TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR
The Atlas][September 27 and October 4, 1829.
I. There is no flattery so gross or extravagant but it will be acceptable. It leaves some sting of pleasure behind, since its very excess seems to imply that there must be some foundation for it. Tell the ugliest person in the world that he is the handsomest, the greatest fool that he is a wit, and he will believe and thank you. There is a possibility at least that you may be sincere. Even the sycophant’sironical laugh turns to a smile of self-complacency at our own fancied perfections.
II. There is no abuse so foul or unprovoked but some part of it willstick. Ill words break the charm of good deeds. Call a man names all the year round, and at the end of the year (for no other reason) his best friends will not care to mention his name. It is no pleasant reflection that a man has been accused, however unjustly, of a folly or a crime. We involuntarily associate words with things; and the imagination retains an unfavourable impression long after the understanding is disabused. Or if we repel the charge and resent the injustice, this is making a toil of a pleasure, and our cowardice and indolence soon take part with the malice of mankind. The assailants are always the more courageous party. It degrades a man even to be subjected to undeserved reproach, for it seems as if without some flaw or blemish no one would dare to attack him; so that the viler and more unprincipled the abuse, the lower it sinks, not him who offers, but him who is the object of it, in general estimation. If we see a man covered with mud we avoid him without expressing the cause. The favourites of the public, like Cæsar’s wife, must not be suspected; and it is enough if we admire and bear witness to the superiority of another under the most favourable circumstances—to do this in spite of secret calumny and vulgar clamour is a pitch of generosity which the world has not arrived at.
III. A certainmannermakes more conquests than either wit or beauty. Suppose a woman to have a graceful ease of deportment, and a mild self-possession pervading every look and tone of voice; this exercises an immediate influence on a person of an opposite and irritable temperament—it calms and enchants him at once. It is like soft music entering the room—from that time he can only breathe in her presence, and to be torn from her is to be torn from himself for ever.
IV. Fame and popularity aredisparatequantities, having no common measure. A poet or painter now living may be as great as any poet or painter that ever did live; and if he be so, he will be so thought of by future ages, but he cannot by the present. Persons of overweening vanity and short-sighted ambition, who would forestall the meed of fame, show themselves unworthy of it, for they reduce it to a level with the reputation they have already earned. They should surely leave something to look forward to. It is weighing dross against gold—comparing a meteor with the polar star. Lord Byron’s narrowness or presumption in this respect was remarkable.What! did he not hope to live two hundred years himself, that he should say it was merely a fashion to admire Milton and Shakspeare as it was the fashion to admire him? Those who compare Sir Walter Scott with Shakspeare do not know what they are doing. They may blunt the feeling with which we regard Shakspeare as an old and tried friend, though they cannot transfer it to Sir Walter Scott, who is, after all, but a new and dazzling acquaintance. To argue that there is no difference in the circumstances is not to put the author of ‘Waverley’ into actual possession of the reversion of fame, but to say that he shall never enjoy it, since it is no better than a chimera and an illusion. It is striking at the foundation of true and lasting renown, and overturning with impatient and thoughtless hands the proud pre-eminence, the golden seats and blest abodes which the predestined heirs of immortality wait for beyond the tomb. The living are merely candidates (more or less successful) for popular applause, thedeadare a religion, or they are nothing.
V. Persons who tell an artist that he is equal to Claude, or a writer that he is as great as Bacon, do not add to the satisfaction of their hearers, but pay themselves a left-handed compliment, by supposing that their judgment is equivalent to the suffrage of posterity.
VI. A French artist advised young beginners against being too fond of a variety of colours, which might do very well on a smaller scale, but when they came to paint a large picture they would find they had soon lavished all their resources. So superficial writers may deck out their barren round ofcommon-placesin the finest phrases imaginable; but those who are accustomed towork outa subject by dint of study, must not use up their whole stock of eloquence at once, they must bring forward their most appropriate expressions as they approach nearer to the truth, and raise their style with their thoughts. A good general keeps his reserve, theéliteof his troops, to charge at the critical moment.
VII. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’ It is singular that we are so often loth to begin what gives us great satisfaction in the progress, and what, after we have once begun it, we are as loth to leave off. The reason is, that the imagination is not excited till the first step is taken or the first blow is struck. Before we begin a certain task, we have little notion how we shall set about it, or how we shall proceed: it is like attempting something of which we have no knowledge, and which we feel we are incapable of doing. It is no wonder, therefore, that a strong repugnance accompanies this seeming inaptitude: it is having tomake bricks without straw. Butafter the first effort is over, and we have turned our minds to the subject, one thing suggests another, our ideas pour in faster than we can use them, and we launch into the stream which bears us on with ease and pleasure to ourselves. The painter who did not like to mix his colours or begin on a new canvas in the morning, sees the light close in upon him with unwilling eyes; and the essayist, though gravelled for a thought, or at a loss for words at the outset of his labours, winds up with alacrity and spirit.
VIII. Conversation is like a game at tennis, or any other game of skill. A person shines in one company who makes no figure in another—just as a tolerably good cricketer, who might be an acquisition to a country club, would have his wicket struck down at the first bowl atLord’s-ground. The same person is frequently dull at one time and brilliant at another: sometimes those who are most silent at the beginning of an entertainment are most loquacious at the end. There is arun in the luckboth in cards and conversation. Some people are good speakers but bad hearers: these are put out, unless they have all the talk to themselves. Some are best in atête-à-tête; others in a mixed company. Some persons talk well on a set subject, who can hardly answer a common question, still less pay a compliment or make arepartee. Conversation may be divided into thepersonalor thedidactic: the one resembles the style of a lecture, the other that of a comedy. There are as many who fail in conversation from aiming at too high a standard of excellence, and wishing only to utter oracles orjeux-d’esprit, as there are who expose themselves from having no standard at all, and saying whatever comes into their heads. Pedants and gossips compose the largest class. Numbers talk on without paying any attention to the effect they produce upon their audience: some few take no part in the discourse but by assenting to everything that is said, and these are not the worst companions in the world. An outcry is sometimes raised against dull people, as if it were any fault of theirs. The most brilliant performers very soon grow dull, and we like people to begin as they end. There is then no disappointment nor false excitement. The great ingredient in society is good-will. He who is pleased with what he himself has to say, and listens in his turn with patience and good-humour, is wise and witty enough for us. We do not covet those parties where one wit dares not go, because another is expected. How delectable must the encounter of such pretenders be to one another! How edifying to the bye-standers!
IX. It was well said by Mr. Coleridge, that people never improve by contradiction, but byagreeing to differ. If you discuss a questionamicably you may gain a clear insight into it; if you dispute about it you only throw dust in one another’s eyes. In all angry or violent controversy, your object is not to learn wisdom, but to prove your adversary a fool; and in this respect, it must be admitted, both parties usually succeed.
X. Envy is the ruling passion of mankind. The explanation is obvious. As we are of infinitely more importance in our own eyes than all the world beside, the chief bent and study of the mind is directed to impress others with this self-evident but disputed distinction, and to arm ourselves with the exclusive signatures and credentials of our superiority, and to hate and stifle all that stands in the way of, or obscures, our absurd pretensions. Each individual looks upon himself in the light of a dethroned monarch, and the rest of the world as his rebellious subjects and runaway slaves, who withhold the homage that is his natural due, and burst the chains of opinion he would impose upon them: the madman in Hogarth (sooth to say), with his crown of straw and wooden sceptre, is but a type andcommon-placeemblem of every-day life.
XI. It has been made a subject of regret that in forty or fifty years’ time (if we go on as we have done) no one will read Fielding. What a falling off! Already, if you thoughtlessly lendJoseph Andrewsto a respectable family, you find it returned upon your hands as an improper book. To be sure, people read ‘Don Juan’; butthatis in verse. The worst is, that this senseless fastidiousness is more owing to an affectation of gentility than to a disgust at vice. It is not the scenes that are described at an alehouse, but thealehouseat which they take place that gives the mortal stab to taste and refinement. One comfort is, that the manners and characters which are objected to aslowin Fielding have in a great measure disappeared or taken another shape; and this at least is one good effect of all excellent satire—that it destroys ‘the very food whereon it lives.’ The generality of readers, who only seek for the representation of existing models, must therefore, after a time, seek in vain for this obvious verisimilitude in the most powerful and popular works of the kind; and will be either disgusted or at a loss to understand the application. People of sense and imagination, who look beyond the surface or the passing folly of the day, will always readTom Jones.
XII. There is a set of critics and philosophers who have never read anything but what has appeared within the last ten years, and to whom every mode of expression or turn of thought extending beyond that period has a very odd effect. They cannot comprehend howpeople used such out-of-the-way phrases in the time of Shakspeare; the style of Addison would not do now—even Junius, they think, would make but a shabbythread-barefigure in the columns of a modern newspaper—all the riches that the language has acquired in the course of time, all the idiomatic resources arising from study or accident, are utterly discarded—sink under-ground: and all that is admired by the weak or sought after by the vain, is a thin surface of idle affectation and glossy innovations. Even spelling and pronunciation have undergone such changes within a short time, that Pope and Swift require a littlemodernizingto accommodate them to ‘ears polite;’ and that abluestocking bellewould be puzzled in reciting Dryden’s sounding verse with its occasional barbarous, old-fashioned accenting, if it were the custom to read Dryden aloud in those serene, morning circles. There is no class more liable to set up this narrow superficial standard, than people of fashion, in their horror of what is vulgar and ignorance of what really is so; they have a jargon of their own, but scout whatever does not fall in with it as Gothic andoutré; the English phrases handed down from the last age they think come east of Temple-bar, and they perform a sedulous quarantine against them. TheTimes, having found it so written in some outlandishdepêcheof the Marquis of Wellesley’s, chose as a mark of thehaute literature, to spelldispatchwith ane, and for a long time he was held for a novice or an affected and absolute writer who spelt it otherwise. TheGlobe, with its characteristic good sense and sturdiness of spirit has restored the old English spelling in defiance of scandal. Some persons who were growing jealous that the author ofWaverleyhad eclipsed their favourite luminaries may make themselves easy; he himself is on the wane with those whose opinions ebb and flow with the ‘inconstant moon’ of fashion, and has given way (if Mr. Colburn’s advertisements speak true, ‘than which what’s truer?’) to a set of titled nonentities. Nothing solid is to go down, or that is likely to last three months; instead of the standing dishes of old English literature we are to take up with thenicknacksand whipt syllabubs of modern taste; are to be occupied with a stream of titlepages, extracts, and specimens, like passing figures in acamera obscura, and are to be puzzled in a mob of new books as in the mob of new faces in what was formerly the narrow part of the Strand.
XIII. Never pity people because they are ill-used. They only wait the opportunity to use others just as ill. Hate the oppression and prevent the evil if you can; but do not fancy there is any virtue in being oppressed, or any love lost between the parties. The unfortunate are not a jot more amiable than their neighbours, though theygive themselves out so, and our pity takes part with those who have disarmed our envy.
XIV. The human mind seems to improve, because it is continually in progress. But as it moves forward to new acquisitions and trophies, it loses its hold on those which formerly were its chief boast and employment. Men are better chemists than they were, but worse divines; they read the newspapers, it is true, but neglect the classics. Everything has its turn. Neither is error extirpated so much as it takes a new form and puts on a more artful disguise. Folly shifts its ground, but finds its level: absurdity is never left without a subterfuge. The dupes of dreams and omens in former times, are now the converts to graver and more solemn pieces of quackery. The race of the sanguine, the visionary, and the credulous, of those who believe what they wish, or what excites their wonder, in preference to what they know, or can have rationally explained, will never wear out; and they only transfer their innate love of the marvellous from old and exploded chimeras to fashionable theories, and theterra incognitaof modern science.
XV. It is a curious speculation to take a modernbelle, or some accomplished female acquaintance, and conceive what her great-great-grandmother was like, some centuries ago. Who was the Mrs. —— of the year 200? We have some standard of grace and elegance among eastern nations 3000 years ago, because we read accounts of them in history; but we have no more notion of, or faith in, our own ancestors than if we had never had any. Wecut the connexionwith the Druids and the Heptarchy; and cannot fancy ourselves (by any transformation) inmates of caves and woods, or feeders on acorns and sloes. We seemengraftedon that low stem—a bright, airy, and insolent excrescence.
XVI. There is this advantage in painting, if there were no other, that it is the truest and most self-evident kind of history. It shows that there were people long ago, and alsowhatthey were, not in a book darkly, but face to face. It is not the half-formed clay, the old-fashioned dress, as we might conceive; but the living lineaments, the breathing expression. You look at a picture by Vandyke, and there see as in an enchanted mirror, an English woman of quality two hundred years ago, sitting in unconscious state with her child playing at her feet, and with all the dove-like innocence of look, the grace and refinement that it is possible for virtue and breeding to bestow. It is enough to make us proud of our nature and our countrywomen; and dissipates at oncethe idle,upstartprejudice that all before our time was sordid and scarce civilised. If our progress does not appear so great as our presumption has suggested, what does it signify? With such models kept in view, our chief object ought to be not to degenerate; and though the future prospect is less gaudy and imposing, the retrospect opens a larger and brightervistaof excellence.
XVII. I am by education and conviction inclined to republicanism and puritanism. In America they have both; but I confess I feel a little staggered in the practical efficacy and saving grace offirst principles, when I ask myself, ‘Can they throughout the United States, from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head like one of Titian’s Venetian nobles, nurtured in all the pride of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery?’ Of all the branches of political economy, the human face is perhaps the best criterion ofvalue.