Scott’s fringed eyelids and storied forehead than the vacant brow
of prince or peer? When Mrs. Siddons used to sit in parties and at
drawing-rooms, the Lady Marys and the Lady Dorothys of the day came and
peeped into the room to get a glance of her, with more awe and wonder
than if it had been a queen. This was honour, this was power. There was
but one person in the world who would have drawn the gaping gaze of
curiosity from these and from all the crowned heads in Europe; and Sir
Walter exults that he perished like a felon in the grasp of a jailor. We
must indeed admire the talents, when we forgive the use of them: or is
it that genius, with its lofty crest and variegated colours, seems
destined like the serpent to lick the dust, and crawl all its life with
its belly on the ground? We can reckon up in our time three great tragic
performers; Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Kean, and Madame Pasta. (If there is a
fourth instance, we either know not of it, or it is Miss Kelly: but that
in a parenthesis, as our private opinion, or that of persons no wiser
than ourselves.) Of these three, Mrs. Siddons seemed to command every
source of terror and pity, and to rule over their wildest elements with
inborn ease and dignity. Her person was made to contain her spirit; her
soul to fill and animate her person. Her eye answered to her voice. She
wore a crown. She looked as if descended from a higher sphere, and
walked the earth in majesty and pride. She sounded the full diapason,
touched all chords of passion, they thrilled through her, and yet she
preserved an elevation of thought and character above them, like the
tall cliff round which the tempest roars, but its head reposes in the
blue serene! Mrs. Siddons combined the utmost grandeur and force with
every variety of expression and excellence: her transitions were rapid
and extreme, but were massed into unity and breadth—there was nothing
warped or starting from its place—she produced the most overpowering
effects[42] without the slightest effort, by a look, a word, a gesture.
Mr. Kean, in the intellectual and impassioned part, is in our judgment
equal to any one, but he produces his most striking effects by fits and
starts, without the same general tone and elevation of character, and,
for want of the instrumental advantages, with an appearance of effort
and sometimes of extravagance. Madame Pasta, on the contrary, never goes
out of her way, never aims at effect or startles by any one pointed
passage, nor does she combine a variety of feelings together (as far as
we have seen) but she rises to the very summit of her art, and satisfies
every expectation by absolute and unbroken integrity of purpose, and by
the increasing and unconscious intensity of passion. She has neither Mr.
Kean’s inequalities nor Mrs. Siddons’s scope: she neither deviates from
the passion nor rises above it, but she commits herself wholly to its
impulse, borrows strength from its strength, ascends with it to heaven,
or is buried in the abyss. In a word, she is the creature of truth and
nature, and joins the utmost simplicity with the utmost force. This has
little to do with Mademoiselle Jenny Vertpre: ah! she is charming too,
and we hope to have a great deal to say in her praise—twenty years
hence. She counts her silver spoons inimitably, and when she is
suspected of stealing one of them says, ‘_C’est desagreable_,’ in a
voice and manner that none but a Frenchwoman can. The _Misanthrope_ and
the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ have been repeated at this theatre; and M.
Perlet has done equal justice to Moliere’s sententious gravity in the
one, and to his delightful flighty farce and fanciful exaggeration of
folly in the other. Moliere is our Wycherley and O’Keefe, both in one:
or it might be said that he possessed the critical sense of Montaigne,
with the exuberant mirth and humour of Rabelais.—We believe this little
theatre, with its lively company and excellent pieces, answers tolerably
well, as most French theatres do. We were thinking of this the other
evening, and thought we had accounted for it. The French performances,
with a tenth of the audience, pay better than the English with ten times
the number and receipts. How so? It arises, on a critical inquiry, from
the unity of place, which is the fundamental law of the French drama.
One barbarism leads to another;—a slight technical distinction involves
manager after manager in bankruptcy and ruin. Where there is no change
of situation, the scenery is the same; and where this is the case, it is
no object either of attraction or expense. Little more is required than
a drop-scene. Therefore, all you have to do is to get good plays, and a
good company to perform them: three or four hundred people in the house
will maintain a dozen or a score of comedians on the stage; and the
excellence of the performance and the taste of the town keep pace with
one another, and with the absence of show and extrinsic decoration. But
with us all this is reversed. The scene travels, and our scene-shifters,
scene-painters, mechanists, and the whole theatrical _commissariat_ go
along with it. The variety, the gaudiness, the expense is endless: to
pay for the getting up such an immense apparatus, the houses must be
enlarged to hold a proportionable rabble of ‘barren spectators:’ the
farther off they are thrown, the stronger must be the glare, the more
astonishing the effect, and the play and the players (with all relish
for wit or nature) dwindle into insignificance, and are lost in the
blaze of a huge chandelier or the grin of a baboon. We do not see the
features of the actors, but we admire (very justly) Mr. Stanfield’s
landscape back-grounds, or a castle set on fire by Mr. Farley; we hear
the din and bray of the orchestra, not the honeyed words of the poet;
and still we wonder that operas and melo-drames flourish, and that the
legitimate stage and good old English Comedy languishes. Poor old green
curtain! when thou wast withdrawn to make room for gas lights and
shining marble pillars, the last relic of the heart-felt pageant faded;
and the _Veluti in speculum_ flew after _Astræa_ to the skies!
THE THREE QUARTERS, &c.
_The Examiner_] [_June 1, 1828._
DRURY LANE.
The new comedy in three acts brought out at this theatre on Tuesday
evening is, we apprehend, taken from a French piece, entitled _Les Trois
Quartiers_. The Three Quarters of the town indicate the three sorts or
stages of society, as they are to be met with in the _Rue St. Honoré_,
the _Rue Mont Blanc_, and the _Fauxbourg St. Germain_, which may be
supposed to answer (we speak under correction of the Secretary of the
Admiralty, skilled as he is in the transitions from low to high life) to
our Fish-street-hill, Russell and Grosvenor square. It was thought a
nice distinction in Miss Burney, forty years ago, to place the residence
of the Harrells in Portman square, and to assign Grosvenor square to the
Delville family; the one being considered as the resort of the upstart
fashionables, the other of the old gentry. To know whether this
court-geography holds good in the present year, see the files of the
_John Bull_, or the _Last Series of Sayings and Doings_, where such
matters are noted and discussed with a becoming want of elegance and
decorum, which is made up for by the innate loftiness of the subject. In
the French piece, a rich adventurer from South America is introduced
into these different circles by an officious go-between, as a travelled
prodigy, _un homme qui a vu_ Bolivar; and in each his perplexity and
astonishment increases with the progress and refinement of manners in
the _Three Quarters_ of the town. There is some sense in that; and the
French actors have the skill to make the line of demarcation
intelligible. But here we vow that though we shift the scene, no
progress is made; or we are _at the top of the tree_ in the second
stage. _Kitty Corderoy_ is sufficiently forward and vulgar, it is true;
_Amelia Mammonton_ is naturally elegant and genteel; but we get no
farther; or rather _Lady Charlewood_ is a falling off, having neither
natural nor acquired grace; and the _Countess Dowager Delamere_ is
distinguished by nothing but a rude and harsh familiarity of manner. The
Banker (Mr. Cooper) has evidently the advantage of the Lord (Mr.
Hooper); and _Jack Pointer_ (Mr. Jones) a busybody and toad-eater,
carries it hollow by dint of sheer impudence and impertinence. Mr.
Jones’s Bond street slang—‘She’s a delicious creature’—is echoed every
five minutes by _Lady Delamere’s_—‘You’ll excuse my freedom, _Lady
Charlewood_;’ the changes are rung upon a few and slender notes of
fashion, while the author has the full range of the Cockney dialect, and
sinks deep in the bathos of low life. _Mrs. Corderoy_, we observe, is
played by a Mrs. C. Jones. Is Mr. Jones lately married? If so, we
congratulate him: she is an excellent cook. We could wish the
accomplished author of _Killing no Murder_, he who dips his pen so
carelessly in poison or honey, the expert _improvisatori_ in fact or
fiction, would turn his thoughts to this matter; give us a comedy or
criticism to show our actors or play-wrights what they ought to do in
these degenerate days; and from his ease of access to palaces or
princes, give us a taste of true refinement, the court-air, the
drawing-room grace, the after-dinner conversation, the mornings and the
evenings of the great, instead of confining his abilities to teaching
young gentlemen at Long’s how to eat their fish with a silver fork: the
waiters might do that just as well. Or could not Mr. Croker, now that
Augustus has given peace to sea and land, and who shakes epics and
reviews from his brow ‘like dew-drops from the lion’s mane,’ _smile_ a
comedy that should point the nice gradations from the city to the court—
‘Fine by degrees, and beautifully less,’
and make it for ever impossible for Cheapside to pass Temple-bar or
Russell-square to step into the Regent’s Park? We understand, indeed,
that Mr. Colburn has a plan in contemplation to remedy all this, and
that we may look forward to the dawn of a new era in literature, through
the happy idea which the little bookselling Buonaparte has conceived of
establishing an inviolable _Concordat_ between the world of genius and
fashion. The proposal is to buy up the manuscripts of all authors by
profession, to lock them in a drawer, so as to put the whole corps of
Garretteers and Grub street writers on the shelf, and leave the door
open to none but persons of quality and amateurs, lords, ladies, and
hangers-on of the great. The scheme has in a great measure succeeded in
the periodical department, and only requires a little management to be
extended to the stage. What an air already breathes from the New
Parnassus! What a light breaks over Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden! What
delicacy, what discrimination, what refinement of sentiment! What
halycon days! What peaceable productions! There will be no grossness, no
violence, no political allusions or party spite! The best understanding
will subsist between Government and men of letters, nor will there be
any occasion for a Dramatic Censor, when Ministers of State furnish the
plot, and Peeresses in their own right suggest the last corrections to
the dialogue. There is no doubt the taste for the drama will be revived
by means of such an arrangement—people of fashion will go to see what
people of fashion write—the manners of high life will be reflected on
the stage as in the mirrors at each end of the dress circle—
‘They best can paint them who have known them most;’
the hireling crew will withdraw to hide themselves in a garret or a
jail—the pit will wonder—the galleries be silent or shut up—Lord
Porchester’s tragedy will be crowned with bays, Lord Morpeth’s
transferred from the closet to the stage—Mr. Moore, by particular desire
of several persons of distinction, will try his hand at another
_Blue-Stocking_ affair—and the _Sphynx_, the _Athenæum_, the _Argus_ (a
new evening), and the _Aurora_ (a new morning paper), which Mr.
Buckingham will by that time have set up on the same independent
principles of voluntary contribution, will applaud to the skies the
change which Mr. Colburn’s spirit and genius will have brought like a
perfect paradise upon earth. It is whispered that a certain Duke has got
through the first act of a piece, called ‘The Deaf and Dumb Politician,’
but dreads the vulgar composition of the public taste:—nay, who knows
but the coast being cleared of plebeian scribblers and the rabble of
competitors, Majesty itself might not take the field, the _Lady Godiva_
of the scene, in a night-gown and slippers, with a grand romantic
interlude called ‘The Prince and the Pretender, or the Year 1745’—with
Mr. O—holding the glass-door in Burlington street for three days
together in his hand, and Mr. C—p—b—ll to officiate as _Peeping
Tom_—‘Oh! dearest Ophelia, we are ill at these numbers:’ but neither
_Ups and Downs_ nor _Carron-Side_ suggested anything better. Mr. Liston
in the first played a city fortune-hunter, who pays his addresses to,
who jilts, and is jilted by three mistresses in succession, to whom he
is introduced by _Jack Pointer_ (Jones), his pretensions rising with his
fortune, and with whom he is confronted and exposed without much effect
in the last act. He at first aspires no higher than to _Kitty Corderoy_,
a tradesman’s daughter; but having twenty thousand pounds left him, he
contrives to cut with her, to her great joy, she being secretly in love
with _Mr. Christopher Higgins_ (Russell), her father’s apprentice, a
person by no means approved by her mother _Mrs. Corderoy_ (Mrs. C.
Jones), because he himself is ‘a little sneaking chap,’ and his father a
tailor—as if tailors were not in the order of nature or of civil
society. Our hero, that is, _Mr. Felix Mudberry_, next offers himself,
with a large bunch of flowers and a suit of clothes picked up on the way
at the _Readymade Depôt_, to _Miss Amelia Mammonton_ (the charming Miss
Ellen Tree), a banker’s sister, who is in love with _Earl Delamere_ (Mr.
Hooper), love and romantic sentiment, according to the situation or rank
in which it is found, aiming at still greater and more airy heights. She
laughs at him and his ‘delicate attentions’ (as she well may)—but being
led to suppose that his uncle, _Mr. Stanley_, a Liverpool merchant, or
as he used to call him ‘_Black Boy Billy_,’ is dead, and has left him a
fortune of half a million, he begins to blubber out his sorrow for his
uncle’s death and his own ‘good, he means, bad fortune,’ stammers his
excuses for leaving the company of _Mr. Mammonton_ and his sister, and
is wound up to a Countess by his mischievous prompter. _Lady Charlewood_
(Miss I. Paton) is disgusted with the behaviour of her new and absurd
admirer; her mother, the _Countess Dowager Delamere_ (Mrs. Davison),
admires his fortune, and patronises the match according to the etiquette
of rank and high life. His inconstancy and meanness are however exposed
in the meantime by _Miss Kitty Corderoy_, who is intimate with both the
young ladies, having been at the same school with them somewhere in the
neighbourhood of London, and runs up and down ‘the Ladder of Life’ as
she pleases (in the French play the corresponding character is a
milliner, which is a little more in keeping)—and _Mr. Felix Mudberry_,
in his own emphatic phrase, is ‘blown’ by all the three at once;—the
bubble of his legacy also bursts, and _Jack Pointer_ turning short round
upon him at this extremity, advises him to go abroad again, make another
fortune, and on his return, promises to introduce him to a Princess! Mr.
Liston produced a good deal of laughter in the part, but perhaps from
not being near enough to see his face, the drollery fell flat upon us.
It was (to get within bow-shot of an Hibernicism) like hearing the
report of a pistol, before seeing the flash. Weepers and a round hat do
not move our risible muscles. We think Mr. Liston shines in the cockney,
more than in the cockney and dandy together. ‘He knows his cue best
without a prompter.’ His affectation even must be unaffected. We will
match his lead against anybody’s, we will not answer for the tinsel. We
have a delicate request to make of him, that he would play _Madge_ for
his benefit and our satisfaction—unless _Moll Flagon_ should complain of
it as compromising her dignity. Is this piece Mr. Kenney’s? It shivers
on the brink of nothing, and plunges over head and ears into nonsense.
We wish our authors and architects, if they must give us foreign models,
would give them entire, and not by bits and samples, altering only to
spoil.
COVENT-GARDEN.
_Carron-Side, or the Fête Champêtre_, a new Opera, the words by Mr.
Planche, the music by M. Liverati, was brought out here on Tuesday, and
was repeated on Thursday. The dialogue is tolerable; and so are the
songs. Miss Stephens was the chief attraction in it; though she does not
make much figure by Scottish stream or mountain. Mr. Sapio and Mr. Wood
personated, the one a military, the other a naval hero in it, and
maintained the superiority of their several professions in song and bold
defiance—with equal loudness and skill. Miss Stephens (_Blanche Mackay_)
the supposed daughter of a peasant, is in love with _Captain Allan
Lindsay_ (Sapio), and he with her, though he is about to be married to
_Grace Campbell_ (Miss Cawse), who likes another of her cousins, _Cornet
Hector Lindsay_ (Mr. Wood) quite as well or better, as far as we could
judge by the event. When _Blanche_ has to present a _bouquet_ to the
intended couple on the morning of their nuptials, and to sing a song of
congratulation, her voice falters and she faints away in the midst of
it. She then, partly through shame and partly through vexation, escapes
to the house of the miller (Little Keely) and his wife (Miss Goward),
where she is kindly received, but supposed by her own friends to have
rashly drowned herself. The anguish of _Captain Allan Lindsay_ is not to
be restrained on this occasion, and betrays his passion for the unhappy
girl, who is at the same time discovered not to be the real daughter of
the old trumpeter _Donald Mackay_ (Bartley), but the daughter of _Mrs.
Campbell_, who had been supposed to be lost when an infant in the
Spanish campaign. The mystery being cleared up, the secret of her birth
is communicated to poor _Blanche_ amidst her smiles and tears. _Miss
Grace Campbell_ under the circumstances, and from her previous
indifference, declares for _Cornet Lindsay_, and _Blanche_ is united to
the Captain. Mr. Keely crept on and off the stage as usual; and Miss
Cawse danced and flourished round it as she sung, because Madame Vestris
does so. We are quite satisfied with Madame Vestris, without wishing to
see her imitated.
MR. KEAN
_The Examiner._] [_June 15, 1828._
We do not wonder at Mr. Kean’s want of success in Paris. As they do not
like or understand Shakespear, it is not to be supposed they should like
or understand any one who goes near to represent him, or who gives
anything more than a trite version or modernised paraphrase of him.
Voltaire has borrowed largely from the English dramatist, and has taken
_Othello’s_ dying speech almost entire, as far as the prose-ground of
it, but has contrived to leave out all the striking, picturesque points
of it:—so they would no doubt object to and cancel, by a sweeping
condemnation, all the unexpected and marked beauties of an impassioned
recitation of it. Whatever is not literal and conventional, is with them
extravagant and grotesque: they have so long been accustomed (we are
speaking of serious matters) to consider affectation as nature, that
they consider nature when it comes across them as affectation and
quaintness.
‘The poet’s eye, in a fine phrenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.’
So the actor’s eye (if truly inspired) comprehends more than is set down
for him, starts at hidden fancies that only pale passion sees; and his
voice is the trembling echo and the broken instrument of thoughts and of
an agony that lie too deep for mere words to express. This licence, that
is, this truth of nature is, with our accomplished and more
thorough-bred neighbours, entirely out of the question. Their art,
whether in poetry, acting, painting, is well-drilled regimental art:—it
is art in uniform and on parade. Thus tragic poetry cannot, in its dumb
despair, call on all nature to supply it with an appropriate language,
that places what it feels in palpable and lofty imagery before the
reader: it must, on the contrary, have its rhetorical and didactic
flourishes all ready for the occasion—these may be as tedious, as
pompous, as bombastic as you please, but to pass or allude to anything
beyond them, is vile and Gothic indeed. The actor may mouth, rant, and
whine as much as he pleases, so that he does it in measured time, and
seems in perfect health and spirits all the while; but if he is once
thrown off his guard, and loses sight of himself and the audience in the
sufferings of his hero, it is all over with him. Again, an actor’s face
‘should be as a book where one may read strange matters.’ This would be
an inexpiable offence in France, where there is nothing strange, and
where all must appear upon the surface or be kept quite out of sight, on
the score of decency and good manners. As the poet must introduce no
image or sentiment for which there is not a prescribed _formula_, so the
tragedian must give no shade or inflection of feeling which the entire
audience were not prepared complacently to anticipate. The self-love of
the pit would rise in open rebellion if he did. In France it is a rule
that no person is wiser than another: you cannot be beforehand with
their conceit and infinite superiority in impertinence. So they
themselves tell the story of a man who, hearing of the assassination of
the Duke of Berri, and not willing to allow that his informant had the
start of him on so interesting a topic, made answer—‘Yes, I knew it!’ We
are not therefore surprised that the Parisians find fault with the only
actor of much genius we possess: he must puzzle them almost as much as
the Hetman Platoff; and this assuredly they cannot forgive, as in the
present case their rank cowardice cannot get the better of their
consummate vanity. It is ludicrous too that they should charge us with
extravagance and fustian—they, who have their _Pensions de l’Univers_
and _Diligences de l’Univers_[43] stuck on every pillar and post! As we
know what the most refined people in the universe do not like, we are
also happy in learning what they do like. For others to despise what we
admire, is always to assume an attitude of seeming superiority over us:
to admire what we do not think much of, is to give us our revenge again.
Fastidiousness is here, as in many other cases, the effect not of an
excess of refinement, but of a want of conception. When Voltaire called
Shakespear a barbarian, we were a little staggered in our previous
opinion, as we could not tell what lofty models of excellence he
contemplated in his own mind; but when he pronounced Addison’s _Cato_ to
be a perfect tragedy, we knew what to think of him and ourselves. He
might as well have pronounced a marble slab to be a perfect statue. In
like manner, it might ‘give us pause’ that such competent critics are
dissatisfied with Mr. Kean, if we did not learn in the same breath that
they are in raptures with Mr. C. Kemble, Mr. Macready, and Miss
Smithson; not that we disapprove of the last, but that being our own
country people, we beg leave to judge of their relative merits better
than foreigners. If they scouted our pretentions altogether, we might
despond; but as they _laud_ us in the wrong place, we may smile in our
turn. The contradiction between us is not owing to an inferiority of
nature, but to a difference of opinion. We can understand why, with
reason, they admire Macready: he declaims well, and so far resembles
good French actors. Mr. C. Kemble is not only an excellent actor, but a
very good-looking man; and good looks are a letter of recommendation,
whether among the Laplanders or Hottentots, at Zenith or the Pole. Miss
Smithson is tall; and the French admire tall women. All these come under
a class, and meet with obvious sympathy and approbation. Mr. Kean, on
the other hand, stands alone,—is merely an original; and the French hate
originality: it seems to imply that there is some possible excellence or
talent that they are without! Beside it appears that they expected him
to be a giant. _Mon Dieu qu’il est petit!_—as if this was an insuperable
bar to his bestriding the theatric world like a Colossus. He is
diminutive, it is true: so was the _Little Corporal_: but since the
latter disappeared from the stage, they have ceased to be the _Great
Nation_. They stir up our bile by their arrogance and narrow-mindedness,
and we cannot help its overflowing in some degree of ill-humour and
petulance. We were heartily glad to find that Mr. Knowles’s tragedy of
_Virginius_ is well received in Paris—(we would always rather agree
with, than differ from them, for we know their subtlety and double
edge)—but this is to be attributed to the inherent and classical
excellence of the composition. Its scenes present a series of elegant
bas-reliefs, and are equally enchanting to the eye and to the ear.
We have received a letter from a Correspondent, praying us to put down
the large poke-bonnets which ladies at present take with them to the
theatre, and often persist in keeping on, as a female privilege. We
confess, we do not see the custom in that amiable light: it appears to
us the privilege of annoying others without any object. He says, that on
applying to a gentleman in the gallery of the King’s Theatre, to know if
a lady with him would have any objection to take off her bonnet, which,
with her involuntary movements from side to side, prevented three
persons behind her from seeing or enjoying the Opera, her friend
answered, ‘You see she is in the same situation with yourself,’ pointing
to another lady just before her. So that the evil being doubled was an
argument for it. At this rate, people might go to the play with
umbrellas, and hold them open the whole time,—or ladies with their
parasols, if we must have a more light and portable nuisance,—and by
thus setting up a screen to the performance, and making the absurdity
truly English and complete, put an end to it by common consent of those
who are only bent on incommoding others, when they think they are in
some degree singular in doing it. We expect some novelty (of which we
have had a dreary dearth of late) on the opening of the Haymarket
Theatre next week, and a treat, which we greatly long for, in little
Bartolozzi. But we must not count upon our good fortune too soon.
MUNDEN’S SIR PETER TEAZLE
_The Times._] [_September 8, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
This theatre opened on Saturday with _The School for Scandal_ and _Past
Ten O’clock_. The chief novelty in the former was Munden’s _Sir Peter
Teazle_. We cannot speak very favourably of it. He did not feel at home
in the part, which is indeed quite out of his way. His lengthened visage
and abrupt tones did not suit the character or sentiments of _Sir
Peter_. _Sir Peter_ is a common every-day sort of character, a tetchy
amorous old bachelor, who has married a young wife, with an uneasy
consciousness of his own infirmities, and placed in situations to make
those infirmities more ridiculous. But still he is a classical
character, and not a grotesque; and, therefore, the actor’s peculiar
talents were thrown away upon him, or rather were judiciously kept as
much as possible in the back-ground, and hardly dared to show themselves
once the whole evening. Mr. Munden went through the part with laudable
gravity and decorum, without _making any hole in his manners_; nor did
he purposely play the clown or _pantomime_ in any of the scenes. Yet the
negation of farce is not comedy. _Sir Peter_ was a knight newly dubbed
as well as married, a gentleman on his good behaviour both with his
mistress and the public. We missed the irresistible expansion of his
broad, shining face; and reckoned up a number of suppressed shrugs, and
embryo grimaces, that shrunk from the glare of the new gas lights. His
eyebrows were not lifted up with wonder; his lips were not moistened
with jests as with marmalade; nor did his chin drop down once its whole
length as with a total dislocation of his ideas. In the scene of the
discovery in the fourth act, where his wife as ‘the little _French
Milliner_’ is concealed behind the screen, he took a greater license,
but from the mechanical restraint to which he had been subjected, there
was something even here dolorous and petrified in his manner. If,
however, Mr. Munden did penance in _Sir Peter_, it was a holyday-time
with him, high carnival in _Old Nosy_ in the farce, where he made
himself and the audience amends for all the temptations he had resisted
to indulge his natural genius, and let out his whole faculties of face,
voice, and gesture. In his character, as an old steward, he is
reeling-ripe from the beginning to the end of the piece; and he produces
a dizziness in the heads of the audience as unavoidable, though more
pleasant than that which overtakes the passengers in a Margate hoy. The
_School for Scandal_ was, in the other characters, cast much as usual,
and as well as the strength of the company in genteel comedy would
permit. Mrs. Davison’s _Lady Teazle_, though not without spirit, is too
coarse and hoydening. Wallack’s _Joseph Surface_ wanted dignity and
plausibility. Not to compare him with old Jack Palmer, he does not hit
off the officious condescending solemnity of the character so well as
Young. He seems sulky and reserved, instead of being self-complacent and
ostentatious; to shrink into a cautious contemplation of his own designs
and villainy, instead of protecting others under the shadow of his
assumed virtues, and covering their failings and defects with a veil of
pompous sentiment. It was said of Garrick, that he played the footman
too like the fine gentleman; Mr. Wallack, on the other hand, plays the
fine gentleman too much like the footman. When dressed to most
advantage, he puts us in mind of a valet out of livery. Mr. Rae’s
_Charles Surface_ was without any thing to recommend it, but the wit,
gaiety, and magnanimity of the author. His mode of speaking is more
harsh and untuneable in comedy than in regular declamation, which in
some measure hides its habitual defects. It is a brogue in full gallop
suddenly stopped short by the turnpike gate of criticism. Harley’s _Sir
Benjamin Backbite_ was inoffensive from its insipidity; and Knight as
old _Crabtree_ had painted his eyebrows very naturally. The house was
not very crowded. The curtain drew up punctually at seven, without any
previous expression of impatience; and the play was over before ten: but
the rapidity with which the acts followed one another, and the almost
immediate interruption of the music between the acts as soon as it had
struck up, produced on us an unpleasant effect. It was like going a
journey in the mail-coach, where they do not allow you time for your
meals. A good play, like a hearty dinner, requires some time for
digestion: the music in the orchestra acts upon the imagination, like
wine upon the stomach; and habit makes it as ungrateful to us to be
disappointed of the one as to be deprived of the other.
YOUNG’S HAMLET
_The Times._] [_September 9, 1817._
COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.
This theatre opened last night with _Hamlet_, and the _Miller and his
Men_. The chief improvement in the house seems to us to be the large
mirrors at each end of the first row of boxes, which reflect the company
in a brilliant perspective, and have a very magical effect. The great
chandelier suspended from the top of the theatre, we should admire more,
if it did not put out our eyes in looking at it; nor do we think the
glare it produces any addition to the general appearance of the company
or the house. The only advantage resulting from it—that of throwing the
light upon the countenances of the actors from above instead of from
below (which last method inverts the natural shadows of the face, and
distorts the expression), is defeated by the gas lights which are still
retained between the stage and the orchestra. Nor do we know how these
can well be dispensed with, as it is by raising or withdrawing them that
the stage is enlightened or darkened as the occasion requires it. The
house was exceedingly full, and the play went off as well as could be
expected. Mr. Young’s _Hamlet_ is not his most happy or successful
effort. He in a great measure imitates Mr. Kemble, and Mr. Kemble is a
bad model in this part; even where he is original he is not more what he
ought to be, not more like _Hamlet_. He declaims it very well, and rants
it very well; but where is the expression of the feeling?—where the
thought beyond all ordinary means of expression, wrapped up in itself as
in a dim cloud, shown most by being hid, that derives its energy from
rest, not from action, and is as it were audible from its very silence?
Mr. Young, we allow, rehearsed several passages very well, as detached
passages from a school-boy’s exercise: but he wanted keeping—the fine
inflections, sudden or gradual, of the character—the unthought-of
swellings of the passion—the involuntary ebbing and flowing of his idle
purposes. This actor in fact executes his conception well: but then his
conception is either common-place, or wrong. He has not always the
judgment or the genius to pitch each passage in the right key, and in
harmony with the rest. We will mention only two instances. In reciting
the description of man as the noblest of creatures, ‘the paragon of
animals,’ &c., Mr. Young was so vehement, that he seemed quite angry;
and his sudden turning round to the players at the conclusion of the
speech was exactly as if they had given him some serious offence by
their ‘smiling.’ Again, he spoke the soliloquy after the scene in which
the player gives the description of Pyrrhus, in a style not conveying
the idea of his own melancholy and weakness as contrasted with the
theatrical fury of the imaginary hero, but as if he had himself caught
by mere physical infection the very fury which he describes himself to
be without. This was certainly not right, but (what is perhaps better)
it was applauded. Mr. Bonnell Thornton was _Horatio_, and appeared not
to have recovered all the evening from his fright at first seeing the
_Ghost_. His pronunciation is thick, as if he spoke with pebbles in his
mouth; nor is his emphasis judicious. Mr. Egerton’s _Ghost_ is the most
substantial we ever saw. He does not look like one that has ‘peaked or
pined’ long, and has by no means realized _Hamlet’s_ wish—
‘Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.’
Miss Matthews played ‘the pretty _Ophelia_’ very pleasingly. She is as
good an _Ophelia_ as we have lately seen—better, we think than Miss
Stephens, because she does not sing _quite_ so well. This character
ought not indeed to be in general given to a fine singer; for it has
been well observed, that ‘_Ophelia_ does not go mad because she can
sing, but she sings because she has gone mad.’
DOWTON IN THE HYPOCRITE
_The Times._] [_September 19, 1817._
DRURY LANE THEATRE.
The excellent comedy of _The Hypocrite_ was acted here last night.
Dowton’s _Dr. Cantwell_, is a very admirable and edifying performance.
The divine and human affections are ‘very craftily qualified’ in his
composition, which is a mixture of the Methodist parson ingrafted on the
old French pietist, and accomplished Abbé. The courtly air of Moliere’s
_Tartuffe_ has been considerably lowered down and vulgarised to fit the
character to the grossness of modern times and circumstances: only the
general features of the character, and the prominent incidents of the
story, have been retained by the English translator, and they seem to
require the long speeches, the oratorical sentiments, and laboured
casuistry of the original author to render them probable or even
credible. It has been remarked, that the wonderful success of this piece
on the French stage is a lasting monument of the stress laid by that
talking and credulous nation on all verbal professions of virtue and
sincerity, and of the little difference they make between words and
things. With all the pains that have been taken to bring it within the
verge of verisimilitude by the aid of popular allusions and religious
prejudices, it with difficulty _naturalizes_ on our own stage, and
remains at last an incongruous, though a very striking and instructive
caricature. Dowton’s jovial and hearty characters are his best; his
demure and hypocritical ones are only his second best. His _Dr.
Cantwell_ is not so good as his _Major Sturgeon_, or his _Sir Anthony
Absolute_, but still it is very good. Their excellence consists in
giving way to the ebullition of his feelings of social earnestness, or
vainglorious ostentation; the excellence of _this_ in the systematic
concealment of his inmost thoughts and purposes. _Cantwell_ sighs out
his soul with the melancholy formality of a piece of clockwork, and
exhibits the encroachments of amorous importunity under a mask of _still
life_. The locks of his hair are combed with appropriate sleekness and
unpretending humility over his forehead and shoulders: his face looks
godly and greasy; his person and mind are well fortified in a decent
suit of plain broad cloth, and the calves of his legs look stout and
saint-like in stockings of dark pepper-and-salt fleecy hosiery. Bitter
smiles contend with falling tears; the whining tones of the conventicle
with the insolence of success, and the triumph of his unbridled rage in
the last act over his phlegmatic hypocrisy is complete. He was admirably
supported by Mrs. Sparks, as old _Lady Lambert_, and by Oxberry as
_Mawworm_. This last character is as loose and dangling as the sails of
a windmill, and is puffed up and set in motion by one continuous blast
of folly and fanaticism. The other characters in the piece were less
happily supported.
MISS BRUNTON’S ROSALIND
_The Times._] [_September 20, 1817._
COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.
At this theatre last night Miss Brunton appeared in _Rosalind_, in _As
you Like it_. She certainly played the part very respectably and very
agreeably, but not _exquisitely_; and if it is not played exquisitely,
in our mind it is spoiled. ‘But would Shakspeare’s _Rosalind_ do so?’ is
a question that, if put home as it ought to be, might deter many an
accomplished young lady from attempting to give life to the careless,
inimitable graces of this ideal creation of the poet’s art. Miss Brunton
recited the different passages with considerable point, intelligence,
and archness, like a lively and sensible school-girl, repeating it as an
exercise; but she was not half giddy, fond, and rapturous enough for
_Rosalind_. She spoke her sentences with ‘good emphasis and discretion,’
instead of running herself and the imaginations of the audience fairly
out of breath with pleasure, love, wit, and playful gaiety. She has,
however, white teeth and black eyes, a clear voice, a pleasing figure,
with youth on her side, and a very good understanding to boot. What more
can be required in a young actress, except by fastidious critics like
us? She sung the _Cuckoo_ song very prettily, and was encored in it. The
other parts were not very elaborately got up. We liked Mr. Duruset’s two
songs as well as any thing else. Mr. Young’s _Jaques_ was less spirited
than we have sometimes seen it: indeed, the character is in some measure
spoiled to his hands by the prompt-book critics, who have put a great
deal of improper praise of himself into the mouth of the melancholy
_Jaques_. It required some contrivance to make him or Shakspeare an
egotist! Mr. Fawcett’s _Touchstone_ was amusing, but too rapid and
slovenly. There are some parts of this character which the actor
probably thinks it becoming his Managerial dignity to hurry over as fast
as possible. Mrs. Gibbs’s _Audrey_ is almost too good. If ‘the gods have
not made her poetical,’ they have at least inspired her with the very
spirit of folly, and with all its bliss. A Russian ballet, and _The
Libertine_, closed the entertainments of the evening. The former of
these is a curious exhibition of Russian costume, but it does not
exhibit the Miss Dennetts to any advantage. The play of _As you Like it_
was given out again for Monday, instead of _The Slave_.
MAYWOOD’S ZANGA
_The Times._] [_October 3, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
Mr. Maywood appeared here in _Zanga_ last night. It is not certainly
from any wish to discourage, but we cannot speak so favourably of his
performance of this character as of his _Shylock_. Considerable
diffidence still appears in this actor’s manner, and retards his
progress to reputation and excellence. He does not give sufficient scope
and vehemence to the impassioned parts of the character, nor sufficient
decision and significance to its wily and malignant duplicity. _Zanga’s_
blood is on fire; it boils in his veins; it should dilate, and agitate
his whole frame with the fiercest rage and revenge: and again, the
suppression of his constitutional ardour, of the ungovernable passions
that torment and goad on his mind, ought to be marked with a
correspondent degree of artful circumspection and studied hypocrisy. In
both extremes (for the character is in extremes throughout) we thought
Mr. Maywood failed. His rage and hatred, where it had opportunity to
vent itself in a torrent of exclamations, was not strong or sustained
enough, and appeared in the very tempest and whirlwind of the passion,
to recoil affrighted ‘from the sound itself had made.’ In the
concealment of his purposes, and in the villainous insinuations with
which he fills _Alonzo’s_ mind, ‘distilling them like a leprous poison
in his ear,’ he was ‘too tame,’ too servile and mechanical, and
resembled more the busy, mercenary, credulous tale-bearer, than the
dark, secret assassin of the peace, life, and honour, of his
unsuspecting patron. The passage in which Mr. Maywood failed most, and
in which the greatest symptoms of disapprobation manifested themselves,
was that in which the greatest effect is generally produced, and where
consequently the expectations are raised the highest: we mean, in the
terrific and overpowering exclamation to _Alonzo_, ‘’Twas I that did
it!’ In the long and nasal emphasis which Mr. Maywood laid on the
monosyllable ‘I’ he shocked the ears and tired the patience of the
auditors; less, we apprehend, from any thing wrong in his conception of
the part, than from the remains of a provincial accent hanging on his
pronunciation, and in passages of great vehemence and ardour, preventing
him from having the full command of his utterance. In the less violent
expression of passion, he was more successful; and gave one or two of
the short soliloquies which occur of a more thoughtful and reasoning
cast, with considerable depth of tone and feeling. We are not without
hopes, when Mr. Kean returns, and imparts some of his confidence and
admirable decision to his young rival or pupil, of seeing some very good
acting _between_ them: we say so without meaning a double-entendre.
This play of _The Revenge_ is certainly a very indifferent piece of
work; and in the hero of the story, _Alonzo_, Mr. Rae _bolted_ some very
ranting speeches, blank verse and all, clean out of his mouth like shot
from the mouth of a cannon, with a tone and emphasis that might have
startled ears less accustomed to the ‘forced gait’ and high clattering
hoofs of his voice than ours. By stamping so hard, too, he raises not
only a shout in the upper-gallery, but a cloud of dust from the green
baize on the stage-floor.
KEAN’S RICHARD III.
_The Times._] [_October 7, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
Mr. Kean has returned to us again (after no very long absence), in the
character of _Richard the Third_. His performance of the part is so well
known to the public, and has been so often criticised, that it would be
superfluous to enter into particulars again at present. We observe no
great alteration in him. If any thing, his voice is deepened, and his
pauses are lengthened, which did not need to be. His habitual style of
acting is apt to run into an excess of significance; and any studied
addition to that excess necessarily tasks the attention to a painful
degree. Mr. Pope resumed his situation as _King Henry_, and was stabbed
in the Tower, according to the rules of art. We were glad to see him in
the part, though we should have no objection to see the part itself
omitted, to make room for the fine abrupt beginning of Shakspeare’s
_Richard the Third_, with the soliloquy, ‘Now is the winter of our
discontent,’ &c. In our opinion, the _Richard the Third_ which was
manufactured by Cibber, and which has now obtained prescriptive
possession of the stage, is a vile jumble; and we are convinced that a
restoration of the original play (as written by the original author)
would, with the omission of a few short scenes, be an advantage to the
managers, and a gratification to the public. We understand, indeed, that
something of this sort has been in agitation; and in order to contribute
any little aid in our power to so laudable an attempt, we shall here
give a few of the passages which are omitted in the common stage
representation, but which appear to us particularly calculated for stage
effect, and which would also fit Mr. Kean’s peculiar style of acting, as
the glove fits the hand. One of these occurs almost immediately after
the first opening soliloquy, in the dialogue between _Glo’ster_ and
_Brackenbury_:—
_Glo’ster._—Even so! an’ please your worship, Brackenbury,
You may partake of any thing we say;
We speak no treason, man:—we say, the king
Is wise and virtuous; and his noble queen
Well strook in years: fair, and not jealous:
We say that Shore’s wife hath a pretty foot,
A cherry lip, a bonny eye, a passing pleasing tongue:
That the queen’s kindred are made gentle folks:
How say you, Sir? can you deny all this?
_Brackenbury._—With this, my lord, myself have nought to do.
_Glo’ster._—What, naught to do with mistress Shore?
I tell thee, fellow,
He that doth naught with her, excepting one,
Were best to do it secretly, alone,
_Brackenbury._—What one, my Lord?
_Glo’ster._—Her husband, knave:—Would’st thou betray me?
We think, if any thing could give additional effect to the fine taunting
irony of these lines, it would be Mr. Kean’s mode of delivering them. He
is almost the only actor who does not spoil Shakspeare.
Again, a very spirited scene of a different description, which is an
astonishing mixture of violence and duplicity, occurs when _Glo’ster_
rushes into the apartment where the _Queen’s_ friends are assembled, to
complain of their taking advantage of his meekness and simplicity:—
_Glo’ster._—They do me wrong, and I will not endure it.
Who are they that complain unto the king,
That I, forsooth, am stern, and love them not?
By holy Paul, they love his Grace but lightly,
That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours!
Because I cannot flatter, and speak fair,
Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abus’d
By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?
_Grey._—To whom in all this presence speaks your Grace?
_Glo’ster._—To thee, that hast nor honesty, nor grace?
When have I injured thee? When done thee wrong?
Or thee? or thee? or any of your faction?
A plague upon you all!
This is certainly an admirable conclusion to so modest an introduction.
Any one who reads this passage, and who has seen Mr. Kean acquit himself
in similar situations, must, we think, feel with us a desire to see him
in this. We might multiply these instances of characteristic traits in
the adroit and high-spirited _Richard_. We shall give one more, which is
so fine in its effect, and besides, conveys so striking a picture of the
outward demeanour which an actor, to fulfil the poet’s conception, ought
to assume in the part, that we cannot resist giving it entire. It is the
scene where he entraps the unsuspecting _Hastings_:—
_Hastings._—His grace looks cheerfully and smooth this morning:
There’s some conceit or other likes him well,
When he doth bid good-morrow with such spirit.
I think, there’s ne’er a man in Christendom,
Can lesser hide his love or hate than he;
For by his face straight shall you know his heart.
_Stanley._—What of his heart perceive you in his face,
By any likelihood he show’d to-day?
_Hastings._—Marry, that with no man here he is offended;
For, were he, he had shown it in his looks.’
Re-enter _Glo’ster and Buckingham_.
‘_Glo’ster._—I pray you all, tell me what they deserve
That do conspire my death with devilish plots
Of damned witchcraft; and that have prevail’d
Upon my body with their hellish charms?
_Hastings._—The tender love I bear your grace, my lord,
Makes me most forward in this noble presence
To doom the offenders: whosoe’er they be,
I say, my lord, they have deserved death.
_Glo’ster._—Then be your eyes the witness of their evil;
Look how I am bewitch’d; behold, mine arm
Is, like a blasted sapling, wither’d up;
And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.
_Hastings._—If they have done this deed, my noble lord—
_Glo’ster._—If? thou protector of this damn’d strumpet,
Talk’st thou to me of _ifs_!—Thou art a traitor:—
Off with his head! Now by St. Paul I swear,
I will not dine until I see the same.
Lovell and Catesby, look that it be done.
The rest, that love me, rise and follow me.
Now this is despatching business in the true dramatic style. Poets
cannot take the same bold licenses, with their characters on the stage,
till kings are reinstated in their former plenitude of power. The
incident which is here omitted in the acting play of _Richard III._ has
been transferred to Rowe’s _Jane Shore_. We should like to see it
restored to its original place, and justice done it by Mr. Kean’s
distorted gestures, and smothered voice, suddenly bursting on the ear
like thunder.
THE WONDER
_The Times._] [_October 9, 1817._
COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.
_The Wonder_, or _A Woman keeps a Secret_, was performed here last night
with admirable effect. Miss Brunton was the heroine of the piece, the
charming _Violante_. We cannot speak in rapturous terms of her
performance of the part. There is in the character itself an extreme
spirit, and at the same time an extreme delicacy, which it is not easy
to unite. Miss Brunton went through the different scenes, however, with
a considerable degree of grace, vivacity, and general propriety, never
falling below, and seldom rising above mediocrity. She does not
‘Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art;’
nor, according to another line of the same poet, which seems to convey a
perfect idea of female comic acting,
‘Catch ere she falls the Cynthia of the minute.’
We have already objected to this young lady’s recitation, a certain
didactic, monotonous _twang_, and we cannot upon the present occasion
recant our criticism. Miss Foote was _Violante’s_ friend, _Donna
Isabella_, and looked and lisped the part very mincingly. Charles
Kemble’s _Don Felix_ is one of his best parts. He raves, sighs, starts,
frets, grows jealous, and relents, with all the characteristic spirit of
an amorous hero; and in the drunken scene with old _Don Lopez_, where he
produces his pistol as the marriage-contract, is particularly excellent
and edifying. Fawcett played _Lissardo_ as he plays almost every thing:
he chattered like a magpie, and strutted like a crow in a gutter. But
Emery’s _Gibby_ was the thing: the genius of Scotland shone through his
Highland plaid and broad bluff face: he seemed evidently afraid neither
of having his voice heard, nor his face seen. In person he resembled the
figure of the Highlander which we see stuck up as a sign at
tobacconists’ windows. We never see nor wish to see better acting than
this. Emery’s acting is indeed the most perfect imitation of common
nature on the stage. Abbott was respectable as _Colonel Briton_. Mrs.
Gibbs’s _Flora_ was what every waiting-woman ought to be.
VENICE PRESERVED
_The Times._] [_October 10, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
Otway’s noble tragedy of _Venice Preserved_ was produced here last
night. The effect upon the whole was not satisfactory. The novelties of
the representation were Mr. H. Johnstone as _Pierre_, and Miss Campbell
(from the Dublin Theatre) as _Belvidera_. Of Mr. Johnstone’s _Pierre_,
after having seen Mr. Kemble in it, or even Mr. Young, we cannot speak
in terms of applause. The character is not one of blunt energy, but of
deep art. It is more sarcastic than fierce, and even the fierceness is
more calculated to wound others than to shake or disturb himself. He is
a master-mind, that plays with the foibles and passions of others and
wields their energies to his dangerous purposes with conscious careless
indifference. Mr. Johnstone was boisterous in his declamation, coarse in
his irony, pompous and common-place in his action. Mr. Rae (as
_Jaffier_), in the famous scene between these two characters, displayed
some strong touches of nature and pathos. Miss Campbell, as _Belvidera_,
did not altogether realize our idea of Otway’s heroine; one of ‘the most
replenished sweet works of art or nature.’ Her face, though not
handsome, is not without expression; but its character is strength,
rather than softness. In her person she is graceful, and has a mixture
of dignity and ease in her general deportment. Her voice is powerful,
but in its higher tones it rises too much into a scream, and in its
gentler ones subsides into a lisp, which is more infantine than
feminine. In her general style of acting she put us sometimes in mind of
Mrs Fawcit, sometimes of Miss Somerville, and more than once of Miss
O’Neill. Her delineation of the part, if not sufficiently tender or
delicate, was however forcible, impassioned, and affecting. We thought
the last scene, in which she goes mad, and digs for her murdered husband
in the grave, the best. We should indeed give her the preference over
Miss O’Neill in this very trying scene. Her expression of the disordered
wanderings of the imagination, and of the last desperate struggles of
passion in her bosom, both by the intonations of her voice, and the
varying actions of her body, were more natural, and less repulsive than
the mere physical violence of Miss O’Neill in the same passage. The play
was given out for repetition with some marks of disapprobation from a
part of the audience.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
_The Times._] [_October 15, 1817._
COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.
Goldsmith’s comedy of _She Stoops to Conquer_ was played at this theatre
last night: its reception was highly favourable. It bears the stamp of
the author’s genius, which was an indefinable mixture of the original
and imitative. His plot, characters, and incidents, are all new, and yet
they are all old, with little variation or disguise—that is, the writer
sedulously avoided common-place, and sought for singularity, but found
it rather in the unhackneyed and out-of-the-way inventions of those who
had gone before him than in his own stores. His _Vicar of Wakefield_,
which abounds more than any of his works in delightful and original
traits, is still very much borrowed from Fielding’s _Joseph Andrews_.
Again, the characters and adventures of _Tony Lumpkin_ and his mother in
the present comedy are a counterpart, even to the incident of the theft
of the jewels, of those of the _Widow Blackacre_ and her booby son in
Wycherley’s _Plain Dealer_. The change of character and the rustic
disguise of _Miss Hardcastle_, by which she gains her lover, are also a
faint imitation of _Letitia Hardy_ in _The Belle’s Stratagem_. This sort
of plagiarism, which gives us a repetition of what are comparatively new
and eccentric pictures of human life, is much to be preferred to the
dull routine of trite, vapid, every-day common-places: but it is also
more dangerous, as the stealing of pictures or family plate, where the
goods are immediately identified, is surer of detection than the
stealing of bank-notes or the current coin of the realm. Johnson’s
sarcasm against some writer that ‘his singularity was not his
excellence,’ cannot be applied to Goldsmith’s works in general: but we
do not know whether it might not in severity be applied to _She Stoops
to Conquer_. The incidents and characters are, some of them, exceedingly
amusing; but it is a little at the expense of probability and
_bienseance_. _Tony Lumpkin_ is certainly a very essential, and
unquestionably comic personage; and his absurdities or his humours were
very effectually portrayed by Liston. His impenetrability and
unconscious confusion of mind and face in reading and spelling out the
letter was admirable. Charles Kemble’s bashful scene with his mistress
was irresistibly ludicrous, and excellently well played: but still it
did not quite overcome our incredulity as to the existence of such a
character in such circumstances. It is a highly amusing caricature, a
ridiculous fancy, but no more. One of the finest and most delicate
touches of real acting we ever witnessed was in the transition of this
modest gentleman’s manner to the easy and agreeable tone of familiarity
with the supposed chambermaid, which was not total and abrupt, but
exactly such in kind and degree as such a character of natural reserve
and constitutional timidity would undergo from the change of
circumstances. Miss Brunton’s _Miss Hardcastle_ was a very correct and
agreeable piece of acting. Mrs. Davenport’s _Mrs. Hardcastle_ was like
her acting in all such characters, as good as it could possibly be.
KEAN’S MACBETH
_The Times._] [_October 21, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
Macbeth (with Matthew Lock’s music) was played here last night. Mr. Kean
was _Macbeth_, Miss Campbell _Lady Macbeth_. We never saw the former to
such advantage in the part. Mr. Kean’s _Macbeth_ did not use to be a
great favourite with us, except in the murder scene: but he last night,
we thought, lifted the general character to almost an equality with this
single scene. At least, he played the whole in a style of boldness and
grandeur which we have not seen before. He was ‘proud and lion-hearted,
and lacked fear.’ A thousand hearts seemed swelling in his bosom. His
voice rolled from the bottom of his breast like thunder, and his eye
flashed scorching flame. Instead of going back (as some cunning critics
who have been peeping out of their cells at him ever since he began his
career, to watch for his first failure, and to fall upon him
magnanimously at a disadvantage, have been predicting), he advances even
beyond himself with manly steps and a heroic spirit. In the
banquet-scene he was particularly excellent; and called forth, with
complete effect, those deep tones of nature and passion, recoiling upon
and bursting with a convulsive movement from the heart, which are his
very best and surest resource, though he has as yet made the least use
of them. Let him go on, and open all the sluices of passion in his
breast which are yet unlocked. He has done much: let him do as much
more, by giving as much depth of internal emotion (where it is required)
as he has done of external vehemence, by adding stateliness and a
measured march to infinite force and truth, that he may be the greatest
poet, as he unquestionably is the greatest prose-actor of the stage.
When we speak of him as deficient in these qualities, we only do so in
comparison with Mrs. Siddons: it would be a mockery both of him and the
public to compare him with any one else. But she had something of
_divine_ about her which Mr. Kean has not; he in general only shows us
the utmost force of what is _human_. Of Miss Campbell’s _Lady Macbeth_
we are almost afraid to speak, because we cannot speak favourably of it;
yet a failure in this part is by no means decisive against the general
merits of an actress. But she was altogether too tame and drawling for
_Lady Macbeth_; and some attempts at originality failed of effect from
the timidity with which they were executed.
KEAN’S OTHELLO
_The Times._] [_October 27, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
_Othello_ was played here on Saturday to a crowded house. There were two
new appearances—Mr. Maywood as _Iago_, and a young lady as _Desdemona_.
The name of this young _debutante_ is not announced; but her reception
was exceedingly flattering. Her face is handsome, her person elegant,
her voice sweet, and her general deportment graceful and easy. There was
also a considerable portion of tenderness and delicacy of feeling in
several of the passages; but perhaps less than the character would bear.
The only faults which we think it necessary to mention in her
performance were, a too continual movement of the hands up and down, and
sometimes a monotonous cadence in the recitation of the blank verse. Mr.
Maywood’s _Iago_ had some of the faults which we have noticed in his
former characters; but in the most trying scenes in the third act with
_Othello_, we thought him exceedingly happy and successful. His
conception was just, and his execution effective. There was a cold
stillness in his manner which was more frightful than the expression of
the most inveterate malignity. He seemed to crawl and watch for his prey
like the spider, instead of darting upon it like the serpent. In the
commencement of the part his timidity appeared to prevent him from doing
justice to his intention, and once or twice his voice grew loud and
unmanageable, so as to excite some marks of disapprobation. Mr. Kean’s
_Othello_ is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in the world. It is
impossible either to describe or praise it adequately. We have never
seen any actor so wrought upon, so ‘perplexed in the extreme.’ The
energy of passion, as it expresses itself in action, is not the most
terrific part; it is agony of his soul, showing itself in looks and
tones of voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the
fiend-like insinuations of _Iago_, he presented the very face, the
marble aspect of Dante’s _Count Ugolino_. On his fixed eyelids ‘Horror
sat plumed.’ In another part, where a gleam of hope or of tenderness
returns to subdue the tumult of his passions, his voice broke in
faltering accents from his overcharged breast. His lips might be said
less to utter words, than to bleed drops of blood gushing from his
heart. An instance of this was in his pronunciation of the line ‘Of one
that loved not wisely but too well.’ The whole of this last speech was
indeed given with exquisite force and beauty. We only object to the
virulence with which he delivers the last line, and with which he stabs
himself—a virulence which _Othello_ would neither feel against himself
at that moment, nor against the turbaned Turk (whom he had slain) at
such a distance of time. His exclamation on seeing his wife, ‘I cannot
think but _Desdemona’s_ honest,’ was ‘the glorious triumph of exceeding
love;’ a thought flashing conviction on his mind, and irradiating his
countenance with joy, like sudden sunshine. In fact, almost every scene
or sentence in this extraordinary exhibition is a master-piece of
natural passion. The convulsed motion of the hands, and the involuntary
swellings of the veins of the forehead in some of the most painful
situations, should not only suggest topics of critical panegyric, but
might furnish studies to the painter or anatomist.
KEAN AND MISS O’NEILL
_The Times._] [_December 2, 1817._
COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.
The tragedy of _Venice Preserved_ was acted here last night to rather an
empty house. Mr. Young’s _Pierre_ is one of his very best and most
spirited performances. Mr. C. Kemble did to the character of _Jaffier_
all the justice it deserves. But the great attraction of this piece, as
it is at present acted, is Miss O’Neill’s _Belvidera_. In this, however,
we think her less excellent than on her first appearance in it. Her
pathos is less simple, less touching, and her action more outrageous and
violent. Perhaps the reason of this change may be, that, acting in such
parts from an impulse of real sympathy with the heroine, as she repeats
the character, her immediate interest in it becomes gradually
diminished, and she is compelled to make up for the want of genuine
feeling by the external vehemence of her manner. Be this as it may, she
at present carries this violence of manner to the utmost pitch at which
it can be borne. Her screams almost torture the ear, her looks almost
petrify the sight. It is time that she should return to her first style
of acting, which did not ‘o’erstep the modesty of nature.’ We speak thus
of her from a sense of justice, and of respect, not of contempt, for her
powers: for we think she owes it to those powers _not to abuse them_. As
_Belvidera_ is one of her most prominent characters, we shall take this
opportunity to sum up in a few words our opinion of her general merit as
a tragic actress; and perhaps we shall be able to do this best by
pointing out the difference between her and another celebrated performer
of the day.
Mr. Kean affects the audience from the force of passion rather than of
sentiment, or subsides into the pathetic after the violence of action,
but seldom rises into it from the depth of natural feeling. In this
respect, he presents almost a direct contrast to Miss O’Neill. Her
energy appears to rise out of her sensibility: distress takes possession
of, and overwhelms, her faculties: she triumphs in her weakness, and
vanquishes by yielding. Mr. Kean is chiefly great in the conflict of
passions, and resistance to his fate—in the opposition of his will to
circumstances—in the keen excitement of his understanding. It is not
without some reluctance, and after a good deal of reflection, that we
should say, that the finest parts of his acting are superior to the
finest parts of hers: for instance, to her parting with _Jaffier_ in
_Belvidera_,—to her terror and joy in meeting with _Biron_ in
_Isabella_,—to the death-scene in the same character,—and to the scene
in the prison with her husband as Mrs. Beverley. Her acting is more
correct, equable, and faultless throughout than Mr. Kean’s, and it is
also quite as overpowering at the time, in the most impassioned parts;
but it does not leave the same impression on the mind afterwards. It
adds little to the stock of our ideas, or to our materials for
reflection, but passes away with the momentary illusion of the scene.
And this difference of effect perhaps arises from the difference of the
parts they have to sustain on the stage. In the female characters which
Miss O’Neill plays, the distress is in a great measure physical and
involuntary, or such as is common to every woman in similar
circumstances. She abandons herself to the impulses of grief or
tenderness, and revels in the excess of an uncontrollable affliction.
She can call to her aid with perfect propriety and the greatest effect,
all the weaknesses of her sex; tears, sighs, convulsive sobs, shrieks,
death-like stupefaction, and laughter more terrible than all: but it is
not the same in the parts which Mr. Kean has to act. There must here be
a manly fortitude, as well as a natural sensibility. There must be a
restraint constantly put upon the feelings by the understanding and the
will. He must in part be ‘as one in suffering all, who suffers nothing.’
He cannot give way entirely to his situation or his feelings, but must
endeavour to become master of them and of himself. This, in our
conception, must make it more easy to give the utmost effect and
interest to female characters on the stage, by rendering the expression
of the passion more simple, obvious, and natural; and must also make
them less rememberable afterwards, by leaving less scope for the
exercise of intellect, and for the distinct and complicated reaction of
the character upon circumstances. At least, we can only account in some
such way for the different impression which the acting of these two
admired performers makes on our minds, when we see or when we think of
them. As critics, we particularly feel this. Mr. Kean affords a
never-failing source of observation and discussion: we can only praise
or blame Miss O’Neill. The peculiarity and the strong hold of Mrs.
Siddons’s acting was, that she in a wonderful degree united both the
extremes of excellence here spoken of, that is, the natural frailties of
passion, or its inarticulate and involuntary expression, with a
commanding strength of intellect, and the loftiest flights of
imagination. Her person could also endure more violence of action than
Miss O’Neill’s; whose tender frame is hardly able to ‘abide the beating
of so strong a passion,’ as she often has to assume, and whose fair face
is injured by the least distortion.
THE HONEY MOON
_The Times._] [_December 3, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
The favourite comedy of the _Honey Moon_ was performed here last night;
the part of the _Duke_ by Mr. H. Johnston. Upon the whole he acquitted
himself well in it, with spirit and effect. More than that the character
does not require; and it would be hard if the critic required of the
actor what the poet has not clearly and intelligibly exacted from him.
When, indeed, an accomplished performer, who happens to be a man of
genius, lends additional graces to a character, and places it in a
brilliant light of his own, we are bound to thank him: when he merely
gives ‘what is set down for him’ with force and fidelity, we are bound
to be content. Mr. Johnston, we thought, sometimes too coarse, and
sometimes too sarcastic; but in this sort of assumption of character, it
is hard to say exactly how far the habitual manners and sentiments are
to modify and appear through those which are put on to answer the
purpose of the moment. In this species of the _mock-heroic_, which is a
sort of equivocal mixture of comedy and tragedy, half pompous and half
playful, Elliston, who was the first _Duke Aranza_, excelled all those
who have succeeded him. ‘Plautus was too light, Seneca was too heavy for
him.’ He just aspired to something above comedy, he just fell short of
tragedy; but _he hit the stage between wind and water_. Mr. H.
Johnston’s energy is more fierce, his irony more virulent: but still he
moved, and looked, and spoke, if not like a lord, like a very lordly
husband, and gave the essential interest to the part. He danced much at
his ease, and recited the speech in which the Duke describes his idea of
what his wife’s dress should be, with propriety and feeling. Knight’s
countryman was admirable: his hysteric laughter at the dispute between
his host and hostess, and his sheepish confusion when discovered, were
equally perfect. His wonder at the manner in which Johnston rates his
wife was ecstatic:
‘And near him sat ecstatic Wonder,
Listening the hoarse applauding thunder.’
His jaws relaxed to their utmost expansion, and his nose ‘grew sharp as
a pen.’ Miss Kelly was too pert and forward, and too much like my lady’s
chambermaid. Nor can we speak in praise of Mrs. Davison’s _Juliana_. She
pouts, flounces, and lumbers about the stage strangely. Mr. Harley did
the _Mock Duke_ well; he seemed like Sancho Panza in his government. The
_Honey Moon_ is a very pleasing drama: it is a cento of passages from
old plays modernized; it is an ingenious plagiarism from beginning to
end. The author was a most incorrigible pilferer, but so expert in his
art, that we would say to other authors, ‘Go thou and do likewise!’
MR. KEAN
_The Times._] [_December 16, 1817._
DRURY-LANE THEATRE.
_Mr. Kean_, after an absence of nearly six weeks, owing to serious
indisposition, last night resumed his professional duties at this
theatre, in the arduous character of _Richard the Third_. He was
received on his appearance with all that warm greeting and enthusiastic
applause, which are perhaps the highest meed of histrionic talent, and
which are unfailingly called forth by this distinguished actor, after
every suspension, however short, of the exercise of his art. This
expression of good-will was increased, we think, in the present
instance, by the recollection that the privation was caused by illness,
and that it was possible the stage might have been deprived of one of
its greatest ornaments. The acclamations, the waving of hats and
handkerchiefs, continued for some minutes. Mr. Kean looks somewhat
thinner than before his indisposition, but betrayed no deficiency of
power; on the contrary, on account probably of our having for sometime
past been doomed to witness very inferior performances, he appeared to
surpass himself. He exhibited all that energy and discrimination, that
faculty of identifying himself with the character he represents, which
is to be ranked among the greatest efforts of human talents; he realized
our conceptions of a being whose soul
‘Not Fate itself could awe.’
The fine passages of this piece of acting are well known to the public;
to quote them would be to extract the whole play. The conclusion of his
career was marked by nearly as much applause as the commencement. The
theatre was well filled, notwithstanding the extreme wetness of the
evening.
KING JOHN
_The Times._] [_December 18, 1817._
COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE.
Shakspeare’s tragedy of _King John_ was acted last night at this
theatre. Miss O’Neill performed the part of _Constance_; and though
everything undertaken by this excellent actress must have a large
proportion of good in it, we think that she is less successful in this
than in most of her other characters: for this, physical causes, her
youth for example, may be assigned; and her perfect delineation of
_Constance_ is, perhaps, reserved to the maturity of her age and her
talents. She did not convey to us that warmth of temper, that
susceptibility to grief and anger, which mark this injured Princess. Her
speeches on the conclusion of the marriage with _Blanch_, which admit
great variety of expression, were simple declamation, without passion
and nearly in the same tone: but we would rather dwell on beauties than
defects. Two or three lines at the end of the scene just mentioned made
amends for all; when she says,
‘To me, and to the state of my great grief,
Let kings assemble.’
she utters the passage with beautiful feeling, and leaves nothing to be
wished. The burst of indignation when Austria endeavours to silence her,
subsiding instantly into a tone of the keenest contempt, was no less
striking. Her very best effort was on quitting the stage, when, having
uttered those pathetic exclamations for the loss of her son, she goes
out in all the wildness of despair, as if occupied by no other thought
than to seek him through the world. Young was a little too violent in
some parts of the character of _King John_; but, on the whole, it may be
considered a fine piece of acting: the two scenes with _Hubert_, and his
‘dying scene, were excellent. _Faulconbridge_, the bastard, is one of
Charles Kemble’s happiest hits; his manly figure, and martial
appearance, well bear him out in his scoffs at the _Duke of Austria_; he
is no sooner knighted, than he seems made for his rank, and leads out
_Queen Elinor_ like a ‘lordly gallant.’ Some of the nobles of _John’s_
court did not convey the idea of much dignity either in their dress or
persons: we wish that the managers, who have the power of issuing
patents of nobility at pleasure, would consider whether the general
effect might not be improved by a little more attention to this point.
THE PRESS—COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, AND BENTHAM
_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_January 3, 1818._
A debate has been lately going on, in the French House of Commons,
respecting the Liberty of the Press. M. Jollivet said, ‘the Liberty of
the Press is less necessary in a Representative Government than in any
other.’ ‘The press’ he added, ‘is represented as the only instrument by
which truth can be made known; but the passions of men are too
impetuous, to permit the Press that liberty which some demand. _The real
national representation is in the King_;[44]—the legitimate inheritance
of his Crown, from whence all powers and honours are derived, fixes
there, with the destinies of the people. This is the primitive
representation, from which all others emanate. There is the sacred depot
of sovereignty. The powers established by the Charter are only the means
of that sovereignty, for the dispensation of order and justice. We must
then leave out of the question this pretended influence of the Liberty
of the Press upon our representative Government, in favour of the branch
called the Democratic. We must reject principles which can never return
in France. By this course we may perhaps lose some commentaries upon the
rights of man, but all classes of society will find their repose in it.’
So says M. Jollivet; and so sings a modern bard:—
‘Kiuprili—Had’st thou believ’d thine own tale, had’st thou _fancied_
Thyself the rightful successor of Andreas,
Would’st thou have pilfer’d from our school-boys’ themes
These shallow sophisms of a _popular choice_?
What people? How convened? or, if convened,
Must not the magic power that charms together
Millions of men in council, needs have power
To win or wield them? Better, O far better
Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains
And with a thousand-fold reverberation
Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,
Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!
By wholesome laws t’imbank the sov’reign power,
To deepen by restraint, and by prevention
Of lawless will t’amass and guide the flood,
In its majestic channel, is man’s task
And the true patriot’s glory! _In all else
Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves_
When least themselves in the mad whirl of crowds
Where folly is contagious, and too oft
Even wise men leave their better sense at home
To chide and wonder at them when return’d.’
_Coleridge’s Zapolya._
Whether M. Jollivet, the French speaker, was one of the Orators of the
Human Race in the time of Robespierre, we do not know; but this we know,
that Mr. Coleridge was at that time delivering _Conciones ad populum_ in
a tone of mob-sycophancy, the height and heat of which could, it seems,
only be qualified by the doctrines of Divine Right and Passive
Obedience. The above exquisite morceau of political logic, and dramatic
recantation of the author’s popular harangues, was intended for
representation at Drury-Lane Theatre, and was one of the passages
pointed out, if we are to believe Mr. Coleridge, as a reason for the
rejection of this spurious offspring of his loyal Muse.
Mr. Southey has not yet given us a poetical version of the true _Jus
Divinum_. We should like to know what he says to this speech of M.
Jollivet—Content or Not Content—and whether this was the result he
anticipated when he so sweetly and loudly, about three years ago,
invited France ‘restored and shaking off her chain’ to join in his (Mr.
Southey’s) triumphal song,—
‘_Glory to God on high, Deliverance to Mankind._’
Can that laurel wreathe which adorns his brows (if it still adorns them)
any longer hide or prevent those blushes, deep and lasting, which should
suffuse his once well-meaning face for having been the shameful dupe of
a cozenage so shameful?
As to Mr. Wordsworth, another of these heroic deliverers, he is ‘a full
solemne man,’ and you cannot get much out of him. But we should like to
hear his opinion—Aye or No—of M. Jollivet’s allied notions of liberty
and the rights of man. Is this sort of legitimate clapping down under
the hatches the deliverance for which he mouthed out deep-toned Odes and
Sonnets? Is this repose, the repose of lasting slavery and avowed,
barefaced annihilation of the rights of human nature, the consummation
devoutly to be wished, which kindled in him so much disinterested zeal
against all his old friends and feelings? If he were to say so, the very
echoes of his favourite mountains, ‘with thousand-fold reverberation,’
would contradict him. But he says nothing. He is profoundly silent. He
will not answer Mum to our Budget. From the elevation of his former
well-timed enthusiasm against tyrants and conquerors, he slid into a
place: and he will never rise out of it by any ill-timed intemperance.
_Snug’s the word._ St. Peter is well at Rome; and Mr. Wordsworth is
attached to the Excise. What is it to him, seated on Rydal Mount, what
M. Jollivet, a prating Frenchman, says to that poor creature, Louis
XVIII? It is enough for Mr. Wordsworth that he signs his stamped
receipts and distributes them:—he is not bound, _by his office_, to
subscribe to M. Jollivet’s doctrines, or to circulate them in this
country. He is a customhouse officer, and no longer a citizen of the
world. He keeps himself quiet, like the philosopher of old, lest the
higher powers should hear him. If he were to mutter a syllable against
any one act of legitimate despotism, he knows (in his sleeve) that not
all his odes on Hoffer and Schill, and the Cortes, or even to the King,
would save him one hour. He is wise. After having endorsed the
accommodation bills of the Allied Sovereigns on liberty and
independence, with a pen which ought to have been sacred to humanity, he
now leaves it to the people of France, Spain, Italy, to us, to the
world, to take up these dishonoured forgeries, and will not utter a word
of resentment or indignation, or contempt, against those who have made
him a poor accomplice in a fraud upon mankind!
This sort of shuffling on the side of principle, and tenaciousness on
the side of power, seems to be the peculiar privilege of the race of
modern poets. The philosophers, if not much wiser, appear to be
honester. Some of these had been taken in, but they want to be let out.
They declare off in time to save at least their own characters, and will
not sign and seal ‘a dateless bargain to all-engrossing despotism,’ when
she unfolds the long dark scroll of her rotten parchment bonds to them,
and they see it ‘stretching out even to the crack of doom.’ They had got
into a bad house, it is true, thinking, though the owners were the same,
they had changed their calling, in company with an old bawd masked, who
pretended to have just escaped being robbed and ravished, if not
murdered. They were proud of such an opportunity of shewing their
gallantry. But as soon as the old lady pulled off her mask of
Legitimacy, and shewed herself ‘the same, that is, that was, and is to
be,’ our philosophers went to the window, threw up the sash, and alarmed
the neighbourhood; while the poets, either charmed, with the paint and
patches of the hag, or with her gold and trinkets, put a grave face upon
the matter, make it a point of conscience, a match for life—_for better
or worse_, stick to their filthy bargain, go to bed, and by lying quiet
and keeping close, would fain persuade the people out of doors that all
is well, while they are fumbling at the regeneration of mankind out of
an old rotten carcase, and threatening us, as the legitimate consequence
of their impotent and obscene attempts, with the spawn of Bible and
Missionary Societies, Schools for All, and a little aiery of children,
with a whole brood of hornbooks and catechisms,—a superfetation more
preposterous than that of Mrs. Tofts, the rabbit-breeding lady in
Hogarth.—Mr. Bentham was one of the philosophers who were so taken in by
the projects of the Holy Alliance, but who did not chuse to continue so
with his eyes open. He had lent an ear to the promises of kings. He
thought tyrants had taken a sudden fancy to the abstract principles of
sound legislation. With a little exuberance of philosophical vanity, and
a little want of philosophical penetration, he thought he could ‘charm
these deaf adders wisely.’ He thought absolute sovereigns, having
suffered persecution, had learnt mercy: that they were convinced, by
their own experience, of the value of justice, truth, and liberty. He
did not suspect their appeal to humanity was the cry of the crocodile to
allure and destroy: he, like many more, thought their tears were ‘drops
which sacred pity had engendered.’ Not so. He soon found his mistake;
and no sooner found, than he hastes to amend it. He does not try (half
fool, half knave) to hush up the affair, to screen their villainy, or
salve his own idle vanity. Out the whole story comes, in a book which he
has just published,[45] containing an account of the papers, and
correspondence which passed between himself and the Emperor Alexander.
Mr. Bentham sent the autocrat a plan of legislation, and the sovereign
sent him a snuff-box in return. The Emperor however took no other notice
of the plan, and the legislator returned the snuff-box. This was as it
should be. It is of course the favourite object of Alexander to be lord
over millions of slaves: it must be Mr. Bentham’s greatest ambition to
be a wise and honest man. He had committed his character for wisdom
sufficiently in supposing that the lord of millions of slaves would, in
the pure coxcombry of his heart, and in the giddy round of gold
snuff-boxes, and in his delight in the infinite multiplication of his
own pictures set in brilliants, set millions of slaves free! The Emperor
would as soon let Mr. Bentham cuckold him as resign his people to the
Platonic embraces of Mr. Bentham’s legislative genius. But having gone
thus far on a wrong calculation of the characters of rulers, Mr. Bentham
was too honest a man to try to repeat the imposition upon others of
which he had been made the momentary dupe himself. He was not ambitious
any longer to remain that tool
‘Which knaves do work with, called a fool.’
He would not be made a mild decoy of humanity, and go a dottrel-catching
with the Emperor Alexander in Finland, in Poland, or in South America.
He would not be made an amiable stalking-horse of liberty and equality
for royal sportsmen to catch their silly prey, the human race, and then
to be turned loose, stripped of his netting and his ribbons, to graze
where he could. He had a spirit above it. He could not brook this league
with detected hypocrisy and barefaced power. He had not the stomach to
swallow a lie for truth. He could not bring himself to say, or by any
tampering with his own mind to believe that a thing _was_ what he knew
_it was not_. He was by habit a logician—by nature, a plain, literal
man. ‘The Gods had not made him poetical.’ That is, Mr. Bentham had not,
like Messrs. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, been playing at fast
and loose with fiction, till he could like them believe whatever he
pleased of matter of fact, and stand to it stoutly too with ‘a mingled
air of cunning and of impudence,’—to the equal satisfaction of his
understanding and his conscience!
MR. COLERIDGE’S LECTURES
_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_February 21, 1818._
‘On Friday evening Mr. Coleridge gave his first Lecture on Shakspeare to
a numerous and genteel audience. He stated the permanent objects
Shakspeare had in view in drawing his characters, and how obviously he
disregarded those that were of a transitory nature. The character of
_Caliban_, as an original and caricature of Jacobinism, so fully
illustrated at Paris during the French Revolution, he described in a
vigorous and lively manner, exciting repeated bursts of applause. He
commenced an inquiry into the order of succession in which Shakspeare
wrote his plays, and decided that _Love’s Labour Lost_ must have been
the first, as there are so many allusions in it such as a youth would
make, few or none resulting from an experience of the world. That play
and _The Tempest_ were the chief objects of his discourse, into which,
however, he introduced a great variety of new and striking remarks, not
confined to any particular play. As for instance, he said, wherever
Shakspeare had drawn a character addicted to sneering, and contempt for
the merits of others, that character was sure to be a villain. Vanity,
envy, and malice, were its certain accompaniments: too prudent to praise
itself, it fed its concentrated egotism by sarcasm and lowering others.
This is but a poor description of the very glowing language, ample
detail, and profound thought, Mr. Coleridge displayed on this topic,
which produced a thunder of applause.’—_Courier_, Feb. 9.
Mr. Coleridge, in his prospectus, modestly observed, that the attending
his course of Lectures on Poetry, and ‘those fair parts that there
adjacent lie,’ would enable any grown gentleman to talk on all subjects
of polite conversation, except religion and politics. By the above
extract, and from what we have heard, it should appear that Mr.
Coleridge has gone beyond his engagement, and given his grown gentleman
a slice of religion and politics in the same dish with his account of
the Dark Ages. Not like a lady who puts her mind into the postscript,
Mr. C. does that first which he promised last. Whatever may be the case
with his metaphysical hypercriticisms, his religious and political
opinions seem pretty transparent. As he has sent a passage against
Jacobinism to his friend Mr. Stuart, of the _Courier_, we wonder that he
could not (as he still retains all his old sentiments, with only the
advantage of new light added to them) have vamped up a sly passage from
his _Conciones ad Populum_, in favour of the _so-called_ Jacobin
principles he formerly professed, to have sent it to us. We should
gladly do all in our power to assist Mr. Coleridge in publishing a
harmony of his opinions, which are, we suspect, too liberal and
multifarious to be comprised, in all their speculative and practical
bearings, in a shabby Evening Paper. As to this argument about
_Caliban_, we suspect it must have been sadly curtailed and _scissarsed_
by Mr. Stuart, in order to fit his cloth to his coat, and to bring Mr.
Coleridge’s ‘unhouselled free conditions into the circumscription and
confine’ of the Editor’s party politics. _Caliban_ is so far from being
a prototype of modern Jacobinism, that he is strictly the legitimate
sovereign of the isle, and _Prospero_ and the rest are usurpers, who
have ousted him from his hereditary jurisdiction by superiority of
talent and knowledge. ‘This island’s mine, by _Sycorax_ my mother;’ and
he complains bitterly of the artifices used by his new friends to cajole
him out of it. He is the Louis XVIII. of the enchanted island in _The
Tempest_: and Dr. Stoddart would be able to prove by the civil law, that
he had the same right to keep possession of it, ‘independently of his
conduct or merits, as Mr. Coke has to his estate at Holkham.’ Even his
affront to the daughter of that upstart philosopher _Prospero_, could
not be brought to bar his succession to the natural sovereignty of his
dominions. His boast that ‘he had peopled else this isle with
_Calibans_,’ is very proper and dignified in such a person; for it is
evident that the right line would be supplanted in failure of his issue;
and that the superior beauty and accomplishments of _Ferdinand_ and
_Miranda_ could no more be opposed to the legitimate claims of this
deformed and loathsome monster, than the beauty and intellect of the
Bonaparte family can be opposed to the bloated and ricketty minds and
bodies of the Bourbons, cast, as they are, in the true _Jus Divinum_
mould! This is gross. Why does Mr. Coleridge provoke us to write as
great nonsense as he talks? Why also does he not tell, in his general
‘lunes and abstractions,’ what to think of _Prospero’s_ brother, the
Duke, who usurped his crown, and drove him into banishment; or of those
finished Court-practitioners, _Sebastian_ and _Antonio_, who wanted to
murder the sleeping King? Were they Jacobins like _Caliban_, or
legitimate personages, like Mr. Coleridge? Did they belong to the new
school or the old? That is the question; but it is a question which our
lay-preacher will take care not to answer. Shakespear, says Mr.
Coleridge, always spoke of mobs with contempt, but with kindness. Mr.
Coleridge does better: he speaks of mobs with contempt, and of Courts
with kindness. Again, says this critical discoverer of a meaning in a
millstone, _Caliban_ had that envy of superior genius and virtue, which
was a mark of the true Jacobins in the time of the French Revolution. We
are sorry to hear, that on one occasion Mr. C. was interrupted in a
tirade upon this favourite topic, on which he was led out of pure
generosity, to enlighten the grown gentlemen who came to hear him, by a
person calling out in good broad Scotch, ‘But you once praised that
Revolution, Mr. Coleridge!’ The worst is, that Mr. Coleridge praised
that Revolution when it was triumphant, going on ‘conquering and to
conquer,’ as it was thought; and now that it is fallen, this man of
mighty mind,—of gigantic genius, and superiority to interested motives
and mob-sycophancy, insults over it,—tramples on the carcase,—kicks it
with his asinine hoofs,—and brays a long, loud, dreary, doleful bravura
over it. Of what the Jacobins were in the year 1793, this person has a
right to speak, both from experience and observation. The worst he can
say of them is, that he was once one of the set. He says that Jacobins
are envious people,—and that envious people, not being able to praise
themselves openly, take an indirect method of doing this, by
depreciating and secretly slandering others. Was it upon this principle
that the reformed Jacobin, Mr. Coleridge (what is bred in the bone will
never come out of the flesh) took such pains, two years ago, to praise
himself by depreciating and canting profound German mysticism against
Mr. Maturin’s successful tragedy of _Bertram_, which he proved, being
himself in the secret, to be ultra-Jacobinism, and quite different in
its philosophical and poetical tendency from his own sweet injured
_Zapolya_,—the harbinger of Legitimacy and the Bourbons, which was
offered to Mr. Whitbread for his acceptance, as a piece of
ultra-Royalism, and accordingly rejected by that friend of
constitutional government and the people; but which any one may see
represented to the life at the Royal Circus, accompanied with music, and
compressed into three acts, to make it ‘tedious and brief.’ Or was it
from the remains of the Jacobin leaven in our philosophical poet, that
in a public library at Bristol he endeavoured to advance his own
reputation on the ruins of that of a friend, by that lofty panegyric
which he pronounced on our laurel-honouring laureat:—‘The man may indeed
be a reviewer, but God help him if he fancies himself a poet?’ And is
this the man to talk about the envy of the people towards hereditary
virtue and wisdom, as the cause and root of Jacobinism? This—
‘Fie, Sir! O fie! ’tis fulsome,
Sir, there’s a soil for that rank weed flattery
To trail its poisonous and obscene clusters:
A poet’s soul should bear a richer fruitage—
The aconite grew not in Eden. Thou,
That thou, with lips tipt with the fire of Heaven,
’Th’ excursive eye, that in its earth-wide range
Drinks in the grandeur and the loveliness,
That breathes along this high-wrought world of man,
That hast within thee apprehensions strong
Of all that’s pure, and passionless, and heavenly—
That thou, a vapid and mawkish parasite,
Should’st pipe to that witch Fortune’s favourites!
’Tis coarse—’tis sickly—’tis as though the eagle
Should spread his sail-broad wings to flap a dunghill;
As though a pale and withering pestilence
Should ride the golden chariot of the sun;
As one should use the language of the Gods
To chatter loose and ribald brothelry.’—FAZIO.
It is well for the author of this tragedy that it has been praised in
the _Quarterly Review_,—or we should not wonder to see Mr. Coleridge, as
well from these lines as from its being acted with universal applause at
the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, set about proving it to be a very
ultra-Jacobinical performance.—But ‘to leave this keen encounter of the
wits, and fall to something of a slower method.’ The reason—(for Mr.
Coleridge knows, that if we have not ‘reason as plenty as blackberries,’
yet what we have, we are ready ‘to give to any man without
compulsion’)—the reason why Mr. Coleridge is not what he might be, is,
that he would be thought what he is not. His motto is, to be nothing or
every thing. His levity or his vanity is not satisfied with being
admired for what he is, but for all that he is capable of becoming, wise
or foolish, knave or not. He is not contented to be ‘the inconstant
moon,’ unless he can be the halo round it. He would glitter in the
sunshine of public favour, and yet he would cast no shadow. Please all
and please none is his rule, he has succeeded. He thinks it a great
disparagement of his parts, a proof of a narrow and contracted mind, to
be thought to hold only the sentiments which he professes. His capacious
mind has room for all opinions, both those which he believes and those
which he does not. He thinks he shews the greatest magnanimity when he
shews the greatest contempt for his own principles, past, present, and
to come. He would be esteemed greatly superior, not only to the rest of
the world, but to himself. Would any one catch him in the trammels of a
sect? Would any one make him swear to the dogmas of a party? Would any
one suppose that he has any prejudices in favour of his own notions?
That he is blindly wedded to one single view of a subject, as a man is
wedded to one wife? He is shocked at any such imputation of intellectual
uxoriousness. Would the Presbyterians try to hook him in?—he knows
better than Socinus or old John Knox. Would the Established Church
receive him at her wide portals?—he carries too great a weight of the
Fathers and school divinity at his back. Would the Whigs patronise
him?—he is too straitened in antiquated notions and traditional
prejudices. Would the Tories take him in?—he is too liberal,
enlightened, and transcendental for them. Would principle bind him?—he
shuffles out of it, as a clog upon his freedom of thought, ‘his large
discourse of reason, looking before and after.’ Would interest lay dirty
hands upon him?—he jockies her too by some fetch or conundrum, borrowed
from the great clerks of the so-called Dark Ages. You can no more know
where to have him than an otter. You might as well hedge the cuckoo. You
see him now squat like a toad at the ear of the _Courier_; and oh! that
we could rouse him up once more into an archangel’s shape. But what is
it to him what so poor a thing as he himself is, who is sublimely
indifferent to all other things, and who may be looked upon as a
terrible petrification of religion, genius, and the love of liberty. Yet
it is too much to think that he who began his career with two Sonnets to
Lord Stanhope and Mary Wolstonecraft, in the _Morning Chronicle_, should
end with slimy, drivelling abuse of Jacobinism and the French
Revolution, in the _Courier_;—that, like some devoted fanatic, he should
seek the praise of martyrdom by mangling his own soul with a
prostituted, unpaid-for pen, and let out his last breath as a pander to
that which would be a falsehood, but that it means nothing.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE (CANTO IV.)
_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_May 2, 1818._
‘I do perceive a fury in your words, but nothing wherefore.’
The fourth and last canto of _Childe Harold_ has disappointed us. It is
a falling off from the three former ones. We have read it carefully
through, but it has left only the same impression on our minds that a
troubled dream does,—as disturbed, as confused, as disjointed, as
harassing, and as unprofitable. It is an indigestion of the mind. It is
the lassitude or feverish tossing and tumbling of the imagination, after
having taken a surfeit of pleasure, and fed upon the fumes of pride.
Childe Harold is a spoiled child of the Muses—and of Fortune. He looks
down upon human life, not more with the superiority of intellect than
with the arrogance of birth. The poet translates the lord into high
sounding and supercilious verse. It is Agamemnon and Thersites in one
person. The common events and calamities of the world afford matter for
the effusions of his spleen, while they seem resented as affronts to his
personal dignity.
‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly, unhandsome corse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.’
So when ‘the very age and body of the time’ comes between his Lordship’s
speculative notions and hereditary prejudices, he stops the nose at it,
and plays some very fantastic tricks before the public, who are
lookers-on. In general, the idle wants, the naughty airs, the ill
humours and _ennui_, the contempt for others, and disgust at themselves,
common to exalted birth and station, are suffered to corrupt and
stagnate in the blood that inherits them;—they are a disease in the
flesh, an obstinate tumour in the mind, a cloud upon the brow, a venom
that vents itself in hateful looks and peevish words to those about
them; but in this poem and this author they have acquired ‘an
understanding and a tongue,’—are sublimed by imagination, systematised
by sophistry—mount the steps of the Capitol, fulmine over Greece, and
are poured in torrents of abuse on the world. It is well if the world
like it—we are tired of the monotony of his Lordship’s griefs, of which
we can perceive neither beginning nor end. ‘They are begot of nothing,
born of nothing.’ He volunteers his own Pilgrimage,—appoints his own
penance,—makes his own confession,—and all—for nothing. He is in
despair, because he has nothing to complain of—miserable, because he is
in want of nothing. ‘He has tasted of all earth’s bliss, both living and
loving,’ and therefore he describes himself as suffering the tortures of
the damned. He is in love with misery, because he has possessed every
enjoyment; and because he has had his will in every thing, is
inconsolable because he cannot have impossibilities. His Lordship, in
fact, makes out his own hard case to be, that he has attained all those
objects that the rest of the world admire; that he has met with none of
those disasters which embitter their lives; and he calls upon us to
sympathise with his griefs and his despair.
This will never do. It is more intolerable than even Mr. Wordsworth’s
arbitrary egotism and pampered self-sufficiency. _He_ creates a
factitious interest out of nothing: Lord Byron would destroy our
interest in all that is. Mr. Wordsworth, to salve his own self-love,
makes the merest toy of his own mind,—the most insignificant object he
can meet with,—of as much importance as the universe: Lord Byron would
persuade us that the universe itself is not worth his or our notice; and
yet he would expect us to be occupied with him.
——‘The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature’s works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful ever.’
These lines, written by one of these two poets, might be addressed to
both of them with equal propriety.
Lord Byron, in this the fourth and last Canto of _Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage_, seems to have worn out the glowing fervour of his genius to
a _calx_, and to have exhausted the intense enthusiasm of his favourite
topics of invective. There is little about himself, historically
speaking—there is no plot, no story, no interest excited, no
catastrophe. The general reflections are connected together merely by
the accidental occurrence of different objects—the Venus of Medici, or
the statue of Pompey,—the Capitol at Rome, or the Bridge of Sighs at
Venice,—Shakespear, and Mrs. Radcliffe,—Bonaparte, and his Lordship in
person,—are brought together as in a phantasmagoria, and with as little
attention to keeping or perspective, as in Hogarth’s famous print for
reversing the laws of vision. The judgements pronounced are often more
dogmatical than profound, and with all their extravagance of expression,
common-place. His Lordship does not understand the Apollo Belvidere or
the Venus de Medicis, any more than Bonaparte. He cants about the one
and against the other, and in doing the last, cuts his own throat. We
are not without hopes that his friend Mr. Hobhouse will set this matter
right in his ‘Historical Illustrations’; and shew that, however it may
suit his Noble Friend’s poetical cross-purposes, politically and
practically speaking, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He
first, in his disdain of modern times, finds nothing to compare with the
grandeur of antiquity but Bonaparte; and then ‘as ’twere in spite of
scorn,’ goes on to disdain this idol, which he had himself gratuitously
set up, in a strain of effeminate and rancorous abuse worthy of Mr.
Wordsworth’s pastoral, place-hunting Muse. Suppose what is here said of
‘the child and champion of Jacobinism’ to be true, are there not venal
tongues and venal pens enough to echo it, without his Lordship’s joining
in the cry? Will ‘the High Legitimates, the Holy Band’ be displeased
with these captious efforts to level the object of their hate to the
groveling standard of royalty? Is there not a division of labour even on
Mount Parnassus? The other writers of prose and verse, who enter the
Temple of Fame by Mr. Murray’s door in Albemarle-street, have their
cues. Mr. Southey, for instance, never sings or says, or dreams of
singing or saying, that the Prince Regent is not so great a man as
Julius Cæsar. Why then should Lord Byron force the comparison between
the modern and the ancient hero? It is because the slaves of power mind
the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned;
but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is _only_
the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
The league between tyrants and slaves is a chain of adamant; the bond
between poets and the people is a rope of sand. Is this a truth, or is
it not? If it is not, let Lord Byron write no more on this subject,
which is beyond his height and his depth. Let him not trample on the
mighty or the fallen! Bonaparte is not Beppo.
The versification and style of this poem are as perverse and capricious
as the method or the sentiments. One stanza perpetually runs on into the
next, making the exception the rule, merely because it properly ends in
itself; and there is a strange mixture of stately phraseology and
far-fetched metaphor, with the most affected and bald simplicity of
expression and uncouthness in the rhymes. It is well his Lordship is
born so high, or all Grub street would set him down as a plebeian for
such lines as the following:—
[‘I lov’d her[46] from my boyhood,’ &c. (stanza 18 and part of 19)].
What will the Critics of the Cockney School of Poetry say to this?—Lie
on, and swear that it is high patrician poetry, and of very noble birth.
The introductory stanzas are on the same subject, Venice; and are
better.
[‘I stood in Venice, on the bridge of sighs,’ &c. (stanzas 1, 2, and
3)].
The thought expressed in the last stanza, ‘but nature doth not die,’ is
particularly fine, and consolatory to the mind. We prefer the stanza
relating to the tomb of Petrarch, to any others in the poem:—
[‘There is a tomb in Arqua;—rear’d in air,’ &c. (stanzas 30–33)].
The apostrophe to Tasso and to his patron is written with great force,
but in a different spirit:—
[‘Ferrara! in thy wide and grass-grown streets,’ &c. (stanzas 35–38)].
In the same strain, and with an alternate mixture of enthusiasm and
spleen, the author pays the tribute of acknowledgement to the artist of
‘the statue that enchants the world,’ to the shades of Michael Angelo,
Alfieri, ‘the starry Galileo,’ Machiavel, and to the Bard of Prose, ‘him
of the Hundred Tales of Love’—Boccacio.
From these recollections the poet proceeds to describe the fall of the
Velino, ‘a hell of waters.’ We cannot say but that we think his powers
better suited to express the human passions than to reflect the forms of
nature. In the present instance, however, the poet has not invoked the
genius of the place in vain: it represents, in some measure, the
workings of his own spirit,—disturbed, restless, labouring, foaming,
sparkling, and now hid in labyrinths and plunging into the gloom of
night. The following description is obscure, tortuous, perplexed, and
abortive; yet who can say that it is not beautiful, striking, and
impassioned?—
[‘How profound
The gulf! and how the giant element,’ &c. (stanzas 70–72)].
We’ll look no more: such kind of writing is enough to turn the brain of
the reader or the author. The repetitions in the last stanza are like
interlineations in an imperfect manuscript, left for afterselection;
such as, ‘Hope upon a death-bed’—‘Love watching madness,’—‘Unworn its
steady dies’—‘Serene its brilliant hues,’—‘the distracted waters’—‘the
torture of the scene,’ &c. There is here in every line an effort at
brilliancy, and a successful effort; and yet, in the next, as if nothing
had been done, the same thing is attempted to be expressed again with
the same labour as before, the same success, and with as little
appearance of repose or satisfaction of mind.
It is in vain to attempt a regular account of the remainder of this
poem, which is a mass of discordant things, incoherent, not gross, seen
‘now in glimmer and now in gloom,’ and ‘moving wild laughter in the
throat of death.’ The poem is like the place it describes:—
‘The double night of ages, and of her,
Night’s daughter, Ignorance, hath wrapt and wrap[47]
All round us: we but feel our way to err:
The ocean hath his chart, the stars their map,
And Knowledge spreads them on her ample lap;
But Rome is as the desart, where we steer
Stumbling on recollections; now we clap
Our hands, and cry “Eureka!” it is clear—
When but some false mirage[48] of ruin rises near.’
This is undoubtedly fine: but Rome was glorious, before she became a
ruin; stately, before she was laid low; was ‘seen of all eyes,’ before
she was confounded in oblivion. Lord Byron’s poetry, in its irregular
and gloomy magnificence, we fear, antedates its own doom; and is buried
in a desolation of his own creating, where the mists of fancy cloud,
instead of lighting up the face of nature; and the fierceness of the
passions, like the Sirocco of the Desart, withers and consumes the
heart. We give this judgment against our wills; and shall be happy,
should we live to see it reversed by another generation. All our
prejudices are in favour of the Noble Poet, and against his maligners.
_Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_ is dedicated to Mr. Hobhouse, and there are
passages both in the dedication and the poem which would bribe our
opinions, were they to be bribed either by our admiration of genius or
our love of liberty. Such are the following passages:—
[‘What from this barren being do we reap,’ &c. (stanzas 93–95)].
But we must conclude; not, however, till we have made two extracts more.
We shall not give the passages relating to his separation from his wife,
or the death of the Princess Charlotte: we see nothing remarkable in the
events, or in his Lordship’s reflections on them. As to his vow of
revenge, which is to end in forgiveness, it is unconscious,
constitutional caprice and contradiction: it is self-will exerting
itself in straining at a violent conclusion; and then, by another
exertion, defeating itself by doing nothing. So also he expatiates on
the boundless anticipated glories of a female reign, which were never
likely, and are now impossible, only that he may rail at lady Fortune in
good set terms, and indulge a deeper disgust at all that is real or
possible. We will give what is better than such cant,—the description of
the dying Gladiator, and the conclusion of the poem:—
[‘I see before me the Gladiator lie,’ &c. (stanzas 140 and 141)].
_O si sic Omnia!_ All, however, is not so. The stanzas immediately
following, on the story of the Grecian Daughter and the Apollo
Belvidere, are in as false and sophisticated a taste, as these are pure
and sublime. But, at the close of the poem, in addressing the pathless
ocean,—the self-willed, untamed mighty world of waters,—his genius
resumes its beauty and its power, and the Pilgrim sinks to rest in
strains as mild and placid as the breath of childhood, that frets itself
asleep.
[‘My task is done—my song hath ceased—my theme,’ &c. (stanzas 185 and
186)].
THE OPERA
_The Yellow Dwarf._] [_May 23, 1818._
The Opera is a fine thing: the only question is, whether it is not too
fine. It is the most fascinating, and at the same time the most
tantalising of all places. It is not the _too little_, but the _too
much_, that offends us. Every object is there collected, and displayed
in ostentatious profusion, that can strike the senses or dazzle the
imagination; music, dancing, painting, poetry, architecture, the blaze
of beauty, ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’ and yet we are
not satisfied—because the multitude and variety of objects distracts the
attention, and by flattering us with a vain shew of the highest
gratification of every faculty and wish, leaves us at last in a state of
listlessness, disappointment, and _ennui_. The powers of the mind are
exhausted, without being invigorated; our expectations are excited, not
satisfied; and we are at some loss to distinguish an excess of
irritation from the height of enjoyment. To sit at the Opera for a whole
evening, is like undergoing the process of animal magnetism for the same
length of time. It is an illusion and a mockery, where the mind is made
‘the fool of the senses,’ and cheated of itself; where pleasure after
pleasure courts us, as in a fairy palace; where the Graces and the
Muses, waving in a gay, fantastic round with one another, still turn
from our pursuit; where art, like an enchantress with a thousand faces,
still allures our giddy admiration, shifts her mask, and again
disappoints us. The Opera, in short, proceeds upon a false estimate of
taste and morals; it supposes that the capacity for enjoyment may be
multiplied with the objects calculated to afford it. It is a species of
intellectual prostitution; for we can no more receive pleasure from all
our faculties at once than we can be in love with a number of mistresses
at the same time. Though we have different senses, we have but one
heart; and if we attempt to force it into the service of them all at
once, it must grow restive or torpid, hardened or enervated. The
spectator may say to the sister-arts of Painting, Poetry, and Music, as
they advance to him in a _Pas de Trois_ at the Opera, ‘How happy could I
be with either, were t’other dear charmer away;’ but while ‘they all
tease him together,’ the heart gives a satisfactory answer to none of
them;—is ashamed of its want of resources to supply the repeated calls
upon its sensibility, seeks relief from the importunity of endless
excitement in fastidious apathy or affected levity; and in the midst of
luxury, pomp, vanity, indolence, and dissipation, feels only the hollow,
aching void within, the irksome craving of unsatisfied desire, because
more pleasures are placed within its reach than it is capable of
enjoying, and the interference of one object with another ends in a
double disappointment. Such is the best account we can give of the
nature of the Opera,—of the contradiction between our expectations of
pleasure and our uneasiness there,—of our very jealousy of the
flattering appeals which are made to our senses, our passions, and our
vanity, on all sides,—of the little relish we acquire for it, and the
distaste it gives us for other things. Any one of the sources of
amusement to be found there would be enough to occupy and keep the
attention alive; the _tout ensemble_ fatigues and oppresses it. One may
be stifled to death with roses. A head-ache may be produced by a
profusion of sweet smells or of sweet sounds: but we do not like the
head-ache the more on that account. Nor are we reconciled to it, even at
the Opera.
What makes the difference between an opera of Mozart’s, and the singing
of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the corner of the street? The
one is nature, and the other is art: the one is paid for, and the other
is not. Madame Fodor sings the air of _Vedrai Carino_ in _Don Giovanni_
so divinely, because she was hired to sing it; she sings it to please
the audience, not herself, and does not always like to be _encored_ in
it; but the thrush that awakes at daybreak with its song, does not sing
because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or
criticised. It sings because it is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds
from its throat, to relieve the overflowings of its own heart—the liquid
notes come from, and go to the heart, dropping balm into it, as the
gushing spring revives the traveller’s parched and fainting lips. That
stream of joy comes pure and fresh to the longing sense, free from art
and affectation; the same that rises over vernal groves, mingled with
the breath of morning, and the perfumes of the wild hyacinth, that waits
for no audience, that wants no rehearsing, and still—
‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’
This is the great difference between nature and art, that the one _is_
what the other _seems_, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because
it feels it itself. Madame Fodor sings, as a musical instrument may be
made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is
not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases,
and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its
singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than bass or
treble, than the Italian or the German school, than quavers or
crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in
the world but truth and nature!
The Opera is the most artificial of all things. It is not only art, but
ostentatious, unambiguous, exclusive art. It does not subsist as an
imitation of nature, but in contempt of it; and instead of seconding,
its object is to pervert and sophisticate all our natural impressions of
things. When the Opera first made its appearance in this country, there
were strong prejudices entertained against it, and it was ridiculed as a
species of the _mock-heroic_. The prejudices have worn out with time,
and the ridicule has ceased; but the grounds for both remain the same in
the nature of the thing itself. At the theatre, we see and hear what has
been said, thought, and done by various people elsewhere; at the Opera,
we see and hear what was never said, thought, or done any where but at
the Opera. Not only is all communication with nature cut off, but every
appeal to the imagination is sheathed and softened in the melting medium
of Siren sounds. The ear is cloyed and glutted with warbled ecstacies or
agonies; while every avenue to terror or pity is carefully stopped up
and guarded by song and recitative. Music is not made the vehicle of
poetry, but poetry of music: the very meaning of the words is lost or
refined away in the effeminacy of a foreign language. A grand serious
Opera is a tragedy wrapped up in soothing airs, to suit the tender
feelings of the nurselings of fortune—where tortured victims swoon on
beds of roses, and the pangs of despair sink in tremulous accents into
downy repose. Just so much of human misery is given as to lull those who
are exempted from it into a deeper sense of their own security: just
enough of the picture of human life is shewn to relieve their languor,
without disturbing their indifference;—not to excite their sympathy, but
‘with some sweet, oblivious antidote,’ to pamper their sleek and sordid
apathy. In a word, the whole business of the Opera is to stifle emotion
in its birth, and to intercept every feeling in its progress to the
heart. Every impression that, left to itself, might sink deep into the
mind, and wake it to real sympathy, is overtaken and baffled by means of
some other impression, plays round the surface of the imagination,
trembles into airy sound, or expires in an empty pageant. In the grand
carnival of the senses,
‘The cloister’d heart
Sits squat at home, like Pagod in a niche
Obscure’;—
the pulse of life is suspended, the link which binds us to humanity is
broken; the soul is fretted by the sense of excessive softness into a
feverish hectic dream; truth becomes a fable, good and evil matters of
perfect indifference, except as they can be made subservient to our
selfish gratification; and there is hardly a vice for which the mind on
coming out of the Opera is not prepared, no virtue of which it is
capable!
But what shall we say of the company at the Opera? Is it not grand,
select, splendid, and imposing? Do we not see there ‘the flower of
Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ her nobles and her
diplomatic characters? First, we only know the diplomatic characters by
their taking prodigious quantities of snuff. As to great warriors, some
that we know had better not shew their faces—if there is any truth in
physiognomy; and as to great men, we know of but one in modern times,
and neither Europe nor the Opera-house was big enough to hold him. With
respect to Lords and Ladies, we see them as we do gilded butterflies in
glass cases. We soon get tired of them, for they seem tired of
themselves, and one another. They gape, stare, affect to whisper, laugh,
or talk loud, to fill up the vacuities of thought and expression. They
do not gratify our predilection for happy faces! But do we not feel the
throb of pleasure from the blaze of beauty in the side-boxes? That blaze
would be brighter, were it not quenched in the sparkling of diamonds. As
for the rest, _the grapes are sour_. Beauty is a thing that is not made
only to be seen. Who can behold it without a transient wish to be near
it, to adore, to possess it? He must be a fool or a coxcomb, whom the
sight of a beauty dazzles, but does not warm; whom a thousand glances
shot from a thousand heavenly faces pierce without wounding; who can
behold without a pang the bowers of Paradise opening to him by a
thousand doors, and barred against him by magic spells!—Bright
creatures, fairest of the fair, ye shine above our heads, bright as
Ariadne’s crown, fair as the dewy star of evening: but ye are no more to
us! There is no golden chain let down to us from you: we have sometimes
seen you at a play, or caught a glimpse of your faces passing in a
coronet-coach; but——As we are growing romantic, we shall take a turn
into the _crush-room_, where, following the train of the great
statesmen, the warriors, and the diplomatic characters, we shall meet
with a nearly equal display of external elegance and accomplishment,
without the pride of sex, rank, or virtue! If the women were all Junos
before, here they are all Venuses, and no less Goddesses! Those who
complained of inaccessible beauty before, may here find beauty more
accessible, and take their revenge on the boxes in the lobbies!
* * * * *
In fine, though we do not agree with a contemporary critic, that the
Opera is an entertainment that ought to be held in general estimation,
yet we think the present a very proper time for its encouragement. It
may serve to assist the _euthanasia_ of the British character, of
British liberty, and British morals,—by hardening the heart, while it
softens the senses, and dissolving every manly and generous feeling in
an atmosphere of voluptuous effeminacy.
ON THE QUESTION WHETHER POPE WAS A POET
_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_February, 1818._
The question whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and
is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have
been a great prose writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort.
He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and
as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the
vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a
good one. If, indeed, by a great poet we mean one who gives the utmost
grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the
passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the
bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the contrary way;
namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent
observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his critical essays;
or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point
of view, as in his satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity,
as in his poems of fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and
familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and
all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his
epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm,
of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of
nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a
wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world; with a
keen relish for the elegancies of art, or of nature when embellished by
art, a quick _tact_ for propriety of thought and manners, as established
by the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the
sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them, within the
little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet not
of nature but of art: and the distinction between the two is this. The
poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of
passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and
grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its
immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men;
so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his
mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be
identified with, and to foreknow, and to record the feelings of all men,
at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and
to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does.
He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he
feels them in their universal interest; for he feels them as they affect
the first principles of his and our common nature. Pope was not
assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it. He saw
nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought
for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of
others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakespeare had an intuitive
and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in
all possible circumstances; Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he
himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring
flight from heaven to earth through chaos and old night. Pope’s muse
never wandered with safety but from his library to his grotto, or from
his grotto into his library again. His mind dwelt with greater pleasure
on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could describe the
faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person better than
the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven; a piece
of cut glass, or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect
than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more
delighted with a patent lamp than with ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s
brow,’ that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, trembles
through the cottage casement, and cheers the watchful mariner on the
lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished
life. That which was nearest to him was the greatest: the fashion of the
day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He
preferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he
had a stronger fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or
proprietor of a gewgaw than admiration of that which was interesting to
all mankind alike. He preferred the artificial to the natural in
passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating impulses of the one
hurried him away with a force and vehemence with which he could not
grapple, while he could trifle with the conventional and superficial
modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, put them on
or off like a masquerade dress, make much or little of them, indulge
them for a longer or a shorter time as he pleased, and because, while
they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once
disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the
antithesis of strength and grandeur: its power was the power of
indifference. He had none of the inspired raptures of poetry: he was in
poetry what the sceptic is in religion. It cannot be denied that his
chief excellence lay more in diminishing than ‘in aggrandizing
objects,—in checking than in encouraging our enthusiasm,—in sneering at
the extravagancies of fancy or passion, instead of giving a loose to
them,—in describing a row of pins and needles rather than the embattled
spears of Greeks and Trojans,—in penning a lampoon or a compliment,—and
in praising Martha Blount!
Shakespeare says,—
‘In fortune’s ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the brize
Than by the tyger: But when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathize,
And with an accent tuned i’ th’ self-same key,
Replies to chiding fortune.’
There is hardly any of this rough work in Pope. His muse was on a peace
establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and indulgence.
He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of the
great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of
nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered
flatteries; his forked lightnings playful sarcasms; for the ‘gnarled
oak’ he gives us ‘the soft myrtle’; for rocks, and seas, and mountains,
artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for
earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a
china-jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of
the passions, we have
‘Calm contemplation and poetic ease.’
Yet within this retired and narrow circle, how much, and that how
exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,
what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what
refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a
microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new
consequence,—where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and
slightest shades of difference,—when the little becomes gigantic, the
deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the
magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing; but still the exhibition
is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or
surprised.
ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE.
_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_August 1818._
There is not any term that is oftener misapplied, or that is a stronger
instance of the abuse of language, than this same word, _respectable_.
By a _respectable man_ is generally meant a person whom there is no
reason for respecting, or none that we choose to name: for if there is
any good reason for the opinion we wish to express, we naturally assign
it as the ground of his respectability. If the person whom you are
desirous to characterize favourably, is distinguished for his
good-nature, you say that he is a good-natured man; if by his zeal to
serve his friends, you call him a friendly man; if by his wit or sense,
you say that he is witty or sensible; if by his honesty or learning, you
say so at once; but if he is none of these, and there is no one quality
which you can bring forward to justify the high opinion you would be
thought to entertain of him, you then take the question for granted, and
jump at a conclusion, by observing gravely, that ‘he is a very
respectable man.’ It is clear, indeed, that where we have any striking
and generally admitted reasons for respecting a man, the most obvious
way to ensure the respect of others, will be to mention his estimable
qualities; where these are wanting, the wisest course must be to say
nothing about them, but to insist on the general inference which we have
our particular reasons for drawing, only vouching for its authenticity.
If, for instance, the only motive we have for thinking or speaking well
of another is, that he gives us good dinners, as this is not a valid
reason to those who do not, like us, partake of his hospitality, we may
(without going into particulars) content ourselves with assuring them,
that he is a most respectable man: if he is a slave to those above him,
and an oppressor of those below him, but sometimes makes us the channels
of his bounty or the tools of his caprice, it may be as well to say
nothing of the matter, but to confine ourselves to the safer generality,
that he is a person of the highest respectability: if he is a low dirty
fellow, who has amassed an immense fortune, which he does not know what
to do with, the possession of it alone will guarantee his
respectability, if we say nothing of the manner in which he has come by
it, or in which he spends it. A man may be a knave or a fool, or both
(as it may happen), and yet be a most respectable man, in the common and
authorized sense of the term, provided he keeps up appearances, and does
not give common fame a handle for no longer keeping up the imposture.
The best title to the character of respectability lies in the
convenience of those who echo the cheat, and in the conventional
hypocrisy of the world. Any one may lay claim to it who is willing to
give himself airs of importance, and can find means to divert others
from inquiring too strictly into his pretensions. It is a disposable
commodity,—not a part of the man, that sticks to him like his skin, but
an appurtenance, like his goods and chattels. It is meat, drink, and
clothing to those who take the benefit of it by allowing others the
credit. It is the current coin, the circulating medium, in which the
fictitious intercourse of the world is carried on, the bribe which
interest pays to vanity. Respectability includes all that vague and
indefinable mass of respect floating in the world, which arises from
sinister motives in the person who pays it, and is offered to
adventitious and doubtful qualities in the person who receives it. It is
spurious and nominal; hollow and venal. To suppose that it is to be
taken literally or applied to sterling merit, would betray the greatest
ignorance of the customary use of speech. When we hear the word coupled
with the name of any individual, it would argue a degree of romantic
simplicity to imagine that it implies any one quality of head or heart,
any one excellence of body or mind, any one good action or praiseworthy
sentiment; but as soon as it is mentioned, it conjures up the ideas of a
handsome house with large acres round it, a sumptuous table, a cellar
well stocked with excellent wines, splendid furniture, a fashionable
equipage, with a long list of elegant contingencies. It is not what a
man _is_, but what he _has_, that we speak of in the significant use of
this term. He may be the poorest creature in the world in himself, but
if he is well to do, and can spare some of his superfluities, if he can
lend us his purse or his countenance upon occasion, he then ‘buys golden
opinions’ of us;—it is but fit that we should speak well of the bridge
that carries us over, and in return for what we can get from him, we
embody our servile gratitude, hopes, and fears, in this word
respectability. By it we pamper his pride, and feed our own necessities.
It must needs be a very honest uncorrupted word that is the go-between
in this disinterested kind of traffic. We do not think of applying this
word to a great poet or a great painter, to the man of genius or the man
of virtue, for it is seldom we can _spunge_ upon them. It would be a
solecism for any one to pretend to the character who has a shabby coat
to his back, who goes without a dinner, or has not a good house over his
head. He who has reduced himself in the world by devoting himself to a
particular study, or adhering to a particular cause, excites only a
smile of pity, or a shrug of the shoulders at the mention of his name;
while he who has raised himself in it by a different course, who has
become rich for want of ideas, and powerful from want of principle, is
looked up to with silent homage, and passes for a respectable man. ‘The
learned pate ducks to the golden fool.’ We spurn at virtue and genius in
rags; and lick the dust in the presence of vice and folly in purple.
When Otway was left to starve after having produced _Venice Preserv’d_,
there was nothing in the phrenzied action with which he devoured the
food that choked him, to provoke the respect of the mob, who would have
hooted at him the more for knowing that he was a poet. Spenser, kept
waiting for the hundred pounds which Burleigh grudged him ‘for a song,’
might feel the mortification of his situation; but the statesman never
felt any diminution of his sovereign’s favour in consequence of it.
Charles II.’s neglect of his favourite poet Butler did not make him look
less gracious in the eyes of his courtiers, or of the wits and critics
of the time. Burns’s embarrassments, and the temptations to which he was
exposed by his situation, degraded him, but left no stigma on his
patrons, who still meet to celebrate his memory, and consult about his
monument, in the face of day. To enrich the mind of a country by works
of art or science, and leave yourself poor, is not the way for any one
to rank as respectable, at least in his lifetime:—to oppress, to
enslave, to cheat, and plunder it, is a much better way. ‘The time gives
evidence of it.’ But the instances are common.
Respectability means a man’s situation and success in life, not his
character or conduct. The city merchant never loses his respectability
till he becomes bankrupt. After that, we hear no more of it or him. The
justice of the peace, and the parson of the parish, the lord and the
squire, are allowed, by immemorial usage, to be very respectable people,
though no one ever thinks of asking why. They are a sort of fixtures in
this way. To take an example from one of them. The country parson may
pass his whole time, when he is not employed in the cure of souls, in
flattering his rich neighbours, and leaguing with them to _snub_ his
poor ones, in seizing poachers, and encouraging informers; he may be
exorbitant in exacting his tithes, harsh to his servants, the dread and
bye-word of the village where he resides, and yet all this, though it
may be notorious, shall abate nothing of his respectability. It will not
hinder his patron from giving him another living to play the petty
tyrant in, or prevent him from riding over to the squire’s in his
carriage and being well received, or from sitting on the bench of
justices with due decorum and with clerical dignity. The poor curate, in
the mean time, who may be a real comfort to the bodies and minds of his
parishioners, will be passed by without notice. Parson Adams, drinking
his ale in Sir Thomas Booby’s kitchen, makes no very respectable figure;
but Sir Thomas himself was right worshipful, and his widow a person of
honour! A few such historiographers as Fielding would put an end to the
farce of respectability, with others like it. Peter Pounce, in the same
author, was a consummation of this character, translated into the most
vulgar English. The character of Captain Blifil, his epitaph, and
funeral sermon, are worth tomes of casuistry, and patched up theories of
moral sentiments. Pope somewhere exclaims, in his fine indignant way,
‘What can ennoble sots, or knaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.’
But this is the heraldry of poets, not of the world. In fact, the only
way for a poet now-a-days to emerge from the obscurity of poverty and
genius, is to prostitute his pen, turn literary pimp to some
borough-mongering lord, canvass for him at elections, and by this means
aspire to the same importance, and be admitted on the same respectable
footing with him as his valet, his steward, or his practising attorney.
A Jew, a stock-jobber, a war contractor, a successful monopolist, a
nabob, an Indian director, or an African slave-dealer, are all very
respectable people in their turn. A member of parliament is not only
respectable, but _honourable_;—‘all honourable men!’ Yet this
circumstance, which implies such a world of respect, really means
nothing. To say of any one that he is a member of parliament, is to say,
at the same time, that he is not at all distinguished as such. No body
ever thought of telling you, that Mr. Fox or Mr. Pitt were members of
parliament. Such is the constant difference between names and things!
The most mischievous and offensive use of this word has been in
politics. By respectable people (in the fashionable cant of the day) are
meant those who have not a particle of regard for any one but
themselves, who have feathered their own nests, and only want to lie
snug and warm in them. They have been set up and appealed to as the only
friends of their country and the constitution, while in truth they were
friends to nothing but their own interest. With them all is well, if
they are well off. They are raised by their lucky stars above the reach
of the distresses of the community, and are cut off by their situation
and sentiments, from any sympathy with their kind. They would see their
country ruined before they would part with the least of their
superfluities. Pampered in luxury and their own selfish comforts, they
are proof against the calls of patriotism, and the cries of humanity.
They would not get a scratch with a pin to save the universe. They are
more affected by the overturning of a plate of turtle soup than by the
starving of a whole county. The most desperate characters, picked up
from the most necessitous and depraved classes, are not worse judges of
politics than your true, staunch, thorough-paced ‘lives and fortunes
men,’ who have what is called a stake in the country, and see every
thing through the medium of their cowardly and unprincipled hopes and
fears. London is, perhaps, the only place in which the standard of
respectability at all varies from the standard of money. There things go
as much by appearance as by weight; and he may be said to be a
respectable man who cuts a certain figure in company by being dressed in
the fashion, and venting a number of common-place things with tolerable
grace and fluency. If a person there brings a certain share of
information and good manners into mixed society, it is not asked, when
he leaves it, whether he is rich or not. Lords and fiddlers, authors and
common council men, editors of newspapers and parliamentary speakers,
meet together, and the difference is not so much marked as one would
suppose. To be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in
modern literary society.
ON FASHION
_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_September 1818._
‘Born of nothing, begot of nothing.’
‘His garment neither was of silk nor say,
But painted plumes in goodly order dight,
Like as the sun-burnt Indians do array
Their tawny bodies in their proudest plight:
As those same plumes, so seem’d he vain and light,
That of his gait might easily appear;
For still he far’d as dancing in delight,
And in his hands a windy fan did bear,
That in the idle air he mov’d still here and there.’
Fashion is an odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and
antipathies. It exists only by its being participated among a certain
number of persons, and its essence is destroyed by being communicated to
a greater number. It is a continual struggle between ‘the great vulgar
and the small’ to get the start of or keep up with each other in the
race of appearances, by an adoption on the part of the one of such
external and fantastic symbols as strike the attention and excite the
envy or admiration of the beholder, and which are no sooner made known
and exposed to public view for this purpose, than they are successfully
copied by the multitude, the slavish herd of imitators, who do not wish
to be behind-hand with their betters in outward show and pretensions,
and which then sink, without any farther notice, into disrepute and
contempt. Thus fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy
innovation and restless vanity. To be old-fashioned is the greatest
crime a coat or a hat can be guilty of. To look like nobody else is a
sufficiently mortifying reflection; to be in danger of being mistaken
for one of the rabble is worse. Fashion constantly begins and ends in
the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity. It is the
perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste,
elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority
than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was
yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious
from its being common. It is one of the most slight and insignificant of
all things. It cannot be lasting, for it depends on the constant change
and shifting of its own harlequin disguises; it cannot be sterling, for,
if it were, it could not depend on the breath of caprice; it must be
superficial, to produce its immediate effect on the gaping crowd; and
frivolous, to admit of its being assumed at pleasure by the numbers of
those who affect, by being in the fashion, to be distinguished from the
rest of the world. It is not any thing in itself, nor the sign of any
thing but the folly and vanity of those who rely upon it as their
greatest pride and ornament. It takes the firmest hold of the most
flimsy and narrow minds, of those whose emptiness conceives of nothing
excellent but what is thought so by others, and whose self-conceit makes
them willing to confine the opinion of all excellence to themselves and
those like them. That which is true or beautiful in itself, is not the
less so for standing alone. That which is good for any thing, is the
better for being more widely diffused. But fashion is the abortive issue
of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling,
affected, servile, despotic, mean, and ambitious, precise and
fantastical, all in a breath—tied to no rule, and bound to conform to
every whim of the minute. ‘The fashion of an hour old mocks the wearer.’
It is a sublimated essence of levity, caprice, vanity, extravagance,
idleness, and selfishness. It thinks of nothing but not being
contaminated by vulgar use, and winds and doubles like a hare, and
betakes itself to the most paltry shifts to avoid being overtaken by the
common hunt that are always in full chase after it. It contrives to keep
up its fastidious pretensions, not by the difficulty of the attainment,
but by the rapidity and evanescent nature of the changes. It is a sort
of conventional badge, or understood passport into select circles, which
must still be varying (like the water-mark in bank-notes) not to be
counterfeited by those without the pale of fashionable society; for to
make the test of admission to all the privileges of that refined and
volatile atmosphere depend on any real merit or extraordinary
accomplishment, would exclude too many of the pert, the dull, the
ignorant, too many shallow, upstart, and self-admiring pretenders, to
enable the few that passed muster to keep one another in any tolerable
countenance. If it were the fashion, for instance, to be distinguished
for virtue, it would be difficult to set or follow the example; but then
this would confine the pretension to a small number, (not the most
fashionable part of the community), and would carry a very singular air
with it. Or if excellence in any art or science were made the standard
of fashion, this would also effectually prevent vulgar imitation, but
then it would equally prevent fashionable impertinence. There would be
an obscure circle of _virtù_ as well as virtue, drawn within the
established circle of fashion, a little province of a mighty empire;—the
example of honesty would spread slowly, and learning would still have to
boast of a respectable minority. But of what use would such uncourtly
and out-of-the-way accomplishments be to the great and noble, the rich
and the fair, without any of the _eclat_, the noise and nonsense which
belong to that which is followed and admired by all the world alike? The
real and solid will never do for the current coin, the common wear and
tear of foppery, and fashion. It must be the meretricious, the showy,
the outwardly fine, and intrinsically worthless—that which lies within
the reach of the most indolent affectation, that which can be put on or
off at the suggestion of the most wilful caprice, and for which, through
all its fluctuations, no mortal reason can be given, but that it is the
newest absurdity in vogue! The shape of a head-dress, whether flat or
piled (curl on curl) several stories high by the help of pins and
pomatum, the size of a pair of paste buckles, the quantity of gold-lace
on an embroidered waistcoat, the mode of taking a pinch of snuff, or of
pulling out a pocket-handkerchief, the lisping and affected
pronunciation of certain words, the saying _Me’m_ for _Madam_, Lord
Foppington’s _Tam and ’Paun honour_, with a regular set of visiting
phrases and insipid sentiments ready sorted for the day, were what
formerly distinguished the mob of fine gentlemen and ladies from the mob
of their inferiors. These marks and appendages of gentility had their
day, and were then discarded for others equally peremptory and
unequivocal. But in all this chopping and changing, it is generally one
folly that drives out another; one trifle that by its specific levity
acquires a momentary and surprising ascendency over the last. There is
no striking deformity of appearance or behaviour that has not been made
‘the sign of an inward and invisible grace.’ Accidental imperfections
are laid hold of to hide real defects. Paint, patches, and powder, were
at one time synonymous with health, cleanliness, and beauty. Obscenity,
irreligion, small oaths, tippling, gaming, effeminacy in the one sex and
Amazon airs in the other, any thing is the fashion while it lasts. In
the reign of Charles II., the profession and practice of every species
of extravagance and debauchery were looked upon as the indispensable
marks of an accomplished cavalier. Since that period the court has
reformed, and has had rather a rustic air. Our belles formerly
overloaded themselves with dress: of late years, they have affected to
go almost naked,—‘and are, when unadorned, adorned the most.’ The women
having left off stays, the men have taken to wear them, if we are to
believe the authentic Memoirs of the Fudge Family. The Niobe head is at
present buried in the _poke_ bonnet, and the French milliners and
_marchands des modes_ have proved themselves an overmatch for the Greek
sculptors, in matters of taste and costume.
A very striking change has, however, taken place in dress of late years,
and some progress has been made in taste and elegance, from the very
circumstance, that, as fashion has extended its empire in that
direction, it has lost its power. While fashion in dress included what
was costly, it was confined to the wealthier classes: even this was an
encroachment on the privileges of rank and birth, which for a long time
were the only things that commanded or pretended to command respect, and
we find Shakespear complaining that ‘the city madam bears the cost of
princes on unworthy shoulders;’ but, when the appearing in the top of
the mode no longer depended on the power of purchasing certain expensive
articles of dress, or the right of wearing them, the rest was so obvious
and easy, that any one who chose might cut as coxcombical a figure as
the best. It became a matter of mere affectation on the one side, and
gradually ceased to be made a matter of aristocratic assumption on the
other. ‘In the grand carnival of this our age,’ among other changes this
is not the least remarkable, that the monstrous pretensions to
distinctions in dress have dwindled away by tacit consent, and the
simplest and most graceful have been in the same request with all
classes. In this respect, as well as some others, ‘the age is grown so
picked, the peasant’s toe comes so near the courtier’s heel, it galls
his kibe;’ a lord is hardly to be distinguished in the street from an
attorney’s clerk; and a plume of feathers is no longer mistaken for the
highest distinction in the land! The ideas of natural equality and the
Manchester steam-engines together have, like a double battery, levelled
the high towers and artificial structures of fashion in dress, and a
white muslin gown is now the common costume of the mistress and the
maid, instead of their wearing, as heretofore, rich silks and satins or
coarse linsey-wolsey. It would be ridiculous (on a similar principle)
for the courtier to take the wall of the citizen, without having a sword
by his side to maintain his right of precedence; and, from the stricter
notions that have prevailed of a man’s personal merit and identity, a
cane dangling from his arm is the greatest extension of his figure that
can be allowed to the modern _petit-maître_.
What shews the worthlessness of mere fashion is, to see how easily this
vain and boasted distinction is assumed, when the restraints of decency
or circumstances are once removed, by the most uninformed and commonest
of the people. I know an undertaker that is the greatest prig in the
streets of London, and an Aldermanbury haberdasher, that has the most
military strut of any lounger in Bond-street or St. James’s. We may, at
any time, raise a regiment of fops from the same number of fools, who
have vanity enough to be intoxicated with the smartness of their
appearance, and not sense enough to be ashamed of themselves. Every one
remembers the story in Peregrine Pickle, of the strolling gipsy that he
picked up in spite, had well scoured, and introduced her into genteel
company, where she met with great applause, till she got into a passion
by seeing a fine lady cheat at cards, rapped out a volley of oaths, and
let nature get the better of art. Dress is the great secret of address.
Clothes and confidence will set anybody up in the trade of modish
accomplishment. Look at the two classes of well-dressed females whom we
see at the play-house, in the boxes. Both are equally dressed in the
height of the fashion, both are _rouged_, and wear their neck and arms
bare,—both have the same conscious, haughty, theatrical air;—the same
toss of the head, the same stoop in the shoulders, with all the grace
that arises from a perfect freedom from embarrassment, and all the
fascination that arises from a systematic disdain of formal prudery,—the
same pretence and jargon of fashionable conversation,—the same mimicry
of tones and phrases,—the same ‘lisping, and ambling, and painting, and
nicknaming of Heaven’s creatures;’ the same every thing but real
propriety of behaviour, and real refinement of sentiment. In all the
externals, they are as like as the reflection in the looking-glass. The
only difference between the woman of fashion and the woman of pleasure
is, that the one _is_ what the other only _seems to be_; and yet, the
victims of dissipation who thus rival and almost outshine women of the
first quality in all the blaze, and pride, and glitter of shew and
fashion, are, in general, no better than a set of raw, uneducated,
inexperienced country girls, or awkward, coarse-fisted servant maids,
who require no other apprenticeship or qualification to be on a level
with persons of the highest distinction in society, in all the
brilliancy and elegance of outward appearance, than that they have
forfeited its common privileges, and every title to respect in reality.
The truth is, that real virtue, beauty, or understanding, are the same,
whether ‘in a high or low degree;’ and the airs and graces of pretended
superiority over these which the highest classes give themselves, from
mere frivolous and external accomplishments, are easily imitated, with
provoking success, by the lowest, whenever they _dare_.
The two nearest things in the world are gentility and vulgarity—
‘And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’
Where there is much affectation of the one, we may be always sure of
meeting with a double share of the other. Those who are conscious to
themselves of any real superiority or refinement, are not particularly
jealous of the adventitious marks of it. Miss Burney’s novels all turn
upon this slender distinction. It is the only thing that can be said
against them. It is hard to say which she has made out to be the worst;
low people always aping gentility, or people in high life always
avoiding vulgarity. Mr. Smith and the Brangtons were everlastingly
trying to do as their fashionable acquaintances did, and these again
were always endeavouring _not_ to do and say what Mr. Smith and the
Brangtons did or said. What an instructive game at cross-purposes!
‘Kings are naturally lovers of low company,’ according to the
observation of Mr. Burke; because their rank cannot be called into
question by it, and they can only hope to find, in the opposite extreme
of natural and artificial inequality, any thing to confirm them in the
belief, that their personal pretensions at all answer to the ostensible
superiority to which they are raised. By associating only with the worst
and weakest, they persuade themselves that they are the best and wisest
of mankind.
ON NICKNAMES
_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_September 1818._
‘Hæ nugæ in seria ducunt.’
This is a more important subject than it seems at first sight. It is
as serious in its results as it is contemptible in the means by which
those results are brought about. Nicknames for the most part govern
the world. The history of politics, of religion, of literature, of
morals, and of private life, is too often little less than the history
of nicknames. What are half the convulsions of the civilised world,
the frequent overthrow of states and kingdoms, the shock and hostile
encounter of mighty continents, the battles by sea and land, the
intestine commotions, the feuds of the Vitelli and Orsini, of the
Guelphs and Gibellines, the civil wars in England, and the League in
France, the jealousies and heart-burnings of cabinets and councils,
the uncharitable proscriptions of creeds and sects, Turk, Jew, Pagan,
Papist and Puritan, Quaker and Methodist,—the persecutions and
massacres, the burnings, tortures, imprisonments, and lingering deaths
inflicted for a different profession of faith,—but so many
illustrations of the power of this principle? Fox’s Book of Martyrs,
and Neale’s History of the Puritans, are comments on the same text.
The fires in Smithfield were fanned by nicknames, and a nickname set
its seal on the unopened dungeons of the Holy Inquisition. Nicknames
are the talismans and spells that collect and set in motion all the
combustible part of men’s passions and prejudices, which have hitherto
played so much more successful a game, and done their work so much
more effectually than reason, in all the grand concerns and petty
details of human life, and do not yet seem tired of the task assigned
them. Nicknames are the convenient portable tools by which they
simplify the process of mischief, and get through their job with the
least time and trouble. These worthless, unmeaning, irritating,
envenomed words of reproach are the established signs by which the
different compartments of society are ticketted, labelled, and marked
out for each other’s hatred and contempt. They are to be had, ready
cut and dry, of all sorts and sizes, wholesale and retail, for foreign
exportation or home consumption, and for all occasions in life. ‘The
priest calls the lawyer a cheat, the lawyer beknaves the divine.’ The
Frenchman hates the Englishman because he is an Englishman, and the
Englishman hates the Frenchman for as good a reason. The Whig hates
the Tory, and the Tory the Whig. The Dissenter hates the
Church-of-England-man, and the Church-of-England-man hates the
Dissenter, as if they were of a different species, because they have a
different designation. The Mussulman calls the worshipper of the Cross
‘Christian dog,’ spits in his face, and kicks him from the pavement,
by virtue of a nickname; and the Papist retorts the indignity upon the
Infidel and the Jew by the same infallible rule of right. In France,
they damn Shakespear in the lump, by calling him a _barbare_; and we
talk of Racine’s _verbiage_ with inexpressible contempt and
self-complacency. Among ourselves, an anti-Jacobin critic denounces a
Jacobin poet and his friends, at a venture, ‘as infidels and
fugitives, who have left their wives destitute, and their children
fatherless’—whether they have wives and children or not. The
unenlightened savage makes a meal of his enemy’s flesh, after
reproaching him with the name of his tribe, because he is differently
tattooed; and the literary cannibal cuts up the character of his
opponent by the help of a nickname. The jest of all this is, that a
party nickname is always a relative term, and has its counter-sign,
which has just the same force and meaning, so that both must be
perfectly ridiculous and insignificant. A Whig implies a Tory; there
must be ‘Malcontents’ as well as ‘Malignants’; Jacobins and
Anti-Jacobins; French and English. These sort of _noms des guerres_
derive all their force from their contraries. Take away the meaning of
the one, and you take the sting out of the other. They could not exist
but upon the strength of mutual and irreconcileable antipathies; there
must be no love lost between them. What is there in the names
themselves to give them a preference over each other? ‘Sound them,
they do become the mouth as well; weigh them, they are as heavy;
conjure with them, one will raise a spirit as soon as the other.’ If
there were not fools and madmen who hated both, there could not be
fools and madmen bigotted to either. I have heard an eminent character
boast that he had done more to produce the late war by nicknaming
Buonaparte ‘the Corsican,’ than all the state-papers and documents on
the subject put together. And yet Mr. Southey asks triumphantly, ‘Is
it to be supposed that it is England, _our_ England, to whom that war
was owing?’ As if, in a dispute between two countries, the conclusive
argument which lies in the pronoun _our_, belonged only to one of
them. I like Shakespear’s version of the matter better:
‘Hath Britain all the sun that shines? day, night,
Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume
_Our_ Britain seems as of it, but not in it;
In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee think
There’s livers out of Britain.’
In all national disputes, it is common to appeal to the numbers on your
side as decisive on the point. If every body in England thought the late
war right, every body in France thought it wrong. There were ten
millions on one side of the question, (or rather of the water), and
thirty millions on the other side. That’s all. I remember some one
arguing, in justification of our ministers interfering on that occasion,
‘That governments would not go to war for nothing;’ to which I answered,
Then they could not go to war at all, for, at that rate, neither of them
could be in the wrong, and yet both of them must be in the right, which
was absurd. The only meaning of these vulgar nicknames and
party-distinctions, where they are urged most violently and confidently,
is, that others differ from you in some particular or other, (whether it
be opinion, dress, clime, complexion), which you highly disapprove of,
forgetting, that, by the same rule, they have the very same right to be
offended at you because you differ from them. Those who have reason on
their side do not make the most obstinate and furious appeals to
prejudice and abusive language. I know but of one exception to this
general rule, and that is, where the things that excite disgust are of
such a kind that they cannot well be gone into without offence to
decency and good manners; but it is equally certain in this case, that
those who are most shocked at the things are not those who are most
forward to apply the names. A person will not be fond of repeating a
charge, or adverting to a subject, that inflicts a wound on his own
feelings, even for the sake of wounding the feelings of another. A man
should be very sure that he himself is not what he has always in his
mouth. The greatest prudes have been often accounted the greatest
hypocrites, and a satirist is at best but a suspicious character. The
loudest and most unblushing invectives against vice and debauchery will
as often proceed from a desire to inflame and pamper the passions of the
writer, by raking into a nauseous subject, as from a wish to excite
virtuous indignation against it in the public mind, or to reform the
individual. To familiarise the mind to gross ideas is not the way to
increase your own or the general repugnance to them. But, to return to
the subject of nicknames.
The use of this figure of speech is, that it excites a strong idea
without requiring any proof. It is a shorthand compendious mode of
getting at a conclusion, and never troubling yourself or any body else
with the formalities of reasoning or the dictates of common sense. It is
superior to all evidence, for it does not rest upon any, and operates
with the greatest force and certainty in proportion to the utter want of
probability. Belief is only a strong impression, and the malignity or
extravagance of the accusation passes for a proof of the crime. ‘Brevity
is the soul of wit;’ and of all eloquence a nickname is the most
concise, and of all arguments the most unanswerable. It gives _carte
blanche_ to the imagination, throws the reins on the neck of the
passions, and suspends the use of the understanding altogether. It does
not stand upon ceremony, on the nice distinctions of right and wrong. It
does not wait the slow processes of reason, or stop to unravel the web
of sophistry. It takes every thing for granted that serves for
nourishment for the spleen. It is instantaneous in its operations. There
is nothing to interpose between the effect and it. It is passion without
proof, and action without thought,—‘the unbought grace of life, the
cheap defence of nations.’ It does not, as Mr. Burke expresses it,
‘leave the will puzzled, undecided, and sceptical in the moment of
action.’ It is a word and a blow.
‘Bring but a Scotsman frae his hill,
Clap in his cheek a Highland gill,
Say such is royal George’s will,
And there’s the foe,
He has nae thought but how to kill
Twa at a blow.’
The ‘No Popery’ cry, raised a little while ago, let loose all the
lurking spite and prejudice which had lain rankling in the proper
receptacles for them for above a century, without any knowledge of the
past history of the country which had given rise to them, or any
reference to their connection with present circumstances; for the
knowledge of the one would have prevented the possibility of their
application to the other. Facts present a tangible and definite idea to
the mind, a train of causes and consequences, accounting for each other,
and leading to a positive conclusion—but no farther. But a nickname is
tied down to no such limited service; it is a disposable force, that is
almost always perverted to mischief. It clothes itself with all the
terrors of uncertain abstraction, and there is no end of the abuse to
which it is liable but the cunning of those who employ, or the credulity
of those who are gulled by it. It is a reserve of the ignorance,
bigotry, and intolerance of weak and vulgar minds, brought up where
reason fails, and always ready, at a moment’s warning, to be applied to
any, the most absurd purposes. If you bring specific charges against a
man, you thereby enable him to meet and repel them, if he thinks it
worth his while; but a nickname baffles reply, by the very vagueness of
the inferences from it, and gives increased activity to the confused,
dim, and imperfect notions of dislike connected with it, from their
having no settled ground to rest upon. The mind naturally irritates
itself against an unknown object of fear or jealousy, and makes up for
the blindness of its zeal by an excess of it. We are eager to indulge
our hasty feelings to the utmost, lest, by stopping to examine, we
should find that there is no excuse for them. The very consciousness of
the injustice we may be doing another makes us only the more loud and
bitter in our invectives against him. We keep down the admonitions of
returning reason, by calling up a double portion of gratuitous and
vulgar spite. The will may be said to act with most force _in vacuo_;
the passions are the most ungovernable when they are blindfolded. That
malignity is always the most implacable which is accompanied with a
sense of weakness, because it is never satisfied of its own success or
safety. A nickname carries the weight of the pride, the indolence, the
cowardice, the ignorance, and the ill-nature of mankind on its side. It
acts, by mechanical sympathy, on the nerves of society. Any one who is
without character himself may make himself master of the reputation of
another by the application of a nickname, as, if you do not mind soiling
your fingers, you may always throw dirt on another. No matter how
undeserved the imputation, it will stick; for, though it is sport to the
bye-standers to see you bespattered, they will not stop to see you wipe
out the stains. You are not heard in your own defence; it has no effect,
it does not tell, excites no sensation, or it is only felt as a
disappointment of their triumph over you. Their passions and prejudices
are inflamed by the charge, ‘as rage with rage doth sympathise;’ by
vindicating yourself, you merely bring them back to common sense, which
is a very sober, mawkish state. _Give a dog a bad name, and hang him_,
is a proverb. ‘A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw
at a man.’ It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not
believe it, it still haunts our apprehensions. Let a nickname be
industriously applied to our dearest friend, and let us know that it is
ever so false and malicious, yet it will answer its end; it connects the
person’s name and idea with an ugly association, you think of them with
pain together, or it requires an effort of indignation or magnanimity on
your part to disconnect them; it becomes an uneasy subject, a sore
point, and you will sooner desert your friend, or join in the conspiracy
against him, than be constantly forced to repel charges without truth or
meaning, and have your penetration or character called in question by a
rascal. Nay, such is the unaccountable construction of language and of
the human mind, that the affixing the most innocent or praiseworthy
appellation to any individual or set of individuals, _as a nickname_,
has all the effect of the most opprobrious epithets. Thus the cant name
‘The Talents,’ was successfully applied as a stigma to the Whigs at one
time; it held them up to ridicule, and made them obnoxious to public
feeling, though it was notorious to every body that the Whig leaders
were ‘the Talents,’ and that their adversaries nicknamed them so from
real hatred and pretended derision. ‘The Party’ is now substituted for
‘the Talents,’ since success has given their own set the monstrous
affectation of being men of talents; and the poor Morning Chronicle is
persecuted daily as the Party as it formerly stood the brunt (innocently
enough) of all the abuse and sarcasms that were showered on the Talents.
Call a man short by his Christian name, as Tom or Dick such a one, or by
his profession, (however respectable), as Canning pelted a noble lord
with his left-off title of Doctor,—and you undo him for ever, if he has
a reputation to lose. Such is the tenaciousness of spite and ill-nature,
or the jealousy of public opinion, even this will be peg enough to hang
doubtful inuendos, weighty dilemmas upon. ‘With so small a web as this
will I catch so great a fly as Cassio.’ The public do not like to see
their favourites treated with impertinent familiarity—it lowers the tone
of admiration very speedily. It implies that some one stands in no great
awe of their idol, and he perhaps may know as much about the matter as
they do. It seems as if a man whose name, with some contemptuous
abbreviation, is always dinned in the public ear, was distinguished by
nothing else. By repeating a man’s name in this manner you may soon make
him sick of it, and of his life too. Mr. Southey has by this time, I
should suppose, a tolerable surfeit of his title of Laureate! Children
do not like to be _called out of their names_. It is questioning their
personal identity. A writer, who has made his vocabulary rich in
nicknames, (the late Editor of the Times,) thought he had made a great
acquisition to his stock, when it was pretended at one time that
Bonaparte’s real name was not Napoleon but Nicholas. He congratulated
himself on this discovery, as a standing jest and a lasting triumph. Yet
there was nothing in the name to signify. Nicholas Poussin was an
instance of a great man in the last age, and in our own times, have we
not Nicholas Vansittart? The same writer has the merit of having carried
this figure of speech as far as it would go. He fairly worried his
readers into conviction by abuse and nicknames. People surrendered their
judgments to escape the persecution of his style, and the disgust and
indignation which his incessant violence and vulgarity excited, at last
made you hate those who were the objects of it. _Causa causæ causa
causati._ He made people sick of a subject by making them sick of his
arguments. Yet he attributed the effect he produced to the eloquence of
his phraseology and the force of his reasonings!
A parrot may be taught to call names; and if the person who keeps the
parrot has a spite to his neighbours, he may give them a great deal of
annoyance without much wit, either in the employer or the puppet. The
insignificance of the instrument has nothing to do with the efficacy of
the means. Hotspur would have had ‘a _starling_ taught to repeat nothing
but Mortimer,’ in the ears of his enemy. Nature, it is said, has given
arms to all creatures the most proper to defend themselves, and annoy
others: to the lowest she has given the use of nicknames.
There are some droll instances of the effect of proper names combined
with circumstances. A young student had come up to London from
Cambridge, and went in the evening and planted himself in the pit of the
play-house. He had not been seated long when, in one of the front boxes
near him, he discovered one of his college tutors, with whom he felt an
immediate and strong desire to claim acquaintance, and called out in a
low and respectful voice, ‘Dr. Topping!’ The appeal was, however,
ineffectual. He then repeated in a louder tone, but still in an under
key, so as not to excite the attention of any one but his friend, ‘Dr.
Topping!’ The Doctor took no notice. He then grew more impatient, and
repeated ‘Dr. Topping, Dr. Topping!’ two or three times pretty loud, to
see whether the Doctor did not or would not hear him. Still the Doctor
remained immovable. The joke began at length to get round, and one or
two persons, as he continued his invocations of the Doctor’s name,
joined with him in them; these were reinforced by others calling out,
‘Dr. Topping! Dr. Topping!’ on all sides, so that he could no longer
avoid perceiving it, and at length the whole pit rose and roared, ‘Dr.
Topping!’ with loud and repeated cries, and the Doctor was forced to
retire precipitately, frightened at the sound of his own name. There is
sometimes an inconvenience in common as well as uncommon names. On the
night that Garrick took his leave of the stage, an inveterate playgoer
could not get a seat in any part of the house. At length he went up into
the gallery, but found that equally full with the rest. In this
extremity a thought struck him, and he called out as loud as he could,
‘Mr. Smith, you’re wanted. Your wife’s taken suddenly ill, and you must
go home immediately.’ In an instant, half a dozen persons started up
from different parts of the gallery to go out, and the gentleman took
possession of the first place that offered. No doubt these persons would
be disposed to quarrel with their names and their wives for some time
after.
The calling people by their Christian or surnames is a proof of
affection, as well as of hatred. They are generally the best good
fellows with whom their friends take this sort of liberty. _Diminutives_
are titles of endearment. Dr. Johnson’s calling Goldsmith ‘Goldy’ did
equal honour to both. It shewed the regard he had for him. This
familiarity may perhaps imply a certain want of formal respect; but
formal respect is not necessary to, if it is consistent with, cordial
friendship. Titles of honour are the reverse of nicknames,—they convey
the idea of respect as the others do of contempt, and equally mean
little or nothing. Junius’s motto, _Stat nominis umbra_, is a very
significant one, it might be extended farther. A striking instance of
the force of names, standing by themselves, is in the respect felt
towards Michael Angelo in this country. We know nothing of him but his
name. It is an abstraction of fame and greatness. Our admiration of him
supports itself, and our idea of his superiority seems self-evident,
because it is attached to his name only. Some of our artists seem trying
to puff their names into reputation from an instinctive knowledge of
this principle,—by talking incessantly of themselves and doing nothing.
It is not, indeed, easy to deny the merit of the works—which they do
_not_ produce. Those which they have produced are very bad.
THOUGHTS ON TASTE
_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_Oct. 1818._
Taste is nothing but sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of
excellence in the works of art or nature. This definition will perhaps
be disputed; for I am aware the general practice is to make it consist
in a disposition to find fault.
A French man or woman will in general conclude their account of
Voltaire’s denunciation of Shakespeare and Milton as barbarians, on the
score of certain technical improprieties, with assuring you, that ‘he
(Voltaire) had a great deal of taste.’ It is their phrase, _Il avait
beaucoup du goût_. To which the proper answer is, that that might be;
but that he did not shew it in this case; as the overlooking great and
countless beauties, and being taken up only with petty or accidental
blemishes, shews as little strength of understanding as it does
refinement or elevation of taste. The French author, indeed, allows of
Shakespeare, that ‘he had found a few pearls on his enormous dunghill.’
But there is neither truth nor proportion in this sentence, for his
works are (to say the least),
‘Rich as the oozy bottom of the sea,
With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.’
Genius is the power of producing excellence: taste is the power of
perceiving the excellence thus produced in its several sorts and
degrees, with all their force, refinement, distinctions, and
connections. In other words, taste (as it relates to the productions of
art) is strictly the power of being properly affected by works of
genius. It is the proportioning admiration to power, pleasure to beauty:
it is entire sympathy with the finest impulses of the imagination, not
antipathy, not indifference to them. The eye of taste may be said to
reflect the impressions of real genius, as the even mirror reflects the
objects of nature in all their clearness and lustre, instead of
distorting or diminishing them;
‘Or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat.’
To take a pride and pleasure in nothing but defects (and those perhaps
of the most paltry, obvious, and mechanical kind)—in the disappointment
and tarnishing of our faith in substantial excellence, in the proofs of
weakness, not of power, (and this where there are endless subjects to
feed the mind with wonder and increased delight through years of patient
thought and fond remembrance), is not a sign of uncommon refinement, but
of unaccountable perversion of taste. So, in the case of Voltaire’s
hypercriticisms on Milton and Shakespeare, the most common-place and
prejudiced admirer of these authors knows, as well as Voltaire can tell
him, that it is a fault to make a sea-port (we will say) in Bohemia, or
to introduce artillery and gunpowder in the war in Heaven. This is
common to Voltaire, and the merest English reader: there is nothing in
it either way. But what he differs from us in, and, as it is supposed,
greatly to his advantage, and to our infinite shame and mortification,
is, that this is all that he perceives, or will hear of in Milton or
Shakespeare, and that he either knows, or pretends to know, nothing of
that prodigal waste, or studied accumulation of grandeur, truth, and
beauty, which are to be found in each of these authors. Now, I cannot
think, that, to be dull and insensible to so great and such various
excellence,—to have no feeling in unison with it, no latent suspicion of
the treasures hid beneath our feet, and which we trample upon with
ignorant scorn, to be cut off, as by a judicial blindness, from that
universe of thought and imagination that shifts its wondrous pageant
before us, to turn aside from the throng and splendour of airy shapes
that fancy weaves for our dazzled sight, and to strut and vapour over a
little pettifogging blunder in geography or chronology, which a
school-boy, or a village pedagogue, would be ashamed to insist upon, is
any proof of the utmost perfection of taste, but the contrary. At this
rate, it makes no difference whether Shakespeare wrote his works or not,
or whether the critic, who ‘damns him into everlasting redemption’ for a
single slip of the pen, ever read them;—he is absolved from all
knowledge, taste, or feeling, of the different excellencies, and
inimitable creations of the poet’s pen—from any sympathy with the
wanderings and the fate of Imogen, the beauty and tenderness of Ophelia,
the thoughtful abstraction of Hamlet; his soliloquy on life may never
have given him a moment’s pause, or touched his breast with one solitary
reflection;—the Witches in Macbeth may ‘lay their choppy fingers upon
their skinny lips’ without making any alteration in his pulse,—and
Lear’s heart may break in vain for him;—he may hear no strange noises in
Prospero’s island,—and the moonlight that sleeps on beds of flowers,
where fairies couch in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, may never once have
steeped his senses in repose. Nor will it avail Milton to ‘have built
high towers in Heaven,’ nor to have brought down heaven upon earth, nor
that he has made Satan rear his giant form before us, ‘majestic though
in ruin,’ or decked the bridal bed of Eve with beauty, or clothed her
with innocence, ‘likest heaven,’ as she ministered to Adam, and his
angel guest. Our critic knows nothing of all this, of beauty or
sublimity, of thought or passion, breathed in sweet or solemn sounds,
with all the magic of verse ‘in tones and numbers hit;’ he lays his
finger on the map, and shews you, that there is no sea-port for
Shakespeare’s weather-beaten travellers to land at in Bohemia, and takes
out a list of mechanical inventions, and proves that gunpowder was not
known till long after Milton’s battle of the angels; and concludes, that
every one who, after these profound and important discoveries, finds
anything to admire in these two writers, is a person without taste, or
any pretensions to it. By the same rule, a thorough-bred critic might
prove that Homer was no poet, and the Odyssey a vulgar performance,
because Ulysses makes a pun on the name of Noman. Or some other disciple
of the same literal school might easily set aside the whole merit of
Racine’s _Athalie_, or Moliere’s _Ecole des Femmes_, and pronounce these
_chef d’œuvres_ of art barbarous and Gothic, because the characters in
the first address one another (absurdly enough) as _Monsieur_ and
_Madame_, and because the latter is written in rhyme, contrary to all
classical precedent. These little false measures of criticism may be
misapplied and retorted without end, and require to be eked out by
national antipathy or political prejudice to give them currency and
weight. Thus it was in war-time that the author of the ‘Friend’ ventured
to lump all the French tragedies together as a smart collection of
epigrams, and that the author of the ‘Excursion, a poem, being
portion[49] of a larger poem, to be named the Recluse,’ made bold to
call Voltaire a dull prose-writer—with impunity. Such pitiful quackery
is a cheap way of setting up for exclusive taste and wisdom, by
pretending to despise what is most generally admired, as if nothing
could come up to or satisfy that ideal standard of excellence, of which
the person bears about the select pattern in his own mind. ‘Not to
admire any thing’ is as bad a test of wisdom as it is a rule for
happiness. We sometimes meet with individuals who have formed their
whole character on this maxim, and who ridiculously affect a decided and
dogmatical tone of superiority over others, from an uncommon degree both
of natural and artificial stupidity. They are blind to painting—deaf to
music—indifferent to poetry; and they triumph in the catalogue of their
defects as the fault of these arts, because they have not sense enough
to perceive their own want of perception. To treat any art or science
with contempt, is only to prove your own incapacity and want of taste
for it: to say that what has been done best in any kind is good for
nothing, is to say that the utmost exertion of human ability is not
equal to the lowest, for the productions of the lowest are worth
something, except by comparison with what is better. When we hear
persons exclaiming that the pictures at the Marquis of Stafford’s or Mr.
Angerstein’s, or those at the British Gallery, are a heap of trash, we
might tell them that they betray in this a want not of taste only, but
of common sense, for that these collections contain some of the finest
specimens of the greatest masters, and that _that_ must be excellent in
the productions of human art, beyond which human genius, in any age or
country, has not been able to go. Ask these very fastidious critics what
it is that they _do_ like, and you will soon find, from tracing out the
objects of their secret admiration, that their pretended disdain of
first-rate excellence is owing either to ignorance of the last
refinements of works of genius, or envy at the general admiration which
they have called forth. I have known a furious Phillippic against the
faults of shining talents and established reputation subside into
complacent approbation of dull mediocrity, that neither tasked the
kindred sensibility of its admirer beyond its natural inertness, nor
touched his self-love with a consciousness of inferiority; and that, by
never attempting original beauties, and never failing, gave no
opportunity to intellectual ingratitude to be plausibly revenged for the
pleasure or instruction it had reluctantly received. So there are judges
who cannot abide Mr. Kean, and think Mr. Young an incomparable actor,
for no other reason than because he never shocks them with an idea which
they had not before. The only excuse for the over-delicacy and
supercilious indifference here described, is when it arises from an
intimate acquaintance with, and intense admiration of, other and higher
degrees of perfection and genius. A person whose mind has been worked up
to a lofty pitch of enthusiasm in this way, cannot perhaps condescend to
notice, or be much delighted with inferior beauties; but then neither
will he dwell upon, and be preposterously offended with, slight faults.
So that the ultimate and only conclusive proof of taste is even here not
indifference, but enthusiasm; and before a critic can give himself airs
of superiority for what he despises, he must first lay himself open to
reprisals, by telling us what he admires. There we may fairly join issue
with him. Without this indispensable condition of all true taste,
absolute stupidity must be more than on a par with the most exquisite
refinement; and the most formidable drawcansir of all would be the most
impenetrable blockhead. Thus, if we know that Voltaire’s contempt of
Shakespeare arose from his idolatry of Racine, this may excuse him in a
national point of view; but he has no longer any advantage over us; and
we must console ourselves as well as we can for Mr. Wordsworth’s not
allowing us to laugh at the wit of Voltaire, by laughing now and then at
the only author whom he is known to understand and admire![50]
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_July, 1819._
Instead of making a disposition to find fault a proof of taste, I would
reverse the rule, and estimate every one’s pretensions to taste by the
degree of their sensibility to the highest and most various excellence.
An indifference to less degrees of excellence is only excusable as it
arises from a knowledge and admiration of higher ones; and a readiness
in the detection of faults should pass for refinement only as it is
owing to a quick sense and impatient love of beauties. In a word, fine
taste consists in sympathy, not in antipathy; and the rejection of what
is bad is only to be accounted a virtue when it implies a preference of
and attachment to what is better.
There is a certain point, which may be considered as the highest point
of perfection at which the human faculties can arrive in the conception
and execution of certain things: to be able to reach this point in
reality is the greatest proof of genius and power; and I imagine that
the greatest proof of taste is given in being able to appreciate it when
done. For instance, I have heard (and I can believe) that Madame
Catalani’s manner of singing ‘Hope told a flattering tale,’ was the
perfection of singing; and I cannot conceive that it would have been the
perfection of taste to have thought nothing at all of it. There was, I
understand, a sort of fluttering of the voice and a breathless
palpitation of the heart, (like the ruffling of the feathers of the
robin-redbreast), which completely gave back all the uneasy and
thrilling voluptuousness of the sentiment; and I contend that the person
on whom not a particle of this expression was lost, (or would have been
lost, if it had even been finer), into whom the tones of sweetness or
tenderness sink deeper and deeper as they approach the farthest verge of
ecstacy or agony, he who has an ear attuned to the trembling harmony,
and a heart ‘pierceable’ by pleasure’s finest point, is the best judge
of music,—not he who remains insensible to the matter himself, or, if
you point it out to him, asks, ‘What of it?’ I fancied that I had a
triumph some time ago, over a critic and connoisseur of music, who
thought little of the minuet in Don Giovanni; but the same person
redeemed his pretensions to musical taste in my opinion by saying of
some passage in Mozart, ‘This is a soliloquy equal to any in Hamlet.’ In
hearing the accompaniment in the Messiah of angels’ voices to the
shepherds keeping watch at night, who has the most taste and delicacy,
he who listens in silent rapture to the silver sounds, as they rise in
sweetness and soften into distance, drawing the soul from earth to
heaven, and making it partaker of the music of the spheres, or he who
remains deaf to the summons, and remarks that it is an allegorical
conceit? Which would Handel have been most pleased with, the man who was
seen standing at the performance of the Coronation anthem in Westminster
Abbey, with his face bathed in tears, and mingling ‘the drops which
sacred joy had engendered’ with that ocean of circling sound, or with
him who sat with frigid, critical aspect, his heart untouched and his
looks unaltered as the marble statue on the wall?[51] Again, if any one,
in looking at Rembrandt’s picture of Jacob’s Dream, should not be struck
with the solemn awe that surrounds it, and with the dazzling flights of
angels’ wings like steps of golden light, emanations of flame or spirit
hovering between earth and sky, and should observe very wisely that
Jacob was thrown in one corner of the picture like a bundle of clothes,
without power, form, or motion, and should think this a defect, I should
say that such a critic might possess great knowledge of the mechanical
part of painting, but not an atom of feeling or imagination.[52] Or who
is it that, in looking at the productions of Raphael or Titian, is the
person of true taste? He who finds what there is, or he who finds what
there is not in each? Not he who picks a petty vulgar quarrel with the
colouring of Raphael or the drawing of Titian is the true critic and
judicious spectator, but he who broods over the expression of the one
till it takes possession of his soul, and who dwells on the tones and
hues of the other till his eye is saturated with truth and beauty, for
by this means he moulds his mind to the study and reception of what is
most perfect in form and colour, instead of letting it remain empty,
‘swept and garnished,’ or rather a dull blank, with ‘knowledge at each
entrance quite shut out.’ He who cavils at the want of drawing in Titian
is not the most sensible to it in Raphael; instead of that, he only
insists on his want of colouring. He who is offended at Raphael’s
hardness and monotony is not delighted with the soft, rich pencilling of
Titian; he only takes care to find fault with him for wanting that
which, if he possessed it in the highest degree, he would not admire or
understand. And this is easy to be accounted for. First, such a critic
has been told what to do, and follows his instructions. Secondly, to
perceive the height of any excellence, it is necessary to have the most
exquisite sense of that kind of excellence through all its gradations:
to perceive the want of any excellence, it is merely necessary to have a
negative or abstract notion of the thing, or perhaps only of the name.
Or, in other words, any the most crude and mechanical idea of a given
quality is a measure of positive deficiency, whereas none but the most
refined idea of the same quality can be a standard of superlative merit.
To distinguish the finest characteristics of Titian or Raphael, to go
along with them in their imitation of Nature, is to be so far like them:
to be occupied only with that in which they fell short of others,
instead of that in which they soared above them, shows a vulgar, narrow
capacity, insensible to any thing beyond mediocrity, and an ambition
still more grovelling. To be dazzled by admiration of the greatest
excellence, and of the highest works of genius, is natural to the best
capacities, and the best natures; envy and dulness are most apt to
detect minute blemishes and unavoidable inequalities, as we see the
spots in the sun by having its rays blunted by mist or smoke. It may be
asked, then, whether mere extravagance and enthusiasm are proofs of
taste? And I answer, no, where they are without reason and knowledge.
Mere sensibility is not true taste, but sensibility to real excellence
is. To admire and be wrapt up in what is trifling or absurd, is a proof
of nothing but ignorance or affectation: on the contrary, he who admires
most what is most worthy of admiration, (let his raptures or his
eagerness to express them be what they may), shows himself neither
extravagant nor ‘unwise.’ When Mr. Wordsworth once said that he could
read the description of Satan in Milton,
‘Nor seem’d
Less than archangel ruin’d, and the excess
Of glory obscur’d,’
till he felt a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of
beauty and grandeur, I saw no extravagance in this, but the utmost truth
of feeling. When the same author, or his friend Mr. Southey, says, that
the Excursion is better worth preserving than the Paradise Lost, this
appears to me, I confess, a great piece of impertinence, or an
unwarrantable stretch of friendship. Nor do I think the preference given
by certain celebrated reviewers, of Mr. Rogers’s Human Life over Mr.
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, founded on the true principles of poetical
justice; for something is, after all, better than nothing.
To hasten to a conclusion of these desultory observations. The highest
taste is shown in habitual sensibility to the greatest beauties; the
most general taste is shown in a perception of the greatest variety of
excellence. Many people admire Milton, and as many admire Pope, while
there are but few who have any relish for both. Almost all the disputes
on this subject arise, not so much from false, as from confined taste.
We suppose that only one thing can have merit; and that, if we allow it
to any thing else, we deprive the favourite object of our critical faith
of the honours due to it. We are generally right in what we approve
ourselves; for liking proceeds from a certain conformity of objects to
the taste; as we are generally wrong in condemning what others admire;
for our dislike mostly proceeds from our want of taste for what pleases
them. Our being totally senseless to what excites extreme delight in
those who have as good a right to judge as we have, in all human
probability implies a defect of faculty in us, rather than a limitation
in the resources of nature or art. Those who are pleased with the fewest
things, know the least; as those who are pleased with every thing, know
nothing. Shakespeare makes Mrs. Quickly say of Falstaff, by a pleasant
blunder, that ‘Carnation was a colour he could never abide.’ So there
are persons who cannot like Claude, because he is not Salvator Rosa;
some who cannot endure Rembrandt, and others who would not cross the
street to see a Vandyke; one reader does not like the neatness of
Junius, and another objects to the extravagance of Burke; and they are
all right, if they expect to find in others what is only to be found in
their favourite author or artist, but equally wrong if they mean to say,
that each of those they would condemn by a narrow and arbitrary standard
of taste, has not a peculiar and transcendent merit of his own. The
question is not, whether _you_ like a certain excellence, (it is your
own fault if you do not), but whether another possessed it in a very
eminent degree. If he did not, who is there that possessed it in a
greater—that ranks above him in that particular? Those who are accounted
the best, are the best in their line. When we say that Rembrandt was a
master of _chiaro-scuro_, for instance, we do not say that he joined to
this the symmetry of the Greek statues, but we mean that we must go to
him for the perfection of _chiaro-scuro_, and that a Greek statue has
not _chiaro-scuro_. If any one objects to Junius’s Letters, that they
are a tissue of epigrams, we answer, Be it so; it is for that very
reason that we admire them. Again, should any one find fault with Mr.
Burke’s writings as a collection of rhapsodies, the proper answer always
would be, Who is there that has written finer rhapsodies? I know an
admirer of Don Quixote who can see no merit in Gil Blas, and an admirer
of Gil Blas who could never get through Don Quixote. I myself have great
pleasure in reading both these works, and in that respect think I have
an advantage over both these critics. It always struck me as a singular
proof of good taste, good sense, and liberal thinking, in an old friend,
who had Paine’s Rights of Man and Burke’s Reflections on the French
Revolution, bound up in one volume, and who said, that, both together,
they made a very good book. To agree with the greatest number of good
judges, is to be in the right; and good judges are persons of natural
sensibility and acquired knowledge.[53] On the other hand, it must be
owned, there are critics whose praise is a libel, and whose
recommendation of any work is enough to condemn it. Men of the greatest
genius and originality are not always persons of the most liberal and
unprejudiced taste; they have a strong bias to certain qualities
themselves, are for reducing others to their own standard, and lie less
open to the general impressions of things. This exclusive preference of
their own peculiar excellencies to those of others, in writers whose
merits have not been sufficiently understood or acknowledged by their
contemporaries, chiefly because they were _not_ common-place, may
sometimes be seen mounting up to a degree of bigotry and intolerance,
little short of insanity. There are some critics I have known who never
allow an author any merit till all the world ‘cry out upon him,’ and
others who never allow another any merit that any one can discover but
themselves. So there are connoisseurs who spend their lives and waste
their breath in extolling sublime passages in obscure writers, and
lovers who choose their mistresses for their ugly faces. This is not
taste, but affectation. What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and
that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity, had in general much
better remain in it.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
Taste relates to that which, either in the objects of nature, or the
imitation of them or the Fine Arts in general is calculated to give
pleasure. Now, to know what is calculated to give pleasure, the way is
to enquire what does give pleasure: so that taste is, after all, much
more a matter of fact and less of theory than might be imagined. We may
hence determine another point, _viz._—whether there is any universal or
exclusive standard of taste, since this is to inquire, in other words,
whether there is any one thing that pleases all the world alike, or
whether there is only one thing that pleases anybody, both which
questions carry their own answers with them. Still it does not follow,
because there is no dogmatic or bigoted standard of taste, like a
formula of faith, which whoever does not believe without doubt he shall
be damned everlastingly, that there is no standard of taste whatever,
that is to say, that certain things are not more apt to please than
others, that some do not please more generally, that there are not
others that give most pleasure to those who have studied the subject,
that one nation is most susceptible of a particular kind of beauty, and
another of another, according to their characters, &c. It would be a
difficult attempt to force all these into one general rule or system,
and yet equally so to deny that they are absolutely capricious, and
without any foundation or principle whatever. There are, doubtless,
books for children that we discard as we grow up; yet, what are the
majority of mankind, or even readers, but grown children? If put to the
vote of all the milliners’ girls in London, _Old Mortality_, or even
_Heart of Midlothian_, would not carry the day (or, at least, not very
triumphantly) over a common Minerva-press novel; and I will hazard
another opinion, that no woman ever liked Burke. Mr. Pratt, on the
contrary, said that he had to ‘boast of many learned and beautiful
suffrages.’[54] It is not, then, solely from the greatest number of
voices, but from the opinion of the greatest number of well-informed
minds, that we can establish, if not an absolute standard, at least a
comparative scale, of taste. Certainly, it can hardly be doubted that
the greater the number of persons of strong natural sensibility or love
for any art, and who have paid the closest attention to it, who agree in
their admiration of any work of art, the higher do its pretensions rise
to classical taste and intrinsic beauty. In this way, as the opinion of
a thousand good judges may outweigh that of nearly all the rest of the
world, so there may be one individual among them whose opinion may
outweigh that of the other nine hundred and ninety-nine; that is, one of
a still stronger and more refined perception of beauty than all the
rest, and to whose opinion that of the others and of the world at large
would approximate and be conformed, as their taste or perception of what
was pleasing became stronger and more confirmed by exercise and proper
objects to call it forth. Thus, if we were still to insist on an
universal standard of taste, it must be that, not which _does_, but
which _would_ please universally, supposing all men to have paid an
equal attention to any subject and to have an equal relish for it, which
can only be guessed at by the imperfect and yet more than casual
agreement among those who have done so from choice and feeling. Taste is
nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of
imagination, &c. It is time, however, to apply this rule. There is, for
instance, a much greater number of habitual readers and playgoers in
France, who are devoted admirers of Racine or Molière than there are in
England of Shakspeare: does Shakspeare’s fame rest, then, on a less
broad and solid foundation than that of either of the others? I think
not, supposing that the class of judges to whom Shakspeare’s excellences
appeal are a higher, more independent, and more original court of
criticism, and that their suffrages are quite as unanimous (though not
so numerous) in the one case as in the other. A simile or a sentiment is
not the worse in common opinion for being somewhat superficial and
hackneyed, but it is the worse in poetry. The perfection of
_common-place_ is that which would unite the greatest number of
suffrages, if there were not a tribunal above _common-place_. For
instance, in Shakspeare’s description of flowers, primroses are
mentioned—
‘That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty:’
Now, I do not know that this expression is translatable into French, or
intelligible to the common reader of either nation, but raise the scale
of fancy, passion, and observation of nature to a certain point, and I
will be bold to say that there will be no scruple entertained whether
this single metaphor does not contain more poetry of the kind than is to
be found in all Racine. As no Frenchman could write it, so I believe no
Frenchman could understand it. We cannot take this insensibility on
their part as a mark of our superiority, for we have plenty of persons
among ourselves in the same predicament, but not the wisest or most
refined, and to these the appeal is fair from the many—‘and fit audience
find, though few.’ So I think it requires a higher degree of taste to
judge of Titian’s portraits than Raphael’s scripture pieces: not that I
think more highly of the former than the latter, but the world and
connoisseurs in general think there is no comparison (from the dignity
of the subject), whereas I think it difficult to decide which are the
finest. Here again we have a common-place, a preconception, the moulds
of the judgment preoccupied by certain assumptions of degrees and
classes of excellence, instead of judging from the true and genuine
impressions of things. Men of genius, or those who can produce
excellence would be the best judges of it—poets of poetry, painters of
painting, &c.—but that persons of original and strong powers of mind are
too much disposed to refer everything to their own peculiar bias, and
are comparatively indifferent to merely passive impressions. On the
other hand, it is wholly wrong to oppose taste to genius, for genius in
works of art is nothing but the power of producing what is beautiful
(which, however, implies the intimate sense of it), though this is
something very different from mere negative or formal beauties, which
have as little to do with taste as genius.
I have, in a former essay, ascertained one principle of taste or
excellence in the arts of imitation, where it was shown that objects of
sense are not as it were simple and self-evident propositions, but admit
of endless analysis and the most subtle investigation. We do not see
nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. To
suppose that we see the whole of any object, merely by looking at it, is
a vulgar error: we fancy that we do, because we are, of course,
conscious of no more than we see in it, but this circle of our knowledge
enlarges with further acquaintance and study, and we then perceive that
what we perhaps barely distinguished in the gross, or regarded as a dull
blank, is full of beauty, meaning, and curious details. He sees most of
nature who understands its language best, or connects one thing with the
greatest number of other things. Expression is the key to the human
countenance, and unfolds a thousand imperceptible distinctions. How,
then, should every one be a judge of pictures, when so few are of faces?
A merely ignorant spectator, walking through a gallery of pictures, no
more distinguishes the finest than your dog would, if he was to
accompany you. Do not even the most experienced dispute on the
preference, and shall the most ignorant decide? A vulgar connoisseur
would even prefer a Denner to a Titian, because there is more of merely
curious and specific detail. We may hence account for another
circumstance, why things please in the imitation which do not in
reality. If we saw the whole of anything, or if the object in nature
were merely one thing, this could not be the case. But the fact is, that
in the imitation, or in the scientific study of any object, we come to
an analysis of the details or some other abstract view of the subject
which we had overlooked in a cursory examination, and these may be
beautiful or curious, though the object in the gross is disgusting, or
connected with disagreeable or uninteresting associations. Thus, in a
picture of _still life_, as a shell or a marble chimney-piece, the
stains or the gradations of colour may be delicate, and subjects for a
new and careful imitation, though the _tout ensemble_ has not, like a
living face, the highest beauty of intelligence and expression. Here lie
and here return the true effects and triumphs of art. It is not in
making the eye a microscope, but in making it the interpreter and organ
of all that can touch the soul and the affections, that the perfection
of fine art is shown. Taste, then, does not place in the first rank of
merit what merely proves difficulty or gratifies curiosity, unless it is
combined with excellence and sentiment, or the pleasures of imagination
and the moral sense. In this case the pleasure is more than doubled,
where not only the imitation but the thing imitated, is fine in itself.
Hence the preference given to Italian over Dutch pictures.
In respect to the imitation of nature, I would further observe that I
think Sir Joshua Reynolds was wrong in making the grandeur of the design
depend on the omission of the details, or the want of finishing. This
seems also to proceed on the supposition that there cannot be two views
of nature, but that the details are opposed to and inconsistent with an
attention to general effect. Now this is evidently false, since the two
things are undoubtedly combined by nature. For instance, the grandeur of
design or character in the arch of an eyebrow is not injured or
destroyed in reality by the hair-lines of which it is composed. Nor is
the general form or outline of the eyebrow altered in the imitation,
whether you make it one rude mass or descend into the minutiæ of the
parts, which are arranged in such a manner as to produce the arched form
and give the particular expression. So the general form of a nose, say
an aquiline one, is not affected, whether I paint a wart which may
happen to be on it or not, and so of the outline and proportions of the
whole face. That is, general effect is consistent with individual
details, and though these are not necessary to it, yet they often assist
it, and always confirm the sense of verisimilitude. The most finished
paintings, it is true, are not the grandest in effect; but neither is it
true that the greatest daubs are the most sublime in character and
composition. The best painters have combined an eye to the whole with
careful finishing, and as there is a medium in all things, so the rule
here seems to be not to go on _ad infinitum_ with the details, but to
stop when the time and labour necessary seem, in the judgment of the
artist, to exceed the benefit produced.
Beauty does not consist in a medium, but in gradation or harmony. It has
been the fashion of late to pretend to refer everything to association
of ideas (and it is difficult to answer this appeal, since association,
by its nature, mixes up with everything), but as Hartley has himself
observed, who carried this principle to the utmost extent, and might be
supposed to understand its limits, association implies something to be
associated, and if there is a pleasing association, there must be first
something naturally pleasing from which the secondary satisfaction is
reflected, or to which it is conjoined. The chirping of a sparrow is as
much a rural and domestic sound as the notes of the robin or the thrush,
but it does not serve as a point to link other interests to because it
wants beauty in itself; and, on the other hand, the song of the
nightingale draws more attention to itself as a piece of music, and
conveys less sentiment than the simple note of the cuckoo, which, from
its solitary singularity, acts as the warning voice of time. Those who
deny that there is a natural and pleasing softness arising from harmony
or gradation, might as well affirm that sudden and abrupt transitions do
not make our impressions more distinct as that they do not make them
more harsh and violent. Beauty consists in gradation of colours or
symmetry of form (conformity): strength or sublimity arises from the
sense of power, and is aided by contrast. The ludicrous is the
incoherent, arising, not from a conflicting power, but from weakness or
the inability of any habitual impulse to sustain itself. The _ideal_ is
not confined to creation, but takes place in imitation, where a thing is
subjected to one view, as all the parts of a face to the same
expression. Invention is only feigning according to nature, or with a
certain proportion between causes and effects. Poetry is infusing the
same spirit into a number of things, or bathing them all as it were, in
the same overflowing sense of delight (making the language also soft and
musical), as the same torch kindles a number of lamps. I think invention
is chiefly confined to poetry and words or ideas, and has little place
in painting or concrete imagery, where the want of truth, or of the
actual object, soon spoils the effect and force of the representation.
Indeed, I think all genius is, in a great measure, national and local,
arising out of times and circumstances, and being sustained at its full
height by these alone, and that originality is not a deviation from, but
a recurrence to nature. Rules and models destroy genius and art; and the
excess of the artificial in the end cures itself, for it in time becomes
so uniform and vapid as to be altogether contemptible, and to seek
_perforce_ some other outlet or purchase for the mind to take hold of.
The metaphysical theory above premised will account not only for the
difficulty of imitating nature, but for the excellence of various
masters, and the diversity and popularity of different styles. If the
truth of sense and nature were one, there could be but one mode of
representing it, more or less correct. But nature contains an infinite
variety of parts, with their relations and significations, and different
artists take these, and altogether do not give the whole. Thus Titian
coloured, Raphael designed, Rubens gave the florid hue and motions,
Rembrandt _chiaro-scuro_, &c.; but none of these reached perfection in
their several departments, much less with reference to the whole
circumference of art. It is ridiculous to suppose there is but one
standard or one style. One artist looks at objects with as different an
eye from another, as he does from the mathematician. It is erroneous to
tie down individual genius to ideal models. Each person should do that,
not which is best in itself, even supposing this could be known, but
that which he can do best, which he will find out if left to himself.
Spenser could not have written _Paradise Lost_, nor Milton the _Faerie
Queene_. Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce
mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and
unknown to themselves. Did Correggio know what he had done when he had
painted the ‘St. Jerome’—or Rembrandt when he made the sketch of
‘Jacob’s Dream?’ Oh, no! Those who are conscious of their powers never
do anything.
ON THE PRESENT STATE OF PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE
_The London Magazine._] [_October 1820._
It was a fine impertinence of the younger Pliny, to try to persuade
Tacitus, in one of his epistles, that the diffuse style was better than
the concise. ‘Such a one,’ says he, ‘aims at the throat of his
adversary: now I like to strike him wherever I can.’ I may be thought
guilty of a like piece of officiousness in the remarks here offered on
several of the most prominent of our parliamentary speakers. In general,
to suggest advice, or hazard criticism, is to recommend it to others to
do something, which we know they either will not or cannot do: or it is
to desire them either to please us, or do nothing. The present article
may be considered as a marginal note or explanatory addition to a former
one, on nearly the same subject—like one of Lord Castlereagh’s long
parentheses: but I hope there will be more in it. It is a subject of
which I wish to make clear work as I go; for it is one to which, if I
can once get rid of it, I am not likely to recur.
The haughty tone of invective which I have already ascribed to Lord
Chatham, was very different from that didactic style of parliamentary
oratory which has since been imported from northern colleges and
lecture-rooms. Of this school Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Brougham may
be reckoned at the head.
This method consists, not so much in taking a side, as in stating a
question. The speaker takes upon him to be the judge rather than the
advocate; and if he had the authority of a judge, or could direct the
decision, as well as sum up the evidence, it would be all very well. An
orator of this stamp does not seat himself on the Opposition side of the
House to urge or to reply to particular points, but in a Professor’s
chair of Humanity, to read a lecture to the tyros of the Treasury-Bench,
on the elementary principles and all the possible bearings, the
objections and answers, the difficulties and the solutions of every
question in philosophy, jurisprudence, politics, and political
economy,—on war, peace, ‘domestic treason, foreign levy,’ colonial
produce, copy-right of authors, prison discipline, the hulks, the
corn-bill, the penitentiary, prostitutes, and pick-pockets. Nothing
comes amiss to him that can puzzle himself or _pose_ his hearers; and he
lets out all his knowledge indiscriminately, whether it makes for or
against him, with deliberate impartiality and scrupulous exactness. Such
persons might be called _Orators of the Human Mind_. They are a little
out of their place, it must be owned, in the House of Commons. The
object there is—not to put the majority in possession of the common
grounds of judging, as in a class of students—(these are taken for
granted as already known)—but to carry a point, to gain a verdict for
yourself or for truth, by throwing the weight of eloquence and argument
into the scale against interest, prejudice, or sophistry. There are
retainers enough on the other side to manage for the crown, who are
ready to take all advantages without your volunteering to place yourself
in their power, or to put excuses in their mouths, to help them out at a
dead-lift. If they were candid, if they were disinterested, if they were
not hostilely disposed, it might be a feasible scheme to consider a
debate as an amicable communication of doubts and lights, as a
comparison of strength or a confession of weakness: but why hint a
doubt, or start a difficulty needlessly in your own path, which will be
eagerly caught at, and made use of in the most insulting manner to
defeat a host of real proofs, and overturn the most legitimate
conclusions? Why tamper with your own cause? Why play at fast and loose
with your object? Why restore the weapons into your enemies’ hands,
which you have just wrested from them? Why ‘make a wanton’ of the First
Minister of State? It is either vanity, weakness, or indifference to do
so. You might as well in confidence tell an adversary where you meant to
strike him, point out to him your own weak sides, or wait in courtesy
for the blow. Gamesters do not show one another their hands: neither
should politicians, who understand what they are about—that is, knaves
_will_ not, and honest men _ought_ not. Others will find out the rotten
parts of a question: do you stick to the sound—knowledge is said to be
power: but knowledge, applied as we have seen it, neutralises itself.
Mere knowledge, to be effectual, must act _in vacuo_: but the House of
Commons is by no means a vacuum, and empty receiver for abstract truth
and airy speculation. There is the resistance, the refrangibility of
dense prejudice and crooked policy: you must concentrate, you must
enforce, you must urge to glowing sympathy: and enthusiasm, zeal,
perfect conviction on your part, is the only principle that can be
brought into play against the cool calculations or gross incentives of
selfishness and servility on the opposite side. A middle line of conduct
does not excite respect, but contempt. They do not think you sincere,
but lukewarm. They give you credit for affectation or timidity, but none
for heartiness in a cause, or fidelity to a party. They have more hopes
of you than fears. By everlasting subtle distinctions, and hesitating,
qualified, retracting dissent from measures you would be thought most to
reprobate, you do more harm than good. In theory there are infinite
shades of difference, but in practice the question must be decided one
way or other: either the Ayes or the Noes must have it. In all such
cases, those who are not for us are against us. In political
controversy, as in a battle, there are but two sides to chuse between;
and those who create a diversion in favour of established abuses by
setting up a third, fanciful, impracticable standard of perfection of
their own, in the most critical circumstances, betray the cause they
pretend to espouse with such overweening delicacy. For my own part, I
hate a fellow who picks a hole in his own coat, who finds a flaw in his
own argument, who treats his enemies as if they might become friends, or
his friends as if they might become enemies. I hate your shuffling,
_shilly-shally_ proceedings, and diagonal sidelong movements between
right and wrong. Fling yourself into the gap at once—either into the
arms, or at the heads of Ministers!
I remember hearing, with some pain and uneasiness, Sir James
Mackintosh’s maiden speech on the Genoa business. It was a great, but
ineffectual effort. The mass of information, of ingenuity, and
reasoning, was very prodigious; but the whole was misdirected, no
impression whatever was made. It was like an inaugural dissertation on
the general principles of ethics, on the laws of nature and nations, on
ancient and modern history—a laboured treatise _de omnibus rebus et
quibusdam aliis_. There were all the rules of moral arithmetic, all the
items in a profligate political account; but the bill was not properly
cast up, the case was not distinctly made out, the counsel got no
damages for his client. Nothing was gained by this motion, nor could
there be. When he had brought his heaviest artillery to bear with
probable success upon a certain point, he stopped short like a
scientific demonstrator (not like a skilful engineer) to show how it
might be turned against himself. When he had wound up the charge of
treachery or oppression to a climax, he gratuitously suggested a
possible plea of necessity, accident, or some other topic, to break the
force of his inference; or he anticipated the answers that might be made
to it, as if he was afraid he should not be thought to know all that
could be said on both sides of the question. This enlarged knowledge of
good and evil may be very necessary to a philosopher, but it is very
prejudicial to an orator. No man can play the whole game in this manner,
blow hot and cold in a breath, or take an entire debate into his own
hands, and wield it in which way he pleases. He will find his own load
enough for his own shoulders to bear. The exceptions if you chuse to go
into them, multiply faster than the rules: the various complications of
the subject distract, instead of convincing: you do your adversary’s
work for him; the battle is lost without a blow being struck; and a
speech of this sceptical kind requires and receives no answer. It falls
by its own weight, and buries any body but the Minister under its
ruins—or it is left, not a triumphal arch, but a splendid mausoleum of
the learning, genius, and eloquence of the speaker.—The Cock-pit of St.
Stephen’s does not relish this scholastic refinement, this method of
holding an argument with a man’s self: a little bear-garden,
cut-and-thrust work would be much better understood. Sir James has of
late improved his tact and knowledge of the House. He has taken up Sir
Samuel Romilly’s department of questions relating to the amelioration of
the penal code and general humanity, and I have no doubt Government will
leave him in quiet possession of it. They concede these sort of
questions as an amiable diversion, or friendly _bonus_, to the
indefatigable spirit of Opposition.
Mr. Brougham is, I conceive, another instance of this analytical style
of debating, which ‘plays round the head, but does not reach the heart.’
There is a want of warmth, of _momentum_, of impulse in his speeches. He
loses himself in an infinity of details, as his learned and honourable
friend does in a wide sea of speculation. He goes picking up a number of
curious pebbles on the shore, and at the outlets of a question—but he
does not ‘roll all his strength and all his sharpness up into one ball,’
to throw at and crush his enemies beneath his feet. He enters into
statistics, he calls for documents, he examines accounts. This method is
slow, perplexing, circuitous, and not sure. While the evidence is
collecting, the question is lost. While one thing is substantiating,
another goes out of your mind. These little detached multifarious
particulars, which require such industry and sagacity in the speaker to
bring them forward, have no clue in the minds of the hearers to connect
them together. There is no substratum of prejudice, no cement of
interest. They do not grow out of the soil of common feeling and
experience, but are set in it; nor do they bear the fruits of
conviction. Mr. Brougham can follow the ramifications of an intricate
subject, but he is not so well acquainted with the springs of the human
mind. He finds himself at the end of his speech,—in the last sentence of
it,—just where he was at the beginning, or in any other given part of
it. He has not acquired any additional _impetus_, is not projected
forward with any new degree of warmth or vigour. He was cold, correct,
smart, pointed at first, and he continues so still. A repetition of
blows, however, is of no use, unless they are struck in the same place:
a change of position is not progression. As Sir James Mackintosh’s
speeches are a decomposition of the moral principles of society, so Mr.
Brougham’s are an ingenious taking in pieces of its physical mechanism.
While they are at work with their experiments, their antagonists are
putting in motion the passions, the fears, and antipathies of mankind,
and blowing their schemes of reform above the moon.
Talent alone, then, is not sufficient to support a successful
Opposition. There is talent on the other side too, of some sort or
other; and, in addition, there is another weight, that of influence,
which requires a counterpoise. This can be nothing else but fixed
principle, but naked honesty, but undisguised enthusiasm. That is the
expansive force that must shatter the strongholds of corruption if ever
they are shattered, that must make them totter, if ever they are made to
totter, about the heads of their possessors. Desire to expose a
ministry, and you will do it—if it be, like ours, vulnerable all over.
Desire to make a display of yourself, and you will do it, if you have a
decent stock of acquirements. Mr. Brougham has a great quantity of
combustible materials constantly passing through his hands, but he has
not the warmth in his own heart to ‘kindle them into a flame of sacred
vehemence.’ He is not a good hater. He is not an impassioned lover of
the popular cause. He is not a Radical orator: he is not a Back-bone
debater. He wants nerve, he wants impetuosity. He may divide on a
question, but he will never carry it. His circumspection, which he
thinks his strength, is in reality his weakness. He makes paltry
excuses, unmanly concessions. His political warfare is not a _bellum
internecinum_. He commits no mortal offences. He has not yet cut off his
retreat. In a word, he trims too much between all parties. A person who
does this too long, loses the confidence, loses the cordiality of all
parties; loses his character; and when he has once lost that, there is
nothing to stand in his way to office and the first honours of the
State!
He who is not indifferent himself will find out, from his own feelings,
what it is that interests others in a cause. An honest man is an orator
by nature. The late Mr. Whitbread was an honest man, and a true
parliamentary speaker. He had no artifices, no tricks, no reserve about
him. He spoke point-blank what he thought, and his heart was in his
broad, honest, English face. He had as much activity of mind as Mr.
Brougham, and paid the same attention to business as that gentleman
does; but it was with him a matter of feeling, and had nothing of a
professional look. His objects were open and direct; and he had a
sufficient stock of natural good sense and practical information, not to
be made the dupe of sophistry and chicane. He was always in his place,
and ready to do his duty. If a falsehood was stated, he contradicted it
instantly in a few plain words: if an act of injustice was palliated, it
excited his contempt; if it was justified, it roused his indignation: he
retorted a mean insinuation with manly spirit, and never shrunk from a
frank avowal of his sentiments. He presented a petition or complaint
against some particular grievance better than any one else I ever saw.
His manner seemed neither to implicate him in the truth of the charge,
nor to signify a wish to disclaim it beforehand. He was merely the organ
through which any alleged abuse of power might meet the public ear, and
he either answered or redressed, according to the merits of the case
upon inquiry. In short, he was the representative of the spontaneous,
unsophisticated sense of the English people on public men and public
measures. Any plain, well-meaning man, on hearing him speak, would say,
‘That is just what I think’; or from observing his manner, would say,
‘That is just what I feel.’ He was not otherwise a powerful debater or
an accomplished speaker. He could not master a general view of any
subject, or get up a set speech with effect. One or two that I heard him
make (particularly one on the Princess of Wales and the situation of her
affairs in 1813, in which he grew pathetic) were complete failures. He
could pull down better than he could build up. The irritation of
constant contradiction was necessary to his full possession of
himself:—give him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ and he lost his way.
He stuck close to the skirts of Ministry, but he was not qualified to
originate or bring to a triumphant conclusion any great political
movement. His enthusiasm ran away with his judgment, and was not
_backed_ by equal powers of reasoning or imagination. He was a sanguine,
high-spirited man, but not a man of genius, or a deep thinker; and his
fortitude failed him, when the last fatal blow was given to himself and
his party. He could not have drawn up so able a political statement as
Mr. Brougham; but he would have more personal adherents in the House of
Commons, for he was himself the adherent of a cause.
Mr. Tierney is certainly a better speaker and a cleverer man. But he can
never make a leader for want of earnestness. He has no Quixotic
enthusiasm in himself; much less any to spare for his followers. He
cares nothing (or seems to care nothing) about a question; but he is
impatient of absurdity, and has a thorough contempt for the
understandings of his opponents. Sharpened by his spleen, nothing
escapes his acuteness. He makes fine sport for the spectators. He takes
up Lord Castlereagh’s blunders, and Mr. Vansittart’s no-meanings; and
retorts them on their heads in the finest style of execution imaginable.
It is like being present on a Shrove-Tuesday, and seeing a set of
mischievous unfeeling boys throwing at a brace of cocks, and breaking
their shins. Mr. Tierney always brings down his man: but beyond this you
feel no confidence in him; you take no interest in his movements but as
he is instrumental in annoying other people. He (to all appearance) has
no great point to carry himself, and no wish to be thought to have any
important principle at stake. He is by much too sincere for a hypocrite,
but is not enough in earnest for a parliamentary leader. For others to
sympathise with you, you must first sympathise with them. When Mr.
Whitbread got up to speak, you felt an interest in what he was going to
say, in the success of his arguments: when you hear that Mr. Tierney is
on his legs, you feel that you shall be amused with an admirable display
of dexterity and talent, but are nearly indifferent as to the result.
You look on as at an exhibition of extraordinary skill in fencing or
prize-fighting.
Of all those who have for some years past aspired by turns to be leaders
of the Opposition, Mr. Ponsonby was the person who had the fewest
pretensions. He was a literal arguer. He affected great sagacity and
judgment, and referred every thing, in a summary way, to the principles
of common sense, and the reason of the case. He abounded in truisms,
which seldom go far in deciding disputable points. He generally reduced
the whole range of the debate into the narrow compass of a self-evident
proposition:—to make sure of his object, he began by taking the question
for granted, and necessarily failed when he came to the particular
application. He was not aware of the maxim, that he who proves too much,
proves nothing. His turn of observation was legal, not acute: his manner
was dry, but his blows were not hard: his features were flat on his
face, and his arguments did not stand out from the question. He might
have been a tolerable special-pleader, but he was a bad orator, and, I
think, a worse politician. Any one who argues on strict logical grounds
must be prepared to go all lengths, or he will be sure to be defeated at
every step he takes: but the gentleman’s principles were of a very
cautious and temporising cast. I have seen him, more than once, give
himself great airs over those who took more general views of the
subject; and he was very fastidious in the choice of associates, with
whom he would condescend to act.
Mr. Ponsonby’s style of speaking was neither instructive nor
entertaining. In this respect, it was the reverse of Mr. Grattan’s,
which was both. To see the latter make one of his promised motions on
Catholic Emancipation, was one of the most extraordinary exhibitions,
both bodily and mental, which could possibly be witnessed. You saw a
little oddly-compacted figure of a man, with a large head and
features,—such as they give to pasteboard masks, or stick upon the
shoulders of Punch in the puppet-show,—rolling about like a
Mandarin—sawing the air with his whole body from head to foot, sweeping
the floor with a roll of parchment, which he held in one hand, and
throwing his legs and arms about like the branches of trees tossed by
the wind:—every now and then striking the table with impatient
vehemence, and, in a sharp, slow, nasal, gutteral tone, drawling out,
with due emphasis and discretion, a set of little smart antithetical
sentences,—all ready-cut and dry, polished and pointed;—that seemed as
if they ‘would lengthen out in succession to the crack of doom.’
Alliterations were tacked to alliterations,—inference was dove-tailed
into inference,—and the whole derived new brilliance and piquancy from
the contrast it presented to the uncouthness of the speaker, and the
monotony of his delivery. His were compositions that would have done
equally well to be said or sung. The rhyme was placed at the beginning
instead of the end of each line; he sharpened the sense on the sound,
and clenched an argument by corresponding letters of the alphabet. It
must be confessed, that there was something meretricious, as well as
alluring, in this style. After the first surprise and startling effect
is over, and the devoted champion of his country’s cause goes on ringing
the changes on ‘the Irish People and the Irish Parliament’—on ‘the
Guinea and the Gallows,’ as the ultimate resources of the English
government,—on ‘ministerial mismanagement, and privileged
profligacy,’—we begin to feel that there is nothing in these quaint and
affected verbal coincidences more nearly allied to truth than
falsehood:—there is a want of directness and simplicity in this warped
and garbled style; and our attention is drawn off from the importance of
the subject by a shower of epigrammatic conceits, and fanciful
phraseology, in which the orator chuses to veil it. It is hardly enough
to say, in defence of this jingle of words, (as well as of the
overstrained hyperbolical tone of declamation which accompanies it) that
‘it is a custom of Ireland.’[55] The same objection may be made to it in
point of taste that has been made to the old-fashioned, obsolete
practice of cutting trees into the shape of arm-chairs and peacocks, or
to that style of landscape-gardening, where
‘Grove nods to grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other—’
and I am afraid that this objection cannot be got over, at least, on
this side the water.[56]
The best Irish speaker I ever heard (indeed the best speaker without any
exception whatever) is Mr. Plunkett; who followed Mr. Grattan in one of
the debates on the Catholic question above alluded to. The contrast was
not a little striking; and it was certainly in favour of Mr. Plunkett.
His style of workmanship was more manly and more masterly. There were no
little Gothic ornaments or fantastic excrescences to catch and break the
attention: no quaintness, witticism, or conceit. Roubilliac, after being
abroad, said, that ‘what he had seen there made his own work in
Westminster Abbey look like tobacco-pipes.’ You had something of the
same sort of feeling with respect to Mr. Grattan’s artificial and
frittered style, after hearing Mr. Plunkett’s defence of the same side
of the question. He went strait forward to his end with a force equal to
his rapidity. He removed all obstacles, as he advanced. He overturned
Mr. Banks with his right hand, and Mr. Charles Yorke with his left—the
one on a chronological question of the Concordat, and the other as to
the origin of the Corporation and Test Acts. One wonders how they ever
got up again, or trusted themselves on a ground of matter-of-fact ever
after. Mr. Secretary Peele did not offer to put himself in his way. No
part of the subject could come amiss to him—history, law, constitutional
principle, common feeling, local prejudices, general theory,—all was
alike within his reach and his controul. Having settled one point, he
passed on to another, carrying his hearers with him:—it was as if he
knew all that could be said on the question, and was anxious to impart
his knowledge without any desire of shining. There was no affectation,
no effort, but equal ease and earnestness. Every thing was brought to
bear that could answer his purpose, and there was nothing superfluous.
His eloquence swept along like a river,
‘Without o’erflowing, full.’
Every step told: every sentence went to account. I cannot say that there
was any thing very profound or original in argument, imposing in
imagination, or impassioned in sentiment, in any part of this
address—but it was throughout impregnated with as much thought,
imagination and passion as the House would be likely to understand or
sympathise with. It acted like a loadstone to the feelings of the House;
and the speaker raised their enthusiasm, and carried their convictions
as far as he wished, or as it was practicable. The effect was
extraordinary: the impression grew stronger from first to last. No one
stirred the whole time, and, at the end, the lobbies were crowded with
members going up stairs and saying, ‘Well, this is a speech worth going
without one’s dinner to hear,’ (Oh, unequivocal testimony of applause!)
‘there has been nothing like this since the time of Fox,’ etc. For
myself, I never heard any other speech that I would have given three
farthings to have made. It did not make the same figure in the
newspapers the next day; for it was but indifferently reported, owing to
the extreme fluency with which it was delivered. There was no boggling,
no straggling, irrelevant matter;—you could not wait for him at the end
of a long parenthesis, and go on with your report as if nothing had
happened in the interval, as is sometimes the case,[57]—and besides, for
the reason above given, it was a speech better calculated to strike in
the hearing than the perusal; for though it was fully up to the tone of
the House, the public mind can bear stronger meats. Another such speech
would have decided the question, and made the difference of four votes
by which it was lost. While the impression was fresh in the mind, it was
not easy for any one, pretending to honesty, to look his neighbour in
the face and vote against the motion. But Mr. Plunkett, in the mean
time, sailed for Ireland. Any one who can speak as he can, and is a
friend to his own, or any other country, ought not to let the present
men retain their seats six months longer. Nothing but the will is
wanting.—The ability, I will venture to say, is there.
And what shall I say of Lord Castlereagh—that spouter without beginning,
middle, or end—who has not an idea in his head, nor a word to say for
himself—who carries the House of Commons by his manner alone—who bows
and smiles assent and dissent—who makes a dangling proposition of his
person, and is himself a drooping figure of speech—what shall I say of
this inanimate automaton? Nothing! For what can be said of him?
‘Come then, expressive silence, muse his praise.’[58]
Neither have I any thing to say of the style of eloquence of Mr.
Alderman Wood, or Mr. Waithman, or Sir. W. Curtis—except that the latter
always appears to me a very fit and lively representative of the good
living, drinking, and eating of the city. This is but reasonable. The
bodies of the city, not their minds, should be represented. A large
turtle in the House (with a proxy to the minister) would answer the
purpose just as well.
Mr. Wilberforce is a speaker whom it is difficult to class either with
ministers or opposition. His character and his pretensions are
altogether equivocal. He is a man of some ability, and, at one time, had
considerable influence. He is what might be called ‘a sweet speaker’:
his silver voice floats and glides up and down in the air, as if it was
avoiding every occasion of offence, and dodging the question through its
various avenues of reason and interest.
——‘In many a winding bout
Of melting softness long drawn out.’
There is a finical flexibility of purpose, and a cautious curiosity of
research, that would put you in pain for him, if the want of proper
self-respect did not take away all common fellow-feeling. His stratagems
are so over-wrought that you wish them to fail: his evasions are so
slippery and yet so palpable that you laugh in his face. Mr. Wilberforce
is a man that has always two strings to his bow: as an orator, he is a
kind of lay-preacher in parliament. He is at continual _hawk and
buzzard_ between character and conscience, between popularity and court
favour, between his loyalty and his religion, between this world and the
next. Is not this something like trying to serve God and Mammon? He is
anxious to stand fair with the reflecting part of the community, without
giving umbrage to power. He is shocked at vice in low stations:
‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore;
Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.’
He would go with the popular cause as long as it was popular, and gave
him more weight than he lost by it; but would desert it the instant it
became obnoxious, and that an obstinate adherence to it was likely to
deprive him of future opportunities of doing good. He had rather be on
the right side than the wrong, if he loses nothing by it. His reputation
costs him nothing; though he always takes care to save appearances. His
virtues compound for his vices in a very amicable manner. His humanity
is at the horizon, three thousand miles off,—his servility stays at
home, at the beck of the minister. He unbinds the chains of Africa, and
helps (we trust without meaning it) to rivet those of his own country,
and of Europe. As a general truth,—(not meaning any undue application in
the present instance,) it may be affirmed, that there is not a more
insignificant as well as a dangerous character crawling between heaven
and earth, than that of the pretended patriot, and philanthropist, who
has not courage to take the plain reward of vice or virtue—who crouches
to authority, and yet dreads the censure of the world, who gives a
sneaking casting vote on the side of conscience only when he can do it
with impunity,—or else throws the weight of his reputation into the
scale of his interest and the profligacy of others—who makes an
affectation of principle a stalking-horse to his pitiful desire of
distinction, and betrays a cause, sooner than commit himself.
‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ We have another example of
trumpery ambition in the person of Mr. C. Wynne; who, officious,
indefatigable in his petty warfare with the abuses of power, is chiefly
anxious to stand well with those who sanction them. He interprets the
text literally, _not to do evil that good may come_. He is so fearful of
the imputation of the least wrong, that he will never do or let any one
else do the greatest right. _Summum jus summa injuria_, has never
entered his head. He is the dog in the political manger: a technical
marplot. He takes a systematic delight in giving a lift to his enemies,
and in hampering his friends. He is a regular whipper-in on the side of
opposition, to all those who go but a hairs-breadth beyond his
pragmatical notions of discretion and propriety. He sets up for a
balance-master of the constitution and, by insisting on its never
deviating from its erect, perpendicular position, is sure to have it
overturned. He professes to be greatly scandalized at the abuses and
corruptions in our ancient institutions, which are ‘as notorious as the
sun at noon-day,’ and would have them removed—but he is much more
scandalized at those indiscreet persons who bring to light any of these
notorious abuses, in order to have them remedied. He is more angry at
those with whom he differs in the smallest iota than at those who differ
from him _toto cælo_: and is at mortal enmity with every antiministerial
measure that is not so clogged with imbecility and objections as to be
impracticable or absolutely unavailing. He is therefore a bad partisan,
and does little mischief, only because he is little attended to. Indeed,
his voice is against him.
I did not much like Sir Samuel Romilly’s significant, oracular way of
laying down the law in the House:—his self-important assumption of
second-hand truths, and his impatience of contradiction, as if he gave
his time there to humanity for _nothing_. He was too solemn a speaker:
as Garrow was too flippant and fluent. The latter appeared to have
nothing to do but to talk nonsense _by the yard_, for the pleasure of
exposing himself or being exposed by others. He might be said to hold in
his hand a general retainer for absurdity, and to hold his head up in
the pillory of his own folly with a very unabashed and unblushing gaiety
of demeanour. Lawyers, as a general rule, are the very worst speakers in
the House: if there are a few nominal exceptions, it is because they are
not lawyers.
I do not recollect any other speaker of importance but Mr. Canning; and
he requires a chapter by himself. Thus then I would try to estimate
him.—The orator and the writer do not always belong to the same class of
intellectual character; nor is it, I think, in general, fair to judge of
the merit of popular harangues by reducing them to the standard of
literary compositions. Something,—a great deal,—is to be given to the
suddenness of the emergency, the want of preparation, the instantaneous
and effectual, but passing appeal to individual characters, feelings,
and events. The speaker has less time allowed him to enforce his
purpose, and to procure the impression he aims at than the writer; and
he is therefore entitled to produce it by less scrupulous, by more
obvious and fugitive means. He must strike the iron while it is hot. The
blow must be prompt and decisive. He must mould the convictions and
purposes of his hearers while they are under the influence of passion
and circumstances,—as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with
his breath. If he can take the popular mind by surprise, and stamp on
it, while warm, the impression desired, it is not to be demanded whether
the same means would have been equally successful on cool reflection or
after the most mature deliberation. That is not the question at issue.
At a moment’s notice the expert debater is able to start some topic,
some view of a subject, which answers the purpose of the moment. He can
suggest a dextrous evasion of his adversaries’ objections, he knows when
to seize and take advantage of the impulse of popular feeling, he is
master of the dazzling fence of argument, ‘the punto, the stoccado, the
reverso,’ the shifts, and quirks, and palpable topics of debate; he can
wield these at pleasure, and employ them to advantage on the spur of the
occasion—this is all that can be required of him; for it is all that is
necessary, and all that he undertakes to do. That another could bring
forward more weighty reasons, offer more wholesome advice, convey more
sound and extensive information in an indefinite period, is nothing to
the purpose; for all this wisdom and knowledge would be of no avail in
the supposed circumstances; the critical opportunity for action would be
lost, before any use could be made of it. The one thing needful in
public speaking is not to say what is best, but the best that can be
said in a given time, place, and circumstance. The great qualification
therefore of a leader in debate (as of a leader in fight) is presence of
mind: he who has not this, wants every thing, and he who has it, may be
forgiven almost all other deficiencies. The current coin of his
discourses may be light and worthless in itself; but if it is always
kept bright and ready for immediate use, it will pass unquestioned; and
the public voice will affix to his name the praise of a sharp-witted,
able, fluent, and eloquent speaker. We ‘no further seek his merits to
disclose, or scan his frailties in their brief abode,’—the popular ear
and echo of popular applause. What he says may be trite, pert, shallow,
contradictory, false, unfounded, and sophistical; but it was what was
wanted for the occasion, and it told with those who heard it. Let it
stop there, and all is well. The rest is forgotten; nor is it worth
remembering.
But Mr. Canning has an ill habit of printing his speeches: and I doubt
where the same oratorical privileges can be extended to _printed_
speeches; or to this gentleman’s speeches in general, even though they
should not be printed. Whether afterwards committed to the press or not,
they have evidently, I think, been first committed, with great care, to
paper or to memory. They have all the marks, and are chargeable with all
the _malice prepense_ of written compositions. They are not occasional
effusions, but set harangues. They are elaborate _impromptus_; deeply
concerted and highly polished pieces of extempore ingenuity. The
repartee has been conceived many months before the luckless observation
which gives ostensible birth to it; and an argument woven into a debate
is sure to be the counterpart or fag-end of some worn-out sophism of
several years’ standing. Mr. Canning is not so properly an orator as an
author reciting his own compositions. He foresees (without much of the
spirit of prophecy) what will, may, or can be said on some well-conned
subject, and gets up, by anticipation, a tissue of excellent good
conceits, indifferent bad arguments, classical quotations, and showy
similes, which he contrives, by a sort of rhetorical join-hand, to tack
on to some straggling observation dropped by some Honourable Member,—and
so goes on, with folded arms and sonorous voice, neither quickened nor
retarded, neither elevated nor depressed by the _hear him’s_ that now
rise on the one side, or are now echoed from the other;—never diverted
into laughing gaiety, never hurried into incontrolable passion—till he
is regularly delivered in the course of the same number of hours of the
labour of weeks and months. To those who are in the secret of the arts
of debating, who are versed in the complicated tactics of parliamentary
common-place, there is nothing very mysterious in the process, though it
startles the uninitiated. The fluency, the monotony, the unimpressible,
imposing style of his elocution,—‘swinging slow with sullen roar,’ like
the alternate oscillation of a pendulum—afraid of being thrown off his
balance—never trusting himself with the smallest inflection of tone or
manner from the impulse of the moment,—all shew that the speaker relies
on the tenaciousness of his memory, not on the quickness and fertility
of his invention. Mr. Canning, I apprehend, never answered a speech: he
answers, or affects to answer some observation in a speech, and then
manufactures a long _tirade_ out of his own ‘mother-wit and arts
_well-known_ before.’ He _caps_ an oration, as school-boys cap verses;
and gets up his oracular responses, as Sidrophel and Whackum did theirs,
by having met with his customers of old. From that time he has the
debate entirely in his own hands, and exercises over it ‘sole sovereign
sway and masterdom.’ One of these spontaneous mechanical sallies of his
resembles a _voluntary_ played on a barrel-organ: it is a kind of
Pan-harmonic display of wit and wisdom—such as Mr. Canning possesses!
The amplest stores of his mind are unfolded to their inmost source—the
classic lore, the historic page, the philosophic doubt, the sage reply,
the sprightly allusion, the delicate irony, the happy turning of a
period or insinuation of a paragraph with senatorial dignity and Ovidian
grace—are all here concocted, studied, revised, varnished over, till the
sense aches at their glossy beauty and sickens at hopeless perfection.
Our modern orator’s thoughts have been declared by some to have all the
elegance of the antique; I should say, they have only the fragility and
smoothness of plaster-cast copies!
If I were compelled to characterize Mr. Canning’s style by a single
trait, I should say that he is a mere _parodist_ in verse or prose, in
reasoning or in wit. He transposes arguments as he does images, and
makes sophistry of the one, and burlesque of the other. ‘What’s serious,
he turns to farce.’ This is perhaps, not art in him, so much as nature.
The specific levity of his mind causes it to subsist best in the
rarified atmosphere of indifference and scorn: it attaches most interest
and importance to the slight and worthless. There is a striking want of
solidity and keeping in this person’s character. The frivolous, the
equivocal, is his delight—the element in which he speaks, and writes,
and has his being, as an orator and poet. By applying to low and
contemptible objects the language or ideas which have been appropriated
to high and swelling contemplations, he reduces the latter to the same
paltry level, or renders the former doubly ridiculous. On the same
principle, or from not feeling the due force and weight of different
things, as they affect either the imagination or the understanding, he
brings the slenderest and most evanescent analogies to bear out the most
important conclusions; establishes some fact in history by giving it the
form of an idle interrogation, like a school-boy declaiming on he knows
not what; and thinks to overturn the fixed sentiment of a whole people
by an interjection of surprise at what he knows to be unavoidable and
unanswerable. There is none of the gravity of the statesman, of the
enthusiasm of the patriot, the impatient zeal of the partizan, in Mr.
Canning. We distinguish through the disguise of pompous declamation, or
the affectation of personal consequence, only the elegant trifler, the
thoughtless epigrammatist, spreading ‘a windy fan of painted plumes,’ to
catch the breath of popular applause, or to flutter in the tainted
breeze of court-favour. ‘As those same plumes, so seems he vain and
light,’—never applying his hand to useful action, or his mind to sober
truth. A thing’s being evident, is to him a reason for attempting to
falsify it: its being right is a reason for straining every nerve to
evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him
inversion is the order of nature. ‘Trifles light as air, are’ to his
understanding, ‘confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:’ and he
winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous
truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely
fanciful and fictitious texture—a kind of moral, religious, political,
and sentimental _filligre-work_: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts,
and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his
gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it
might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and
unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to
magnify and extol.[59] It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure,
‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ which he does with the
pertness of a school-boy and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes
indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong
by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by
the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,—‘takes the
rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister
there.’
The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy
of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in
the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of
peerage in the awful attention of his auditors, which is granted while
there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear
Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in
different words—to listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers
his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the
commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the
Senate—Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind
than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of
the _vis inertiæ_ of office into his official harangues, than he does.
Lord Ellenborough was great ‘in the extremity of an oath.’ Lord Eldon,
‘his face ’twixt tears and smiles contending,’ never loses his place or
his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a
popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish
he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to
Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the
instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country
where they are born,—which he considered as an innate and unerring
principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of
patriotism, argued by way of illustration, that if it were not for this
original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were,
_rooting_ every one to the spot where he was bred and born,—civil
society should never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from
the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first
instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to
places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never
stayed at all, is an oversight of the speaker which remains unexplained.
On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect,
observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old
playground near his father’s mansion, where he used to play at ball when
a child, his sensations would be of a most affecting description. This
is possible; but his Lordship returned homewards the next day, thinking,
no doubt, he had anticipated all the sentiment of the situation. This
puts one in mind of the story one has heard of Tom Sheridan, who told
his father he had been down to the bottom of a coal-pit. ‘Then, you are
a fool, Tom,’ said the father. ‘Why so, Sir?’ ‘Because,’ said the other,
‘it would have answered all the same purpose _to have said you had been
down_!’
HAYDON’S ‘CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN’
_The London Magazine._] [_May, 1821._
We have prefixed to the present number an engraved outline of this
picture (which we hope will be thought satisfactory), and we subjoin the
following description of it in the words of the artist’s catalogue.
‘_Christ’s Agony in the Garden._—The manner of treating this subject in
the present picture has not been taken from the account of any one
Apostle [Evangelist] in particular, but from the united relations of the
whole four.
‘The moment selected for the expression of our Saviour is the moment
when he acquiesces to (in) the necessity of his approaching sacrifice,
after the previous struggle of apprehension.
“_Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done._”
‘It is wished to give an air of submissive tenderness, while a quiver of
agony still trembles on his features. The Apostles are resting a little
behind, on a sort of garden-bank; St. John in an unsound doze—St. James
in a deep sleep—St. Peter has fallen into a disturbed slumber against a
tree, while keeping guard with his sword, and is on the point of waking
at the approach of light. Behind St. Peter, and stealing round the edge
of the bank, comes the mean traitor, Judas, with a centurion, soldiers,
and a crowd; the centurion has stepped forward from his soldiers (who
are marching up) to look with his torch, where Christ is retired and
praying; while Judas, alarmed lest he might be surprised too suddenly,
presses back his hand to enforce caution and silence, and crouching down
his malignant and imbecile face beneath his shoulders, he crawls forward
like a reptile to his prey, his features shining with the anticipated
rapture of successful treachery.
‘It is an inherent feeling in human beings, to rejoice at the instant of
a successful exercise of their own power, however despicably directed.
‘The Apostles are supposed to be lit by the glory which emanates from
Christ’s head, and the crowd by the torches and lights about them.’
The printed catalogue contains also elaborate and able descriptions of
Macbeth, the murder of Dentatus, and the judgment of Solomon, which have
been already before the public.
We do not think _Christ’s Agony in the Garden_ the best picture in this
collection, nor the most striking effort of Mr. Haydon’s pencil. On the
contrary, we must take leave to say, that we consider it as a
comparative failure, both in execution and probable effect. We doubt
whether, in point of policy, the celebrated artist would not have
consulted his reputation and his ultimate interest more, by waiting till
he had produced another work on the same grand and magnificent scale as
his last, instead of trusting to the ebb of popularity, resulting from
the exhibition of Christ’s Entrance into Jerusalem, to float him through
the present season. It is well, it may be argued, to keep much before
the public, since they are apt to forget their greatest favourites: but
they are also fastidious; and it is safest not to appear always before
them in the same, or a less imposing, attitude. It is better to rise
upon them at every step, if possible (and there is yet room for
improvement in our artist’s productions), to take them by surprise, and
compel admiration by new and extraordinary exertions—than to trust to
their generosity or gratitude, to the lingering remains of their
affection for old works, or their candid construction of some less
arduous undertaking. A liberal and friendly critic has, indeed, declared
on this occasion, that if the spirits of great men and lofty geniuses
take delight in the other world, in contemplating what delighted them in
this, then the shades of Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Correggio, can
find no better employment than to descend again upon the earth, once
more teeming with the birth of high art, and stand with hands crossed,
and eyes uplifted in mute wonder, before Mr. Haydon’s picture of
Christ’s Agony in the Garden. If we believed that the public in general
sympathised seriously in this sentiment, we would not let a murmur
escape us to disturb it;—the opinion of the world, however erroneous, is
not easily altered; and if they are happy in their ignorance, let them
remain so;—but if the artist himself, to whom this august compliment has
been paid, should find the hollowness of such hyperbolical commendation,
a hint to him, as to its cause in the present instance, may not be
thrown away. The public may, and must, be managed to a certain point;
that is, a little noise, and bustle, and officious enthusiasm, is
necessary to catch their notice and fix their attention; but then they
should be left to see for themselves; and after that, an artist should
fling himself boldly and fairly into the huge stream of popularity (as
Lord Byron swam across the Hellespont), stemming the tide with manly
heart and hands, instead of buoying himself up with borrowed bloated
bladders, and flimsy newspaper paragraphs. When a man feels his own
strength, and the public confidence, he has nothing to do but to use the
one, and not abuse the other. As his suspicions of the lukewarmness or
backwardness of the public taste are removed, his jealousy of himself
should increase. The town and the country have shown themselves willing,
eager patrons of Mr. Haydon’s AT HOME:—he ought to feel particular
obligations not to invite them by sound of trumpet and beat of drum to
an inferior entertainment; but, like our advertising friend, Matthews,
compass ‘sea, earth, and air,’ to keep up the eclat of his first and
overwhelming _accueil_! So much for advice; now to criticism.
We have said, that we regard the present performance as a comparative
failure; and our reasons are briefly and plainly these following:—First,
this picture is inferior in size to those that Mr. Haydon has of late
years painted, and is so far a falling off. It does not fill a given
_stipulated_ space in the world’s eye. It does not occupy one side of a
great room. It is the Iliad in a nutshell. It is only twelve feet by
nine, instead of nineteen by sixteen; and that circumstance tells
against it with the unenlightened many, and with the judicious few. One
great merit of Mr. Haydon’s pictures is their size. Reduce him within
narrow limits, and you cut off half his resources. His genius is
gigantic. He is of the race of Brobdingnag, and not of Lilliput. He can
manage a groupe better than a single figure: he can manage ten groupes
better than one. He bestrides his art like a Colossus. The more you give
him to do, the better he does it. Ardour, energy, boundless ambition,
are the categories of his mind, the springs of his enterprises. He only
asks ‘ample room and verge enough.’ Vastness does not confound him,
difficulty rouses him, impossibility is the element in which he glories.
He does not concentrate his powers in a single point, but expands them
to the utmost circumference of his subject, with increasing impetus and
rapidity. He must move great masses, he must combine extreme points, he
must have striking contrasts and situations, he must have all sorts of
characters and expressions; these he hurries over, and dashes in with a
decided, undistracted hand;—set him to finish any one of these to an
exact perfection, to make ‘a hand, an ear, an eye,’ that, in the words
of an old poet, shall be ‘worth an history,’ and his power is gone. His
_forte_ is in motion, not in rest; in complication and sudden effects,
not in simplicity, subtlety, and endless refinement. As it was said in
the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Haydon’s compositions are masterly
sketches;—they are not, as it was said in Blackwood’s Magazine, finished
miniature pictures. We ourselves thought the Christ in the triumphant
Entry into Jerusalem, the least successful part of that much admired
picture: but there it was lost, or borne along in a crowd of bold and
busy figures, in varied or violent actions. Here it is, not only the
principal, but a solitary, and almost the only important figure: it is
thrown in one corner of the picture like a lay-figure in a painter’s
room; the attitude is much like still-life: and the expression is (in
our deliberate judgment) listless, feeble, laboured, neither expressing
the agony of grief, nor the triumph of faith and resignation over it. It
may be, we are wrong: but if so, we cannot help it. It is evident,
however, that this head is painted on a different principle from that of
the Christ last year. It is wrought with care, and even with precision,
in the more detailed outlines: but it is timid, without relief, and
without effect. The colour of the whole figure is, as if it had been
smeared over, and neutralized, with some chalky tint. It does not stand
out from the canvas, either in the general masses, or in the nicer
inflections of the muscles and surface of the skin. It has a veil over
it, not a glory round it. We ought, in justice, to add, that a black and
white copy (we understand by a young lady) of the head of Christ has a
more decided and finer apparent character. To what can this anomaly be
owing? Is it that Mr. Haydon’s conception and drawing of character is
good, but that his mastery in this respect leaves him, when he resigns
the port-crayon; and that, instead of giving additional force and beauty
to the variations of form and expression, by the aid of colour and real
light and shade, he only _smudges_ them over with the pencil, and leaves
the indications of truth and feeling more imperfect than he found them?
We believe that Mr. Haydon generally copies from nature only with his
port-crayon; and paints from conjecture or fancy. If so, it would
account for what we have here considered as a difficulty. We have reason
to believe that the old painters copied form, colour,—every thing, to
the last syllable,—from nature. Indeed, we have seen two of the heads in
the celebrated Madonna of the Garland, the Mother, and the fine head of
Joseph, as original, finished studies of heads (the very same as they
are in the large composition) in the collection at Burleigh-house. By
the contrary practice, Mr. Haydon, as it appears to us, has habituated
his hand and eye to giving only the contour of the features or the
grosser masses:—when he comes to the details of those masses, he fails.
Some one, we suspect from the style of this picture, has been advising
our adventurous and spirited artist to try to finish, and he has been
taking the advice: we would advise him to turn back, and consult the
natural bent of his own genius. A man may avoid great faults or
absurdities by the suggestion of friends: he can only attain positive
excellence, or overcome great difficulties, by the unbiassed force of
his own mind.
The crowd coming, with Judas at their head, to surprise our Saviour, is
not to our taste. We dislike mobs in a picture. There is, however, a
good deal of bustle and movement in the advancing group, and it
contrasts almost too abruptly with the unimpassioned stillness and
retirement of the figure of Christ. Judas makes a bad figure both in Mr.
Haydon’s catalogue, and on his canvas. We think the original must have
been a more profound and plausible-looking character than he is here
represented. He should not grin and show his teeth. He was by all
accounts, a grave, plodding, calculating personage, usurious, and with a
cast of melancholy, and soon after went and hanged himself. Had Mr.
Haydon been in Scotland when he made this sketch? Judas was not a
laughing, careless wag; he was one of the ‘Melancholy Andrews.’—The best
part of this picture is decidedly (in our opinion) the middle ground,
containing the figures of the three Apostles. There is a dignity, a
grace, a shadowy repose about them which approaches close indeed upon
the great style in painting. We have only to regret that a person, who
does so well at times, does not do well always. We are inclined to
attribute such inequalities, and an appearance of haste and
unconcoctedness in some of Mr. Haydon’s plans, to distraction and hurry
of mind, arising from a struggle with the difficulties both of art and
of fortune; and as the last of these is now removed, we trust this
circumstance will leave him at leisure to prosecute the grand design he
has begun (the Raising of Lazarus) with a mind free and unembarrassed;
and enable him to conclude it in a manner worthy of his own reputation,
and that of his country!
POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES[60]
_The London Magazine._] [_June 1821._
This is a very proper letter for a lord to write to his bookseller, and
for Mr. Murray to show about among his friends, as it contains some dry
rubs at Mr. Bowles, and some good hits at Mr. Southey and his
‘invariable principles.’ There is some good _hating_, and some good
writing in it, some coarse jests, and some dogmatical assertions; but
that it is by any means a _settler_ of the question, is what we are in
all due form inclined to doubt. His Lordship, as a poet, is a little
headstrong and self-willed, a spoiled child of nature and fortune: his
philosophy and criticism have a tincture of the same spirit: he doles
out his opinions with a great deal of frankness and spleen, saying,
‘this I like, that I loathe;’ but he does not trouble himself, or the
reader, with his reasons, any more than he accounts to his servants for
the directions he gives them. This might seem too great a compliment in
his Lordship to the public.
All this _pribble prabble_ about Pope, and Milton, and Shakspeare, and
what foreigners say of us, and the Venus, and Antinous, and the
Acropolis, and the Grand Canal at Venice, and the Turkish fleet, and
Falconer’s Shipwreck, and ethics, and ethical poetry (with the single
exception of some bold picturesque sketches in the poet’s best
prose-style) is what might be talked by any Bond-street lounger of them
all, after a last night’s debauch, in the intervals between the
splashings of the soda-water and the acid taste of the port wine rising
in the mouth. It is no better than that. If his Lordship had sent it in
from Long’s, or the Albany, to be handed about in Albemarle-street, in
slips as he wrote it, it would have been very well. But all the way from
Ravenna, cannot he contrive to send us something better than his own
ill-humour and our own common-places—than the discovery that Pope was a
poet, and that Cowper was none; and the old story that Canova, in
forming a statue, takes a hand from one, a foot from another, and a nose
from a third, and so makes out the idea of perfect beauty! (We would
advise his Lordship to say less about this subject of _virtù_, for he
knows little about it: and besides, his perceptions are at variance with
his theories.) In truth, his Lordship has the worst of this controversy,
though he throws out a number of pert, smart, flashy things, with the
air of a man who sees company on subjects of taste, while his reverend
antagonist, who is the better critic and logician of the two, goes
prosing on in a tone of obsequious pertinacity and sore pleasantry, as
if he were sitting (an unwelcome guest) at his Lordship’s table, and
were awed, yet galled, by the cavalier assumption of patrician manners.
We cannot understand these startling _voluntaries_, played off before
the public on the ground of personal rank, nor the controversial
under-song, like the drone of a bagpipe that forms a tedious
accompaniment to them. As Jem Belcher, when asked if he did not feel a
little awkward at facing Gamble the tall Irishman, made answer, ‘An
please ye, sir, when I am stript to my shirt, I am afraid of no man;’—so
we would advise Mr. Bowles, in a question of naked argument, to fear no
man, and to let no man bite his thumb at him. If his Lordship were to
invite his brother-poet to his house, and to eke out a sour jest by the
flavour of Monte-Pulciano or Frontiniac,—if in the dearth of argument he
were to ply his friend’s weak side with rich sauces and well seasoned
hospitality, ‘_Ah! ça est bon, ah! goutez ça!_‘—if he were to point, in
illustration of Pope’s style, to the marble pillars, the virandas, the
pier glasses, the classic busts, the flowering dessert, and were to
exclaim, ‘You see, my dear Bowles, the superiority of art over nature,
the triumph of polished life over Gothic barbarism: we have here neither
the ghosts nor fairies of Shakspeare, nor Milton’s Heaven, nor _his_
Hell, yet we contrive to do without them;’—it might require Parson
Supple’s command of countenance to smile off this uncourteous address;
but the divine would not have to digest such awkward raillery on an
empty stomach—he would have his _quid pro quo_: his Lordship would have
paid for the liberty of using his privilege of peerage. But why any man
should carry the _rôle_ of his Lordship’s chaplain out of his Lordship’s
house, is what we see no reason for.—Lord Byron, in the Preface to his
Tragedy, complains that Horace Walpole has had hard measure dealt him by
the critics, ‘firstly, because he was a lord, and secondly, because he
was a gentleman.’ We do not know how the case may stand between the
public and a dead nobleman: but a living lord has every reasonable
allowance made him, and can do what no one else can. If Lord Byron
chooses to make a bad joke, by means of an ill-spelt pun, it is a
condescension in his Lordship:—if he puts off a set of smart assertions
and school-boy instances for pithy proofs, it is not because he is not
able, but because he cannot be at the pains of going deeper into the
question:—if he is rude to an antagonist, it is construed into agreeable
familiarity; any notice from so great a man appears like a favour:—if he
tells or recommends ‘a tale of bawdry,’ he is not to be tied down by the
petty rules which restrict common men:—if he publishes a work, which is
thought of too equivocal a description for the delicate air of
Albemarle-street, his Lordship’s own name in the title-page is
sufficient to back it without the formality of a bookseller’s; if a
wire-drawn tragedy of his is acted, in spite of his protestations
against such an appeal to the taste of a vulgar audience, the storm of
pitiless damnation is not let loose upon it, because it is felt that it
would fall harmless on so high and proud a head; the gilded coronet
serves as a conductor to carry off the lightning of popular criticism,
which might blast the merely laurelled bard; the blame, the
disappointment, the flat effect, is thrown upon the manager, upon the
actors—upon any body but the Noble Poet! This sounding title swells the
mouth of Fame, and lends her voice a thousand circling echoes: the rank
of the Author, and the public charity extended to him, as he does not
want it, cover a multitude of sins. What does his Lordship mean, then by
this whining over the neglect of Horace Walpole,—this uncalled-for
sympathy with the faded lustre of patrician and gentlemanly pretensions?
Has _he_ had only half his fame! Or, does he already feel, with morbid
anticipation, the retiring ebb of that overwhelming tide of popularity,
which having been raised too high by adventitious circumstances, is lost
in flats and shallows, as soon as their influence is withdrawn? Lord
Byron has been twice as much talked of as he would have been, had he not
been Lord Byron. His rank and genius have been happily placed ‘each
other’s beams to share,’ and both together, by their mutually reflected
splendour, may be said to have melted the public coldness into the very
wantonness of praise: the faults of the man (real or supposed) have only
given a dramatic interest to his works. Whence, then, this repining,
this ungracious cavilling, this _got up_ ill-humour? We load his
Lordship with ecstatic admiration, with unqualified ostentatious
eulogies; and he throws them stifling back in our face: he thanks us
with cool, cutting contempt: he asks us for our voices, ‘our sweet
voices,’ like Coriolanus; and, like Coriolanus, disdains us for the
unwholesome gift. Why, then does he ask for it? If, as a lord, he holds
in contempt and abhorrence the willing, delighted homage, which the
public pay to the poet, let him retire and feed the pride of birth in
stately solitude, or take his place among his equals: but if he does not
find this enough, and wants our wondering tribute of applause to satisfy
his craving vanity, and make him something more than a mere vulgar lord
among hundreds of other lords, why dash the cup of delicious poison,
which, at his uneasy request, we tender him, to the ground, with
indignant reckless hands, and tell us he scorns equally our censure or
our praise? If he looks upon both as equal impertinence, he can easily
escape out of the reach of both by ceasing to write; we shall in that
case soon cease to think of his Lordship: but if he cannot do without
our good opinion, why affect all this coyness, coldness, and contempt?
If he says he writes not to please us, but to live by us, that only
alters the nature of the obligation, and he might still be civil to Mr.
Murray’s customers. Whether he is independent of public opinion, or
dependent on it, he need not be always sending his readers to Coventry.
When we come to offer him our demonstrations of good will, he should not
kick us down stairs. If he persists in this humour, the distaste may in
time ‘become mutual.’
Before we proceed, there is one thing in which we must say we heartily
agree with Lord Byron; and that is the ridicule with which he treats Mr.
Bowles’s editorial inquisition into the moral character of Pope. It is a
pure piece of clerical priggism. If Pope was not free from vice, we
should like to know who is. He was one of the most faultless of poets,
both in his life and in his writings. We should not care to throw the
first stone at him. We do not wonder at Lord Byron’s laughing outright
at Mr. Bowles’s hysterical horrors at poor Pope’s platonic peccadillos,
nor at his being a little impatient of the other’s attempt to make
himself a _make-believe_ character of perfection out of the ‘most small
faults’ he could rake up against the reputation of an author, whom he
was bound either not to edite or not to injure. But we think his
Lordship turns the tables upon the divine, and gets up into the reading
desk himself, without the proper canonical credentials, when he makes
such a fuss as he does about didactic or moral poetry as the highest of
all others, because moral truth and moral conduct are of such vast and
paramount concernment in human life. But because they are such good
things in themselves, does it follow that they are the better for being
put into rhyme? We see no connection between ‘ends of verse, and sayings
of philosophers.’ This reasoning reminds us of the critic who said, that
the only poetry he knew of, good for any thing, was the four lines,
beginning ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,’ for
that these were really of some use in finding out the number of days in
the different months of the year. The rules of arithmetic are important
in many respects, but we do not know that they are the fittest subjects
of poetry. Besides, Pope was not the only moral poet, nor are we sure
that we understand his moral system, or that Lord Byron understands it,
or that he understood it himself. Addison paraphrased the Psalms, and
Blackmore sung the Creation: yet Pope has written a lampoon upon the
one, and put the other in his Dunciad. Mr. Bowles has numbers of
manuscript sermons by him, the morality of which, we will venture to
say, is quite as pure, as orthodox, as that of the unpublished cantos of
Don Juan; yet we doubt whether Mr. Murray, the Mecænas of poetry and
orthodoxy, would give as much for the one as for the other. We do not
look for the flowers of fancy in moral treatises, nor for a homily in
his Lordship’s irregular stanzas. The Decalogue, as a practical prose
composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient
weight and authority; but we should not regard the putting this into
heroic verse, as an effort of the highest poetry. That ‘Sternhold and
Hopkins had great qualms’ is no imputation on the pious raptures of the
Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the
allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other
respects to his Lordship’s taste, which is more than we can pretend to
determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject and
transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and
sophistically.
‘The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the
dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by
the ingenuous boast,
“That not in Fancy’s maze he wander’d long,
But _stoop’d_ to Truth, and moraliz’d his song.”
‘He should have written “rose to truth.” In my mind the highest of all
poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be
moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is
something beyond human hands except Milton’s and Dante’s, and even
Dante’s powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though
in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men?
His moral truth—his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God
hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have
made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an
adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that
ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it,
whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the _very first
order_ of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the
priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the
“forests” that ever were “walked” for their “description,” and all the
epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are
indisputably, and, I believe, _undisputedly_, even a finer poem than the
Æneid. Virgil knew this: he did not order _them_ to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”
‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call
“imagination” and “invention,”—the two commonest of qualities: an Irish
peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and invent more
than would furnish forth a modern poem. If Lucretius had not been
spoiled by the Epicurean system, we should have had a far superior poem
to any now in existence. As mere poetry, it is the first of Latin poems.
What then has ruined it? His ethics. Pope has not this defect: his moral
is as pure as his poetry is glorious.’ P. 42.
Really this is very inconsequential, incongruous reasoning. An Irish
peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, would not fall upon more
blunders, contradictions, and defective conclusions. Lord Byron talks of
the ethical systems of Socrates and Jesus Christ. What made the former
the great man he supposes?—The invention of his system—the discovery of
sublime moral truths. Does Lord Byron mean to say, that the mere
repetition of the same precepts in prose, or the turning them into
verse, will make others as great, or will make a great man at all? The
two things compared are wholly disparates. The finding out the 48th
proposition in Euclid made Pythagoras a great man. Shall we say that the
putting this into a grave, didactic distich would make either a great
mathematician or a great poet? It would do neither one nor the other;
though, according to Lord Byron, this distich would belong to the
highest class of poetry, ‘because it would do that in verse, which one
of the greatest of men had wished to accomplish in prose.’ Such is the
way in which his Lordship transposes the common sense of the
question,—because it is his humour! The value of any moral truth depends
on the philosophic invention implied in it. But this rests with the
first author, and the general idea, which forms the basis of didactic
poetry, remains the same, through all its mechanical transmissions
afterwards. The merit of the ethical poet must therefore consist in his
manner of adorning and illustrating a number of these general truths
which are not his own, that is, in the poetical invention and
imagination he brings to the subject, as Mr. Bowles has well shown, with
respect to the episodes in the Essay on Man, the description of the poor
Indian and the lamb doomed to death, which are all the unsophisticated
reader ever remembers of that much-talked-of production. Lord Byron
clownishly chooses to consider all poetry but what relates to this
ethical or didactic truth as ‘a lie.’ Is Lear a lie? Or does his
Lordship prefer the story, or the moral, in Æsop’s Fables? He asks ‘why
must the _poet_ mean the _liar_, the _feigner_, the _tale-teller_? A man
may make and create better things than these.’—He may make and create
better things than a common-place, and he who does not, makes and
creates nothing. The ethical or didactic poet necessarily repeats after
others, because general truths and maxims are limited. The individual
instances and illustrations, which his Lordship qualifies as ‘lies,’
‘feigning,’ and ‘tale-telling,’ are infinite, and give endless scope to
the genius of the true poet. The rank of poetry is to be judged of by
the truth and purity of the moral—so we find it ‘in the bond,’—and yet
Cowper, we are told, was no poet. Is there any keeping in this, or is it
merely an air? Again, we are given to understand that didactic poetry
‘requires more mind, more power than all the descriptive or epic poetry
that ever was written:’ and as a proof of this, his Lordship lays it
down, that the Georgics are a finer poem than the Æneid. We do not
perceive the inference here. ‘Virgil knew this: he did not order _them_
to be burnt.
“The proper study of mankind is man.”’
Does our author mean that this was Virgil’s reason for liking his
pastoral poetry better than his description of Dido and Æneas? But
farther, there is a Latin poem (that of Lucretius) superior even to the
Georgics; nay, it would have been so to any poem now in existence, but
for one unlucky circumstance. And what is that? ‘Its ethics!’ So that
ethics have spoiled the finest poem in the world. This is the rub that
makes didactic poetry come in such a questionable shape. If original,
like Lucretius, there will be a difference of opinion about it. If trite
and acknowledged, like Pope, however pure, there will be little valuable
in it. It is the glory and the privilege of poetry to be conversant
about those truths of nature and the heart that are at once original and
self-evident. His Lordship ought to _have known this_. In the same
passage, he speaks of imagination and invention as ‘the two commonest of
qualities.’ We will tell his Lordship what is commoner, the want of
them. ‘An Irish peasant,’ he adds, ‘with a little whiskey in his head,
will imagine and invent more than’—(What? Homer, Spenser, and Ariosto?
No: but than)—‘would furnish forth a modern poem.’ That we will not
dispute. But at any rate, when sober next morning, he would be as ‘full
of wise saws and modern instances’ as his Lordship; and in either case,
equally positive, tetchy, and absurd!
His Lordship, throughout his pamphlet, makes a point of contradicting
Mr. Bowles, and, it would seem, of contradicting himself. He cannot be
said to have any opinions of his own, but whatever any one else
advances, he denies out of mere spleen and rashness. ‘He hates the word
_invariable_,’ and not without reason. ‘What is there of human, be it
poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter,
life, or death, which is invariable?’ There is one of the particulars in
this enumeration, which seems pretty invariable, which is death. One
would think that the principles of poetry are so too, notwithstanding
his peevish disclaimer: for towards the conclusion of this letter he
sets up Pope as a classic model, and considers all modern deviations
from it as grotesque and barbarous.
‘They have raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest
architecture; and, more barbarous than the barbarians from whose
practice I have borrowed the figure, they are not contented with their
own grotesque edifice, unless they destroy _the prior and purely
beautiful fabric which preceded_,[61] and which shames them and theirs
for ever and ever.’
Lord Byron has here substituted his own invariable principles for Mr.
Bowles’s, which he hates as bad as Mr. Southey’s variable politics. Will
nothing please his Lordship—neither dull fixtures nor shining
weather-cocks?—We might multiply instances of a want of continuous
reasoning, if we were fond of this sort of petty cavilling. Yet we do
not know that there is any better quarry in the book. Why does his
Lordship tell us that ‘ethical poetry is the highest of all poetry,’ and
yet that ‘Petrarch the sonnetteer’ is esteemed by good judges the very
highest poet of Italy? Mr. Bowles is a sonnetteer, and a very good one.
Why does he assert that ‘the poet who executes the best is the highest,
whatever his department,’ and then affirm in the next page that didactic
poetry ‘requires more mind, more wisdom, more power than all the forests
that ever were walked for their description;’ and then again, two pages
after, that ‘a good poet can make a silk purse of a sow’s ear;’ that is,
as he interprets it, ‘can imbue a pack of cards with more poetry than
inhabits the forests of America?’ That’s a _Non Sequitur_, as Partridge
has it. Why, contending that all subjects are alike indifferent to the
genuine poet, does he turn round upon himself, and assume that ‘the sun
shining upon a warming-pan cannot be made sublime or poetical?’ Why does
he say that ‘there is nothing in nature like the bust of the Antinous,
except the Venus,’ which is not in nature?[62] Why does he call the
first ‘that wonderful _creation_ of perfect beauty,’ when it is a mere
portrait, and on that account so superior to his favourite coxcomb, the
Apollo? Why does he state that ‘more poetry cannot be gathered into
existence’ than we here see, and yet that this poetry arises neither
from nature nor moral exaltedness; Mr. Bowles and he being at issue on
this very point, viz. the one affirming that the essence of poetry is
derived from nature, and his Lordship, that it consists in moral truth?
Why does he consider a shipwreck as an artificial incident? Why does he
make the excellence of Falconer’s Shipwreck consist in its
technicalities, and not in its faithful description of common feelings
and inevitable calamity? Why does he say all this, and much more, which
he should not? Why does he write prose at all? Yet, in spite of all this
trash, there is one passage for which we forgive him, and here it is.
‘The truth is, that in these days the grand _primum mobile_ of England
is _cant_: cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral;
but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the
fashion, and while it lasts, will be too powerful for those who can only
exist by taking the tone of the times. I say _cant_, because it is a
thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the
English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided
among themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the
prevalence of this verbal decorum.’ These words should be written in
letters of gold, as the testimony of a lofty poet to a great moral
truth, and we can hardly have a quarrel with the writer of them.
There are three questions which form the subject of the present
pamphlet; viz. What is poetical? What is natural? What is artificial?
And we get an answer to none of them. The controversy, as it is carried
on between the chief combatants, is much like a dispute between two
artists, one of whom should maintain that blue is the only colour fit to
paint with, and the other that yellow alone ought ever to be used. Much
might be said on both sides, but little to the purpose. Mr. Campbell
leads off the dance, and launches a ship as a beautiful and poetical
artificial object. But he so loads it with patriotic, natural, and
foreign associations, and the sails are ‘so perfumed that the winds are
love-sick,’ that Mr. Bowles darts upon and seizes it as contraband to
art, swearing that it is no longer the work of the shipwright, but of
Mr. Campbell’s lofty poetic imagination; and dedicates its stolen beauty
to the right owners, the sun, the winds, and the waves. Mr. Campbell, in
his eagerness to make all sure, having overstepped the literal mark,
presses no farther into the controversy; but Lord Byron, who is ‘like an
Irishman in a row, _any body’s customer_,’ carries it on with good
polemical hardihood, and runs a very edifying parallel between the ship
without the sun, the winds, and waves,—and the sun, the winds, and waves
without the ship. ‘The sun,’ says Mr. Bowles, ‘is poetical, by your
Lordship’s admission.’ We think it would have been so without it. But
his Lordship contends that ‘the sun would no longer be poetical, if it
did not shine on ships, or pyramids, or fortresses, and other works of
art,’ (he expressly excludes ‘footmen’s liveries’ and ‘brass
warming-pans’ from among those artificial objects that reflect new
splendour on the eye of Heaven)—to which Mr. Bowles replies, that let
the sun but shine, and ‘it is poetical _per se_,’ in which we think him
right. His Lordship decompounds the wind into a _caput mortuum_ of
poetry, by making it howl through a pig-stye, instead of
‘Roaming the illimitable ocean wide;’
and turns a water-fall, or a clear spring, into a slop-basin, to prove
that nature owes its elegance to art. His Lordship is ‘ill at these
numbers.’ Again, he affirms that the ruined temple of the Parthenon is
poetical, and the coast of Attica with Cape Colonna, and the
recollection of Falconer’s Shipwreck, classical. Who ever doubted it?
What then? Does this prove that the Rape of the Lock is not a
mock-heroic poem? He assures us that a storm with cockboats scudding
before it is interesting, particularly if this happens to take place in
the Hellespont, over which the noble critic swam; and makes it a
question, whether the dark cypress groves, or the white towers and
minarets of Constantinople are more impressive to the imagination? What
has this to do with Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, or the boat in which he
paddled across the Thames to Kew? Lord Byron tells us (and he should
know) that the Grand Canal at Venice is a muddy ditch, without the
stately palaces by its side; but then it is a natural, not an artificial
canal; and finally, he asks, what would the desert of Tadmor be without
the ruins of Palmyra, or Salisbury Plain without Stone-Henge? Mr. Bowles
who, though tedious and teasing, has ‘damnable iteration in him,’ and
has read the Fathers, answers very properly, by saying that a desert
alone ‘conveys ideas of immeasurable distance, of profound silence, of
solitude;’ and that Salisbury Plain has the advantage of Hounslow Heath,
chiefly in getting rid of the ideas of artificial life, ‘carts,
caravans, raree-show-men, butchers’ boys, coaches with coronets, and
livery servants behind them,’ even though Stone-Henge did not lift its
pale head above its barren bosom. Indeed, Lord Byron’s notions of art
and poetry are sufficiently wild, romantic, far-fetched, obsolete: his
taste is Oriental, Gothic; his Muse is not domesticated; there is
nothing _mimminee-pimminee_, modern, polished, light, fluttering, in his
standard of the sublime and beautiful: if his thoughts are proud,
pampered, gorgeous, and disdain to mingle with the objects of humble,
unadorned nature, his lordly eye at least ‘keeps distance due’ from the
vulgar vanities of fashionable life; from drawing-rooms, from
card-parties, and from courts. He is not a carpet poet. He does not sing
the sofa, like poor Cowper. He is qualified neither for poet-laureate
nor court-newsman. He is at issue with the Morning Post and Fashionable
World, on what constitutes the true pathos and sublime of human life. He
hardly thinks Lady Charlemont so good as the Venus, or as an Albanian
girl, that he saw mending the road in the mountains. If he does not like
flowers and forests, he cares as little for stars, garters, and prince’s
feathers, for diamond necklaces and paste buckles. If his Lordship
cannot make up his mind to the quiet, the innocence, the simple,
unalterable grandeur of nature, we are sure that he hates the frippery,
the foppery, and pert grimace of art, quite as much. His Lordship likes
the poetry, the imaginative part of art, and so do we; and so we believe
did the late Mr. John Scott. He likes the _sombre_ part of it, the
thoughtful, the decayed, the ideal, the spectral shadow of human
greatness, the departed spirit of human power. He sympathizes not with
art as a display of ingenuity, as the triumph of vanity or luxury, as it
is connected with the idiot, superficial, petty self-complacency of the
individual and the moment, (these are to him not ‘luscious as locusts,
but bitter as coloquintida’); but he sympathizes with the triumphs of
Time and Fate over the proudest works of man—with the crumbling
monuments of human glory—with the dim vestiges of countless generations
of men—with that which claims alliance with the grave, or kindred with
the elements of nature. This is what he calls art and artificial poetry.
But this is not what any body else understands by the terms, commonly or
critically speaking. There is as little connexion between the two things
as between the grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts, who appeared at court the
other day, and Lady Godiva—as there is between a reigning toast and an
Egyptian mummy. Lord Byron, through the whole of the argument, pelts his
reverend opponent with instances, like throwing a stone at a dog, which
the incensed animal runs after, picks up, mumbles between his teeth, and
tries to see what it is made of. The question is, however, too tough for
Mr. Bowles’s powers of mastication, and though the fray is amusing,
nothing comes of it. Between the Editor of Pope, and the Editor of the
New Monthly Magazine, his Lordship sits
‘——high arbiter,
And by decision more embroils the fray.’
What is the use of taking a work of art, from which ‘all the art of art
is flown’ a mouldering statue, or a fallen column in Tadmor’s marble
waste, that staggers and over-awes the mind, and gives birth to a
thousand dim reflections, by seeing the power and pride of man
prostrate, and laid low in the dust; what is there in this to prove the
self-sufficiency of the upstart pride and power of man? A Ruin is
poetical. Because it is a work of art, says Lord Byron. No, but because
it is a work of art o’erthrown. In it we see, as in a mirror, the life,
the hopes, the labour of man defeated, and crumbling away under the slow
hand of time; and all that he has done reduced to nothing, or to a
useless mockery. Or as one of the bread-and-butter poets has described
the same thing a little differently, in his tale of Peter Bell the
potter,—
‘——The stones and tower
Seem’d fading fast away
From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.’
If this is what Lord Byron means by artificial objects and interests,
there is an end of the question, for he will get no critic, no school to
differ with him. But a fairer instance would be a snug citizen’s box by
the road side, newly painted, plastered and furnished, with every thing
in the newest fashion and gloss, not an article the worse for wear, and
a lease of one-and-twenty years to run, and then let us see what Lord
Byron, or his friend and ‘host of human life’ will make of it, compared
with the desolation, and the waste of all these comforts, arts, and
elegances. Or let him take—not the pyramids of Egypt, but the pavilion
at Brighton, and make a poetical description of it in prose or verse. We
defy him. The poetical interest, in his Lordship’s transposed cases,
arises out of the imaginary interest. But the truth is, that where art
flourishes and attains its object, imagination droops, and poetry along
with it. It ceases, or takes a different and ambiguous shape; it may be
elegant, ingenious, pleasing, instructive, but if it aspires to the
semblance of a higher interest, or the ornaments of the highest fancy,
it necessarily becomes burlesque, as for instance, in the Rape of the
Lock. As novels end with marriage, poetry ends with the consummation and
success of art. And the reason (if Lord Byron would attend to it) is
pretty obvious. Where all the wishes and wants are supplied, anticipated
by art, there can be no strong cravings after ideal good, nor dread of
unimaginable evils; the sources of terror and pity must be dried up:
where the hand has done every thing, nothing is left for the imagination
to do or to attempt: where all is regulated by conventional
indifference, the full workings, the involuntary, uncontrollable
emotions of the heart cease: property is not a poetical, but a practical
prosaic idea, to those who possess and clutch it; and cuts off others
from cordial sympathy; but nature is common property, the unenvied idol
of all eyes, the fairy ground where fancy plays her tricks and feats;
and the passions, the workings of the heart (which Mr. Bowles very
properly distinguishes from manners, inasmuch as they are not in the
power of the will to regulate or satisfy) are still left as a subject
for something very different from didactic or mock-heroic poetry. By
_art_ and _artificial_, as these terms are applied to poetry or human
life, we mean those objects and feelings which depend for their
subsistence and perfection on the will and arbitrary conventions of man
and society; and by nature, and natural subjects, we mean those objects
which exist in the universe at large, without, or in spite of, the
interference of human power and contrivance, and those interests and
affections which are not amenable to the human will. That we are to
exclude art, or the operation of the human will, from poetry altogether,
is what we do not affirm; but we mean to say, that where this operation
is the most complete and manifest, as in the creation of given objects,
or regulation of certain feelings, there the spring of poetry, _i.e._ of
passion and imagination, is proportionably and much impaired. We are
masters of Art, Nature is our master; and it is to this greater power
that we find working above, about, and within us, that the genius of
poetry bows and offers up its highest homage. If the infusion of art
were not a natural disqualifier for poetry, the most artificial objects
and manners would be the most poetical: on the contrary, it is only the
rude beginnings, or the ruinous decay of objects of art, or the simplest
modes of life and manners, that admit of, or harmonize kindly with, the
tone and language of poetry. To consider the question otherwise, is not
to consider it too curiously, but not to understand it at all. Lord
Byron talks of Ulysses striking his horse Rhesus with his bow, as an
instance of the heroic in poetry. But does not the poetical dignity of
the instrument arise from its very commonness and simplicity? A bow is
not a supererogation of the works of art. It is almost peculiar to a
state of nature, that is, the first and rudest state of society. Lord
Byron might as well talk of a shepherd’s crook, or the garland of
flowers with which he crowns his mistress, as images borrowed from
artificial life. He cannot make a gentleman-usher’s rod poetical, though
it is the pink of courtly and gentlemanly refinement. Will the bold
stickler for the artificial essence of poetry translate Pope’s
description of Sir Plume,—
‘Of amber-headed snuff-box justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane,’—
into the same sort of poetry as Homer’s description of the bow of
Ulysses? It is out of the question. The very mention of the last has a
sound with it like the twang of the bow itself; whereas the others, the
snuff-box and clouded cane, are of the very essence of effeminate
impertinence. Pope says, in Spence’s Anecdotes, that ‘a lady of fashion
would admire a star, because it would remind her of the twinkling of a
lamp on a ball-night.’ This is a much better account of his own poetry
than his noble critic has given. It is a clue to a real solution of the
difficulty. What is the difference between the feeling with which we
contemplate a gas light in one of the squares, and the crescent moon
beside it, but this—that though the brightness, the beauty perhaps, to
the mere sense, is the same or greater; yet we know that when we are out
of the square we shall lose sight of the lamp, but that the moon will
lend us its tributary light wherever we go; it streams over green valley
or blue ocean alike; it is hung up in air, a part of the pageant of the
universe; it steals with gradual, softened state into the soul, and
hovers, a fairy apparition, over our existence! It is this which makes
it a more poetical object than a patent lamp, or a Chinese lanthorn, or
the chandelier at Covent-garden, brilliant as it is, and which, though
it were made ten times more so, would still only dazzle and scorch the
sight so much the more; it would not be attended with a mild train of
reflected glory; it would ‘denote no foregone conclusion,’ would touch
no chord of imagination or the heart; it would have nothing romantic
about it.—A man can make any thing, but he cannot make a sentiment! It
is a thing of inveterate prejudice, of old association, of common
feelings, and so is poetry, as far as it is serious. A ‘pack of cards,’
a silver bodkin, a paste buckle, ‘may be imbued’ with as much mock
poetry as you please, by lending false associations to it; but real
poetry, or poetry of the highest order, can only be produced by
unravelling the real web of associations, which have been wound round
any subject by nature, and the unavoidable conditions of humanity. Not
to admit this distinction at the threshold, is to confound the style of
Tom Thumb with that of the Moor of Venice, or Hurlothrumbo with the Doge
of Venice. It is to mistake jest for earnest, and one thing for another.
‘How far that little candle throws its beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’
The image here is one of artificial life; but it is connected with
natural circumstances and romantic interests, with darkness, with
silence, with distance, with privation, and uncertain danger: it is
common, obvious, without pretension or boast, and therefore the poetry
founded upon it is natural, because the feelings are so. It is not the
splendour of the candle itself, but the contrast to the gloom
without,—the comfort, the relief it holds out from afar to the benighted
traveller,—the conflict between nature and the first and cheapest
resources of art, that constitutes the romantic and imaginary, that is,
the poetical interest, in that familiar but striking image. There is
more art in the lamp or chandelier; but for that very reason, there is
less poetry. A light in a watch-tower, a beacon at sea, is sublime for
the same cause; because the natural circumstances and associations set
it off; it warns us against danger, it reminds us of common calamity, it
promises safety and hope: it has to do with the broad feelings and
circumstances of human life, and its interest does not assuredly turn
upon the vanity or pretensions of the maker or proprietor of it. This
sort of art is co-ordinate with nature, and comes into the first-class
of poetry, but no one ever dreamt of the contrary. The features of
nature are great leading landmarks, not near and little, or confined to
a spot, or an individual claimant; they are spread out everywhere the
same, and are of universal interest. The true poet has therefore been
described as
‘Creation’s tenant, he is nature’s heir.’
What has been thus said of the man of genius might be said of the man of
no genius. The spirit of poetry, and the spirit of humanity are the
same. The productions of nature are not locked up in the cabinets of the
curious, but spread out on the green lap of earth. The flowers return
with the cuckoo in the spring: the daisy for ever looks bright in the
sun; the rainbow still lifts its head above the storm to the eye of
infancy or age—
‘So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man,
So shall it be till I grow old and die;’
but Lord Byron does not understand this, for he does not understand Mr.
Wordsworth’s poetry, and we cannot make him. His Lordship’s nature, as
well as his poetry, is something arabesque and outlandish.—Again, once
more, what, we would ask, makes the difference between an opera of
Mozart’s, and the singing of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the
corner of the street in which we live? The one is nature, and the other
is art: the one is paid for, and the other is not. Madame Fodor sings
the air of _Vedrai Carino_ in _Don Giovanni_ so divinely, because she is
hired to sing it; she sings it to please the audience, not herself, and
does not always like to be _encored_ in it; but the thrush that awakes
us at daybreak with its song, does not sing because it is paid to sing,
or to please others, or to be admired or criticised. It sings because it
is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds from its throat, to relieve the
overflowings of its own breast—the liquid notes come from, and go to,
the heart, dropping balm into it, as the gushing spring revives the
traveller’s parched and fainting lips. That stream of joy comes pure and
fresh to the longing sense, free from art and affectation, the same that
rises over vernal groves, mingled with the breath of morning, and the
perfumes of the wild hyacinth; that waits for no audience, that wants no
rehearsing, that exhausts its raptures, and still—
‘Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love.’
There is this great difference between nature and art, that the one _is_
what the other _seems_, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because
it feels it itself. Madame Fodor sings, as a musical instrument may be
made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is
not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases,
and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its
singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than base or
treble, than the Italian or the German School, than quavers or
crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in
the world but truth and nature!
To give one more instance or two of what we understand by a natural
interest ingrafted on artificial objects, and of the principle that
still keeps them distinct. Amelia’s ‘hashed mutton’ in Fielding, is one
that I might mention. Hashed mutton is an article in cookery, homely
enough in the scale of art, though far removed from the simple products
of nature; yet we should say that this common delicacy which Amelia
provided for her husband’s supper, and then waited so long in vain for
his return, is the foundation of one of the most natural and affecting
incidents in one of the most natural and affecting books in the world.
No description of the most splendid and luxurious banquet could come up
to it. It will be remembered, when the _Almanach des Gourmands_, and
even the article on it in the last Edinburgh Review, are forgotten. Did
Lord Byron never read Boccacio? We wish he would learn refinement from
him, and get rid of his hard _bravura_ taste, and swashbuckler
conclusions. What makes the charm of the Story of the Falcon? Is it
properly art or nature? The tale is one of artificial life, and elegant
manners, and chivalrous pretensions; but it is the fall from these, the
decline into the vale of low and obscure poverty,—the having but one
last loop left to hang life on, and the sacrifice of that to a feeling
still more precious, and which could only give way with life
itself,—that elevates the sentiment, and has made it find its way into
all hearts. Had Frederigo Alberigi had an aviary of Hawks, and preserves
of pheasants without end, he and his poor bird would never have been
heard of. It is not the expence and ostentation of the entertainment he
set before his mistress, but the prodigality of affection, squandering
away the last remains of his once proud fortunes, that stamps this
beautiful incident on the remembrance of all who have ever read it. We
wish Lord Byron would look it over again, and see whether it does not
most touch the chords of pathos and sentiment in those places where we
feel the absence of all the pomp and vanities of art. Mr. Campbell talks
of a ship as a sublime and beautiful object in art. We will confess we
always stop to look at the mail-coaches with no slight emotion, and,
perhaps, extend our hands after some of them, in sign of gratulation.
They carry the letters of friends, of relations; they keep up the
communication between the heart of a country. We do not admire them for
their workmanship, for their speed, for their livery—there is something
more in it than this. Perhaps we can explain it by saying, that we once
heard a person observe—‘I always look at the Shrewsbury mail, and
sometimes with tears in my eyes: that is the coach that will bring me
the news of the death of my father and mother.’ His Lordship will say,
the mail-coach is an artificial object. Yet we think the interest here
was not founded upon that circumstance. There was a finer and deeper
link of affection that did not depend on the red painted pannels, or the
_dyed garments_ of the coachman and guard. At least it strikes us so.
This is not an easy subject to illustrate, and it is still more
difficult to define. Yet we shall attempt something of the sort.
1. Natural objects are common and obvious, and are imbued with an
habitual and universal interest, without being vulgar. Familiarity in
them does not breed contempt, as it does in the works of man. They form
an ideal class; their repeated impression on the mind, in so many
different circumstances, grows up into a sentiment. The reason is, that
we refer them generally and collectively to ourselves, as links and
mementos of our various being; whereas, we refer the works of art
respectively to those by whom they are made or to whom they belong. This
distracts the mind in looking at them, and gives a petty and unpoetical
character to what we feel relating to them. When the works of art become
poetical, it is when they are emancipated from this state of
‘circumscription and confine,’ by some circumstance that sets aside the
idea of property and individual distinction. The sound of village
bells,—
‘——The poor man’s only music,’[63]
excites as lively an interest in the mind, as the warbling of a thrush:
the sight of a village spire presents nothing discordant with the
surrounding scenery.
2. Natural objects are more akin to poetry and the imagination, partly
because they are not our own handy-work, but start up spontaneously,
like a visionary creation, of their own accord, without our knowledge or
connivance.—
‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water hath,
And these are of them;—’
and farther, they have this advantage over the works of art, that the
latter either fall short of their preconceived intention, and excite our
disgust and disappointment by their defects; or, if they completely
answer their end, they then leave nothing to the imagination, and so
excite little or no romantic interest that way. A Count Rumford stove,
or a Dutch oven, are useful for the purposes of warmth or culinary
dispatch. Gray’s purring favourite would find great comfort in warming
its nose before the one, or dipping its whiskers in the other; and so
does the artificial animal, man: but the poetry of Rumford grates or
Dutch ovens, it would puzzle even Lord Byron to explain. Cowper has made
something of the ‘loud-hissing urn,’ though Mr. Southey, as being one of
the more refined ‘naturals,’ still prefers ‘the song of the kettle.’ The
more our senses, our self-love, our eyes and ears, are surrounded, and,
as it were, saturated with artificial enjoyments and costly decorations,
the more the avenues to the imagination and the heart are unavoidably
blocked up. We do not say, that this may not be an advantage to the
individual; we say it is a disadvantage to the poet. Even ‘Mine Host of
Human Life’ has felt its palsying, enervating influence. Let any one
(after ten years old) take shelter from a shower of rain in Exeter
Change, and see how he will amuse the time with looking over the
trinkets, the chains, the seals, the curious works of art. Compare this
with the description of Una and the Red Cross Knight in Spenser:
‘Enforc’d to seek some covert nigh at hand,
A shady grove not far away they spied,
That promis’d aid the tempest to withstand:
Whose lofty trees, yclad with summer’s pride,
Did spread so broad, that heaven’s light did hide,
Not pierceable with power of any star;
And all within were paths and alleys wide,
With footing worn, and leading inward far;
Far harbour that them seems: so in they enter’d are.
‘And forth they pass, with pleasure forward led,
Joying to hear the birds’ sweet harmony,
Which therein shrowded from the tempest’s dread,
Seem’d in their song to scorn the cruel sky.
Much can they praise the trees so straight and high,
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,
The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspen good for staves, the cypress funeral.’[64]
Artificial flowers look pretty in a lady’s head-dress; but they will not
do to stick into lofty verse. On the contrary, a crocus bursting out of
the ground seems to blush with its own golden light—‘a thing of life.’
So a greater authority than Lord Byron has given his testimony on this
subject: ‘Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they
spin; yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these.’ Shakspeare speaks of—
——‘Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares and take
The winds of March with beauty.’
All this play of fancy and dramatic interest could not be transferred to
a description of hot-house plants, regulated by a thermometer. Lord
Byron unfairly enlists into the service of his argument those artificial
objects, which are direct imitations of nature, such as statuary, etc.
This is an oversight. At this rate, all poetry would be artificial
poetry. Dr. Darwin is among those, who have endeavoured to confound the
distinctions of natural and artificial poetry, and indeed, he is,
perhaps, the only one who has gone the whole length of Lord Byron’s
hypercritical and super-artificial theory. Here are some of his lines,
which have been greatly admired.
_Apostrophe to Steel._
‘Hail, adamantine steel! magnetic lord,
King of the prow, the ploughshare, and the sword!
True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady course amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee!’
This is the true false gallop of the sublime. Yet steel is a very useful
metal, and doubtless performs all these wonders. But it has not, among
so many others, the virtue of amalgamating with the imagination. We
might quote also his description of the spinning-jenny, which is
pronounced by Dr. Aikin to be as ingenious a piece of mechanism as the
object it describes; and, according to Lord Byron, this last is as well
suited to the manufacture of verses as of cotton-twist without end.
3. Natural interests are those which are real and inevitable, and are so
far contradistinguished from the artificial, which are factitious and
affected. If Lord Byron cannot understand the difference, he may find it
explained by contrasting some of Chaucer’s characters and incidents with
those in the Rape of the Lock, for instance. Custance floating in her
boat on the wide sea, is different from Pope’s heroine,
‘Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.’
Griselda’s loss of her children, one by one, of her _all_, does not
belong to the same class of incidents, nor of subjects for poetry, as
Belinda’s loss of her favourite curl. A sentiment that has rooted itself
in the heart, and can only be torn from it with life, is not like the
caprice of the moment—the putting on of paint and patches, or the
pulling off a glove. The inbred character is not like a masquerade
dress. There is a difference between the theatrical, and natural, which
is important to the determination of the present question, and which has
been overlooked by his Lordship. Mr. Bowles, however, formally insists
(and with the best right in the world) on the distinction between
passion and manners. But he agrees with Lord Byron, that the Epistle to
Abelard is the height of the pathetic.
‘Strange that such difference should be
Twixt tweedledum and tweedledee.’
That it is in a great degree pathetic, we should be amongst the last to
dispute; but its character is more properly rhetorical and voluptuous.
That its interest is of the highest or deepest order, is what we should
wonder to hear any one affirm, who is intimate with Shakspeare, Chaucer,
Boccacio, our own early dramatists, or the Greek tragedians. There is
more true, unfeigned, unspeakable, heart-felt distress in one line of
Chaucer’s tale just mentioned,
‘Let me not like a worm go by the way,’
than in all Pope’s writings put together; and we say it without any
disrespect to him too. Didactic poetry has to do with manners, as they
are regulated, not by fashion or caprice, but by abstract reason and
grave opinion, and is equally remote from the dramatic, which describes
the involuntary and unpremeditated impulses of nature. As Lord Byron
refers to the Bible, we would just ask him here, which he thinks the
most poetical parts of it, the Law of the Twelve Tables, the Book of
Leviticus, etc.; or the Book of Job, Jacob’s dream, the story of Ruth
etc?
4. Supernatural poetry is, in the sense here insisted on, allied to
nature, not to art, because it relates to the impressions made upon the
mind by unknown objects and powers, out of the reach both of the
cognizance and will of man, and still more able to startle and confound
his imagination, while he supposes them to exist, than either those of
nature or art. The Witches in Macbeth, the Furies in Æschylus, are so
far artificial objects, that they are creatures of the poet’s brain; but
their impression on the mind depends on their possessing attributes,
which baffle and set at nought all human pretence, and laugh at all
human efforts to tamper with them. Satan in Milton is an artificial or
ideal character: but would any one call this artificial poetry? It is,
in Lord Byron’s phrase, super-artificial, as well as super-human poetry.
But it is serious business. Fate, if not Nature, is its ruling genius.
The Pandemonium is not a baby-house of the fancy, and it is ranked
(ordinarily,) with natural, _i.e._ with the highest and most important
order of poetry, and above the Rape of the Lock. We intended a
definition, and have run again into examples. Lord Byron’s _concretions_
have spoiled us for philosophy. We will therefore leave off here, and
conclude with a character of Pope, which seems to have been written with
an eye to this question, and which (for what we know) is as near a
solution of it as the Noble Letter-writer’s emphatical division of
Pope’s writings into ethical, mock-heroic, and fanciful poetry.
‘Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of
it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion;
he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the
feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakspeare had an
intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart
of man in all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all
that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his
daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope’s
Muse never wandered with safety, but from his library to his grotto, or
from his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater
pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could
describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own
person, better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the
face of heaven—a piece of cut glass or a pair of paste buckles with more
brilliance and effect, than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun.
He would be more delighted with a patent lamp, than with “the pale
reflex of Cynthia’s brow,” that fills the skies with its soft silent
lustre, that trembles through the cottage window, and cheers the
watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of
personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him, was the
greatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the
immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in
external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the
self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw, than admiration of
that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial
to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating
impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with
which he could not grapple; while he could trifle with the conventional
and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or
admire, put them on or off like a masquerade dress, make much or little
of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time, as he pleased; and
because while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they
never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind
was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its power was the power of
indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry
what the sceptic is in religion.
‘It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing,
than in aggrandizing objects; in checking, not in encouraging our
enthusiasm; in sneering at the extravagances of fancy or passion,
instead of giving a loose to them; in describing a row of pins and
needles, rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans; in
penning a lampoon or a compliment, and in praising Martha Blount.
‘Shakspeare says,
“——In Fortune’s ray and brightness
The herd hath more annoyance by the brize
Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind
Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,
And flies fled under shade, why then
The thing of courage,
As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise;
And with an accent tuned in the self-same key,
Replies to chiding Fortune.”
There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a
peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and
indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour
of the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies
of nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are
whispered flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for—“the
gnarled oak,” he gives us “the soft myrtle:” for rocks, and seas, and
mountains, artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for
earthquakes and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a
china jar; for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of
the passions, we have
“Calm contemplation and poetic ease.”
Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how
exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,
what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered
refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a
microscope, where every thing assumes a new character and a new
consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and
slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the
deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the
magnifier is, to be sure, held to everything, but still the exhibition
is highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or
surprised. Such, at least, is the best account I am able to give of this
extraordinary man, without doing injustice to him or others.’
ON CONSISTENCY OF OPINION
_The London Magazine._] [_November 1821._
‘——Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab inceptu processerit, et sibi constet.’
Many people boast of being masters in their own house. I pretend to be
master of my own mind. I should be sorry to have an ejectment served
upon me for any notions I may chuse to entertain there. Within that
little circle I would fain be an absolute monarch. I do not profess the
spirit of martyrdom; I have no ambition to march to the stake or up to a
masked battery, in defence of an hypothesis: I do not court the rack: I
do not wish to be flayed alive for affirming that two and two make four,
or any other intricate proposition: I am shy of bodily pains and
penalties, which some are fond of, imprisonment, fine, banishment,
confiscation of goods: but if I do not prefer the independence of my
mind to that of my body, I at least prefer it to every thing else. I
would avoid the arm of power, as I would escape from the fangs of a wild
beast: but as to the opinion of the world, I see nothing formidable in
it. ‘It is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.’ I am not to
be brow-beat or wheedled out of any of my settled convictions. Opinion
to opinion, I will face any man. Prejudice, fashion, the cant of the
moment, go for nothing; and as for the reason of the thing, it can only
be supposed to rest with me or another, in proportion to the pains we
have taken to ascertain it. Where the pursuit of truth has been the
habitual study of any man’s life, the love of truth will be his ruling
passion. ‘Where the treasure is, there the heart is also.’ Every one is
most tenacious of that to which he owes his distinction from others.
Kings love power, misers gold, women flattery, poets reputation—and
philosophers truth, when they can find it. They are right in cherishing
the only privilege they inherit. If ‘to be wise were to be obstinate,’ I
might set up for as great a philosopher as the best of them; for some of
my conclusions are as fixed and as incorrigible to proof as need be. I
am attached to them in consequence of the pains, the anxiety, and the
waste of time they have cost me. In fact, I should not well know what to
do without them at this time of day; nor how to get others to supply
their place. I would quarrel with the best friend I have sooner than
acknowledge the absolute right of the Bourbons. I see Mr. —— seldomer
than I did, because I cannot agree with him about the _Catalogue
Raisonnée_. I remember once saying to this gentleman, a great while ago,
that I did not seem to have altered any of my ideas since I was sixteen
years old. ‘Why then,’ said he,’ you are no wiser now than you were
then!’ I might make the same confession, and the same retort would apply
still. Coleridge used to tell me, that this pertinacity was owing to a
want of sympathy with others. What he calls _sympathising with others_
is their admiring him, and it must be admitted that he varies his
battery pretty often, in order to accommodate himself to this sort of
mutual understanding. But I do not agree in what he says of me. On the
other hand, I think that it is my sympathising _beforehand_ with the
different views and feelings that may be entertained on a subject, that
prevents my retracting my judgment, and flinging myself into the
contrary extreme _afterwards_. If you proscribe all opinion opposite to
your own, and impertinently exclude all the evidence that does not make
for you, it stares you in the face with double force when it breaks in
unexpectedly upon you, or if at any subsequent period it happens to suit
your interest or convenience to listen to objections which vanity or
prudence had hitherto overlooked. But if you are aware from the first
suggestion of a subject, either by subtlety of tact, or close attention,
of the full force of what others possibly feel and think of it, you are
not exposed to the same vacillation of opinion. The number of grains and
scruples, of doubts and difficulties, thrown into the scale while the
balance is yet undecided, add to the weight and steadiness of the
determination. He who anticipates his opponent’s arguments, confirms
while he corrects his own reasonings. When a question has been carefully
examined in all its bearings, and a principle is once established, it is
not liable to be overthrown by any new facts which have been arbitrarily
and petulantly set aside, nor by every wind of idle doctrine rushing
into the interstices of a hollow speculation, shattering it in pieces,
and leaving it a mockery and a bye-word; like those tall, gawky,
staring, pyramidal erections which are seen scattered over different
parts of the country, and are called the _Follies_ of different
gentlemen! A man may be confident in maintaining a side, as he has been
cautious in chusing it. If after making up his mind strongly in one way,
to the best of his capacity and judgment, he feels himself inclined to a
very violent revulsion of sentiment, he may generally rest assured that
the change is in himself and his motives, not in the reason of things.
I cannot say that, from my own experience, I have found that the persons
most remarkable for sudden and violent changes of principle have been
cast in the softest or most susceptible mould. All their notions have
been exclusive, bigoted, and intolerant. Their want of consistency and
moderation has been in exact proportion to their want of candour and
comprehensiveness of mind. Instead of being the creatures of sympathy,
open to conviction, unwilling to give offence by the smallest difference
of sentiment, they have (for the most part) been made up of mere
antipathies—a very repulsive sort of personages—at odds with themselves,
and with every body else. The slenderness of their pretensions to
philosophical inquiry has been accompanied with the most presumptuous
dogmatism. They have been persons of that narrowness of view and
headstrong self-sufficiency of purpose, that they could see only one
side of a question at a time, and whichever they pleased. There is a
story somewhere in Don Quixote, of two champions coming to a shield hung
up against a tree with an inscription written on each side of it. Each
of them maintained, that the words were what was written on the side
next him, and never dreamt, till the fray was over, that they might be
different on the opposite side of the shield. It would have been a
little more extraordinary if the combatants had changed sides in the
heat of the scuffle, and stoutly denied that there were any such words
on the opposite side as they had before been bent on sacrificing their
lives to prove were the only ones it contained. Yet such is the very
situation of some of our modern polemics. They have been of all sides of
the question, and yet they cannot conceive how an honest man can be of
any but one—that which they hold at present. It seems that they are
afraid to look their old opinions in the face, lest they should be
fascinated by them once more. They banish all doubts of their own
sincerity by inveighing against the motives of their antagonists. There
is no salvation out of the pale of their strange inconsistency. They
reduce common sense and probity to the straitest possible limits—the
breasts of themselves and their patrons. They are like people out at sea
on a very narrow plank, who try to push every body else off. Is it that
they have so little faith in the cause to which they have become such
staunch converts, as to suppose that, should they allow a grain of sense
to their old allies and new antagonists, they will have more than they?
Is it that they have so little consciousness of their own
disinterestedness, that they feel if they allow a particle of honesty to
those who now differ with them, they will have more than they? Those
opinions must needs be of a very fragile texture which will not stand
the shock of the least acknowledged opposition, and which lay claim to
respectability by stigmatising all who do not hold them as ‘sots, and
knaves, and cowards.’ There is a want of well-balanced feeling in every
such instance of extravagant versatility; a something crude, unripe, and
harsh, that does not hit a judicious palate, but sets the teeth on edge
to think of. ‘I had rather hear my mother’s cat mew, or a wheel grate on
the axle-tree, than one of these same metre-balladmongers’ chaunt his
incondite retrograde lays without rhyme and without reason.
The principles and professions change: the man remains the same. There
is the same spirit at the bottom of all this pragmatical fickleness and
virulence, whether it runs into one extreme or another:—to wit, a
confinement of view, a jealousy of others, an impatience of
contradiction, a want of liberality in construing the motives of others
either from monkish pedantry, or a conceited overweening reference of
every thing to our own fancies and feelings. There is something to be
said, indeed, for the nature of the political machinery, for the
whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel which has of late wrenched
men’s understandings almost asunder, and ‘amazed the very faculties of
eyes and ears;’ but still this is hardly a sufficient reason, why the
adept in the old as well as the new school should take such a prodigious
latitude himself, while at the same time he makes so little allowance
for others. His whole creed need not be turned topsy-turvy, from the top
to the bottom, even in times like these. He need not, in the rage of
party spirit, discard the proper attributes of humanity, the common
dictates of reason. He need not outrage every former feeling, nor
trample on every customary decency, in his zeal for reform, or in his
greater zeal against it. If his mind, like his body, has undergone a
total change of essence, and purged off the taint of all its early
opinions, he need not carry about with him, or be haunted in the persons
of others with, the phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and
execrate them. He need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all
his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the
shrine of matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a
living and ignominious satire on himself. Mr. Wordsworth has hardly, I
should think, so much as a single particle of feeling left in his whole
composition, the same that he had twenty years ago; not ‘so small a drop
of pity,’ for what he then was, ‘as a wren’s eye,’—except that I do not
hear that he has given up his theory that poetry should be written in
the language of prose, or applied for an injunction against the Lyrical
Ballads. I will wager a trifle, that our ingenious poet will not concede
to any patron, (how noble and munificent soever) that the Leech Gatherer
is not a fit subject of the Muse, and would sooner resign the
stamp-distributorship of two counties, than burn that portion of the
Recluse, a Poem, which has been given to the world under the title of
the Excursion. The tone, however, of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetical effusions
requires a little revision to adapt it to the progressive improvement in
his political sentiments: for, as far as I understand the Poems
themselves or the Preface, his whole system turns upon this, that the
thoughts, the feelings, the expressions of the common people in country
places are the most refined of all others; at once the most pure, the
most simple, and the most sublime:—yet, with one stroke of his
prose-pen, he disfranchises the whole rustic population of Westmoreland
and Cumberland from voting at elections, and says there is not a man
among them that is not a knave in grain. In return, he lets them still
retain the privilege of expressing their sentiments in select and
natural language in the Lyrical Ballads. So much for poetical justice
and political severity! An author’s political theories sit loose upon
him, and may be changed like his clothes. His literary vanity, alas!
sticks to him like his skin, and survives in its first gloss and
sleekness, amidst
‘The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.’
Mr. Southey still makes experiments on metre, not on governments, and
seems to think the last resort of English liberty is in court-iambics.
Still the same upstart self-sufficiency, still the same itch of new
fangled innovation directed into a new channel, still the same principle
of favouritism, still the same overcharged and splenetic hostility—all
is right that he approves, all is wrong that opposes his views in the
smallest particular. There is no inconsistency in all these anomalies.
Absurdity is uniform; egotism is the same thing; a limited range of
comprehension is a habit of mind that a man seldom gets the better of,
and may distinguish equally the Pantisocratist or Constitutional
Association-monger.
To quit this, which is rather a stale topic, as well as a hopeless one,
and give some instances of a change of sentiment in individuals, which
may serve for materials of a history of opinion in the beginning of the
19th century:—A gentleman went to live, some years ago, in a remote part
of the country, and as he did not wish to affect singularity he used to
have two candles on his table of an evening. A romantic acquaintance of
his in the neighbourhood, smit with the love of simplicity and equality,
used to come in, and without ceremony snuff one of them out, saying, it
was a shame to indulge in such extravagance, while many a poor cottager
had not even a rush-light to see to do their evening’s work by. This
might be about the year 1802, and was passed over as among the ordinary
occurrences of the day. In 1816 (oh! fearful lapse of time, pregnant
with strange mutability), the same enthusiastic lover of economy, and
hater of luxury, asked his thoughtless friend to dine with him in
company with a certain lord, and to lend him his man servant to wait at
table; and just before they were sitting down to dinner, he heard him
say to the servant in a sonorous whisper—‘and be sure you don’t forget
to have six candles on the table!’ Extremes meet. The event here was as
true to itself as the oscillation of the pendulum. My informant, who
understands moral equations, had looked for this reaction, and noted it
down as characteristic. The impertinence in the first instance was the
cue to the ostentatious servility in the second. The one was the
fulfilment of the other, like the type and anti-type of a prophecy.
No—the keeping of the character at the end of fourteen years was as
unique as the keeping of the thought to the end of the fourteen lines of
a Sonnet! Would it sound strange if I were to whisper it in the reader’s
ear, that it was the same person who was thus anxious to see six candles
on the table to receive a lord, who once (in ages past) said to me, that
‘he saw nothing to admire in the eloquence of such men as Mansfield and
Chatham; and what did it all end in, but their being made Lords?’ It is
better to be a lord than a lacquey to a lord. So we see that the
swelling pride and preposterous self-opinion which exalts itself above
the mightiest, looking down upon, and braying the boasted pretensions of
the highest rank and the most brilliant talents as nothing, compared
with its own conscious powers and silent unmoved self-respect, grovels
and licks the dust before titled wealth, like a lacquered slave, the
moment it can get wages and a livery! Would Milton or Marvel have done
thus?
Mr. Coleridge, indeed, sets down this outrageous want of keeping to an
excess of sympathy, and there is, after all, some truth in his
suggestion. There is a craving after the approbation and concurrence of
others natural to the mind of man. It is difficult to sustain the weight
of an opinion singly for any length of way. The intellect languishes
without cordial encouragement and support. It exhausts both strength and
patience to be always striving against the stream. _Contra audentior
ito_—is the motto but of few. Public opinion is always pressing upon the
mind, and, like the air we breathe, acts unseen, unfelt. It supplies the
living current of our thoughts, and infects without our knowledge. It
taints the blood, and is taken into the smallest pores. The most
sanguine constitutions are, perhaps, the most exposed to its influence.
But public opinion has its source in power, in popular prejudice, and is
not always in accord with right reason, or a high and abstracted
imagination. Which path to follow where the two roads part? The heroic
and romantic resolution prevails at first in high and heroic tempers.
They think to scale the heights of truth and virtue at once with him
‘whose genius had angelic wings, and fed on manna,’—but after a time
find themselves baffled, toiling on in an uphill road, without friends,
in a cold neighbourhood, without aid or prospect of success. The poet
‘Like a worm goes by the way.’
He hears murmurs loud or suppressed, meets blank looks or scowling
faces, is exposed to the pelting of the pitiless press, and is stunned
by the shout of the mob, that gather round him to see what sort of a
creature a poet and a philosopher is. What is there to make him proof
against all this? A strength of understanding steeled against
temptation, and a dear love of truth that smiles opinion to scorn? These
he perhaps has not. A lord passes in his coach. Might he not get up, and
ride out of the reach of the rabble-rout? He is invited to stop dinner.
If he stays he may insinuate some wholesome truths. He drinks in rank
poison—flattery! He recites some verses to the ladies, who smile
delicious praise, and thank him through their tears. The master of the
house suggests a happy allusion in the turn of an expression. ‘There’s
sympathy.’ This is better than the company he lately left. Pictures,
statues meet his raptured eye. Our Ulysses finds himself in the gardens
of Alcinous: our truant is fairly caught. He wanders through enchanted
ground. Groves, classic groves, nod unto him, and he hears ‘ancestral
voices’ hailing him as brother-bard! He sleeps, dreams, and wakes cured
of his thriftless prejudices and morose philanthropy. He likes this
courtly and popular sympathy better. ‘He looks up with awe to kings;
with honour to nobility; with reverence to magistrates,’ &c. He no
longer breathes the air of heaven and his own thoughts, but is steeped
in that of palaces and courts, and finds it agree better with his
constitutional temperament. Oh! how sympathy alters a man from what he
was!
‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind,
Kind deeds with coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of man
Has oftener set me mourning.’
A spirit of contradiction, a wish to monopolise all wisdom, will not
account for uniform consistency, for it is sure to defeat and turn
against itself. It is ‘every thing by turns, and nothing long.’ It is
warped and crooked. It cannot bear the least opposition, and sooner than
acquiesce in what others approve it will change sides in a day. It is
offended at every resistance to its captious, domineering humour, and
will quarrel for straws with its best friends. A person under the
guidance of this demon, if every whimsy or occult discovery of his own
is not received with acclamation by one party, will wreak his spite by
deserting to the other, and carry all his talent for disputation with
him, sharpened by rage and disappointment. A man, to be steady in a
cause, should be more attached to the truth than to the acquiescence of
his fellow-citizens. A young student, who came up to town a few years
since with some hypercritical refinements on the modern philosophy to
introduce him to the Gamaliels of the age, but who would allow no one
else to have a right view of the common doctrines of the school, or to
be able to assign a reason for the faith that was in him, was sent to
Coventry by the true adepts, who were many of them as wise and as
fastidious as himself. He therefore turned round upon the whole set for
this indignity, and has been playing off the heavy artillery of his
scurrilous abuse, his verbal logic, and the powerful distinctions of the
civil and canon law upon the devoted heads of his tasteless associates;
‘perpetual volley, arrowy sleet,’ ever since! It is needless to mention
names. The learned gentleman having left his ungrateful party and
unprofitable principles in dudgeon, has gone into the opposite extreme
like mad, sticks at nothing, is callous to public opinion, so that he
pleases his employers, and can become ‘a thorn in the side of freedom’;
and fairly takes the bridle in his teeth, stop him who can. A more
obstinate being never took pen in hand. Yet, by agreeing to his
conclusions, and subscribing to his arguments (such as they are) it
would be still possible to make him give up every one of his absurdities
in succession, and to drive him to set up another New Daily Paper
against himself!
I can hardly consider Mr. Coleridge as a deserter from the cause he
first espoused, unless one could tell what cause he ever heartily
espoused, or what party he ever belonged to, in downright earnest. He
has not been inconsistent with himself at different times, but at all
times. He is a sophist, a casuist, a rhetorician, what you please; and
might have argued or declaimed to the end of his breath on one side of a
question or another, but he never was a pragmatical fellow. He lived in
a round of contradictions, and never came to a settled point. His fancy
gave the cue to his judgment, and his vanity set his invention afloat in
whatever direction he could find most scope for it, or most _sympathy_,
that is, admiration. His Life and Opinions might naturally receive the
title of one of Hume’s Essays—‘A Sceptical Solution of Sceptical
Doubts.’ To be sure, his WATCHMAN and his FRIEND breathe a somewhat
different tone on subjects of a particular description, both of them
apparently pretty high-raised, but whoever will be at the pains to
examine them closely, will find them to be _voluntaries_, fugues, solemn
capriccios, not set compositions with any malice prepense in them, or
much practical meaning. I believe some of his friends, who were indebted
to him for the suggestion of plausible reasons for conformity, and an
opening to a more qualified view of the letter of their paradoxical
principles, have lately disgusted him by the virulence and extravagance
to which they have carried hints, of which he never suspected that they
would make the least possible use. But if Mr. Coleridge is satisfied
with the wandering Moods of his Mind, perhaps this is no reason that
others may not reap the solid benefit. He himself is like the idle
sea-weed on the ocean, tossed from shore to shore: they are like
barnacles fastened to the vessel of state, rotting its goodly timbers!
There are some persons who are of too fastidious a turn of mind to like
any thing long, or to assent twice to the same opinion. —— always sets
himself to prop the falling cause, to nurse the ricketty bantling. He
takes the part which he thinks in most need of his support, not so much
out of magnanimity, as to prevent too great a degree of presumption or
self-complacency on the triumphant side. ‘Though truth be truth, yet he
contrives to throw such changes of vexation on it as it may lose some
colour.’ I have been delighted to hear him expatiate with the most
natural and affecting simplicity on a favourite passage or picture, and
all the while afraid of agreeing with him, lest he should instantly turn
round and unsay all that he had said, for fear of my going away with too
good an opinion of my own taste, or too great an admiration of my
idol—and his own. I dare not ask his opinion twice, if I have got a
favourable sentence once, lest he should belie his own sentiments to
stagger mine. I have heard him talk divinely (like one inspired) of
Boccaccio, and the story of the Pot of Basil, describing ‘how it grew,
and it grew, and it grew,’ till you saw it spread its tender leaves in
the light of his eye, and wave in the tremulous sound of his voice; and
yet if you asked him about it at another time, he would, perhaps, affect
to think little of it, or to have forgotten the circumstance. His
enthusiasm is fickle and treacherous. The instant he finds it shared in
common, he backs out of it. His enmity is equally refined, but hardly so
unsocial. His exquisitely turned invectives display all the beauty of
scorn, and impart elegance to vulgarity. He sometimes finds out minute
excellencies, and cries up one thing to put you out of conceit with
another. If you want him to praise Sir Joshua _con amore_, in his best
manner, you should begin with saying something about Titian—if you seem
an idoliser of Sir Joshua, he will immediately turn off the discourse,
gliding like the serpent before Eve, wary and beautiful, to the graces
of Sir Peter Lely, or ask if you saw a Vandyke the other day, which he
does not think Sir Joshua could stand near. But find fault with the Lake
Poets, and mention some pretended patron of rising genius, and you need
not fear but he will join in with you and go all lengths that you can
wish him. You may calculate upon him there. ‘Pride elevates, and joy
brightens his face.’ And, indeed, so eloquent is he, and so beautiful in
his eloquence, that I myself, with all my freedom from gall and
bitterness, could listen to him untired, and without knowing how the
time went, losing and neglecting many a meal and hour,
——‘From morn to noon,
From noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day!’
When I cease to hear him quite, other tongues, turned to what accents
they may of praise or blame, will sound dull, ungrateful, out of tune,
and harsh, in the comparison.
An overstrained enthusiasm produces a capriciousness in taste, as well
as too much indifference. A person who sets no bounds to his admiration
takes a surfeit of his favourites. He over-does the thing. He gets sick
of his own everlasting praises, and affected raptures. His preferences
are a great deal too violent to last. He wears out an author in a week,
that might last him a year, or his life, by the eagerness with which he
devours him. Every such favourite is in his turn the greatest writer in
the world. Compared with the lord of the ascendant for the time being,
Shakspeare is common-place, and Milton a pedant, a little insipid or so.
Some of these prodigies require to be dragged out of their
lurking-places, and cried up to the top of the compass;—their traits are
subtle, and must be violently obtruded on the sight. But the effort of
exaggerated praise, though it may stagger others, tires the maker, and
we hear of them no more after a while. Others take their turns, are
swallowed whole, undigested, ravenously, and disappear in the same
manner. Good authors share the fate of bad, and a library in a few years
is nearly dismantled. It is a pity thus to outlive our admiration, and
exhaust our relish of what is excellent. Actors and actresses are
disposed of in the same conclusive peremptory way: some of them are
talked of for months, nay, years; then it is almost an offence to
mention them. Friends, acquaintance, go the same road;—are now asked to
come six days in the week, then warned against coming the seventh. The
smallest faults are soon magnified in those we think too highly of: but
where shall we find perfection? If we will put up with nothing short of
that, we shall have neither pictures, books, nor friends left—we shall
have nothing but our own absurdities to keep company with! ‘In all
things a regular and moderate indulgence is the best security for a
lasting enjoyment.’ BURKE.
There are numbers who judge by the event, and change with fortune. They
extol the hero of the day, and join the prevailing clamour whatever it
is; so that the fluctuating state of public opinion regulates their
feverish, restless enthusiasm, like a thermometer. They blow hot or
cold, according as the wind sets favourably or otherwise. With such
people the only infallible test of merit is success; and no arguments
are true that have not a large or powerful majority on their side. They
go by appearances. Their vanity, not the truth, is their ruling object.
They are not the last to quit a falling cause, and they are the first to
hail the rising sun. Their minds want sincerity, modesty, and keeping.
With them—
——‘To have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.’
They still, ‘with one consent, praise new-born gauds,’ and Fame, as they
construe it, is
——‘Like a fashionable host,
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand;
And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,
Grasps-in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,
And Farewell goes out sighing.’
Such servile flatterers made an idol of Buonaparte while fortune smiled
upon him, but when it left him, they removed him from his pedestal in
the cabinet of their vanity, as we take down the picture of a relation
that has died without naming us in his will. The opinion of such
triflers is worth nothing: it is merely an echo. We do not want to be
told the event of a question, but the rights of it. Truth is in their
theory nothing but ‘noise and inexplicable dumb show.’ They are the
heralds, outriders, and trumpeters in the procession of fame; are more
loud and boisterous than the rest, and give themselves great airs, as
the avowed patrons and admirers of genius and merit.
As there are many who change their sentiments with circumstances, (as
they decided lawsuits in Rabelais with the dice), so there are others
who change them with their acquaintance. ‘Tell me your company, and I’ll
tell you your opinions,’ might be said to many a man who piques himself
on a select and superior view of things, distinct from the vulgar.
Individuals of this class are quick and versatile, but they are not
beforehand with opinion. They catch it, when it is pointed out to them,
and take it at the rebound, instead of giving the first impulse. Their
minds are a light, luxuriant soil, into which thoughts are easily
transplanted, and shoot up with uncommon sprightliness and vigour. They
wear the dress of other people’s minds very gracefully and
unconsciously. They tell you your own opinion, or very gravely repeat an
observation you have made to them about half a year afterwards. They let
you into the delicacies and luxuries of Spenser with great
disinterestedness, in return for your having introduced that author to
their notice. They prefer West to Raphael, Stothard to Rubens, till they
are told better. Still they are acute in the main, and good judges in
their way. By trying to improve their taste, and reform their notions
according to an ideal standard, they perhaps spoil and muddle their
native faculties, rather than do them any good. Their first manner is
their best, because it is the most natural. It is well not to go out of
ourselves, and to be contented to take up with what we are, for better
for worse. We can neither beg, borrow, nor steal characteristic
excellencies. Some views and modes of thinking suit certain minds, as
certain colours suit certain complexions. We may part with very shining
and very useful qualities without getting better ones to supply them.
Mocking is catching, only in regard to defects. Mimicry is always
dangerous.
It is not necessary to change our road in order to advance on our
journey. We should cultivate the spot of ground we possess to the utmost
of our power, though it may be circumscribed and comparatively barren.
_A rolling stone gathers no moss._ People may collect all the wisdom
they will ever attain, quite as well by staying at home as by travelling
abroad. There is no use in shifting from place to place, from side to
side, or from subject to subject. You have always to begin again, and
never finish any course of study or observation. By adhering to the same
principles you do not become stationary. You enlarge, correct, and
consolidate your reasonings, without contradicting and shuffling about
in your conclusions. If truth consisted in hasty assumptions and
petulant contradictions, there might be some ground for this whiffling
and violent inconsistency. But the face of truth, like that of nature,
is different and the same. The first outline of an opinion, and the
general tone of thinking, may be sound and correct, though we may spend
any quantity of time and pains in working up and uniting the parts at
subsequent sittings. If we have mistaken the character of the
countenance altogether at first, no alterations will bring it right
afterwards. Those who mistake white for black in the first instance, may
as well mistake black for white when they reverse their canvass. I do
not see what security they can have in their present opinions, who build
their pretension to wisdom on the total folly, rashness, and
extravagance (to say no worse) of their former ones. The perspective may
change with years and experience: we may see certain things nearer, and
others more remote; but the great masses and landmarks will remain,
though thrown into shadow and tinged by the intervening atmosphere: so
the laws of the understanding, the truth of nature, will remain, and
cannot be thrown into utter confusion and perplexity by our blunders or
caprice, like the objects in Hogarth’s Rules of Perspective, where every
thing is turned upside down, or thrust out of its well-known place. I
cannot understand how our political Harlequins feel after all their
summersaults and metamorphoses. They can hardly, I should think, look at
themselves in the glass, or walk across the room without stumbling. This
at least would be the case if they had the least reflection or
self-knowledge. But they judge from pique and vanity solely. There
should be a certain decorum in life as in a picture, without which it is
neither useful nor agreeable. If my opinions are not right, at any rate
they are the best I have been able to form, and better than any others I
could take up at random, or out of perversity, now. Certainly opinions
vitiate one another, and destroy the simplicity and clearness of the
mind: nothing is good that has not a beginning, a middle, and an end;
and I would wish my thoughts to be
‘Linked each to each by natural piety!’
ON THE SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP
_The London Magazine._] [_December, 1821._
I have in my time known few thorough partisans; at least on my own side
of the question. I conceive, however, that the honestest and
strongest-minded men have been so. In general, interest, fear, vanity,
the love of contradiction, even a scrupulous regard to truth and
justice, come to divert them from the popular cause. It is a character
that requires very opposite and almost incompatible qualities—reason and
prejudice, a passionate attachment founded on an abstract idea. He who
can take up a speculative question, and pursue it with the same zeal and
unshaken constancy that he does his immediate interests or private
animosities, he who is as faithful to his principles as he is to
himself, is the true partisan. I do not here speak of the bigot, or the
mercenary or cowardly tool of a party. There are plenty of this
description of persons (a considerable majority of the inhabitants of
every country)—who are ‘ever strong upon the stronger side,’ staunch,
thorough-paced sticklers for their passions and prejudices, and who
stand by their party as long as their party can stand by them. I speak
of those who espouse a cause from liberal motives and with liberal
views, and of the obstacles that are so often found to relax their
perseverance or impair their zeal. These may, I think, be reduced
chiefly to the heads of obligations to friends, of vanity, or the desire
of the lead and distinction, to an over-squeamish delicacy in regard to
appearances, to fickleness of purpose, or to natural timidity and
weakness of nerve.
There is nothing more contemptible than party spirit in one point of
view; and yet it seems inseparable in practice from public principle.
You cannot support measures unless you support men;—you cannot carry any
point or maintain any system, without acting in concert with others. In
theory, it is all very well. We may refine in our distinctions, and
elevate our language to what point we please. But in carrying the most
sounding words and stateliest propositions into effect, we must make use
of the instrumentality of men; and some of the alloy and imperfection of
the means may insinuate itself into the end. If we do not go all lengths
with those who are embarked with us in the same views; if we are not
hearty in the defence of their interests and motives; if we are not
fully in their confidence and they in ours; if we do not ingraft on the
stock of public virtue the charities and sentiments of private affection
and esteem; if the bustle and anxiety and irritation of the
state-affairs do not kindle into the glow of friendship as well as
patriotism; if we look distant, suspicious, lukewarm at one another; if
we criticise, carp at, pry into the conduct of our party with watchful,
jealous eyes; it is to be feared we shall play the game into the enemy’s
hands, and not co-operate together for the common good with all the
steadiness and cordiality that might be wished. On the other hand, if we
lend ourselves to the foibles and weaknesses of our friends; if we
suffer ourselves to be implicated in their intrigues, their scrambles
and bargainings for place and power; if we flatter their mistakes, and
not only screen them from the eyes of others, but are blind to them
ourselves; if we compromise a great principle in the softness of a
womanish friendship; if we entangle ourselves in needless family-ties;
if we sell ourselves to the vices of a patron, or become the mouthpiece
and echo of a _coterie_; we shall be in that case slaves of a faction,
not servants of the public, nor shall we long have a spark of the old
Roman or the old English virtue left. Good-nature, conviviality,
hospitality, habits of acquaintance and regard, favours received or
conferred, spirit and eloquence to defend a friend when pressed hard
upon, courtesy and good-breeding, are one thing—patriotism, firmness of
principle, are another. The true patriot knows when to make each of
these in turn give way to or control the other, in furtherance of the
common good, just as the accomplished courtier makes all other
interests, friendships, cabals, resentments, reconciliations,
subservient to his attachment to the person of the king. He has the
welfare of his country, the cause of mankind at heart, and makes that
the scale in which all other motives are weighed as in a balance. With
this inward prompter, he knows when to speak and when to hold his
tongue, when to temporise, and when to throw away the scabbard, when to
make men of service to principles, and when to make principles the sole
condition of popularity,—nearly as well as if he had a title or a
pension depending in reversion on his success: for it is true that ‘in
their generation the children of this world are wiser than the children
of light.’ In my opinion, Charles Fox had too much of what we mean by
‘the milk of human kindness’ to be a practical statesman, particularly
in critical times, and with a cause of infinite magnitude at stake. He
was too easy a friend, and too generous an enemy. He was willing to
think better of those with whom he acted, or to whom he was opposed,
than they deserved. He was the creature of temperament and sympathy, and
suffered his feelings to be played upon, and to get the better of his
principles, which were not of the most rigid kind—not ‘stuff o’ the
conscience.’ With all the power of the crown, and all the strongholds of
prejudice and venality opposed to him, ‘instead of a softness coming
over the heart of a man,’ he should (in such a situation) have ‘turned
to the stroke his adamantine scales that feared no discipline of human
hands,’ and made it a struggle _ad internecionem_ on the one side, as it
was on the other. There was no place for moderation, much less for
huckstering and trimming. Mr. Burke saw the thing right enough. It was a
question about a principle—about the existence or extinction of human
rights in the abstract. He was on the side of legitimate slavery; Mr.
Fox on that of natural liberty. That was no reason he should be less
bold or jealous in her defence, because he had every thing to contend
against. But he made too many coalitions, too many compromises with
flattery, with friendship, (to say nothing of the baits of power) not to
falter and be defeated at last in the noble stand he had made for the
principles of freedom.
Another sort are as much too captious and precise, as these are lax and
_cullible_ in their notions of political warfare. Their fault is an
overweening egotism, as that of the former was too great a facility of
temper. They will have every thing their own way to the minutest tittle,
or they cannot think of giving it their sanction and support. The cause
must come to them, they will not go to the cause. They stand upon their
punctilio. They have a character at stake, which is dearer to them than
the whole world. They have an idea of perfect truth and beauty in their
own minds, the contemplation of which is a never-failing source of
delight and consolation to them,
‘Though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk,’
and which they will not soil by mixing it up with the infirmities of any
cause or any party. They will not, ‘to do a great right, do a little
wrong.’ They will let the lofty pillar inscribed to human liberty fall
to the ground sooner than extend a finger to save it, on account of the
dust and cobwebs that cling to it. It is not this great and mighty
object they are thinking of all the time, but their own fantastic
reputation and puny pretensions. While the world is tumbling about our
ears, and the last hold of liberty, the ark containing our birth-right,
the only possible barrier against barefaced tyranny, is
tottering—instead of setting the engines and the mortal instruments at
work to prop it, and fighting in the trenches to the last drop, they are
washing their hands of all imaginary imperfections, and looking in the
glass of their own vanity, with an air of heightened self-complacency.
Alas! they do not foresee the fatal consequences; they have an eye only
to themselves. While all the power, the prejudice, and ignorance of
mankind are drawn up in deadly array against the advance of truth and
justice, they owe it to themselves, forsooth! to state the naked merits
of the question (heat and passion apart) and pick out all the faults of
which their own party has been guilty, to fling as a make-weight into
the adversary’s scale of unmeasured abuse and execration. They will not
take their ready stand by the side of him who was ‘the very arm and
burgonet of man,’ and like a demi-Atlas, could alone prop a declining
world, because for themselves they have some objections to the
individual instrument, and they think principles more important than
persons. No, they think persons of more consequence than principles, and
themselves most of all. They injure the principle, through the person
most able to protect it. They betray the cause by not defending it as it
is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and
without remorse. When every thing is at stake, dear and valuable to man,
as man; when there is but the one dreadful alternative of entire loss,
or final recovery of truth and freedom, it is no time to stand upon
trifles and moot-points; that great object is to be secured first, and
at all hazards.
‘Entire affection scorneth nicer hands.’
But there is a third thing in their minds, a fanciful something which
they prefer to both contending parties. It may be so; but neither they
nor we can get it. We must have one of the two things imposed upon us,
not by choice but by hard necessity. ‘Our bane and antidote are both
before us:’ and if we do anything to neglect the one, we justly incur
the heavy, intolerable, unredeemed penalty of the other. If our pride is
stung, if we have received a blow or the lie in our own persons, we know
well enough what to do: our blood is up, we have an actual feeling and
object to satisfy; and we are not to be diverted from our purpose by
sophistry or mere words. The quarrel is personal to ourselves; and we
feel the whole stress of it, rousing every faculty and straining every
nerve. But if the quarrel is general to mankind; if it is one in which
the rights, freedom, hopes, and happiness of the whole world are
embarked; if we see the dignity of our common nature prostrate, trampled
upon and mangled before the brute image of power, this gives us little
concern; our reason may disapprove, but our passions, our prejudices,
are not touched; and therefore our reason, our humanity, our abstract
love of right (not ‘screwed to the sticking place’ by some paltry
interest of our own) are easily satisfied with any hollow professions of
good-will, or put off with vague excuses, or staggered with open
defiance. We are here, where a principle only is in danger, at leisure
to calculate consequences, prudently for ourselves, or favourably for
others: were it a point of honour (we think the honour of human nature
is not our honour, that its disgrace is not our disgrace—we are not the
_rabble_!) we should throw consideration and compassion to the dogs, and
cry—‘Away to Heaven respective lenity, and fire-eyed fury be my conduct
now!’ But charity is cold. We are the dupes of the flatteries of our
opponents, because we are indifferent to our own object: we stand in awe
of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our
persons. They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have
nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will;
they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters
of mankind, or to be hurled from high,—
‘To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!’
They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is
with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground
that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no
concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all
that makes for them; if they pause, it is to gain time; if they offer
terms, it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you
relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new
efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand
upon more ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the
gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of
inquiry, and _douce humanité_. Their object is to destroy you, your
object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied
dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that
will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to
undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the
difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again
resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition
and a practical interest.
One thing that makes tyrants bold is, that they have the power to
justify their wrong. They lay their hands upon the sword, and ask who
will dispute their commands. The friends of humanity and justice have
not in general this ark of confidence to recur to, and can only appeal
to reason and propriety. They oppose power on the plea of right and
conscience; and shall they, in pursuance of their claims, violate in the
smallest tittle what is due to truth and justice? So that the one have
no law but their wills, and the absolute extent of their authority, in
attaining or securing their ends, because they make no pretensions to
scrupulous delicacy: the others are cooped and cabined in, by all sorts
of nice investigations in philosophy, and misgivings of the moral sense;
that is, are deprived or curtailed of the means of succeeding in their
ends, because those ends are not barefaced violence and wrong. It might
as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the
highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as
best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate
and make reprisals on the common enemies of mankind in their own style
and mode of execution. Is not a man to defend his liberty, or the
liberties of his fellow-men, as strenuously and remorselessly as he
would his life or his purse? Men are Quakers in political principle,
Turks and Jews in private conscience.
The whole is an error, arising from confounding the distinction between
theory and practice, between the still-life of letters and the tug and
onset of contending factions. I might recommend to our political
mediators the advice which Henry V. addressed to his soldiers on a
critical occasion.
‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass-cannon: let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean:
Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit
To his full height.’
So, in speculation, refine as much as you please, intellectually and
morally speaking, and you may do it with advantage. Reason is then the
instrument you use, and you cannot raise the standard of perfection you
fix upon and propose to others too high, or proceed with too much
candour and moderation in the advancement of truth: but in practice, you
have not your choice of ends or means. You have two things to decide
between, the extreme, probably, of an evil and a considerable good, and
if you will not make your mind up to take the best of the two with all
its disadvantages and draw-backs you must be contented to take the
worst: for as you cannot alter the state of the conflicting parties who
are carrying their point by force, or dictate what is best by a word
speaking; so by finding fault with the attainable good, and throwing
cold water on it, you add fuel to your enemy’s courage and assist his
success. ‘Those who are not for us are against us.’ You create a
diversion in his favour, by distracting and enervating men’s minds, as
much as by questioning the general’s orders, or drawing off a strong
detachment in the heat of a battle. Political, is like military warfare.
There are but two sides, and after you have once chosen your party, it
will not do to stand in the midway, and say you like neither. There is
no other to like, in the eye of common sense, or in the practical and
inevitable result of the thing. As active partisans, we must take up
with the best we can get in the circumstances, and defend it with all
our might against a worse cause (which will prevail, if this does not)
instead of ‘letting our frail thoughts dally with faint surmise;’—or,
while dreaming of an ideal perfection, we shall find ourselves surprised
into the train, and gracing the triumph, of the common enemy. It is
sufficient if our objects and principles are sound and disinterested. If
we were engaged in a friendly contest, where integrity and fair dealing
were the order of the day, our means might be as unimpeachable as our
ends; but in a struggle with the passions, interests, and prejudices of
men, right reason, pure intention, are hardly competent to carry us
through: we want another stimulus. The vices may be opposed to each
other sometimes with advantage and propriety. A little of the alloy of
human frailty may be allowed to lend its aid to the service of humanity;
and if we have only so much obstinacy or insensibility as enables us to
persevere in the path of public duty with more determination and effect,
both our motives and conduct will be above the ordinary standard of
political morality. To suppose that we can do much more than this, or
that we can set up our individual opinion of what is best in itself, or
of the best means of attaining it, and be listened to by the world at
large, is egregiously to overrate their docility or our own powers of
persuasion.
It is the same want of a centripetal force, of a ruling passion, of a
moral instinct of union and co-operation for a general purpose, that
makes men fly off into knots and factions, and each set up for the
leader of a party himself. Where there is a strong feeling of interest
at work, it reconciles and combines the most discordant materials, and
fits them to their place in the social machine. But in the conduct and
support of the public good, we see ‘nothing but vanity, chaotic vanity.’
There is no forbearance, no self-denial, no magnanimity of proceeding.
Every one is seeking his own aggrandisement, or to supplant his
neighbour, instead of advancing the popular cause. It is because they
have no real regard for it but as it serves as a stalking-horse to their
ambition, restless inquietude, or love of cabal. They abuse and vilify
their own party, just as they do the Ministers.
‘Each lolls his tongue out at the other,
And shakes his empty noddle at his brother.’
John Bull does not aim so maliciously, or hit so hard at Whigs and
Reformers, as Cobbett. The reason is, that a very large proportion of
these Marplots and regenerators of the world are actuated by no love of
their species or zeal for a general question, but by envy, malice, and
all uncharitableness. They are discontented with themselves and with
every thing about them. They object to, they dissent from every measure.
Nothing pleases their fastidious tastes. For want of something to
exercise their ill-humour and troublesome officiousness upon, they abuse
the Government:—when they are baulked or tired of this they fall foul of
one another. The slightest slip or difference of opinion is never
forgiven, but gives birth to a deadly feud. Touch but their petty
self-importance, and out comes a flaming denunciation of their own
cabal, and all they know about the individuals composing it. This is not
patriotism, but spleen—a want of something to do and to talk about—of
sense, honesty, and feeling. To wreak their spite on an individual, they
will ruin the cause, and serve up the friend and idol of the people
sliced and carbonadoed, a delicious morsel to the other side. There is a
strange want of keeping in this. They are true neither to themselves nor
to their principles. The Reformers are in general, it must be confessed,
an ill-conditioned set; and they should be told of this infirmity that
most easily besets them. When they find their gall and bitterness
overflowing on the very persons who take the lead, and deservedly take
the lead, in their affairs, for some slight flaw or misunderstanding,
they should be taught to hold their tongues, or be drummed out of the
regiment as spies and informers.
Trimming, and want of spirit to declare the honest truth, arise in part
from the same source. When a man is not thoroughly convinced of an
opinion, or where he does not feel a deep interest in it, he does not
like to make himself obnoxious by avowing it; is willing to make all the
allowance he can for difference of sentiment, and consults his own
safety by retiring from a sinking cause. This is the very time when the
genuine partisan, who has a rooted attachment to a principle, and feels
it as a part of himself, finds himself most called upon to come forward
in its support. His anxiety for truth and justice leaves him in no fear
for himself, and the sincerity of his motives makes him regardless of
censure or obloquy. His profession of hearty devotion to freedom was not
an ebullition called forth by the sunshine of prosperity, a lure for
popularity and public favour; and when these desert it, he still
maintains his post with his integrity. There is a natural timidity of
mind, also, which can never go the whole length of any opinion, but is
always interlarding its qualified assent with unmeaning _buts_ and
_ifs_; as there is a levity and discursiveness of imagination which
cannot settle finally in any belief, and requires a succession of
glancing views, topics, and opposite conclusions, to satisfy its
appetite for intellectual variety. I have known persons leave the cause
of independence and freedom, not because they found it unprofitable, but
because they found it flat and stale for want of novelty. At the same
time, interest is a great stimulator; and perhaps the success of their
early principles might have reconciled them to their embarrassing
monotony. Few persons have strength and simplicity of mind (without some
additional inducement) to be always harping on the same string, or to
put up with the legitimate variety to be found in an abstract principle,
applicable to all emergencies. They like changeable silks better than
lasting homespun. A sensible man once mentioned to me his having called
on —— that morning, who entertained him with a _tirade_ against the
Bourbons for two hours; but he said he did not at all feel convinced
that he might not have been writing Ultra-royalist paragraphs for the
——, just before he came, in their favour, and only shifted his side of
the argument, as a man who is tired of lying too long on one side of his
body is glad to turn to the other. There was much shrewdness, and equal
probability in this conjecture.
I think the spirit of partisanship is of use in a point of view that has
not been distinctly adverted to. It serves as a conductor to carry off
our antipathies and ill-blood in a quarter and a manner that is least
hurtful to the general weal. A thorough partisan is a good hater; but he
hates only one side of a question, and that the _outside_. His bigotry
throws human nature into strong light and shade; he has his sympathies
as well as his antipathies; it is not all black or a dull drab-colour.
He does not generalise in his contempt or disgust, or proceed from
individuals to universals. He lays the faults and vices of mankind to
the account of sects and parties, creeds and classes. Man in himself is
a good sort of animal. It is the being a Tory or a Whig (as it may
happen) that makes a man a knave or fool; but then we hardly look upon
him as of the same species with ourselves. Kings are not arbitrary, nor
priests hypocritical, because they are men, but because they are kings
and priests. We form certain nominal abstractions of these classes,
which the more we dislike them, the less natural do they seem, and leave
the general character of the species untouched, or act as a foil to it.
There is nothing that is a greater damper to party spirit than to
suggest that the errors and enormities of both sides arise from certain
inherent dispositions, common to the species. It shocks the liberal and
enlightened among us, to suppose that under any circumstances they could
become bigots, tools, persecutors. They wipe their hands clean of all
such aspersions. There is a great gulph of prejudice and passion placed
between us and our opponents; and this is interpreted into a natural
barrier and separation of sentiment and feeling. ‘Our withers are
unwrung.’ Burke represented modern revolutionists to himself, under the
equivocal similitude of ‘green-eyed, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed
philosophers, whether going on two legs or on four;’ and thus removed to
a distance from his own person all the ill attributes with which he had
complimented the thorough-bred metaphysician. By comparing the plausible
qualities of a Minister of state to the sleekness of the panther, I
myself seem to have no more affinity with that whole genus, than with
the whiskers and claws of that formidable and spirited animal. Bishop
Taylor used to reprimand his rising pride by saying, at the sight of a
reprobate, ‘There goes my wicked self:’ we do not apply the same method
politically, and say, ‘There goes my Tory or my Jacobin self.’ We
suppose the two things incompatible. The Calvinist damns the Arminian,
the Protestant the Papist, &c. but it is not for a difference of nature,
but an opposition of opinion. The spirit of partizanship is not a spirit
of our misanthropy. But for the vices and errors of example and
institution, mankind are (on this principle) only a little lower than
the angels: it is false doctrine and absurd prejudices that make demons
of them. The only original sin is differing in opinion with us: of that
they are curable like any occasional disorder, and the man comes out,
from beneath the husk of his party and prejudices, pure and immaculate.
Make proselytes of them, let them come over to our way of thinking, and
they are a different race of beings quite. This is to be effected by the
force of argument and the progress of knowledge. It is well, it is
perfectly well. We cast the slough of our vices with the shibboleth of
our party; a Reform in Parliament would banish all knavery and folly
from the land. It is not the same wretched little mischievous animal,
man, that is alike under all denominations and all systems, and in whom
different situations and notions only bring out different inherent,
incorrigible vices and propensities; but the professions and the theory
being changed for the one, which we think the only true and infallible
one, the whole world, by the mere removal of our arbitrary prejudices
and modes of thinking, would become as sincere, as benevolent, as
independent, and as worthy people as we are! To hate and proscribe half
the species under various pretexts and nicknames, seems, therefore, the
only way to entertain a good opinion of ourselves and mankind in
general.
‘THE PIRATE’
_The London Magazine._] [_January, 1822._
This is not the best, nor is it the worst (the worst is good enough for
us) of the Scotch Novels. There is a story in it, an interest excited
almost from the first, a clue which you get hold of and wish to follow
out; a mystery to be developed, and which does not disappoint you at
last. After you once get into the stream, you read on with eagerness,
and have only to complain of the number of impediments and diversions
thrown in your way. The author is evidently writing to gain time, to
make up his complement of volumes, his six thousand guineas worth of
matter; and to get to the end of your journey, and satisfy the curiosity
he has raised, you must be content to travel with him, stop when he
stops, and turn out of the road as often as he pleases. He dallies with
your impatience, and smiles in your face, but you cannot, and dare not
be angry with him, while with his giant-hand he plays at pushpin with
the reader, and sweeps the rich stakes from the table. He has, they say,
got a _plum_ by his writings. What have not the public got by reading
them? The course of exchange is, and will be, in our favour, as long as
he gives us one volume for ourselves, and two for himself. Who is there
that has not been the better, the wiser, and happier man for these fine
and inexhaustible productions of genius? The more striking characters
and situations are not quite so highly wrought up in the present, as in
some former instances, nor are they so crowded, so thickly sown. But the
genius of the author is not exhausted, nor can it be so till not a
Scotch superstition, or popular tradition is left, or till the pen drops
lifeless and regretted from its master’s hand. Ah! who will then call
the mist from its hill? Who will make the circling eddies roar? Who,
with his ‘so potent art,’ will dim the sun, or stop the winds, that wave
the forest-heads, in their course? Who will summon the spirits of the
northern air from their chill abodes, or make gleaming lake or hidden
cavern teem with wizard, or with elfin forms? There is no one but the
Scottish Prospero, but old Sir Walter, can do the trick aright. He is
the very genius of the clime—mounts in her old grey clouds, dips in her
_usquebaugh_ and whiskey!—startles you with her antique Druid spells in
the person of Elshie, or stirs up the fierce heat of her theological
fires with Macbriar and Kettle-drumle: sweeps the country with a far
war-cry to Lochiel, or sighs out the soul of love in the perfumed breath
of the Lily of St. Leonard’s. Stand thou, then, Meg Merrilies, on the
point of thy fated rock, with wild locks and words streaming to the
wind; and sit thou there in thy narrow recess, Balfour of Burley,
betwixt thy Bible and thy sword, thy arm of flesh and arm of the
Spirit:—when the last words have passed the lips of the author of
Waverley, there will be none to re-kindle your fires, or recall your
spirit! Let him write on then to the last drop of ink in his ink-stand,
even though it should not be made according to the model of that
described by Mr. Coleridge, and we will not be afraid to read whatever
he is not ashamed to publish. We are the true and liege subjects of his
pen, and profess our ultra-fealty in this respect, like the old French
leaguers, with a _Quand même_.
The Pirate is not what we expected, nor is it new. We had looked for a
prodigious _row_—landing and boarding, cut and thrust, blowing up of
ships, and sacking of sea-ports, with the very devil to pay, and a noise
to deafen clamour,
‘Guns, drums, trumpets,
Blunderbusses and thunder.’
We supposed that for the time ‘Hell itself would be empty, and all the
devils be here.’ _There be land pirates and water pirates_; and we
thought Sir Walter would be for kicking up just such a dust by sea, in
the Buccaneers, (as it was to be called) as he has done by land in Old
Mortality. _Multum abludit imago._ There is nothing or little of the
sort. There is here (bating a sprinkling of twenty pages of roaring
lads, who come on shore for no use but to get themselves hanged in the
Orkneys,) only a single Pirate, a peaking sort of gentleman, spiteful,
but not enterprising; in love, and inclined to take up and reform, but
very equivocal in the sentiments he professes, and in those he inspires
in others. Cleveland is the Pirate, who is wrecked off the coast of
Zetland, is saved from destruction by young Mordaunt Mertoun, who had
been so far the hero of the piece, and jilts him with his mistress,
Minna, a grave sentimentalist, and the elder of two sisters, to whom
Mordaunt had felt a secret and undeclared passion. The interest of the
novel hinges on this _bizarre_ situation of the different parties. Sir
Walter (for he has in the present work leisure on his hands to
philosophize) here introduces a dissertation of some length, but not
much depth, to show that the jilting of favoured, or half-favoured
lovers, comes by the dispensation of Providence, and that the breed of
honest men and bonny lasses would be spoiled if the fairest of the fair,
the sentimental Miss, and the prude (contrary to all previous and
common-place calculation), did not prefer the blackguard and the bravo,
to the tender, meek, puny, unpretending, heartbroken lover. We do not
think our novelist manages his argument well, or shines in his new
Professor’s chair of morality. Miss Polly Peachum, we do indeed
remember, the artless, soft, innocent Polly, fell in love with the bold
Captain Macheath; but so did Miss Lucy Lockitt too, who was no chicken,
and who, according to this new balance of power in the empire of love,
ought to have tempered her fires with the phlegm of some young chaplain
to the prison, or the soft insinuations of some dreaming poet. But as
our author himself is not in a hurry to get on with his story, we will
imitate him, and let him speak here in his superfluous character of a
casuist, or commentator on his own narrative.
[A long passage from Chap, XIII., beginning ‘Captain Cleveland sate
betwixt the sisters,’ follows.]
Suffice it to say, that we differ from this solution of the difficulty,
ingenious and old as it is; and to justify that opinion, ask only
whether such a man as Cleveland would not be a general favourite with
women, instead of being so merely with those of a particularly retired
and fantastic character, which destroys the author’s balance of
qualities in love? Indeed, his own story is a very bad illustration of
his doctrine; for this romantic and imprudent attachment of the gentle
and sensitive Minna to the bold and profligate Captain Cleveland leads
to nothing but the most disastrous consequences; and the opposition
between their sentiments and characters, which was to make them fit
partners for life, only prevents the possibility of their union, and
renders both parties permanently miserable. Besides, the whole
perplexity is, after all, gratuitous. The enmity between Cleveland and
young Mertoun (the chief subject of the plot) is founded on their
jealousy of each other in regard to Minna, and yet there had been no
positive engagement between her and Mertoun, who, like Edmund in Lear,
is equally betrothed to both sisters—in the end marrying the one that he
as well as the reader likes least. Afterwards, when the real character
of this gay rover of the seas is more fully developed, and he gets into
scrapes with the police of Orkney, the grave, romantic Minna, like a
true northern lass, deserts him, and plays off a little old-fashioned,
unavailing, but discreet morality upon him. When the reader begins to
sympathise with ‘a brave man in distress,’ then is the time for his
mistress with ‘the pale face and raven locks’ to look to her own
character. We like the theory of the Beggar’s Opera better than this:
the ladies there followed their supposed hero, their _beau ideal_ of a
lover, to prison, instead of leaving him to his untoward fate. Minna is
no NUT-BROWN MAID, though she has a passion for outlaws, between whose
minds and those of the graver and more reflecting of the fair sex there
is, according to the opinion of our GREAT UNKNOWN, a secret and
pre-established harmony. What is still more extraordinary and
unsatisfactory in the progress of the story is this—all the pretended
preternatural influence of Norna of the Fitful-Head, the most potent and
impressive personage in the drama, is exerted to defeat Cleveland’s
views, and to give Minna to Mordaunt Mertoun, for whom she conceives an
instinctive and anxious attachment as her long-lost son; and yet in the
end the whole force of this delusion, and the reader’s sympathies, are
destroyed by the discovery that Cleveland, not Mertoun, is her real
offspring, and that she has been equally led astray by her maternal
affection and preternatural pretensions. Does this great writer of
romances, this profound historiographer of the land of visions and of
second sight, thus mean to qualify his thrilling mysteries—to _back_ out
of his thrice-hallowed prejudices, and to turn the tables upon us with
modern cant and philosophic scepticism? That is the last thing we could
forgive him!
We have said that the characters of the Pirate are not altogether new.
Norna, the enchantress, whom he is ‘so fond’ at last to depose from her
_ideal_ cloudy throne of spells and mystic power, is the Meg Merrilies
of the scene. She passes over it with vast strides, is at hand whenever
she is wanted, sits hatching fate on the topmost tower that overlooks
the wilderness of waves, or glides suddenly from a subterraneous
passage, and in either case moulds the elements of nature, and the
unruly passions of men, to her purposes. She has ‘strange power of
speech,’ weaves events with words, is present wherever she pleases, and
performs what she wills, and yet she doubts her own power, and
criticises her own pretensions. Meg Merrilies was an honester witch. She
at least stuck true to herself. We hate anything by halves; and most of
all, imagination and superstition piece-meal. Cleveland, again, is a
sort of inferior _Gentle Geordie_, and Minna lags after Effie Deans, the
victim of misplaced affection, but far, far behind. Wert thou to live a
thousand years, and write a thousand romances, thou wouldst never, old
True-penny, beat thy own _Heart of Mid Lothian_! It is for that we can
forgive thee all that thou didst mean to write in the BEACON, or hast
written elsewhere, beneath the dignity of thy genius and knowledge of
man’s weaknesses, as well as better nature! Magnus Troil is a great
name, a striking name; but we _ken_ his person before; he is of the same
genealogy as the Bailie Braidwardine, and other representatives of old
Scottish hospitality; the dwarf Nick Strumpfer is of a like familiar
breed, only uglier and more useless than any former one: we have even
traces, previous to the Pirate, of the extraordinary agriculturist and
projector, Mr. Timothy Yellowley, and his sister, Miss Barbara
Yellowley, with pinched nose and grey eyes; but we confess we have one
individual who was before a stranger to us, at least in these parts,
namely, Claud Halcro, the poet, and friend of ‘Glorious John.’ We do not
think him in his place amidst dwarfs, witches, pirates, and _Udallers_;
and his stories of the Wits’ Coffee-house and Dryden’s poetry are as
tedious to the critical reader as they are to his Zetland patron and
hearers. We might confirm this opinion by a quotation, but we should be
thought too tedious. He fills up, we will venture to say, a hundred
pages of the work with sheer impertinence, with _pribble prabble_.
Whenever any serious matter is to be attended to, Claud Halcro pulls out
his fiddle and draws the long bow, and repeats some verses of ‘_Glorious
John_.’ Bunce, the friend of Cleveland, is much better; for we can
conceive how a strolling-player should turn gentleman-rover in a time of
need, and the foppery and finery of the itinerant stage-hero become the
quarter-deck exceedingly well. In general, however, our author’s humour
requires the aid of costume and dialect to set it off to advantage: his
wit is Scotch, not English wit. It must have the _twang_ of the uncouth
pronunciation and peculiar manners of the country in it. The elder
Mertoun is a striking misanthropic sketch; but it is not very well made
out in what his misanthropy originates, nor to what it tends. He is
merely a part of the machinery: neither is he the first gentleman in
these Novels who lands without an introduction on the remote shores of
Scotland, and shuts himself up (for reasons best known to himself) in
inaccessible and solitary confinement. We had meant to give the outline
of the story of the Pirate, but we are ill at a plot, and do not care to
blunt the edge of the reader’s curiosity by anticipating each
particular. As far, however, as relates to the historical foundation of
the narrative, the author has done it to our hands, and we give his
words as they stand in the _Advertisement_.
[Nearly the whole of the Advertisement is quoted.]
Of the execution of these volumes we need hardly speak. It is inferior,
but it is only inferior to some of his former works. Whatever he
touches, we see the hand of a master. He has only to describe action,
thoughts, scenes, and they everywhere speak, breathe, and live. It
matters not whether it be a calm sea-shore, a mountain tempest, a
drunken brawl, the ‘Cathedral’s choir and gloom,’ the Sybil’s
watch-tower, or the smuggler’s cave; the things are immediately there
that we should see, hear, and feel. He is Nature’s Secretary. He neither
adds to, nor takes away from her book; and that makes him what he is,
the most popular writer living. We might give various instances of his
unrivalled undecaying power, but shall select only one or two with which
we were most struck and delighted in the perusal. The characters of the
two sisters, daughters of Magnus Troil, and the heroines of the tale,
are thus beautifully drawn.
[Here follows the description of Minna and Brenda, from Chap. III.]
So much for elegant Vandyke portrait-painting. Now for something of the
Salvator style. Norna, the terrific and unhappy Norna, is thus finely
introduced.
[The first introduction of Norna is quoted from Chap. V.]
We give one more extract in a different style; and we think the comic
painting in it is little inferior to Hogarth’s.
[A passage, beginning ‘Now the fortunate arrival of Mordaunt,’ &c. is
quoted from Chap. XI.]
Shall we go on? No, but will leave the reader to revel at ease in the
luxuries of feeling and description scattered through the rest of the
work.
We have only time to add two remarks more, which we do not remember to
have seen made. One relates to the exquisitely good-natured and liberal
tone displayed in the author’s quotations from living writers. He takes
them every one by turns, and of all factions in poetry and politics,
under his wing, and sticks a stanza from Coleridge, from Wordsworth,
from Byron, from Crabbe, from Rogers, as a motto to his chapters, not
jealous of their popularity, nor disdaining their obscurity. The author
can hardly guess how much we like him for this. The second thing we
would advert to is a fault, and a remarkable one. It is the slovenliness
of the style and badness of the grammar throughout these admirable
productions. Badness of the grammar! Slovenly style! What do you mean by
that? Take a few instances, and we have done with the subject for ever.
We give them _seriatim_, as we marked them in the margin.
‘Here Magnus proceeded with great _animation_, sipping from _time_ to
_time_ the half diluted spirit, which at the same _time animated_ his
resentment against the intruders,’ etc. P. 16.
‘In those days (for the _present_ times are greatly altered for the
better) the _presence_ of a superior in such a situation,’ etc. P. 21.
‘The _information_, which she acquired by habits of patient attention,
_were_ indelibly rivetted in a naturally powerful memory.’ P. 48.
‘And I know not _whom_ else are expected.’ P. 56.
‘Or perhaps he _preferred_ the situation, of the house and farm which he
himself was to occupy (which indeed was a tolerable one) as _preferable_
to that, etc.’ P. 89.
‘The _strength_ of the retiring wave proved even _stronger_ than he had
expected,’ etc. P. 169.
But let us have done with this, and leave it to the Editor of the
Quarterly Review to take up the subject as a mighty important little
discovery of his own!
‘PEVERIL OF THE PEAK’
_The London Magazine._] [_February, 1823._
The author of Waverley is here himself again; and it is on English
ground that he has come upon his feet. Peveril of the Peak is all but
equal to the best of the SCOTCH NOVELS. It is no weaving up of old odds
and ends; no lazy repetition of himself at second-hand, and _the worse
for the wear_. Peveril is all new, good,[65] full of life, spirit,
character, bustle, incident, and expectation; nothing is wanting to make
it quite equal to the very best of his former productions, but that it
has not the same intense interest, nor the same preternatural and
overpowering imagery. Fenella, a deaf and dumb dwarf, attached to the
Countess of Derby, is, indeed, an exquisitely drawn character, and
exerts a sort of quaint, apparently magic influence over the scene; but
her connection with it is so capricious, so ambiguous, and at last so
improbable, as to produce or to leave none of those thrilling and
awe-struck impressions which were so irresistibly interwoven with some
former delineations of the same kind. But as a sketch, as a picture, the
little fairy attendant of the Queen of Man is one of the most beautiful
and interesting the author ever struck out with his enchanting and
enchanted pencil. The present Novel comes the nearest to OLD MORTALITY,
both in the class of subjects of which it treats, and in the
indefatigable spirit and hurried movement of the execution. It differs
from that noble master-piece in this, that Sir Walter (or whoever else,
in the devil’s name, it is) has not infused the same depth or loftiness
of sentiment into his English Roundheads and Cavaliers, as into his
Scotch Covenanters and Royalists; that the characters are left more in
the outlines and dead colouring; and though the incidents follow one
another as rapidly, and have great variety and contrast, there is not
the same accumulation of interest, the same thickening of the plot, nor
the same thronging together of eager and complicated groups upon the
canvas. His English imagination is not so fully peopled with character,
manners, and sentiment, as his Scotch understanding is; but, by the
mass, they are not ‘thinly scattered to make up a show.’ There is _cut
and come again_. We say this the more willingly, because we were among
those who conceived there was a falling off, a _running to seed_, in
some of the later productions of the author. The FORTUNES OF NIGEL
showed a resuscitation in his powers; that is, a disposition to take new
ground, and proceed with real pains and unabated vigour; and in his
Peveril, we think he has completed his victory over excusable idleness
and an inexcusable disregard of reputation. He may now go on upon a
fresh lease, and write ten more Novels, just as good or as bad as he
pleases!
There were two things that we used to admire of old in this author, and
that we have had occasion to admire anew in the present instance, the
extreme life of mind or naturalness displayed in the descriptions, and
the magnanimity and freedom from bigotry and prejudice shewn in the
drawing of the characters. This last quality is the more remarkable, as
the reputed author is accused of being a thorough-paced partisan in his
own person,—intolerant, mercenary, mean; a professed toad-eater, a
sturdy hack, a pitiful retailer or suborner of infamous slanders, a
literary Jack Ketch, who would greedily sacrifice any one of another way
of thinking as a victim to prejudice and power, and yet would do it by
other hands, rather than appear in it himself. Can this be all true of
the author of Waverley; and does he deal out such fine and heaped
justice to all sects and parties in time past? Perhaps (if so) one of
these extremes accounts for the other; and, as ‘he knows all qualities
with a learned spirit,’ probably he may be aware of this practical
defect in himself, and be determined to shew to posterity, that when his
own interest was not concerned, he was as free from that nauseous and
pettifogging bigotry, as a mere matter of speculation, as any man could
be. As a novel-writer, he gives the devil his due, and he gives no more
to a saint. He treats human nature scurvily, yet handsomely; that is,
much as it deserves; and, if it is the same person who is the author of
the Scotch novels, and who has a secret moving hand in certain Scotch
Newspapers and Magazines, we may fairly characterize him as
‘The wisest, _meanest_ of mankind.’
Among other characters in the work before us, is that of Ned Christian,
a cold-blooded hypocrite, pander, and intriguer; yet a man of prodigious
talent,—of great versatility,—of unalterable self-possession and good
humour, and with a power to personate agreeably, and to the life, any
character he pleased. Might not such a man have written the Scotch
Novels?
It has been suggested, with great modesty, that the Author of Waverley
was like Shakspeare. We beg leave with equal modesty to suggest another
comparison, which we think much nearer the mark; and that is, to the
writings of Mr. Cobbett. The peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mind is (we
humbly apprehend) that sort of power which completely levels the
distinction between imagination and reality. His mind properly has
wings, and it is indifferent to him whether he treads the air or walks
the earth. He makes us acquainted with things we did not know before, as
if we knew them familiarly. Now Sir Walter Scott only recals to us what
we already knew—he deals wholly in realities, or what are commonly
received as such; and so does Mr. Cobbett. Both are downright
matter-of-fact minds, and have little, if any, of that power which
throws into objects more than ordinary opinion or feeling connects with
them. Naturalness is the _forte_ of both these writers. They have a
strong, vivid, bodily perception (so to speak), a material intuition of
what they write about. All their ideas are concrete, and not abstracted.
Mention an old, dilapidated castle, and a thriving, substantial brick
mansion to Sir Walter Scott, and he immediately has an actual image of
some such objects conjured up in his mind, and describes them as he has
seen them, with all their local circumstances, and so as to bring back
some similar recollection to the reader’s mind, as if there had been
just two such buildings in the place where he was brought up. But this
revived reality is all; there is no new light thrown upon the subject.
It is a sort of poetic memory. Good. So set Mr. Cobbett to work upon the
subject of our agricultural distress, and with quite as much poetry, as
much of the picturesque, and in as good English as Sir Walter Scott
writes Scotch, he will describe you to the life a turnip-field with the
green sprouts glittering in the sun, the turnips frozen to a mere clod,
the breath of the oxen steaming near that are biting it, and the dumb
patience of the silly sheep. We should like to know whether he is not as
great a hand at this sort of ocular demonstration as Sir Walter himself?
He shall describe a Scotch heath, or an American wilderness against Sir
Walter for a thousand pounds. Then for character; who does it with more
master-strokes, with richer gusto, or a greater number of palpable hits
than the Editor of the Political Register? Again, as to pathos, let Mr.
Cobbett tell a story of a pretty servant girl or soldier’s wife, left by
her sweetheart, or shot dead in his arms, and see if he will not come
near the _Heart of Mid Lothian_? You may say it is not this or that, it
is coarse, low, the man has no feeling, but it is nature, and that’s
quite enough. The truth is, these two original geniuses have found out a
secret; they write as they feel. It is just like school boys being able
to read as they would talk. It is a very awkward difficulty to get over,
but being once accomplished, the effect is prodigious. Then, there is
the same strong sarcastic vein of _roystering_ pot-house humour in the
one as in the other; and as for giving both sides of a question, nobody
has done that more effectually than Mr. Cobbett in the course of his
different writings. His style also is as good, nay, far better: and if
it should be said that Mr. Cobbett sometimes turns blackguard, it cannot
be affirmed that he is a cat’s paw—which is the _dernier resort_ of
humanity, into which Sir Walter has retreated, and shuts himself up in
it impregnably as in a fortress. To conclude this parallel, we will be
bold to say in illustration of our argument, that there is hardly a
single page in the Scotch Novels which Mr. Cobbett could not write, if
he set his mind to it; and there is not a single page in Shakspeare,
either the best or the worst, which he _could_ write for his life, and
let him try ever so. Such is the genius of the three men.
So much by way of preface to our account of the most magnanimous Peveril
of the Peak, and now for extracts. We have not time or limits to give
the story, which, however, relates to the Civil Wars of England; but we
shall furnish our readers with a specimen of the spirit with which it is
written; it is the description of the meeting of Peveril with the dwarf
Fenella, where she tries to prevent his going to meet Alice Bridgenorth
at the Goddard Crovann-stone in the Isle of Man.
[The whole of Chap. XVI. of _Peveril of the Peak_ is set out].
We have been led to such length by the beauty of this description that
we have not room for another extract, or we would give that master-piece
of wit and irony, the scene where Peveril meets with Ganlesse and Smith
at a low alehouse, on his route through Derbyshire.
COMMON PLACES
_The Literary Examiner._] [_September-December 1823._
I. The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
II. Liberty is the only true riches. Of all the rest we are at once the
masters and the slaves.
III. Do I not feel this from the least shadow of restraint, of
obligation, of dependence? Why then do I complain? I have had nothing to
do all my life but to think, and have enjoyed the objects of thought,
the sense of truth and beauty, in perfect integrity of soul. No one has
said to me, _Believe this, do that, say what we would have you_; no one
has come between me and my free-will; I have breathed the very air of
truth and independence. Compared with this unbiassed, uncontrouled
possession of the universe of thought and nature, what I have wanted is
light in the balance, and hardly claims the tribute of a sigh. Oh!
Liberty, what a mistress art thou! Have I not enjoyed thee as a bride,
and drank thy spirit as of a wine-cup, and will yet do so to my latest
breath!
IV. But is not Liberty dangerous, and self-will excessive? I do not
think so: for those who are not governed by their own feelings are led
away by prejudice or interest; and reason is a safer guide than opinion,
liberty a nobler one than fear.
V. Do I see a Claude? What is there to prevent me from fixing my eye, my
heart, my understanding, upon it? What sophist shall deter me from
thinking it fine? What is there to make me afraid of expressing what I
think? I enter into all its truth and beauty. I wonder over it, I detect
each hidden grace, I revel and luxuriate in it, without any doubts or
misgivings. Is not this to be master of it and of myself? But is the
picture mine? No—oh! yes, ten times over!
VI. That thing, _a lie_, has never come near my soul. I know not what it
is to fear to think or to say what I think.
VII. I am choked, pent up in any other atmosphere but this. I cannot
imagine how kings and courtiers contrive to exist. I could no more live
without daring to speak, to look, to feel what I thought, than I could
hold in my breath for any length of time. Nor could I bear to debar
others of this privilege. Were it not that the Great would play the part
of slaves themselves, they would hate to be surrounded with nothing but
slaves, and to see meanness and hypocrisy crawling before them, as much
as we do to see a spider crawling in our path.
VIII. I never knew what it was to feel like a footman. How many lords in
waiting can say as much?
IX. When I consider how little difference there is in mankind (either in
body or mind) I cannot help being astonished at the airs some people
give themselves.
X. I am proud up to the point of equality—every thing above or below
_that_ appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
XI. The ignorant and vulgar think that a man wants spirit, if he does
not insult and triumph over them. This is a great mistake.
XII. For a man to be a coxcomb, shews a want of imagination. No one will
ever pride himself on his beauty who has studied the head of the
Antinous, or be in danger of running into the excess of the fashion, who
has any knowledge of the Antique. The _ideal_ is incompatible with
personal vanity.
XIII. A scholar is like a book written in a dead language—it is not
every one that can read in it.
XIV. Just as much as we see in others, we have in ourselves.
XV. A painter gives only his own character in a portrait, whether grave
or gay, gross or refined, wise or foolish. Even in copying a head, there
is some difficulty in making the features unlike our own. A person with
a low forehead or a short chin puts a constraint upon himself in
painting a high forehead or a long chin. So much has sympathy to do with
the operations both of the eye and the hand, with observation and
practice!
XVI. People at a play hiss an unsuccessful author or actor, as if the
latter had committed some heinous crime—he has committed the greatest
crime, that of setting up a superiority over us which he has failed to
make good.
XVII. The rich, who do nothing themselves, represent idleness as the
greatest crime. They have reason: it is necessary that some one should
do something.
XVIII. What a pity that kings and great men do not write books, instead
of mere authors! What superior views they must have of things, and how
the world would be benefited by the communication!
XIX. The greatest proof of superiority is to bear with impertinence.
XX. No truly great man ever thought himself so.
XXI. Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary.
XXII. Abuse is an indirect species of homage.
XXIII. From the height from which the great look down on the world, all
the rest of mankind seem equal.
XXIV. It is a bad style that requires frequent _breaks_ and marks of
admiration.
XXV. It happens in conversation as in different games. One person seems
to excel, till another does better, and we then think no more of the
first.
XXVI. Those who can keep secrets, have no curiosity. We only wish to
gain knowledge, that we may impart it.
XXVII. Genius is native to the soil where it grows—is fed by the air,
and warmed by the sun—and is not a hot-house plant or an exotic.
XXVIII. All truly great works of art are _national_ in their character
and origin.
XXIX. People are distinguished less by a genius for any particular
thing, than by a peculiar tone and manner of feeling and thinking,
whatever be the subject. The same qualities of mind or characteristic
excellence that a man shows in one art, he would probably have displayed
in any other. I have heard Mr. Northcote say, that he thought Sir Joshua
Reynolds would have written excellent genteel comedies. His _Discourses_
certainly are bland and amiable (rather than striking or original) like
his pictures.
XXX. The same kind of excellence may be observed to prevail in different
arts at the same period of time, as characteristic of the spirit of the
age. Fielding and Hogarth were cotemporaries.
XXXI. There is an analogy in the style of certain authors to certain
professions. One writes like a lawyer: it seems as if another would have
made an eminent physician. Mandeville said of Addison that he was ‘a
parson in a tye-wig:’ and there is something in _The Spectator_ to
justify this description of him.
XXXII. Salvator Rosa paints like a soldier; Nicholas Poussin like a
professor at a University; Guido like a finished gentleman; Parmegiano
with something of the air of a dancing master. Alas! Guido was a
gamester and a madman; and Parmegiano a searcher after the philosopher’s
stone. One of the happiest ideas in modern criticism was that of
designating different living poets by the cups Apollo gives them to
drink out of: thus Wordsworth is made to drink out of a wooden bowl,
Lord Byron out of a skull chased with silver, &c.
XXXIII. Extreme impatience and irritability are often combined with a
corresponding degree of indifference and indolence. When the eagerness
of pursuit or the violence of opposition ceases, nothing is left to
interest the mind, that has been once accustomed to a state of morbid
excitement.
XXXIV. Artists and other studious professions are not happy, for this
reason: they cannot enjoy mental repose. A state of lassitude and
languor succeeds to that of overstrained, anxious exertion.
XXXV. It is the custom at present to exclude all but Scientific and
Mechanical subjects from our fashionable Public Institutions, lest any
allusions to popular sentiments or the cause of humanity should by
chance creep in, to the great annoyance of the polite and well-informed
part of the audience.
XXXVI. People had much rather be thought to look ill than old: because
it is possible to recover from sickness, but there is no recovering from
age.
XXXVII. I never knew but one person who had a passion for truth—and only
one who had the same regard to the distinction between right and wrong,
that others have to their own interest.
XXXVIII. Women are the sport of caprice, the slaves of custom.
XXXIX. When men are not favourites with women, it is either from habits
of vulgar debauchery, or from constitutional indifference, or from an
overstrained and pedantic idea of the sex, taken from books, and
answering to nothing in real life.
XL. The object of books is to teach us ignorance; that is, to throw a
veil over nature, and persuade us that things are not what they are, but
what the writer fancies or wishes them to be.
XLI. My little boy said the other day, ‘He could not tell what to do
without a book to read—he should wander about without knowing what to do
with himself.’ So have I wandered about, till now, and, waking from the
dream of books at last, don’t know what to do with myself. My poor
little fellow! may’st thou dream long amidst thy darling books, and
never wake!
XLII. Political truth is a libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
XLIII. The greatest crime in the eye of the world is to endeavour to
instruct or amend it.
XLIV. Weighing remote consequences in the mind is like weighing the air
in scales.
XLV. A hypocrite seems to be the only perfect character—since it
embraces the extremes of what human nature _is_, and of what it _would
be thought_.
XLVI. The Scotch understanding differs from the English, as an
Encyclopedia does from a circulating library. An Englishman is contented
to pick up a few odds and ends of knowledge; a Scotchman is master of
every subject alike. Here each individual has a particular _hobby_ and
favourite bye-path of his own: in Scotland learning is a common hack,
which every one figures away with, and uses at his pleasure.
XLVII. A misanthropic writer might be called _the Devil’s amanuensis_.
XLVIII. To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is the most enviable
distinction of humanity. There is all the pride and sense of
independence, irritated and strengthened by being proscribed by power,
and liable to be harassed by petty daily insults from every, the meanest
vassal. What a situation to make the mind recoil from the world upon
itself, and to sit and brood in moody grandeur and disdain of soul over
fallen splendours and present indignities! It is just the life I should
like to have led.
XLIX. The tone of good company is marked by the absence of
personalities. Among well-informed persons, there are plenty of topics
to discuss, without giving pain to any one present—without submitting to
act the part of a _butt_, or of that still poorer creature, the wag that
plays upon him.
L. Londoners complain of the dullness of the country, and country people
feel equally uncomfortable and at a loss what to do with themselves in
town. The fault is neither in the town nor in the country—every one is
naturally unsettled and dissatisfied without his usual resources and
occupations, let them be _what_ or _where_ they may.
LI. Each rank in society despises that which is a step below it, and the
highest looks down upon them all. To get rid of the impertinence of
artificial pretensions, we resort to nature at last. Kings, for this
reason, are fond of low company; and lords marry actresses and barmaids.
The Duke of York (not the present, but the late King’s brother) was at a
ball at Plymouth. He danced with a Miss Byron, a very pretty girl,
daughter of the admiral of that name, and aunt to our poet. But there
was a Mrs. Fanning present, who was a paragon of beauty. The Duke asked,
‘Who is she?’ ‘A baker’s daughter,’ was the answer. ‘I don’t mean that;
but what is she now?’—‘A broker’s wife.’ The lady did not perceive, that
to a prince of the blood there was little difference between a
tradesman’s wife and the daughter of a naval officer; but that the
handsomest woman at a ball was an object of admiration in spite of
circumstances.
LII. It has been asked, whether Lord Byron is a writer likely to live?
Perhaps not: he has intensity of power, but wants distinctive character.
In my opinion, Mr. Wordsworth is the only poet of the present day that
is likely to live—_should he ever happen to be born_! But who will be
the midwife to bring his works to light? It is a question whether Milton
would have become popular without the help of Addison; nay, it is a
question whether he is so, even with it.
LIII. An anecdote is told of General Wolfe,[66] that he was out with a
party of friends in a boat the day before the Battle of Quebec. It was a
beautiful summer’s evening, and the conversation turned to Gray’s _Elegy
in a Country Churchyard_, which was just then published. Wolfe repeated
the lines, ‘For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,’ &c., with enthusiasm,
and said, ‘I would rather be the author of those lines than beat the
French to-morrow!’ He did beat the French, and was himself killed the
next day. Perhaps it was better to be capable of uttering a sentiment
like this, than to gain a battle or write a poem.
LIV. Authors, a short time since, set upon Government: Government have
of late turned the tables on them, and set upon authors. In one respect,
it must be confessed, the court-tools have greatly the advantage of us:
they can go all lengths in vulgar Billingsgate and abuse, without being
charged with vulgarity. They have the sanction of the Court; they plead
the King’s privilege. It is not to be supposed that any thing inelegant
or gross can be patronised at Carlton-house. Every thing about a place,
even the convenience of an Admiralty secretary, must, one would think,
be kept sweet and wholesome. But instead of the least refinement and
polish, they treat us with nothing, but garbage. A lie and a nickname
are their favourite figures of rhetoric—the alternate substitutes for
wit and argument—the twin-supporters of the Bible and the Crown. They
use us (it seems) contrary to the advice of Hamlet, ‘according to our
own deserts, and not their own dignity.’ The dirt they fling sticks on
their opponents, without soiling their own fingers. Loyalty is ‘the true
fuller’s earth that takes out all stains.’ At all events, do or say what
they can, it is they who are the _gentlemen_, and we who are the
_blackguards_. If we were to call Sir Walter Scott a _Sawney_ writer, or
Mr. Croker _Jackey_, it would be thought shocking, indecent, vulgar, and
no one would look at our publication twice: yet on the Tory side the
same thing passes for the height of sense and wit; and ladies of quality
are delighted with the _John Bull_, gentlemen read _Blackwood_, and
divines take in the _Quarterly_. There is Mr. William Mudford, of the
_Courier_—a vapid common-place hack, pert and dull—but who would think
of calling him by the diminutive of his Christian name? No; these are
the extreme resources reserved for the Court-classics, who, in the zeal
of their loyalty, are allowed to forget their manners. There is, in
fact, nothing too mean for the genius of these writers, or too low for
the taste of their employers.
LV. A Tory can rise no higher than _the assumption of a question_. If he
relied on any thing but custom and authority, he would cease to be a
Tory. He has a prejudice in favour of certain _things_, and against
certain _persons_. This is all he knows of the matter. He therefore
gives you assertions for argument, and abuse for wit. If you ask a
reason for his opinions, he calls you names; and if you ask why he does
so, he proves that he is in the right, by repeating them a thousand
times. A nickname with him is the test of truth. It vents his spleen,
strengthens his own prejudices, and communicates them mechanically to
his hearers.
LVI. When an Elector of Hanover is made into a King of England, what
does he become in the course of a century?—A George the Fourth.
LVII. If I were to give a toast at a loyal and patriotic meeting, it
should be, _Down with the Stuarts all over the world!_
LVIII. The taste of the great in pictures is singular, but not
unaccountable. The King is said to prefer the Dutch to the Italian
school of painting; and if you hint your surprise at this, you are
looked upon as a very Gothic and _outré_ sort of person. You are told,
however, by way of consolation, ‘To be sure, there is Lord Carlisle
likes an Italian picture—Mr. Holwell Carr likes an Italian picture—the
Marquis of Stafford is fond of an Italian picture—Sir George Beaumont
likes an Italian picture.’ These, notwithstanding, are regarded as
quaint and daring exceptions to the established rule; and their
preference is a species of _lèse-majesté_ in the Fine Arts—as great an
eccentricity and want of fashionable etiquette, as if any gentleman or
nobleman still preferred old claret to new, when the King is known to
have changed his mind on this subject, or was guilty of the offence of
dipping his fore-finger and thumb in the middle of a snuff-box, instead
of gradually approximating the contents to the edge of the box,
according to the most approved models. One would imagine that the great
and exalted in station would like lofty subjects in works of art,
whereas they seem to have an exclusive predilection for the mean and
mechanical. One would think those whose word is law, would be pleased
with the great and striking effects of the pencil[67]: on the contrary,
they admire nothing but the little and elaborate. They have a fondness
for cabinet or _furniture_ pictures, and a proportionable antipathy to
works of genius. Even arts with them must be servile, to be tolerated.
Perhaps the seeming contradiction may be thus explained. These persons
are raised so high above the rest of the species, that the more violent
and agitating pursuits of mankind appear to them like the turmoil of
ants on a molehill. Nothing interests them but their own pride and
self-importance. Our passions are to them an impertinence; an expression
of high sentiment they rather shrink from as a ludicrous and upstart
assumption of equality. They, therefore, like what glitters to the eye,
what is smooth to the touch; but they shun, by an instinct of sovereign
taste, whatever has a soul in it, and implies a _reciprocity_ of
feeling. The gods of the earth can have no interest in any thing human;
they are cut off from all sympathy with the ‘bosoms and businesses of
men.’ Instead of requiring to be wound up beyond their habitual feeling
of stately dignity, they wished to have the springs of overstrained
pretension let down, to be relaxed with ‘trifles light as air,’ to be
amused with the familiar and frivolous, and to have the world appear a
scene of _still life_, except as they disturb it! The little in thought
and internal sentiment is a necessary relief and set-off to the
oppressive sense of external magnificence. Hence Kings babble and repeat
they know not what. A childish dotage often accompanies the
consciousness of absolute power. Repose is somewhere necessary, and the
soul sleeps, while the senses gloat around. Besides, the mechanical and
high-finished style of art may be considered as something _done to
order_. It is a task to be executed more or less perfectly, according to
the price given and the industry of the artist. We stand by, as it were,
see the work done, insist upon a greater degree of neatness and
accuracy, and exercise a sort of petty jealous jurisdiction over each
particular. We are judges of the minuteness of the details, and though
ever so nicely executed, as they give us no ideas beyond what we had
before, we do not feel humbled in the comparison. The artisan scarcely
rises into the artist; and the name of genius is degraded, rather than
exalted in his person. The performance is so far ours that we have paid
for it, and the highest price is all that is necessary to produce the
highest finishing. But it is not so in works of genius and imagination.
Their price is above rubies. The inspiration of the Muse comes not with
the _fiat_ of a monarch, with the donation of a patron; and therefore
the Great turn with disgust or effeminate indifference from the mighty
masters of the Italian school because such works baffle and confound
their self-will, and make them feel that there is something in the mind
of man which they can neither give nor take away.
‘Quam nihil ad tuum, Papinane, ingenium!’
LIX. The style of conversation in request in courts proceeds much upon
the same principle. It is low, and it is little. I have known a few
persons who have had access to the Presence (and who might be supposed
to catch what they could of the tone of royalty at second-hand, bating
the dignity—God knows there was nothing of that!) and I should say they
were the _highest finishers_ in this respect I ever met with. No
circumstance escaped them, they worked out all the details (whether to
the purpose or not) like a fac-simile, they mimicked every thing,
explained every thing; the story was not _told_, but acted over again.
It is true, there were no _grandes pensées_, there was a complete truce
with all thought and reflection; but they were everlasting dealers in
matters of fact, and there was no end of their minute prolixity—one must
suppose this mode pleased their betters, or was copied from them.
Dogberry’s declaration—‘Were I as tedious as a king, I could find in my
heart to bestow it all upon your worship’—is not so much a blunder of
the clown’s, as a sarcasm of the poet’s. Are we to account for the
effect (as before) from supposing that their overstrained attention to
great things makes them seek for a change in little ones?—Or that their
idea of themselves as raised above every one else is confirmed by
dwelling on the meanest and most insignificant objects?—Or is it that
from their ignorance and seclusion from the world, every thing is alike
new and wonderful to them? Or that dreading the insincerity of those
about them, they exact an extraordinary degree of trifling accuracy, and
require every one to tell a story, as if he was giving evidence on oath
before a court of justice? West said that the late King used to get him
up into a corner, and fairly put his hands before him so that he could
not get away, till he had got every particular out of him relating to
the affairs of the Royal Academy. This weakness in the mind of kings has
been well insisted on by Peter Pindar. It is of course like one of the
spots in the sun.
LX. I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a
wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of
the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
LXI. Happy are they that can say with Timon—‘I am Misanthropos, and hate
mankind!’ They can never be at a loss for subjects to exercise their
spleen upon: their sources of satisfaction must hold out while the world
stands. Those who do not pity others, assuredly need not envy them: if
they take pleasure in the distresses of their fellow-creatures, they
have their wish. Let them cast an eye on that long disease, human life,
on that villainous compound, human nature, and glut their malice. There
is madness, there is idiotcy, there is sickness, old age, and death;
there is the cripple, the blind, and the deaf; there is the deformed in
body, the weak in mind, the prisoner and the gaoler, the beggar and the
dwarf; there is poverty, labour, pain, ignominy; there is riches, pride,
griping avarice, bloated luxury; there is the agony of suffering or the
lassitude of _ennui_; there is the sickness of the heart from hope
delayed, and the worse and more intolerable sickness from hope attained;
there is the gout, the stone, the plague, cold, fever, thirst, and
nakedness, shipwreck, famine, fire and the sword, all are instruments of
human fate, and pamper the dignity of human nature: there are the
racking pains of jealousy, remorse, and anguish, the lingering ones of
disappointment, sorrow, and regret; there is the consciousness of
unmerited, hopeless obscurity, and ‘the cruel sunshine thrown by fortune
on a fool;’ there is unrequited love, and—marriage; there is the coquet
slighting others and slighted in her turn, the jilt, the antiquated
prude, the brutal husband, and the common-place wife; there are vows of
celibacy and lost character; there is the cabal, the idle gossiping, the
churlishness and dulness of the country, the heartlessness and
profligacy of great cities; there are the listless days, the sleepless
nights, the having too much or too little to do; years spent in vain in
a pursuit, or, if successful, the having to leave it at last; there are
the jealousies of different professions among themselves or of each
other, lawyers, divines, physicians, artists; the contempt of the more
thriving for the less fortunate, and the hatred and heart-burnings with
which it is repaid; there is hypocrisy, oppression, falsehood,
treachery, cowardice, selfishness, meanness; the luck of fools, the
respectability of knaves; the cant of piety, loyalty, and humanity; the
lamentations of West-India planters over the ingratitude of their negro
slaves, and Louis XVIII. resigning to God and the Mother of all Saints
the credit of the success of his arms; there are sects and parties,
kings and their subjects, queens and common-council men, speeches in
Parliament, plays and actors _damned_, or successful for a time and then
laid on the shelf, and heard of no more; quacks at all corners,
mountebanks in the pulpit, and drones in the state, peace and war,
treaties of offence and defence, conspiracies, revolutions, Holy
Alliances, the sudden death of Lord Castlereagh, and the oratory of his
successor Mr. Canning, hid for the present like the moon ‘in its vacant
interlunar cave;’ and Ferdinand and his paper-kites, and the Cortes,
unconscious of the rebel maxim, ‘Catch a king and kill a king’; and Slop
raving at the bloodthirsty victims of courtly assassins, and whetting
mild daggers for patriot throats; and Mr. Croker’s _cheat-the-gallows
face_ in the _Quarterly_, and Lord Wellington’s _heart_ in the cause of
Spanish liberty, and a beloved Monarch retired amid all this to shady
solitude ‘to play with Wisdom.’ A good hater may here find wherewithal
to feed the largest spleen and swell it, even to bursting!
LXII. Happiness, like mocking, is catching. At least, none but those who
are happy in themselves, can make others so. No wit, no understanding,
neither riches nor beauty, can communicate this feeling—the happy alone
can make happy. Love and Joy are twins, or born of each other.
LXIII. No one knows when he is safe from ridicule.
LXIV. Is it a misfortune or a happiness that we so often like the faults
of one we love better than the virtues of any other woman; that we like
her refusals, better than all other favours; that we like her love of
others, better than any one else’s love of us?
LXV. If a man were refused by a woman a thousand times, and he really
loved her, he would still think that at the bottom of her heart she
preferred him to every one else. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider
that all passion is a species of madness; and that the feeling in the
mind towards the beloved object is the most amiable and delightful thing
in the world. Our love to her is heavenly, and so (the heart whispers
us) must hers be to us—though it were buried at the bottom of the sea;
nay, from the tomb our self-love would revive it! We never can persuade
ourselves that a mistress cares nothing about us, till we no longer care
about her. No! It is certain that there is nothing truly deserving of
love but love, and
‘In spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,’
we still believe in the justice of the blind God!
LXVI. It would be easy to forget a misplaced attachment, but that we do
not like to acknowledge ourselves in the wrong.
LXVII. A great mind is one that can forget or look beyond itself.
LXVIII. The grand scenes of Nature are more adapted for occasional
visits than for constant residence. They are the temples of the Goddess,
not fit dwellings for her worshippers. Familiarity breeds contempt or
indifference; and it is better to connect this feeling with the petty
and trivial than with the lofty and sublime. Besides, it is unnecessary
to run the risk in the latter case. One chief advantage of the great and
magnificent objects of Nature is, that they stamp their image on the
mind for ever; the blow need not be repeated to have the desired effect.
We take them with us wherever we go; we have but to think of them and
they appear; and at the distance of half a life or of the circumference
of the globe, we unlock the springs of memory, and the tall mountain
shoots into the sky, the lake expands its bosom, and the cataract rushes
from the pine-clad rock. The bold majestic outline is all that there is
to discover in such situations, and this we can always remember. In more
cultivated and artificial scenes we may observe a thousand hedge-row
beauties with curious eye, or pluck the tender flower beneath our feet,
while Skiddaw hovers round our heads, and the echoes of Helvellyn
thunder in our hearts.
LXIX. I should always choose to live within reach of a fine prospect,
rather than to see one from my windows. A number of romantic, distant
objects staring in upon one (uncalled-for) tantalise the imagination,
and tempt the truant feet; whereas, at home, I wish to feel satisfied
where I am, and sheltered from the world.
LXX. Mr. Martin’s picture of Adam and Eve in Paradise has this capital
defect, that there is no _repose_ in it. You see two insignificant naked
figures, and a preposterous architectural landscape, like a range of
buildings overlooking them. They might as well be represented sleeping
on the top of the pinnacle of the Temple with the world and all the
glories thereof spread out before them. They ought to have been painted
imparadised in one another’s arms, shut up in measureless content, with
Eden’s choicest bowers closing round them, and Nature stooping to clothe
them with vernal bowers. Nothing could be too retired, too voluptuous,
too sacred from day’s garish eye: instead of which, you have a gaudy
panoramic view, a glittering barren waste, a triple row of clouds, of
rocks, and mountains piled one upon the other, as if the imagination
already bent its idle gaze over that wide world, which was so soon to be
their place of exile, and the aching restless spirit of the artist was
occupied in building a stately prison for our first parents, instead of
decking their bridal bed, and wrapping them in a short-lived dream of
bliss!
LXXI. The mind tires of variety, but becomes reconciled to uniformity.
Change produces a restless habit, a love of farther change: the
recurrence of the same objects conduces to repose, and to content. My
Uncle Toby’s bowling-green bounded his harmless ambition; Bonaparte, not
contented with France and Europe for a pleasure-ground, wanted to have
Russia for an ice-house; and Alexander, at the farthest side of India,
wept for new worlds to conquer. If we let our thoughts wander abroad,
there is no end to fantastic projects, to the craving after novelty, to
fickleness, and disappointment: if we confine them at home, Peace may
find them there. Mr. Horne Tooke used to contend that all tendency to
excess was voluntary in the mind: the wants of Nature kept within a
certain limit. Even if a person adhered to a regular number of cups of
tea or glasses of wine, he did not feel tempted to exceed this number:
but if he once went beyond his usual allowance, the desire to transgress
increased with its indulgence, and the artificial appetite was
proportioned to the artificial stimulus. It has been remarked that in
the tropical climates, where there is no difference of seasons, time
passes away on smoother and swifter pinions, ‘the earth spins round on
its soft axle,’ unnoticed, unregretted: and life wears out soonest and
best in sequestered privacy, within the round of a few, simple, unenvied
enjoyments.
LXXII. The retailing of a set of anecdotes is not conversation. A story
admits of no answer: a remark or an opinion naturally calls forth
another, and leads to as many different views of a subject as there are
minds in company. An officer in a Scotch marching regiment has always a
number of very edifying anecdotes to communicate: but unless you are of
the same mess or the same clan, you are necessarily _sent to Coventry_.
Prosing, mechanical narrations of this kind are tedious, as well as
tinctured with egotism: if they are set off with a brilliant manner,
with mimicry, and action, they become theatrical: the speaker is a kind
of _Mr. Matthews at home_, and the audience are more or less delighted
and amused with the exhibition; but there is an end of society, and you
no more think of interrupting a confirmed story-teller, than you would
of interrupting a favourite actor on the stage.
LXXIII. The Queen’s trial gave a deathblow to the hopes of all
reflecting persons with respect to the springs and issues of public
spirit and opinion. It was the only question I ever knew that excited a
thorough popular feeling. It struck its roots into the heart of the
nation; it took possession of every house or cottage in the kingdom;
man, woman, and child took part in it, as if it had been their own
concern. Business was laid aside for it: people forgot their pleasures,
even their meals were neglected, nothing was thought of but the fate of
the Queen’s trial. The arrival of the _Times Newspaper_ was looked upon
as an event in every village, the Mails hardly travelled fast enough;
and he who had the latest intelligence in his pocket was considered as
the happiest of mortals. It kept the town in a ferment for several
weeks: it agitated the country to the remotest corner. It spread like
wildfire over the kingdom; the public mind was electrical. So it should
be on other occasions; it was only so on this. An individual may be
oppressed, a nation may be trampled upon, mankind may be threatened with
annihilation of their rights, and the threat enforced; and not a finger
is raised, not a heart sinks, not a pulse beats quicker in the public or
private quarrel, a momentary burst of vain indignation is heard, dies
away, and is forgotten. Truth has no echo, but folly and imposture have
a thousand reverberations in the hollowness of the human heart. At the
very time when all England went mad about the poor Queen, a man of the
name of Bruce was sent to Botany Bay for having spoken to another who
was convicted of sedition; and no notice was taken of it. We have seen
what has been done in Spain, and Earth does not roll its billows over
the heads of tyrants, to bury them in a common grave. What was it then
in the Queen’s cause that stirred this mighty ‘coil and pudder’ in the
breast? Was it the love of truth, of justice, of liberty? No such thing!
Her case was at best doubtful, and she had only suffered the loss of
privileges peculiar to herself. But she was a Queen, she was a woman,
and _a thorn in the King’s side_. There was the cant of loyalty, the
cant of gallantry, and the cant of freedom mixed altogether in
delightful and inextricable confusion. She was a Queen—all the loyal and
well-bred bowed to the name; she was a wife—all the women took the
alarm; she was at variance with the lawful sovereign—all the free and
independent Electors of Westminster and London were up in arms. ‘The
Queen’s name was a tower of strength,’ which these persons had hitherto
wanted, and were glad to catch at. Though a daughter of the Duke of
Brunswick, though a grand-daughter of George III., yet because she was
separated from her husband, she must be hand-and-glove with the people,
the wretched, helpless, doating, credulous, meddlesome people, who are
always ready to lick the hands, not just then raised to shed their blood
or rivet on their chains. There was here an idol to pull down and an
idol to set up. There was an imperial title and meretricious
frontispiece to the spurious volume of Liberty. There was the
mock-majesty of an empty throne behind the real one, and the
impertinence of mankind was interested to thrust the unwelcome claimant
into it. City patriots stood a chance of becoming liege men, and true to
a Queen—of their own choosing. The spirit of faction was half merged in
the spirit of servility. There was a rag-fair of royalty—every one
carried his own paints and patches into the presence of the new Lady of
Loretto—there was a sense of homage due, of services and countenance
bestowed on Majesty. This popular farce had all the charm of _private
theatricals_. The Court of St. James’s was nothing to the _make-believe_
Court at Kew. The king was a sort of _state-fixture_; but the
Queen-Consort, the favourite of the rabble, was herself one of them. The
presence-doors were flung open, and every blackguard and blockhead
rushed in. What an opportunity to see, to hear, to touch a Queen! To
gratify the itch of loyalty by coming in contact with the person of the
Sovereign was a privilege reserved for a few; but to receive this favour
at the Queen’s hands was a distinction common to all. All the trades of
London came to kiss the Queen’s hand: Presbyterian parsons knelt to kiss
the hand of their royal mistress; the daughters of country curates and
of city knights sipped loyalty from the back of her Majesty’s hand.
Radicals and reformers contended who should be first in paying homage to
the Queen; there was a race for precedence, quarrelling and pulling of
caps between the wives of distinguished orators and caricaturists, at
the very footsteps of the throne; while Mr. Alderman Wood,
‘A gentle Husher, Vanity by name.’
strove to keep the peace, and vindicate the character of civic dames for
courtly manners. Mr. Place, Mr. Hone, Mr. Thelwall, Sir Richard
Phillips, kissed her Majesty’s hand; Mr. Cobbett alone was not
invited,—it was thought he might _bite_. What a pity that it was before
Mr. Irving’s time, or he might have thrown in the casting-weight of his
perfect mind and body, and _ousted_ both the King and Bergami! In the
midst of all this, his Majesty went to the play, bowed to the boxes, the
pit, the gallery, and to the _actors_, and you would suppose in four
days’ time, that a whisper had never been uttered to imply that the King
not only was not the most graceful man in his dominions, but the best of
monarchs and of husbands. The Queen and her _pic-nic_ parties were no
more thought of. What a scene for history to laugh at!
LXXIV. A crowd was collected under the Horse-Guards, and on enquiry I
found it was to see the Duke of York come out. ‘What went they forth for
to see?’ They were some of the lowest and most wretched of the people,
and it was perhaps the sense of contrast,—a sense of which the great and
mighty have always availed themselves liberally, to cherish the
enthusiasm of their admirers. It was also curiosity to see a name, a
sound that they had so often heard, reduced to an object of sight; a
metaphysical and political abstraction actually coming out of a door
with a ruddy face and a frock-coat. It was, in the first place, the
Commander-in-Chief, and the commander of the troops at Dunkirk, the
author of the love-letters to Mrs. Clarke and of army-circulars, the son
of the King, and presumptive heir to the Crown;—there were all these
contradictions embodied in the same person. ‘Oh, the wonderful works of
nature,’ as the _Recruit_ in the play says on looking at the guinea
which has just enlisted him: so we may say on looking at a king or a
king’s brother. I once pointed out the Duke of York to a Scotchman. ‘Is
that his Grace—I mean his Royal Highness?’ said the native of the North,
out of breath to acknowledge the title, and pay with his tongue the
instinctive adulation which his heart felt!
LXXV. When Effie Deans becomes a fine lady, do we not look back with
regret to the time when she was the poor faded lily of St. Leonards, the
outcast and condemned prisoner? So, should the cause of liberty and
mankind ever become triumphant, instead of militant, may we not heave a
sigh of regret over the past, and think that poor suffering human
nature, with all its wrongs and insults, trodden into the earth like a
vile weed, was a more interesting topic for reflection? We need not be
much alarmed for the event, even if this should be so; for the way to
Utopia is not ‘the primrose path of dalliance;’ and at the rate we have
hitherto gone on, it must be many thousand years off!
LXXVI. Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and
idols—it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of
truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to
them.
LXXVII. The Devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was
always something to fear and to hate. He supplied the antagonist powers
of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm
without him. Mr. Irving may perhaps bring him into fashion again.
LXXVIII. Perhaps the evils arising from excessive inequality in a state
would be sufficiently obviated if property were divided equally among
the surviving children. But it is said it would be impossible to make a
law for this purpose, under any circumstances or with any
qualifications, because the least interference with the disposal of
property would be striking at its existence and at the very root of all
property. And yet this objection is urged in those very countries, where
the law of primogeniture (intended to keep it in disproportionate
masses, and setting aside the will of the testator altogether) is
established as an essential part of the law of the land. So blind is
reason, where passion or prejudice intervenes!
LXXIX. Kings, who set up for Gods upon earth, should be treated as
madmen, which one half of them, or as idiots, which the other half,
really are.
LXXX. Tyrants are at all times mad with the lust of power.
LXXXI. Reformers are naturally speculative people; and speculative
people are effeminate and inactive. They brood over ideas, till
realities become almost indifferent to them. They talk when they should
act, and are distracted with nice doubts and distinctions, while the
enemy is thundering at the gates, and the bomb-shells are bursting at
their feet. They hold up a paper Constitution as their shield, which the
sword pierces through, and drinks their heart’s blood! They are cowards,
too, at bottom; and dare not strike a decisive blow, lest it should be
retaliated. While they merely prate of moderation and the public good,
they think, if the worst comes to the worst, there may still be a chance
of retreat for them, hoping to screen themselves behind their
imbecility. They are not like their opponents, whose all is at stake,
and who are urged on by instinctive fury and habitual cunning to defend
it: the common good is too remote a speculation to call forth any
violent passions or personal sacrifices; and if it should be lost, it is
as fine a topic as ever to harangue and lament about. Patriots are, by
the constitution of their minds, poets; and an Elegy on the fall of
Liberty is as interesting to hear or to recite as an Ode on its most
triumphant success. They who let off Ferdinand the other day, confiding
in the promises of a traitor and in the liberality of a despot, were
greater hypocrites to themselves than he was.
LXXXII. In the late quarrel about Liberty, upwards of five millions of
men have been killed, and _one king_.
LXXXIII. The people (properly speaking) are not a herd of slaves just
let loose, or else goaded on, like blind drudges, to execute the behests
of their besotted taskmasters; but the band of free citizens, taught to
know their rights, and prepared to exercise them.
LXXXIV. The people are the slaves of ignorance and custom; the friends
of the people are the dupes of reason and humanity. Power stops at
nothing but its own purposes.
LXXXV. The Author of Waverley observes—‘In truth, the Scottish peasantry
are still infected with that rage for funeral ceremonial, which once
distinguished the grandees of the kingdom so much, that a sumptuary law
was made by the Parliament of Scotland for the purpose of restraining
it; and I have known many in the lowest stations who have denied
themselves not merely the comforts, but almost the necessaries of life,
in order to save such a sum of money as might enable their surviving
friends to bury them like Christians, as they termed it; nor could their
faithful executors be prevailed upon, though equally necessitous, to
turn to the use and maintenance of the living the money vainly wasted
upon the interment of the dead.’—‘Antiquary,’ vol. IV. p. 48. If I were
to attempt an explanation of the peculiar delight and pride which the
Scotch are thus supposed to take in funeral ceremonies, I should say,
that as inhabitants of wild and barren districts, they are more familiar
with the face of nature than with the face of man; and easily turn to it
as their place of rest and final home. There is little difference, in
their imaginations, between treading the green mountain turf, and being
laid beneath it. The world itself is but a living tomb to them. Their
mode of subsistence is cold, hard, comfortless, bare of luxuries and of
enjoyments, torpid, inured to privations and self-denial; and death
seems to be its consummation and triumph, rather than its unwelcome end.
Their life was a sort of struggle for a dreary existence; so that it
relapses into the grave with joy and a feeling of exultation. The grey
rock out of which their tomb is cut is a citadel against all assaults of
the flesh and the spirit; the kindred earth that wraps the
weather-beaten, worn-out body, is a soft and warm resting-place from the
hardships it has had to encounter. It is no wonder, therefore, that the
Scotch prepare for the due celebration of this event with the foresight
characteristic of them, and that their friends consign them to the earth
with becoming fortitude and costly ceremony. ‘Man,’ says Sir Thomas
Brown, though in quite a different spirit, ‘man is a noble animal,
splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave; solemnising nativities and
deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery, even in
the INFAMY of his nature.—_See his_ URN BURIAL.
LXXXVI. In the Heart of Midlothian vol. IV. p. 13, we meet with the
following reflections: ‘Perhaps one ought to be actually a Scotchman to
conceive how ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situation,
they feel their mutual connection with each other as natives of the same
country. There are, I believe, more associations common to the
inhabitants of a rude and wild than of a well-cultivated and fertile
country: their ancestors have more seldom changed their place of
residence; their mutual recollection of remarkable objects is more
accurate; the high and the low are more interested in each other’s
welfare; the feelings of kindred and relationship are more widely
extended; and, in a word, the bonds of patriotic affection, always
honourable, even when a little too exclusively strained, have more
influence on men’s feelings and actions.’ Thus far our author, but
without making much progress in the question he has started. ‘_Via_
Goodman Dull! thou hast spoken no word all this while’—I might say, but
I do not choose, to say so, to the Great Unknown. There is an
enumeration of particulars, slightly and collaterally connected with the
subject, but, as ‘Douce David Deans’ would say, ‘they do not touch the
root of the matter.’ In fact, then, the mind more easily forms a strong
and abstracted attachment to the soil (in which it was bred) in remote
and barren regions, where few artificial objects or pursuits fritter
away attention, or divert it from its devotion to the naked charms of
nature—(perhaps the privations, dangers, and loneliness incident to such
situations also enhance the value and deepen the interest we take in
them)—and again, in a rude and scattered population, where there is a
dearth and craving after general society, we naturally become more
closely and permanently attached to those few persons with whom
neighbourhood, or kindred, or a common cause, or similar habits or
language, bring us into contact. Two Englishmen meeting in the wilds of
Arabia would instantly become friends, though they had never seen one
another before, from the want of all other society and sympathy. So it
is in the ruder and earlier stages of civilisation. This is what
attaches the Highlander to his hill and to his clan. This is what
attaches Scotchmen to their country and to one another. A Londoner, in
his fondness for London, is distracted between the play-houses, the
opera, the shops, the coffee-houses, the crowded streets, &c. An
inhabitant of Edinburgh has none of these diversities to reconcile: he
has but one idea in his head or in his mouth,—that of the Calton Hill;
an idea which is easily embraced, and which he never quits his hold of,
till something more substantial offers,—a situation as porter in a
warehouse, or as pimp to a great man.
NOTES
FUGITIVE WRITINGS
ON ABSTRACT IDEAS
This essay was first published along with the second edition (1836) of
_An Essay on the Principles of Human Action_. See Bibliographical Note,
vol. VII. p. 384. The source of the essay does not appear to be known,
but it very likely formed the substance of one of the Lectures which
Hazlitt delivered at the Russell Institution. See _ante_, pp. 25, _et
seq._ and notes. The title of one of these Lectures (III.) was ‘On
Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, and on the Nature of
Abstraction.’ It has not been thought necessary to give references to
all the numerous passages quoted from Locke and other philosophers
discussed by Hazlitt. In many cases he himself gives a sufficient
reference in the text.
PAGE
1. _It is by Mr. Locke ... denied_, _etc._ See _An Essay concerning
Human Understanding_, II. xi. 10.
‘_From the root_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 479–481.
6. _The Bishop of Worcester._ Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699), who
published three pamphlets in reply to Locke’s _Essay_. For an
account of the controversy see Locke’s _Works_ (Bohn), II. 339
_et seq._
7. ‘_General ideas_,’ _etc._ Condillac, _La Logique_, chap. V.
8. ‘_To speak_,’ _etc. Ibid._
9. ‘_It is agreed on all hands_,’ _etc._ All the passages quoted
from Berkeley are from the Introduction to _A Treatise
concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge_ (1710).
12. ‘_Abstract ideas_,’ _etc._ Locke’s _Essay_, IV. vii. 9.
ON THE WRITINGS OF HOBBES
This and the four succeeding papers were first published in _Literary
Remains_, where the author’s son says of them (vol. I. p. 115): ‘The
following Essays form part of a series of Lectures delivered with very
great effect by my father at the Russell Institution, in 1813. I found
them with other papers in an old hamper which many years ago he stuffed
confusedly full of MSS. and odd volumes of books, and left in the _care_
of some lodging-house people, by whom it was thrown into a cellar, so
damp that even the covers of some of the books were fast mouldering when
I first looked over the collection. The injury to the MSS. may be
imagined. Some of the Lectures, indeed, to my deep regret, are
altogether missing, burnt, probably, by the ignorant people of the
house; and I have had the greatest difficulty in preparing those which
remain for the press. They are, however, most valuable.’ The course,
consisting of ten Lectures, was delivered in 1812, not 1813. The
syllabus will be found in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs of William
Hazlitt_, 1. 192 et seq. The first lecture was ‘On the Writings of
Hobbes, showing that he was the father of the modern system of
philosophy.’
27. ‘_They were made fierce_,’ _etc._ _Advancement of Learning_, I.
iv. 6.
28. ‘_Four champions fierce_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, II. 898.
29. _It has been generally supposed_, _etc._ Cf. the essay ‘Mr. Locke
a Great Plagiarist,’ _post_, p. 284.
32. ‘_Discourse of Human Nature._’ This work, though circulated in
MS. as early as 1640, was not published till 1650, the year
before the publication of _Leviathan_.
45. ‘_This difference of quickness_,’ _etc._ _Leviathan_, part I.
chap. VIII.
_Harris, the author of Hermes_, _etc._ Cf. vol. VIII. (_The
English Comic Writers_) p. 19, where the same passages are
quoted from Locke, Hobbes, and Harris.
46. ‘_Though the effect of folly_,’ _etc._ _Leviathan_, part I. chap.
VIII.
‘_The foolish daughters of Pelias_’ [Peleus], _etc. Ibid._ part
II. chap. XXX.
_The same allusion in Burke._ _Reflections on the Revolution in
France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 113).
48. ‘_Soft collar of social esteem._’ _Ibid._ II. 90.
‘_Order of thoughts_,’ _etc._ _Leviathan_, part I. chap. III.
‘_Stood all astonied_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, VII. VI. 28.
50. _Jonathan Edwards._ Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), the American
theologian and metaphysician, published his work _On the
Freedom of the Will_ in 1754.
ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY
Lectures VII. and VIII. were ‘On the Writers on Liberty and Necessity,
and on Materialism.’
_Gassendi._ Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the French philosopher
and mathematician, with whom Hobbes had been intimate at Paris.
53. _Spinoza’s most exact and beautiful demonstration_, _etc._ In the
_Ethica_, published in _Opera Posthuma_ (1677).
_Marsennus._ Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), the friend and disciple
of Descartes.
54. _Bishop Bramhall._ John Bramhall (1594–1663), successively Bishop
of Derry and Archbishop of Armagh, whose controversy with
Hobbes arose in 1655.
57. _Tripos._ ‘Hobbes’s Tripos’ (1684) contained, among other things,
the essay ‘Of Liberty and Necessity’ (1654).
58. ‘_With all these means_,’ _etc._ _Henry IV._ Part II. Act III.
Sc. 1.
60. ‘_Fixed fate_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 560.
_Dr. Priestley._ Joseph Priestley’s (1733–1804) _The Doctrine of
Philosophical Necessity Illustrated_ appeared in 1777. His
controversy with Horsley lasted from 1783 till 1790, during
which time many letters to Dr. Horsley were published.
71. ‘_Something far more deeply interfused_,’ _etc._ Borrowed from
Wordsworth’s _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_,
96 _et seq._
73. ‘_Ille igitur_,’ _etc._ Cicero, _De Fato_, XIX. 43.
ON LOCKE’S ESSAY ON THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
This appears to have been Lecture II. of the course. Cf. the essay ‘Mr.
Locke a Great Plagiarist,’ _post_, p. 284.
79. ‘_Discourse of reason._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2
81. ‘_Without form and void._’ _Genesis_ i. 2.
81. _The mind alone is formative._ Kant. Cf. _post_, p. 176.
82. _The natural fool, etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 41.
84. ‘_Peace to all such._’ Pope, _Prologue to the Satires_, 193.
85. _The Vicar’s profession of faith._ See _Émile_, Livre IV.
‘_Light of Nature pursued._’ A work abridged by Hazlitt himself.
See vol. IV. of the present edition.
88. ‘_Fluttering its pennons vain_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, II.
933–4.
89. ‘_The latter end_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Tempest_, Act II. Sc. 1.
100. ‘_The fundamental principle_,’ _etc._ Hume, _A Treatise of Human
Nature_, part IV. sect. IV.
108. _The ‘Essay on Vision.’_ Published in 1709.
110. ‘_Reason pandering will._’ Cf. ‘And reason panders will.’
_Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.
118. _Dr. Clarke’s celebrated work._ Samuel Clarke’s (1675–1729)
_Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, etc._,
one of the Boyle lectures delivered in 1704 and 1705.
ON TOOKE’S DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY
Lecture IX. was ‘On the Theory of Language; as treated by Horne Tooke,
by the author of _Hermes_, and Lord Monboddo.’ Cf. vol. IV. (_The Spirit
of the Age_), p. 231, and notes.
119. ‘_Mere_ [very] _midsummer madness_.’ _Twelfth Night_, Act III.
Sc. 4.
123. _M. Portalis._ Jean Étienne Marie Portalis (1745–1807), one of
the compilers of the _Code Napoléon_.
‘_Of the little sneering_,’ _etc._ Junius, Letter LIV.
‘_Undoes creation_,’ _etc._ Gay, _Verses to be placed under the
Picture of Sir R. Blackmore_.
‘_Rebelling angels_,’ _etc._ Marvell, _On Mr. Milton’s Paradise
Lost_.
‘_Holds us a while_,’ _etc. Ibid._
125. ‘_That honour consists._’ _etc._ _Jonathan Wild_, Book I. Chap.
13.
128. _A celebrated German philosopher._ Kant.
131. ‘_So from the root_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 1, where much of this
paragraph is repeated.
132. ‘_Has oft been chased_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _The Hind and the
Panther_, l. 5–8.
ON SELF-LOVE
Lecture IV. of the series. Cf. the essay on ‘Self-Love and Benevolence
(A Dialogue)’ printed in vol. XII. pp. 95 _et seq._, and _An Essay on
the Principles of Human Action_ (vol. VII. pp. 383, _et seq._), from
which a great part of the present Lecture is taken.
133. ‘_Wise saws and modern instances._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
136. ‘_Mutual interest_,’ _etc._ _Jonathan Wild_, Book I. Chap. 4.
139. _Shaftesbury or Hutcheson._ Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of
Shaftesbury (1671–1713), author of the _Characteristics_
(1711), and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), a supporter of
Shaftesbury’s ethics.
140. ‘_Pity is only_,’ _etc._ See Hobbes’s _Human Nature_, Chap. IX.
Sect. 10.
147. ‘_The jealous God_,’ _etc._
‘Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.’
Pope, _Eloisa to Abelard_, 75–6.
158. ‘_Thrills in each nerve_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.’
Pope, _An Essay on Man_, l. 218.
159. ‘_The hair-breadth scapes_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
160. _Junius has remarked, etc._ In his letter to George III. (Dec.
19, 1769).
MADAME DE STAËL’S ACCOUNT OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE
Madame de Staël’s _De l’Allemagne_, published in London in 1813, had
been reviewed, possibly by Hazlitt, in _The Morning Chronicle_ for Nov.
13, 1813, and the four papers here reprinted and signed ‘An English
Metaphysician’ are ostensibly a continuation of that review, though they
contain very little about German philosophy and nothing at all about
German literature. They are, in fact, merely fragments in letter form of
the course of lectures which Hazlitt had recently delivered at the
Russell Institution. See _ante_, pp. 25 _et seq._ and notes. Hazlitt was
a regular contributor to _The Morning Chronicle_ during 1813 and 1814.
Some of his contributions on politics, the stage, and the fine arts will
be found in vols. III., VIII. and IX. of the present edition; and he
gives an account of his relations with James Perry, the editor, in the
essay ‘On Patronage and Puffing’ (see vol. VI. p. 289). None of the
_Chronicle_ papers included in the present volume have been republished
before.
162. _The article in The Edinburgh Review._ Vol. XXII. p. 198. The
review was by Jeffrey.
164. ‘_They were made fierce_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 27.
165. ‘_Four champions fierce_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 28.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
167. ‘_A justly decried author._’ Locke, _Third Letter to the Bishop
of Worcester_ (_Works_, Bohn, II. 401).
‘_Fame is no plant_,’ _etc._ _Lycidas_, 78–82.
168. ‘_Harsh and crabbed._’ _Comus_, 476.
_Willich. Elements of the Critical Philosophy, etc., Translated
by A. F. M. Willich, M.D._, appeared in 1798. _The Critique of
Pure Reason_ had appeared in 1781.
171. ‘_And all this_,’ _etc._ Ben Jonson, _The Alchemist_, Act II. Sc.
1.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
174. _‘A dark closet_,’ _etc._ Cf. Locke’s _Essay_, II. xi. 17.
‘_Drossy and divisible._’ Dryden, _The Hind and the Panther_, I.
319.
175. _Mrs. Salmon’s ... wax figures._ An old established exhibition in
Fleet Street, near Temple Bar. See _The Spectator_, No. 28.
176. ‘_Without form and void._’ _Genesis_ i. 2.
179. ‘_Thrills in each nerve_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 158.
‘_Jove’s light’nings_,’ _etc._ _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
At the end of this letter it was announced that ‘Another Letter on the
_Principles of Human Action_ will conclude this series.’ The promised
Letter, however, does not seem to have been published.
181. ‘_Peace to all such._’ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 84.
Note. For Fearn’s book, see _Table Talk_, vol. VI. pp. 63–5;
260–2 and notes.
183. ‘_So from the root_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 1.
186. ‘_Had oft been chased_,’ _etc._ _The Hind and the Panther_, I.
5–8.
FINE ARTS.—BRITISH INSTITUTION
Hazlitt used a portion of this notice in the essay on ‘Fine Arts’ which
he afterwards (1824) contributed to _The Encyclopædia Britannica_. See
vol. IX., pp. 406–7. The British Institution was founded in 1805 at 52
Pall Mall and continued till 1866. The winter exhibition was of the
works of living artists. A second notice, in _The Morning Chronicle_ for
Feb. 10, is probably by Hazlitt. It contains very brief comments on the
less notable pictures, and is not reprinted here.
188. _Mr. Bird’s Picture of Job._ The painter was Edward Bird
(1772–1819), elected a Royal Academician in 1815.
189. _Mr. Allston’s large picture._ This picture by the ‘American
Titian,’ Washington Allston (1779–1843), gained a prize of
200 guineas from the British Institution and is now at
Philadelphia.
190. _Mr. Hilton’s Picture._ By William Hilton (1786–1839), Royal
Academician (1818).
_Mr. West’s Picture._ For Benjamin West (1738–1820), who
succeeded Reynolds (1792) as President of the Royal Academy,
see vol. IX. (_Essays on the Fine Arts_), pp. 318 _et seq._
‘_Pure religion_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s Sonnet, ‘O Friend! I know
not which way I must look,’ etc.
_Society for the suppression of vice._ Cf. vol. I. (_The Round
Table_), p. 60 and note.
_Mr. Turner’s grand landscape._ Now in the National Gallery and
(wrongly) known as ‘Apuleia in search of Apuleius.’ The
confusion seems to have arisen from a misreading by Turner of a
story in Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ (XIV. 517 _et seq._) which the
picture was designed to illustrate.
_Lord Egremont’s picture._ An engraving by Woollett of Claude’s
‘Jacob and Laban’ was in the possession of Lord Egremont at
Petworth, and it is probably to this that Hazlitt refers. It
was at Petworth that Turner painted the landscape in question.
191. ‘_Mercury and Herse._’ Exhibited in 1811.
_The Favourite Lamb._ By William Collins (1788–1847).
THE STAGE
Nearly the whole of this paper was incorporated into the essay on
_Richard III._ in _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_. See vol. I. pp.
300–303 and notes.
192. ‘_As tenderly be led_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Bustle in._’ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc. 1.
THE FINE ARTS. THE LOUVRE
195. _Blücher._ The fighting at Laon had taken place on March 9 and
10. Blücher entered Paris on March 31.
‘_Away to Heav’n_,’ _etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_Nay, if you mouth_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
196. ‘_Pigeon-liver’d_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Scrawls_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Prologue to the Satires_, 19–20.
_The treaty of Pilnitz._ See vol. III. (_Political Essays_), p.
61 and note.
‘_This present ignorant time._’ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Tell me your company_,’ _etc._ The proverb is quoted in _Don
Quixote_, Part II. chap. 23.
‘_Stands the statue_,’ _etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, _Summer_,
1347. The Venus de Medici was restored to Florence after the
fall of Napoleon.
_There is the Apollo_, _etc._ This enumeration of the treasures
collected at the Louvre by Napoleon makes Hazlitt’s authorship
of the essay quite certain. Cf. vol. VI. (_Table Talk_),
pp. 15–16 and notes, and vol. VIII. (_The English Comic
Writers_), p. 149, where the present passage is repeated almost
_verbatim_. See also _Notes of a Journey_, _etc._, vol. IX. p.
107.
197. ‘_There is old Proteus_,’ _etc._ Misquoted from Wordsworth’s
Sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us,’ etc.
‘_What’s Hecuba to them_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Real feelings_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 101).
‘_We look up_,’ _etc. Ibid._
‘_Breath can make them_,’ _etc._ Goldsmith, _The Deserted
Village_, 54.
_Wittgenstein_, _etc._ Louis Adolphe Pierre Wittgenstein
(1769–1843); Ferdinand, Baron Wintzingerode (1770–1818), two
well-known Russian generals.
‘_But once put out their light_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
_Poet who celebrated the fall_, _etc._ Coleridge, presumably.
‘_Time-hallowed laws._’ Hazlitt elsewhere attributes this phrase
to Wordsworth. See vol. III., note to p. 175.
WILSON’S LANDSCAPES AT THE BRITISH INSTITUTION
Part of this article was incorporated in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_
article on ‘Fine Arts’ (see vol. IX. pp. 392–394), and a further part
was included in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s edition of the same essay in _Essays
on the Fine Arts_ (1873). Many of Wilson’s landscapes were exhibited at
the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1903. In this and in the
later notices of exhibitions the catalogue numbers have been omitted,
and in a few cases it has been necessary to substitute a semicolon for a
comma, in order to distinguish between different pictures.
199. ‘_A buoy_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act IV. Sc. 6.
200. ‘_Resembling a goose-pye_,’ Swift, _Vanburgh’s House_, l. 104.
201. Note. ‘_Silly shepherds_,’ _etc._ Cf. Milton, _On the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity_, The Hymn, St. viii.
202. ‘_While universal Pan_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 266–8.
Note. _Mr. Northcote’s Dream of a Painter._ See vol. I. (_The
Round Table_), note to p. 162.
ON GAINSBOROUGH’S PICTURES
This article, like the last, was used for the _Encyclopædia_ essay (vol.
IX. pp. 395–6) and was partly reproduced in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s edition
of _Essays on the Fine Arts_, 1873 (notes to p. 244).
202. _A Portrait of a Youth._ The famous ‘Blue Boy’ belonging to the
Duke of Westminster, painted in 1779.
203. _Portrait of Garrick._ Painted in 1776, and now at the
Stratford-on-Avon Museum.
‘_Distilled books_,’ _etc._ Bacon, _Essays_ (‘Of Studies’).
‘_I to Hercules._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_Cottage Children._ ‘Rustic Children,’ now in the National
Gallery.
205. Note. _Two Spanish Beggar Boys._ In the Dulwich Gallery. See vol.
IX. p. 25.
MR. KEMBLE’S PENRUDDOCK
This theatrical notice is clearly Hazlitt’s, though he omitted it from
_A View of the English Stage_. Cf. vol. I. (_Characters of Shakespeare’s
Plays_), p. 237, where the same words are used, with trifling
variations, in criticism of Kemble’s _Hamlet_. Cf. also vol. VIII. p.
376.
205. _Penruddock._ In Richard Cumberland’s _The Wheel of Fortune_
(1795).
206. ‘_Is whispering nothing_,’ _etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act I. Sc.
2.
207. ‘_There is no variableness_,’ _etc._ _St. James_ i. 17.
‘_Splenetic_ [splenetive] _and rash_.’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_The fiery soul_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _Absalom and Achitophel_, l.
156–8.
‘_You shall relish_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 1.
INTRODUCTION TO AN ACCOUNT OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS’S DISCOURSES
Hazlitt contributed to _The Champion_ six papers on the ‘Character of
Sir Joshua Reynolds.’ The first two of these (Oct. 30 and Nov. 6. 1814)
were used in the author’s _Encyclopædia Britannica_ essay on ‘Fine
Arts.’ See vol. IX. of the present edition, pp. 377 _et seq._, and the
notes, where the omitted portions of the two articles are supplied. The
last four (viz. the present essay and the three succeeding ones) are
here reprinted for the first time. Hazlitt afterwards dealt with the
same subject in the two essays entitled ‘On Certain Inconsistencies in
Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses’ (vol. VI. _Table Talk_, pp. 122–145).
208. Note. For Richardson see vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), p. 10 and note.
Charles Antoine Coypel (1694–1752) was Director of the Academy
from 1747. His Discourses on Art were republished in 1883 by H.
Jouin (_Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture_).
ON GENIUS AND ORIGINALITY
211. _If Raphael, for instance, had only copied_, _etc._ See
Reynolds’s Twelfth Discourse.
212. ‘_Sole sitting_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Poems on the Naming of
Places_, IV.
‘_Beauty, rendered still more beautiful._’ Cf.
‘——And he would gaze till it became
Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain
The beauty, still more beauteous.’
Wordsworth, _Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree_, 35–37.
‘_Thrice happy fields_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, III.
569–570.
213. ‘_The tender mercies._’ ‘The tender mercies of the wicked are
cruel.’ _Proverbs_ xii. 10.
‘_Wandering through dry places_,’ _etc._ Cf. S. _Matthew_ xii.
43.
213. Note. Claude’s _Liber Veritatis_, now in the possession of the
Duke of Devonshire, is not a collection of original sketches,
but a record of his pictures with inscriptions showing for whom
they were painted.
215. ‘_Human face divine._’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 44.
ON THE IMITATION OF NATURE
221. ‘_Blinking Sam._’ See Mrs. Piozzi’s _Anecdotes_, _etc._
(_Johnsonian Miscellanies_, ed. G. B. Hill, I. 313).
ON THE IDEAL
223. ‘_Might ascend_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._ Prologue.
224. ‘_Obscurity her curtain_,’ _etc._ From a poem _To the Honourable
and Reverend F. C._ in Dodsley’s _Collection of Poems_, vol.
VI. (1758), p. 138. The poem (anonymously published) was
written by Sneyd Davies (1709–1769), and was addressed to
Frederick Cornwallis, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. See
_The Gentleman’s Magazine_, vol. I. p. 174, and Nichols’s
_Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth
Century_, vol. I.
226. ‘_Whose end_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
228. _We have heard it observed_, _etc._ By Coleridge, probably. See
vol. IV. p. 217.
CHARLEMAGNE: OU L’ÉGLISE DÉLIVRÉE
230. _The brother of Buonaparte._ Lucien Buonaparte (1775–1840),
Prince of Canino. The present review of his _Charlemagne_,
_etc._ is signed ‘W. H.’
231. _Henriade._ Voltaire’s epic (1723).
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
235. _The true Florimel_, _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, III. viii.
236. _Another epic poem._ _La Cirnéide_ (1819).
LUCIEN BUONAPARTE’S COLLECTION, ETC.
This article is signed ‘W. H.’
237. ‘_Vile durance._’ Kenrick’s _Falstaff’s Wedding_ (1766), Act I.
Sc. 2.
‘_The mistress or the saint._’ Cf. Goldsmith, _The Traveller_,
152.
_Jocunda._ The portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco del
Giocondo.
239. ‘_Laborious foolery._’ Hazlitt seems to be quoting from himself.
See his Letter ‘On Modern Comedy’ (1813), vol. VIII. p. 554.
240. ‘_Come, then, the colours_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, II.
17–20.
_Watteau._ Antoine Watteau (1684–1721).
_Guerin._ Pierre Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833). The picture
referred to is now in the Louvre.
241. _The Deluge by Girodet._ This picture of Anne Louis Girodet’s
(1767–1824) is in the Louvre.
242. _Lefebre._ Hazlitt presumably refers to Robert Le Fèvre’s
(1756–1830) portrait of Napoleon now in the Gallery at
Versailles.
BRITISH INSTITUTION
These three notices of the Exhibition at the British Institution are
signed ‘W. H.’
243. _C. L. Eastlake._ Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865), elected
President of the Royal Academy and knighted in 1850; Director
of the National Gallery from 1855.
‘_Antique Roman._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 2.
_A hint from a high quarter._ Hazlitt presumably refers to the
fact that Canning had not been in office since his quarrel with
Castlereagh in 1809.
244. ‘_A great book is a great evil._’ A saying of Voltaire’s. Cf.
vol. V. (_Lectures on the English Poets_), p. 114.
‘_It is place_,’ _etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 3.
245. _G. Hayter._ George (afterwards Sir George) Hayter (1792–1871).
His ‘Ezra’ gained a prize of £200.
_Mr. Harlowe’s Hubert and Arthur._ By George Henry Harlow
(1787–1819), a pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence.
‘_Deep scars_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 601.
_Miss Geddes._ Margaret Sarah Geddes (1793–1872), better known as
Mrs. Carpenter, and a portrait-painter.
_Chalon._ Alfred Edward Chalon (1781–1860).
_Burnetts_, _etc._ James M. Burnet (1788–1816) and John Burnet
(1784–1868); Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787–1855);
Thomas Christopher Hofland (1777–1843); John Glover
(1767–1849). Both the Nasmyths, Alexander (1758–1840) and Peter
(1787–1831), were represented at the Exhibition.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
246. _W. Collins._ William Collins (1788–1847).
247. _Bone._ Robert Trewick Bone (1790–1840).
_H. Howard._ Henry Howard (1769–1847).
_H. Singleton._ Henry Singleton (1766–1839).
_P. H. Rogers._ Philip Hutchins Rogers (1794–1853).
_J. Wilson._ John Wilson (1774–1855).
248. _The ablest landscape painter_, _etc._ Turner. Cf. vol. I. (_The
Round Table_), p. 76 note.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
248. _B. Barker._ Benjamin Barker (1776–1838).
_Ab. Cooper._ Abraham Cooper (1787–1868).
_W. Westall._ William Westall (1781–1850).
249. _J. Stark._ James Stark (1794–1859).
_P. Dewint._ Peter De Wint (1784–1849).
_A. Sauerweide._ Alexander Sauerweid (1782–1844).
‘_War is a game_,’ _etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, V. 187–8.
ON MR. WILKIE’S PICTURES
This essay is signed ‘W. H.’
249. _Archbishop Herring’s letters._ Cf. vol. V. (_Lectures on the
English Poets_), p. 141 and note.
250. _The highest authority on art._ From this point the rest of the
essay was incorporated in the Lecture on Hogarth. See vol.
VIII. pp. 139–141.
251. ‘_To shew vice_ [virtue],’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_The very error_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘It is the very error of the
moon.’ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
252. ‘_Your lungs begin to crow_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II.
Sc. 7.
[CHARACTER OF MR. WORDSWORTH’S NEW POEM, THE EXCURSION]
Under this heading Hazlitt contributed to _The Examiner_ three papers
which he afterwards partly republished with omissions and variations in
two essays in _The Round Table_. See vol. I. pp. 111–125. These
omissions and variations are given below.
At the beginning of the first essay as published in _The Round
Table_ add from the first (August 21, 1814) of _The Examiner_
articles the following passage:—
‘In power of intellect, in lofty conception, in the depth of
feeling, at once simple and sublime, which pervades every part
of it and which gives to every object an almost preternatural
and preterhuman interest, this work has seldom been surpassed.
If the subject of the Poem had been equal to the genius of the
Poet, if the skill with which he has chosen his materials had
accorded with the power exerted over them, if the objects
(whether persons or things) which he makes use of as the
vehicle of his feelings had been such as immediately and
irresistibly to convey them in all their force and depth to
others, then the production before us would indeed have “proved
a monument,” as he himself wishes it, worthy of the author and
of his country. Whether, as it is, this most original and
powerful performance may not rather remain like one of those
stupendous but half-finished structures, which have been
suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour
attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel it would
be rather presumptuous in us to determine.’
At the end of the first paragraph on p. 112 add the following
note:—
‘Every one wishes to get rid of the booths and bridges in the
Park,[68] in order to have a view of the ground and water
again. Our Poet looks at the more lasting and serious works of
men as baby-houses and toys, and from the greater elevation of
his mind regards them much in the same light as we do the
Regent’s Fair and Mr. Vansittart’s “permanent erections.”’
For ‘He sees all things in himself’ (p. 112, l. 28) read ‘He sees
all things in his own mind; he contemplates effects in their
causes, and passions in their principles.’
To the words ‘our very constitution’ (p. 113, l. 8) Hazlitt in
_The Examiner_ appends, as a note, ‘“God knew Adam in the
elements of his chaos, and saw him in the great obscurity of
nothing.” _Sir Thomas Browne._’
For ‘The general and the permanent’ (p. 113, l. 12) read ‘The
common and the permanent.’
The words ‘interlocutions between Lucius and Caius’ (p. 113, l.
19) are not between quotation marks in the magazine.
_The Examiner_ for Aug. 28, 1814 contained a second essay on the
same subject, republished in _The Round Table_, except that the
opening paragraph was somewhat curtailed. In place of the
paragraph in _The Round Table_ ‘We could have wished,’ etc.
(vol. I. p. 113) read:—
‘We could have wished that Mr. Wordsworth had given to his work
the form of a philosophical poem altogether, with only
occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances.
There is in his general sentiments and reflections on human
life a depth, an originality, a truth, a beauty, and grandeur
both of conception and expression, which place him decidedly
at the head of the poets of the present day, or rather which
place him in a totally distinct class of excellence. But he
has chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and
description which, instead of assisting, hinders the progress
and effect of the general reasoning. Almost all this part of
the work, which Mr. Wordsworth has inwoven with the text,
would have come in better in plain prose as notes at the end.
Indeed, there is something evidently inconsistent, upon his
own principles, in the construction of the poem. For he
professes, in these ambiguous illustrations, to avoid all
that is striking or extraordinary—all that can raise the
imagination or affect the passions—all that is not every way
common and necessarily included in the natural workings of
the passions in all minds and in all circumstances. Then why
introduce particular illustrations at all which add nothing
to the force of the general truth, which hang as a dead
weight upon the imagination, which degrade the thought and
weaken the sentiment, and the connection of which with the
general principle it is more difficult to find out than to
understand the general principle itself? It is only by an
extreme process of abstraction that it is often possible to
trace the operation of the general law in the particular
illustration, yet it is to supply the defect of abstraction
that the illustration is given. Mr. Wordsworth indeed says
finely, and perhaps as truly as finely,’ etc.
Instead of saying that Wordsworth’s powers of description and
fancy seem to be little inferior to those of his classical
predecessor, Akenside (p. 114), Hazlitt, in _The Examiner_,
made the very different statement that ‘his powers of
description and fancy seem to be little inferior to those of
thought and sentiment.’
To the quotation on page 116, ‘Poor gentleman,’ etc. Hazlitt
adds, as a note, ‘Love in a Wood.’
After the words ‘any thing but dull’ (p. 116, l. 22) add, from
_The Examiner_, ‘_Rasselas_ indeed is dull; but then it is
privileged dulness.’
After ‘natural exercise of others’ (p. 117, l. 7) add ‘The
intellectual and the moral faculties of man are different; the
ideas of things and the feelings of pleasure and pain connected
with them.’ There are a few other trifling verbal alterations
in this paragraph. The note on the word ‘solitary’ on p. 117 is
not in _The Examiner_.
A third essay on the same subject was published in _The Examiner_
for October 2, 1814. This was reprinted with a few omissions
and additions in _The Round Table_ (see vol. I. pp. 120–125).
The opening paragraph in _The Round Table_ is condensed from the
following:—
‘Poetry may be properly divided into two classes; the poetry of
imagination and the poetry of sentiment. The one consists in
the power of calling up images of the most pleasing or striking
kind; the other depends on the strength of the interest which
it excites in given objects. The one may be said to arise out
of the faculties of memory and invention, conversant with the
world of external nature; the other from the fund of our moral
sensibility. In the combination of these different excellences
the perfection of poetry consists; the greatest poets of our
own or other countries have been equally distinguished for
richness of invention and depth of feeling. By the greatest
poets of our own country, we mean Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare
and Milton, who evidently possessed both kinds of imagination,
the intellectual and moral, in the highest degree. Young and
Cowley might be cited as the most brilliant instances of the
separation of feeling from fancy, of men who were dazzled by
the exuberance of their own thoughts and whose genius was
sacrificed to their want of taste. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other
hand, whose powers of feeling are of the highest order, is
certainly deficient in fanciful invention: his writings exhibit
all the internal power, without the external form of poetry. He
has none of the pomp and decoration and scenic effect of
poetry: no gorgeous palaces nor solemn temples awe the
imagination: no cities rise with glistering spires and
pinnacles adorned[69]: we meet with no knights pricked forth on
airy steeds: no hair-breadth scapes and perilous accidents[70]
by flood or field. Either from the predominant habit of his
mind, not requiring the stimulus of outward impressions, or
from the want of an imagination teeming with various forms, he
takes the common every-day events and objects of nature, or
rather seeks those that are the most simple and barren of
effect; but he adds to them a weight of interest from the
resources of his own mind, which makes the most insignificant
things serious and even formidable. All other interests are
absorbed in the deeper interest of his own thoughts, and find
the same level. His mind magnifies the littleness of his
subject, and raises its meanness; lends it his strength, and
clothes it with borrowed grandeur. With him a molehill, covered
with wild thyme, assumes the importance of “the great vision of
the guarded mount”[71]: a puddle is filled with preternatural
faces, and agitated with the fiercest storms of passion; and to
his mind, as he himself informs us, and as we can easily
believe,
“——The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”’[72]
After the words ‘among these northern Arcadians’ (vol. I. p. 121)
Hazlitt quotes ll. 411–439 of Book V. of _The Excursion_.
The short paragraph on p. 122 reads in _The Examiner_:—
‘We think it is pushing our love or admiration of natural
objects a good deal too far, to make it a set-off against a
story like the preceding, which carries that concentration
of self-interest and callousness to the feelings of others
to its utmost pitch, which is the general character of
those who are cut off by their mountains and valleys from
an intercourse with mankind, even more than of the country
people.’
In _The Examiner_, after the words ‘the beautiful poem of _Hart
Leap Well_,’ the essay concludes as follows:—
‘We conceive that about as many fine things have passed through
Mr. Wordsworth’s mind as, with five or six exceptions, through
any human mind whatever. The conclusion of the passage we refer
to is admirable, and comes in like some dying close in
music:—[_The Excursion_, Book VII., ll. 976–1007].
‘If Mr. Wordsworth does not always write in this manner, it is
his own fault. He can as often as he pleases. It is not in our
power to add to, or take away from, the pretensions of a poem
like the present, but if our opinion or wishes could have any
weight, we would take our leave of it by saying—_Esto_
perpetua!’
The first two of these _Examiner_ articles are referred to by
Lamb in a letter to Wordsworth of Sept. 19, 1814. See
_Letters_, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, I. 434–5. It is significant of
Hazlitt’s increasing bitterness (caused mainly, no doubt, by
the final downfall of Napoleon) that the passages omitted from
_The Round Table_ are for the most part of a highly eulogistic
character.
ON ROCHEFOUCAULT’S MAXIMS
This paper is signed ‘W. H.’ in _The Examiner_.
254. ‘_The web of our life_,’ _etc._ _All’s Well that Ends Well_, Act
IV. Sc. 3.
_The Practice of Piety._ See vol. III. (_Political Essays_), note
to p. 111.
_Grove’s Ethics._ Henry Grove’s (1684–1738) _A System of Moral
Philosophy_ (1749).
_De l’Esprit._ Helvétius’s famous book (1758).
Note. _Lines written while sailing in a boat at evening._
256. ‘_Make assurance_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
257. ‘_Gets the start_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.
ON THE PREDOMINANT PRINCIPLES, ETC.
This essay, the title of which has been taken from the Index to _The
Examiner_, is No. IX. of the _Round Table_ series. It was republished in
_Winterslow_ under the title of ‘Mind and Motive.’
259. ‘_Friends now fast sworn_,’ _etc._ _Coriolanus_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
260. ‘_The servile slave._’ _The Faerie Queene_, II. vii. 33.
261. ‘_The toys of desperation._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 4.
262. _A fine observation_, _etc._ Aristotle, _Metaphysics_, A I. 980
a, 21.
THE LOVE OF POWER, ETC.
No. XIII. of the _Round Table_ series, republished in _Winterslow_ along
with the former essay as ‘Mind and Motive.’
265. ‘_But for an utmost end_,’ _etc._ Hobbes, _Human Nature_, VII. 5,
6 (_Works_, ed. Molesworth, IV. 33).
266. ‘_He courted a statue_,’ _etc._ _Don Quixote_, Part I. Book II.
Chap. 13.
267. ‘_Catch glimpses_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s Sonnet, ‘The world is
too much with us,’ etc.
‘_I also was an Arcadian._’ Cf. vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), p. 27
and note.
268. ‘_Sithence no fairy lights_,’ _etc._ Sneyd Davies, _To the
Honourable and Reverend F. C._ See _ante_, note to p. 224.
_Happy are they_, _etc._ Hazlitt seems to have been fond of this
passage. See vol. IV. (_Reply to Malthus_), p. 104, and vol.
III. (_Political Essays_), note to p. 266.
ESSAY ON MANNERS
This essay, No. XVIII. of the _Round Table_ series, was republished in
_Winterslow_. Part of it Hazlitt himself used in the essay ‘On Manner’
in _The Round Table_. See vol. I. pp. 44–7 and notes.
269. _The Flower and Leaf._ This poem is not now regarded as
Chaucer’s. Cf. vol. V. (_Lectures on the English Poets_), p. 27
and note.
271. ‘_The painted birds_,’ _etc._ Dryden, _The Flower and the Leaf_,
_etc._, ll. 46–53, 102–152.
272. _Lord Chesterfield’s character of the Duke of Marlborough_,
_etc._ The rest of the essay from this point is in vol. I. (see
pp. 44–7 and notes).
KEAN’S BAJAZET, ETC.
This theatrical notice is proved to be Hazlitt’s by the passage (p. 276)
beginning ‘Happy age, when the utmost stretch of a morning’s study,’
etc., which is repeated in the Lecture ‘On Wycherley, Congreve,
Vanbrugh, and Farquhar.’ See vol. VIII. p. 70. Rowe’s _Tamerlane_ was
first produced in 1702.
274. _Miss Stephens’s reappearance in Polly._ Cf. vol. VIII. pp.
193–5.
275. ‘_Full of sound_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 5.
‘_A load to sink a navy._’ _Henry VIII._ Act III. Sc. 2.
_Ambition as the hunger of noble minds._ See _Tamerlane_, Act II.
Sc. 2.
276. _The Country Girl._ Produced originally in 1766, an adaptation by
Garrick of _The Country Wife_ of Wycherley. Cf. vol. VIII. p.
76. Mrs. Mardyn, Mrs. Alsop, and the actors here referred to
are dealt with by Hazlitt in _A View of the English Stage_.
DOCTRINE OF PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY
This paper, signed ‘W,’ is clearly Hazlitt’s. Cf. the Lecture on the
same subject, _ante_, pp. 48–74. The essay is No. XXVII. of the _Round
Table_ series.
277. ‘_For I had learnt_,’ _etc._ Cf. Wordsworth, _Lines composed a
few miles above Tintern Abbey_, 95–102.
278. ‘_Threshold of Jove’s throne._’ Cf. ‘Before the starry threshold
of Jove’s court,’ _Comus_, I.
279. ‘_Praise and blame_,’ _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 56.
280. ‘_A good favour_,’ _etc._ Loosely quoted from _Much Ado About
Nothing_, Act III. Sc. 3.
282. _Marvell and his leg of mutton._ Hazlitt refers to the story of
Danby’s unsuccessful attempt to win over Marvell to the court.
One version of the story is that in Danby’s presence Marvell
summoned his servant and said to him, ‘Pray, what had I for
dinner yesterday?’ ‘A shoulder of mutton.’ ‘And what do you
allow me to-day?’ ‘The remainder hashed.’ Marvell then added to
Danby, ‘And to-morrow, my lord, I shall have the sweet
blade-bone broiled.’
‘_Allemagne_,’ _etc._ _De l’Allemagne_, Preface.
‘_But there is matter_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, _Hart-Leap Well_,
95–6.
PARALLEL PASSAGES IN VARIOUS POETS
No. XXVIII. of the Round Table series, and signed ‘W.’ The long passages
from Voltaire, etc. have been indicated by the first and last line.
282. _Zaire._ 1732.
283. ‘_Soft you_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
‘_Vanished_ [melted] _into thin air_.’ _The Tempest_, Act IV. Sc.
1.
_Ducis._ Jean François Ducis (1733–1816), who adapted some of
Shakespeare’s plays for the stage.
283. _‘As flat,’ etc._ Cf. ‘He has crushed his nose, Susannah says, as
flat as a pancake to his face.’ _Tristram Shandy_, III. 27.
284. _Potter._ Robert Potter’s (1721–1804) translation of Æschylus
appeared in 1777.
_‘When I had gazed,’ etc._ _Poems on the Naming of Places_, II.
51 _et seq._
_We have once already attempted, etc._ In three articles in _The
Examiner_. Cf. _ante_, pp. 572–5, and vol. I. (_The Round
Table_), pp. 111–125.
_‘In my former days of bliss,’ etc._ From ‘The Shepherd’s
Hunting’ (1615).
_THE DUKE D’ENGHIEN_
In addition to the essays reprinted in the text from _The Examiner_ of
1815 there are four letters signed ‘Peter Pickthank’ on the Duke
D’Enghien, to which reference should be made. These appeared on
September 24, October 8, November 19, and December 10, and were written
in reply to a correspondent signing himself ‘Fair Play.’ The controversy
arose out of an article (September 3) entitled ‘Chateaubriand, The
Quack,’ which contained a casual reference to the Duke D’Enghien, ‘whom
Buonaparte is accused of having murdered because he was not willing that
he, the said Royal Duke, should assassinate him.’ ‘Fair Play’ seized on
this passage and protested (September 10) against the implied defence of
the Duke D’Enghien’s execution. ‘Peter Pickthank’ replied (September
24), and the correspondence was kept up till near the end of the year,
‘Fair Play’ contributing letters on October 1, October 29, and November
26. ‘Peter Pickthank’s’ letters contain many of Hazlitt’s stock
quotations and personal allusions (to Dr. Stoddart, for example); they
embody exactly his political opinions, and altogether the internal
evidence of their having been written by him is very strong. Inasmuch,
however, as there is not absolute certainty in the matter, and a
considerable part of the letters would have been unintelligible without
including ‘Fair Play’s’ letters as well, the editors have felt justified
in omitting the whole correspondence. An editorial note at the end of
‘Peter Pickthank’s’ third letter (November 19) states that ‘this article
has been delayed in order to soften some of the asperities.’
MR. LOCKE A GREAT PLAGIARIST
No. XXXI. of the Round Table series, and signed ‘W.H.’
285. _‘The very head,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_A justly exploded_ [decried] _author_.’ See _ante_, p. 167 and
note.
_Professor Stewart’s very elegant Dissertation._ Prefixed to the
Supplement to the 4th and 5th editions of the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ (1816).
286. _‘Fame is no plant,’ etc._ _Lycidas_ 78–82.
287. _‘The greatest and as it were radical distinction,’ etc._ Bacon,
_Aphorisms_, LV.
‘_That strain I heard was of a higher mood._’ _Lycidas_, 87.
288. _What is most remarkable, etc._ This passage on wit will be found
in an expanded form in _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_.
See vol. VIII. pp. 18–21.
_Three papers, which we propose to write._ These papers do not
appear to have been written.
289. ‘_The laborious fooleries._’ See _ante_, note to p. 239.
290. _‘The tenth transmitter,’ etc._ Cf. ‘No tenth transmitter of a
foolish face.’ Savage, _The Bastard_, 8.
‘_The mind alone is formative._’ See _ante_, p. 176.
[THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED]
In _The Examiner_ for March 3, 1816 appeared the following note:—‘A
correspondent who signs himself J.W. thinks we ought to bring proofs of
Mr. Locke’s want of originality as the founder of a system. We recommend
him, if he is curious on this subject, to read the first eighty pages of
Hobbes’s _Leviathan_, if the name does not alarm him. After that, if he
is not satisfied and repeats his request, perhaps we may attend to it.’
On March 31 (Round Table No. XXXIV.) Hazlitt brings forward his proofs
in a long paper which consists chiefly of extracts from Locke, Hobbes
and other philosophers. The essay begins as follows:—
‘We have been required to give proof of Mr. Locke’s want of originality
as a metaphysical reasoner, and of the claims of Hobbes to be considered
as the founder of the modern system of the philosophy of the human mind.
‘Here then it is. But at the same time we would observe, that we do not
think ourselves bound to give this proof to those who have demanded it
(somewhat impatiently) at our hands. It was sufficient for us to have
stated our opinion on this subject, and to have referred the curious
expressly to the sources from which they might satisfy themselves of the
truth or hollowness of our assertion. To our readers in general we owe
some apology for alluding to such subjects at all. But to the point.—We
have said that the principles of the modern school of metaphysics are
all to be found, pure, entire, connected, and explicitly stated, in the
writings of Hobbes: that Mr. Locke borrowed the leading principle of
that philosophy from Hobbes, without understanding or without admitting
the system in general, concerning which he always seems to entertain two
opinions: that succeeding writers have followed up Mr. Locke’s general
principle into its legitimate consequences, and have arrived at exactly
the same conclusions as Hobbes, but that being ignorant of the name and
writings of Hobbes, they have with one accord and with great injustice
attributed the merit of the original discovery of that system to Mr.
Locke, as having made the first start, and having gone further in it
than any one else before him.
‘The principles of the modern system, of which Mr. Locke is the reputed
and Mr. Hobbes the real founder, are chiefly the following:—
1. That all our ideas are derived from external objects, by means of the
senses alone, and are merely repetitions of our sensible impressions.
2. That as nothing exists out of the mind but matter and motion, so the
mind itself, with all its operations, is nothing but matter and motion.
3. That thoughts are single, or that we can have only one idea at a
time; in other words, that there are no complex ideas in the mind.
4. That we have no general or abstract ideas.
5. That the only principle of connection between one idea and another is
_association_, or their previous connection in sense.
6. That reason and understanding are resolvable entirely into the
mechanism of language.
7. and 8. That the sense of pleasure and pain is the sole spring of
action, and self-interest the source of all our affections.
9. That the mind acts from necessity, and consequently is not a moral or
accountable agent.
[_The manner of stating and reasoning on this last point, viz. the moral
and practical consequences of the doctrine of necessity is the only
circumstance of importance, in which the modern philosophers differ from
Hobbes._]
10. That there is no such thing as genius, or a difference in the
natural capacities or dispositions of men, the mind being originally
alike passive to all impressions, and becoming whatever it is from
circumstances &c., &c.
‘That these are the most striking positions of the moderns with respect
to the human mind, is what every one, familiar with the writers since
Locke, as Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, Priestley, Horne Tooke, Beddoes,
among ourselves, and Helvetius, Condillac, Mirabaud, Condorcet &c.,
among the French, will readily allow: that most of them are to be found
in the _Essay on Human Understanding_, mixed up in a state of
inextricable confusion with common-place and common sense notions, now
advanced, now retracted, the arguments on one side of the question now
prevailing through an endless labyrinth of explanation, now those on the
other, and now both opinions asserted and denied in the same sentence is
what is equally well known to the readers of Locke and his commentators.
That the same system came from the mind of Hobbes, not hesitating,
stammering, puling, drivelling, ricketty, a sickly half birth, to be
brought up by hand, to be nursed and dandled into common life and
existence, but just the reverse of all this, full grown, completely
proportioned and articulated, compact, stamped in all its lineaments,
with the vigour and decision of the author’s mind, is what we have now
to shew.’
The extracts follow, interspersed with brief comments by Hazlitt, and
the essay concludes as follows:—
‘To what Mr. Hobbes has written on this subject [Liberty and Necessity]
nothing has been added nor can be taken away. We agree to every word of
it, and the more heartily, because it is the only one of all the points
which have been stated on which we do. In speaking of the popular
notions of liberty, in his controversy with a foolish Bishop of that day
(Bramhall), he says, “In fine, that freedom which men commonly find in
books, that which the poets chaunt in the theatres, and the shepherds on
the mountains, that which the pastors teach in the churches, and the
doctors in the universities, and that which the common people in the
markets, and all mankind in the whole world do assent unto, is the same
that I assent unto, namely, that a man hath freedom to do if he will;
but whether he hath freedom to will, is a question which it seems
neither the Bishop nor they ever thought on.” Hobbes was as superior to
Locke as a writer, as he was as a reasoner. He had great powers both of
wit and imagination. In short he was a great man, not because he was a
great metaphysician, but he was a great metaphysician because he was a
great man.
‘It has been thought, that the neglect into which Hobbes’s metaphysical
speculations have fallen was originally owing to the obloquy excited by
the irreligious and despotical tendency of his other writings. But in
this he has also been unfairly dealt with. Locke borrowed his
fundamental ideas of government from him; and there is not a word
directly levelled at religion in any of his works. At least, his
aristocratical notions and his want of religion must have, in some
measure, balanced one another; and Charles II. had his picture hanging
in his bed-room, though the Bishops wished to have him burnt. The true
reason of the fate which this author’s writings met with was, that his
views of things were too original and comprehensive to be immediately
understood, without passing through the hands of several successive
generations of commentators and interpreters. Ignorance of another’s
meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear produces hatred: hence
arose the rancour and suspicion of his adversaries, who, to quote some
fine lines of Spenser,
——‘Stood all astonished like a sort of steers
’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race
Unawares is chanced far straying from his peers;
So did their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.’[73]
_COLERIDGE’S ‘CHRISTABEL’_
On June 2, 1816, _The Examiner_ published a review of Coleridge’s
_Christabel_, as to the authorship of which there has been some
discussion. See _Notes and Queries_, 9th Ser. XI. pp. 171 and 271. Mr.
Dykes Campbell (_The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, p. 606)
is disposed to attribute the review to Hazlitt. As in the case of the
_Edinburgh Review_ notice of _Christabel_ (see vol. X. of the present
edition, pp. 411–418), Hazlitt’s authorship cannot be regarded as
absolutely certain. The review is as follows:—
‘The fault of Mr. Coleridge is, that he comes to no conclusion. He is a
man of that universality of genius, that his mind hangs suspended
between poetry and prose, truth and falsehood, and an infinity of other
things, and from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing. Here
are two unfinished poems, and a fragment. _Christabel_, which has been
much read and admired in manuscript, is now for the first time confided
to the public. The _Vision of Kubla Khan_ still remains a profound
secret; for only a few lines of it ever were written.[74]
‘The poem of _Christabel_ sets out in the following manner:
“’Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken’d the crowing cock;
Tu—whit! Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters and twelve for the hour;
Ever and aye, moonshine or shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say, she sees my lady’s shroud.”
‘We wonder that Mr. Murray, who has an eye for things, should suffer
this “mastiff bitch” to come into his shop. Is she a sort of Cerberus to
fright away the critics? But—gentlemen, she is toothless.
‘There is a dishonesty as well as affectation in all this. The secret of
this pretended contempt for the opinion of the public, is that it is a
sorry subterfuge for our self-love. The poet, uncertain of the
approbation of his readers, thinks he shews his superiority to it by
shocking their feelings at the outset, as a clown, who is at a loss how
to behave himself, begins by affronting the company. This is what is
called _throwing a crust to the critics_. If the beauties of
_Christabel_ should not be sufficiently admired, Mr. Coleridge may lay
it all to two lines which he had too much manliness to omit in
complaisance to the bad taste of his contemporaries.
‘We the rather wonder at this bold proceeding in the author, as his
courage has cooled in the course of the publication, and he has omitted,
from mere delicacy, a line which is absolutely necessary to the
understanding the whole story. The _Lady Christabel_, wandering in the
forest by moonlight, meets a lady in apparently great distress, to whom
she offers her assistance and protection, and takes her home with her to
her own chamber. This woman,
——“beautiful to see,
Like a lady of a far countree,”
is a witch. Who she is else, what her business is with _Christabel_,
upon what motives, to what end her sorceries are to work, does not
appear at present; but this much we know, that she is a witch, and that
_Christabel’s_ dread of her arises from her discovering this
circumstance, which is told in a single line, which line, from an
exquisite refinement in efficiency,[75] is here omitted. When the
unknown lady gets to _Christabel’s_ chamber, and is going to undress, it
is said—
“Then drawing in her breath aloud
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast:
Her silken robe and inner vest
Dropt to her feet, and full in view
_Behold! her bosom and half her side_—
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
And she is to sleep by Christabel!”
‘The manuscript runs thus, or nearly thus:—
“Behold her bosom and half her side—
_Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue_.”
‘This line is necessary to make common sense of the first and second
part. “It is the keystone that makes up the arch.”[76] For that reason
Mr. Coleridge left it out. Now this is a greater physiological curiosity
than even the fragment of _Kubla Khan_.
‘In parts of _Christabel_ there is a great deal of beauty, both of
thought, imagery, and versification; but the effect of the general story
is dim, obscure, and visionary. It is more like a dream than a reality.
The mind, in reading it, is spell-bound. The sorceress seems to act
without power—Christabel to yield without resistance. The faculties are
thrown into a state of metaphysical suspense and theoretical imbecility.
The poet, like the witch in _Spenser_, is evidently
“Busied about some wicked gin.”[77]
But we do not foresee what he will make of it. There is something
disgusting at the bottom of his subject, which is but ill glossed over
by a veil of Della Cruscan sentiment and fine writing—like moon-beams
playing on a charnel-house, or flowers strewed on a dead body. Mr.
Coleridge’s style is essentially superficial, pretty, ornamental, and he
has forced it into the service of a story which is petrific. In the
midst of moonlight, and fluttering ringlets, and flitting clouds, and
enchanted echoes, and airy abstractions of all sorts, there is one
genuine outburst of humanity, worthy of the author, when no dream
oppresses him, no spell binds him. We give the passage entire:—’
[Here follow ll. 403–430 of _Christabel_, beginning ‘But when he heard
the lady’s tale.’]
‘Why does not Mr. Coleridge always write in this manner, that we might
always read him? The description of the Dream of Bracy the bard, is also
very beautiful and full of power.
‘The conclusion of the second part of _Christabel_, about “the little
limber elf,” is to us absolutely incomprehensible. _Kubla Khan_, we
think, only shews that Mr. Coleridge can write better _nonsense_ verses
than any man in England. It is not a poem, but a musical composition.
“A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play’d,
Singing of Mount Abora.”
‘We could repeat these lines to ourselves not the less often for not
knowing the meaning of them.’
In a sketch of Coleridge which appeared in _The Examiner_ for Oct. 21,
1821, Leigh Hunt quotes the lines from _Kubla Khan_ (‘A damsel with a
dulcimer,’ etc.) and says: ‘We could repeat such verses ... down a green
glade, a whole summer’s morning’; but in spite of this and a few other
verbal similarities, a comparison of the sketch with the review does not
support the theory that the latter was written by Leigh Hunt. Possibly
he wrote a few lines here and there, but the review as a whole is far
more suggestive of Hazlitt.
SHAKESPEAR’S FEMALE CHARACTERS
No. XLIII. of the _Round Table_ series. It is partly reproduced in
_Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_. See especially the essays on
_Cymbeline_ and _Othello_ (vol. I. 179 _et seq._ and 200 _et seq._ and
notes).
290. _Miss Peggy._ See _ante_, p. 276.
291. ‘_Calls true love_,’ _etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
295. ‘_Books, dreams_,’ _etc._ _Personal Talk_, ll. 33 _et seq._
_Tate._ Nahum Tate’s _King Lear_ was brought out in 1681.
‘_And her heart beats_,’ _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III.
Sc. 2.
296. ‘_Sir, the fairest flowers_,’ _etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV.
Sc. 4.
_SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY OF THE GOOD OLD TIMES_
Three papers appeared in _The Examiner_ for April 6, April 13, and April
20, 1817, under the heading of ‘Sketches of the History of the Good Old
Times before the French Revolution, when Kings and Priests did what they
pleased, by the grace of God.’ In these essays a French anti-Bourbon
book, the title of which is not given, is made the text for a most
unflattering review of the characters of a number of kings, from Hugh
Capet to Louis XVI. The subject would naturally attract Hazlitt, and
indeed it may be said that the essays are almost certainly his. As,
however, the internal evidence, though very strong, does not prove his
authorship to be absolutely certain, it has been thought better not to
include the essays in the present edition.
MISS O’NEILL’S WIDOW CHEERLY
This and the five succeeding theatrical papers from _The Examiner_ of
1817 have been inserted in the text because the internal evidence seems
to leave no room for doubt that they were written by Hazlitt. It is
clear from _A View of the English Stage_ that he was writing theatrical
notices for _The Examiner_ during the whole of the period in question
(Jan.–May, 1817).
297. _The best actress ... with one great exception_, _etc._ For this
comparison of Miss O’Neill with Mrs. Siddons, cf. vol. VIII. p.
198, and for Miss O’Neill’s failure in comedy, _ibid._ p. 291.
297. _The Soldier’s Daughter._ By Andrew Cherry, produced in 1804.
298. ‘_The insipid levelling morality_,’ _etc._ See Lamb’s footnote to
Middleton and Rowley’s _A Fair Quarrel_. Hazlitt quotes the
passage elsewhere.
PENELOPE AND THE DANSOMANIE
299. ‘_Like to see the unmerited fall_,’ _etc._ Cf. Burke,
_Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed.
Payne, II. 164).
300. _The Gentleman who is understood_, _etc._ William Ayrton
(1777–1858), who was musical director at the King’s Theatre in
1817 and again in 1821.
_Of the Dansomanie_, _etc._ A comparison of this passage with a
reference to the ‘Dansomanie’ in vol. VIII. p. 437 is
conclusive as to Hazlitt’s authorship of this notice.
‘_Such were the joys_,’ _etc._ Bickerstaffe, _Love in a Village_,
Act II. Sc. 1.
‘_Roll on_,’ _etc._ Ossian, _The Songs of Selma_.
The notice concludes with a long quotation from Colley Cibber,
introduced by the following paragraph: ‘As the present season
may be considered as a sort of revival of the Opera, the
following particulars of its first introduction into this
country may not be unacceptable to the reader. They are taken
from _Colley Cibber’s Memoirs of himself_, p. 316.’
OROONOKO
This tragedy by Thomas Southerne (1660–1746) was produced in 1696. See
_post_, note to p. 303 (on _Imogine_), for conclusive proof of Hazlitt’s
authorship of this notice.
301. _The success of his Richard II._ This passage, though the
conclusion drawn by Hazlitt is somewhat different, may be
compared with his notice of Kean’s Richard II. (vol. VIII. p.
223).
‘_The melting mood._’ _Othello_, Act V. Sc. 2.
302. ‘_The devil has not_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc 3.
303. _Imogine._ In Maturin’s _Bertram_. Cf. the notice of that play in
_A View of the English Stage_ (vol. VIII. p. 307). In one of
Hazlitt’s theatrical papers in _The London Magazine_ (_ibid._
p. 391), he says of Miss Somerville’s (Mrs. Bunn’s) voice that
‘it resembles the deep murmur of a hive of bees in spring-tide,
and the words drop like honey from her lips.’
‘_The music of her honey-vows._’ Cf. ‘That suck’d the honey of
his music vows.’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_He often has beguiled us_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_Gray, the poet_, _etc._ See a letter to Horace Walpole,
September, 1737 (_Letters_, ed. Tovey, i. 8).
THE PANNEL AND THE RAVENS
A comparison of this paper with _A View of the English Stage_ and the
other dramatic essays in vol. VIII., makes it perfectly clear that
Hazlitt is the writer.
304. _The Pannel._ By John Philip Kemble, produced at Drury Lane in
1788.
‘_Balsam of fierabras._’ Described by Don Quixote. See _Don
Quixote_, I. I. 2.
304. _The howling of the rabble._ The Regent had been attacked on his
return to St. James’s Palace after opening Parliament on March
28, 1817.
_The wax figures at Mrs. Salmon’s._ See _ante_, p. 175.
‘_Circe and the Sirens three._’ _Comus_, 253.
_Miss Stephens._ Hazlitt had noticed her first appearance. See
vol. VIII. p. 192.
_Mr. Fawcett._ John Fawcett (1768–1837) was manager of Covent
Garden theatre.
_Till Miss O’Neill is tired_, _etc._ See vol. VIII. note to p.
308.
‘_The ravens are hoarse_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
_Toujours perdrix._ See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of The Age_), p.
275 and note.
_Mr. Canning._ Cf. _post_, p. 336 note.
_The Ravens_, _etc._ See vol. VIII. note to p. 353.
_The Maid and Magpie_, _etc._ See vol. VIII. pp. 244 and 279.
‘_And choughs_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
_The Maid of Palisseau._ _The Magpie, or the Maid of Palaiseau_,
a version attributed to T. J. Dibdin of _La Pie Voleuse_,
produced at Dury Lane, Sept. 12, 1815.
_Reminded us of her mother’s._ Mrs. Alsop was daughter of Mrs.
Jordan.
JOHN GILPIN
305. ‘_And when he next_,’ _etc._ _John Gilpin_, St. 63.
306. ‘_The turnpike men_,’ _etc. Ibid._ St. 29 and 30.
‘_First, last, and midst._’ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, V. 165. Quoted
by Hazlitt more than once.
‘_That ligament_,’ _etc._ Hazlitt elsewhere quotes this passage
from _Tristram Shandy_ (Book VI. Chap. 10).
307. _Mrs. Hill._ ‘From Belfast,’ her first appearance.
DON GIOVANNI AND KEAN’S EUSTACE DE ST. PIERRE
With this notice compare Hazlitt’s article on _Don Juan_ in _A View of
the English Stage_, vol. VIII. pp. 362–366.
307. _Spenser’s description of Belphebe._ In his former notice Hazlitt
had compared Madame Fodor with Spenser’s Belphebe. See vol.
VIII. p. 364 and note.
308. _The Surrender of Calais._ By George Colman, Junior, originally
produced at the Haymarket in 1791, and described by Genest as
‘a jumble of Tragedy, Comedy, and Opera.’
‘_A clout upon that head_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act. II. Sc. 2.
‘_Though we have seen this_,’ _etc. Ibid._
‘_Thunder, nothing but thunder._’ _Measure for Measure_, Act II.
Sc. 2.
_A new character_, _etc._ Achmet in _Barbarossa_. See vol. VIII.
p. 372.
CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY PEOPLE
The internal evidence of Hazlitt’s authorship of this paper is
overwhelmingly strong. Some of the main points are referred to in the
following notes. The essay was probably written at Winterslow.
309. ‘_Here be truths._’ This is a saying, not of Dogberry, but of
Pompey, in _Measure for Measure_, Act II. Sc. 1.
309. ‘_Mountain foreigner._’ _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act I. Sc.
1.
‘_Retired from public haunts._’ Cf. ‘This our life exempt from
public haunt,’ etc. _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_Lord Foppington._ In Vanbrugh’s _The Relapse_.
_A philosophical poet_, _etc._ Coleridge, probably.
‘_Pelting villages._’ _King Lear_, Act II. Sc. 3.
‘_A crew of patches_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream_, Act
III. Sc. 2.
_P—tt—n._ Probably Pitton, a small village near Winterslow.
_My friend C—— L——._ Lamb, no doubt, who went with Hazlitt from
Winterslow to Oxford in August, 1810. Cf. vol. VI. (_Table
Talk_), p. 188.
‘_Fearing no colours._’ _Twelfth Night_, Act I. Sc. 5.
310. _They are feræ naturæ_, _etc._ Cf. a sentence in vol. I. (_The
Round Table_), p. 124: ‘They [country people] are taken out of
a state of nature, without being put in possession of the
refinements of art.’
311. ‘_Be trampled in the mire_,’ _etc._ A favourite quotation of
Hazlitt’s from Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 93).
_A mischievous wag_, _etc._ Perhaps Lamb’s schoolfellow, Bobbie
Allen, who visited Scotland and the Lakes with Dr. Stoddart in
1802. Lamb describes him in ‘Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty
Years Ago.’ See also Lamb’s _Letters_ (ed. Ainger), I. 188.
‘_The spinsters_,’ _etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act II. Sc. 4.
‘_May I not take mine ease at mine inn?_’ _1 Henry IV._, Act III.
Sc. 3.
_A few odd volumes of old plays and novels._ It is known that
Hazlitt was at the Hut at Winterslow during the summer and
autumn of 1819, and that he had taken with him some volumes of
the old dramatists in order to prepare for the course of
lectures ‘On the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth,’
delivered in the following year. See Barry Cornwall’s
_Autobiographical Fragment_.
‘_Fleet the golden time_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act I.
Sc. 1.
Note 1. Salisbury is only six miles from Winterslow.
312. ‘_Giving to airy nothing_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_,
Act V. Sc. 1.
_To elevate and surprise._ Frequently quoted by Hazlitt from the
Duke of Buckingham’s _The Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_But I told him_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.
313. ‘_Sufficient to the day_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_, vi. 34.
‘_’Twould thin the land_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act III.
Sc. 4.
314. ‘_Anon as patient_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
MR. MACREADY’S MACBETH
Macready played Macbeth for the first time on June 9, 1820. Cf. this
with the notice of Kean’s Macbeth (vol. VIII. p. 204).
315. ‘_Air-drawn dagger_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_Thick-coming fancies._’ _Ibid._ Act V. Sc. 3.
‘_Docked and curtailed._’ Cf. ‘We know that they [bishops] hate
to be dockt and clipt.’ Milton, _Reformation in England_, I.
‘_Twa lang Scotch miles._’ Cf. ‘We think na on the lang Scots
miles.’ _Tam O’Shanter_, 7.
‘_Oh Hell-kite, all?_’ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
_David Rizzio._ See vol. VIII. p. 459.
315. _The Lord of the Manor._ A comic opera by General John Burgoyne
(1722–1792), produced in 1780.
_The Libertine._ An opera attributed to Isaac Pocock, produced in
1817. See vol. VIII. p. 370.
_Mr. Contrast._ In _The Lord of the Manor_.
‘_A speaking face._’ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of the lines in
_Bombastes Furioso_ (Sc. 1):
‘——Fusbos, give place,
You know you haven’t got a singing face.’
_Moll Flagon._ In _The Lord of the Manor_.
‘_Let those laugh_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘Let those love now, who never lov’d before;
Let those who always lov’d, now love the more.’
Parnell, Catullus, _The Vigil of Venus_.
317. _Mrs. Salmon._ Eliza Salmon (1787–1849), a well-known concert and
oratorio singer. The references in this paragraph to Miss
Stephens and the quotations are conclusive evidence of
Hazlitt’s authorship of the notice.
_D’une pathétique_, _etc._ Rousseau, _Confessions_, Liv. I.
‘_Thoughts of which_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Yet loss of thee would never
from my heart,’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 912.
‘_With other notes_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 17.
_The voice of Liberty_, _etc._ The Revolution in Spain had broken
out early in 1820, and on March 10 King Ferdinand had
proclaimed the Liberal Constitution of 1812.
‘_Had three ears again._’ Cf. ‘Had I three ears, I’d hear thee.’
_Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
‘_Know the return of spring._’ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act II. Sc.
1.
GUY FAUX
See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the Age_), p. 365 and note, and the essay
‘On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen’ (republished in vol. XII. of
the present edition), from which it appears that the subject was
suggested to Hazlitt by Lamb. Lamb himself wrote an essay (not
republished by him) on the same subject in _The London Magazine_ for
November 1823. This essay, in which a chaffing reference is made to
Hazlitt’s three papers, was partly founded on an earlier essay ‘On the
Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason,’ published in _The
Reflector_, 1811. See _The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb_, ed. E. V.
Lucas, I. 236 and notes.
317. _Mr. Hogg’s Jacobite Relics._ Published in 2 vols. in 1819. In
the Introduction Hogg says, ‘And now, when the horrors of the
Catholic religion have ceased to oppress the minds of men,
there is but one way of thinking on the rights of the Stuarts
throughout the realm.’
_A Popish Priest._ Guy Fawkes (1570–1606) was not a priest.
318. _Which Mr. Hogg treats_, _etc._ Hazlitt seems to be referring to
the general sense of the Introduction to _The Jacobite Relics_.
‘_The best of cut-throats._’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
319. _Regulus._ The stories of the self-sacrifice of Regulus and of
Codrus, the last King of Athens, are familiar.
320. ‘_The compunctious visitings of nature._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc.
5.
‘_The spirit is willing_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_ xxvi. 41.
320. _The keys of the House of Commons_, _etc._ The allusion is to a
passage in John Cam Hobhouse’s pamphlet, _A Trifling Mistake_,
for which as a breach of privilege he was committed to Newgate
in 1819.
_Margaret Lambrun._ This story is told as a ‘popular historical
tradition’ by Miss Strickland in her _Lives of the Queens of
England_.
321. _Sandt._ Karl Ludwig Sand (1795–1820), who had assassinated
Kotzebue the dramatist (March 23, 1819).
‘_Well done_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_, xxv. 21.
‘_No dim doubts alloy._’ Lamb, Lines _On the Celebrated Picture
by Lionardo da Vinci, called the Virgin of the Rocks_.
‘_Quiring_,’ _etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act V. Sc. 1.
322. ‘_This night_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ xxiii. 43.
‘_Dross compared_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Romans_ viii. 18.
‘_Disembowelled_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 101).
_The Constitutional Association._ See vol. VI. (_Table Talk_),
note to p. 190.
_The concealed Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine._ This question of
the editorship of _Blackwood_ had recently (Feb. 16, 1821) led
to the fatal duel between John Scott and Lockhart’s friend,
Christie.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
323. ‘_The infinite agitation of wit._’ Bacon, _Advancement of
Learning_, Book I. iv. 5.
‘_The soul of goodness_,’ _Henry V._, Act IV. Sc. 1.
324. ‘_According to knowledge_,’ _Romans_ x. 2.
‘_A consummation_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_A king is but a king_ [man],’ _etc._ _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 90).
‘_As the vine_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 307.
325. ‘_Through the airy region_,’ _etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II.
Sc. 2.
326. Note. ‘_As men should serve a cucumber_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s
Opera_, Act I. Sc. 1.
327. ‘_Bears a charmed life._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 8.
‘_All mortal consequences._’ _Ibid._ Act V. Sc. 3.
‘_Set duty in one eye_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Set but a Scotsman_,’ _etc._ Burns, _The Author’s Earnest Cry
and Prayer_, _etc._, Postscript.
‘_Happy warrior._’ See Wordsworth’s _Character of a Happy
Warrior_ (1807).
THE SAME SUBJECT CONCLUDED
328. _The Cid._ Southey’s translation of the _Chronicle of the Cid_
was published in 1808.
332. _Mr. Kean._ An American lion was presented to Kean by Sir Edward
Tucker. Barry Cornwall (_Life of Edmund Kean_, II. 135) says
that ‘it amused the tragedian (who was fond of simple
pleasures) to allure his acquaintance into the room, and set
them face to face with the beast.’
‘_Masterless passion_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
IV. Sc. 1.
‘_The shot of accident_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
333. _Like Hotspur._ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc. 4.
_Regnault de St. Jean Angely._ Michel Louis Étienne, Comte
Regnaud de Saint Jean D’Angely (1762–1819), a well-known
politician of the Revolution and under Buonaparte. The
reference seems to be to his conduct in 1814 when in command of
the National Guard at Paris.
333. ‘_Be mine to read_,’ _etc._ Gray, Letter to West (_Letters_, ed.
Tovey, I. 97).
‘_From worldly care_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. IV. 20.
CHARACTER OF MR. CANNING
This essay was included in the Paris edition (1825) and subsequent
editions of _The Spirit of the Age_. See vol. IV. p. 186.
334. ‘_The child_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up,’ etc.
‘_Like as the sun-burnt Indians_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_,
III. XII. 8.
336. ‘_Like the morn_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 310–311.
‘_Scylla heard_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Comus_, 257–259.
‘_The nation’s Great Divan._’ Cf. ‘August divan of the British
Senate.’ H. Walpole, Letters (1857), IV. 130.
337. _Reply to Sir John Coxe Hippesley._ On March 11, 1813.
_Speeches_, ed. Therry, III. 396.
338. ‘_The worse the better reason._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 113–4.
‘_That makes these odds all even._’ _Measure for Measure_, Act
III. Sc. 1.
‘_He aggravates_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act I. Sc.
2.
‘_Quite chopfallen._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
339. ‘_The inimitable satire of Cervantes._’ See Canning’s Plymouth
speech, October 1823.
340. ‘_Pluck out the heart_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_The deliverance of mankind._’ Cf. Southey, _Carmen Triumphale_.
‘_Of his port_,’ _etc._ Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_,
Prologue, 69.
‘_Freezes his spirits up_,’ _etc._ Cf. _2 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc.
1.
341. _Described so well_, _etc._ In his speech on receiving the
freedom of Plymouth, October 1823.
‘_The golden round_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Richard II._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_And to call evil good_,’ etc. _Isaiah_ v. 20.
‘_Revered and ruptured Ogden._’ For this famous phrase, used
during the debates on the Indemnity Bill, 1818, see _Hansard_,
XXXVII. 1026, and Stapleton’s _Political Life of Canning_, I.
86.
_Rejected Addresses._ By James and Horace Smith, published in
1812.
‘_Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin._’ Republished (1801) from _The
Anti-Jacobin_.
342. ‘_To turn what is serious_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘What should be great,
you turn to farce.’ Prior, _The Ladle_, 139.
Note. See _The Three Trials of William Hone_ (1818, First Trial,
pp. 38–9), where a verse of Jekyll’s parody is quoted from _The
Spirit of the Journals_.
Note. ‘_A wit’s a feather_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV.
247–8.
THE DANDY SCHOOL
This essay, now republished for the first time, is attributed to Hazlitt
by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (_Memoirs_, _etc._, I. xxix) and by Ireland (_List
of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt_, p. 76). The MS., in
Hazlitt’s hand-writing, is still in existence.
343. _Vivian Grey._ Disraeli’s first novel, published 1826–7. The
dedication was as follows: ‘To the best and greatest of men I
dedicate these volumes. He, for whom it is intended, will
accept and appreciate the compliment: those, for whom it is not
intended, will—do the same.’
344. _Long’s._ A well-known hotel in Bond Street.
_Almack’s._ Assembly Rooms (now known as ‘Willis’s Rooms’), in
King Street, St. James’s.
_Mr. Martin’s bill_, _etc._ Richard Martin’s (1754–1834) efforts
on behalf of animals were bitterly opposed on all sides.
_Mr. Croker_, _etc._ ‘The Dulwich collection ... was quite as
distant as Russell Square, though he did not profess to know
exactly where Russell Square was.’ March 28, 1825. _Hansard_,
New Series, XII. 1266.
345. _Sir Sedley Clarendels_, _etc._ In _Camilla_.
_Meadowses._ In _The Wanderer_.
346. ‘_The Court_,’ _etc._ Cf. _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act III.
Sc. 2.
_Sayings and Doings._ The first series appeared in 1824, the
second in 1825 and the third in 1828.
348. _Mr. Vivacity Dull._ A character in _Vivian Grey_, said to
represent Horace Twiss.
ACTORS AND THE PUBLIC
This and the eleven following papers from _The Examiner_ of 1828 have
been included in the text mainly on account of the strong internal
evidence they bear of Hazlitt’s authorship. One of the papers is signed
‘W. H.,’ the rest are unsigned. During the period covered by these
essays other _Theatrical Examiners_ appeared, signed ‘X’ or ‘Q.’ So far
as the editors are aware, it has not been hitherto known that Hazlitt
resumed regular theatrical criticism so late as 1828, but they feel that
no reasonable doubt can exist with regard to his authorship of these
twelve essays.
349. _Bate Dudley._ Sir Henry Bate Dudley (1745–1824), the notorious
clergyman and journalist discussed by Johnson and Boswell
(_Life_, ed. G. B. Hill, IV. 296). He was for a time editor of
_The Morning Post_.
‘_Fall into misfortune._’ Cf. _post_, note to p. 533.
‘_To tatters_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
350. _Who has praised Sir Walter_, _etc._ The failure of Constable and
of Ballantyne and Co., involving Scott’s financial ruin, had
occurred in 1826.
_A vulgar crim. con._ In January 1825, a verdict of £800 was
given against Kean in an action, Cox v. Kean, for criminal
conversation. In consequence of this he was for a time ‘hooted
from the stage.’
‘_The spells_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_If an actor is indeed six feet high_, _etc._ Hazlitt probably
refers to Conway. See vol. VIII. p. 200, and _post_, p. 361.
351. ‘_The fiery soul_,’ _etc._ Dryden _Absalom and Achitophel_,
156–8.
‘_The envy_,’ _etc._ _Richard II._, Act II. Sc. 1.
_Madame Catalani._ Angelica Catalani had retired from the stage
in 1827.
_It was some time since we had seen Mr. Kean’s Shylock_, _etc._
This paragraph makes Hazlitt’s authorship of this _Theatrical
Examiner_ quite certain. Cf. vol. VIII. p. 179.
FRENCH PLAYS
352. _Monsieur Perlet._ Adrien Perlet (1795–1850), a well-known French
comedian, who had made his first appearance in 1814.
‘_Upturned eyes_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
352. _Madame Pasta._ Cf. vol. VII. (_The Plain Speaker_), pp. 324 _et
seq._
‘_A friend of ours_,’ _etc._ See Patmore’s _My Friends and
Acquaintance_ (vol. III. pp. 32–5). According to Patmore, the
following passage was intended by Hazlitt to form part of the
_Conversations with Northcote_ in _The New Monthly Magazine_,
but was suppressed by the editor:—
‘He then asked me if I had seen anything of H——?[78] I said, yes;
and that he had vexed me; for I had shown him some fine heads
from the Cartoons, done about a hundred years ago (which
appeared to me to prove that since that period those noble
remains have fallen into a state of considerable decay), and
when I went out of the room for a moment, I found the prints
thrown carelessly on the table, and that he had got out a
volume of Tasso, which he was spouting, as I supposed, to let
me understand that I knew nothing of art, and that he knew a
great deal about poetry.
‘I said I never heard him speak with enthusiasm of any painter
or work of merit, nor show any love of art, except as a
puffing-machine for him to get up into to blow a trumpet in
his own praise. Instead of falling down and worshipping such
names as Raphael and Michael Angelo, he is only considering
how he may, by storm or stratagem, place himself beside them,
on the loftiest seats of Parnassus, as ignorant country
squires affect to sit with judges on the bench. He told me he
had had a letter from Wilkie, dated Rome, with three marks of
admiration, and that he had dated his answer “Babylon the
Great,” with four marks of admiration. Stuff! Why must he
always “out-Herod Herod?”[79] Why must the place where he is
always have one note of admiration more than any other? He
gave as his reasons, indeed, our river, our bridges, the
Cartoons, and the Elgin Marbles—the two last of which,
however, are not our own. H. should have been the boatswain
of a man-of-war: he has no other ideas of glory than those
which belong to a naval victory, or to vulgar noise and
insolence; not at all as something in which the whole world
may participate alike. I hate “this stamp exclusive and
professional.”[80] He added that Wilkie gave a poor account
of Rome, and seemed, on the whole, disappointed. He (Haydon)
should not be disappointed when he went, for his expectations
were but moderate. “Ay,” said Northcote, “that is like the
speech of a little, crooked, conceited painter of the name of
Edwards, who went to Italy with Romney and Humphreys, and
when they looked round the Vatican, he turned round to Romney
and said, ‘Egad, George, we’re bit.’”
‘I said that when I heard stories of this kind, of even clever
men who seemed to have no idea or to take no interest except in
what they themselves could do, it almost inclined me to be of
Peter Pindar’s opinion, who pretended to prefer taste to
genius: “Give me,” said he, “one man of taste, and I will find
you twenty men of genius.” N. replied, “It is a pity you should
be of that opinion, for all your acquaintances are great
geniuses; and yet, I fancy, they have no admiration for anybody
but themselves.’”
352. _Sir William Curtis’s._ Sir William Curtis (1752–1829), Lord
Mayor of London (1795) and for long M.P. for the City.
353. ‘_Our Cupid_,’ _etc._ Cf. The Earl of Dorset’s song, _Dorinda_.
354. _The age of Louis XIV._, _etc._ Cf. a passage in vol. IX. (_Notes
of a Journey_, _etc._), p. 150.
354. ‘_New manners_,’ _etc._ Thomas Warton, Sonnet ‘Written in a Blank
Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon.’
355. ‘_Unmixed with baser matter._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
_A certain happy-spirited writer._ Leigh Hunt, no doubt, whose
recently published _Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries_
had created some sensation.
FRENCH PLAYS (_continued_)
This article in _The Examiner_ begins with a long editorial passage
written in a chaffing spirit and praising the former notice of the
French Plays.
356. ‘_That soul of pleasure_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Moral Essays_, III.
306.
357. l. 15. _Ariste._ This should be Valère.
358. _There is a credulous and unqualified assent_, _etc._ Cf. a
passage in vol. VIII. (_English Comic Writers_), p. 29, where
almost the same words are used.
‘_To the woods_,’ _etc._ Quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
THE THEATRES AND PASSION WEEK
This paper is signed ‘W. H.’
358. ‘_Because thou art virtuous_,’ _etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act II.
Sc. 3.
359. ‘_Seizing_ [tear] _their pleasures_,’ _etc._ Marvell, _To his Coy
Mistress_.
360. _Ranting Croly._ The Rev. George Croly (1780–1860), a contributor
to _Blackwood’s Magazine_, and to Jerdan’s _Literary Gazette_.
‘_Stretched upon the rack_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_All the natural ills_ [shocks], _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc.
1.
‘_To jest_,’ _etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc. 2.
361. ‘_What is set down for them._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
CHARLES KEAN
362. _Young Mr. Kean._ Charles John Kean (1811?–1868), second son of
Edmund Kean. He had made his first appearance at the opening of
the Drury Lane season, October 1, 1827.
_Lovers’ Vows._ Mrs. Inchbald’s adaptation from Kotzebue (1798).
_The Marquis of Douro._ Arthur Richard (1807–1884), eldest son of
the Duke of Wellington, afterwards second Duke.
363. _We do not presume_, _etc._ This adaptation of a passage from
Burke’s _A Letter to a Noble Lord_ (_Works_, Bohn, V. 114) is
quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
_The Dumb Savoyard._ By Thompson, acted thirty-eight times.
364. _Mrs. W. West._ Mrs. W. West (1790–1876) who first appeared (as
Miss Cooke) in London in 1812. She married William West in
1815.
_Meggy Macgilpin._ Maggy Macgilpin in O’Keeffe’s _Highland Reel_
(1788).
_Keeley._ Robert Keeley (1793–1869). His height was five feet two
inches.
365. ‘_A man made after supper_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc.
2.
‘_Vice to be hated_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, II.
217–18.
366. _Ecole des Veillards._ By Casimir Delavigne (1823).
SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS
This notice is full of favourite quotations and of sentiments which
Hazlitt had expressed elsewhere. See specially the Dramatic Essays in
vol. VIII.
366. ‘_Warbles_,’ _etc._ _L’ Allegro_, 134.
‘_Fierce extremes._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 599.
_The Invincibles._ A musical farce, acted 34 times.
‘_Our mind’s eye._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Our heart’s core._’ Cf. _Ibid._ Act III. Sc. 2.
367. ‘_Fancy’s midwife._’ Cf. ‘The fairies’ midwife.’ _Romeo and
Juliet_, Act I. Sc. 4.
‘_Gay creatures_,’ _etc._ Comus, 299–301.
‘_Tears_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 620.
368. ‘_Mr. Kean’s Othello_,’ _etc._ From The _Times_. See _post_, p.
406, and vol. VIII. p. 414 and notes.
‘_With kindliest change._’ _Paradise Lost_, V. 336.
THE COMPANY AT THE OPERA
369. _Mr. Peake._ Richard Brinsley Peake (1792–1847). The farce here
noticed is called by Genest ‘Little Offerings.’
‘_Crabbed age_,’ _etc._ _The Passionate Pilgrim_, Stanza XII.
_Miss Goward._ Mary Ann Goward (1805?–1899), who afterwards
became so well known as Mrs. Keeley. She married Keeley in
1829.
370. _Madame Caradori._ Madame Caradori-Allan (1800–1865), who made
her début at the Italian Opera in London in 1822.
_Mademoiselle Sontag._ Henriette Sontag (1806–1854). She married
Count Rossi in 1828 and retired from the stage till near the
end of her life.
371. _Brocard._ Suzanne Brocard (1798–1855), whose first appearance at
the Comédie Française was in 1817 and who retired in 1839.
372. _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 355.
‘_The mob_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, Book II. Ep. I.
108.
THE BEGGAR’S OPERA
373. ‘_Vanity, chaotic Vanity._’ Hazlitt may have had in mind the
lines in _Romeo and Juliet_ (Act I. Sc. 1), ‘O heavy lightness!
serious vanity! misshapen chaos!’
374. ‘_Waste her sweetness_,’ _etc._ Cf. Gray’s _Elegy_, 56.
_Splenetic_ ‘[splenitive] _and rash_.’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_Blanchard._ William Blanchard (1769–1835), for long a member of
the Covent Garden Company.
‘_And when the date_,’ _etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, Part I. Canto
1. 285–6.
_De Vere._ By Robert Plumer Ward (1765–1846), published in 1827.
It was supposed by some, though denied by the author, that De
Vere was intended to represent Canning.
‘_We have heard_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 2.
375. _Sir John Sylvester._ Sir John Silvester (1745–1822), Recorder of
London.
‘_The thief_,’ _etc._ _Leviathan_, Part I. Chap. 3.
_A Race for Dinner._ By G. H. B. Rodwell (1800–1852).
‘_And Birnam wood_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Acts IV. and V.
_The Poor Gentleman._ By George Colman the Younger (1801).
375. ‘_To advantage dressed._’ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_, 297.
376. _Miss Ellen Tree._ Ellen Tree (1805–1880), who married Charles
Kean in 1842. She was a younger sister of Mrs. Bradshaw, the
actress and singer.
377. _Miss Love._ Emma Love, afterwards Mrs. Calcroft, had made her
first appearance on the stage in 1817 at the English Opera
House.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND L’AVARE
377. ‘_The lungs of others_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
378. _Mr. Wilkie failed_, _etc._ See _ante_, p. 252.
‘_Warble, warble._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 5.
379. _Mademoiselle Mars._ For Mademoiselle Mars in ‘a sort of shadowy
_Catherine and Petruchio_,’ see vol. IX. p. 151.
380. _Ninette à la cour._ By Charles Simon Favart (1710–1792).
381. _Seraglio._ An opera by Dimond, produced in 1827.
_Charles the Second._ By Howard Payne, produced in 1824.
MRS. SIDDONS
381. _Pie Voleuse._ See _ante_, note to p. 304.
‘_Born to converse_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Prologue to the Satires_,
196.
_The Fall of Nineveh._ By John Martin (1789–1854). The painting
was being exhibited in Bond Street.
382. _Abridged Paradise Lost._ Mrs. Siddons published _The Story of
our First Parents selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost for the
use of young persons_, 1822.
_A triumphant peroration_, _etc._ Hazlitt no doubt refers to
Scott’s _Life of Napoleon_, published in 1827.
‘_The worst, the second fall of man._’ Cf. William Windham,
_Speeches_, II. 47 (Nov. 4, 1801).
384. ‘_Barren spectators._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_Mr. Stanfield’s landscape back-grounds._ William Clarkson
Stanfield (1793–1867).
_Veluti in speculum._ Cf. ‘Inspicere tamquam in speculum in vitas
omnium,’ etc. Terence, _Adelphi_, Act III. Sc. 3.
THE THREE QUARTERS, ETC.
384. _The new comedy._ _Ups and Downs, or the Ladder of Life_ was the
title of the piece here noticed by Hazlitt. It was acted eight
times.
_The secretary of the Admiralty_, _etc._ Croker. Cf. _ante_, p.
344.
385. _A nice distinction in Miss Burney._ See her _Cecilia_.
_Killing no Murder._ A farce by Theodore Hook, produced in 1809.
386. ‘_Like dew-drops_,’ _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III. Sc.
3.
‘_Fine by degrees_,’ _etc._ Prior, _Henry and Emma_, 430.
‘_They best can paint them_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Eloisa to Abelard_,
366.
_Lord Porchester’s tragedy._ _Don Pedro, King of Castile_, by
Lord Porchester, afterwards 3rd Earl of Carnarvon (1800–1849)
was produced at Drury Lane on March 10, 1828.
_Lord Morpeth’s._ Lord Morpeth, afterwards 7th Earl of Carlisle
(1802–1864) published in 1828 _The Last of the Greeks; or the
Fall of Constantinople_, a tragedy in verse.
386. _The Sphynx_, _etc._ _The Sphynx_ (1827) and _The Athenæum_
(1828) were started, and _The Argus_ (1828) was projected by
James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855).
387. ‘_Oh! dearest Ophelia_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
388. ‘_He knows his cue_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
MR. KEAN
389. _We do not wonder_, _etc._ Kean had played Richard III. at the
Théâtre Français in May 1828.
_Voltaire has borrowed_, _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 282.
‘_The poet’s eye_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V.
Sc. 1.
390. ‘_Should be as a book_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
_The Hetman Platoff._ The Russian general, Matvei Ivanovich
Platoff (1757–1818), Hetman of the Cossacks of the Don. See
vol. IX. p. 465.
391. ‘_Give us pause._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
_Miss Smithson._ Harriet Constance Smithson (1800–1854), who
played frequently in France and married Hector Berlioz in 1833.
_A series of elegant bas-reliefs_, _etc._ Cf. vol. VIII. p. 456,
where the same comparison is made.
392. _Little Bartolozzi._ Miss Bartolozzi made her first appearance
(at the Haymarket) on June 17, 1828. She was a sister of Madame
Vestris.
MUNDEN’S SIR PETER TEAZLE
For Hazlitt’s connection with The _Times_ as dramatic critic see vol.
VIII. p. 512. The fifteen articles reprinted for the first time in the
present volume have been included upon internal evidence of Hazlitt’s
authorship. No reasonable doubt can be felt with regard to any of them.
392. _Past Ten O’clock._ ‘A moderate farce’ by Dibdin, produced March
11, 1815. See Genest. In another account of Munden (vol. VIII.
p. 270) Hazlitt had referred to his ‘broad shining face’ and
‘the alarming drop of his chin.’
YOUNG’S HAMLET
Cf. this paper with the account of _Hamlet_ in _Characters of
Shakespear’s Plays_, vol. I. p. 237.
394. _The Miller and his Men._ A successful melodrama by Pocock,
produced in 1813.
395. ‘_The paragon of animals._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Peaked or pined._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Oh that this too, too solid flesh_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I.
Sc. 2.
‘_The pretty Ophelia._’ _Ibid._ Act IV. Sc. 5.
DOWTON IN THE HYPOCRITE
Cf. the notice of _The Hypocrite_ in _A View of the English Stage_, vol.
VIII. pp. 245–7.
395. ‘_Very craftily qualified._’ _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 3.
MISS BRUNTON’S ROSALIND
Cf. the notices of two other Rosalinds in _A View, etc._, vol. VIII. pp.
252 and 336.
397. _Miss Brunton._ Elizabeth Brunton (1799–1860), who in 1823
married Frederick Henry Yates, the actor.
‘_Good emphasis and discretion._’ Cf. ‘With good accent and good
discretion,’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_The gods_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act III. Sc. 3.
MAYWOOD’S ZANGA
Hazlitt had noticed Maywood’s Shylock. See _A View_, _etc._ vol. VIII.
p. 374. In 1821 Maywood wrote to Hazlitt from New York introducing a Mr.
Greenhow, who was entrusted to present to Hazlitt a morsel of George
Cooke’s liver. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs_, _etc._, II. 1–2.
398. ‘_From the sound_,’ _etc._ Cf. Collins, Ode, _The Passions_,
19–20.
‘_Distilling them_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Too tame._’ _Ibid._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_’Twas I that did it._’ _The Revenge_, Act V. Sc. 2.
‘_Forced gait._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
KEAN’S RICHARD III.
Cf. the essay on Richard III. in _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_
(vol. I. pp. 298–303), where Hazlitt speaks of the ‘miserable medley
acted for Richard III.’ and gives some of the omitted passages as being
‘peculiarly adapted for stage effect.’ Shakespeare’s _Richard III._ was
revived at Covent Garden on March 12, 1821, Macready playing Richard and
Mrs. Bunn Queen Margaret.
399. ‘_Now is the winter_,’ _etc._ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_Even so!_’ _etc. Ibid._
400. ‘_They do me wrong_,’ _etc. Ibid._ Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_His grace looks cheerfully_,’ _etc. Ibid._ Act III. Sc. 4.
THE WONDER
Cf. _A View_, _etc._, vol. VIII. p. 332.
402. ‘_Snatch a grace_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_, 155.
‘_Catch ere she falls_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, II. 20.
VENICE PRESERVED
Cf. the account of Kemble’s Pierre, vol. VIII. p. 378.
403. ‘_The most replenished_,’ _etc._ _Richard III._, Act IV. Sc. 3.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
403. _Borrowed from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews._ Cf. vol. III. p. 115.
404. ‘_His singularity_,’ _etc._ Johnson frequently denounced
singularity. The instances are collected in Boswell’s _Life_,
ed. G. B. Hill, II. 74–5.
KEAN’S MACBETH
405. _Except in the murder scene._ Cf. vol. VIII. p. 207.
‘_Proud and lion-hearted_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Be lion-mettled, proud,
and take no care,’ etc. _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
KEAN’S OTHELLO
405. _This young debutante._ Her name was Mrs. Robinson.
406. _Mr. Kean’s Othello_, _etc._ This passage, to the end of the
notice, was quoted more than once by Hazlitt. Cf. _ante_, p.
368 and vol. VIII. p. 414 and notes.
KEAN AND MISS O’NEILL
Cf. this with Hazlitt’s appreciation of Miss O’Neill in _The London
Magazine_, vol. VIII. of the present edition, pp. 392 _et seq._
407. ‘_O’erstep the modesty_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
408. ‘_As one in suffering all_,’ _etc. Ibid._
‘_Abide the beating_,’ _etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act II. Sc. 4.
THE HONEY MOON
409. ‘_What is set down for him._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Plautus was too light_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_And near him_,’ _etc._ Collins, _Ode on the Poetical
Character_, 43–4.
‘_Grew sharp as a pen._’ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.
410. ‘_Go thou_,’ _etc._ _S. Luke_ x. 37.
MR. KEAN
410. ‘_Not Fate itself could awe._’ _Richard III._ (Cibber’s version),
Act V. Sc. 3.
KING JOHN
411. ‘_To me_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act III. Sc. 1.
THE PRESS, ETC.
Hazlitt was a very frequent contributor to John Hunt’s ‘Weekly
Miscellany,’ _The Yellow Dwarf_, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 23, 1818.
Most of his contributions were included in _Political Essays_. See vol.
III. pp. 254 _et seq._ Of those included in the present volume ‘The
Opera’ was reprinted with some omissions and variations in _Literary
Remains_, the rest are now republished for the first time, on the
strength of what the editors regard as the conclusive internal evidence
of Hazlitt’s authorship. All the essays are reprinted _verbatim_ from
the Magazine.
411. _M. Jollivet._ Jean Baptiste Moïse, Comte Jollivet (1753–1818), a
prominent French politician.
412. ‘_Had’st thou believed_,’ _etc._ _Zapolya_, Prelude, Sc. 1.
413. _Was one of the passages, etc._ See the last chapter of
Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_.
_‘Restored,’ etc._ _Carmen Triumphale_, St. XVIII.
‘_A full solemne man._’ _Canterbury Tales_, Prologue, 209.
414. _Odes on Hoffer, etc._ Hazlitt refers to some of Wordsworth’s
‘Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.’
_‘A dateless bargain,’ etc._ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act V. Sc.
3.
_‘Stretching out,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
_‘The same,’ etc._ Hazlitt is no doubt quoting from Southey’s
_Carmen Nuptiale_, St. 52.
_Mrs. Tofts._ See Hogarth’s ‘Credulity, Superstition, and
Fanaticism,’ where the well-known imposture of Mary Tofts
(1701?–1763) is ridiculed.
415. _‘Charm these deaf adders,’ etc._ Cf. _Psalms_, lviii. 4, 5.
_‘Drops which sacred pity,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
_‘Which knaves,’ etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, I. i. 35–6.
416. _‘The Gods,’ etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_A mingled_ [medley] _air,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _Peter Bell_,
304–5.
MR. COLERIDGE’S LECTURES
This course of Lectures began on Jan. 27, and ended on March 13, 1818.
Hazlitt was lecturing on Poetry at the same time. For Coleridge’s
prospectus see _Lectures on Shakespeare_ (ed. Ashe), 170.
416. _‘Those fair parts,’ etc._ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 1.
417. ‘_Unhouselled_,’ [unhoused] _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘This island’s mine,’ etc._ _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘Independently of his conduct,’ etc._ Cf. vol. III. (_Political
Essays_), p. 285.
_‘He had peopled else,’ etc._ _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Lunes and abstractions._’ Cf. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act
IV. Sc. 2.
418. ‘_Conquering and to conquer._’ _Revelation_ vi. 2.
_Bertram._ Cf. vol. X. p. 158, and _ante_, pp. 412–3.
‘_Tedious and brief._’ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_‘The man may indeed be a reviewer,’ etc._ This saying does not
seem to have been reported elsewhere. Coleridge and Wordsworth
were often accused of ridiculing Southey’s poetical genius.
419. _‘Fie, Sir!’ etc._ Milman, _Fazio_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_‘To leave this keen encounter,’ etc._ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc.
2.
‘_Reason_ [reasons] _as plenty,’ etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc.
4.
‘_The inconstant moon._’ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
420. _‘His large discourse of reason,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE
420. _‘I do perceive a fury,’ etc._ Cf.
‘I do understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.’ _Othello_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
421. _‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,’ etc._ _1 Henry
IV._, Act I. Sc. 3.
_‘The very age,’ etc._ ‘The very age and body of the time.’
_Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_‘An understanding,’ etc._ ‘Give it an understanding, but no
tongue.’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
421. _‘They are begot,’ etc._ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of ‘Begot
upon itself, born on itself.’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 4.
_‘He has tasted,’ etc._ Lamb’s version (as given by Coleridge) of
Thekla’s song in Act II. Sc. 6 of _The Piccolomini_. See
Coleridge’s _Poetical Works_ (ed. J. D. Campbell), p. 648. Lamb
himself printed the song differently. See _The Works of Charles
and Mary Lamb_, ed. E. V. Lucas, v. 27 and notes.
422. _‘The man whose eye,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _Lines left upon a Seat
in a Yew-tree, etc._, 55–59.
_Hogarth’s famous print._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to Hogarth’s
frontispiece to Kirby’s ‘Perspective.’
‘_As ’twere in spite of scorn._’ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, I. 619.
_‘The child and champion,’ etc._ See vol. III. p. 99 and note.
424. _‘The statue,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Summer, 1346.
‘_The starry Galileo._’ _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_, Canto IV.
54.
_‘Now in glimmer,’ etc._ Coleridge, _Christabel_, 169.
_‘Moving wild laughter,’ etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc.
2.
_‘The double night’, etc._ _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_, Canto
IV. 81.
425. ‘_Seen of all eyes._’ Cf. _Revelation_, i. 7.
THE OPERA
426. _‘The glass of fashion,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_The fool of the senses._’ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_‘How happy,’ etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act II. Sc. 2.
428. _‘With some sweet,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 3.
_‘The cloister’d heart,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 268 and note.
429. _‘The flower of Britain’s warriors,’ etc._ Southey, _Carmen
Nuptiale_, 16.
430. _A contemporary critic._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to Schlegel. See
vol. VIII. (_A View, etc._) p. 324.
ON THE QUESTION WHETHER POPE WAS A POET
Hazlitt was for a time a fairly frequent contributor to _The Edinburgh
Magazine_ (New Series), otherwise known as _The New Scots Magazine_. Two
of his contributions, ‘Remarks on Mr. West’s Picture of Death on the
Pale Horse,’ and ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned,’ have been published
in vols. IX. and VI. respectively. The essays ‘On Fashion,’ ‘On
Nicknames’ and ‘Thoughts on Taste’ in the present volume were first
reprinted with omissions and variations in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839);
those ‘On the Question whether Pope was a Poet,’ (signed W. H.), and ‘On
Respectable People,’ are now reprinted for the first time.
431. ‘_The pale reflex._’ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 5.
432. _‘In fortune’s ray,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Gnarled oak._’ Shakespeare uses this phrase (_Measure for
Measure_, Act II. Sc. 2), but Hazlitt probably meant a ‘knotted
oak’ which is the expression used in the passage he had just
written down.
_‘Calm contemplation,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Autumn,
1277.
ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE
Signed ‘A. Z.’ in the Magazine.
434. ‘_Buys golden opinions._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
_‘The learned pate,’ etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
435. _Otway, etc._ Otway, according to the familiar but probably
untrue account first given by T. Cibber in _The Lives of
the Poets_, was choked by the first mouthful of a roll
which he bought with money given to him by a gentleman in a
coffee-house.
‘_For a song._’ The story of Lord Burghley’s ungenerous treatment
of Spenser was first recorded by Fuller.
‘_The time gives evidence of it._’ Cf. ‘This was sometime a
paradox, but now the time gives it proof.’ _Hamlet_, Act III.
Sc. 1.
436. _‘What can ennoble sots,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV.
215–6.
‘_All honourable men._’ _Julius Cæsar_, Act III. Sc. 2.
437. ‘_Lives and fortunes men._’ For the old formula of ‘lives and
fortunes’ see Burke’s _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 18 and note.)
ON FASHION
437. _‘Born of nothing,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 421.
_‘His garment,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, III. xii. 8.
‘_The great vulgar and the small._’ Cowley, Horace’s _Odes_, III.
1.
439. _‘The sign of an inward,’ etc._ Misquoted from the Catechism.
440. _‘And are, when unadorned,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Autumn,
206.
‘_The city madam_’ [woman], _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
_‘The age is grown so picked,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
441. _The story in Peregrine Pickle._ Chap, lxxxvii.
_‘Lisping and ambling,’ etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
442. ‘_In a high or low degree._’ Cf. Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_,
1. 137.
_‘And thin partitions,’ etc._ Dryden, _Absalom and Achitophel_,
1. 164.
‘_Kings are naturally,’ etc._ Burke, _Speech on Economical
Reform_ (_Works_, Bohn, II. 106).
ON NICKNAMES
442. _‘Hæ nugæ,’ etc._ Cf. Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 451–2.
443. _‘The priest,’ etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act I. Sc. 1.
_‘As infidels,’ etc._ Hazlitt alludes to a note in the ‘Beauties
of the Anti-Jacobin,’ denouncing Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey.
See vol. X. (_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_), p. 139.
444. _‘Sound them,’ etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_An eminent character._ Probably Stoddart, late editor of _The
Times_. See _post_, p. 448.
_‘Hath Britain all the sun,’ etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 4.
445. ‘_Brevity is the soul of wit._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_‘The unbought grace of life,’ etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
446. _‘Leave the will puzzled,’ etc._ _Ibid._, II. 103.
_‘Bring but a Scotsman,’ etc._ Burns, _The Author’s Earnest Cry
and Prayer, etc._ Postscript, St. 4.
447. _‘As rage,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_‘A nickname is the heaviest stone,’ etc._ Cf. ‘It is the
heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell
him he is at the end of his nature.’ Sir Thomas Browne,
_Hydriotaphia_, IV. 23. See also vol. III. (_Political
Essays_), p. 261.
_As Canning pelted a noble lord, etc._ Canning ridiculed Henry
Addington (afterwards Lord Sidmouth) under the title of the
‘Doctor.’ His father was well known as a ‘mad’ doctor.
448. _‘With so small a web,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_‘A starling,’ etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 3.
449. _Stat nominis umbra._ Lucan, _Pharsalia_, I. 135.
THOUGHTS ON TASTE
450. _‘He had found a few pearls,’ etc._ _Œuvres_, L. 58. July 19,
1776.
_‘Rich as the oozy bottom,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘Or like a gate of steel,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act
III. Sc. 3.
451. ‘_Damns_ [condemns] _him,’ etc._ _Much Ado About Nothing_, Act
IV. Sc. 3.
_‘Lay their choppy fingers,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.
452. _‘Have built high towers,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 749.
_‘Majestic though in ruin.’_ _Paradise Lost_, II. 305.
_Innocence ‘likest heaven.’_ ‘O innocence deserving Paradise.’
_Ibid._, V. 445–6.
_‘In tones,’ etc._ _Paradise Regained_, IV. 255.
_The author of the ‘Friend,’ etc._ Coleridge may have said this
to Hazlitt himself. He described Pope’s writings as ‘a
conjunction disjunctive of epigrams’ (_Biographia Literaria_,
chap. I.). For his views on French Tragedy, see _ibid._,
Satyrane’s _Letters_, Letter II.
_The author of the ‘Excursion,’ etc._ See _The Excursion_, II.
484. Cf. vol. I. (_The Round Table_), p. 116 and note.
Note. _Non satis est, etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 99.
453. _‘Not to admire,’ etc._ ‘Not to admire is all the art I know,’
quoted by Pope from Creech’s translation of Horace. See
_Imitations of Horace_, Book I. Epistle vi. I.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
454. ‘_Hope told a flattering tale._’ An anonymous song sung to
Paisiello’s famous air, ‘Nel cor più non mi sento,’ from _La
Molinara_.
455. ‘_Pierceable._’ ‘Not perceable with any power of any starr’ (_The
Faerie Queene_, I. I. 7) is quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
_‘The drops,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act. II. Sc. 7.
456. ‘_Swept and garnished._’ _S. Matthew_ xii. 44.
_‘Knowledge at each entrance,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 50.
Note. _Mr. Allston._ See _ante_, note to p. 189.
Note. _‘A temple,’ etc._ Cf. _2 Corinthians_, v. 1.
457. ‘_Nor seem’d_’ [appeared], _‘etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 592–4.
_Better than nothing._ At this point in the Magazine there is a
footnote by the editor, protesting against the view that
Rogers’s _Human Life_ is ‘nothing,’ and the _Lyrical Ballads_
only ‘something.’ He adds ‘Who told this lively writer that Mr.
Southey ever preferred the _Excursion_ to _Paradise Lost_?’
_The preference given, etc._ A review of _Human Life_ by Jeffrey
in _The Edinburgh Review_ (XXXI. 325) contains a contemptuous
reference to ‘a Lakish ditty.’
457. _‘Carnation,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.
458. _I know an admirer of Don Quixote, etc._ This was Lamb. See vol.
VII. (_The Plain Speaker_), p. 36.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
This conclusion of ‘Thoughts on Taste’ does not appear to have been
published in the _Edinburgh Magazine_, or, so far as the editors have
been able to discover, in any Magazine. In the _Edinburgh Magazine_ the
_second_ essay is described as ‘a conclusion of some thoughts on the
same subject, in our Number for October 1818.’ This third essay is
reprinted from _Sketches and Essays_, where it was perhaps printed from
a MS. or proof.
460. _Mr. Pratt._ Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814), whose ‘Sympathy, a
Poem,’ was published anonymously in 1788.
_‘That come’ etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
461. _‘And fit audience find,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, VII. 31.
[HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE]
(1) Two letters from Hazlitt under the heading ‘Historical Illustrations
of Shakespeare’ appeared in the number for January 1819 (vol. IV. p. 39)
and ran as follows: ‘Mr. Editor, I daresay you will agree with me in
thinking, that whatever throws light on the dramatic productions of
Shakespeare, deserves to be made public. I have already, in the volume
called _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_,[81] shewn, by a reference to
the passages in North’s translation of Plutarch, his obligations to the
historian in his Coriolanus, and the noble way in which he availed
himself of the lights of antiquity in composing that piece. I shall,
with your permission, pursue the subject in the present and some future
articles. The parallel is even more striking between the celebrated
trial-scene in Henry VIII., and the following narrative of that event,
as it actually took place, which is to be found in Cavendish’s
Negociations of Cardinal Wolsey,’ [a long quotation from that work
follows, and Hazlitt concludes]: ‘In another article I shall give some
remarks on this subject, and the passages in Holingshed on which Macbeth
is, in a great measure, founded. I am, Sir, your humble servant, W.
Hazlitt. London, Nov. 13, 1818.’ Another letter on the same subject
appeared in September 1819 (vol. V. p. 262): ‘Mr. Editor, The following
passage in North’s translation of Plutarch will be found to have been
closely copied in the scene between Brutus and his wife in Julius Cæsar’
[a long quotation from Plutarch—see Temple Classics edition, vol. IX.
pp. 256–258—follows, and Hazlitt continues]: Again, the following
curious account, extracted from Magellan’s Voyage to the South Seas, may
throw light on the origin of the Tempest, and the character of Caliban.
The mention of the god Setebos seems decisive of the identity of the
source from which he borrowed.’ The letter concludes with an extract
from Magellan’s Voyage.
ON THE PRESENT STATE OF PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE
Many of Hazlitt’s numerous contributions to _The London Magazine_ have
been included in former volumes of the present edition. Of those printed
in this volume, the essay ‘On the Spirit of Partisanship’ was reprinted
in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839), that ‘On Consistency of Opinion’ in
_Winterslow_ (1850). The remaining five are now republished for the
first time.
Some interesting particulars about _The London Magazine_ will be found
in Mr. Bertram Dobell’s _Sidelights on Charles Lamb_ (1903).
The essay ‘On the Present State of Parliamentary Eloquence’ is signed
‘T.’ and is No. IV. of the series entitled ‘Table Talk.’ Cf. the
Bibliographical and Critical Notes to _The Eloquence of the British
Senate_, vol. III. p. 389, to which this essay may be regarded as
supplementary. Hazlitt had been a parliamentary reporter on _The Morning
Chronicle_ in 1813. The exact period does not seem to be ascertainable,
but the present essay shows that he heard Plunket’s great speech on
Catholic Emancipation (Feb. 25, 1813), and Sir James Mackintosh’s maiden
speech (Dec. 14, 1813). With regard to Plunket’s speech there is a
tradition that Hazlitt was so fascinated by it that he omitted to take
any notes of it. See _Memoirs, etc._ (1867), I. 196. Most of the
speakers here described are referred to more than once by Hazlitt
elsewhere.
464. _‘Such a one,’ etc._ The Letters of the younger Pliny, I. 20.
465. _‘Domestic treason,’ etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.
466. ‘_Make a wanton._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 2.
468. _‘Plays round the head,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 254.
469. _‘Kindle them,’ etc._ _Comus_, 794–5.
470. _‘Ample scope,’ etc._ Cf. Gray, _The Bard_, 51.
471. ‘_Would lengthen_ [stretch] _out,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc.
1.
472. _‘Grove nods to grove,’ etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, IV. 117–8.
_Roubilliac._ Louis François Roubiliac (1695–1762), many of whose
monuments are in Westminster Abbey. His remark quoted by
Hazlitt was made to Reynolds. See Northcote’s _Life of Sir J.
Reynolds_, p. 44.
Note 1. _‘It is a custom,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 4.
Note 2. _Mr. Phillips._ Hazlitt presumably refers to Charles
Phillips (1787?–1859), a florid Irish barrister, called to the
English bar in 1821.
Note 3. _‘Like Juno’s swans,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act I. Sc.
3.
473. _Mr. Banks._ Henry Bankes (1757–1834), M.P. for Corfe Castle
(1780–1826).
_Mr. Charles Yorke._ Charles Philip Yorke (1764–1834), who had
been conspicuous in the stormy privilege debates of 1810. He
was at this time M.P. for Liskeard.
_Mr. Secretary Peele._ Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), then Chief
Secretary for Ireland and a strong opponent of Catholic
Emancipation.
‘_Without o’erflowing, full._’ Sir John Denham, _Cooper’s Hill_,
192.
_It was but indifferently reported, etc._ As to Hazlitt’s own
difficulty in reporting it, see _ante_, introductory note to
the essay.
474. _‘Come then, expressive silence,’ etc._ Thomson, _A Hymn_, 118.
Note 2. _‘That speech,’ etc._ This famous saying is usually
credited to Talleyrand, but Voltaire had said much the same
thing (_Dialogues_, XIV. _Le Chapon et la Poularde_).
Note 2. _Isabey._ Jean Baptiste Isabey’s (1767–1855) picture of
The Congress of Vienna is at Windsor Castle.
475. _‘In many a winding bout,’ etc._ _L’Allegro_, 139–140.
_‘But ’tis the fall,’ etc._ Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_, I.
144–5.
476. ‘_Out upon such half-faced fellowship._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act I.
Sc. 3.
_Summum jus, etc._ Cicero, _De Officiis_, I. 10.
477. _‘The punto,’ etc._ Cf. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act II. Sc.
3, and Act II. Sc. 1; and _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 4.
_‘No further seek,’ etc._ Misquoted from Gray’s _Elegy_, 125–6.
478. _‘Hear him’s that now rise,’ etc._ Cf. Burke, _Speech on American
Taxation_, 1774 (_Works_, Bohn, I. 429).
_‘Swinging slow,’ etc._ _Il Penseroso_, 76.
_‘Mother-wit,’ etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_, 166.
_‘Sole sovereign sway,’ etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
479. _‘What’s serious,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 342.
_‘A windy fan,’ etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, III. xii. 8.
480. _‘Trifles,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘To make the worse,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, Book II. 113–4.
_‘Takes the rose,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_In the extremity of an oath._’ Probably an adaptation of a
common Shakesperian expression.
[MR. CRABBE]
To _The London Magazine_ for May 1821, Hazlitt contributed an essay on
Crabbe, under the heading ‘Living Authors, No. V.’ The greater part of
this essay was republished in _The Spirit of the Age_ (see vol. IV. pp.
348 _et seq._), but some passages were omitted which are here supplied.
In the Magazine the first paragraph (which differs to some extent from
the opening of the _Spirit of the Age_ essay) runs as follows:
‘The object of Mr. Crabbe’s writings seems to be, to show what
an unpoetical world we live in: or rather, perhaps, the very
reverse of this conclusion might be drawn from them; for it
might be said, that if this is poetry, there is nothing but
poetry in the world. Our author’s style might be cited as an
answer to Audrey’s inquiry, “Is poetry a true thing?” If the
most feigning poetry is the truest, Mr. Crabbe is of all poets
the least poetical. There are here no ornaments, no flights of
fancy, no illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song
is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing
woe. Literal fidelity serves him in the place of invention; he
assumes importance by a number of petty details; he rivets
attention by being prolix. He not only deals in incessant
matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar,
the least animating, and most unpleasant kind; but he relies for
the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which
he dissects the most trivial objects—and, for the interest he
excites on the unshrinking determination with which he handles
the most painful. His poetry has an official and professional
air. He is called out to cases of difficult births, of fractured
limbs, or breaches of the peace; and makes out a parish register
of accidents and offences. He takes the most trite, the most
gross and obvious, and revolting part of nature, for the subject
of his elaborate descriptions; but it is nature still, and
Nature is a great and mighty goddess. “Great is Diana of the
Ephesians.”[82] It is well for the reverend author that it is
so. Individuality is, in his theory, the only definition of
poetry. Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever makes an
exact image of any thing on the earth below, however deformed or
insignificant, according to him, must succeed and he has
succeeded. Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of
our living writers. That he is so, can be accounted for on no
other principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world
about us and our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any
manner powerfully and directly reminds us of it. His Muse is not
one of the daughters of Memory, but the old toothless mumbling
dame herself, doling out the gossip and scandal of the
neighbourhood, recounting, _totidem verbis et literis_, what
happens in every place in the kingdom every hour in the year,
and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels.
But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous,
leaving nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest
grievances, a village oracle and critic, most veritable, most
identical, bringing us acquainted with persons and things just
as they happened, and giving us a local interest in all she
knows and tells. The springs of Helicon are, in general,
supposed to be a living stream, bubbling and sparkling, and
making sweet music as it flows; but Mr. Crabbe’s fountain of the
Muses is a stagnant pool, dull, motionless, choked up with weeds
and corruption; it reflects no light from heaven, it emits no
cheerful sound:—his Pegasus has not floating wings, but feet,
cloven feet that scorn the low ground they tread upon;—no
flowers of love, of hope, or joy spring here, or they bloom only
to wither in a moment; our poet’s verse does not put a spirit of
youth in every thing, but a spirit of fear, despondency and
decay; it is not an electric spark to kindle and expand, but
acts like the torpedo touch to deaden and contract: it lends no
rainbow tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the
heart; it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view
the current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited,
half-underground, muddy, and clogged with all creeping things.
The world is one vast infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a
penitentiary; to read him is a penance; yet we read on! Mr.
Crabbe is a _fascinating_ writer. He contrives to “turn diseases
to commodities,” and makes a virtue of necessity. He puts us out
of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should
do; yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to
another. His morbid feelings droop and cling to the earth;
grovel, where they should soar; and throw a dead weight on every
aspiration of the soul after the good or beautiful. By degrees,
we submit and are reconciled to our fate, like patients to a
physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell. We can only
explain this by saying, as we said before, that Mr. Crabbe gives
us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the
distressing; that he does this thoroughly, with the hand of a
master; and we forgive all the rest!’—
The essay then proceeds as in _The Spirit of the Age_, with a few
trifling variations, down to the words ‘inscribed to the Rutland
family!’ (vol. IV. p. 351, last line), after which there is the
following long passage, omitted from that work [the quotations are
indicated in brackets]:
‘But enough of this; and to our task of quotation.’ The poem of
_The Village_ sets off nearly as follows:
‘“No; cast by Fortune on a frowning coast,” etc. [_The Village_,
i. 49–62].
‘This plea, we would remark by the way, is more plausible than
satisfactory. By associating pleasing ideas with the poor, we
incline the rich to extend their good offices to them. The
cottage twined round with real myrtles, or with the poet’s
wreath, will invite the hand of kindly assistance sooner than
Mr. Crabbe’s “ruin’d shed”; for though unusual, unexpected
distress excites compassion, that which is uniform and
remediless produces nothing but disgust and indifference.
Repulsive objects (or those which are painted so) do not
conciliate affection, or soften the heart.’
‘“Lo! where the heath with withering brake grown o’er,” etc.
[_The Village_, i. 63–84].[83]
‘This is a specimen of Mr. Crabbe’s taste in landscape-painting,
of the power, the accuracy, and the hardness of his pencil. If
this were merely a spot upon the canvas, which might act as a
foil to more luxuriant and happier scenes, it would be well. But
our valetudinarian “travels from Dan to Beersheba, and cries it
is all barren.” Or if he lights “in a favouring hour” on some
more favoured spot, where plenty smiles around, he then turns
his hand to his human figures, and the balance of the account is
still very much against Providence, and the blessings of the
English Constitution. Let us see.
‘“But these are scenes where Nature’s niggard hand,” etc. [_The
Village_, I. 131–153.][84]
‘Grant all this to be true; nay, let it be told, but not told in
“mincing poetry.”[85] Next comes the WORKHOUSE, and this, it
must be owned, is a master-piece of description, and the climax
of the author’s inverted system of rural optimism.
‘“Thus groan the Old, till by disease opprest,” etc. [_The
Village_, I. 226 to the end of Book I.][86]
‘To put our taste in poetry, and the fairness of our opinion of
Mr. Crabbe’s in particular, to the test at once, we will
confess, that we think the two lines we have marked in italics:
‘“Him now they follow to his grave, and stand
Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand”—
worth nearly all the rest of his verses put together, and an
unanswerable condemnation of their general tendency and spirit.
It is images, such as these, that the polished mirror of the
poet’s mind ought chiefly to convey; that cast their soothing,
startling reflection over the length of human life, and grace
with their amiable innocence its closing scenes; while its less
alluring and more sombre tints sink in, and are lost in an
absorbent ground of unrelieved prose. Poetry should be the
handmaid of the imagination, and the foster-nurse of pleasure
and beauty: Mr. Crabbe’s Muse is a determined enemy to the
imagination, and a spy on nature.
‘Before we proceed, we shall just mark a few of those
quaintnesses of expression, by which our descriptive poet has
endeavoured to vary his style from common prose, and so far has
succeeded. Speaking of Quarle he says:
‘“Of Hermit Quarle we read, in island rare,
Far from mankind and seeming far from care;
Safe from all want, and sound in every limb;
Yes! there was he, and there was care with him.”[87]
· · · · ·
‘“Here are no wheels for either wool or flax,
But packs of cards—made up of sundry packs.”[88]
· · · · ·
‘“Fresh were his features, his attire was new;
Clean was his linen, and his jacket blue:
Of finest _jean_, his trowsers, tight and trim,
Brush’d the large buckle at the silver rim.”[89]
‘To compare small things with great, this last touch of minute
description is not unlike that in Theseus’s description of his
hounds:
‘“With ears that sweep away the morning dew.”[90]
· · · · ·
‘“Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant,
Where once my motive, now the thoughts of want.
Women like me, as ducks in a decoy,
Swim down a stream, and seem to swim in joy.”[91]
· · · · ·
‘“But from the day, that fatal day she spied
The pride of Daniel, Daniel was her pride.”[92]
‘As an instance of the _curiosa felicitas_ in descriptive
allusion (among many others) take the following. Our author,
referring to the names of the genteeler couples, written in the
parish register, thus “morals” on the circumstance:
‘“How fair these names, how much unlike they look,” etc. [_The
Parish Register_, II. 283–300.]
‘The _Library_ and the _Newspaper_, in the same volume, are
heavy and common-place. Mr. Crabbe merely sermonises in his
didactic poetry. He must pierce below the surface to get at his
genuine vein. He is properly himself only in the petty and the
painful. The _Birth of Flattery_ is a homely, incondite lay. The
author is no more like Spenser than he is like Pope. The ballad
of Sir Eustace Grey is a production of great power and genius.
The poet, in treating of the wanderings of a maniac, has given a
loose to his conception of imaginary and preternatural evils.
But they are of a sort that chill, rather than melt the mind;
they repel instead of haunting it. They might be said to be
square, portable horrors, physical, external, not shadowy, not
malleable; they do not arise out of any passion in the mind of
the sufferer, nor touch the reader with involuntary sympathy.
Beds of ice, seas of fire, shaking bogs, and fields of snow, are
disagreeable matters of fact; and though their contact has a
powerful effect on the senses, we soon shake them off in fancy.
Let any one compare this fictitious legend with the unadorned,
unvarnished tale of Peter Grimes, and he will see in what Mr.
Crabbe’s characteristic strength lies. He is a most potent
copyist of actual nature, though not otherwise a great poet. In
the case of Sir Eustace, he cannot conjure up any phantoms from
a disordered imagination; but he makes honest Peter, the
fisherman of the Borough, see visions in the mud where he had
drowned his ’prentice boys, that are as ghastly and bewitching
as any mermaid. We cannot resist giving the scene of this
striking story, which is in our author’s exclusive manner.
“Within that circle none durst walk but he.”[93]
‘“Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,” etc. [_The
Borough_, Letter XXII. 171–204.]’
The last paragraph, following this quotation, is the same as in _The
Spirit of the Age_ (vol. IV. pp. 352–3).
HAYDON’S CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN
483. _Matthews._ Charles Mathews (1776–1835), the comedian, whose
famous ‘At Homes’ Hazlitt refers to.
‘_Sea, earth, and air._’ Cf. ‘And shot my being through earth,
sea, and air.’ Coleridge, _France, An Ode_, 103.
_He bestrides his art, etc._ Haydon was pleased with these words
which he quoted in a letter to a friend extracted in Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt’s _Four Generations of a Literary Family_ (I. 234).
Haydon wrongly refers to Hazlitt’s article as having appeared
in _The New Monthly Magazine._ See also Haydon’s _Life, etc._
(ed. T. Taylor, I. 418), where, speaking of this picture,
Haydon says ‘Except the Christ’s head and the St. John sleeping
it was the worst picture ever escaped my pencil.’
_‘Ample room,’ etc._ Gray, _The Bard_, 51.
484. _‘A hand,’ etc._ Donne, _The Storm_, 3–4.
485. _The celebrated Madonna, etc._ See vol. IX. p. 67.
POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES
For Byron’s Letters to Murray ‘On the Rev. Wm. L. Bowles’s Strictures on
the Life and Writings of Pope’ and a full account of the controversy see
Byron’s _Letters and Journals_ (ed. Prothero), V. Appendix iii. Cf. a
passage in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters,’ vol. VI.
(_Table Talk_), pp. 210, 223, and notes.
487. _Jem Belcher._ James Belcher (1781–1811), who defeated Andrew
Gamble in 1800.
_In the Preface to his Tragedy._ _Marino Faliero._
‘_A tale of bawdry._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
488. ‘_Our sweet voices._’ _Coriolanus_, Act II. Sc. 3.
489. ‘_Most small faults._’ Cf. _King Lear_, Act I. Sc. 4.
_‘Ends of verse,’ etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, I. iii. 1011–2.
490. ‘_Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms._’ The Earl of
Rochester, _On a Parish Clerk with a bad voice._
492. _‘Full of wise saws,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
494. _‘So perfumed,’ etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act II. Sc. 2.
495. ‘_Roaming the illimitable ocean wide._’ Cf. ‘Roaming the
illimitable waters round.’ Wordsworth, _The Female Vagrant_,
175.
‘_Ill at these numbers._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Damnable iteration in him._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Keeps distance due._’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 578.
496. _‘Luscious,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_The grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts._ The two Misses Burdett,
presumably the daughters of Sir Francis Burdett and therefore
grand-daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker, were presented at
court on May 3, 1821, but Hazlitt’s meaning is a little
obscure.
_The Editor of the New Monthly Magazine._ Campbell, the poet.
_‘High arbiter,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 908–9.
‘_All the art of art is flown._’ Cf. the note on ‘all the life of
life was flown’ in vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), p. 24.
497. _‘The stones and tower,’ etc._ Cf. _Peter Bell_, 856 _et seq._
497. ‘_Host of human life._’ Byron in his Letter speaks of having met
Bowles at the house ‘of our venerable host of _Human Life_,’
_i.e._ Rogers, the Poet.
498. _‘Of amber-headed snuff-box,’ etc._ Pope, _The Rape of the Lock_,
IV. 123–4.
499. ‘_Denote no foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘How far,’ etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act V. Sc. 1.
500. _‘So was it,’ etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up,’ etc.
501. _Almanach des gourmands._ See _The Edinburgh Review_, XXXV. 53.
502. ‘_Circumscription and confine_,’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_The poor man’s only music._’ Coleridge, _Frost at Midnight_,
29.
503. _‘The earth hath bubbles,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Loud-hissing urn._’ Cowper, _The Task_, The Winter Evening, 38.
_‘Enforc’d to seek,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. i. 7 and 8.
504. ‘_A thing of life._’ ‘She walks the waters like a thing of life.’
Byron, _The Corsair_, I. iii.
_‘Behold the lilies,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_, vi. 28–9.
_‘Daffodils,’ etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
505. _‘Hail, adamantine steel,’ etc._ Erasmus Darwin, _The Botanic
Garden_, Part I, II. 201–6.
_‘Launched,’ etc._ _The Rape of the Lock_, II. 4.
_‘Strange that such difference,’ etc._ Byrom, ‘On the Feuds
between Handel and Bononcini.’
506. _‘Let me not,’ etc._ _The Canterbury Tales_, The Clerke’s Tale,
880.
_‘Pope was not assuredly,’ etc._ The rest of the essay is quoted
from a former paper ‘On the question whether Pope was a poet.’
See _ante_, pp. 431–2 and notes.
ON CONSISTENCY OF OPINION
Published with some omissions in _Winterslow_ (1850).
508. _‘Servetur ad imum,’ etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 126–7.
509. _‘It is the eye of childhood,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_‘Where the treasure is,’ etc._ _S. Matthew_ vi. 21.
_‘To be wise,’ etc._ Cf. ‘Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.’
_Coriolanus_, V. 3.
_Mr._ ——. Northcote, no doubt, who told Haydon that he was so
delighted with the _Catalogue_ that he ‘ordered a long candle
and went to bed to read it in ecstasy.’ _Life of Haydon_ (ed.
T. Taylor), I. 376.
511. _‘Sots,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 215.
_‘I had rather hear,’ etc._ Cf. _1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
_‘Amaze the very faculties,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
512. _Mr. Wordsworth has hardly, etc._ This passage, down to
‘Constitutional Association-monger’ (p. 513) was omitted from
_Winterslow_.
_‘So small a drop,’ etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
_Applied for an injunction, etc._ A hit at Southey. See vol. III.
(_Political Essays_), pp. 192 _et seq._ and notes.
_One stroke of his prose-pen, etc._ Hazlitt probably refers
to Wordsworth’s _Two Addresses to the Freeholders of
Westmoreland_, published in 1818.
_‘The wreck of matter,’ etc._ Addison, _Cato_, v. I.
514. _Contra audentior ito._ _Æneid_, VI. 95.
_‘Whose genius,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, The Garden, 255–6.
_‘Like a worm,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 506.
‘_There’s sympathy._’ _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act II. Sc.
1.
515. ‘_Ancestral voices._’ Coleridge, _Kubla Khan_, 29.
515. _‘He looks up with awe,’ etc._ Cf. Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed Payne, II. 101).
_‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _Simon Lee_,
93–6.
_‘Every thing by turns,’ etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Absalom and
Achitophel_, I. 548.
_A young student, etc._ This passage, to the end of the
paragraph, was omitted in _Winterslow_. It would seem from the
last sentence that Sir John Stoddart is referred to.
_‘Perpetual volley,’ etc._ Cf. ‘Arrowy sleet, skin-piercing
volley.’ Cowper, _The Task_, The Winter Morning Walk, 140–1.
516. _—— always sets himself, etc._ The reference seems clearly to be
to Northcote.
_‘Though truth be truth,’ etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 1.
517. _‘Pride elevates,’ etc._ Cf. ‘Hope elevates, and joy brightens
his crest.’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 633–4.
_‘From morn to noon,’ etc._ _Ibid._ I. 742–4.
518. _‘In all things,’ etc_. Cf. Burke’s Speech on Economical Reform
(Feb. 11, 1780), _Works_, Bohn, II. 105.
_‘To have done,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘With one consent,’ etc._ _Ibid._
‘_Like a fashionable host_,’ _Ibid._
519. _‘Noise,’ etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_‘Tell me your company,’ etc._ Cf. the well-known proverb quoted
in _Don Quixote_, Part II. chap. xxiii.
520. ‘_Linked_ [bound] _each to each,’ etc._ Wordsworth, ‘My heart
leaps up,’ etc., 9.
ON THE SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP
Published in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839).
521. _‘Ever strong,’ etc._ _King John_, Act III. Sc. 1.
522. _‘In their generation,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ xvi. 8.
‘_The milk of human kindness._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Stuff o’ the conscience._’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘Turned to the stroke,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, The
Time-Piece, 324–5.
523. _‘Though sun and moon,’ etc._ _Comus_, 374–5.
_‘To do a great right,’ etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act IV.
Sc. 1.
524. _‘The very arm,’ etc._ Cf. _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Entire affection scorneth_ [hateth],’ _etc._ _The Faerie
Queene_, I. VIII. 40.
_‘Our bane,’ etc._ Addison, _Cato_, V. 1.
‘_Screwed to the sticking place._’ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
_‘Away to Heaven,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
525. ‘_To grinning scorn._’
‘To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning infamy.’
Gray, _On a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, 73–4.
526. _‘In peace,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act III. Sc. 1.
_‘Those who are not for us,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_, xii. 30.
527. _‘Letting our frail thoughts,’ etc._ Cf. _Lycidas_, 153.
_‘Nothing but vanity,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 373.
530. ‘_Our withers are unwrung._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_‘Green-eyed,’ etc._ Cf. Burke, _A Letter to a Noble Lord_
(_Works_, Bohn, V. 142).
THE PIRATE
Now republished for the first time on the strength of the internal
evidence of Hazlitt’s authorship.
531. ‘_So potent art._’ _The Tempest_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_A far war-cry to Lochiel._’ ‘It is a far cry to Lochow’ is the
old saying.
532. _That described by Mr. Coleridge._ See _Selections from Mr.
Coleridge’s Literary Correspondence_, No. I. Letter IV., ‘To a
Junior Soph. at Cambridge,’ (_Blackwood’s Magazine_, Oct. 1821,
X. 256), republished in _Miscellanies, etc._ (Bohn, ed. Ashe),
pp. 246 _et seq._
_‘Guns,’ etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, I. 26.
_‘Hell itself,’ etc._ Cf. _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_There be land pirates, etc._’ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
I. Sc. 3.
_Multum abludit imago._ Horace, _Satires_, II. iii. 320.
533. ‘_A brave man in distress._’ Macheath is described by Lucy as ‘a
great man in distress.’ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act III. Sc. 4.
PEVERIL OF THE PEAK
Now republished for the first time, as it appeared in the first copies
of _The London Magazine_ for February 1823. Before fifty copies had been
sold, the second and third paragraphs,—from ‘There were two things that
we used to admire,’ etc. to ‘Might not such a man have written the
Scotch Novels?’ (see post, p. 538)—were suppressed. Shortly afterwards a
writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, having obtained possession of one of
the original copies, published this passage together with indignant
comments. See _Blackwood’s Magazine_, August 1824, XVI. 180–1. The
editor of _The London Magazine_ replied to this attack in the number for
October 1824, and stated that the review was by ‘a celebrated critic,’
and that the passage had been withdrawn out of respect, not fear. See
Mr. Bertram Dobell’s _Sidelights on Charles Lamb_ (pp. 205 _et seq._).
The suppressed passage is here reprinted from _Blackwood’s Magazine_.
538. _‘Thinly scattered,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_‘He knows all qualities,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘The wisest,’ etc._ Cf. Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 282.
COMMON PLACES
These were first republished by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in Bohn’s Standard
Library (1871) in the volume containing _The Round Table_, etc. They
originally appeared in _The Literary Examiner_ on the following dates in
1823, viz.: Nos. I.–XVIII., September 6; Nos. XIX.–XLV., September 13;
Nos. XLVI.–LIII., October 11; Nos. LIV.–LIX., October 25; Nos. LX.–LXI.,
November 8; Nos. LXII.–LXXIII., November 15; Nos. LXXIV.–LXXV., November
22; Nos. LXXVI.–LXXXII., November 29; Nos. LXXXIII.–LXXXVII., December
13.
547. _‘According to our own deserts,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_‘The true fuller’s earth,’ etc._ Cf. ‘For time, like fuller’s
earth, takes out each stain.’ Peter Pindar, _Lyric Odes_, VII.
14.
_The taste of the great in pictures, etc._ Cf. vol. VII. (_The
Plain Speaker_) pp. 292–4, where the whole paragraph is
repeated.
549. _‘Were I as tedious,’ etc._ _Much Ado About Nothing_, Act III.
Sc. 5.
550. _‘I am Misanthropos,’ etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
_‘The cruel sunshine,’ etc._ Cf. Armstrong, _The Art of
Preserving Health_, IV.
551. ‘_In its vacant interlunar cave._’ _Samson Agonistes_, 89.
_Slop._ Sir John Stoddart, no doubt. Cf. vol. III. p. 158 and
note.
552. _‘In spite of pride,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, I. 293.
553. _Mr. Martin’s picture._ By John Martin (1789–1854).
l. 9. _Bowers._ Query, a misprint for ‘flowers.’
_‘The earth spins round,’ etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 164–5.
555. _‘A gentle Husher,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. IV. 13.
556. _Mr. Cobbett alone was not invited._ The editor of _The Literary
Examiner_ says, in a note, ‘This is _bien trouvé_, but not
quite correct.’
_‘What went they forth,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_ xi. 7.
_The author of the love-letters, etc._ Cf. vol. III. (_Political
Essays_) p. 218 and note.
‘_Oh, the wonderful works of nature._’ Farquhar, _The Recruiting
Officer_, Act II. Sc. 3.
557. _‘The primrose path,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 3.
559. _‘Via Goodman Dull,’ etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc. 1.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh
University Press
-----
Footnote 1:
Those essays which are now republished for the first time are
indicated by an asterisk.
Footnote 2:
These two essays were published together in _Winterslow_ as ‘Mind and
Motive.’
Footnote 3:
Published in _Winterslow_ as ‘Matter and Manner.’
Footnote 4:
This paper did not appear in _The Edinburgh (New Scots) Magazine_. See
_post_, note to p. 459.
Footnote 5:
The passage in Locke is as follows:
‘If in having our ideas in the memory ready at hand, consists
quickness of parts, in this of having them unconfused and being able
nicely to distinguish one thing from another, where there is but the
least difference, consists in a great measure the exactness of
judgment and clearness of reason, which is to be observed in one man
above another. And hence perhaps may be given some reason of that
common observation that men who have a great deal of wit and prompt
memories, have not always the clearest judgment, or deepest reason.
For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting them
together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any
resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and
agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment on the contrary lies quite on
the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein
can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by
similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.’—_Locke’s
Essay_, vol. i. p. 143.
Footnote 6:
This relates to what Mr. Locke says of unity, whom all succeeding
writers have made a point of bringing forward on all occasions, merely
for the purpose of differing from him. They set him up as the
standard, or _ne plus ultra_ of profound wisdom, and yet they always
contrive to go beyond him. I will just add, by the bye, on this
argument about number, that the fair way of putting it is by asking
whether one combination of ideas is not different from another, or
whether one foot or one inch is the same with thirty-six feet, or
thirty-six inches, not whether one foot is the same as thirty-six
inches. Otherwise there will remain a real distinction of number, both
in idea and in fact.
Footnote 7:
The two men of the greatest ability in modern times as metaphysicians,
that is, with the greatest power of seeing things in the abstract, and
of pursuing a principle into all its consequences, are in my opinion
Hobbes and Berkeley: after them come Hume and Hartley. Compared with
these Locke was a mere common practical man: of the four, I think
Hobbes was at the head, as the others only worked out the materials
with which he furnished them.
Footnote 8:
This, if the translation is correct, is proving a great deal more than
Leibnitz’s restriction of Locke’s doctrine requires, and is, as it
appears to me, the great stumbling block in Kant’s Philosophy. It is
quite enough to shew, not that there are certain notions _à priori_ or
independent of sensation, but certain faculties independent of the
senses or sensible objects, which are the intellect itself, and
necessary, after the objects are given, to form _ideas_ of them. That
is to say, ideas are the result of the action of objects on such and
such faculties of the mind. Kant’s notions _à priori_, seem little
better than the innate ideas of the schools, or the Platonic ideas or
forms, which are to me the forms of _nothing_. The sole and simple
question is, whether there are not certain intellectual faculties
distinct from the senses, which exist before any ideas can be formed,
as it is not denied by any one, that there are certain sensitive
faculties which must exist before any sensations can be received. The
one supposition no more implies innate ideas, than the other implies
innate sensations.
Footnote 9:
Now Kant, by thus classing, as he apparently does, the representations
of space and time as forms of the sensitive faculty, throws up the
whole argument: for if these very complex (not to say distracted)
ideas, can be referred to mere sensation, I do not see why all the
rest may not. Time is obviously an idea of succession or memory, and
cannot be the result of an immediate sensible impression. The only
power of the sensitive faculty is to receive blind, unconscious,
unconnected impressions; the only category of the understanding is to
perceive the _relations between these impressions_, so as to connect
them consciously together, or to form ideas. To this category of
relation, all the other general categories of quantity, totality,
cause and effect, etc. as well as the ideas of space and time, are
necessarily consequent and subordinate.
Footnote 10:
See to the same purpose Hobbes’s Human Nature, p. 25, and Leviathan,
p. 14. Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 15 and 24. Hume’s
Treatise, p. 46. Helvetius on the Mind, p. 10, and Condillac’s Logic,
p. 54.
Footnote 11:
‘Lastly, that there is some one principle or substance, absolutely
simple in its nature, and distinct from every composition of matter,
which is the seat of thought, the soul of man, and the bond of our
existence, will appear evident to any one who considers the nature of
judgment and comparison: where both terms of the one, and both
branches of the other must be apprehended together, in order to
determine between them. Let one man be ever so well acquainted with
St. Peter’s at Rome, and another with St. Paul’s in London, they can
never tell which is the larger, the handsomer, or make any other
comparison between the two buildings by virtue of this knowledge. But
you will say, the one may communicate his knowledge to the other: but
then that other has the idea of both before him in his imagination,
and it is from this that he forms his judgment. Nor is the case
different with respect to the parts of a percipient being: let the
idea of an elephant be impressed upon particle _a_, and that of a
mouse upon particle _b_, they can never know either jointly or
separately which is the larger creature: nor can a judgement be formed
till the ideas of both coincide in one and the same individual. This
is the common sense of mankind. For when we make use of the pronouns,
I, He, You, &c. and say, _I heard such a sound_; _I saw such a sight;
or felt such a sensation_; are not these different impressions all
referred by implication to the same simple individual? Or were I to
say, that in looking at a chess-board for instance, one part of me saw
the yellow king, another the black, another the queen, another the
bishop, and so on, should I not be laughed at by every body as not
knowing what I was talking about?’—Tucker’s Light of Nature pursued,
chapter on the Independent Existence of Mind. See also Rousseau’s
reasoning in Answer to Helvetius, Emile, tom. 3. And Bentley’s Sermons
at the Boyle Lecture.
Footnote 12:
So little has this principle of the unity of thought and consciousness
been understood, that even Professor Stewart, the great champion of
the intellectual philosophy, utterly rejects it, and supposes that the
idea which the mind forms of any visible figure is nothing but a rapid
succession of the ideas of the several parts. See his reasoning on
this subject most ably confuted in a work lately published, entitled
‘An Essay on Consciousness, by John Fearn.’—This Essay, in spite of
the disadvantage of the mechanical hypothesis with which it is
encumbered, and the technical obscurity of the style, contains, I
think, more close and original observation on the individual processes
of the human mind, than any work published in this country in the last
fifty years.
Footnote 13:
The faces of N. Poussin want expression, as his figures want grace;
but the landscape part of his historical compositions was never
surpassed. In his plague of Athens the buildings seem stiff with
horror. His Giants seated on the tops of their fabled mountains, and
playing on their Pan’s pipes are as natural and familiar as ‘silly
shepherds sitting in a row.’ The finest of his landscapes is his
picture of the Deluge. The sun is just seen wan and drooping in his
course, the sky is bowed down with a weight of waters, and heaven and
earth seem commingling.
Footnote 14:
The reader is referred to an elegant and beautiful description of
Claude, in Mr. Northcote’s Dream of a Painter.
Footnote 15:
The idea of the necessity of tampering with nature, or giving what is
called _a flattering likeness_, was universal in this country fifty
years ago. This would no doubt be always easy, if the whole of the art
consisted in leaving out, and not putting in, what is to be found in
nature. It may not be improper to add here, that, in our opinion,
Murillo is at the head of the class of painters, who have treated
subjects of common life. There is something in his pictures which is
not to be found at all in the productions of the Dutch school. After
making the colours on the canvass feel and think, the next best thing
is to make them breathe and live. But there is in Murillo’s pictures a
look of real life, a cordial flow of animal spirits, to be met with no
where else. We might here particularly refer to his picture of the
_Two Spanish Beggar-boys_ in Mr. Desenfans’ collection, which cannot
be forgotten by those who have ever seen it.
Footnote 16:
This theory will be found contained in Richardson’s Essay on Painting,
and in Coypel’s Discourses to the French Academy.
Footnote 17:
This painter’s book of studies from nature, commonly called _Liber
Veritatis_, disproves the truth of Sir Joshua’s assumption, that his
landscapes are mere general compositions, for the finished pictures
are nearly fac-similes of the original sketches, and what is added to
them in point of regularity (if this addition was any advantage) was
at least the result of his own genius.
Footnote 18:
Sir Joshua considers it as a great disadvantage to Raphael in studying
from the antique, that he had not the facilities afforded by modern
prints, but was forced to seek out, and copy them one by one with
great care. We should be disposed to reverse this conclusion.
Footnote 19:
The pictures of Rubens at Blenheim are another proof of this, and
certainly finer than the Luxembourg gallery.
Footnote 20:
Michael Angelo took his ideas of painting from sculpture, and Sir
Joshua from Michael Angelo.
Footnote 21:
Why fabulous or obscure?
Footnote 22:
The personification of the Deity is another instance of critical
contradiction and conceit. Objecting to the figures of Raphael and
Michael Angelo as mythological and sensible, he introduces a little
golden triangle behind a cloud (_triangulum in nube_) as a
philosophical emblem of the Trinity!
Footnote 23:
When the writer of this article was in France twelve years ago, a
young French artist began to copy in pencil a figure of the Virgin by
Leonardo da Vinci. He returned to it day after day, and week after
week. He was always there. He would first retouch an eyebrow or an
eyelash, then do something to one of the fingers, then mark in a bit
of the drapery, and then return to the face again. All this he did,
sometimes leaning over the railing before the picture, sometimes
sitting on a stool, mechanically screwed on to it, sometimes standing
on one leg. He also relieved the monotony of his undertaking, by
retiring to a small distance to compare his copy with the original, or
shewed it to some one near him, or went round to look over others who
were copying, or stood at the fire for an hour together, or loitered
into the sculpture room, or walked round the gallery, and generally
observed at his return that Poussin was excellent ‘pour la
composition,’ Raphael ‘pour l’expression,’ Titian ‘pour les beaux
coloris,’ but that David and his pupils united all these qualities to
the fine forms of the antique. At the end of eleven weeks, we left him
perfecting his copy. For anything we know, he may be at it still.
Footnote 24:
It is not correct to say that the French always colour from their
casts. They sometimes rouge them over with a beautiful rose-colour, or
cover their lay-figures with flesh-coloured Nankin, like that which
adorns the bodies of their opera dancers. We were at a loss to account
for the colouring of David, till we heard of this contrivance. It is
thus that these accomplished persons think to rival the hues of Titian
and Correggio!
Footnote 25:
A radical objection to it, in point of composition, is, that it is
addressing the spectator, and has its back turned to the audience.
Footnote 26:
The waiter drawing the cork in the Rent-day, is another exception, and
quite Hogarthian.
Footnote 27:
Mr. Wilkie’s pictures are in general much better painted than
Hogarth’s: but the Marriage a-la-mode is superior both in colour and
execution to any of Wilkie’s.
Footnote 28:
‘And see! how dark the backward stream
A little moment past how smiling!
And still perhaps, with faithless gleam,
Some other loiterer beguiling.’
_Wordsworth._
Footnote 29:
Mr. Southey is, it is hoped, politically reconciled to Mr. Dryden,
since his succession to the Laureatship. Which of these two writers is
the better poet, it would be presumptuous in us to determine. We could
sooner determine which was the honester man. Mr. Dryden, we believe,
never wrote Regicide Sonnets, Jacobin Odes, or Revolutionary Epic
Poems. How the Prince must laugh, if he can laugh at any thing. He
might as well have made his chaplain his historical painter!
Footnote 30:
As a contrast to the story at the beginning of this article, it will
be not amiss to mention that of Sir Isaac Newton, on a somewhat
similar occasion. He had prepared some papers for the press with great
care and study, but happening to leave a lighted candle on the table
with them, his dog Diamond overturned the candle, and the labour of
several years was destroyed. This great man, on seeing what was done,
only shook his head, and said with a smile, ‘Ah, Diamond, you don’t
know what mischief you have done!’
Footnote 31:
We have an instance in our own times of a man, equally devoid of
understanding and principle, but who manages the House of Commons by
his _manner_ alone.
Footnote 32:
Sheer impudence answers almost the same purpose. ‘Those impenetrable
whiskers have confronted flames.’ Many persons, by looking big and
talking loud, make their way through the world without any one good
quality. We have here said nothing of mere personal qualifications,
which are another set-off against sterling merit. Fielding was of
opinion that ‘the more solid pretensions of virtue and understanding
vanish before perfect beauty.’ ‘A certain lady of a manor’ (says _Don
Quixote_ in defence of his attachment to _Dulcinea_, which however was
quite of the Platonic kind), ‘had cast the eyes of affection on a
certain squat, brawny lay brother of a neighbouring monastery, to whom
she was lavish of her favours. The head of the order remonstrated with
her on this preference shown to one whom he represented as a very low,
ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior pretensions of himself,
and his more learned brethren. The lady having heard him to an end,
made answer: All that you have said may be very true; but know, that
in those points which I admire, Brother Chrysostom is as great a
philosopher, nay greater than Aristotle himself!’ So the _Wife of
Bath_:
‘To church was mine husband borne on the morrow
With neighbours that for him maden sorrow,
And Jenkin our clerk was one of tho:
As help me God, when that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legs and feet, so clean and fair,
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.’
‘All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down.’
Footnote 33:
At Salisbury, which is a cathedral and county town, you cannot get a
copy of Congreve or Wycherley at any of the shops.
Footnote 34:
The knack of off-hand, unprincipled, idle fabrication is not assisted,
but the contrary, by general knowledge or regular education. Women,
for this reason, have the better of their husbands in trumping up
sudden excuses and contrivances that have no foundation in fact or
reason; and their servant maids, who are more uneducated still, beat
them hollow at the same paltry game of cross-purposes.
Footnote 35:
It is observed and perhaps justly that the members of the Established
Church are the pleasantest sort of people to deal with. Dissenters are
more soured by the leaven of religion. The others do not trouble
themselves enough about it to come to a conclusion of their own, or to
quarrel with other people who do. They are religious merely out of
conformity to the practice of the age and country in which they live,
and follow that which has authority and numbers on its side.
Footnote 36:
There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is _desperation_;
or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or
death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set
upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice
marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose
sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he
is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and
infamy—
‘As men should serve a cucumber,
She throws herself away!’
Losing gamesters act nearly on the same infatuated principle. Harrel,
in _Cecilia_, makes a fine hair-brained mock-heroic exit. I declare I
prefer it to the termination of Gray’s Bard. Gamesters and highwaymen
are so far heroes that it is neck or nothing with them: they set
consequences at defiance. Their actions are disinterested; but their
motives are not so. A fortune-hunting General stands much in the same
predicament. The abstracted, the _ideal_, is necessary to the true
heroic. But before a man can fight for an idea, he must have an idea
in his head to fight for. Now there are some Generals that are not
understood to possess this qualification of the heroic character.
Footnote 37:
It has been suggested whether this phrase ‘insulted’ is not too
modern.
Footnote 38:
Mr. Canning, when on a tour to the Lakes, did Mr. Wordsworth the
honour of paying him a visit. The favour was duly appreciated, but
quite unexpected. Really, we do not know any one so little capable of
appreciating the _Lyrical Ballads_.
Footnote 39:
We once heard it said, that ‘Mr. Canning had the most elegant mind
since Virgil.’ But we could not assent to this remark, as we just then
happened to think of Claude Lorraine.
Footnote 40:
We have said nothing here of the impiety of Mr. Canning’s parodies,
though a great deal has been said of the impiety of Mr. Hone’s, which
unfortunately happen to be on the other side of the question. It is
true that _one man may steal a horse sooner than another can look over
a hedge_. Mr. Hone is not a Cabinet Minister, and therefore is not
allowed to take liberties with the Liturgy. It is to no purpose to
urge that Mr. Hone is a very good-natured man, that he is mild and
inoffensive in his manners, that he is utterly void of guile, with a
great deal of sincere piety, and that his greatest vice is that he is
fond of a joke, and given to black-letter reading. The answer is—‘But
he has written parodies’—and it is to no purpose to reply—So has Mr.
Canning! He is a Cabinet Minister, and therefore incapable of any
thing vulgar or profane. One would think that the triumphant question
put by Mr. Hone to his Jury, ‘Whether Mr. Jekyll’s Parody on
Black-eyed Susan was meant to ridicule Sir William Curtis or the
Ballad of Black-eyed Susan?’ would have put an end for ever to the
cant on this subject, if reason could put an end to cant on any
subject. The fate of different men is curious. Mr. Canning, who has
all his life been defending the most odious and mischievous men and
measures, passes, on that very account, for a most amiable character
and an accomplished statesman. Mr. Hone, who defended himself against
a charge of blasphemy for a parody on the _Church Service_ of which
Mr. Canning had furnished him with a precedent, rose from the attack
by the force of good-nature, and by that noble spirit of freedom and
honesty in which to be unjustly accused is to be superior to all fear,
and to speak truth is to be eloquent—but that he did not suffer
himself to be crushed to atoms, and made a willing sacrifice to the
prejudice, talent, and authority arrayed against him, is a resistance
to the opinions of the world and the insolence of power, that can
never be overlooked or forgiven.
‘A wit’s a feather, and a chief’s a rod:
An honest man’s the noblest work of God!’
Footnote 41:
It is amusing to see an English woman in the streets of Paris looking
like a dowdy, and scarcely able to put one foot before another for
very awkwardness and shame, who but a week before she left home had
perhaps trampled on a dress brought home to her, in a fit of
uncontrollable rage, thrown a cap into the fire, and kicked her
milliner down stairs for bringing her such unfashionable trumpery. One
would scarcely believe that a mere change of place would make such an
alteration in behaviour. When we see our country-women so unpleasantly
situated, we are naturally both ashamed and sorry for them: but, as in
this case, we pity many of them more than they deserve.
Footnote 42:
Lady Byron, when a girl, was so affected at seeing Mrs. Siddons as
_Isabella_, in the _Fatal Marriage_, that she was carried out fainting
into the lobbies, and kept sobbing and exclaiming involuntarily ‘Oh,
Byron, Byron!’ Egad, she had enough of Byron afterwards. This
good-natured remark is not ours. Whose, reader, do you suppose it is?
We have heard the late Mr. Curran say, that when he was a young man
studying the law at the Temple, his supreme delight was to see Mrs.
Siddons in her great parts, and all he wanted was a couple of _pails_
on each side of him to fill them with his tears! Such things have
been.
Footnote 43:
‘Lodging-houses for the Universe,’ and ‘Stage-coaches of the
Universe.’
Footnote 44:
In this sort of representative Government the utility of the Press
seems by no means superseded.
Footnote 45:
Papers on Codification. What an odd title. Mr. Bentham writes a style
of his own, and in his titlepages he puts his best foot foremost.
Footnote 46:
Venice.
Footnote 47:
There is a false concord here.
Footnote 48:
This word is not English, nor its meaning clear.
Footnote 49:
Why is the word _portion_ here used, as if it were a portion of
Scripture?
‘Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a _portion_ with judicious care.’
_Cottar’s Saturday Night._
Now, Mr. Wordsworth’s poems, though not profane, yet neither are they
sacred, to deserve this solemn style, though some of his admirers have
gone so far as to compare them for primitive, patriarchal simplicity,
to the historical parts of the Bible. Much has been said of the merits
and defects of this large poem, which is ‘portion of a
larger;’—perhaps Horace’s rule has been a double bar to its
success—_Non satis est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto_. The
features of this author’s muse want sweetness of expression as well as
regularity of outline.
Footnote 50:
A French teacher, in reading Titus and Berenice with an English pupil,
used to exclaim, in raptures, at the best passages, ‘What have you in
Shakespeare equal to this?’ This showed that he had a taste for
Racine, and a power of appreciating his beauties, though he might want
an equal taste for Shakespeare.
Footnote 51:
It is a fashion among the scientific or pedantic part of the musical
world to decry Miss Stephens’s singing as feeble and insipid. This it
is to take things by their contraries. Her excellence does not lie in
force or contrast, but in sweetness and simplicity. To give only one
instance. Any person who does not feel the beauty of her singing the
lines in Artaxerxes, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c., in
which the notes seem to fall from her lips like languid drops from the
bending flower, and her voice flutters and dies away with the expiring
conflict of passion in her bosom, may console himself with the
possession of other faculties, but assuredly he has no ear for music.
Footnote 52:
There is a very striking and spirited picture of this subject by an
ingenious living artist (Mr. Alston), in the present exhibition of the
Royal Academy. The academic skill in it is admirable, and many of the
forms are truly elegant and beautiful; but I may be permitted to add,
that the scene (as he represents it) too much resembles the courtly
designs of Vitruvius or Palladio, rather than ‘a temple not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens’; and that the angels seem rather
preparing to dance a minuet or grand ballet on the marble pavement
which they tread, than descending the air in a dream of love, of hope,
and gratitude.
Footnote 53:
I apprehend that natural is of more importance than acquired
sensibility. Thus, any one, without having been at an opera, may judge
of opera dancing, only from having seen (with judicious eyes) a stag
bound across a lawn, or a tree wave its branches in the air. In all,
the general principles of motion are the same.
Footnote 54:
In answer to a criticism by Mr. Godwin on his poem called _Sympathy_.
Footnote 55:
‘Liberty is a custom of England,’ said a Member of Congress; who seems
also to be of opinion, that _it is a custom more honoured in the
breach than the observance_.
Footnote 56:
I by no means wish to preclude Mr. Phillips from trying annually to
naturalize his favourite mode of oratory at watering-places in this
country, or in Evangelical Societies held at the Egyptian-hall, where
it is not out of character. He may there assure his hearers, with
great impunity, that Dr. Franklin’s orthodoxy was never called in
question; and rank Moses and Mahomet together as true prophets, (by
virtue of the first letter of their names) in opposition to the
infidelity of Paine and Priestly, who go together for the same reason—
Like Juno’s Swans, link’d and inseparable.
Footnote 57:
The best speeches are the worst reported, the worst are made better
than they are. They both find a convenient newspaper level.
Footnote 58:
His Lordship is said to speak French with as little hesitation as he
does his native tongue; and once made a speech in that language to the
Congress for three hours without interruption. The sentiments, we may
be sure, were not English. Or was it on that occasion that Prince
Tallyrand made his observation, ‘that speech was given to man to
conceal his thoughts’? I cannot agree with Mr. Hobhouse in his
compliment to the expression which Isabey has given to Lord
Castlereagh’s face in the _insulated_ figure of him in the picture of
the Congress. An old classical friend of Mr. Hobhouse’s would have
supplied a better interpretation of it. But I do not think the French
artist has done his Lordship justice. His features are marked, but the
expression is dormant.
Footnote 59:
See his panegyric on the late King, his defence of the House of
Commons, and his eulogy on the practical liberty of the English
Constitution in his Liverpool Dinner Speech.
Footnote 60:
Letter to **** ****** on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the
Life and Writings of Pope. By the Right Hon. Lord Byron. Third
Edition. Murray.
Footnote 61:
We have ‘purest architecture’ just before; and ‘the prior fabric which
preceded,’ is rather more than an inelegant pleonasm.
Footnote 62:
See Mr. Bowles’s Two Letters.
Footnote 63:
Coleridge.
Footnote 64:
Most people have felt the _ennui_ of being detained under a gateway in
a shower of rain. Happy is he who has an umbrella, and can escape when
the first fury of the storm has abated. Turn this gateway into a
broker’s shop, full of second-hand furniture—tables, chairs,
bedsteads, bolsters, and all the accommodations of man’s life,—the
case will not be mended. On the other hand, convert it into a wild
natural cave, and we may idle away whole hours in it, marking a streak
in the rock, or a flower that grows on the sides, without feeling time
hang heavy on us. The reason is, that where we are surrounded with the
works of man—the sympathy with the art and purposes of man, as it
were, irritates our own will, and makes us impatient of whatever
interferes with it: while, on the contrary, the presence of nature, of
objects existing without our intervention and controul, disarms the
will of its restless activity, and disposes us to submit to accidents
that we cannot help, and the course of outward events, without
repining. We are thrown into the hands of nature, and become converts
to her power. Thus the idea of the artificial, the conventional, the
voluntary, is fatal to the romantic and imaginary. To us it seems,
that the free spirit of nature rushes through the soul, like a stream
with a murmuring sound, the echo of which is poetry.
Footnote 65:
This, we are sorry to say, relates only to the three first volumes.
The fourth is in a very mixed style indeed. It looks as if the author
was tired, and got somebody to help him.
Footnote 66:
See Mackenzie’s Life of Home, the author of Douglas.
Footnote 67:
The Duke of Wellington, it is said, cannot enter into the merits of
Raphael, but he admires ‘the spirit and fire of Tintoret.’ I do not
wonder at this bias. A sentiment, probably, never dawned upon his
Grace’s mind; but he may be supposed to relish the dashing execution
and _hit or miss_ manner of the Venetian artist. Oh, Raphael! well is
it that it was one who did not understand thee that blundered upon the
destruction of humanity!
Footnote 68:
Hazlitt refers to what _The Examiner_ calls the ‘regal raree-show’ in
the Parks at the beginning of August 1814. A sham fight on the
Serpentine was one of the features.
Footnote 69:
_Paradise Lost_, III. 550.
Footnote 70:
Wordsworth himself says (_Hart-Leap Well_) ‘The moving accident is not
my trade.’
Footnote 71:
_Lycidas_, 161.
Footnote 72:
Wordsworth’s Ode, _Intimations of Immortality_, 206–7.
Footnote 73:
See _ante_, note to p. 48.
Footnote 74:
This opening paragraph is certainly very like Hazlitt. Cf. the review
by anticipation of Coleridge’s _Lay Sermon_ in _Political Essays_,
vol. III. pp. 138–142.
Footnote 75:
Query, a misprint for ‘delicacy.’
Footnote 76:
Ben Jonson’s _Underwoods_, XXX., ‘An Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville.
A favourite quotation of Hazlitt’s.
Footnote 77:
_The Faerie Queene_, III. VII. 7.
Footnote 78:
Haydon.
Footnote 79:
_Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
Footnote 80:
Leigh Hunt, _The Story of Rimini_, III. 32.
Footnote 81:
See vol. I. p. 218–221.
Footnote 82:
Acts xix. 28.
Footnote 83:
To the line ‘And to the ragged infant threaten war,’ Hazlitt appends
the footnote, ‘This is a pleasing line; because the unconsciousness to
the mischief in the child is a playful relief to the mind, and the
picturesqueness of the imagery gives it double point and _naiveté_.’
Footnote 84:
To the line ‘See them beneath the dog-stars raging heat,’ Hazlitt has
a footnote: ‘This seems almost a parody on the lines in Shakespeare.
“Not all these, laid in bed majestical,” etc. [_Henry V._, Act IV. Sc.
1, ll. 284–297.] Who shall decide where two such authorities
disagree!’
Footnote 85:
_1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
Footnote 86:
To the line ‘Or wipes the tear that stagnates in his eyes,’ Hazlitt
adds a footnote: ‘And the motion unsettles a tear.—Wordsworth.’ [_The
Convict_, (Lyrical Ballads) l. 42.]
Footnote 87:
_The Parish Register_, I. 107–10.
Footnote 88:
_Ibid._ I. 230–1.
Footnote 89:
_The Parish Register_, I. 301–4.
Footnote 90:
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
Footnote 91:
_The Parish Register_, I. 454–7.
Footnote 92:
_Ibid._ II. 319–20.
Footnote 93:
Dryden, Prologue to _The Tempest_, 20.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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