NB. The quotes are arranged roughly in
chronological order of their first publication. Relevant bibliographical
information is given in square brackets. Essays are listed separately, but lectures
and book chapters are not. The classic Collected
Works of William Hazlitt edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold
Glover (1902-4, 12 vols.) has been used as copy text. Square brackets in the
text denote additional context for better understanding or a few allusions I
have thought worth making clear. The credit for the latter goes to the Hazlitt
editors, above all George Sampson, to a lesser degree Jon Cook, Tom Paulin & David Chandler, and Glover & Waller.
On Actors and
Acting I
[The
Examiner, 5 Jan 1817; The Round Table,
1817, Vol. 2, expanded.]
Players are ‘the abstracts and brief
chronicles of the time’; the motley representatives of human nature. They are
the only honest hypocrites. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.
The height of their ambition is to be beside
themselves. To-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are
themselves, that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing
from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter’s call, they wear the livery of
other men’s fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own. They are, as it
were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity,
frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second- hand in them: they shew us all
that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. The stage is
an epitome, a bettered likeness of the world, with the dull part left out: and,
indeed, with this omission, it is nearly big enough to hold all the rest. What brings
the resemblance nearer is, that, as they
imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. How many fine gentlemen do we owe to
the stage? How many romantic lovers are mere Romeos in masquerade? How many
soft bosoms have heaved with Juliet’s sighs? They teach us when to laugh and
when to weep, when to love and when to hate, upon principle and with a good
grace! Wherever there is a play-house, the world will go on not amiss. The
stage not only refines the manners, but it is the best teacher of morals, for
it is the truest and most intelligible picture of life. It stamps the image of virtue
on the mind by first softening the rude materials of which it is composed, by a
sense of pleasure. It regulates the passions by giving a loose to the
imagination. It points out the selfish and depraved to our detestation, the
amiable and generous to our admiration; and if it clothes the more seductive
vices with the borrowed graces of wit and fancy, even those graces operate as a
diversion to the coarser poison of experience and bad example, and often
prevent or carry off the infection by inoculating the mind with a certain taste
and elegance. To shew how little we agree with the common declamations against the
immoral tendency of the stage on this score, we will hazard a conjecture, that
the acting of the Beggar’s Opera a certain number of nights every year since it
was first brought out, has done more towards putting down the practice of
highway robbery, than all the gibbets that ever were erected. A person, after seeing
this piece is too deeply imbued with a sense of humanity, is in too good humour
with himself and the rest of the world, to set about cutting throats or rifling
pockets. Whatever makes a jest of vice, leaves it too much a matter of
indifference for any one in his senses to rush desperately on his ruin for its
sake.
Characters of
Shakespear’s Plays
[1817, 1st edn.; 1818, 2nd
edn.]
The character of lago is one of the
supererogations of Shakespear's genius. Some persons, more nice than wise, have
thought this whole character unnatural, because his villainy is without a sufficient motive. Shakespear,
who was as good a philosopher as he was a poet, thought otherwise. He knew that
the love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, is natural
to man. He would know this as well or better than if it had been demonstrated
to him by a logical diagram, merely from seeing children paddle in the dirt or
kill flies for sport. lago in fact belongs to a class of character, common to
Shakespear and at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and
active as their hearts are hard and callous. lago is to be sure an extreme
instance of the kind; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity, with
the most perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided
preference of the latter, because it falls more readily in with his favourite
propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions. He is
quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others; he runs
all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and
victim of his ruling passion – an insatiable craving after action of the most
difficult and dangerous kind. ‘Our ancient’ is a philosopher, who fancies that
a lie that kills has more point in it than an alliteration or an antithesis;
who thinks a fatal experiment on the peace of a family a better thing than
watching the palpitations in the heart of a flea in a microscope; who plots the
ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in the dark
to prevent ennui. His gaiety, such as
it is, arises from the success of his treachery; his ease from the torture he
has inflicted on others. He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead
of employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten
incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up his plot
at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and connections,
and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated
resolution.
[...]
Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition
of Shakespear looks like a laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits
of his author under a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his
excellences and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of ‘swelling figures and
sonorous epithets.’ Nor could it well be otherwise; Dr. Johnson’s general
powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas were
cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were made out by rule and system, by
climax, inference, and antithesis: Shakespear’s were the reverse. Johnson’s
understanding dealt only in round numbers: the fractions were lost upon him. He
reduced everything to the common standard of conventional propriety; and the
most exquisite refinement or sublimity produced an effect on his mind, only as
they could be translated into the language of measured prose. To him an excess
of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to him like an excrescence; and his imagination
was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of
native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow
hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on the permanent and
tangible.
[…]
He was a man of strong common sense
and practical wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling. He retained the
regular, habitual impressions of actual objects, but he could not follow the
rapid flights of fancy, or the strong movements of passion. That is, he was to
the poet what the painter of still life is to the painter of history. Common
sense sympathises with the impressions of things on ordinary minds in ordinary
circumstances: genius catches the glancing combinations presented to the eye of
fancy, under the influence of passion. It is the province of the didactic
reasoner to take cognizance of those results of human nature which are
constantly repeated and always the same, which follow one another in regular
succession, which are acted upon by large classes of men, and embodied in
received customs, laws, language, and institutions; and it was in arranging,
comparing, and arguing on these kind of general results, that Johnson’s
excellence lay. But he could not quit his hold of the common-place and mechanical,
and apply the general rule to the particular exception, or show how the nature
of man was modified by the workings of passion, or the infinite fluctuations of
thought and accident. Hence he could judge neither of the heights nor depths of
poetry.
[...]
It would be too much to say that his
[Shylock’s] body should be made crooked and deformed to answer to his mind,
which is bowed down and warped with prejudices and passion. That he has but one
idea, is not true; he has more ideas than any other person in the piece; and if
he is intense and inveterate in the pursuit of his purpose, he shews the utmost
elasticity, vigour, and presence of mind, in the means of attaining it. But so
rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the
representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that
we saw our error. The stage is not in general the best place to study our
author’s characters in. It is too often filled with traditional common-place
conceptions of the part, handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste
of the great vulgar and the small.
[...]
He has founded the passion of the two
lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they
had not experienced. All that was to
come of life was theirs. At that untried source of promised happiness they
slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made them drunk with love and
joy. They were in full possession of their senses and their affections. Their
hopes were of air, their desires of fire. Youth is the season of love, because the
heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled
to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoyments or its wishes. Desire has no
limit but itself. Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite,
extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it. Juliet
exclaims on her first interview with Romeo:
‘My bounty is as boundless
as the sea,
My love as deep.’
And why should it not? What was to
hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure, which had just gushed from her heart,
from flowing on without stint or measure, but experience which she was yet
without? What was to abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure,
which her heart and her senses had just tasted, but indifference which she was
yet a stranger to? What was there to check the ardour of hope, of faith, of
constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment which she had not yet
felt! As are the desires and the hopes of youthful passion, such is the
keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect. Such is the
transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest despair, from the
nuptial couch to an untimely grave. […] In all this, Shakespear has but
followed nature, which existed in his time, as well as now. The modern
philosophy, which reduces the whole theory of the mind to habitual impressions,
and leaves the natural impulses of passion and imagination out of the account, had
not then been discovered; or if it had, would have been little calculated for
the uses of poetry.
[...]
Shakespear was in one sense the least
moral of all writers; for morality (commonly so called) is made up of
antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature, in all its
shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations. The object of the pedantic
moralist is to find out the bad in everything: his was to shew that ‘there is
some soul of goodness in things evil.’ […] In one sense, Shakespear was no
moralist at all: in another, he was the greatest of all moralists. He was a
moralist in the same sense in which nature is one. He taught what he had learnt
from her. He shewed the greatest knowledge of humanity with the greatest
fellow-feeling for it.
On the
Ignorance of the Learned
[The
Edinburgh (New Scots) Magazine, Jul 1818; Table-Talk, 1821, Vol. 1.]
It is better to be able neither to
read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A lounger who is ordinarily
seen with a book in his hand, is (we may be almost sure) equally without the
power or inclination to attend either to what passes around him, or in his own
mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his
pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves. He is afraid of
venturing on any train of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is
not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible
characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice,
becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless wearisome
succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind,
and continually efface one another. Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil
to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use
of as ‘spectacles’ to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its
strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The
book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the
glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. Nature puts him out.
[...]
Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to others, and which we can only derive at second-hand from books or other artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is before us, or about us, which appeals to our experience, passions, and pursuits, to the bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know. He is the most learned man who knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to the test of experience, and that, having been handed down through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties, and contradictions. It is seeing with the eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names, and dates, not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing about his next-door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and casts of the Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars. He can hardly find his way into the next street, though he is acquainted with the exact dimensions of Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his oldest acquaintance is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous lecture on all the principal characters in history. He cannot tell whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He knows as much of what he talks about, as a blind man does of colours. He cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he ever in the right in any one of his opinions, upon any one matter of fact that really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an infallible judge on all those points, of which it is impossible that he or any other person living should know any thing but by conjecture. He is expert in all the dead and in most of the living languages ; but he can neither speak his own fluently, nor write it correctly.
[...]
The thing is plain. All that men really
understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and
experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or
practise. The rest is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use
of their limbs; for they live by their labour or skill. They understand their
own business, and the characters of those they have to deal with; for it is
necessary that they should. They have eloquence to express their passions, and
wit at will to express their contempt and provoke laughter. Their natural use
of speech is not hung up in monumental mockery, in an obsolete language ; nor
is their sense of what is ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to
express it, buried in collections of Anas.
You will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to
Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the under-graduates, or
heads of colleges, of that famous university; and more home truths are to be
learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an ale-house, than from attending to
a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often
know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes
taken from the history of what has been said, done, and gossiped in a country
town for the last fifty years, than the best blue-stocking of the age will be able
to glean from that sort of learning which consists in an acquaintance with all
the novels and satirical poems published in the same period. People in towns,
indeed, are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only
in the bust, not as a wholelength. People in the country not only know all that
has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as they do his features,
in their descent through several generations, and solve some contradiction in
his behaviour by a cross in the breed, half a century ago. The learned know
nothing of the matter, either in town or country. Above all, the mass of
society have common sense, which the learned in all ages want. The vulgar are
in the right when they judge for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to
their blind guides. The celebrated nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost
stoned to death by the good women of Kidderminster, for asserting from the pulpit
that ‘hell was paved with infants’ skulls;’ but, by the force of argument, and
of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at length
prevailed over the scruples of his congregation, and over reason and humanity.
Such is the use which has been made of
human learning. The labourers in this vineyard seem as if it was their object
to confound all common sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means
of traditional maxims, and preconceived notions, taken upon trust, and increasing
in absurdity, with increase of age. They pile hypothesis on hypothesis,
mountain high, till it is impossible to come at the plain truth on any
question. They see things, not as they are, but as they find them in books ;
and ‘wink and shut their apprehensions up,’ in order that they may discover
nothing to interfere with their prejudices, or convince them of their
absurdity. It might be supposed that the height of human wisdom consisted in
maintaining contradictions, and rendering nonsense sacred. There is no dogma, however
fierce or foolish, to which these persons have not set their seals, and tried
to impose on the understandings of their followers, as the will of Heaven,
clothed with all the terrors and sanctions of religion. How little has the
human understanding been directed to find out the true and useful! How much
ingenuity has been thrown away in the defence of creeds and systems! How much
time and talents have been wasted in theological controversy, in law, in politics,
in verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in finding out the art of
making gold! What actual benefit do we reap from the writings of a Laud or a Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop Waterland [sic], or Prideaux’ Connections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St. Augustine, or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal
but equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan, and Scioppius? How many grains of sense are there
in their thousand folio or quarto volumes? What would the world lose if they
were committed to the flames to-morrow? Or are they not already ‘gone to the
vault of all the Capulets?’ Yet all these were oracles in their time, and would
have scoffed at you or me, at common sense and human nature, for differing with
them. It is our turn to laugh now.
To conclude this subject. The most
sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world,
who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions
of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer
pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from
their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more
truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all.
They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in general more eloquence and
wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence
together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when
they write to their friends (not for the booksellers) is better than that of
most authors. – Uneducated people have most exuberance of invention, and the greatest
freedom from prejudice. Shakespear’s was evidently an uneducated mind, both in
the freshness of his imagination, and in the variety of his views; as Milton’s
was scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespear
had not been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or
against vice. To this we owe the unaffected, but healthy tone of his dramatic morality.
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespear. If we
wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his
commentators.
Lectures on
the English Poets
[1818, 1st edn.; 1819, 2nd
edn.; ch. 3, “On Shakespeare and Milton”]
The universality of his
[Shakespeare’s] genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single works; the
variety of his resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the
most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of Aeschylus
and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only
half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and
indifference of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might
have been. […] He was willing to take advantage of the ignorance of the age in
many things; and if his plays pleased others, not to quarrel with them himself.
His very facility of production would make him set less value on his own
excellences, and not care to distinguish nicely between what he did well or
ill. His blunders in chronology and geography do not amount to above half a
dozen, and they are offences against chronology and geography, not against
poetry. As to the unities, he was right in setting them at defiance. He was
fonder of puns than became so great a man. His barbarisms were those of his
age. His genius was his own.
What is the
People?
[Political
Essays, 1819.]
– And who are you that ask the
question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! Then you would not
have the people nothing. For what is the people? Millions of men, like you,
with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds,
with the blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, and
passions and anxious cares, and busy purposes and affections for others and a
respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and
a will to be free.
And yet you would tear out this mighty
heart of a nation, and lay it bare and bleeding at the foot of despotism: you
would slay the mind of a country to fill up the dreary aching void with the
old, obscene, drivelling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would
tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like ‘a vile jelly,’ that
mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew
Sampson (shorn of his strength and blind), by his insulting taskmasters: you
would make the throne every thing, and the people nothing, to be yourself less
than nothing, a very slave, a reptile, a creeping, cringing sycophant, a court
favourite, a pander to Legitimacy that detestable fiction, which would make you
and me and all mankind its slaves or victims; which would, of right and with
all the sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the lives of millions to
the least of its caprices; which subjects the rights, the happiness, and
liberty of nations, to the will of some of the lowest of the species; which
rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will of a whole people; that claims
mankind as its property, and allows human nature to exist only upon sufferance;
that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre, and oppresses the very
air with a weight that is not to be borne; that like a witch’s spell covers the
earth with a dim and envious mist, and makes us turn our eyes from the light of
heaven, which we have no right to look at without its leave: robs us of ‘the
unbought grace of life,’ the pure delight and conscious pride in works of art
or nature; leaves us no thought or feeling that we dare call our own; makes
genius its lacquey, and virtue its easy prey; sports with human happiness, and
mocks at human misery; suspends the breath of liberty, and almost of life;
exenterates us of our affections, blinds our understandings, debases our
imaginations, converts the very hope of emancipation from its yoke into
sacrilege, binds the successive countless generations of men together in its
chains like a string of felons or galley-slaves, lest they should ‘resemble the
flies of a summer,’ considers any remission of its absolute claims as a
gracious boon, an act of royal clemency and favour, and confounds all sense of
justice, reason, truth, liberty, humanity, in one low servile deathlike dread
of power without limit and without remorse!
[...]
Suppose Mr. Kean should have a son, a little
crook-kneed, raven-voiced, disagreeable, mischievous, stupid urchin, with the
faults of his father's acting exaggerated tenfold, and none of his fine
qualities, what if Mr. Kean should take it into his head to get out
letters-patents to empower him and his heirs for ever, with this hopeful
commencement, to play all the chief parts in tragedy, by the grace of God and
the favour of the Prince Regent! What a precious race of tragedy kings and
heroes we should have!
The theatres would soon be deserted, and
the race of the Keans would ‘hold a barren sceptre’ over empty houses, to be
‘wrenched from them by an unlineal hand!’ – But no! For it would be necessary
to uphold theatrical order, the cause of the legitimate drama, and so to levy a
tax on all those who staid away from the theatre, or to drag them into it by
force. Every one seeing the bayonet at the door, would be compelled to applaud
the hoarse tones and lengthened pauses of the illustrious house of Kean; the
newspaper critics would grow wanton in their praise, and all those would be
held as rancorous enemies of their country, and of the prosperity of the stage,
who did not join in the praises of the best of actors. What a falling off there
would be from the present system of universal suffrage and open competition
among the candidates, the frequency of rows in the pit, the noise in the
gallery, the whispers in the boxes, and the lashing in the newspapers the next
day!
On the
Conversation of Authors I
[London
Magazine, Sep 1820; The Plain Speaker,
1826, Vol. 1.]
An author is bound to write well or
ill, wisely or foolishly: it is his trade. But I do not see that he is bound to
talk, any more than he is bound to dance, or ride, or fence better than other
people. Reading, study, silence, thought, are a bad introduction to loquacity. It
would be sooner learnt of chambermaids and tapsters. He understands the art and
mystery of his own profession, which is book- making: what right has any one to
expect or require him to do more to make a bow gracefully on entering or
leaving a room, to make love charmingly, or to make a fortune at all? In all
things there is a division of labour. A lord is no less amorous for writing ridiculous
love-letters, nor a General less successful for wanting wit and honesty. Why
then may not a poor author say nothing, and yet pass muster?
[...]
Persons of different trades and
professions the mechanic, the shopkeeper, the medical practitioner, the artist,
&c. may all have great knowledge and ingenuity in their several vocations,
the details of which will be very edifying to themselves, and just as incomprehensible
to their neighbours: but over and above this professional and technical
knowledge, they must be supposed to have a stock of common sense and common
feeling to furnish subjects for common conversation, or to give them any
pleasure in each other’s company. It is to this common stock of ideas, spread
over the surface, or striking its roots into the very centre of society, that
the popular writer appeals, and not in vain; for he finds readers. It is of
this finer essence of wisdom and humanity, ‘etherial mould, sky-tinctured,’ that
books of the better sort are made. They contain the language of thought. It
must happen that, in the course of time and the variety of human capacity, some
persons will have struck out finer observations, reflections, and sentiments
than others. These they have committed to books of memory, have bequeathed as a
lasting legacy to posterity; and such persons have become standard authors. We
visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of the inspiration, and cannot
easily ‘breathe in other air less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits.’ Are we
to be blamed for this, because the vulgar and illiterate do not always
understand us? The fault is rather in them, who are ‘confined and cabin’d in,’
each in their own particular sphere and compartment of ideas, and have not the
same refined medium of communication or abstracted topics of discourse. Bring a
number of literary, or of illiterate persons together, perfect strangers to
each other, and see which party will make the best company. ‘Verily we have our
reward.’ We have made our election, and have no reason to repent it, if we were
wise. But the misfortune is, we wish to have all the advantages on one side. We
grudge, and cannot reconcile it to ourselves, that any one ' should go about to
cozen fortune, without the stamp of learning! ‘We think’ because we are scholars,
there shall be no more cakes and ale! ‘We don't know how to account for it,
that bar-maids should gossip, or ladies whisper, or bullies roar, or fools
laugh, or knaves thrive, without having gone through the same course of select
study that we have! This vanity is preposterous, and carries its own punishment
with it. Books are a world in themselves, it is true; but they are not the only
world. The world itself is a volume larger than all the libraries in it.
Learning is a sacred deposit from the experience of ages; but it has not put
all future experience on the shelf, or debarred the common herd of mankind from
the use of their hands, tongues, eyes, ears, or understandings. Taste is a
luxury for the privileged few: but it would be hard upon those who have not the
same standard of refinement in their own minds that we suppose ourselves to
have, if this should prevent them from having recourse, as usual, to their old
frolics, coarse jokes, and horse-play, and getting through the wear and tear of
the world, with such homely sayings and shrewd helps as they may. Happy is it,
that the mass of mankind eat and drink, and sleep, and perform their several
tasks, and do as they like without us caring nothing for our scribblings, our
carpings, and our quibbles; and moving on the same, in spite of our fine-spun
distinctions, fantastic theories, and lines of demarcation, which are like the
chalk-figures drawn on ball-room floors to be danced out before morning! In the
field opposite the window where I write this, there is a countrygirl picking
stones: in the one next it, there are several poor women weeding the blue and
red flowers from the corn: farther on, are two boys, tending a flock of sheep.
What do they know or care about what I am writing about them, or ever will or
what would they be the better for it, if they did? Or why need we despise
‘The wretched slave,
Who like a lackey, from the
rise to the set,
Sweats in the eye of
Phoebus, and all night
Sleeps in Elysium; next
day, after dawn,
Doth rise, and help
Hyperion to his horse;
And follows so the
ever-running year
With profitable labour to
his grave?’
Is not this life as sweet as writing
Ephemerides? But we put that which flutters the brain idly for a moment, and
then is heard no more, in competition with nature, which exists every where,
and lasts always. We not only underrate the force of nature, and make too much
of art but we also over-rate our own accomplishments and advantages derived
from art. In the presence of clownish ignorance, or of persons without any
great pretensions, real or affected, we are very much inclined to take upon
ourselves, as the virtual representatives of science, art, and literature. We
have a strong itch to show off and do the honours of civilization for all the
great men whose
works we have ever read, and whose
names our auditors have never heard of, as noblemen’s lacqueys, in the absence
of their masters, give themselves airs of superiority over every one else.
[...]
The soul of conversation is sympathy.
Authors should converse chiefly with authors, and their talk should be of
books. ‘When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war.’ There is nothing so
pedantic as pretending not to be pedantic. No man can get above his pursuit in
life: it is getting above himself, which is impossible. There is a Free-masonry
in all things. You can only speak to be understood, but this you cannot be,
except by those who are in the secret. Hence an argument has been drawn to
supersede the necessity of conversation altogether; for it has been said, that
there is no use in talking to people of sense, who know all that you can tell
them, nor to fools, who will not be instructed. There is, however, the smallest
encouragement to proceed, when you are conscious that the more you really enter
into a subject, the farther you will be from the comprehension of your hearers
and that the more proofs you give of any position, the more odd and
out-of-the-way they will think your notions.
On the
Pleasure of Painting I
[London
Magazine, Dec 1820; Table-Talk,
1821, Vol. 1.]
I have not much pleasure in writing
these Essays, or in reading them afterwards; though I own I now and then meet
with a phrase that I like, or a thought that strikes me as a true one. But
after I begin them, I am only anxious to get to the end of them, which I am not
sure I shall do, for I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence beforehand;
and when I have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself little more about
them. I sometimes have to write them twice over: then it is necessary to read
the proof, to prevent mistakes by the
printer; so that by the time they appear in a tangible shape, and one can con
them over with a conscious, sidelong glance to the public approbation, they
have lost their gloss and relish, and become ‘more tedious than a twice-told
tale.’ For a person to read his own works over with any great delight, he ought
first to forget that he ever wrote them. Familiarity naturally breeds contempt.
It is, in fact, like poring fondly over
a piece of blank paper; from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning
to the mind, are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an interest
and property in them. I have more satisfaction in my own thoughts than in
dictating them to others: words are necessary to explain the impression of
certain things upon me to the reader, but they rather weaken and draw a veil over
than strengthen it to myself. [...] After I have once written on a subject, it
goes out of my mind: my feelings about it have been melted down into words, and
them I forget. I have, as it were,
discharged my memory of its old habitual reckoning, and rubbed out the score of
real sentiment. For the future, it exists only for the sake of others. – But I
cannot say, from my own experience, that the same process takes place in transferring
our ideas to canvas; they gain more than they lose in the mechanical transformation.
One is never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you knew
already, but what you have just discovered. In the former case, you translate
feelings into words; in the latter, names into things. There is a continual
creation out of nothing going on. With every stroke of the brush, a new field
of inquiry is laid open; new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared
over them. By comparing the imitation with the original, you see what you have
done, and how much you have still to do. The test of the senses is severer than
that of fancy, and an over-match even for the delusions of our self-love. One
part of a picture shames another, and you determine to paint up to yourself, if
you cannot come up to nature. Every object becomes lustrous from the light
thrown back upon it by the mirror of art: and by the aid of the pencil we may
be said to touch and handle the objects of sight. The air-drawn visions that
hover on the verge of existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas:
the form of beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the
universe is made ‘palpable to feeling as to sight.’
[...]
Refinement creates beauty everywhere:
it is the grossness of the spectator that discovers nothing but grossness in
the object.
[...]
Besides the exercise of the mind, painting
exercises the body. It is a mechanical as well as a liberal art. To do any
thing, to dig a hole in the ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, to move
a shuttle, to work a pattern, – in a word, to attempt to produce any effect,
and to succeed has something in it
that gratifies the love of power, and carries off the restless activity of the
mind of man. Indolence is a delightful but distressing state: we must be doing something
to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive
tendencies of the human frame; and painting combines them both incessantly.’
*The famous Schiller used to say, that
he found the great happiness of life, after all, to consist in the discharge of
some mechanical duty.
[...]
Painting is not, like writing, what is
properly understood by a sedentary employment. It requires not indeed a strong,
but a continued and steady exertion of muscular power. The precision and delicacy
of the manual operation makes up for the want of vehemence, – as to balance
himself for any time in the same position the ropedancer must strain every
nerve. Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for
one's dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead
Downs. It is related of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that ‘he took no other exercise
than what he used in his painting-room,’ – the writer means, in walking
backwards and forwards to look at his picture; but the act of painting itself,
of laying on the colours in the proper place, and proper quantity, was a much
harder exercise than this alternate receding from and returning to the picture.
This last would be rather a relaxation and relief than an effort. It is not to
be wondered at, that an artist like Sir Joshua, who delighted so much in the
sensual and practical part of his art, should have found himself at a
considerable loss when the decay of his sight precluded him, for the last year
or two of his life, from the following up of his profession, – ‘the source,’
according to his own remark, ‘of thirty years uninterrupted enjoyment and
prosperity to him.’ It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed
themselves to brood incessantly on abstract ideas, that never feel ennui.
On the
Pleasure of Painting II
[London
Magazine, Dec 1820; Table-Talk,
1821, Vol. 1.]
It has been made a question, whether the artist, or the mere man of taste and natural sensibility, receives most pleasure from the contemplation of works of art? and I think this question might be answered by another as a sort of experimentum crucis, namely, whether any one out of that ‘number numberless’ of mere gentlemen and amateurs, who visited Paris at the period here spoken of, felt as much interest, as much pride or pleasure in this display of the most striking monuments of art as the humblest student would? The first entrance into the Louvre would be only one of the events of his journey, not an event in his life, remembered ever after with thankfulness and regret. He would explore it with the same unmeaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden in the Thuilleries, but not with the fond enthusiasm of an artist. How should he? His is ‘casual fruition, joyless, unendeared.’ But the painter is wedded to his art, the mistress, queen, and idol of his soul. He has embarked his all in it, fame, time, fortune, peace of mind, his hopes in youth, his consolation in age: and shall he not feel a more intense interest in whatever relates to it than the mere indolent trifler? Natural sensibility alone, without the entire application of the mind to that one object, will not enable the possessor to sympathise with all the degrees of beauty and power in the conception of a Titian or a Correggio; but it is he only who does this, who follows them into all their force and matchless grace, that does or can feel their full value. Knowledge is pleasure as well as power. No one but the artist who has studied nature and contended with the difficulties of art, can be aware of the beauties, or intoxicated with a passion for painting. No one who has not devoted his life and soul to the pursuit of art, can feel the same exultation in its brightest ornaments and loftiest triumphs which an artist does. Where the treasure is, there the heart is also. It is now seventeen years since I was studying in the Louvre (and I have long since given up all thoughts of the art as a profession), but long after I returned, and even still, I sometimes dream of being there again – of asking for the old pictures – and not finding them, or finding them changed or faded from what they were, I cry myself awake! What gentleman-amateur ever does this at such a distance of time, – that is, ever received pleasure or took interest enough in them to produce so lasting an impression?
But it is said that if a person had
the same natural taste, and the same acquired knowledge as an artist, without
the petty interests and technical notions, he would derive a purer pleasure
from seeing a fine portrait, a fine landscape, and so on. This however is not
so much begging the question as asking an impossibility: he cannot have the
same insight into the end without having studied the means; nor the same love
of art without the same habitual and exclusive attachment to it. Painters are,
no doubt, often actuated by jealousy, partiality, and a sordid attention to
that only which they find useful to themselves in painting. W---- has been seen
poring over the texture of a Dutch cabinet-picture, so that he could not see
the picture itself. But this is the perversion and pedantry of the profession,
not its true or genuine spirit. If W---- had never looked at any thing but
megilps and handling, he never would have put the soul of life and manners into
his pictures, as he has done. Another objection is, that the instrumental parts
of the art, the means, the first rudiments, paints, oils, and brushes, are
painful and disgusting; and that the consciousness of the difficulty and
anxiety with which perfection has been attained, must take away from the
pleasure of the finest performance. This, however, is only an additional proof
of the greater pleasure derived by the artist from his profession; for these
things which are said to interfere with and destroy the common interest in works
of art, do not disturb him; he never once thinks of them, he is absorbed in the
pursuit of a higher object; he is intent, not on the means but the end; he is
taken up, not with the difficulties, but with the triumph over them. As in the
case of the anatomist, who overlooks many things in the eagerness of his search
after abstract truth; or the alchemist who, while he is raking into his soot
and furnaces, lives in a golden dream; a lesser gives way to a greater object.
But it is pretended that the painter may be supposed to submit to the unpleasant
part of the process only for the sake of the fame or profit in view. So far is
this from being a true state of the case, that I will venture to say, in the
instance of a friend of mine who has lately succeeded in an important
undertaking in his art, that not all the fame he has acquired, not all the
money he has received from thousands of admiring spectators, not all the
newspaper puffs, – nor even the praise of the Edinburgh Review, – not all
these, put together, ever gave him at any time the same genuine, undoubted
satisfaction as any one half-hour employed in the ardent and propitious pursuit
of his art – in finishing to his heart's content a foot, a hand, or even a
piece of drapery. What is the state of mind of an artist while he is at work?
He is then in the act of realising the highest idea he can form of beauty or
grandeur: he conceives, he embodies that which he understands and loves best:
that is, he is in full and perfect possession of that which is to him the
source of the highest happiness and intellectual excitement which he can enjoy.
On Reading
Old Books
[London
Magazine, Feb 1821; The Plain Speaker,
1826, Vol. 2.]
I do not think altogether the worse of
a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more
confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be
divided into two classes – one's friends or one's foes. Of the first we are
compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill,
to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the
merits of either. […] If you want to know what any of the authors were who
lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only
to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature
have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.
The Indian
Jugglers
[Table-Talk,
1821, Vol. 1.]
The hearing a speech in Parliament,
drawled or stammered out by the Honourable Member or the Noble Lord, the
ringing the changes on their common-places, which any one could repeat after
them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself:
but the seeing the Indian Jugglers does. It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask
what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing. What have I been doing
all my life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for all my labour and
pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves,
rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in
the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as
an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost
I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can
write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What
abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what
crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little
how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. I endeavour to recollect all I have ever
observed or thought upon a subject, and to express it as nearly as I can.
Instead of writing on four subjects at a time, it is as much as I can manage to
keep the thread of one discourse clear and unentangled. I have also time on my
hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods: but the one I cannot, and
the other I will not do. I am fond of arguing: yet with a good deal of pains and
practice it is often as much as I can do to beat my man; though he may be a
very indifferent hand. A common fencer would disarm his adversary in the
twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of wit
will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority
in sense or reasoning. There is no complete mastery of execution to be shewn
there: and you hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the
mere clown.
I have always had this feeling of the
inefficacy and slow progress of intellectual compared to mechanical excellence,
and it has always made me somewhat dissatisfied.
The Fight
[New
Monthly Magazine, Feb 1822; Literary
Remains, 1836, ed. WH’s son.]
It’s the devil for any one to tell me
a secret, for it’s sure to come out in print. I do not care so much to gratify
a friend, but the public ear is too great a temptation to me.
[...]
Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If
not, you have a pleasure to come, at least if it is a fight like that between
the Gas-man and Bill Neate. The crowd was very great when we arrived on the
spot; open carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing,
and the country-people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions,
to see their hero beat or be beaten. The odds were still on Gas, but only about
five to four. Gully had been down to try Neate, and had backed him
considerably, which was a damper to the sanguine confidence of the adverse
party. About two hundred thousand pounds were pending. The Gas says, he has
lost 3000l. Which were promised him
by different gentlemen if he had won. He had presumed too much on himself,
which had made others presume on him. This spirited and formidable young fellow
seems to have taken for his motto the old maxim, that ‘there are three things
necessary to success in life – Impudence!
Impudence! Impudence!’ It is so in matters of opinion, but not in the Fancy, which is the most practical of
all things, though even here confidence is half the battle, but only half
[...]
A boxer was bound to beat his man, but
not to thrust his fist, either actually or by implication, in every one's face.
Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he
uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman. A boxer,
I would infer, need not be a blackguard or a coxcomb, more than another.
Perhaps I press this point too much on a fallen man Mr. Thomas Hickman has by this
time learnt that first of all lessons, ‘That man was made to mourn.’ He has
lost nothing by the late fight but his presumption; and that every man may do
as well without! By an over-display of this quality, however, the public had
been prejudiced against him, and the knowing-ones were taken in. Few but those
who had bet on him wished Gas to win.
[...]
The wonder was the half-minute time.
If there had been a minute or more allowed between each round, it would have
been intelligible how they should by degrees recover strength and resolution;
but to see two men smashed to the ground, smeared with gore, stunned,
senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies; and then, before you recover
from the shock, to see them rise up with new strength and courage, stand steady
to inflict or receive mortal offence, and rush upon each other ‘like two clouds
over the Caspian’ this is the most astonishing thing of all : this is the high
and heroic state of man! From this time forward the event became more certain
every round; and about the twelfth it seemed as if it must have been over.
Hickman generally stood with his back to me; but in the scuffle, he had changed
positions, and Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full
in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards ; he
hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in
the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw any thing more
terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural
expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s
head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood,
the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural,
spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno. Yet he fought on after this for several rounds, still
striking the first desperate blow, and Neate standing on the defensive, and
using the same cautious guard to the last, as if he had still all his work to
do; and it was not till the Gas-man was so stunned in the seventeenth or
eighteenth round, that his senses forsook him, and he could not come to time,
that the battle was declared over. Ye who despise the Fancy, do something to
shew as much pluck, or as much
self-possession as this, before you assume a superiority which you have never
given a single proof of by any one action in the whole course of your lives!
When the Gas-man came to himself, the first words he uttered were, ‘Where am I?
What is the matter?’ ‘Nothing is the matter, Tom, you have lost the battle, but
you are the bravest man alive.’ And Jackson whispered to him, ‘I am collecting
a purse for you, Tom.’
On Going a
Journey
[New
Monthly Magazine, 1822; Table-Talk,
1822, Vol. 2.]
One of the pleasantest things in the
world is going a journey; but I like to do it myself. I can enjoy society in a
room; but out of doors, nature is company for me. I am then never less alone
than when alone.
‘The fields
his study, nature was his book.’
I cannot see the wit of walking and
talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the
country. I am not for criticizing hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town
in order to forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places and carry the metropolis with them. I like more
elbow-room and fewer incumbrances. I like solitude, when I give myself up to
it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for
‘a friend in my retreat
Whom I may whisper,
solitude is sweet.’
The soul of a journey is liberty,
perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey
chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave
ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little
breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation
‘May plume her feathers and
let grow her wings,
That in the various bustle
of resort
Were all too
ruffled, and sometimes impair’d,’
that I absent myself from the town for
awhile, without feeling at a loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a
friend in a post-chaise or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with and vary
the same stale topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence.
Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a
winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to
thinking!
[...]
Oh! It is great to shake off the
trammels of the world and of public opinion – to lose our importunate,
tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and become
the creature of the moment, clear of all ties – to hold to the universe only by
a dish of sweet-breads, and to owe nothing but the score of the evening – and
no longer seeking for the applause and meeting with contempt, to be known by no
other title than the gentleman in the
parlour!
On Familiar
Style
[Table-Talk,
1822, Vol. 2.]
It is not easy to write a familiar
style. Many people mistake a familiar for a vulgar style, and suppose that to
write without affectation is to write at random. On the contrary, there is
nothing that requires more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of
expression, than the style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all
unmeaning pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod allusions. It is not to take
the first word that offers, but the best word in common use; it is not to throw
words together in any combinations we please, but to follow and avail ourselves
of the true idiom of the language. To write a genuine familiar or truly English
style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation, who had a
thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force,
and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes. Or to
give another illustration, to write naturally is the same thing in regard to
common conversation, as to read naturally is in regard to common speech. It
does not follow that it is an easy thing to give the true accent and inflection
to the words you utter, because you do not attempt to rise above the level of ordinary
life and colloquial speaking. You do not assume indeed the solemnity of the
pulpit, or the tone of stage-declamation: neither are you at liberty to gabble
on at a venture, without emphasis or discretion, or to resort to vulgar dialect
or clownish pronunciation. You must steer a middle course. You are tied down to
a given and appropriate articulation, which is determined by the habitual
associations between sense and sound, and which you can only hit by entering
into the author’s meaning, as you must find the proper words and style to
express yourself by fixing your thoughts on the subject you have to write
about. Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon
stilts to tell his thoughts: but to write or speak with propriety and
simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style,
to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express: it is not so easy
to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it. Out of eight or ten words equally
common, equally intelligible, with nearly equal pretensions, it is a matter of
some nicety and discrimination to pick out the very one, the preferableness of
which is scarcely perceptible, but decisive.
[...]
I conceive that words are like money,
not the worse for being common, but that it is the stamp of custom alone that
gives them circulation or value. I am fastidious in this respect, and would
almost as soon coin the currency of the realm as counterfeit the King’s
English. I never invented or gave a new and unauthorised meaning to any word
but one single one (the term impersonal applied to feelings) and that was in an
abstruse metaphysical discussion to express a very difficult distinction. I
have been (I know) loudly accused of revelling in vulgarisms and broken English.
I cannot speak to that point: but so far I plead guilty to the determined use
of acknowledged idioms and common elliptical expressions. I am not sure that
the critics in question know the one from the other, that is, can distinguish
any medium between formal pedantry and the most barbarous solecism. As an
author I endeavour to employ plain words and popular modes of construction, as were
I a chapman and dealer, I should common weights and measures.
[...]
It is as easy to write a gaudy style
without ideas, as it is to spread a pallet of shewy colours, or to smear in a
flaunting transparency. ‘What do you read?’ – ‘Words, words, words.’ – ‘What is
the matter?’ – ‘Nothing’, it might be
answered. The florid style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed
as an unvarnished medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a
spangled veil to conceal the want of them. When there is nothing to be set down
but words, it costs little to have them fine.
My First
Acquaintance with Poets
[Liberal,
Apr 1823; Literary Remains, 1836, ed.
WH’s son.]
My soul has indeed remained in its
original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my
heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will
it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not
remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe
to Coleridge. But this is not to my purpose.
On the
Pleasure of Hating
[The
Plain Speaker, 1826, Vol. 1.]
There is a spider crawling along the
matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one which has been so well
allegorised in the admirable Lines to a Spider, but another of the same
edifying breed) he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly
towards me, he stops he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss
whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe but as I do not start up and
seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his
toils, he takes heart, and ventures on, with mingled cunning, impudence, and
fear. As he passes me, I lift up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to
get rid of the unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is
gone. A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have
crushed the little reptile to death my philosophy has got beyond that I bear
the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it. The spirit of
malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We learn to curb our will
and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can
subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the
external demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or
principle of hostility. We do not tread upon the poor little animal in question
(that seems barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with a sort of mystic
horror and superstitious loathing. It will ask another hundred years of fine
writing and hard thinking to cure us of the prejudice, and make us feel towards
this ill-omened tribe with something of ‘the milk of human kindness,’ instead
of their own shyness and venom.
[...]
But so it is, that there is a secret
affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a
perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing
source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit.
Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence,
to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. Do we not see this principle
at work every where? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy:
children kill flies for sport: every one reads the accidents and offences in a
newspaper, as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire,
and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have
it so, but it diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our
passions, rather than with our understandings. Men assemble in crowds, with
eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if there were an execution going
forward in the next street, as Mr. Burke observes, the theatre would be left
empty. A strange cur in a village, an idiot, a crazy woman, are set upon and
baited by the whole community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public
benefits.
[...]
What a strange being man is! Not
content with doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here, ‘upon this bank
and shoal of time,’ where one would think there were heart-aches, pain,
disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the bigoted maniac
takes him to the top of the high peak of school divinity to hurl him down the
yawning gulf of penal fire; his speculative malice asks eternity to wreak its
infinite spite in, and calls on the Almighty to execute its relentless doom!
The cannibals burn their enemies and eat them, in good-fellowship with one
another: meek Christian divines cast those who differ from them but a hair’s-breadth,
body and soul, into hell-fire, for the glory of God and the good of his
creatures! It is well that the power of such persons is not co-ordinate with
their wills: indeed, it is from the sense of their weakness and inability to
control the opinions of others, that they thus ‘outdo termagant,’ and endeavour
to frighten them into conformity by big words and monstrous denunciations.
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous
mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and
bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and
famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness,
and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives
of others. What have the different sects, creeds, doctrines in religion been
but so many pretexts set up for men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another
in pieces about, like a target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that
the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or
disposition to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred to
the French, or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen to be at war
with for the time. Does the love of virtue denote any wish to discover or amend
our own faults? No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own vices
by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties. This principle is of a
most universal application. It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us
hate folly, it makes us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit. If it
inclines us to resent the wrongs of others, it impels us to be as impatient of
their prosperity. We revenge injuries: we repay benefits with ingratitude. Even
our strongest partialities and likings soon take this turn. ‘That which was
luscious as locusts, anon becomes bitter as coloquintida;’ and love and
friendship melt in their own fires. We hate old friends: we hate old books: we
hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.
I have observed that few of those,
whom I have formerly known most intimate, continue on the same friendly
footing, or combine the steadiness with the warmth of attachment. I have been
acquainted with two or three knots of inseparable companions, who saw each other
‘six days in the week,’ that have broken up and dispersed. I have quarrelled
with almost all my old friends, (they might say this is owing to my bad temper,
but) they have also quarrelled with one another. [...] They are scattered, like
last year’s snow. Some of them are dead or gone to live at a distance or pass
one another in the street like strangers; or if they stop to speak, do it as
coolly and try to cut one another as soon as possible. Some of us have grown
rich others poor. Some have got places under Government others a niche in the Quarterly Review. Some of
us have dearly earned a name in the world; whilst others remain in their
original privacy. We despise the one; and envy and are glad to mortify the
other. Times are changed; we cannot revive our old feelings; and we avoid the
sight and are uneasy in the presence of those, who remind us of our infirmity,
and put us upon an effort at seeming cordiality, which embarrasses ourselves
and does not impose upon our quondam associates.
Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and
distasteful. The stomach turns against them. Either constant intercourse and
familiarity breed weariness and contempt; or if we meet again after an interval
of absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too foolish
for us; and we wonder we did not find this out before. We are disconcerted and
kept in a state of continual alarm by the wit of one, or tired to death of the
dullness of another. The good things
of the first (besides leaving stings behind them) by repetition grow stale, and
lose their startling effect; and the insipidity of the last becomes intolerable.
The most amusing or instructive companion is at best like a favourite volume,
that we wish after a time to lay upon the
shelf; but as our friends are not willing to be laid there, this produces a
misunderstanding and ill-blood between us.
[...]
As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd – that virtue was not a mask – that liberty was not a name – that love had its seat in the human heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them. They are become to my ears a mockery and a dream. Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to mischief, ‘to every good work reprobate.’ I have seen all that had been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and intellect of men, ‘of whom the world was not worthy,’ and that promised a proud opening to truth and good through the vista of future years, undone by one man, with just glimmering of understanding enough to feel that he was a king, but not to comprehend how he could be king of a free people! I have seen this triumph celebrated by poets, the friends of my youth and the friends of man, but who were carried away by the infuriate tide that, setting in from a throne, bore down every distinction of right reason before it; and I have seen all those who did not join in applauding this insult and outrage on humanity proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a bye-word of), so that it has become an understood thing that no one can live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellow-man. ‘This was some time a mystery: but the time gives evidence of it.’ The echoes of liberty had awakened once more in Spain, and the morning of human hope dawned again: but that dawn has been overcast by the foul breath of bigotry, and those reviving sounds stifled by fresh cries from the time-rent towers of the Inquisition man yielding (as it is fit he should) first to brute force, but more to the innate perversity and dastard spirit of his own nature, which leaves no room for farther hope or disappointment. And England, that arch-reformer, that heroic deliverer, that mouther about liberty and tool of power, stands gaping by, not feeling the blight and mildew coming over it, nor its very bones crack and turn to a paste under the grasp and circling folds of this new monster, Legitimacy! In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is ‘the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!’ What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and ignorance of ourselves seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
On the
Conversation of Authors II
[The
Plain Speaker, 1826, Vol. 1.]
Montesquieu said, he often lost an
idea before he could find words for it: yet he dictated, by way of saving time,
to an amanuensis. This last is, in my opinion, a vile method, and a solecism in
authorship. Home Tooke, among other paradoxes, used to maintain, that no one
could write a good style who was not in the habit of talking and hearing the
sound of his own voice. He might as well have said that no one could relish a
good style without reading it aloud, as we find common people do to assist
their apprehension. But there is a method of trying periods on the ear, or
weighing them with the scales of the breath, without any articulate sound.
Authors, as they write, may be said to 'hear a sound so fine, there's nothing lives
‘twixt it and silence.’ Even musicians generally compose in their heads. I
agree that no style is good, that is not fit to be spoken or read aloud with
effect. This holds true not only of emphasis and cadence, but also with regard
to natural idiom and colloquial freedom. Sterne’s was in this respect the best
style that ever was written. You fancy that you hear the people talking. For a contrary
reason, no college-man writes a good style, or understands it when written.
Fine writing is with him all verbiage and monotony a translation into classical
centos or hexameter lines.
[...]
There is a character of a gentleman;
so there is a character of a scholar, which is no less easily recognised. The
one has an air of books about him, as the other has of good-breeding. The one
wears his thoughts as the other does his clothes, gracefully; and even if they
are a little old-fashioned, they are not ridiculous: they have had their day.
The gentleman shows, by his manner, that he has been used to respect from others:
the scholar that he lays claim to self-respect and to a certain independence of
opinion. The one has been accustomed to the best company; the other has passed his
time in cultivating an intimacy with the best authors. There is nothing forward
or vulgar in the behaviour of the one; nothing shrewd or petulant in the
observations of the other, as if he should astonish the bye-standers, or was
astonished himself at his own discoveries. Good taste and good sense, like
common politeness, are, or are supposed to be, matters of course. One is distinguished
by an appearance of marked attention to every one present; the other manifests
an habitual air of abstraction and absence of mind. The one is not an upstart
with all die self-important airs of the founder of his own fortune; nor the
other a self-taught man, with the repulsive self-sufficiency which arises from
an ignorance of what hundreds have known before him. We must excuse perhaps a little
conscious family-pride in the one, and a little harmless pedantry in the other.
As there is a class of the first character which sinks into the mere gentleman,
that is, which has nothing but this sense of respectability and propriety to
support it – so the character of a scholar not unfrequently dwindles down into the
shadow of a shade, till nothing is left of it but the mere book-worm. There is
often something amiable as well as enviable in this last character. I know one
such instance, at least [probably George Dyer]. The person I mean has an
admiration for learning, if he is only dazzled by its light. He lives among old
authors, if he does not enter much into their spirit. He handles the covers,
and turns over the page, and is familiar with the names and dates. He is busy
and self-involved. He hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters, or is like the
dust upon the outside of knowledge, which should not be rudely brushed aside.
He follows learning as its shadow; but as such, he is respectable. He browzes
on the husk and leaves of books, as the young fawn browzes on the bark and leaves
of trees. Such a one lives all his life in a dream of learning, and has never
once had his sleep broken by a real sense of things. He believes implicitly in
genius, truth, virtue, liberty, because he finds the names of these things in
books. He thinks that love and friendship are the finest things imaginable,
both in practice and theory. The legend of good women is to him no fiction.
When he steals from the twilight of his cell, the scene breaks upon him like an
illuminated missal, and all the people he sees are but so many figures in a camera obcura. He reads the world, like
a favourite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an edition of some old
work which he is preparing for the press, only to make emendations in it, and correct
the errors that have inadvertently slipt in. He and his dog Tray are much the
same honest, simple-hearted, faithful, affectionate creatures – if Tray could
but read! His mind cannot take the impression of vice: but the gentleness of
his nature turns gall to milk. He would not hurt a fly. He draws the picture of
mankind from the guileless simplicity of his own heart: and when he dies, his spirit
will take its smiling leave, without having ever had an ill thought of others,
or the consciousness of one in itself!
Notes of a
Journey through France and Italy
[1826, 1st edn.]
The rule for travelling abroad is to
take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object
of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or
the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception
before-hand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of
experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to
it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but prejudge nothing.
The English, in particular, carry out their own defects as a standard for
general imitation; and think the virtues of others (that are not their vices)
good for nothing. Thus they find fault with the gaiety of the French as
impertinence, with their politeness as grimace. This repulsive system of
carping and contradiction can extract neither use nor meaning from any thing, and
only tends to make those who give way to it uncomfortable and ridiculous. On
the contrary, we should be as seldom shocked or annoyed as possible, (it is our
vanity or ignorance that is mortified much oftener than our reason!) and contrive
to see the favourable side of things. This will turn both to profit and
pleasure. The intellectual, like the physical, is best kept up by an exchange
of commodities, instead of an ill-natured and idle search after grievances. The
first thing an Englishman does on going abroad is to find fault with what is
French, because it is not English. If he is determined to confine all
excellence to his own country, he had better stay at home.
[...]
Let no one imagine that the crossing
the Alps is the work of a moment, or done by a single heroic effort that they
are a huge but detached chain of hills, or like the dotted line we find in the map.
They are a sea or an entire kingdom of mountains. It took us three days to traverse
them in this, which is the most practicable direction, and travelling at a good
round pace. We passed on as far as eye could see, and still we appeared to have
made little way. Still we were in the shadow of the same enormous mass of rock
and snow, by the side of the same creeping stream. Lofty mountains reared
themselves in front of us horrid abysses were scooped out under our feet.
Sometimes the road wound along the side of a steep hill, overlooking some
village-spire or hamlet, and as we ascended it, it only gave us a view of
remoter scenes, where ‘Alps o’er Alps arise,’ tossing about their billowy tops,
and tumbling their unwieldy shapes in all directions a world of wonders! Any
one, who is much of an egotist, ought not to travel through these districts;
his vanity will not find its account in them; it will be chilled, mortified,
shrunk up: but they are a noble treat to those who feel themselves raised in
their own thoughts and in the scale of being by the immensity of other things,
and who can aggrandise and piece out their personal insignificance by the
grandeur and eternal forms of nature!
A Farewell to
Essay-Writing
[London
Weekly Review, 29 Mar 1828; dated “Winterslow, Feb. 20, 1828”; Winterslow, 1850, ed. WH’s son,
imperfect form.]
We walk through life, as through a
narrow path, with a thin curtain drawn around it; behind are ranged rich
portraits, airy harps are strung – yet we will not stretch forth our hands and
lift aside the veil, to catch glimpses of the one, or sweep the chords of the
other. As in a theatre, when the old-fashioned green curtain drew up, groups of
figures, fantastic dresses, laughing faces, rich banquets, stately columns,
gleaming vistas appeared beyond; so we have only at any time to ‘peep through
the blanket of the past’ to possess ourselves at once of all that has regaled
our senses, that is stored up in our memory, that has struck our fancy, that
has pierced our hearts: – yet to all this we are indifferent, insensible, and
seem intent only on the present vexation, the future disappointment.
[...]
In matters of taste and feeling, one
proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty, is the circumstance
of their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books, pictures,
passages that I ever had: I may therefore presume that they will last me my life
nay, I may indulge a hope that my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of
impression is the only thing on which I pride myself. Even L--- [Lamb], whose
relish of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a surfeit of
admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his select authors or
particular friends, after a lapse of ten years. As to myself, any one knows
where to have me. What I have once made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of
the chapter. One cause of my independence of opinion is, I believe, the liberty
I give to others, or the very diffidence and distrust of making converts. I
should be an excellent man on a jury: I might say little, but should starve ‘the
other eleven obstinate fellows’ out.
[...]
I have not sought to make partisans, still
less did I dream of making enemies; and have therefore kept my opinions myself,
whether they were currently adopted or not. To get others to come into our ways
of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order
to lead. At the time I lived here formerly, I had no suspicion that I should ever
become a voluminous writer; yet I had just the same confidence in my feelings
before I had ventured to air them in public as I have now. Neither the outcry
for or against moves me a jot: I do not say that the one is not more agreeable
than the other.
The Spirit of
Controversy
[Atlas,
31 Jan 1830, not collected in WH’s lifetime and hardly reprinted ever since.]
The Spirit of Controversy has often
been arraigned as the source of much bitterness and vexation, as productive of ‘envy,
malice, and all uncharitableness’: and the charge, no doubt, is too well
founded. But it is said to be an ill wind
that blows nobody good; and there are few evils in life that have not some
qualifying circumstance attending them. It is one of the worst consequences of
this very spirit of controversy that it has led men to regard things too much
in a single and exaggerated point of view. Truth is not one thing, but has many
aspects and many shades of difference; it is neither all black nor all white;
sees something wrong on its own side, something right in others; makes
concessions to an adversary, allowances for human frailty, and is nearer akin
to charity than the dealers in controversy or the declaimers against it are apt
to imagine. The bigot and partisan (influenced by the very spirit he finds
fault with) sees nothing in the endless disputes which have tormented and
occupied men’s thoughts but an abuse of learning and a waste of time: the
philosopher may still find an excuse for so bad and idle a practice. One
frequent objection made to the incessant wrangling and collision of sects and parties
is, What does it all come to? And the
answer is, What would they have done
without it? The pleasure of the
chase, or the benefit derived from it, is not to be estimated by the value of
the game after it is caught, so much as by the difficulty of starting it and
the exercise afforded to the body and the excitement of the animal spirits in
hunting it down: and so it is in the exercises of the mind and the pursuit of
truth, which are chiefly valuable (perhaps) less for their results when
discovered, than for their affording continual scope and employment to the mind
in its endeavours to reach the fancied goal, without its being ever (or but
seldom) able to attain it. Regard the end,
is an ancient saying, and a good one, if it does not mean that we are to forget
the beginning and the middle. By insisting on the ultimate
value of things when all is over, we may acquire the character of grave men, but
not of wise ones. Passe pour cela. If we would set up such a sort of
fixed and final standard of moral truth and worth, we had better try to
construct life over again, so as to make it a punctum stans, and not a
thing in progress; for as it is, every end, before it can be realised, implies
a previous imagination, a warm interest in, and an active pursuit of, itself,
all which are integral and vital parts of human existence, and it is a begging
of the question to say that an end is only of value in itself, and not as it
draws out the living resources, and satisfies the original capacities of human nature.
When the play is over, the curtain drops, and we see nothing but a green cloth;
but before this, there have been five acts of brilliant scenery and
high-wrought declamation, which, if we come to plain matter-of-fact and
history, are still something.
[...]
Besides, there is always pretty nearly
the same quantity of malice afloat in the world; though with the change of time
and manners it may become a finer poison, and kill by more unseen ways. When
the sword has done its worst, slander, ‘whose edge is sharper than the sword,’
steps in to keep the blood from stagnating. Instead of slow fires and paper caps
fastened round the heads of the victims, we arrive at the same end by a politer
way of nicknames and anonymous criticism. Blackwood’s
Magazine is the modern version of Fox’s Book
of Martyrs. Discard religion and politics (the two grand topics of
controversy), and people would hate each other as cordially, and torment each
other as effectually about the preference to be given to Mozart or Rossini, to
Malibran or Pasta.
[...]
We condemn controversy, because we
would have matters all our own way, and think that ours is the only side that
has a title to be heard. We imagine that there is but one view of a subject
that is right; and that all the rest being plainly and wilfully wrong, it is a
shocking waste of speech, and a dreadful proof of prejudice and party spirit,
to have a word to say in their defence. But this is a want of liberality and
comprehension of mind. For in general we dispute either about things respecting
which we are a good deal in the dark, and where both parties are very possibly
in the wrong, and may be left to find out their mutual error; or about those points,
where there is an opposition of interests and passions, and where it would be
by no means safe to cut short the debate by making one party judges for the
other. They must, therefore, be left to fight it out as well as they can; and,
between the extremes of folly and violence, to strike a balance of common sense
and even-handed justice. Every sect or party will, of course, run into
extravagance and partiality; but the probability is, that there is some ground
of argument, some appearance of right, to justify the grossest bigotry and
intolerance. The fury of the combatants is excited because there is something
to be said on the other side of the question. If men were as infallible as they
suppose themselves, they would not dispute.
[...]
Controversy, therefore, is a necessary
evil or good (call it which you will) till all differences of opinion or
interest are reconciled, and absolute certainty or perfect indifference alike
takes away the possibility or the temptation to litigation and quarrels. We
need be under no immediate alarm of coming to such a conclusion. There is
always room for doubt, food for contention. While we are engrossed with one
controversy, indeed, we think every thing else is clear; but as soon as one
point is settled, we begin to cavil and start objections to that which has
before been taken for gospel. The Reformers thought only of opposing the Church
of Rome, and never once anticipated the schisms and animosities which arose
among Protestants: the Dissenters, in carrying their point against the Church of
England, did not dream of that crop of infidelity and scepticism which, to
their great horror and scandal, sprung up in the following age, from their
claim of free inquiry and private judgment. The non-essentials of religion first came into dispute; then the
essentials. Our own opinion, we fancy, is founded on a rock; the rest we regard
as stubble. But no sooner is one out-work of established faith or practice
demolished, than another is left a defenceless mark for the enemy, and the
engines of wit and sophistry immediately begin to batter it. Thus we proceed
step by step, till, passing through the several gradations of vanity and paradox,
we came to doubt whether we stand on our head or our heels, alternately deny
the existence of spirit and matter, maintain that black is white, call evil
good and good evil, and defy any one to prove the contrary. As faith is the
prop and cement that upholds society by opposing fixed principles as a barrier
against the inroads of passion, so reason is the menstruum which dissolves it by leaving nothing sufficiently firm
or unquestioned in our opinions to withstand the current and bias of
inclination. Hence the decay and ruin of states then barbarism, sloth, and ignorance
and so we commence the circle again of building up all that it is possible to
conceive out of a rude chaos, and the obscure shadowings of things, and then
pulling down all that we have built up, till not a trace of it is left. Such is
the effect of the ebb and flow and restless agitation of the human mind.
On Court
Influence
[The
Yellow Dwarf, 3 & 10 Jan 1818,
not collected in WH’s lifetime and
hardly reprinted ever since.]
It is not interest alone, but
prejudice or fashion that sways mankind. Opinion governs opinion. It is not
merely what we can get by a certain line of conduct that we have to consider,
but what others will think of it. The possession of money is but one mode of recommending
ourselves to the good opinion of the world, of securing distinction and
respect. Except as a bribe to popularity, money is of very limited value.
Avarice is (oftener than we might at first suspect) only vanity in disguise. We
should not want fine clothes or fine houses, an equipage or livery-servants,
but for what others will think of us for having or wanting them. The chief and
most expensive commodity that money is laid out in purchasing, is respect.
Money, like other things, is worth no more than it will fetch. It is a pass-
port into society; but if other things will answer the same purpose, as beauty,
birth, wit, learning, desert in art or arms, dress, behaviour, the want of
wealth is not felt as a very severe privation. If a man, who, on whatever
pretensions is received into good company, be- haves with propriety, and
converses rationally, it is not inquired after he is gone, nor once thought of
while he is present, whether he is rich or poor. In the mixed intercourse of
private society every one finds his level, in proportion as he can contribute
to its amusement or information. It is even more so in the general inter-
course of the world, where a poet and a man of genius (if extrinsic
circumstances make any difference) is as much courted and run after for being a
common ploughman, as for being a peer of the realm. Burns, had he been living,
would have started fair with Lord Byron in the race of popularity, and would
not have lost it.
[...]
The unfavourable opinion of others
gives you a bad opinion of yourself or them: and neither of these conduces to
persevering, high-minded integrity. To wish to serve mankind, we should think well
of them. To be able to serve them, they should think well of us. To keep well
with the public, is not more necessary to a man's private interest than to his
general utility. It is a hopeless task to be always striving against the stream:
it is a thankless one to be in a state of perpetual litigation with the
community. The situation of a strange dog in a country town, barked at and
worried by all the curs in the village, is about as enviable as that of a
person who affects singularity in politics. What is a man to do who gets
himself into this predicament, in an age when patriotism is a misnomer in language,
and public principle a solecism in fact? If he cannot bring the world round to
his opinion, he must as a forlorn hope go over to theirs, and be content to be
knave – or nothing.
