APHORISMS ON MAN
The Monthly Magazine.][October, 1830–June, 1831.
Servility is a sort of bastard envy. We heap our whole stock of involuntary adulation on a single prominent figure, to have an excuse for withdrawing our notice from all other claims (perhaps juster and more galling ones), and in the hope of sharing a part of the applause as train-bearers.
Admiration is catching by a certain sympathy. The vain admire the vain; the morose are pleased with the morose; nay, the selfish and cunning are charmed with the tricks and meanness of which they are witnesses, and may be in turn the dupes.
III
Vanity is no proof of conceit. A vain man often accepts of praise as a cheap substitute for his own good opinion. He may think more highly of another, though he would be wounded to the quick if his own circle thought so. He knows the worthlessness and hollowness of the flattery to which he is accustomed, but his ear is tickled with the sound; and the effeminate in this way can no more live without the incense of applause, than the effeminate in another can live without perfumes or any other customary indulgence of the senses. Such people would rather have the applause of fools than the approbation of the wise. It is a low and shallow ambition.
It was said of some one who had contrived to make himself popular abroad by getting intohot water, but who proved very troublesome and ungrateful when he came home—‘We thought him a very persecuted man in India’—the proper answer to which is, that there are some people who are good for nothing else but to be persecuted. They want some check to keep them in order.
It is a sort of gratuitous error in high life, that the poor are naturally thieves and beggars, just as the latter conceive that the rich are naturally proud and hard-hearted. Give a man who is starving a thousand a-year, and he will be no longer under a temptation to get himself hanged by stealing a leg of mutton for his dinner; he may still spend it in gaming, drinking, and the other vices of a gentleman, and not incharity, about which he before made such an outcry.
Do not confer benefits in the expectation of meeting with gratitude; and do not cease to confer them because you find those whom you have served ungrateful. Do what you think fit and right to please yourself; the generosity is not the less real, because it does not meet with a correspondent return. A man should study to get through the world as he gets through St. Giles’s—with as little annoyance and interruption as possible from the shabbiness around him.
Common-placeadvisers and men of the world, are always pestering you to conform to their maxims and modes, just like thebarkersin Monmouth-street, who stop the passengers by entreating them to turn in andrefitat their second-hand repositories.
VIII
The wordgentilityis constantly in the mouths of vulgar people; as quacks and pretenders are always talking ofgenius. Those who possess any real excellence think and say the least about it.
Taste is often envy in disguise: it turns into the art of reducing excellence within the smallest possible compass, or of finding out theminimumof pleasure. Some people admire only what is new and fashionable—the work of the day, of some popular author—the last and frothiest bubble that glitters on the surface of fashion. All the rest is gone by, ‘in the deep bosom of the ocean buried;’ to allude to it is Gothic, to insist upon it odious. We have only to wait a week to be relieved of the hot-pressed page, of the vignette-title; and in the interim can look with sovereign contempt on the wide range of science, learning, art, and on those musty old writers who lived before the present age of novels. Peace be with theirmanes! There are others, on the contrary, to whom all the modern publications are anathema, a by-word—they get rid of this idle literature ‘at one fell swoop’—disqualify the present race from all pretensions whatever, get into a corner with an obscure writer, and devour the cobwebs and the page together, and pick out in the quaintest production, the quaintest passages, the merestchoke-pear, which they think nobody can swallow but themselves.
The source of the love of nature or of the country has never been explained so well as it might. The truth is this. Natural or inanimate objects please merely as objects of sense or contemplation, and we ask no return of the passion or admiration from them, so that we cannot be disappointed or distracted in our choice. If we are delighted with a flower or a tree, we are pleased with itfor its own sake; nothing more is required to make our satisfaction complete; we do not ask the flower or tree whether it likes us again; and, therefore, wherever we can meet with the same or a similar object, we may reckon upon a recurrence of the same soothing emotion. Nature is the only mistress that smiles on us still the same; and does not repay admiration with scorn, love with hatred. She is faithful to us, as long as we are faithful to ourselves. Whereas, in regard to the human species, we have not so much to consider our own dispositions towards others, as theirs towards us; a thousand caprices, interests, and opinions, may intervene before the good understanding can bemutual; we not only cannot infer of one individual from another, but the same individual may change to-morrow: so that in our intercourse with the world, there is nothing but littleness, uncertainty, suspicion, and mortification, instead of the grandeur and repose of nature.
It has been objected to the soothing power of Nature, that it cannot take away the sharp pang of vehement distress, but rather barbs the dart, and seems to smile in mockery of our anguish. But the same might be said of music, poetry, and friendship, which only tantalize and torment us by offering to divert our grief in its keenest paroxysms; but yet cannot be denied to be enviable resources and consolations of the human mind, when the bitterness of the moment has passed over.
Every one is a hero, the circumstances being given. All that is necessary is, that the outward impression should be so strong as to make a man forget himself. A woman rushes into the flames to save her child, not from duty or reason—but because the distracting terror for another banishes all recollection of, and fear for, herself. For the same reason, a person throws himself from a precipice, because the apprehension of danger gets the better of and confounds the sense of self-preservation. The doctrine of self-love, as an infallible metaphysical principle of action, is nonsense.
The heroical ages were those in which there was a constant question between life and death, and men ate their scanty meal with their swords in their hands.
The hero acts from outward impulse; the martyr from internal faith, and so far is the greater character of the two. And yet it may be doubted whether the latter is properly a voluntary agent, or whether, if he could do it unperceived, he would not abstract himself from the scene, instead of becoming a sacrifice and a witness to the truth.
What shews that persecution and danger act as incentives rather than impediments to the will, is that zeal generally goes out with the fires that kindle it; and we become indifferent to a cause, when life,property, and limb are no longer endangered. He is the real philosopher who loves truth for its own sake, not in the spirit of contradiction: he the genuine friend of freedom and justice, who hates oppression and wrong after they have ceased, and as long as the very name of them remains, as well as while it is a bone of contention between infuriated sects and parties.
If reform were to gain the day, reform would become as vulgar as cant of any other kind. We only shew a spirit of independence and resistance to power, as long as power is against us. As soon as the cause of opposition prevails, its essence and character are gone out of it; and the most flagrantradicalismdegenerates into the tamest servility. We then say as others say; sail with the stream; no longer sacrifice interest to principle, but are in a pitiful majority. Had events taken a different turn in 1794, who can predict what the popular cry would have been? This may point out how little chance there is of any great improvement in the affairs of the world. Virtue ceases with difficulty; honesty ismilitant. The mass of mankind, who are governed by indolence and habit, fall in with existing events and interests; the imaginative and reasoning part fall out with facts and reality; but could they have their way, and model the world at their pleasure, their occupation would be gone; or if all governments were wise and good, the character of the patriot would become obsolete, and a sinecure. At present there is a very convenient division of labour; and each class fulfils its vocation. It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
We talk about the cant of politics or religion, as if there were no cant but that which is common to the multitude. But whenever any two individuals agree about any one thing, they begin to cant about it, and take the echo of one another’s voices for the verdict of truth. Half-a-dozen persons will always make aquorumof credulity and vulgarity.
When people have done quarrelling about one set of questions they start another. Motion is necessary to mind as much as to matter; and for ‘an ultimate end,’ Hobbes denies that there is any such thing. Hence the tendency to all Ultra opinions and measures! Man is seldom contented to go as far as others, unless he can go beyond them, and make a caricature and a paradox even of the most vulgar prejudice.It is necessary to aim at some kind of distinction—to create some difficulty, were it only for the sake of overcoming it. Thus we find that O’Connell, having carried his cause, would not let the ‘agitation’ subside without turning it into a personal quarrel: the way was opened to him into the House, and he wanted to force his way there by anex post factoinference; the banns of marriage were published between him and parliament, and he would fain, with the petulance of opposition,seizea seat there.
Truth itself becomes but a fashion. When all the world acknowledge it, it seems trite and stale. It is tinged by the coarse medium through which it passes.
Erasmus, in his ‘Remains,’ tells a story of two thieves, who were recommended by their mother to rob every one they met with; but warned, on peril of their lives, to avoid oneBlack-breeches(Hercules). Meeting him, however, without knowing him, they set upon him, and were slung across his shoulder,—where Hercules heard them muttering behind his back,a long way off, ‘This must surely be he that our mother warned us of.’ In contempt and pity he let them escape. What modern wit can come up to the grotesque grandeur of this invention?
People addicted to secresy are so without knowing why; they are so not ‘for cause,’ but for secresy’s sake. It is a mixture of cowardice and conceit. They think, if they tell you any thing, you may understand it better than they do, or turn it in some way against them; but that while they shut up their mouths they are wiser than you, just as liars think by telling you a falsehood they have an advantage over you. There are others who deal in significant nods, smiles, and half-sentences, so that you never can get at their meaning, and indeed they have none, but leave it to you to put what interpretation you please on their embryo hints and conceptions. They are glad to find aproxyfor their want of understanding.
It is the force and violence of the English mind that has put it into the safe custody of the law, and it is every man’s disposition to act upon his own judgment and presumption, without regard to others, that has made it absolutely necessary to establish equal claims to curbthem. We are too much in a state of nature to submit to what Burke calls ‘the soft collar of social esteem,’ and require ‘the iron rod, the torturing hour,’ to tame us. But though the foundations of liberty, life, and property, are formally secured in this way from the ebullitions of national character, yet the spirit breaks out upon the surface of manners, and is often spurted in our face. Lord Castlereagh was wrong in saying that ‘liberty was merely a custom of England;’ it is the indigenous growth of our temper and our clime; and woe to him who deprives us of the only amends for so many disadvantages and failings! The wild beast roaming his native forests is respectable though formidable—shut up in Exeter ‘Change, he is equally odious and wretched.
It was a long time made an argument for not throwing open the galleries of noblemen and others to the public, that if permission were given they would be filled with the lowest of the rabble, and with squalid wretches, who would run up against well-dressed people, and damage the works of art. Nothing could be more false than this theory, as experience has shown. It was in vain to quote the example of foreign countries, as it was said the common people there were kept more in subjection; but if they are tamer, ours are prouder for that very reason. The National Gallery in Pall-Mall is now open to all the world; and, except a shabby artist or two, who ever saw a soul there who was not, if not well-dressed, yet dressed in his best, and behaving with decency, instead of trying to turn the place into a bear-garden, as had been predicted.[42]People will not go out of their way to see pictures unless they have an interest in them, which gives the title, and is a security against ill consequences; much less will any class of people obtrude themselves where they are pointed at as inferior to the rest of the company, or subject themselves to looks of scorn and disgust, to see any sights in the world. There is no man so poor or low but he loves himself better than pictures or statues; and if he must get snubbed and treated with contempt to indulge his admiration of celebrated works, he will forego the latter.Comparisons are odious; and we avoid them. The first object of every human being (high or low, great or small) is to stand well with himself, and to appear to the best advantage to others. A man is not very fond of passing along the streets in a thread-bare coat, and shoes with holes in them. Will he go in this trim into a group of well-dressed peopleto make himself ridiculous? The mind, so far from being dull or callous on this point, is but too sensitive; our jealousy of public opinion is the ruling passion, a morbid disease. Does not the consciousness of any singularity or impropriety of appearance immediately take off from our pleasure at a play? How seldom we observe an interloper in the dress circle; and how sure he is to pay for it! If a man has any defect or inferiority, this is certain, he will keep it in the back-ground. If a chimney-sweeper or scavenger had a ticket to a ball, would he go? Oh! no; it is enough to bear the sense of our own infirmity and disgrace in silence, and unnoticed, without having it wrought to agony by the glare of contrast and ostentation of insult! What linendraper or grocer’s son would dine with a prince every day though he might, to be crushed into insignificance, and stifled with ironical civility? Do we not observe the difficulty there is in making servants and mechanics sit down, or keep on their hats in speaking to theirbetters, for fear of being thought to encroach, and made liable to a rebuff in consequence? Assuredly, then, the great may throw open their palace-doors and galleries of art without having to dread the inroad or outrages of the mob, or fancying that any one will go who is not qualified to appear, or will not come away with his mind and manners improved. The wooden shoes and mob caps in the Louvre or the Vatican do no harm to the pictures on the walls: but add a new interest to them, and throw a pleasing light on human nature. If we are behind other nations in politeness and civilization, the best way to overtake them is to tread in their steps.
It is at the same time true thatfamiliarity breeds contempt; or that the vulgar, if admitted to an intimacy and footing of equality, try to make you feel all your defects, and to pay for the superiority you have so long usurped over them. The same pride that before kept them at a distance makes them ready to throw down any barrier of deference or distinction the moment they can do so with impunity. No one willingly admits a superiority in another; or does not secretly prefer himself to the whole universe beside. The slave would kill the tyrant, whose feet he kisses; and there is no Turk so loyal that he would not cut off the head of the best of Sultans, if he was sure of putting the diadem upon his own.
The strongest minds are governed more by appearances than by a regard to consequences. Those who pretend to be the greatest calculators of their own interest, or themain-chance, are the very slavesof opinion, and dupes of shallow pretension. They are often so mad in this respect, that they think neither better nor worse of the oldest friend they have in the world than the first person they happen to be in company with does, or the last rumour they heard gives him out. Theircircumspectionamounts to looking three ways at once, and missing the right point of view at last. They would rather speak to a well-dressed fool in the street than to the wisest man in a thread-bare suit. I know an author who succeeds with a set of second-hand thoughts by having a coat of the newest cut; and an editor, who flourishes about the town in virtue of a pair of green spectacles. Lay out all you are worth in decking out the person of a vulgar woman, and she willcutyou in the very finery you have given her; lay it out on your own back, and she will be ambitious of your least notice. People judge of you not from whattheyknow, but from the impression you make on others, which depends chiefly on professions, and on outward bearing and bravery.De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio.If a man has no opinion of himself, how the deuce should any one else? It is like electing a person member of parliament who refuses to come forward as a candidate. On the other hand, let a man have impudence in lieu of all other qualifications, and he needs not despair. The part of quack or coxcomb is a favourite one with the town. The only character that is likely to get on by passing for apoor creatureis the legacy-hunter. Nothing can be too low or insignificant for that. A man is only grateful to you in the other world for having been a foil to him in this. A miser (if he could) would leave his fortune to his dog, that no human being might be the better for it, or no one that he could envy in the possession of it, or think raised to an equality with himself.
We complain of old friends who have made their fortunes in the world and slighted us in their prosperity, without considering those who have been unsuccessful, and whom we have neglected in our turn. When our friends betray or desert us, we cling the closer to those that remain. Our confidence is strengthened by being circumscribed; we do not wish to give up a forlorn hope. With the crumbling and decayed fragments of friendship around us, we maintain our point to the last; like the cobbler, who kept his stall and cooked his beef-steak in the ruins of Drury Lane. Bonaparte used to speak of old generals and favourites who would not have abandoned him in his misfortunes if they had lived; it was perhaps well for them that they were dead. The list of traitors and the ungrateful is too much swelled without any probable additions to it.
XXVII
When we hear of any base or shocking action or character, we think the better of ourselves; instead of which, we ought to think the worse. It strikes at the grounds of our faith in human nature. The reflection of the old divine was wiser on seeing a reprobate—‘There goes my wicked self!’
Over-civility generally ends in impertinence; for as it proceeds from design, and not from any kindness or respect, it ceases with its object.
I am acquainted with but one person, of whom I feel quite sure that if he were to meet an old and tried friend in the street, he would go up and speak to him in the same manner, whether in the interim he had become a lord or a beggar. Upon reflection, I may add a second to the list. Such is my estimate of the permanence and sincerity of our most boasted virtues. ‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’
It has been said that family attachments are the only ones that stand the test of adversity, because the disgrace or misfortune is there in some measure reflected upon ourselves. A friend is no longer a friend, provided we choose to pick a quarrel with him; but we cannot so easily cut the link of relationship asunder. We therefore relieve the distresses of our near relations, or get them out of the way, lest they should shame us. But the sentiment is unnatural, and therefore must be untrue.
L—— said of some monkeys at a fair, that we were ashamed of their resemblance to ourselves on the same principle that we avoidedpoor relations.
Servants and others who consult only their ease and convenience, give a great deal of trouble by their carelessness and profligacy; those who take a pride in their work often carry it to excess, and plague you with constant advice and interference. Their duty gets so much a-head in their imagination, that it becomes their master, and your’s too.
XXXIII
There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books or papers in order, that is, according to their notions of the matter; and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor any body else can find them. This is a sort ofmagpie faculty. If any thing is left where you want it, it is called making alitter. There is a pedantry in housewifery as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not set comfortably to work again for several days.
True misanthropy consists not in pointing out the faults and follies of men, but in encouraging them in the pursuit. They who wish well to their fellow-creatures are angry at their vices and sore at their mishaps; he who flatters their errors and smiles at their ruin is their worst enemy. But men like the sycophant better than the plain-dealer, because they prefer their passions to their reason, and even to their interest.
I am not very patriotic in my notions, nor prejudiced in favour of my own countrymen; and one reason is, I wish to have as good an opinion as I can of human nature in general. If we are the paragons that some people would make us out, what must the rest of the world be? If we monopolize all the sense and virtue on the face of the globe, we ‘leave others poor indeed,’ without having a very great superabundance falling to our own share. Let them have a few advantages that we have not—grapes and the sun!
When the Persian ambassador was at Edinburgh, an old Presbyterian lady, more full of zeal than discretion, fell upon him for his idolatrous belief, and said ‘I hear you worship the sun!’—‘In faith, Madam,’ he replied, ‘and so would you too if you had ever seen him!’
‘To bedirectand honest is not safe,’ says Iago. Shakspeare has here defined the nature of honesty, which seems to consist in the absence of anyindirector sinister bias. The honest man looks at and decides upon an object as it is in itself, without a view to consequences, and as if he himself were entirely out of the question; the prudentman considers only what others will think of it; the knave, how he can turn it to his own advantage or another’s detriment, which he likes better. His straightforward simplicity of character is the reverse of what is understood by the phrase,a man of the world: an honest man is independent of and abstracted from material ties. This character is owing chiefly to strong natural feeling and a love of right, partly to pride and obstinacy, and a want of discursiveness of imagination. It is not well to be too witty or too wise. In many circles (not including the night-cellar or a mess-table) a clever fellow means a rogue. According to the French proverb, ‘Tout homme reflechi est méchant.’ Your honest man often is, and is always set down as no better than an ass.
A person who does not tell lies will not believe that others tell them. From old habit, he cannot break the connection between words and things. This is to labour under a great disadvantage in his transactions withmen of the world: it is playing against sharpers with loaded dice. The secret of plausibility and success ispoint-blanc lying. The advantage which men of business have over the dreamers and sleep-walkers is not in knowing the exact state of a case, but in telling you with a grave face what it is not, to suit their own purposes. This is one obvious reason why students and book-worms are so often reduced to their last legs. Education (which is a study and discipline of abstract truth) is a diversion to the instinct of lying and a bar to fortune.
Those who get their money as wits, spend it like fools.
It is not true that authors, artists, &c., are uniformly ill-paid; they are often improvident, and look upon an income as an estate. A literary man who has made even five or six hundred a-year for a length of time has only himself to blame if he has none of it left (a tradesman with the same annual profits would have been rich or independent); an artist who breaks for ten thousand pounds cannot surely lament the want of patronage. A sieve might as well petition against a dry season. Persons of talent and reputation do not make money, because they do not keep it; and they do not keep it, because they do not care about it till they feel the want of it—and thenthe public stop payment. The prudent and careful, even among players, lay by fortunes.
XLI
In general, however, it is not to be expected that those should grow rich by a special Providence, whose first and last object is by every means and at every sacrifice to grow famous. Vanity and avarice have different goals and travel different roads. The man of genius produces that which others admire: the man of business that which they will buy. If the poet is delighted with the ideas of certain things, the reader is equally satisfied with the idea of them too. The man of genius does that which no one else but himself can do: the man of business gets his wealth from the joint mechanical drudgery of all whom he has the means to employ. Trade is the Briareus that works with a hundred hands. A popular author grew rich, because he seemed to have a hundred hands to write with: but he wanted another hand to say to his well-got gains, ‘Come, let me clutch thee.’ Nollekens made a fortune (how he saved it we know) by having blocks of marble to turn into sharp-looking busts (which required a capital), and by hiring a number of people to hack and hew them into shape. Sir Joshua made more money than West or Barry, partly because he was a better painter, partly because gentlemen like their own portraits better than those of prophet or apostle, saint or hero. What the individual wants, he will pay the highest price for: what is done for the public the State must pay for. How if they will not? The historical painter cannot make them; and if he persists in the attempt, must be contented to fall a martyr to it. It is some glory to fail in great designs; and some punishment is due to having rashly or presumptuously embarked in them.
It is some comfort to starve on a name: it is something to be a poorgentleman; and your man of letters ‘writes himselfarmigero, in any bond, warrant, or quittance.’ In fixing on a profession for a child, it is a consideration not to place him in one in which he may not be thought good enough to sit down in any company. Miserable mortals that we are! If you make a lawyer of him, he may become Lord Chancellor; and then all his posterity are lords. How cheap and yet acceptable a thing is nobility in this country! It does not date from Adam or the conquest. We need not laugh at Buonaparte’s mushroom peers, who were something like Charlemagne’s or the knights of King Arthur’s round table.
We talk of the march of intellect, as if it only unfolded the knowledge of good:the knowledge of evil, which communicates withtwenty times the rapidity, is never once hinted at. Eve’s apple, the torch of Prometheus, and Pandora’s box, are discarded as childish fables by our wise moderns.
As I write this, I hear out of the window a man beating his wife and calling her names. Is this what is meant by good-nature and domestic comfort? Or is it that we have so little of these, ordinarily speaking, that we are astonished at the smallest instances of them; and have never donelaudingourselves for the exclusive possession of them?
A man should never marry beneath his own rank in life—for love. It shews goodness of heart, but want of consideration; and the very generosity of purpose will defeat itself. She may please him and be every way qualified to make him happy: but what will others think? Can he with equal certainty of the issue introduce her to his friends and family? If not, nothing is done; for marriage is an artificial institution, and a wife a part of the machinery of society. We are not in a state of nature, to be quite free and unshackled to follow our spontaneous impulses. Nothing can reconcile the difficulty but a woman’s being a paragon of wit or beauty; but every man fancies his Dulcinea a paragon of wit or beauty. Without this, he will only (with the best intentions in the world) have entailed chagrin and mortification both on himself and her; and she will be as much excluded from society as if he had made her his mistress instead of his wife. She must either mope at home, or tie him to her apron-string; and he will drag a clog and a load through life, if he be not saddled with a scold and a tyrant to boot.
I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and practical malignity of man.
We pity those who lived three hundred years ago, as if the world was hardly then awake, and they were condemned to feel their way and drag out an inanimate existence in the obscure dawn of manners and civilization:weforsooth are at the meridian, and the ages that are to follow are dark night. But if there were any truth in our theory, we should be as much behind-hand and objects of scorn to those who are to come after us, as we have a fancied advantage overthose that have preceded us. Supposing it to be a misfortune to have lived in the age of Raphael or Virgil, it would be desirable (if it were possible) still to postpone the period of our existencesine die: for the value of time must mount up, as it proceeds, through the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees. Common sense with a little reflection will teach us, that one age is as good as another; that in familiar phrasewe cannot have our cake and eat it; and that there is no time like the time present, whether in the first, the tenth or the twentieth century.
The world does not start fair in the race of time: one country has run its course before another has set out or even been heard of. Riches, luxury, and the arts, reach their utmost height in one place, while the rest of the globe is in a crude and barbarous state; decline thenceforward, and can no more be resuscitated than the dead. The twelve old Etruscan cities are stone-walls, surrounded with heaps of cinders: Rome is but the tomb of its ancient greatness. Venice, Genoa, are extinct; and there are those who think that England has had her day. She may exclaim in the words of Gray’sBard—‘To triumph and to die are mine.’ America is just setting out in the path of history, on the model of England, without a language of its own, and with a continent instead of an island to run its career in—like a novice in the art, who gets a larger canvass than his master ever had to cover with his second-hand designs.
It was shrewdly observed that the ruin of states commences with the accumulation of people in great cities, which conceal and foster vice and profligacy.
The world, said a sensible man, does not on the whole grow much worse, nor abandon itself to absolute licentiousness, because as people have children growing up, they do not wish them to be reprobates; but give them good advice and conceal their failings from them. This in each successive generation brings morality on its legs again, however sceptical in virtue or hardened in vice the old may become through habit or bad example.
As children puzzle you by asking explanations of what they do not understand, many grown people shine in company and triumph over their antagonists by dint of ignorance and conceit.
LII
A certain bookseller wanted Northcote to write a history of art in all ages and countries, and in all its ramifications and collateral bearings. It would have taken a life to execute it; but the projector thought it was as easy to make the book as to draw up the title-page. Some minds are as sanguine from a want of imagination, as others are from an excess of it; they see no difficulty or objection in the way of what they undertake, and are blind to every thing but their own interest and wishes.
An outcry is raised against the distresses of literature as a tax upon the public, and against the sums of money and unrepaid loans which authors borrow of strangers or friends. It is not considered that but for authors we should still have been in the hands of tyrants, who rioted in the spoil of widows and orphans, and swept the fortunes of individuals and the wealth of provinces into their pouch. It will be time enough to be alarmed when theLiterary Fundhas laid its iron grasp on fat abbey lands and portly monasteries for the poor brethren of the Muses, has establishments like those of the Franciscan and Dominican Friars for its hoary veterans or tender novices, and has laid half the property of the country under contribution. Authors are theidealclass of the present day, who supply the brains of the community with ‘fancies and good-nights,’ as the priests did of old; and who cultivating no goodly vineyard of their own to satisfy the wants of the body, are sometimes entitled, besides their pittance, to ask the protection of taste or liberality. After all, the fees of Parnassus are trifling in comparison with the toll of Purgatory.
There are but few authors who should marry: they are already wedded to their studies and speculations. Those who are accustomed to the airy regions of poetry and romance, have a fanciful and peculiar standard of perfection of their own, to which realities can seldom come up; and disappointment, indifference, or disgust, is too often the result. Besides, their ideas and their intercourse with society make them fit for the highest matches. If an author, baulked of the goddess of his idolatry, marries an ignorant and narrow-minded person, they have no language in common: if she is abluestocking, they do nothing but wrangle. Neither have most writers the means to maintain a wife and family without difficulty. They have chosen their part, the pursuit of the intellectual and abstracted; and should not attempt to force the world of reality into a union with it, like mixing gold withclay. In this respect, the Romish priests were perhaps wiser. ‘From every work they challengedessoinfor contemplation’s sake.’ Yet their celibacy was but a compromise with their sloth and supposed sanctity. We must not contradict the course of nature, after all.
There is sometimes seen more natural ease and grace in a common gipsy-girl than in an English court-circle. To demand a reason why, is to ask why the strolling fortune-teller’s hair and eyes are black, or her face oval.
The greatest proof of pride is its being able to extinguish envy and jealousy. Vanity produces the latter effect on the continent.
When you speak of the popular effect and enthusiasm produced by the ceremonies of the Catholic church, it is presently objected that all this faith and zeal is excited by mummery and superstition. I am ready to allow that; and when I find that truth and reason have the same homage and reverence paid to them as absurdity and falsehood, I shall think all the advantages are clearly on the side of the former. The processes of reason do not commonly afford the elements of passion as their result; and the object of strong and even lofty feeling seems to appeal rather to the grossness and incongruity of the senses and imagination, than to the clear and dry deductions of the understanding. Man has been truly defined areligious animal; but his faith and heavenward aspirations cease if you reduce him to a mere mathematical machine. The glory and the power of the true religion are in its enlisting the affections of man along with the understanding.
We are imposed upon by the affectation of grace and gentility only till we see the reality; and then we laugh at the counterfeit, and are surprised that we did not see through it before.
English women, even of the highest rank, look likedowdiesin Paris; or exactly as countrywomen do in London. It is arule-of-threeproportion. A French milliner or servant maid laughs (not without reason) at an English Duchess. The more our fair country women dressà la Française, the more unlucky they seem; and themore foreign graces they give themselves, the more awkward they grow. They want thetournureFrançoise. Oh! how we have ‘melted, thawed, and dissolved into a dew,’ to see a bustling, red-faced, bare-necked English Duchess, or banker’s wife, come into a box at the French theatre, bedizened and bedaubed! My Lady-mayoress or the Right Honourable the Countess Dowager of ——, before she ventures on the wordvulgar, or scorns her untitled and untutored neighbours as beneath her notice, should go to seeles Angloises pour rire!Thatis the looking-glass for upstart wealth and inflated aristocracy.
The advantage of our nobility over the plebeian classes is said to be in the blood and in the breed—the Norman breed, we suppose—the high noses and arched eyebrows date from the Conquest. We plead guilty to the insinuation conveyed in the expression—‘the coronet face’—and bow with some sort of pride to the pride of birth. But this hypothesis is hardly compatible with the evident improvement in the present generation of noblemen and gentlemen by the intermarriages with rich heiresses, or the beautiful Pamelas of an humbler stock.Crossing the breedhas done much good; for the actual race of Bond-street loungers would make a very respectable regiment of grenadiers; and the satire on Beau Didapper, in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, has lost its force.
The tone of society in Paris is very far from John Bullish. They do not ask what a man is worth, or whether his father is owner of a tin-mine or a borough—but what he has to say, whether he is amiable andspirituel. In the case (unless a marriage is on thetapis) no one inquires whether his account at his banker’s is high or low; or whether he has come in his carriage or on foot. An English soldier of fortune, or a great traveller, is listened to with some attention as amarked character; while a booby lord is no more regarded than his own footman in livery. The blank after a man’s name is expected to be filled up with talent or adventures, or he passes for what he really is, a cypher.
Our young Englishmen in Paris do not make much figure in the society of Frenchmen of education and spirit. They stumble at the threshold in point of manners, dress, and conversation. They have not only to learn the language, but tounlearnalmost every thing else.Both words and things are different in France; our raw recruits have to get rid of a host of prejudices, and they do it awkwardly and reluctantly, and if they attempt to make a regular stand, are presently out-voted. The termsgothicandbarbarousare talisman to strike them dumb. There is, moreover, a clumsiness in both their wit and advances to familiarity, that the spitefulbrunetteson the other side of the water do not comprehend, and that subjects them to constant sneers; and every false step adds to their confusion and want of confidence. But their lively antagonists are so flushed with victory and victims to their loquacity and charms, that they are not contented to lecture them on morals, metaphysics, sauces, andvirtù, but proceed to teach them the true pronunciation and idiom of the English tongue. Thus a smart French widow having blundered by saying, ‘I have nevermadea child;’ and perceiving that it excited a smile, maintained, for three whole days, against a large company, that it was better than saying, ‘I neverhada child.’
The Parisiantrip(say what they will) is not grace. It is the motion of a puppet, and may be mimicked, which gracecannot. It may be different from the high, heavy-heeled walk of the Englishwoman. Is it not equally remote from the step (if step it may be called) of an Andalusian girl?
It has been often made a subject of dispute, What is the distinguishing characteristic of man? And the answer may, perhaps, be given thathe is the only animal that dresses. He is the only being who is coxcomb enough not to go out of the world naked as he came into it; that is ashamed of what he really is, and proud of what he is not; and that tries to pass off an artificial disguise as himself. We may safely extend the old maxim, and say that it is the tailor that makes both the gentleman and the man.Fine feathers make fine birds—this lie is the motto of the human mind. Dress a fellow in sheepskin, and he is a clown—dress him in scarlet, and he is a gentleman. It is then the clothes that makes all the difference; and the moral agent is simply the lay-figure to hang them on. Man, in short, is the only creature in the known world, with whom appearances pass for realities, words for things; or that has the wit to find out his own defects, and the impudence and hypocrisy, by merely concealing them, to persuade himself and others that he has them not. Teniers’s monkeys, habited like monks, may be thought a satire on human nature—alas!it is a piece of natural history. The monks are the larger and more solemn species, to be sure. Swift has taken a good bird’s eye view of man’s nature, by abstracting the habitual notions of size, and looking at it ingreator inlittle: would that some one had the boldness and the art to do a similar service, by stripping off the coat from his back, the vizor from his thoughts, or by dressing up some other creature in similar mummery! It is not his body alone that he tampers with, and metamorphoses so successfully; he tricks out his mind and soul in borrowed finery, and in the admired costume of gravity and imposture. If he has a desire to commit a base or cruel action without remorse and with the applause of the spectators, he has only to throw the cloak of religion over it, and invoke Heaven to set its seal on a massacre or a robbery. At one time dirt, at another indecency, at another rapine, at a fourth rancorous malignity, is decked out and accredited in the garb of sanctity. The instant there is a flaw, a ‘damned spot’ to be concealed, it is glossed over with a doubtful name. Again, we dress up our enemies in nicknames, and they march to the stake as assuredly as insan Benitos. The words Heretic or Papist, Jew or Infidel, labelled on those who differ from us, stand us in lieu of sense or decency. If a man be mean, he sets up for economy; if selfish, he pretends to be prudent; if harsh, firm; and so on. What enormities, what follies are not undertaken for the love of glory?—and the worst of all, are said to be for the glory of God! Strange, that a reptile should wish to be thought an angel; or that he should not be content to writhe and grovel in his native earth, without aspiring to the skies! It is from the love of dress and finery. He is the Chimney-sweeper on May-day all the year round: the soot peeps through the rags and tinsel, and all the flowers of sentiment!
The meaning of all which is, that man is the only hypocrite in the creation; or that he is composed of two natures, theidealand thephysical, the one of which he is always trying to keep a secret from the other. He is theCentaur not fabulous.
A person who is full of secrets is a knave or a fool, or both.
The error of Mandeville, as well as of those opposed to him, is in concluding that man is a simple and not a compound being. The schoolmen and divines endeavour to prove that the gross and materialpart of his nature is a foreign admixture, distinct from and unworthy of the man himself. The misanthropes and sceptics, on the other hand, maintain thefalsity of all human virtues, and that all that is not sensual and selfish is a mere theatrical deception. But in order that man should be a wholly and incorrigibly selfish being, he should be shut up like an oyster in its shell, without any possible conception of what passes beyond the wall of his senses; and thefeelersof his mind should not extend their ramifications under any circumstance or in any manner, to the thoughts and sentiments of others. Shakspeare has expressed the matter better than the pedants on either side, who wish unreasonably to exalt or degrade human nature.—‘The web of our lives is as of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not, and our vices would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.’
People cry out against the preposterous absurdity of such representations as the German inventions of theDevil’s Elixirand theBottle Imp. Is it then a fiction that we see? Or is it not rather a palpable reality that takes place every day and hour? Who is there that is not haunted by some heated phantom of his brain, some wizard spell, that clings to him in spite of his will, and hurries him on to absurdity or ruin? There is no machinery or phantasmagoria of a melo-drame, more extravagant than the workings of the passions. Mr. Farley may do his worst with scaly forms, with flames, and dragon’s wings: but after all, the true demon is within us. How many, whose senses are shocked at the outward spectacle, and who turn away startled or disgusted might say, pointing to their bosoms, ‘The moral is here!’
Mr. L—— asked Sir Thomas —— who had been intimate with the Prince, if it was true that he was so fine a gentleman as he was generally represented? Sir Thomas —— made answer, that it was certainly true that the Prince was a very fine gentleman indeed: ‘but,’ added he, ‘if I am to speak my mind, the finest gentleman I ever saw, was Sadi Baba, the ambassador to Constantinople, from the Usbek Tartars.’
‘Man is in no haste to be venerable.’ At present, it seems as if there were no occasion to become so. People die as usual; but it is not the fashion to grow old. Formerly, men subsided and settled down into a respectable old age at forty, as they did into a bob-wig,and a brown coat and waistcoat of a certain cut. The father of a family no longer pretended to pass for a gay young fellow, after he had children grown up; and women dwindled, by regular and willing gradations, into mothers and grandmothers, transferring their charms and pretensions to a blooming posterity; but these things are never thought of now-a-days. A matron of sixty flaunts it in ‘La Belle Assemblée’s dresses for May:’ and certainly M. Stultz never inquires into the grand climacteric of his customers. Dress levels all ages as well as all ranks.