The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12) (part 2 of 3)

The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12) (part 2 of 3)

One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it. This is no doubt in part or chiefly because the prospect of success irritates the subsequent disappointment. But people have been known to pine and fall sick from holding the next number to the twenty thousand pound prize in the lottery. Now this could only arise from their being so near winning in fancy, from there seeming to be so thin a partition between them and success. When they were within one of the right number, why could they not have taken the next—it was so easy: this haunts their minds and will not let them rest, notwithstanding the absurdity of the reasoning. It is that the will here has a slight imaginary obstacle to surmount to attain its end: it should appear it had only an exceedingly trifling effort to make for this purpose, that it was absolutely in its power (had it known) to seize the envied prize, and it is continually harassing itself by making the obvious transition from one number to the other, when it is too late. That is to say, the will acts in proportion to its fancied power, to its superiority over immediate obstacles. Now in little or indifferent matters there seems no reason why it should not have its own way, and therefore a disappointment vexes it the more. It grows angry according to the insignificance of the occasion, and frets itself to death about an object, merely because from its very futility there can be supposed to be no real difficulty in the way of its attainment, nor any thing more required for this purpose than a determination of the will. The being baulked of this throws the mind off its balance, or puts it into what is called a passion; and as nothing but an act of voluntary power still seems necessary to get rid of every impediment, we indulge our violence more and more, and heighten our impatience by degrees into a sort of frenzy. The object is the same as it was, but we are no longer as we were. The blood is heated, the muscles are strained. The feelings are wound up to a pitch of agony with the vain strife. The temper is tried to the utmost it will bear. The more contemptible the object or the obstructions in the way to it, the more are we provoked at being hindered by them. It looks like witchcraft. We fancy there is a spell upon us, so that we are hampered by straws and entangled in cobwebs. We believe that there is a fatality about our affairs. It is evidently done on purpose to plague us. A demon is at our elbow to torment and defeat us in every thing, even in the smallest things. We see him sitting and mocking us, and we rave and gnash our teeth at him in return. It is particularly hard that we cannot succeed in any one point, however trifling, that we set our hearts on. We are the sport of imbecility and mischance. We make another desperate effort, and fly out into all the extravagance of impotent rage once more. Our anger runs away with our reason, because, as there is little to give it birth, there is nothing to check it or recal us to our senses in the prospect of consequences. We take up and rend in pieces the mere toys of humour, as the gusts of wind take up and whirl about chaff and stubble. Passion plays the tyrant, in a grand tragic-comic style, over the Lilliputian difficulties and petty disappointments it has to encounter, gives way to all the fretfulness of grief and all the turbulence of resentment, makes a fuss about nothing because there is nothing to make a fuss about—when an impending calamity, an irretrievable loss, would instantly bring it to its recollection, and tame it in its preposterous career. A man may be in a great passion and give himself strange airs at so simple a thing as a game at ball, for instance; may rage like a wild beast, and be ready to dash his head against the wall about nothing, or about that which he will laugh at the next minute, and think no more of ten minutes after, at the same time that a good smart blow from the ball, the effects of which he might feel as a serious inconvenience for a month, would calm him directly—

‘Anon as patient as the female dove, His silence will sit drooping.’

The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can. We can afford to dally and play tricks with the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol, or the insolence of King Cambyses’ vein. To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations. I have before now been disappointed of a hundred pound job and lost half a crown at rackets on the same day, and been more mortified at the latter than the former. That which is lasting we share with the future, we defer the consideration of till to-morrow: that which belongs to the moment we drink up in all its bitterness, before the spirit evaporates. We probe minute mischiefs to the quick; we lacerate, tear, and mangle our bosoms with misfortune’s finest, brittlest point, and wreak our vengeance on ourselves and it for good and all. Small pains are more manageable, more within our reach; we can fret and worry ourselves about them, can turn them into any shape, can twist and torture them how we please:—a grain of sand in the eye, a thorn in the flesh only irritates the part, and leaves us strength enough to quarrel and get out of all patience with it:—a heavy blow stuns and takes away all power of sense as well as of resistance. The great and mighty reverses of fortune, like the revolutions of nature, may be said to carry their own weight and reason along with them: they seem unavoidable and remediless, and we submit to them without murmuring as to a fatal necessity. The magnitude of the events, in which we may happen to be concerned, fills the mind, and carries it out of itself, as it were, into the page of history. Our thoughts are expanded with the scene on which we have to act, and lend us strength to disregard our own personal share in it. Some men are indifferent to the stroke of fate, as before and after earthquakes there is a calm in the air. From the commanding situation whence they have been accustomed to view things, they look down at themselves as only a part of the whole, and can abstract their minds from the pressure of misfortune, by the aid of its very violence. They are projected, in the explosion of events, into a different sphere, far from their former thoughts, purposes, and passions. The greatness of the change anticipates the slow effects of time and reflection:—they at once contemplate themselves from an immense distance, and look up with speculative wonder at the height on which they stood. Had the downfall been less complete, it would have been more galling and borne with less resignation, because there might still be a chance of remedying it by farther efforts and farther endurance—but past cure, past hope. It is chiefly this cause (together with something of constitutional character) which has enabled the greatest man in modern history to bear his reverses of fortune with gay magnanimity, and to submit to the loss of the empire of the world with as little discomposure as if he had been playing a game at chess.[67] This does not prove by our theory that he did not use to fly into violent passions with Talleyrand for plaguing him with bad news when things went wrong. He was mad at uncertain forebodings of disaster, but resigned to its consummation. A man may dislike impertinence, yet have no quarrel with necessity!

There is another consideration that may take off our wonder at the firmness with which the principals in great vicissitudes of fortune bear their fate, which is, that they are in the secret of its operations, and know that what to others appears chance-medley was unavoidable. The clearness of their perception of all the circumstances converts the uneasiness of doubt into certainty: they have not the qualms of conscience which their admirers have, who cannot tell how much of the event is to be attributed to the leaders, and how much to unforeseen accidents: they are aware either that the result was not to be helped, or that they did all they could to prevent it.

—‘Si Pergama dextra Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.’

It is the mist and obscurity through which we view objects that makes us fancy they might have been, or might still be otherwise. The precise knowledge of antecedents and consequents makes men practical as well as philosophical Necessarians.—It is the want of this knowledge which is the principle and soul of gambling, and of all games of chance or partial skill. The supposition is, that the issue is uncertain, and that there is no positive means of ascertaining it. It is dependent on the turn of a die, on the tossing up of a halfpenny: to be fair, it must be a lottery; there is no knowing but by the event; and it is this which keeps the interest alive, and works up the passion little short of madness. There is all the agitation of suspense, all the alternation of hope and fear, of good and bad success, all the eagerness of desire, without the possibility of reducing this to calculation, that is, of subjecting the increased action of the will to a known rule, or restraining the excesses of passion within the bounds of reason. We see no cause beforehand why the run of the cards should not be in our favour:—we will hear of none afterwards why it should not have been so. As in the absence of all data to judge by, we wantonly fill up the blank with the most extravagant expectations, so, when all is over, we obstinately recur to the chance we had previously. There is nothing to tame us down to the event, nothing to reconcile us to our hard luck, for so we think it. We see no reason why we failed (and there was none, any more than why we should succeed)—we think that, reason apart, our will is the next best thing; we still try to have it our own way, and fret, torment, and harrow ourselves up with vain imaginations to effect impossibilities.[68] We play the game over again: we wonder how it was possible for us to fail. We turn our brain with straining at contradictions, and striving to make things what they are not, or in other words, to subject the course of nature to our fantastical wishes. ‘If it had been so—if we had done such and such a thing’—we try it in a thousand different ways, and are just as far off the mark as ever. We appealed to chance in the first instance, and yet, when it has decided against us, we will not give in, and sit down contented with our loss, but refuse to submit to any thing but reason, which has nothing to do with the matter. In drawing two straws, for example, to see which is the longest, there was no apparent necessity we should fix upon the wrong one, it was so easy to have fixed upon the other, nay, at one time we were going to do it—if we had—the mind thus runs back to what was so possible and feasible at one time, while the thing was pending, and would fain give a bias to causes so slender and insignificant, as the skittle-player bends his body to give a bias to the bowl he has already delivered from his hand, not considering that what is once determined, be the causes ever so trivial or evanescent, is in the individual instance unalterable. Indeed, to be a great philosopher, in the practical and most important sense of the term, little more seems necessary than to be convinced of the truth of the maxim, which the wise man repeated to the daughter of King Cophetua, That if a thing is, it is, and there is an end of it!

We often make life unhappy in wishing things to have turned out otherwise than they did, merely because that is possible to the imagination which is impossible in fact. I remember when L—’s farce was damned (for damned it was, that’s certain) I used to dream every night for a month after (and then I vowed I would plague myself no more about it) that it was revived at one of the Minor or provincial theatres with great success, that such and such retrenchments and alterations had been made in it, and that it was thought it might do at the other House. I had heard indeed (this was told in confidence to L—) that Gentleman Lewis was present on the night of its performance, and said, that if he had had it, he would have made it, by a few judicious curtailments, ‘the most popular little thing that had been brought out for some time.’ How often did I conjure up in recollection the full diapason of applause at the end of the Prologue, and hear my ingenious friend in the first row of the pit roar with laughter at his own wit! Then I dwelt with forced complacency on some part in which it had been doing well: then we would consider (in concert) whether the long, tedious opera of the Travellers, which preceded it, had not tired people beforehand, so that they had not spirits left for the quaint and sparkling ‘wit skirmishes’ of the dialogue, and we all agreed it might have gone down after a Tragedy, except L— himself, who swore he had no hopes of it from the beginning, and that he knew the name of the hero when it came to be discovered could not be got over.—Mr. H—, thou wert damned! Bright shone the morning on the play-bills that announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons asking one another if they would go to see Mr. H—, and answering that they would certainly: but before night the gaiety, not of the author, but of his friends and the town was eclipsed, for thou wert damned! Hadst thou been anonymous, thou haply mightst have lived. But thou didst come to an untimely end for thy tricks, and for want of a better name to pass them off!

In this manner we go back to the critical minutes on which the turn of our fate, or that of any one else in whom we are interested, depended; try them over again with new knowledge and sharpened sensibility; and thus think to alter what is irrevocable, and ease for a moment the pang of lasting regret. So in a game at rackets[69] (to compare small things with great) I think if at such a point I had followed up my success, if I had not been too secure or over-anxious in another part, if I had played for such an opening, in short, if I had done any thing but what I did and what has proved unfortunate in the result, the chances were all in my favour. But it is merely because I do not know what would have happened in the other case, that I interpret it so readily to my own advantage. I have sometimes lain awake a whole night, trying to serve out the last ball of an interesting game in a particular corner of the court, which I had missed from a nervous feeling. Rackets (I might observe for the sake of the uninformed reader) is, like any other athletic game, very much a thing of skill and practice: but it is also a thing of opinion, ‘subject to all the skyey influences.’ If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory. If you hesitate in striking at the ball, it is ten to one but you miss it. If you are apprehensive of committing some particular error (such as striking the ball foul) you will be nearly sure to do it. While thinking of that which you are so earnestly bent upon avoiding, your hand mechanically follows the strongest idea, and obeys the imagination rather than the intention of the striker. A run of luck is a forerunner of success, and courage is as much wanted as skill. No one is however free from nervous sensations at times. A good player may not be able to strike a single stroke if another comes into the court that he has a particular dread of; and it frequently so happens that a player cannot beat another even, though he can give half the game to an equal player, because he has some associations of jealousy or personal pique against the first which he has not towards the last. Sed hæc hactenus. Chess is a game I do not understand, and have not comprehension enough to play at. But I believe, though it is so much less a thing of chance than science or skill, eager players pass whole nights in marching and countermarching their men and check-mating a successful adversary, supposing that at a certain point of the game, they had determined upon making a particular move instead of the one which they actually did make. I have heard a story of two persons playing at back-gammon, one of whom was so enraged at losing his match at a particular point of the game, that he took the board and threw it out of the window. It fell upon the head of one of the passengers in the street, who came up to demand instant satisfaction for the affront and injury he had sustained. The losing gamester only asked him if he understood back-gammon, and finding that he did, said, that if upon seeing the state of the game he did not excuse the extravagance of his conduct, he would give him any other satisfaction he wished for. The tables were accordingly brought, and the situation of the two contending parties being explained, the gentleman put up his sword, and went away perfectly satisfied.—To return from this, which to some will seem a digression, and to others will serve as a confirmation of the doctrine I am insisting on.

It is not then the value of the object, but the time and pains bestowed upon it, that determines the sense and degree of our loss. Many men set their minds only on trifles, and have not a compass of soul to take an interest in any thing truly great and important beyond forms and minutiæ. Such persons are really men of little minds, or may be complimented with the title of great children,

‘Pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw.’

Larger objects elude their grasp, while they fasten eagerly on the light and insignificant. They fidget themselves and others to death with incessant anxiety about nothing. A part of their dress that is awry keeps them in a fever of restlessness and impatience; they sit picking their teeth, or paring their nails, or stirring the fire, or brushing a speck of dirt off their coats, while the house or the world tumbling about their ears would not rouse them from their morbid insensibility. They cannot sit still on their chairs for their lives, though, if there were any thing for them to do, they would become immoveable. Their nerves are as irritable as their imaginations are callous and inert. They are addicted to an inveterate habit of littleness and perversity, which rejects every other motive to action or object of contemplation but the daily, teazing, contemptible, familiar, favourite sources of uneasiness and dissatisfaction. When they are of a sanguine instead of a morbid temperament, they become quidnuncs and virtuosos—collectors of caterpillars and odd volumes, makers of fishing-rods and curious in watch-chains. Will Wimble dabbled in this way, to his immortal honour. But many others have been less successful. There are those who build their fame on epigrams or epitaphs, and others who devote their lives to writing the Lord’s Prayer in little. Some poets compose and sing their own verses. Which character would they have us think most highly of—the poet or the musician? The Great is One. Some there are who feel more pride in sealing a letter with a head of Homer than ever that old blind bard did in reciting his Iliad. These raise a huge opinion of themselves out of nothing, as there are those who shrink from their own merits into the shade of unconquerable humility. I know one person at least, who would rather be the author of an unsuccessful farce than of a successful tragedy. Repeated mortification has produced an inverted ambition in his mind, and made failure the bitter test of desert. He cannot lift his drooping head to gaze on the gaudy crown of popularity placed within his reach, but casts a pensive, rivetted look downwards to the modest flowers which the multitude trample under their feet. If he had a piece likely to succeed, coming out under all advantages, he would damn it by some ill-timed, wilful jest, and lose the favour of the public, to preserve the sense of his personal identity. ‘Misfortune,’ Shakespear says, ‘brings a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows:’ and it makes our thoughts traitors to ourselves.—It is a maxim with many—‘Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.’ Those only put it in practice successfully who think more of the pence than of the pounds. To such, a large sum is less than a small one. Great speculations, great returns are to them extravagant or imaginary: a few hundreds a year are something snug and comfortable. Persons who have been used to a petty, huckstering way of life cannot enlarge their apprehensions to a notion of any thing better. Instead of launching out into greater expense and liberality with the tide of fortune, they draw back with a fear of consequences, and think to succeed on a broader scale by dint of meanness and parsimony. My uncle Toby frequently caught Trim standing up behind his chair, when he had told him to be seated. What the corporal did out of respect, others would do out of servility. The menial character does not wear out in three or four generations. You cannot keep some people out of the kitchen, merely because their grandfathers or grandmothers came out of it. A poor man and his wife walking along in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, he said to her peevishly, ‘What is the use of walking along these fine streets and squares? Let us turn down some alley!’ He felt he should be more at home there. L— said of an old acquaintance of his, that when he was young, he wanted to be a tailor, but had not spirit! This is the misery of unequal matches. The woman cannot easily forget, or think that others forget, her origin; and with perhaps superior sense and beauty, keeps painfully in the back-ground. It is worse when she braves this conscious feeling, and displays all the insolence of the upstart and affected fine-lady. But shouldst thou ever, my Infelice, grace my home with thy loved presence, as thou hast cheered my hopes with thy smile, thou wilt conquer all hearts with thy prevailing gentleness, and I will shew the world what Shakespear’s women were!—Some gallants set their hearts on princesses; others descend in imagination to women of quality; others are mad after opera-singers. For my part, I am shy even of actresses, and should not think of leaving my card with Madame V—. I am for none of these bonnes fortunes; but for a list of humble beauties, servant-maids and shepherd-girls, with their red elbows, hard hands, black stockings and mob-caps, I could furnish out a gallery equal to Cowley’s, and paint them half as well. Oh! might I but attempt a description of some of them in poetic prose, Don Juan would forget his Julia, and Mr. Davison might both print and publish this volume. I agree so far with Horace, and differ with Montaigne. I admire the Clementinas and Clarissas at a distance: the Pamelas and Fannys of Richardson and Fielding make my blood tingle. I have written love-letters to such in my time, d’un pathétique à faire fendre les rochers, and with about as much effect as if they had been addressed to stone. The simpletons only laughed, and said, that ‘those were not the sort of things to gain the affections.’ I wish I had kept copies in my own justification. What is worse, I have an utter aversion to blue-stockings. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means. If I know that she has read any thing I have written, I cut her acquaintance immediately. This sort of literary intercourse with me passes for nothing. Her critical and scientific acquirements are carrying coals to Newcastle. I do not want to be told that I have published such or such a work. I knew all this before. It makes no addition to my sense of power. I do not wish the affair to be brought about in that way. I would have her read my soul: she should understand the language of the heart: she should know what I am, as if she were another self! She should love me for myself alone. I like myself without any reason:—I would have her do so too. This is not very reasonable. I abstract from my temptations to admire all the circumstances of dress, birth, breeding, fortune; and I would not willingly put forward my own pretensions, whatever they may be. The image of some fair creature is engraven on my inmost soul; it is on that I build my claim to her regard, and expect her to see into my heart, as I see her form always before me. Wherever she treads, pale primroses, like her face, vernal hyacinths, like her brow, spring up beneath her feet, and music hangs on every bough: but all is cold, barren, and desolate without her. Thus I feel and thus I think. But have I ever told her so? No. Or if I did, would she understand it? No. I ‘hunt the wind, I worship a statue, cry aloud to the desert.’ To see beauty is not to be beautiful, to pine in love is not to be loved again.—I always was inclined to raise and magnify the power of Love. I thought that his sweet power should only be exerted to join together the loveliest forms and fondest hearts; that none but those in whom his Godhead shone outwardly, and was inly felt, should ever partake of his triumphs; and I stood and gazed at a distance, as unworthy to mingle in so bright a throng, and did not (even for a moment) wish to tarnish the glory of so fair a vision by being myself admitted into it. I say this was my notion once, but God knows it was one of the errors of my youth. For coming nearer to look, I saw the maimed, the blind, and the halt enter in, the crooked and the dwarf, the ugly, the old and impotent, the man of pleasure and the man of the world, the dapper and the pert, the vain and shallow boaster, the fool and the pedant, the ignorant and brutal, and all that is farthest removed from earth’s fairest-born, and the pride of human life. Seeing all these enter the courts of Love, and thinking that I also might venture in under favour of the crowd, but finding myself rejected, I fancied (I might be wrong) that it was not so much because I was below, as above the common standard. I did feel, but I was ashamed to feel, mortified at my repulse, when I saw the meanest of mankind, the very scum and refuse, all creeping things and every obscene creature, enter in before me. I seemed a species by myself. I took a pride even in my disgrace: and concluded I had elsewhere my inheritance! The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing the Essay on the Principles of Human Action—a work that no woman ever read, or would ever comprehend the meaning of. But if I do not build my claim to regard on the pretensions I have, how can I build it on those I am totally without? Or why do I complain and expect to gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Thought has in me cancelled pleasure; and this dark forehead, bent upon truth, is the rock on which all affection has split. And thus I waste my life in one long sigh; nor ever (till too late) beheld a gentle face turned gently upon mine!... But no! not too late, if that face, pure, modest, downcast, tender, with angel sweetness, not only gladdens the prospect of the future, but sheds its radiance on the past, smiling in tears. A purple light hovers round my head. The air of love is in the room. As I look at my long-neglected copy of the Death of Clorinda, golden gleams play upon the canvas, as they used when I painted it. The flowers of Hope and Joy springing up in my mind, recal the time when they first bloomed there. The years that are fled knock at the door and enter. I am in the Louvre once more. The sun of Austerlitz has not set. It still shines here—in my heart; and he, the son of glory, is not dead, nor ever shall, to me. I am as when my life began. The rainbow is in the sky again. I see the skirts of the departed years. All that I have thought and felt has not been in vain. I am not utterly worthless, unregarded; nor shall I die and wither of pure scorn. Now could I sit on the tomb of Liberty, and write a Hymn to Love. Oh! if I am deceived, let me be deceived still. Let me live in the Elysium of those soft looks; poison me with kisses, kill me with smiles; but still mock me with thy love![70]

Poets chuse mistresses who have the fewest charms, that they may make something out of nothing. They succeed best in fiction, and they apply this rule to love. They make a Goddess of any dowdy. As Don Quixote said, in answer to the matter of fact remonstrances of Sancho, that Dulcinea del Toboso answered the purpose of signalising his valour just as well as the ‘fairest princess under sky,’ so any of the fair sex will serve them to write about just as well as another. They take some awkward thing and dress her up in fine words, as children dress up a wooden doll in fine clothes. Perhaps, a fine head of hair, a taper waist, or some other circumstance strikes them, and they make the rest out according to their fancies. They have a wonderful knack of supplying deficiencies in the subjects of their idolatry out of the store-house of their imaginations. They presently translate their favourites to the skies, where they figure with Berenice’s locks and Ariadne’s crown. This predilection for the unprepossessing and insignificant, I take to arise not merely from a desire in poets to have some subject to exercise their inventive talents upon, but from their jealousy of any pretensions (even those of beauty in the other sex) that might interfere with the continual incense offered to their personal vanity.

Cardinal Mazarine never thought any thing of Cardinal de Retz, after he told him that he had written for the last thirty years of his life with the same pen. Some Italian poet going to present a copy of verses to the Pope, and finding, as he was looking them over in the coach as he went, a mistake of a single letter in the printing, broke his heart of vexation and chagrin. A still more remarkable case of literary disappointment occurs in the history of a countryman of his, which I cannot refrain from giving here, as I find it related. ‘Anthony Codrus Urceus, a most learned and unfortunate Italian, born near Modena, 1446, was a striking instance,’ says his biographer, ‘of the miseries men bring upon themselves by setting their affections unreasonably on trifles. This learned man lived at Forli, and had an apartment in the palace. His room was so very dark, that he was forced to use a candle in the day-time; and one day, going abroad without putting it out, his library was set on fire, and some papers which he had prepared for the press were burned. The instant he was informed of this ill news, he was affected even to madness. He ran furiously to the palace, and stopping at the door of his apartment, he cried aloud, “Christ Jesus! what mighty crime have I committed! whom of your followers have I ever injured, that you thus rage with inexpiable hatred against me?” Then turning himself to an image of the Virgin Mary near at hand, “Virgin (says he) hear what I have to say, for I speak in earnest, and with a composed spirit: if I shall happen to address you in my dying moments, I humbly intreat you not to hear me, nor receive me into Heaven, for I am determined to spend all eternity in Hell!” Those who heard these blasphemous expressions endeavoured to comfort him; but all to no purpose: for, the society of mankind being no longer supportable to him, he left the city, and retired, like a savage, to the deep solitude of a wood. Some say that he was murdered there by ruffians: others, that he died at Bologna in 1500, after much contrition and penitence.’

Perhaps the censure passed at the outset of the anecdote on this unfortunate person is unfounded and severe, when it is said that he brought his miseries on himself ‘by having set his affections unreasonably on trifles.’ To others it might appear so: but to himself the labour of a whole life was hardly a trifle. His passion was not a causeless one, though carried to such frantic excess. The story of Sir Isaac Newton presents a strong contrast to the last-mentioned one, who on going into his study and finding that his dog Tray had thrown down a candle on the table, and burnt some papers of great value, contented himself with exclaiming, ‘Ah! Tray, you don’t know the mischief you have done!’ Many persons would not forgive the overturning of a cup of chocolate so soon.

I remember hearing an instance some years ago of a man of character and property, who through unexpected losses had been condemned to a long and heart-breaking imprisonment, which he bore with exemplary fortitude. At the end of four years, by the interest and exertions of friends, he obtained his discharge with every prospect of beginning the world afresh, and had made his arrangements for leaving his irksome abode, and meeting his wife and family at a distance of two hundred miles by a certain day. Owing to the miscarriage of a letter, some signature necessary to the completion of the business did not arrive in time, and on account of the informality which had thus arisen, he could not set out home till the return of the post, which was four days longer. His spirit could not brook the delay. He had wound himself up to the last pitch of expectation; he had, as it were, calculated his patience to hold out to a certain point, and then to throw down his load for ever, and he could not find resolution to resume it for a few hours beyond this. He put an end to the intolerable conflict of hope and disappointment in a fit of excruciating anguish. Woes that we have time to foresee and leisure to contemplate break their force by being spread over a larger surface, and borne at intervals; but those that come upon us suddenly, for however short a time, seem to insult us by their unnecessary and uncalled-for intrusion; and the very prospect of relief, when held out and then withdrawn from us, to however small a distance, only frets impatience into agony by tantalising our hopes and wishes; and to rend asunder the thin partition that separates us from our favourite object, we are ready to burst even the fetters of life itself!

I am not aware that any one has demonstrated how it is that a stronger capacity is required for the conduct of great affairs than of small ones. The organs of the mind, like the pupil of the eye, may be contracted or dilated to view a broader or a narrower surface, and yet find sufficient variety to occupy its attention in each. The material universe is infinitely divisible, and so is the texture of human affairs. We take things in the gross or in the detail, according to the occasion. I think I could as soon get up the budget of Ways and Means for the current year, as be sure of making both ends meet, and paying my rent at quarter-day in a paltry huckster’s shop. Great objects move on by their own weight and impulse: great power turns aside petty obstacles; and he, who wields it, is often but the puppet of circumstances, like the fly on the wheel that said, ‘What a dust we raise!’ It is easier to ruin a kingdom and aggrandise one’s own pride and prejudices than to set up a green-grocer’s stall. An idiot or a madman may do this at any time, whose word is law, and whose nod is fate. Nay, he whose look is obedience, and who understands the silent wishes of the great, may easily trample on the necks and tread out the liberties of a mighty nation, deriding their strength, and hating it the more from a consciousness of his own meanness. Power is not wisdom, it is true; but it equally ensures its own objects. It does not exact, but dispenses with talent. When a man creates this power, or new-moulds the state by sage counsels and bold enterprises, it is a different thing from overturning it with the levers that are put into his baby hands. In general, however, it may be argued that great transactions and complicated concerns ask more genius to conduct them than smaller ones, for this reason, viz. that the mind must be able either to embrace a greater variety of details in a more extensive range of objects, or must have a greater faculty of generalising, or a greater depth of insight into ruling principles, and so come at true results in that way. Buonaparte knew everything, even to the names of our cadets in the East-India service; but he failed in this, that he did not calculate the resistance which barbarism makes to refinement. He thought that the Russians could not burn Moscow, because the Parisians could not burn Paris. The French think every thing must be French. The Cossacks, alas! do not conform to etiquette: the rudeness of the seasons knows no rules of politeness!—Some artists think it a test of genius to paint a large picture, and I grant the truth of this position, if the large picture contains more than a small one. It is not the size of the canvas, but the quantity of truth and nature put into it, that settles the point. It is a mistake, common enough on this subject, to suppose that a miniature is more finished than an oil-picture. The miniature is inferior to the oil-picture only because it is less finished, because it cannot follow nature into so many individual and exact particulars. The proof of which is, that the copy of a good portrait will always make a highly finished miniature (see for example Mr. Bone’s enamels), whereas the copy of a good miniature, if enlarged to the size of life, will make but a very sorry portrait. Several of our best artists, who are fond of painting large figures, invert this reasoning. They make the whole figure gigantic, not that they may have room for nature, but for the motion of their brush (as if they were painting the side of a house), regarding the extent of canvas they have to cover as an excuse for their slovenly and hasty manner of getting over it; and thus, in fact, leave their pictures nothing at last but overgrown miniatures, but huge caricatures. It is not necessary in any case (either in a larger or a smaller compass) to go into details, so as to lose sight of the effect, and decompound the face into porous and transparent molecules, in the manner of Denner, who painted what he saw through a magnifying glass. The painter’s eye need not be a microscope, but I contend that it should be a looking-glass, bright, clear, lucid. The little in art begins with insignificant parts, with what does not tell in connection with other parts. The true artist will paint not material points, but moral quantities. In a word, wherever there is feeling or expression in a muscle or a vein, there is grandeur and refinement too.—I will conclude these remarks with an account of the manner in which the ancient sculptors combined great and little things in such matters. ‘That the name of Phidias,’ says Pliny, ‘is illustrious among all the nations that have heard of the fame of the Olympian Jupiter, no one doubts; but in order that those may know that he is deservedly praised who have not even seen his works, we shall offer a few arguments, and those of his genius only: nor to this purpose shall we insist on the beauty of the Olympian Jupiter, nor on the magnitude of the Minerva at Athens, though it is twenty-six cubits in height (about thirty-five feet), and is made of ivory and gold: but we shall refer to the shield, on which the battle of the Amazons is carved on the outer side: on the inside of the same is the fight of the Gods and Giants; and on the sandals, that between the Centaurs and Lapithæ; so well did every part of that work display the powers of the art. Again, the sculptures on the pedestal he called the birth of Pandora: there are to be seen in number thirty Gods, the figure of Victory being particularly admirable: the learned also admire the figures of the serpent and the brazen sphinx, writhing under the spear. These things are mentioned, in passing, of an artist never enough to be commended, that it may be seen that he shewed the same magnificence even in small things.’—Pliny’s Natural History, Book 36.

ESSAY XXIV ON FAMILIAR STYLE

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. The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson’s style is, that there is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it. He uses none but ‘tall, opaque words,’ taken from the ‘first row of the rubric:’—words with the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely English terminations. If a fine style depended on this sort of arbitrary pretension, it would be fair to judge of an author’s elegance by the measurement of his words, and the substitution of foreign circumlocutions (with no precise associations) for the mother-tongue.[71] How simple it is to be dignified without ease, to be pompous without meaning! Surely, it is but a mechanical rule for avoiding what is low to be always pedantic and affected. It is clear you cannot use a vulgar English word, if you never use a common English word at all. A fine tact is shewn in adhering to those which are perfectly common, and yet never falling into any expressions which are debased by disgusting circumstances, or which owe their signification and point to technical or professional allusions. A truly natural or familiar style can never be quaint or vulgar, for this reason, that it is of universal force and applicability, and that quaintness and vulgarity arise out of the immediate connection of certain words with coarse and disagreeable, or with confined ideas. The last form what we understand by cant or slang phrases.—To give an example of what is not very clear in the general statement. I should say that the phrase To cut with a knife, or To cut a piece of wood, is perfectly free from vulgarity, because it is perfectly common: but to cut an acquaintance is not quite unexceptionable, because it is not perfectly common or intelligible, and has hardly yet escaped out of the limits of slang phraseology. I should hardly therefore use the word in this sense without putting it in italics as a license of expression, to be received cum grano salis. All provincial or bye-phrases come under the same mark of reprobation—all such as the writer transfers to the page from his fire-side or a particular coterie, or that he invents for his own sole use and convenience. 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.

The proper force of words lies not in the words themselves, but in their application. A word may be a fine-sounding word, of an unusual length, and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the connection in which it is introduced, may be quite pointless and irrelevant. It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the expression to the idea that clenches a writer’s meaning:—as it is not the size or glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers, and more so than the mere shewy, unsubstantial ornaments. I hate any thing that occupies more space that it is worth. I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without any thing in them. A person who does not deliberately dispose of all his thoughts alike in cumbrous draperies and flimsy disguises, may strike out twenty varieties of familiar every-day language, each coming somewhat nearer to the feeling he wants to convey, and at last not hit upon that particular and only one, which may be said to be identical with the exact impression in his mind. This would seem to shew that Mr. Cobbett is hardly right in saying that the first word that occurs is always the best. It may be a very good one; and yet a better may present itself on reflection or from time to time. It should be suggested naturally, however, and spontaneously, from a fresh and lively conception of the subject. We seldom succeed by trying at improvement, or by merely substituting one word for another that we are not satisfied with, as we cannot recollect the name of a place or person by merely plaguing ourselves about it. We wander farther from the point by persisting in a wrong scent; but it starts up accidentally in the memory when we least expected it, by touching some link in the chain of previous association.

There are those who hoard up and make a cautious display of nothing but rich and rare phraseology;—ancient medals, obscure coins, and Spanish pieces of eight. They are very curious to inspect; but I myself would neither offer nor take them in the course of exchange. A sprinkling of archaisms is not amiss; but a tissue of obsolete expressions is more fit for keep than wear. I do not say I would not use any phrase that had been brought into fashion before the middle or the end of the last century; but I should be shy of using any that had not been employed by any approved author during the whole of that time. Words, like clothes, get old-fashioned, or mean and ridiculous, when they have been for some time laid aside. Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors, that the idea of imitation is almost done away. There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and feeling, an intuition, deep and lively, of his subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress. The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so marked and individual, as to require their point and pungency to be neutralised by the affectation of a singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way. The old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Brown, are a kind of mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical modern, reconciling us to his peculiarities. I do not however know how far this is the case or not, till he condescends to write like one of us. I must confess that what I like best of his papers under the signature of Elia (still I do not presume, amidst such excellence, to decide what is most excellent) is the account of Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist, which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of expression—

‘A well of native English undefiled.’

To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these Essays of the ingenious and highly gifted author have the same sort of charm and relish, that Erasmus’s Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin have to the classical scholar. Certainly, I do not know any borrowed pencil that has more power or felicity of execution than the one of which I have here been speaking.

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. Look through the dictionary, and cull out a florilegium, rival the tulippomania. Rouge high enough, and never mind the natural complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire the look of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable, who regard only appearances, will be delighted with the imposition. Keep to your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all will be well. Swell out an unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of style. A thought, a distinction is the rock on which all this brittle cargo of verbiage splits at once. Such writers have merely verbal imaginations, that retain nothing but words. Or their puny thoughts have dragon-wings, all green and gold. They soar far above the vulgar failing of the Sermo humi obrepens—their most ordinary speech is never short of an hyperbole, splendid, imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a cento of sounding common-places. If some of us, whose ‘ambition is more lowly,’ pry a little too narrowly into nooks and corners to pick up a number of ‘unconsidered trifles,’ they never once direct their eyes or lift their hands to seize on any but the most gorgeous, tarnished, thread-bare patch-work set of phrases, the left-off finery of poetic extravagance, transmitted down through successive generations of barren pretenders. If they criticise actors and actresses, a huddled phantasmagoria of feathers, spangles, floods of light, and oceans of sound float before their morbid sense, which they paint in the style of Ancient Pistol. Not a glimpse can you get of the merits or defects of the performers: they are hidden in a profusion of barbarous epithets and wilful rhodomontade. Our hypercritics are not thinking of these little fantoccini beings—

‘That strut and fret their hour upon the stage’—

but of tall phantoms of words, abstractions, genera and species, sweeping clauses, periods that unite the Poles, forced alliterations, astounding antitheses—

‘And on their pens Fustian sits plumed.’

If they describe kings and queens, it is an Eastern pageant. The Coronation at either House is nothing to it. We get at four repeated images—a curtain, a throne, a sceptre, and a foot-stool. These are with them the wardrobe of a lofty imagination; and they turn their servile strains to servile uses. Do we read a description of pictures? It is not a reflection of tones and hues which ‘nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on,’ but piles of precious stones, rubies, pearls, emeralds, Golconda’s mines, and all the blazonry of art. Such persons are in fact besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the glittering, but empty and sterile phantoms of things. Personifications, capital letters, seas of sunbeams, visions of glory, shining inscriptions, the figures of a transparency, Britannia with her shield, or Hope leaning on an anchor, make up their stock in trade. They may be considered as hieroglyphical writers. Images stand out in their minds isolated and important merely in themselves, without any ground-work of feeling—there is no context in their imaginations. Words affect them in the same way, by the mere sound, that is, by their possible, not by their actual application to the subject in hand. They are fascinated by first appearances, and have no sense of consequences. Nothing more is meant by them than meets the ear: they understand or feel nothing more than meets their eye. The web and texture of the universe, and of the heart of man, is a mystery to them: they have no faculty that strikes a chord in unison with it. They cannot get beyond the daubings of fancy, the varnish of sentiment. Objects are not linked to feelings, words to things, but images revolve in splendid mockery, words represent themselves in their strange rhapsodies. The categories of such a mind are pride and ignorance—pride in outside show, to which they sacrifice every thing, and ignorance of the true worth and hidden structure both of words and things. With a sovereign contempt for what is familiar and natural, they are the slaves of vulgar affectation—of a routine of high-flown phrases. Scorning to imitate realities, they are unable to invent any thing, to strike out one original idea. They are not copyists of nature, it is true: but they are the poorest of all plagiarists, the plagiarists of words. All is far-fetched, dear-bought, artificial, oriental in subject and allusion: all is mechanical, conventional, vapid, formal, pedantic in style and execution. They startle and confound the understanding of the reader, by the remoteness and obscurity of their illustrations: they soothe the ear by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression, and bathos in sentiment. They tantalise the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart. Their Temple of Fame is like a shadowy structure raised by Dulness to Vanity, or like Cowper’s description of the Empress of Russia’s palace of ice, as ‘worthless as in shew ’twas glittering’—

‘It smiled, and it was cold!’

ESSAY XXV ON EFFEMINACY OF CHARACTER

Effeminacy of character arises from a prevalence of the sensibility over the will: or it consists in a want of fortitude to bear pain or to undergo fatigue, however urgent the occasion. We meet with instances of people who cannot lift up a little finger to save themselves from ruin, nor give up the smallest indulgence for the sake of any other person. They cannot put themselves out of their way on any account. No one makes a greater outcry when the day of reckoning comes, or affects greater compassion for the mischiefs they have occasioned; but till the time comes, they feel nothing, they care for nothing. They live in the present moment, are the creatures of the present impulse (whatever it may be)—and beyond that, the universe is nothing to them. The slightest toy countervails the empire of the world; they will not forego the smallest inclination they feel, for any object that can be proposed to them, or any reasons that can be urged for it. You might as well ask of the gossamer not to wanton in the idle summer air, or of the moth not to play with the flame that scorches it, as ask of these persons to put off any enjoyment for a single instant, or to gird themselves up to any enterprise of pith or moment. They have been so used to a studied succession of agreeable sensations, that the shortest pause is a privation which they can by no means endure—it is like tearing them from their very existence—they have been so inured to ease and indolence, that the most trifling effort is like one of the tasks of Hercules, a thing of impossibility, at which they shudder. They lie on beds of roses, and spread their gauze wings to the sun and summer gale, and cannot bear to put their tender feet to the ground, much less to encounter the thorns and briers of the world. Life for them

—‘rolls o’er Elysian flowers its amber stream’—

and they have no fancy for fishing in troubled waters. The ordinary state of existence they regard as something importunate and vain, and out of nature. What must they think of its trials and sharp vicissitudes? Instead of voluntarily embracing pain, or labour, or danger, or death, every sensation must be wound up to the highest pitch of voluptuous refinement, every motion must be grace and elegance; they live in a luxurious, endless dream, or

‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain!’

Siren sounds must float around them; smiling forms must every where meet their sight; they must tread a soft measure on painted carpets or smooth-shaven lawns; books, arts, jests, laughter, occupy every thought and hour—what have they to do with the drudgery, the struggles, the poverty, the disease or anguish, which are the common lot of humanity! These things are intolerable to them, even in imagination. They disturb the enchantment in which they are lapt. They cause a wrinkle in the clear and polished surface of their existence. They exclaim with impatience and in agony, ‘Oh, leave me to my repose!’ How ‘they shall discourse the freezing hours away, when wind and rain beat dark December down,’ or ‘bide the pelting of the pitiless storm,’ gives them no concern, it never once enters their heads. They close the shutters, draw the curtains, and enjoy or shut out the whistling of the approaching tempest. ‘They take no thought for the morrow,’ not they. They do not anticipate evils. Let them come when they will come, they will not run to meet them. Nay more, they will not move one step to prevent them, nor let any one else. The mention of such things is shocking; the very supposition is a nuisance that must not be tolerated. The idea of the trouble, the precautions, the negotiations necessary to obviate disagreeable consequences oppresses them to death, is an exertion too great for their enervated imaginations. They are not like Master Barnardine in Measure for Measure, who would not ‘get up to be hanged’—they would not get up to avoid being hanged. They are completely wrapped up in themselves; but then all their self-love is concentrated in the present minute. They have worked up their effeminate and fastidious appetite of enjoyment to such a pitch, that the whole of their existence, every moment of it, must be made up of these exquisite indulgences; or they will fling it all away, with indifference and scorn. They stake their entire welfare on the gratification of the passing instant. Their senses, their vanity, their thoughtless gaiety have been pampered till they ache at the smallest suspension of their perpetual dose of excitement, and they will purchase the hollow happiness of the next five minutes, by a mortgage on the independence and comfort of years. They must have their will in every thing, or they grow sullen and peevish like spoiled children. Whatever they set their eyes on, or make up their minds to, they must have that instant. They may pay for it hereafter. But that is no matter. They snatch a joy beyond the reach of fate, and consider the present time sacred, inviolable, unaccountable to that hard, churlish, niggard, inexorable task-master, the future. Now or never is their motto. They are madly devoted to the play-thing, the ruling passion of the moment. What is to happen to them a week hence is as if it were to happen to them a thousand years hence. They put off the consideration for another day, and their heedless unconcern laughs at it as a fable. Their life is ‘a cell of ignorance, travelling a-bed;’ their existence is ephemeral; their thoughts are insect-winged, their identity expires with the whim, the folly, the passion of the hour.

Nothing but a miracle can rouse such people from their lethargy. It is not to be expected, nor is it even possible in the natural course of things. Pope’s striking exclamation,

‘Oh! blindness to the future kindly given, That each may fill the circuit mark’d by Heaven!’

hardly applies here; namely, to evils that stare us in the face, and that might be averted with the least prudence or resolution. But nothing can be done. How should it? A slight evil, a distant danger will not move them; and a more imminent one only makes them turn away from it in greater precipitation and alarm. The more desperate their affairs grow, the more averse they are to look into them; and the greater the effort required to retrieve them, the more incapable they are of it. At first, they will not do any thing; and afterwards, it is too late. The very motives that imperiously urge them to self-reflection and amendment, combine with their natural disposition to prevent it. This amounts pretty nearly to a mathematical demonstration. Ease, vanity, pleasure, are the ruling passions in such cases. How will you conquer these, or wean their infatuated votaries from them? By the dread of hardship, disgrace, pain? They turn from them and you who point them out as the alternative, with sickly disgust; and instead of a stronger effort of courage or self-denial to avert the crisis, hasten it by a wilful determination to pamper the disease in every way, and arm themselves, not with fortitude to bear or to repel the consequences, but with judicial blindness to their approach. Will you rouse the indolent procrastinator to an irksome but necessary effort, by shewing him how much he has to do? He will only draw back the more for all your intreaties and representations. If of a sanguine turn, he will make a slight attempt at a new plan of life, be satisfied with the first appearance of reform, and relapse into indolence again. If timid and undecided, the hopelessness of the undertaking will put him out of heart with it, and he will stand still in despair. Will you save a vain man from ruin, by pointing out the obloquy and ridicule that await him in his present career? He smiles at your forebodings as fantastical; or the more they are realised around him, the more he is impelled to keep out the galling conviction, and the more fondly he clings to flattery and death. He will not make a bold and resolute attempt to recover his reputation, because that would imply that it was capable of being soiled or injured; or he no sooner meditates some desultory project, than he takes credit to himself for the execution, and is delighted to wear his unearned laurels while the thing is barely talked of. The chance of success relieves the uneasiness of his apprehensions; so that he makes use of the interval only to flatter his favourite infirmity again. Would you wean a man from sensual excesses by the inevitable consequences to which they lead?—What holds more antipathy to pleasure than pain? The mind given up to self-indulgence, revolts at suffering; and throws it from it as an unaccountable anomaly, as a piece of injustice when it comes. Much less will it acknowledge any affinity with or subjection to it as a mere threat. If the prediction does not immediately come true, we laugh at the prophet of ill: if it is verified, we hate our adviser proportionably, hug our vices the closer, and hold them dearer and more precious, the more they cost us. We resent wholesome counsel as an impertinence, and consider those who warn us of impending mischief, as if they had brought it on our heads. We cry out with the poetical enthusiast—

‘And let us nurse the fond deceit; And what if we must die in sorrow? Who would not cherish dreams so sweet, Though grief and pain should come to-morrow?’

But oh thou! who didst lend me speech when I was dumb, to whom I owe it that I have not crept on my belly all the days of my life like the serpent, but sometimes lift my forked crest or tread the empyrean, wake thou out of thy mid-day slumbers! Shake off the heavy honey-dew of thy soul, no longer lulled with that Circean cup, drinking thy own thoughts with thy own ears, but start up in thy promised likeness, and shake the pillared rottenness of the world! Leave not thy sounding words in air, write them in marble, and teach the coming age heroic truths! Up, and wake the echoes of Time! Rich in deepest lore, die not the bed-rid churl of knowledge, leaving the survivors unblest! Set, set as thou didst rise in pomp and gladness! Dart like the sun-flower one broad, golden flash of light; and ere thou ascendest thy native sky, shew us the steps by which thou didst scale the Heaven of philosophy, with Truth and Fancy for thy equal guides, that we may catch thy mantle, rainbow-dipped, and still read thy words dear to Memory, dearer to Fame!

There is another branch of this character, which is the trifling or dilatory character. Such persons are always creating difficulties, and unable or unwilling to remove them. They cannot brush aside a cobweb, and are stopped by an insect’s wing. Their character is imbecility, rather than effeminacy. The want of energy and resolution in the persons last described, arises from the habitual and inveterate predominance of other feelings and motives; in these it is a mere want of energy and resolution, that is, an inherent natural defect of vigour of nerve and voluntary power. There is a specific levity about such persons, so that you cannot propel them to any object, or give them a decided momentum in any direction or pursuit. They turn back, as it were, on the occasion that should project them forward with manly force and vehemence. They shrink from intrepidity of purpose, and are alarmed at the idea of attaining their end too soon. They will not act with steadiness or spirit, either for themselves or you. If you chalk out a line of conduct for them, or commission them to execute a certain task, they are sure to conjure up some insignificant objection or fanciful impediment in the way, and are withheld from striking an effectual blow by mere feebleness of character. They may be officious, good-natured, friendly, generous in disposition, but they are of no use to any one. They will put themselves to twice the trouble you desire, not to carry your point, but to defeat it; and in obviating needless objections, neglect the main business. If they do what you want, it is neither at the time nor in the manner that you wish. This timidity amounts to treachery; for by always anticipating some misfortune or disgrace, they realise their unmeaning apprehensions. The little bears sway in their minds over the great: a small inconvenience outweighs a solid and indispensable advantage; and their strongest bias is uniformly derived from the weakest motive. They hesitate about the best way of beginning a thing till the opportunity for action is lost, and are less anxious about its being done than the precise manner of doing it. They will destroy a passage sooner than let an objectionable word pass; and are much less concerned about the truth or the beauty of an image, than about the reception it will meet with from the critics. They alter what they write, not because it is, but because it may possibly be wrong; and in their tremulous solicitude to avoid imaginary blunders, run into real ones. What is curious enough is, that with all this caution and delicacy, they are continually liable to extraordinary oversights. They are in fact so full of all sorts of idle apprehensions, that they do not know how to distinguish real from imaginary grounds of apprehension; and they often give some unaccountable offence either from assuming a sudden boldness half in sport, or while they are secretly pluming themselves on their dexterity in avoiding every thing exceptionable; and the same distraction of motive and short-sightedness which gets them into scrapes, hinders them from seeing their way out of them. Such persons (often of ingenious and susceptible minds) are constantly at cross-purposes with themselves and others; will neither do things nor let others do them; and whether they succeed or fail, never feel confident or at their ease. They spoil the freshness and originality of their own thoughts by asking contradictory advice; and in befriending others while they are about it and about it, you might have done the thing yourself a dozen times over.

There is nothing more to be esteemed than a manly firmness and decision of character. I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what is to be done in given circumstances and does it. He does not beat about the bush for difficulties or excuses, but goes the shortest and most effectual way to work to attain his own ends, or to accomplish a useful object. If he can serve you, he will do so; if he cannot, he will say so without keeping you in needless suspense, or laying you under pretended obligations. The applying to him in any laudable undertaking is not like stirring ‘a dish of skimmed milk.’ There is stuff in him, and it is of the right practicable sort. He is not all his life at hawk and buzzard whether he shall be a Whig or a Tory, a friend or a foe, a knave or a fool; but thinks that life is short, and that there is no time to play fantastic tricks in it, to tamper with principles, or trifle with individual feelings. If he gives you a character, he does not add a damning clause to it: he does not pick holes in you lest others should, or anticipate objections lest he should be thought to be blinded by a childish partiality. His object is to serve you; and not to play the game into your enemies’ hands.

‘A generous friendship no cold medium knows, Burns with one love, with one resentment glows.’

I should be sorry for any one to say what he did not think of me; but I should not be pleased to see him slink out of his acknowledged opinion, lest it should not be confirmed by malice or stupidity. He who is well acquainted and well inclined to you, ought to give the tone, not to receive it from others, and may set it to what key he pleases in certain cases.

There are those of whom it has been said, that to them an obligation is a reason for not doing any thing, and there are others who are invariably led to do the reverse of what they should. The last are perverse, the first impracticable people. Opposed to the effeminate in disposition and manners are the coarse and brutal. As those were all softness and smoothness, these affect or are naturally attracted to whatever is vulgar and violent, harsh and repulsive in tone, in modes of speech, in forms of address, in gesture and behaviour. Thus there are some who ape the lisping of the fine lady, the drawling of the fine gentleman, and others who all their lives delight in and catch the uncouth dialect, the manners and expressions of clowns and hoydens. The last are governed by an instinct of the disagreeable, by an appetite and headlong rage for violating decorum, and hurting other people’s feelings, their own being excited and enlivened by the shock. They deal in home truths, unpleasant reflections, and unwelcome matters of fact; as the others are all compliment and complaisance, insincerity and insipidity.

We may observe an effeminacy of style, in some degree corresponding to effeminacy of character. Writers of this stamp are great interliners of what they indite, alterers of indifferent phrases, and the plague of printers’ devils. By an effeminate style I would be understood to mean one that is all florid, all fine; that cloys by its sweetness, and tires by its sameness. Such are what Dryden calls ‘calm, peaceable writers.’ They only aim to please, and never offend by truth or disturb by singularity. Every thought must be beautiful per se, every expression equally fine. They do not delight in vulgarisms, but in common places, and dress out unmeaning forms in all the colours of the rainbow. They do not go out of their way to think—that would startle the indolence of the reader: they cannot express a trite thought in common words—that would be a sacrifice of their own vanity. They are not sparing of tinsel, for it costs nothing. Their works should be printed, as they generally are, on hot-pressed paper, with vignette margins. The Della Cruscan school comes under this description, but is now nearly exploded. Lord Byron is a pampered and aristocratic writer, but he is not effeminate, or we should not have his works with only the printer’s name to them! I cannot help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats’s poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. His Endymion is a very delightful description of the illusions of a youthful imagination, given up to airy dreams—we have flowers, clouds, rainbows, moonlight, all sweet sounds and smells, and Oreads and Dryads flitting by—but there is nothing tangible in it, nothing marked or palpable—we have none of the hardy spirit or rigid forms of antiquity. He painted his own thoughts and character; and did not transport himself into the fabulous and heroic ages. There is a want of action, of character, and so far, of imagination, but there is exquisite fancy. All is soft and fleshy, without bone or muscle. We see in him the youth, without the manhood of poetry. His genius breathed ‘vernal delight and joy.’—‘Like Maia’s son he stood and shook his plumes,’ with fragrance filled. His mind was redolent of spring. He had not the fierceness of summer, nor the richness of autumn, and winter he seemed not to have known, till he felt the icy hand of death!

ESSAY XXVI WHY DISTANT OBJECTS PLEASE

Distant objects please, because, in the first place, they imply an idea of space and magnitude, and because, not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy. In looking at the misty mountain-tops that bound the horison, the mind is as it were conscious of all the conceivable objects and interests that lie between; we imagine all sorts of adventures in the interim; strain our hopes and wishes to reach the air-drawn circle, or to ‘descry new lands, rivers, and mountains,’ stretching far beyond it: our feelings carried out of themselves lose their grossness and their husk, are rarefied, expanded, melt into softness and brighten into beauty, turning to ethereal mould, sky-tinctured. We drink the air before us, and borrow a more refined existence from objects that hover on the brink of nothing. Where the landscape fades from the dull sight, we fill the thin, viewless space with shapes of unknown good, and tinge the hazy prospect with hopes and wishes and more charming fears.

‘But thou, oh Hope! with eyes so fair, What was thy delighted measure? Still it whisper’d promised pleasure, And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail!’

Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines, and are moulded by its touch. When I was a boy, I lived within sight of a range of lofty hills, whose blue tops blending with the setting sun had often tempted my longing eyes and wandering feet. At last I put my project in execution, and on a nearer approach, instead of glimmering air woven into fantastic shapes, found them huge lumpish heaps of discoloured earth. I learnt from this (in part) to leave ‘Yarrow unvisited,’ and not idly to disturb a dream of good!

Distance of time has much the same effect as distance of place. It is not surprising that fancy colours the prospect of the future as it thinks good, when it even effaces the forms of memory. Time takes out the sting of pain; our sorrows after a certain period have been so often steeped in a medium of thought and passion, that they ‘unmould their essence;’ and all that remains of our original impressions is what we would wish them to have been. Not only the untried steep ascent before us, but the rude, unsightly masses of our past experience presently resume their power of deception over the eye: the golden cloud soon rests upon their heads, and the purple light of fancy clothes their barren sides! Thus we pass on, while both ends of our existence touch upon Heaven!—There is (so to speak) ‘a mighty stream of tendency’ to good in the human mind, upon which all objects float and are imperceptibly borne along: and though in the voyage of life we meet with strong rebuffs, with rocks and quicksands, yet there is ‘a tide in the affairs of men,’ a heaving and a restless aspiration of the soul, by means of which, ‘with sails and tackle torn,’ the wreck and scattered fragments of our entire being drift into the port and haven of our desires! In all that relates to the affections, we put the will for the deed:—so that the instant the pressure of unwelcome circumstances is removed, the mind recoils from their hold, recovers its elasticity, and re-unites itself to that image of good, which is but a reflection and configuration of its own nature. Seen in the distance, in the long perspective of waning years, the meanest incidents, enlarged and enriched by countless recollections, become interesting; the most painful, broken and softened by time, soothe. How any object, that unexpectedly brings back to us old scenes and associations, startles the mind! What a yearning it creates within us; what a longing to leap the intermediate space! How fondly we cling to, and try to revive the impression of all that we then were!

‘Such tricks hath strong imagination!’

In truth, we impose upon ourselves, and know not what we wish. It is a cunning artifice, a quaint delusion, by which, in pretending to be what we were at a particular moment of time, we would fain be all that we have since been, and have our lives to come over again. It is not the little, glimmering, almost annihilated speck in the distance, that rivets our attention and ‘hangs upon the beatings of our hearts:’ it is the interval that separates us from it, and of which it is the trembling boundary, that excites all this coil and mighty pudder in the breast. Into that great gap in our being ‘come thronging soft desires’ and infinite regrets. It is the contrast, the change from what we then were, that arms the half-extinguished recollection with its giant-strength, and lifts the fabric of the affections from its shadowy base. In contemplating its utmost verge, we overlook the map of our existence, and re-tread, in apprehension, the journey of life. So it is that in early youth we strain our eager sight after the pursuits of manhood; and, as we are sliding off the stage, strive to gather up the toys and flowers that pleased our thoughtless childhood.

When I was quite a boy, my father used to take me to the Montpelier Tea-gardens at Walworth. Do I go there now? No; the place is deserted, and its borders and its beds o’erturned. Is there, then, nothing that can

‘Bring back the hour Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower?’

Oh! yes. I unlock the casket of memory, and draw back the warders of the brain; and there this scene of my infant wanderings still lives unfaded, or with fresher dyes. A new sense comes upon me, as in a dream; a richer perfume, brighter colours start out; my eyes dazzle; my heart heaves with its new load of bliss, and I am a child again. My sensations are all glossy, spruce, voluptuous, and fine: they wear a candied coat, and are in holiday trim. I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes; tall holy-oaks, red and yellow; the broad sun-flowers, caked in gold, with bees buzzing round them; wildernesses of pinks, and hot-glowing pionies; poppies run to seed; the sugared lily, and faint mignionette, all ranged in order, and as thick as they can grow; the box-tree borders; the gravel-walks, the painted alcove, the confectionary, the clotted cream:—I think I see them now with sparkling looks; or have they vanished while I have been writing this description of them? No matter; they will return again when I least think of them. All that I have observed since, of flowers and plants, and grass-plots, and of suburb delights, seems, to me, borrowed from ‘that first garden of my innocence’—to be slips and scions stolen from that bed of memory. In this manner the darlings of our childhood burnish out in the eye of after-years, and derive their sweetest perfume from the first heartfelt sigh of pleasure breathed upon them,

—‘like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!’

If I have pleasure in a flower-garden, I have in a kitchen-garden too, and for the same reason. If I see a row of cabbage-plants or of peas or beans coming up, I immediately think of those which I used so carefully to water of an evening at W—m, when my day’s tasks were done, and of the pain with which I saw them droop and hang down their leaves in the morning’s sun. Again, I never see a child’s kite in the air, but it seems to pull at my heart. It is to me a ‘thing of life.’ I feel the twinge at my elbow, the flutter and palpitation, with which I used to let go the string of my own, as it rose in the air and towered among the clouds. My little cargo of hopes and fears ascended with it; and as it made a part of my own consciousness then, it does so still, and appears ‘like some gay creature of the element,’ my playmate when life was young, and twin-born with my earliest recollections. I could enlarge on this subject of childish amusements, but Mr. Leigh Hunt has treated it so well, in a paper in the Indicator, on the productions of the toy-shops of the metropolis, that if I were to insist more on it, I should only pass for an imitator of that ingenious and agreeable writer, and for an indifferent one into the bargain.

Sounds, smells, and sometimes tastes, are remembered longer than visible objects, and serve, perhaps, better for links in the chain of association. The reason seems to be this: they are in their nature intermittent, and comparatively rare; whereas objects of sight are always before us, and, by their continuous succession, drive one another out. The eye is always open; and between any given impression and its recurrence a second time, fifty thousand other impressions have, in all likelihood, been stamped upon the sense and on the brain. The other senses are not so active or vigilant. They are but seldom called into play. The ear, for example, is oftener courted by silence than noise; and the sounds that break that silence sink deeper and more durably into the mind. I have a more present and lively recollection of certain scents, tastes, and sounds, for this reason, than I have of mere visible images, because they are more original, and less worn by frequent repetition. Where there is nothing interposed between any two impressions, whatever the distance of time that parts them, they naturally seem to touch; and the renewed impression recals the former one in full force, without distraction or competitor. The taste of barberries, which have hung out in the snow during the severity of a North American winter, I have in my mouth still, after an interval of thirty years; for I have met with no other taste, in all that time, at all like it. It remains by itself, almost like the impression of a sixth sense. But the colour is mixed up indiscriminately with the colours of many other berries, nor should I be able to distinguish it among them. The smell of a brick-kiln carries the evidence of its own identity with it: neither is it to me (from peculiar associations) unpleasant. The colour of brick-dust, on the contrary, is more common, and easily confounded with other colours. Raphael did not keep it quite distinct from his flesh-colour. I will not say that we have a more perfect recollection of the human voice than of that complex picture the human face, but I think the sudden hearing of a well-known voice has something in it more affecting and striking than the sudden meeting with the face: perhaps, indeed, this may be because we have a more familiar remembrance of the one than the other, and the voice takes us more by surprise on that account. I am by no means certain (generally speaking) that we have the ideas of the other senses so accurate and well-made out as those of visible form: what I chiefly mean is, that the feelings belonging to the sensations of our other organs, when accidentally recalled, are kept more separate and pure. Musical sounds, probably, owe a good deal of their interest and romantic effect to the principle here spoken of. Were they constant, they would become indifferent, as we may find with respect to disagreeable noises, which we do not hear after a time. I know no situation more pitiable than that of a blind fiddler, who has but one sense left (if we except the sense of snuff-taking[72]) and who has that stunned or deafened by his own villanous noises. Shakespear says,

‘How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night!’

It has been observed, in explanation of this passage, that it is because in the day-time lovers are occupied with one another’s faces, but that at night they can only distinguish the sound of each other’s voices. I know not how this may be: but I have, ere now, heard a voice break so upon the silence,

‘To angels’ ’twas most like,’

and charm the moonlight air with its balmy essence, that the budding leaves trembled to its accents. Would I might have heard it once more whisper peace and hope (as erst when it was mingled with the breath of spring), and with its soft pulsations lift winged fancy to heaven! But it has ceased, or turned where I no more shall hear it!—Hence, also, we see what is the charm of the shepherd’s pastoral reed; and why we hear him, as it were, piping to his flock, even in a picture. Our ears are fancy-stung! I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low sheltered valleys on Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted chapels and built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish-church near, but tall elms and quivering alders hid it from my sight, when, all of a sudden, I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear, accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village-maids and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the heart like the calm beauty of death: fancy caught the sound, and faith mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!

There is a curious and interesting discussion, on the comparative distinctness of our visual and other external impressions, in Mr. Fearn’s Essay on Consciousness, with which I shall try to descend from this rhapsody to the ground of common sense and plain reasoning again. After observing, a little before, that ‘nothing is more untrue than that sensations of vision do necessarily leave more vivid and durable ideas than those of grosser senses,’ he proceeds to give a number of illustrations in support of this position. ‘Notwithstanding,’ he says, ‘the advantages here enumerated in favour of sight, I think there is no doubt that a man will come to forget acquaintance, and many other visible objects, noticed in mature age, before he will in the least forget tastes and smells, of only moderate interest, encountered either in his childhood, or at any time since.

‘In the course of voyaging to various distant regions, it has several times happened that I have eaten once or twice of different things that never came in my way before nor since. Some of these have been pleasant, and some scarce better than insipid; but I have no reason to think I have forgot, or much altered the ideas left by those single impulses of taste; though here the memory of them certainly has not been preserved by repetition. It is clear I must have seen, as well as tasted those things; and I am decided that I remember the tastes with more precision than I do the visual sensations.

‘I remember having once, and only once, eat Kangaroo in New Holland; and having once smelled a baker’s shop, having a peculiar odour, in the city of Bassorah. Now both these gross ideas remain with me quite as vivid as any visual ideas of those places; and this could not be from repetition, but really from interest in the sensation.

‘Twenty-eight years ago, in the island of Jamaica, I partook (perhaps twice) of a certain fruit, of the taste of which I have now a very fresh idea; and I could add other instances of that period.

‘I have had repeated proofs of having lost retention of visual objects, at various distances of time, though they had once been familiar. I have not, during thirty years, forgot the delicate, and in itself most trifling sensation, that the palm of my hand used to convey, when I was a boy, trying the different effects of what boys call light and heavy tops; but I cannot remember within several shades of the brown coat which I left off a week ago. If any man thinks he can do better, let him take an ideal survey of his wardrobe, and then actually refer to it for proof.

‘After retention of such ideas, it certainly would be very difficult to persuade me that feeling, taste, and smell can scarce be said to leave ideas, unless indistinct and obscure ones....

‘Shew a Londoner correct models of twenty London churches, and, at the same time, a model of each, which differs, in several considerable features, from the truth, and I venture to say he shall not tell you, in any instance, which is the correct one, except by mere chance.

‘If he is an architect, he may be much more correct than any ordinary person: and this obviously is, because he has felt an interest in viewing these structures, which an ordinary person does not feel: and here interest is the sole reason of his remembering more correctly than his neighbour.

‘I once heard a person quaintly ask another, How many trees there are in St. Paul’s churchyard? The question itself indicates that many cannot answer it; and this is found to be the case with those who have passed the church an hundred times: whilst the cause is, that every individual in the busy stream which glides past St. Paul’s is engrossed in various other interests.

‘How often does it happen that we enter a well-known apartment, or meet a well-known friend, and receive some vague idea of visible difference, but cannot possibly find out what it is; until at length we come to perceive (or perhaps must be told) that some ornament or furniture is removed, altered, or added in the apartment; or that our friend has cut his hair, taken a wig, or has made any of twenty considerable alterations in his appearance. At other times, we have no perception of alteration whatever, though the like has taken place.

‘It is, however, certain, that sight, apposited with interest, can retain tolerably exact copies of sensations, especially if not too complex; such as of the human countenance and figure. Yet the voice will convince us, when the countenance will not; and he is reckoned an excellent painter, and no ordinary genius, who can make a tolerable likeness from memory. Nay, more, it is a conspicuous proof of the inaccuracy of visual ideas, that it is an effort of consummate art, attained by many years’ practice, to take a strict likeness of the human countenance, even when the object is present; and among those cases, where the wilful cheat of flattery has been avoided, we still find in how very few instances the best painters produce a likeness up to the life, though practice and interest join in the attempt.

‘I imagine an ordinary person would find it very difficult, supposing he had some knowledge of drawing, to afford, from memory, a tolerable sketch of such a familiar object as his curtain, his carpet, or his dressing-gown, if the pattern of either be at all various or irregular; yet he will instantly tell, with precision, either if his snuff or his wine has not the same character it had yesterday, though both these are compounds.

‘Beyond all this I may observe, that a draper, who is in the daily habit of such comparisons, cannot carry in his mind the particular shade of a colour during a second of time; and has no certainty of tolerably matching two simple colours, except by placing the patterns in contact.’—Essay on Consciousness, p. 303

I will conclude the subject of this Essay with observing, that (as it appears to me) a nearer and more familiar acquaintance with persons has a different and more favourable effect than that with places or things. The latter improve (as an almost universal rule) by being removed to a distance: the former, generally at least, gain by being brought nearer and more home to us. Report or imagination seldom raises any individual so high in our estimation as to disappoint us greatly when we are introduced to him: prejudice and malice constantly exaggerate defects beyond the reality. Ignorance alone makes monsters or bugbears: our actual acquaintances are all very common-place people. The thing is, that as a matter of hearsay or conjecture, we make abstractions of particular vices, and irritate ourselves against some particular quality or action of the person we dislike:—whereas, individuals are concrete existences, not arbitrary denominations or nicknames; and have innumerable other qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, besides the damning feature with which we fill up the portrait or caricature, in our previous fancies. We can scarcely hate any one that we know. An acute observer complained, that if there was any one to whom he had a particular spite, and a wish to let him see it, the moment he came to sit down with him, his enmity was disarmed by some unforeseen circumstance. If it was a Quarterly Reviewer, he was in other respects like any other man. Suppose, again, your adversary turns out a very ugly man, or wants an eye, you are balked in that way:—he is not what you expected, the object of your abstract hatred and implacable disgust. He may be a very disagreeable person, but he is no longer the same. If you come into a room where a man is, you find, in general, that he has a nose upon his face. ‘There’s sympathy!’ This alone is a diversion to your unqualified contempt. He is stupid, and says nothing, but he seems to have something in him when he laughs. You had conceived of him as a rank Whig or Tory—yet he talks upon other subjects. You knew that he was a virulent party-writer; but you find that the man himself is a tame sort of animal enough. He does not bite. That’s something. In short, you can make nothing of it. Even opposite vices balance one another. A man may be pert in company, but he is also dull; so that you cannot, though you try, hate him cordially, merely for the wish to be offensive. He is a knave. Granted. You learn, on a nearer acquaintance, what you did not know before—that he is a fool as well; so you forgive him. On the other hand, he may be a profligate public character, and may make no secret of it; but he gives you a hearty shake by the hand, speaks kindly to servants, and supports an aged father and mother. Politics apart, he is a very honest fellow. You are told that a person has carbuncles on his face; but you have ocular proofs that he is sallow, and pale as a ghost. This does not much mend the matter; but it blunts the edge of the ridicule, and turns your indignation against the inventor of the lie; but he is —, the editor of a Scotch magazine; so you are just where you were. I am not very fond of anonymous criticism; I want to know who the author can be: but the moment I learn this, I am satisfied. Even — would do well to come out of his disguise. It is the mask only that we dread and hate: the man may have something human about him! The notions, in short, which we entertain of people at a distance, or from partial representations, or from guess-work, are simple, uncompounded ideas, which answer to nothing in reality: those which we derive from experience are mixed modes, the only true, and, in general, the most favourable ones. Instead of naked deformity, or abstract perfection—

‘Those faultless monsters which the world ne’er saw,’—

‘the web of our lives is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipt them not; and our vices would despair, if they were not encouraged by our virtues.’ This was truly and finely said long ago, by one who knew the strong and weak points of human nature: but it is what sects, and parties, and those philosophers whose pride and boast it is to classify by nicknames, have yet to learn the meaning of!

ESSAY XXVII ON CORPORATE BODIES

‘Corporate bodies have no soul.’

Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace or punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor good-will. The principle of private or natural conscience is extinguished in each individual (we have no moral sense in the breasts of others), and nothing is considered but how the united efforts of the whole (released from idle scruples) may be best directed to the obtaining of political advantages and privileges to be shared as common spoil. Each member reaps the benefit, and lays the blame, if there is any, upon the rest. The esprit de corps becomes the ruling passion of every corporate body, compared with which the motives of delicacy or decorum towards others are looked upon as being both impertinent and improper. If any person sets up a plea of this sort in opposition to the rest, he is over-ruled, he gets ill-blood, and does no good: he is regarded as an interloper, a black sheep in the flock, and is either sent to Coventry, or obliged to acquiesce in the notions and wishes of those he associates and is expected to co-operate with. The refinements of private judgment are referred to and negatived in a committee of the whole body, while the projects and interests of the Corporation meet with a secret but powerful support in the self-love of the different members. Remonstrance—opposition, is fruitless, troublesome, invidious: it answers no one end: and a conformity to the sense of the company is found to be no less necessary to a reputation for good-fellowship than to a quiet life. ‘Self-love and social’ here look like the same; and in consulting the interests of a particular class, which are also your own, there is even a show of public virtue. He who is a captious, impracticable, dissatisfied member of his little club or coterie, is immediately set down as a bad member of the community in general, as no friend to regularity and order, ‘a pestilent fellow,’ and one who is incapable of sympathy, attachment, or cordial co-operation in any department or undertaking. Thus the most refractory novice in such matters becomes weaned from his obligations to the larger society, which only breed him inconvenience without any adequate recompense, and wedded to a nearer and dearer one, where he finds every kind of comfort and consolation. He contracts the vague and unmeaning character of Man into the more emphatic title of Freeman and Alderman. The claims of an undefined humanity sit looser and looser upon him, at the same time that he draws the bands of his new engagements closer and tighter about him. He loses sight, by degrees, of all common sense and feeling in the petty squabbles, intrigues, feuds, and airs, of affected importance to which he has made himself an accessary. He is quite an altered man. ‘Really the society were under considerable obligation to him in that last business;’ that is to say, in some paltry job or under-hand attempt to encroach upon the rights, or dictate to the understandings of the neighbourhood. In the mean time, they eat, drink, and carouse together. They wash down all minor animosities and unavoidable differences of opinion in pint-bumpers; and the complaints of the multitude are lost in the clatter of plates and the roaring of loyal catches at every quarter’s meeting or mayor’s feast. The town-hall reels with an unwieldy sense of self-importance: ‘the very stones prate’ of processions: the common pump creaks in concert with the uncorking of bottles and tapping of beer-barrels: the market-cross looks big with authority. Every thing has an ambiguous, upstart, repulsive air. Circle within circle is formed, an imperium in imperio: and the business is to exclude from the first circle all the notions, opinions, ideas, interests, and pretensions, of the second. Hence there arises not only an antipathy to common sense and decency in those things where there is a real opposition of interest or clashing of prejudice, but it becomes a habit and a favourite amusement in those who are ‘dressed in a little brief authority,’ to thwart, annoy, insult, and harass others on all occasions where the least opportunity or pretext for it occurs. Spite, bickerings, backbiting, insinuations, lies, jealousies, nicknames, are the order of the day, and nobody knows what it’s all about. One would think that the mayor, aldermen, and liverymen, were a higher and more select species of animals than their townsmen; though there is no difference whatever but in their gowns and staff of office! This is the essence of the esprit de corps. It is certainly not a very delectable source of contemplation or subject to treat of.

Public bodies are so far worse than the individuals composing them, because the official takes place of the moral sense. The nerves that in themselves were soft and pliable enough, and responded naturally to the touch of pity, when fastened into a machine of that sort, become callous and rigid, and throw off every extraneous application that can be made to them with perfect apathy. An appeal is made to the ties of individual friendship: the body in general know nothing of them. A case has occurred which strongly called forth the compassion of the person who was witness of it: but the body (or any special deputation of them) were not present when it happened. These little weaknesses and ‘compunctious visitings of nature’ are effectually guarded against, indeed, by the very rules and regulations of the society, as well as by its spirit. The individual is the creature of his feelings of all sorts, the sport of his vices and his virtues—like the fool in Shakespear, ‘motley’s his proper wear:’—corporate bodies are dressed in a moral uniform; mixed motives do not operate there, frailty is made into a system, ‘diseases are turned into commodities.’ Only so much of any one’s natural or genuine impulses can influence him in his artificial capacity as formally comes home to the aggregate conscience of those with whom he acts, or bears upon the interests (real or pretended), the importance, respectability, and professed objects of the society. Beyond that point the nerve is bound up, the conscience is seared, and the torpedo-touch of so much inert matter operates to deaden the best feelings and harden the heart. Laughter and tears are said to be the characteristic signs of humanity. Laughter is common enough in such places as a set-off to the mock-gravity: but who ever saw a public body in tears? Nothing but a job or some knavery can keep them serious for ten minutes together.[73]

Such are the qualifications and the apprenticeship necessary to make a man tolerated, to enable him to pass as a cypher, or be admitted as a mere numerical unit, in any corporate body: to be a leader and dictator, he must be diplomatic in impertinence, and officious in every dirty work. He must not merely conform to established prejudices; he must flatter them. He must not merely be insensible to the demands of moderation and equity; he must be loud against them. He must not simply fall in with all sorts of contemptible cabals and intrigues; he must be indefatigable in fomenting them, and setting every body together by the ears. He must not only repeat, but invent lies. He must make speeches and write hand-bills; he must be devoted to the wishes and objects of the society, its creature, its jackall, its busy-body, its mouthpiece, its prompter; he must deal in law-cases, in demurrers, in charters, in traditions, in common-places, in logic and rhetoric—in every thing but common sense and honesty. He must (in Mr. Burke’s phrase) ‘disembowel himself of his natural entrails, and be stuffed with paltry, blurred sheets of parchment about the rights’ of the privileged few. He must be a concentrated essence, a varnished, powdered, representative of the vices, absurdities, hypocrisy, jealousy, pride, and pragmaticalness of his party. Such a one by bustle and self-importance and puffing, by flattering one to his face, and abusing another behind his back, by lending himself to the weaknesses of some, and pampering the mischievous propensities of others, will pass for a great man in a little society.

Age does not improve the morality of public bodies. They grow more and more tenacious of their idle privileges and senseless self-consequence. They get weak and obstinate at the same time. Those, who belong to them, have all the upstart pride and pettifogging spirit of their present character ingrafted on the venerableness and superstitious sanctity of ancient institutions. They are naturally at issue, first with their neighbours, and next with their contemporaries, on all matters of common propriety and judgment. They become more attached to forms, the more obsolete they are; and the defence of every absurd and invidious distinction is a debt which (by implication) they owe to the dead as well as the living. What might once have been of serious practical utility they turn to farce, by retaining the letter when the spirit is gone: and they do this the more, the more glaring the inconsistency and want of sound reasoning; for they think they thus give proof of their zeal and attachment to the abstract principle on which old establishments exist, the ground of prescription and authority. The greater the ‘wrong, the greater the right, in all such cases. The esprit de corps does not take much merit to itself for upholding what is justifiable in any system, or the proceedings of any party, but for adhering to what is palpably injurious. You may exact the first from an enemy: the last is the province of a friend. It has been made a subject of complaint, that the champions of the Church, for example, who are advanced to dignities and honours, are hardly ever those who defend the common principles of Christianity, but those who volunteer to man the out-works, and set up ingenious excuses for the questionable points, the ticklish places in the established form of worship, that is, for those which are attacked from without, and are supposed in danger of being undermined by stratagem, or carried by assault!

The great resorts and seats of learning often outlive in this way the intention of the founders, as the world outgrows them. They may be said to resemble antiquated coquets of the last age, who think every thing ridiculous and intolerable but what was in fashion when they were young, and yet are standing proofs of the progress of taste, and the vanity of human pretensions. Our universities are, in a great measure, become cisterns to hold, not conduits to disperse knowledge. The age has the start of them; that is, other sources of knowledge have been opened since their formation, to which the world have had access, and have drunk plentifully at those living fountains, but from which they are debarred by the tenor of their charter, and as a matter of dignity and privilege. They have grown poor, like the old grandees in some countries, by subsisting on the inheritance of learning, while the people have grown rich by trade. They are too much in the nature of fixtures in intellect: they stop the way in the road to truth; or at any rate (for they do not themselves advance) they can only be of service as a check-weight on the too hasty and rapid career of innovation. All that has been invented or thought in the last two hundred years they take no cognisance of, or as little as possible; they are above it; they stand upon the ancient landmarks, and will not budge; whatever was not known when they were first endowed, they are still in profound and lofty ignorance of. Yet in that period how much has been done in literature, arts, and science, of which (with the exception of mathematical knowledge, the hardest to gainsay or subject to the trammels of prejudice and barbarous ipse dixits) scarce any trace is to be found in the authentic modes of study, and legitimate inquiry, which prevail at either of our Universities! The unavoidable aim of all corporate bodies of learning is not to grow wise, or teach others wisdom, but to prevent any one else from being or seeming wiser than themselves; in other words, their infallible tendency is in the end to suppress inquiry and darken knowledge, by setting limits to the mind of man, and saying to his proud spirit, Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther! It would not be an unedifying experiment to make a collection of the titles of works published in the course of the year by Members of the Universities. If any attempt is to be made to patch up an idle system in policy or legislation, or church-government, it is by a Member of the University: if any hashed-up speculation on an old exploded argument is to be brought forward ‘in spite of shame, in erring reason’s spite,’ it is by a Member of the University: if a paltry project is ushered into the world for combining ancient prejudices with modern time-serving, it is by a Member of the University. Thus we get at a stated supply of annual Defences of the Sinking Fund, Thoughts on the Evils of Education, Treatises on Predestination, and Eulogies on Mr. Malthus, all from the same source, and through the same vent. If they came from any other quarter nobody would look at them; but they have an Imprimatur from dulness and authority: we know that there is no offence in them; and they are stuck in the shop-windows, and read (in the intervals of Lord Byron’s works, or the Scotch novels) in cathedral towns and close boroughs!

It is, I understand and believe, pretty much the same in more modern institutions for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. The end is lost in the means: rules take place of nature and genius; cabal and bustle, and struggles for rank and precedence, supersede the study and the love of art. A Royal Academy is a kind of hospital and infirmary for the obliquities of taste and ingenuity—a receptacle where enthusiasm and originality stop and stagnate, and spread their influence no farther, instead of being a school founded for genius, or a temple built to fame. The generality of those who wriggle, or fawn, or beg their way to a seat there, live on their certificate of merit to a good old age, and are seldom heard of afterwards. If a man of sterling capacity gets among them, and minds his own business, he is nobody; he makes no figure in council, in voting, in resolutions or speeches. If he comes forward with plans and views for the good of the Academy and the advancement of art, he is immediately set upon as a visionary, a fanatic, with notions hostile to the interest and credit of the existing members of the society. If he directs the ambition of the scholars to the study of History, this strikes at once at the emoluments of the profession, who are most of them (by God’s will) portrait painters. If he eulogises the Antique, and speaks highly of the Old Masters, he is supposed to be actuated by envy to living painters and native talent. If, again, he insists on a knowledge of anatomy as essential to correct drawing, this would seem to imply a want of it in our most eminent designers. Every plan, suggestion, argument, that has the general purposes and principles of art for its object, is thwarted, scouted, ridiculed, slandered, as having a malignant aspect towards the profits and pretensions of the great mass of flourishing and respectable artists in the country. This leads to irritation and ill-will on all sides. The obstinacy of the constituted authorities keeps pace with the violence and extravagance opposed to it; and they lay all the blame on the folly and mistakes they have themselves occasioned or increased. It is considered as a personal quarrel, not a public question; by which means the dignity of the body is implicated in resenting the slips and inadvertencies of its members, not in promoting their common and declared objects. In this sort of wretched tracasserie the Barrys and H—s stand no chance with the Catons, the Tubbs, and the F—s. Sir Joshua even was obliged to hold himself aloof from them, and Fuseli passes as a kind of nondescript, or one of his own grotesques. The air of an academy, in short, is not the air of genius and immortality; it is too close and heated, and impregnated with the notions of the common sort. A man steeped in a corrupt atmosphere of this description is no longer open to the genial impulses of nature and truth, nor sees visions of ideal beauty, nor dreams of antique grace and grandeur, nor has the finest works of art continually hovering and floating through his uplifted fancy; but the images that haunt it are rules of the academy, charters, inaugural speeches, resolutions passed or rescinded, cards of invitation to a council-meeting, or the annual dinner, prize-medals, and the king’s diploma, constituting him a gentleman and esquire. He ‘wipes out all trivial, fond records;’ all romantic aspirations; ‘the Raphael grace, the Guido air;’ and the commands of the academy alone ‘must live within the book and volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter.’ It may be doubted whether any work of lasting reputation and universal interest can spring up in this soil, or ever has done in that of any academy. The last question is a matter of fact and history, not of mere opinion or prejudice; and may be ascertained as such accordingly. The mighty names of former times rose before the existence of academies; and the three greatest painters, undoubtedly, that this country has produced, Reynolds, Wilson, and Hogarth, were not ‘dandled and swaddled’ into artists in any institution for the fine arts. I do not apprehend that the names of Chantry or Wilkie, (great as one, and considerable as the other of them is,) can be made use of in any way to impugn the jet of this argument. We may find a considerable improvement in some of our artists, when they get out of the vortex for a time. Sir Thomas Lawrence is all the better for having been abstracted for a year or two from Somerset-House; and Mr. Dawe, they say, has been doing wonders in the North. When will he return, and once more ‘bid Britannia rival Greece?’

Mr. Canning somewhere lays it down as a rule, that corporate bodies are necessarily correct and pure in their conduct, from the knowledge which the individuals composing them have of one another, and the jealous vigilance they exercise over each other’s motives and characters; whereas, people collected into mobs are disorderly and unprincipled from being utterly unknown and unaccountable to each other. This is a curious pass of wit. I differ with him in both parts of the dilemma. To begin with the first, and to handle it somewhat cavalierly, according to the model before us: we know, for instance, there is said to be honour among thieves, but very little honesty towards others. Their honour consists in the division of the booty, not in the mode of acquiring it: they do not (often) betray one another, but they will waylay a stranger, or knock out a traveller’s brains: they may be depended on in giving the alarm when any of their posts are in danger of being surprised; and they will stand together for their ill-gotten gains to the last drop of their blood. Yet they form a distinct society, and are strictly responsible for their behaviour to one another and to their leader. They are not a mob, but a gang, completely in one another’s power and secrets. Their familiarity, however, with the proceedings of the corps, does not lead them to expect or to exact from it a very high standard of moral honesty; that is out of the question; but they are sure to gain the good opinion of their fellows by committing all sorts of depredations, fraud, and violence against the community at large. So (not to speak it profanely) some of Mr. C—’s friends may be very respectable people in their way—‘all honourable men’—but their respectability is confined within party-limits; every one does not sympathise in the integrity of their views; the understanding between them and the public is not well-defined or reciprocal. Or, suppose a gang of pickpockets hustle a passenger in the street, and the mob set upon them, and proceed to execute summary justice upon such as they can lay hands on, am I to conclude that the rogues are in the right, because theirs is a system of well-organised knavery, which they settled in the morning, with their eyes one upon the other, and which they regularly review at night, with a due estimate of each other’s motives, character, and conduct in the business; and that the honest men are in the wrong, because they are a casual collection of unprejudiced, disinterested individuals, taken at a venture from the mass of the people, acting without concert or responsibility, on the spur of the occasion, and giving way to their instantaneous impulses and honest anger? Mobs, in fact, then, are almost always right in their feelings, and often in their judgments, on this very account—that being utterly unknown to and disconnected with each other, they have no point of union or principle of co-operation between them, but the natural sense of justice recognised by all persons in common. They appeal, at the first meeting, not to certain symbols and watch-words privately agreed upon, like Free-Masons, but to the maxims and instincts proper to all the world. They have no other clew to guide them to their object but either the dictates of the heart, or the universally understood sentiments of society, neither of which are likely to be in the wrong. The flame, which bursts out and blazes from popular sympathy, is made of honest, but homely materials. It is not kindled by sparks of wit or sophistry, nor damped by the cold calculations of self-interest. The multitude may be wantonly set on by others, as is too often the case, or be carried too far in the impulse of rage and disappointment; but their resentment, when they are left to themselves, is almost uniformly, in the first instance, excited by some evident abuse and wrong; and the excesses into which they run arise from that very want of foresight and regular system, which is a pledge of the uprightness and heartiness of their intentions. In short, the only class of persons to whom the above courtly charge of sinister and corrupt motives is not applicable, is that body of individuals which usually goes by the name of the People!

ESSAY XXVIII WHETHER ACTORS OUGHT TO SIT IN THE BOXES?

I think not; and that for the following reasons, as well as I can give them:—

Actors belong to the public: their persons are not their own property. They exhibit themselves on the stage: that is enough, without displaying themselves in the boxes of the theatre. I conceive that an actor, on account of the very circumstances of his profession, ought to keep himself as much incognito as possible. He plays a number of parts disguised, transformed into them as much as he can ‘by his so potent art,’ and he should not disturb this borrowed impression by unmasking before company, more than he can help. Let him go into the pit, if he pleases, to see—not into the first circle, to be seen. He is seen enough without that: he is the centre of an illusion that he is bound to support, both, as it appears to me, by a certain self-respect which should repel idle curiosity, and by a certain deference to the public, in whom he has inspired certain prejudices which he is covenanted not to break. He represents the majesty of successive kings; he takes the responsibility of heroes and lovers on himself; the mantle of genius and nature falls on his shoulders; we ‘pile millions’ of associations on him, under which he should be ‘buried quick,’ and not perk out an inauspicious face upon us, with a plain-cut coat, to say—‘What fools you all were!—I am not Hamlet the Dane!’

It is very well and in strict propriety for Mr. Matthews, in his At Home, after he has been imitating his inimitable Scotchwoman, to slip out as quick as lightning, and appear in the side-box shaking hands with our old friend Jack Bannister. It adds to our surprise at the versatility of his changes of place and appearance, and he had been before us in his own person during a great part of the evening. There was no harm done—no imaginary spell broken—no discontinuity of thought or sentiment. Mr. Matthews is himself (without offence be it spoken) both a cleverer and more respectable man than many of the characters he represents. Not so when

‘O’er the stage the Ghost of Hamlet stalks, Othello rages, Desdemona mourns, And poor Monimia pours her soul in love.’

A different feeling then prevails:—close, close the scene upon them, and never break that fine phantasmagoria of the brain. Or if it must be done at all, let us chuse some other time and place for it: let no one wantonly dash the Circean cup from our lips, or dissolve the spirit of enchantment in the very palace of enchantment. Go, Mr. —, and sit somewhere else! What a thing it is, for instance, for any part of an actor’s dress to come off unexpectedly while he is playing! What a cut it is upon himself and the audience! What an effort he has to recover himself, and struggle through this exposure of the naked truth! It has been considered as one of the triumphs of Garrick’s tragic power, that once, when he was playing Lear, his crown of straw came off, and nobody laughed or took the least notice, so much had he identified himself with the character. Was he, after this, to pay so little respect to the feelings he had inspired, as to tear off his tattered robes, and take the old, crazed king with him to play the fool in the boxes?

‘No; let him pass. Vex not his parting spirit, Nor on the rack of this rough world Stretch him out farther!’

Some lady is said to have fallen in love with Garrick from being present when he played the part of Romeo, on which he observed, that he would undertake to cure her of her folly if she would only come and see him in Abel Drugger. So the modern tragedian and fine gentleman, by appearing to advantage, and conspicuously, in propria personâ, may easily cure us of our predilection for all the principal characters he shines in. ‘Sir! do you think Alexander looked o’ this fashion in his life-time, or was perfumed so? Had Julius Cæsar such a nose? or wore his frill as you do? You have slain I don’t know how many heroes “with a bare bodkin,” the gold pin in your shirt, and spoiled all the fine love speeches you will ever make by picking your teeth with that inimitable air!’

An actor, after having performed his part well, instead of courting farther distinction, should affect obscurity, and ‘steal most guilty-like away,’ conscious of admiration that he can support nowhere but in his proper sphere, and jealous of his own and others’ good opinion of him, in proportion as he is a darling in the public eye. He cannot avoid attracting disproportionate attention: why should he wish to fix it on himself in a perfectly flat and insignificant part, viz. his own character? It was a bad custom to bring authors on the stage to crown them. Omne ignotum pro magnifico est. Even professed critics, I think, should be shy of putting themselves forward to applaud loudly: any one in a crowd has ‘a voice potential’ as the press: it is either committing their pretensions a little indiscreetly, or confirming their own judgment by a clapping of hands. If you only go and give the cue lustily, the house seems in wonderful accord with your opinions. An actor, like a king, should only appear on state occasions. He loses popularity by too much publicity; or, according to the proverb, familiarity breeds contempt. Both characters personate a certain abstract idea, are seen in a fictitious costume, and when they have ‘shuffled off this more than mortal coil,’ they had better keep out of the way—the acts and sentiments emanating from themselves will not carry on the illusion of our prepossessions. Ordinary transactions do not give scope to grace and dignity like romantic situations, or prepared pageants, and the little is apt to prevail over the great, if we come to count the instances.

The motto of a great actor should be aut Cæsar aut nihil. I do not see how with his crown, or plume of feathers, he can get through those little box-doors without stooping and squeezing his artificial importance to tatters. The entrance of the stage is arched so high ‘that players may jet through, and keep their gorgeous turbans on, without good-morrow to the gods!’

The top-tragedian of the day has too large and splendid a train following him to have room for them in one of the dress-boxes. When he appears there, it should be enlarged express for the occasion: for at his heels march the figures, in full costume, of Cato, and Brutus, and Cassius, and of him with the falcon eye, and Othello, and Lear, and crook-backed Richard, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and numbers more, and demand entrance along with him, shadows to which he alone lends bodily substance! ‘The graves yawn and render up their dead to push us from our stools.’ There is a mighty bustle at the door, a gibbering and squeaking in the lobbies. An actor’s retinue is imperial, it presses upon the imagination too much, and he should therefore slide unnoticed into the pit. Authors, who are in a manner his makers and masters, sit there contented—why should not he? ‘He is used to shew himself.’ That then is the very reason he should conceal his person at other times. A habit of ostentation should not be reduced to a principle. If I had seen the late Gentleman Lewis fluttering in a prominent situation in the boxes, I should have been puzzled whether to think of him as the Copper Captain, or as Bobadil, or Ranger, or young Rapid, or Lord Foppington, or fifty other whimsical characters: then I should have got Munden and Quick, and a parcel more of them in my head, till ‘my brain would have been like a smoke-jack:’ I should not have known what to make of it; but if I had seen him in the pit, I should merely have eyed him with respectful curiosity, and have told every one that that was Gentleman Lewis. We should have concluded from the circumstance that he was a modest, sensible man: we all knew beforehand that he could show off whenever he pleased!

There is one class of performers that I think is quite exempt from the foregoing reasoning, I mean retired actors. Come when they will and where they will, they are welcome to their old friends. They have as good a right to sit in the boxes as children at the holidays. But they do not, somehow, come often. It is but a melancholy recollection with them:—

—‘Then sweet, Now sad to think on!’

Mrs. Garrick still goes often, and hears the applause of her husband over again in the shouts of the pit. Had Mrs. Pritchard or Mrs. Clive been living, I am afraid we should have seen little of them—it would have been too home a feeling with them. Mrs. Siddons seldom if ever goes, and yet she is almost the only thing left worth seeing there. She need not stay away on account of any theory that I can form. She is out of the pale of all theories, and annihilates all rules. Wherever she sits there is grace and grandeur, there is tragedy personified. Her seat is the undivided throne of the Tragic Muse. She had no need of the robes, the sweeping train, the ornaments of the stage; in herself she is as great as any being she ever represented in the ripeness and plenitude of her power! I should not, I confess, have had the same paramount abstracted feeling at seeing John Kemble there, whom I venerate at a distance, and should not have known whether he was playing off the great man or the great actor:—

‘A little more than kin, and less than kind.’

I know it may be said in answer to all this pretext of keeping the character of the player inviolate—‘What is there more common, in fact, than for the hero of a tragedy to speak the prologue, or than for the heroine, who has been stabbed or poisoned, to revive, and come forward laughing in the epilogue?’ As to the epilogue, it is spoken to get rid of the idea of the tragedy altogether, and to ward off the fury of the pit, who may be bent on its damnation. The greatest incongruity you can hit upon is, therefore, the most proper for this purpose. But I deny that the hero of a tragedy, or the principal character in it, is ever pitched upon to deliver the prologue. It is always, by prescription, some walking-shadow, some poor player, who cannot even spoil a part of any consequence. Is there not Mr. C— always at hand for this purpose, whom the late king pronounced three times to be ‘a bad actor?’[74] What is there in common between that accustomed wave of the hand, and the cocked hat under the arm, and any passion or person that can be brought forward on the stage? It is not that we can be said to acquire a prejudice against so harmless an actor as Mr. C—; we are born with a prejudice against a speaker of prologues. It is an innate idea: a natural instinct: there is a particular organ in the brain provided for it. Do we not all hate a manager? It is not because he is insolent or impertinent, or fond of making ridiculous speeches, or a notorious puffer, or ignorant, or mean, or vain, but it is because we see him in a coat, waistcoat, and breeches. The stage is the world of fantasy: it is Queen Mab that has invited us to her revels there, and all that have to do with it should wear motley!

Lastly, there are some actors by profession, whose faces we like to see in the boxes or any where else; but it is because they are no actors, but rather gentlemen and scholars, and in their proper places in the boxes, or wherever they are. Does not an actor himself, I would ask, feel conscious and awkward in the boxes, if he thinks that he is known? And does he not sit there in spite of this uneasy feeling, and run the gauntlet of impertinent looks and whispers, only to get a little by—admiration, as he thinks? It is hardly to be supposed that he comes to see the play, the show. He must have enough of plays and finery. But he wants to see a favourite (perhaps a rival) actor in a striking part. Then the place for him to do this is the pit. Painters, I know, always get as close up to a picture they want to copy as they can; and I should imagine actors would want to do the same, in order to look into the texture and mechanism of their art. Even theatrical critics can make nothing of a part that they see from the boxes. If you sit in the stage-box, your attention is drawn off by the company and other circumstances. If you get to a distance (so as to be out of the reach of notice) you can neither hear nor see well. For myself, I would as soon take a seat on the top of the Monument to give an account of a first appearance, as go into the second or third tier of boxes to do it. I went, but the other day, with a boxticket, to see Miss Fanny Brunton come out in Juliet, and Mr. Macready make a first appearance in Romeo; and though I was told (by a tolerable judge) that the new Juliet was the most elegant figure on the stage, and that Mr. Macready’s Romeo was quite beautiful, I vow to God I knew nothing of it. So little could I tell of the matter, that at one time I mistook Mr. Horrebow for Mr. Abbott. I have seen Mr. Kean play Sir Giles Overreach one night from the front of the pit, and a few nights after from the front boxes, facing the stage. It was another thing altogether. That which had been so lately nothing but flesh and blood, a living fibre, ‘instinct with fire’ and spirit, was no better than a little fantoccini figure, darting backwards and forwards on the stage, starting, screaming, and playing a number of fantastic tricks before the audience. I could account, in the latter instance, for the little approbation of the performance manifested around me, and also for the general scepticism with respect to Mr. Kean’s acting, which has been said to prevail among those who cannot condescend to go into the pit, and have not interest in the orchestra—to see him act. They may then stay away altogether. His face is the running comment on his acting, which reconciles the audience to it. Without that index to his mind, you are not prepared for the vehemence and suddenness of his gestures; his pauses are long, abrupt, and unaccountable, if not filled up by the expression; it is in the working of his face that you see the writhing and coiling up of the passions before they make their serpent-spring; the lightning of his eye precedes the hoarse burst of thunder from his voice.

One may go into the boxes, indeed, and criticise acting and actors with Sterne’s stop-watch, but no otherwise—‘“And between the nominative case and the verb (which, as your lordship knows, should agree together in number, person etc.) there was a full pause of a second and two thirds.” “But was the eye silent—did the look say nothing?”—“I looked only at the stop-watch, my lord.” “Excellent critic!”’—If any other actor, indeed, goes to see Mr. Kean act, with a view to avoid imitation, this may be the place, or rather it is the way to run into it, for you see only his extravagances and defects, which are the most easily carried away. Mr. Matthews may translate him into an AT HOME even from the slips!—Distinguished actors then ought, I conceive, to set the example of going into the pit, were it only for their own sakes. I remember a trifling circumstance, which I worked up at the time into a confirmation of this theory of mine, engrafted on old prejudice and tradition.[75] I had got into the middle of the pit, at considerable risk of broken bones, to see Mr. Kean in one of his early parts, when I perceived two young men seated a little behind me, with a certain space left round them. They were dressed in the height of the fashion, in light drab-coloured great coats, and with their shirt-sleeves drawn down over their hands, at a time when this was not so common as it has since become. I took them for younger sons of some old family at least. One of them, that was very good-looking, I thought might be Lord Byron, and his companion might be Mr. Hobhouse. They seemed to have wandered from another sphere of this our planet to witness a masterly performance to the utmost advantage. This stamped the thing. They were, undoubtedly, young men of rank and fashion; but their taste was greater than their regard for appearances. The pit was, after all, the true resort of thorough-bred critics and amateurs. When there was any thing worth seeing, this was the place; and I began to feel a sort of reflected importance in the consciousness that I also was a critic. Nobody sat near them—it would have seemed like an intrusion. Not a syllable was uttered.—They were two clerks in the Victualling Office!

What I would insist on, then, is this—that for Mr. Kean, or Mr. Young, or Mr. Macready, or any of those that are ‘cried out upon in the top of the compass’ to obtrude themselves voluntarily or ostentatiously upon our notice, when they are out of character, is a solecism in theatricals. For them to thrust themselves forward before the scenes, is to drag us behind them against our will, than which nothing can be more fatal to a true passion for the stage, and which is a privilege that should be kept sacred for impertinent curiosity. Oh! while I live, let me not be admitted (under special favour) to an actor’s dressing-room. Let me not see how Cato painted, or how Cæsar combed! Let me not meet the prompt-boys in the passage, nor see the half-lighted candles stuck against the bare walls, nor hear the creaking of machines, or the fiddlers laughing; nor see a Columbine practising a pirouette in sober sadness, nor Mr. Grimaldi’s face drop from mirth to sudden melancholy as he passes the side-scene, as if a shadow crossed it, nor witness the long-chinned generation of the pantomime sit twirling their thumbs, nor overlook the fellow who holds the candle for the moon in the scene between Lorenzo and Jessica! Spare me this insight into secrets I am not bound to know. The stage is not a mistress that we are sworn to undress. Why should we look behind the glass of fashion? Why should we prick the bubble that reflects the world, and turn it to a little soap and water? Trust a little to first appearances—leave something to fancy. I observe that the great puppets of the real stage, who themselves play a grand part, like to get into the boxes over the stage; where they see nothing from the proper point of view, but peep and pry into what is going on like a magpie looking into a marrow-bone. This is just like them. So they look down upon human life, of which they are ignorant. They see the exits and entrances of the players, something that they suspect is meant to be kept from them (for they think they are always liable to be imposed upon): the petty pageant of an hour ends with each scene long before the catastrophe, and the tragedy of life is turned to farce under their eyes. These people laugh loud at a pantomime, and are delighted with clowns and pantaloons. They pay no attention to any thing else. The stage-boxes exist in contempt of the stage and common sense. The private boxes, on the contrary, should be reserved as the receptacle for the officers of state and great diplomatic characters, who wish to avoid, rather than court popular notice!

ESSAY XXIX ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY

The chief disadvantage of knowing more and seeing farther than others, is not to be generally understood. A man is, in consequence of this, liable to start paradoxes, which immediately transport him beyond the reach of the common-place reader. A person speaking once in a slighting manner of a very original-minded man, received for answer—‘He strides on so far before you, that he dwindles in the distance!’

Petrarch complains, that ‘Nature had made him different from other people’—singular’ d’altra genti. The great happiness of life is, to be neither better nor worse than the general run of those you meet with. If you are beneath them, you are trampled upon; if you are above them, you soon find a mortifying level in their indifference to what you particularly pique yourself upon. What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam? ‘To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’ So says Shakespear; and the commentators have not added that, under these circumstances, a man is more likely to become the butt of slander than the mark of admiration for being so. ‘How now, thou particular fellow[76]?’ is the common answer to all such out-of-the-way pretensions. By not doing as those at Rome do, we cut ourselves off from good-fellowship and society. We speak another language, have notions of our own, and are treated as of a different species. Nothing can be more awkward than to intrude with any such far-fetched ideas among the common herd, who will be sure to

—‘Stand all astonied, like a sort of steers, ’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race Unwares is chanced, far straying from his peers: So will their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.’

Ignorance of another’s meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear produces hatred: hence the suspicion and rancour entertained against all those who set up for greater refinement and wisdom than their neighbours. It is in vain to think of softening down this spirit of hostility by simplicity of manners, or by condescending to persons of low estate. The more you condescend, the more they will presume upon it; they will fear you less, but hate you more; and will be the more determined to take their revenge on you for a superiority as to which they are entirely in the dark, and of which you yourself seem to entertain considerable doubts. All the humility in the world will only pass for weakness and folly. They have no notion of such a thing. They always put their best foot forward; and argue that you would do the same if you had any such wonderful talents as people say. You had better, therefore, play off the great man at once—hector, swagger, talk big, and ride the high horse over them: you may by this means extort outward respect or common civility; but you will get nothing (with low people) by forbearance and good-nature but open insult or silent contempt. C— always talks to people about what they don’t understand: I, for one, endeavour to talk to them about what they do understand, and find I only get the more ill-will by it. They conceive I do not think them capable of any thing better; that I do not think it worth while, as the vulgar saying is, to throw a word to a dog. I once complained of this to C—, thinking it hard I should be sent to Coventry for not making a prodigious display. He said, ‘As you assume a certain character, you ought to produce your credentials. It is a tax upon people’s good-nature to admit superiority of any kind, even where there is the most evident proof of it: but it is too hard a task for the imagination to admit it without any apparent ground at all.’

There is not a greater error than to suppose that you avoid the envy, malice, and uncharitableness, so common in the world, by going among people without pretensions. There are no people who have no pretensions; or the fewer their pretensions, the less they can afford to acknowledge yours without some sort of value received. The more information individuals possess, or the more they have refined upon any subject, the more readily can they conceive and admit the same kind of superiority to themselves that they feel over others. But from the low, dull, level sink of ignorance and vulgarity, no idea or love of excellence can arise. You think you are doing mighty well with them; that you are laying aside the buckram of pedantry and pretence, and getting the character of a plain, unassuming, good sort of fellow. It will not do. All the while that you are making these familiar advances, and wanting to be at your ease, they are trying to recover the wind of you. You may forget that you are an author, an artist, or what not—they do not forget that they are nothing, nor bate one jot of their desire to prove you in the same predicament. They take hold of some circumstance in your dress; your manner of entering a room is different from that of other people; you do not eat vegetables—that’s odd; you have a particular phrase, which they repeat, and this becomes a sort of standing joke; you look grave, or ill; you talk, or are more silent than usual; you are in or out of pocket: all these petty, inconsiderable circumstances, in which you resemble, or are unlike other people, form so many counts in the indictment which is going on in their imaginations against you, and are so many contradictions in your character. In any one else they would pass unnoticed, but in a person of whom they had heard so much, they cannot make them out at all. Meanwhile, those things in which you may really excel, go for nothing, because they cannot judge of them. They speak highly of some book which you do not like, and therefore you make no answer. You recommend them to go and see some picture, in which they do not find much to admire. How are you to convince them that you are right? Can you make them perceive that the fault is in them, and not in the picture, unless you could give them your knowledge? They hardly distinguish the difference between a Correggio and a common daub. Does this bring you any nearer to an understanding? The more you know of the difference, the more deeply you feel it, or the more earnestly you wish to convey it, the farther do you find yourself removed to an immeasurable distance from the possibility of making them enter into views and feelings of which they have not even the first rudiments. You cannot make them see with your eyes, and they must judge for themselves.

Intellectual is not like bodily strength. You have no hold of the understanding of others but by their sympathy. Your knowing, in fact, so much more about a subject does not give you a superiority, that is, a power over them, but only renders it the more impossible for you to make the least impression on them. Is it then an advantage to you? It may be, as it relates to your own private satisfaction, but it places a greater gulf between you and society. It throws stumbling blocks in your way at every turn. All that you take most pride and pleasure in is lost upon the vulgar eye. What they are pleased with is a matter of indifference or of distaste to you. In seeing a number of persons turn over a portfolio of prints from different masters, what a trial it is to the patience, how it jars the nerves to hear them fall into raptures at some common-place flimsy thing, and pass over some divine expression of countenance without notice, or with a remark that it is very singular-looking? How useless is it in such cases to fret or argue, or remonstrate? Is it not quite as well to be without all this hypercritical, fastidious knowledge, and to be pleased or displeased as it happens, or struck with the first fault or beauty that is pointed out by others? I would be glad almost to change my acquaintance with pictures, with books, and, certainly, what I know of mankind, for any body’s ignorance of them!

It is recorded in the life of some worthy (whose name I forget) that he was one of those ‘who loved hospitality and respect:’ and I profess to belong to the same classification of mankind. Civility is with me a jewel. I like a little comfortable cheer, and careless, indolent, chat. I hate to be always wise, or aiming at wisdom. I have enough to do with literary cabals, questions, critics, actors, essay-writing, without taking them out with me for recreation, and into all companies. I wish at these times to pass for a good-humoured fellow; and good-will is all I ask in return to make good company. I do not desire to be always posing myself or others with the questions of fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, &c. I must unbend sometimes. I must occasionally lie fallow. The kind of conversation that I affect most is what sort of a day it is, and whether it is likely to rain or hold up fine for to-morrow. This I consider as enjoying the otium cum dignitate, as the end and privilege of a life of study. I would resign myself to this state of easy indifference, but I find I cannot. I must maintain a certain pretension, which is far enough from my wish. I must be put on my defence, I must take up the gauntlet continually, or I find I lose ground. ‘I am nothing, if not critical.’ While I am thinking what o’clock it is, or how I came to blunder in quoting a well-known passage, as if I had done it on purpose, others are thinking whether I am not really as dull a fellow as I am sometimes said to be. If a drizzling shower patters against the windows, it puts me in mind of a mild spring rain, from which I retired twenty years ago, into a little public house near Wem in Shropshire, and while I saw the plants and shrubs before the door imbibe the dewy moisture, quaffed a glass of sparkling ale, and walked home in the dusk of evening, brighter to me than noon-day suns at present are! Would I indulge this feeling? In vain. They ask me what news there is, and stare if I say I don’t know. If a new actress has come out, why must I have seen her? If a new novel has appeared, why must I have read it? I, at one time, used to go and take a hand at cribbage with a friend, and afterwards discuss a cold sirloin of beef, and throw out a few lack-a-daisical remarks, in a way to please myself, but it would not do long. I set up little pretension, and therefore the little that I did set up was taken from me. As I said nothing on that subject myself, it was continually thrown in my teeth that I was an author. From having me at this disadvantage, my friend wanted to peg on a hole or two in the game, and was displeased if I would not let him. If I won of him, it was hard he should be beat by an author. If he won, it would be strange if he did not understand the game better than I did. If I mentioned my favourite game of rackets, there was a general silence, as if this was my weak point. If I complained of being ill, it was asked why I made myself so? If I said such an actor had played a part well, the answer was, there was a different account in one of the newspapers. If any allusion was made to men of letters, there was a suppressed smile. If I told a humorous story, it was difficult to say whether the laugh was at me or at the narrative. The wife hated me for my ugly face: the servants because I could not always get them tickets for the play, and because they could not tell exactly what an author meant. If a paragraph appeared against any thing I had written, I found it was ready there before me, and I was to undergo a regular roasting. I submitted to all this till I was tired, and then I gave it up.

One of the miseries of intellectual pretensions is, that nine-tenths of those you come in contact with do not know whether you are an impostor or not. I dread that certain anonymous criticisms should get into the hands of servants where I go, or that my hatter or shoemaker should happen to read them, who cannot possibly tell whether they are well or ill founded. The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice. There are people whose good opinion or good will you want, setting aside all literary pretensions; and it is hard to lose by an ill report (which you have no means of rectifying) what you cannot gain by a good one. After a diatribe in the —, (which is taken in by a gentleman who occupies my old apartments on the first floor) my landlord brings me up his bill (of some standing), and on my offering to give him so much in money, and a note of hand for the rest, shakes his head, and says, he is afraid he could make no use of it. Soon after, the daughter comes in, and on my mentioning the circumstance carelessly to her, replies gravely, ‘that indeed her father has been almost ruined by bills.’ This is the unkindest cut of all. It is in vain for me to endeavour to explain that the publication in which I am abused is a mere government engine—an organ of a political faction. They know nothing about that. They only know such and such imputations are thrown out; and the more I try to remove them, the more they think there is some truth in them. Perhaps the people of the house are strong Tories—government-agents of some sort. Is it for me to enlighten their ignorance? If I say, I once wrote a thing called Prince Maurice’s Parrot, and an Essay on the Regal Character, in the former of which allusion is made to a noble marquis, and in the latter to a great personage (so at least, I am told, it has been construed), and that Mr. Croker has peremptory instructions to retaliate; they cannot conceive what connection there can be between me and such distinguished characters. I can get no farther. Such is the misery of pretensions beyond your situation, and which are not backed by any external symbols of wealth or rank, intelligible to all mankind!

The impertinence of admiration is scarcely more tolerable than the demonstrations of contempt. I have known a person, whom I had never seen before, besiege me all dinner-time with asking, what articles I had written in the Edinburgh Review? I was at last ashamed to answer to my splendid sins in that way. Others will pick out something not yours, and say, they are sure no one else could write it. By the first sentence they can always tell your style. Now I hate my style to be known; as I hate all idiosyncrasy. These obsequious flatterers could not pay me a worse compliment. Then there are those who make a point of reading every thing you write (which is fulsome); while others, more provoking, regularly lend your works to a friend as soon as they receive them. They pretty well know your notions on the different subjects, from having heard you talk about them. Besides, they have a greater value for your personal character than they have for your writings. You explain things better in a common way, when you are not aiming at effect. Others tell you of the faults they have heard found with your last book, and that they defend your style in general from a charge of obscurity. A friend once told me of a quarrel he had had with a near relation, who denied that I knew how to spell the commonest words. These are comfortable confidential communications, to which authors, who have their friends and excusers, are subject. A gentleman told me, that a lady had objected to my use of the word learneder, as bad grammar. He said, that he thought it a pity that I did not take more care, but that the lady was perhaps prejudiced, as her husband held a government-office. I looked for the word, and found it in a motto from Butler. I was piqued, and desired him to tell the fair critic, that the fault was not in me, but in one who had far more wit, more learning, and loyalty than I could pretend to. Then, again, some will pick out the flattest thing of yours they can find, to load it with panegyrics; and others tell you (by way of letting you see how high they rank your capacity), that your best passages are failures. L— has a knack of tasting (or as he would say, palating) the insipid: L. H. has a trick of turning away from the relishing morsels you put on his plate. There is no getting the start of some people. Do what you will, they can do it better; meet with what success you may, their own good opinion stands them in better stead, and runs before the applause of the world. I once shewed a person of this over-weening turn (with no small triumph I confess) a letter of a very flattering description I had received from the celebrated Count Stendhal, dated Rome. He returned it with a smile of indifference, and said, he had had a letter from Rome himself the day before, from his friend S—! I did not think this ‘germane to the matter.’ G—dw—n pretends I never wrote any thing worth a farthing but my answers to Vetus, and that I fail altogether when I attempt to write an essay, or any thing in a short compass.

What can one do in such cases? Shall I confess a weakness? The only set-off I know to these rebuffs and mortifications, is sometimes in an accidental notice or involuntary mark of distinction from a stranger. I feel the force of Horace’s digito monstrari—I like to be pointed out in the street, or to hear people ask in Mr. Powell’s court, which is Mr. H—? This is to me a pleasing extension of one’s personal identity. Your name so repeated leaves an echo like music on the ear: is stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. It shews that other people are curious to see you: that they think of you, and feel an interest in you without your knowing it. This is a bolster to lean upon; a lining to your poor, shivering, thread-bare opinion of yourself. You want some such cordial to exhausted spirits, and relief to the dreariness of abstract speculation. You are something; and, from occupying a place in the thoughts of others, think less contemptuously of yourself. You are the better able to run the gauntlet of prejudice and vulgar abuse. It is pleasant in this way to have your opinion quoted against yourself, and your own sayings repeated to you as good things. I was once talking with an intelligent man in the pit, and criticising Mr. Knight’s performance of Filch. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘little Simmons was the fellow to play that character.’ He added, ‘There was a most excellent remark made upon his acting it in the EXAMINER (I think it was)—That he looked as if he had the gallows in one eye and a pretty girl in the other.’ I said nothing, but was in remarkably good humour the rest of the evening. I have seldom been in a company where fives-playing has been talked of, but some one has asked, in the course of it, ‘Pray did any one ever see an account of one Cavanagh, that appeared some time back in most of the papers? Is it known who wrote it?’ These are trying moments. I had a triumph over a person, whose name I will not mention, on the following occasion. I happened to be saying something about Burke, and was expressing my opinion of his talents in no measured terms, when this gentleman interrupted me by saying, he thought, for his part, that Burke had been greatly overrated, and then added, in a careless way, ‘Pray did you read a character of him in the last number of the — —?’ ‘I wrote it!’—I could not resist the antithesis, but was afterwards ashamed of my momentary petulance. Yet no one, that I find, ever spares me.

Some persons seek out and obtrude themselves on public characters, in order, as it might seem, to pick out their failings, and afterwards betray them. Appearances are for it, but truth and a better knowledge of nature are against this interpretation of the matter. Sycophants and flatterers are undesignedly treacherous and fickle. They are prone to admire inordinately at first, and not finding a constant supply of food for this kind of sickly appetite, take a distaste to the object of their idolatry. To be even with themselves for their credulity, they sharpen their wits to spy out faults, and are delighted to find that this answers better than their first employment. It is a course of study, ‘lively, audible, and full of vent.’ They have the organ of wonder and the organ of fear in a prominent degree. The first requires new objects of admiration to satisfy its uneasy cravings: the second makes them crouch to power wherever its shifting standard appears, and willing to curry favour with all parties, and ready to betray any out of sheer weakness and servility. I do not think they mean any harm. At least, I can look at this obliquity with indifference in my own particular case. I have been more disposed to resent it as I have seen it practised upon others, where I have been better able to judge of the extent of the mischief, and the heartlessness and idiot folly it discovered.

I do not think great intellectual attainments are any recommendation to the women. They puzzle them, and are a diversion to the main question. If scholars talk to ladies of what they understand, their hearers are none the wiser: if they talk of other things, they only prove themselves fools. The conversation between Angelica and Foresight, in Love for Love, is a receipt in full for all such overstrained nonsense: while he is wandering among the signs of the zodiac, she is standing a tip-toe on the earth. It has been remarked that poets do not choose mistresses very wisely. I believe it is not choice, but necessity. If they could throw the handkerchief like the Grand Turk, I imagine we should see scarce mortals, but rather goddesses, surrounding their steps, and each exclaiming, with Lord Byron’s own Ionian maid—

‘So shalt thou find me ever at thy side, Here and hereafter, if the last may be!’

Ah! no, these are bespoke, carried off by men of mortal, not ethereal mould, and thenceforth the poet, from whose mind the ideas of love and beauty are inseparable as dreams from sleep, goes on the forlorn hope of the passion, and dresses up the first Dulcinea that will take compassion on him, in all the colours of fancy. What boots it to complain if the delusion lasts for life, and the rainbow still paints its form in the cloud?

There is one mistake I would wish, if possible, to correct. Men of letters, artists, and others, not succeeding with women in a certain rank of life, think the objection is to their want of fortune, and that they shall stand a better chance by descending lower, where only their good qualities or talents will be thought of. Oh! worse and worse. The objection is to themselves, not to their fortune—to their abstraction, to their absence of mind, to their unintelligible and romantic notions. Women of education may have a glimpse of their meaning, may get a clue to their character, but to all others they are thick darkness. If the mistress smiles at their ideal advances, the maid will laugh outright; she will throw water over you, get her little sister to listen, send her sweetheart to ask you what you mean, will set the village or the house upon your back; it will be a farce, a comedy, a standing jest for a year, and then the murder will out. Scholars should be sworn at Highgate. They are no match for chamber maids, or wenches at lodging-houses. They had better try their hands on heiresses or ladies of quality. These last have high notions of themselves that may fit some of your epithets! They are above mortality, so are your thoughts! But with low life, trick, ignorance, and cunning, you have nothing in common. Whoever you are, that think you can make a compromise or a conquest there by good nature, or good sense, be warned by a friendly voice, and retreat in time from the unequal contest.

If, as I have said above, scholars are no match for chambermaids, on the other hand, gentlemen are no match for blackguards. The former are on their honour, act on the square; the latter take all advantages, and have no idea of any other principle. It is astonishing how soon a fellow without education will learn to cheat. He is impervious to any ray of liberal knowledge; his understanding is

‘Not pierceable by power of any star’—

but it is porous to all sorts of tricks, chicanery, stratagems, and knavery, by which any thing is to be got. Mrs. Peachum, indeed, says, that ‘to succeed at the gaming-table, the candidate should have the education of a nobleman.’ I do not know how far this example contradicts my theory. I think it is a rule that men in business should not be taught other things. Any one will be almost sure to make money who has no other idea in his head. A college-education, or intense study of abstract truth, will not enable a man to drive a bargain, to over-reach another, or even to guard himself from being over-reached. As Shakespear says, that ‘to have a good face is the effect of study, but reading and writing come by nature:’ so it might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man. The best politicians are not those who are deeply grounded in mathematical or in ethical science. Rules stand in the way of expediency. Many a man has been hindered from pushing his fortune in the world by an early cultivation of his moral sense, and has repented of it at leisure during the rest of his life. A shrewd man said of my father, that he would not send a son of his to school to him on any account, for that by teaching him to speak the truth, he would disqualify him from getting his living in the world!

It is hardly necessary to add any illustration to prove that the most original and profound thinkers are not always the most successful or popular writers. This is not merely a temporary disadvantage; but many great philosophers have not only been scouted while they were living, but forgotten as soon as they were dead. The name of Hobbes is perhaps sufficient to explain this assertion. But I do not wish to go farther into this part of the subject, which is obvious in itself. I have said, I believe, enough to take off the air of paradox which hangs over the title of this Essay.

ESSAY XXX ON PATRONAGE AND PUFFING

‘A gentle husher, Vanity by name.’—SPENSER.

A lady was complaining to a friend of mine of the credulity of people in attending to quack advertisements, and wondering who could be taken in by them—‘for that she had never bought but one half-guinea bottle of Dr. ——’s Elixir of Life, and it had done her no sort of good!’ This anecdote seemed to explain pretty well what made it worth the doctor’s while to advertise his wares in every newspaper in the kingdom. He would no doubt be satisfied if every delicate, sceptical invalid, in his majesty’s dominions, gave his Elixir one trial, merely to show the absurdity of the thing. We affect to laugh at the folly of those who put faith in nostrums, but are willing to see ourselves whether there is any truth in them.

There is a strong tendency in the human mind to flatter itself with secret hopes, with some lucky reservation in our own favour, though reason may point out the grossness of the trick in general; and, besides, there is a wonderful power in words, formed into regular propositions, and printed in capital letters, to draw the assent after them, till we have proof of their fallacy. The ignorant and idle believe what they read, as Scotch philosophers demonstrate the existence of a material world, and other learned propositions, from the evidence of their senses. The ocular proof is all that is wanting in either case. As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth. We can hardly believe a thing to be a lie, though we know it to be so. The ‘puff direct,’ even as it stands in the columns of the Times newspaper, branded with the title of Advertisement before it, claims some sort of attention and respect for the merits that it discloses, though we think the candidate for public favour and support has hit upon (perhaps) an injudicious way of laying them before the world. Still there may be something in them; and even the outrageous improbability and extravagance of the statement on the very face of it, stagger us, leave a hankering to inquire farther into it, because we think the advertiser would hardly have the impudence to hazard such barefaced absurdities without some foundation. Such is the strength of the association between words and things in the mind—so much oftener must our credulity have been justified by the event than imposed upon. If every second story we heard was an invention, we should lose our mechanical disposition to trust to the meaning of sounds, just as when we have met with a number of counterfeit pieces of coin, we suspect good ones; but our implicit assent to what we hear is a proof how much more sincerity and good faith there is in the sum total of our dealings with one another, than artifice and imposture.

‘To elevate and surprise’ is the great art of quackery and puffing; to raise a lively and exaggerated image in the mind, and take it by surprise before it can recover breath, as it were; so that by having been caught in the trap, it is unwilling to retract entirely—has a secret desire to find itself in the right, and a determination to see whether it is or not. Describe a picture as lofty, imposing, and grand, these words excite certain ideas in the mind like the sound of a trumpet, which are not to be quelled, except by seeing the picture itself, nor even then if it is viewed by the help of a catalogue, written expressly for the occasion by the artist himself. It is not to be supposed that he would say such things of his picture, unless they were allowed by all the world; and he repeats them, on this gentle understanding, till all the world allows them.[77] So reputation runs in a vicious circle, and merit limps behind it, mortified and abashed at its own insignificance. It has been said that the test of fame or popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by others, or is brought to their recollection in the course of a year. At this rate, a man has his reputation in his own hands, and by the help of puffing and the press, may forestall the voice of posterity, and stun the ‘groundling’ ear of his contemporaries. A name let off in your hearing continually, with some bouncing epithet affixed to it, startles you like the report of a pistol close at your ear: you cannot help the effect upon the imagination, though you know it is perfectly harmless—vox et præterea nihil. So, if you see the same name staring you in the face in great letters, at the corner of every street, you involuntarily think the owner of it must be a great man to occupy so large a space in the eye of the town. The appeal is made, in the first instance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind. There are some, indeed, who publish their own disgrace, and make their names a common by-word and nuisance, notoriety being all that they want. A quack gets himself surreptitiously dubbed Doctor or Knight; and though you may laugh in his face, it pays expenses. Parolles and his drum typify many a modern adventurer, and court-candidate, for unearned laurels and unblushing honours. Of all puffs, lottery-puffs are the most ingenious and most innocent. A collection of them would make an amusing Vade mecum. They are still various and the same, with that infinite ruse with which they lull the reader at the outset out of all suspicion, the insinuating turn in the middle, the home-thrust at the ruling passion at last, by which your spare cash is conjured clean out of the pocket in spite of resolution, by the same stale, well-known, thousandth-time repeated, artifice of All prizes and No blanks—a self-evident imposition! Nothing, however, can be a stronger proof of the power of fascinating the public judgment through the eye alone. I know a gentleman who amassed a considerable fortune (so as to be able to keep his carriage) by printing nothing but lottery placards and hand-bills of a colossal size. Another friend of mine (of no mean talents) was applied to (as a snug thing in the way of business) to write regular lottery-puffs for a large house in the city, and on having a parcel of samples returned on his hands as done in too severe and terse a style, complained quaintly enough, ‘That modest merit never could succeed!’ Even Lord Byron, as he tells us, has been accused of writing lottery-puffs. There are various ways of playing one’s self off before the public, and keeping one’s name alive. The newspapers, the lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one. I have heard of a man of literary celebrity sitting in his study writing letters of remonstrance to himself, on the gross defects of a plan of education he had just published, and which remained unsold on the bookseller’s counter. Another feigned himself dead in order to see what would be said of him in the newspapers, and to excite a sensation in this way. A flashy pamphlet has been run to a five-and-thirtieth edition, and thus ensured the writer a ‘deathless date’ among political charlatans, by regularly striking off a new title-page to every fifty or a hundred copies that were sold. This is a vile practice. It is an erroneous idea got abroad (and which I will contradict here) that paragraphs are paid for in the leading Journals. It is quite out of the question. A favourable notice of an author, an actress, &c. may be inserted through interest or to oblige a friend, but it must invariably be done for love, not money!

When I formerly had to do with these sort of critical verdicts, I was generally sent out of the way when any debutant had a friend at court, and was to be tenderly handled. For the rest, or those of robust constitutions, I had carte blanche given me. Sometimes I ran out of the course, to be sure. Poor Perry! what bitter complaints he used to make, that by running-a-muck at lords and Scotchmen I should not leave him a place to dine out at! The expression of his face at these moments, as if he should shortly be without a friend in the world, was truly pitiable. What squabbles we used to have about Kean and Miss Stephens, the only theatrical favourites I ever had! Mrs. Billington had got some notion that Miss Stephens would never make a singer, and it was the torment of Perry’s life (as he told me in confidence) that he could not get any two people to be of the same opinion on any one point. I shall not easily forget bringing him my account of her first appearance in the Beggar’s Opera. I have reason to remember that article: it was almost the last I ever wrote with any pleasure to myself. I had been down on a visit to my friends near Chertsey, and, on my return, had stopped at an inn at Kingston-upon-Thames, where I had got the Beggar’s Opera, and had read it over-night. The next day I walked cheerfully to town. It was a fine sunny morning, in the end of autumn, and as I repeated the beautiful song, ‘Life knows no return of spring,’ I meditated my next day’s criticism, trying to do all the justice I could to so inviting a subject. I was not a little proud of it by anticipation. I had just then begun to stammer out my sentiments on paper, and was in a kind of honey-moon of authorship. But soon after, my final hopes of happiness, and of human liberty, were blighted nearly at the same time; and since then I have had no pleasure in any thing:—

‘And Love himself can flatter me no more.’

It was not so ten years since (ten short years since.—Ah! how fast those years run that hurry us away from our last fond dream of bliss!) when I loitered along thy green retreats, oh! Twickenham, and conned over (with enthusiastic delight) the chequered view, which one of thy favourites drew of human life! I deposited my account of the play at the Morning Chronicle Office in the afternoon, and went to see Miss Stephens as Polly. Those were happy times, in which she first came out in this character, in Mandane, where she sang the delicious air, ‘If o’er the cruel tyrant, Love,’ (so as it can never be sung again), in Love in a Village, where the scene opened with her and Miss Matthews in a painted garden of roses and honeysuckles, and ‘Hope, thou nurse of young Desire,’ thrilled from two sweet voices in turn. Oh! may my ears sometimes still drink the same sweet sounds, embalmed with the spirit of youth, of health, and joy, but in the thoughts of an instant, but in a dream of fancy, and I shall hardly need to complain! When I got back, after the play, Perry called out, with his cordial, grating voice, ‘Well, how did she do?’ and on my speaking in high terms, answered, that ‘he had been to dine with his friend the Duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject, he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the true sostenuto style; but as I had written the article’ (holding my peroration on the Beggar’s Opera carelessly in his hand) ‘it might pass!’ I could perceive that the rogue licked his lips at it, and had already in imagination ‘bought golden opinions of all sorts of people’ by this very criticism, and I had the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens coming out of the Editor’s room, who had been to thank him for his very flattering account of her.

I was sent to see Kean the first night of his performance in Shylock, when there were about a hundred people in the pit, but from his masterly and spirited delivery of the first striking speech, ‘On such a day you called me dog,’ &c. I perceived it was a hollow thing. So it was given out in the Chronicle, but Perry was continually at me as other people were at him, and was afraid it would not last. It was to no purpose I said it would last: yet I am in the right hitherto. It has been said, ridiculously, that Mr. Kean was written up in the Chronicle. I beg leave to state my opinion that no actor can be written up or down by a paper. An author may be puffed into notice, or damned by criticism, because his book may not have been read. An artist may be overrated, or undeservedly decried, because the public is not much accustomed to see or judge of pictures. But an actor is judged by his peers, the play-going public, and must stand or fall by his own merits or defects. The critic may give the tone or have a casting voice where popular opinion is divided; but he can no more force that opinion either way, or wrest it from its base in common-sense and feeling, than he can move Stonehenge. Mr. Kean had, however, physical disadvantages and strong prejudices to encounter, and so far the liberal and independent part of the press might have been of service in helping him to his seat in the public favour. May he long keep it with dignity and firmness![78]

It was pretended by the Covent-garden people, and some others at the time, that Mr. Kean’s popularity was a mere effect of love of novelty, a nine days’ wonder, like the rage after Master Betty’s acting, and would be as soon over. The comparison did not hold. Master Betty’s acting was so far wonderful, and drew crowds to see it as a mere singularity, because he was a boy. Mr. Kean was a grown man, and there was no rule or precedent established in the ordinary course of nature why some other man should not appear in tragedy as great as John Kemble. Farther, Master Betty’s acting was a singular phenomenon, but it was also as beautiful as it was singular. I saw him in the part of Douglas, and he seemed almost like ‘some gay creature of the element,’ moving about gracefully, with all the flexibility of youth, and murmuring Æolian sounds with plaintive tenderness. I shall never forget the way in which he repeated the line in which Young Norval says, speaking of the fate of two brothers:

‘And in my mind happy was he that died!’

The tones fell and seemed to linger prophetic on my ear. Perhaps the wonder was made greater than it was. Boys at that age can often read remarkably well, and certainly are not without natural grace and sweetness of voice. The Westminster school-boys are a better company of comedians than we find at most of our theatres. As to the understanding a part like Douglas, at least, I see no difficulty on that score. I myself used to recite the speech in Enfield’s Speaker with good emphasis and discretion when at school, and entered, about the same age, into the wild sweetness of the sentiments in Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, I am sure, quite as much as I should do now. Yet the same experiment has been often tried since, and has uniformly failed.[79]

It was soon after this that Coleridge returned from Italy, and he got one day into a long tirade to explain what a ridiculous farce the whole was, and how all the people abroad were shocked at the gullibility of the English nation, who on this and every other occasion were open to the artifices of all sorts of quacks, wondering how any persons with the smallest pretensions to common sense could for a moment suppose that a boy could act the characters of men without any of their knowledge, their experience, or their passions. We made some faint resistance, but in vain. The discourse then took a turn, and Coleridge began a laboured eulogy on some promising youth, the son of an English artist, whom he had met in Italy, and who had wandered all over the Campagna with him, whose talents, he assured us, were the admiration of all Rome, and whose early designs had almost all the grace and purity of Raphael’s. At last, some one interrupted the endless theme by saying a little impatiently, ‘Why just now you would not let us believe our own eyes and ears about young Betty, because you have a theory against premature talents, and now you start a boy phenomenon, that nobody knows any thing about but yourself—a young artist that, you tell us, is to rival Raphael!’ The truth is, we like to have something to admire ourselves, as well as to make other people gape and stare at; but then it must be a discovery of our own, an idol of our own making and setting up:—if others stumble on the discovery before us, or join in crying it up to the skies, we then set to work to prove that this is a vulgar delusion, and show our sagacity and freedom from prejudice by pulling it in pieces with all the coolness imaginable. Whether we blow the bubble or crush it in our hands, vanity and the desire of empty distinction are equally at the bottom of our sanguine credulity or fastidious scepticism. There are some who always fall in with the fashionable prejudice as others affect singularity of opinion on all such points, according as they think they have more or less wit to judge for themselves.

If a little varnishing and daubing, a little puffing and quacking, and giving yourself a good name, and getting a friend to speak a word for you, is excusable in any profession, it is, I think, in that of painting. Painting is an occult science, and requires a little ostentation and mock-gravity in the professor. A man may here rival Katterfelto, ‘with his hair on end at his own wonders, wondering for his bread;’ for, if he does not, he may in the end go without it. He may ride on a high trotting horse, in green spectacles, and attract notice to his person any how he can, if he only works hard at his profession. If ‘it only is when he is out he is acting,’ let him make the fools stare, but give others something worth looking at. Good Mr. Carver and Gilder, good Mr. Printer’s Devil, good Mr. Bill-sticker, ‘do me your offices’ unmolested! Painting is a plain ground, and requires a great many heraldic quarterings and facings to set it off. Lay on, and do not spare. No man’s merit can be fairly judged of, if he is not known; and how can he be known, if he keeps entirely in the back ground?[80] A great name in art goes but a little way, is chilled as it creeps along the surface of the world, without something to revive and make it blaze out with fresh splendor. Fame is here almost obscurity. It is long before your name affixed to a sterling design will be spelt out by an undiscerning, regardless public. Have it proclaimed, therefore, as a necessary precaution, by sound of trumpet at the corners of the street, let it be stuck as a label in your mouth, carry it on a placard at your back. Otherwise, the world will never trouble themselves about you, or will very soon forget you. A celebrated artist of the present day, whose name is engraved at the bottom of some of the most touching specimens of English art, once had a frame-maker call on him, who, on entering his room, exclaimed with some surprise, ‘What, are you a painter, sir?’ The other made answer, a little startled in his turn, ‘Why, didn’t you know that? Did you never see my name at the bottom of prints?’ He could not recollect that he had. ‘And yet you sell picture-frames and prints?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What painters’ names then did he recollect: Did he know West’s?’ ‘Oh! yes.’ ‘And Opie’s?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And Fuseli’s?’ ‘Oh! yes.’ ‘But you never heard of me?’ ‘I cannot say that I ever did!’ It was plain, from this conversation, that Mr. N— had not kept company enough with picture-dealers and newspaper critics. On another occasion, a country-gentleman, who was sitting to him for his portrait, asked him if he had any pictures in the Exhibition at Somerset-house, and on his replying in the affirmative, desired to know what they were. He mentioned among others, ‘The Marriage of Two Children;’ on which the gentleman expressed great surprise, and said that was the very picture his wife was always teasing him to go and have another look at, though he had never noticed the painter’s name. When the public are so eager to be amused, and care so little who it is that amuses them, it is not amiss to remind them of it now and then; or even to have a starling taught to repeat the name, to which they owe such misprized obligations, in their drowsy ears. On any other principle, I cannot conceive how painters (not without genius or industry) can fling themselves at the head of the public in the manner they do, having lives written of themselves, busts made of themselves, prints stuck in the shop-windows of themselves, and their names placed in ‘the first row of the rubric,’ with those of Rubens, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, swearing by themselves or their proxies that these glorified spirits would do well to leave the abodes of the blest in order to stand in mute wonder and with uplifted hands before some production of theirs, which is yet hardly dry! Oh! whatever you do, leave that string untouched. It will jar the rash and unhallowed hand that meddles with it. Profane not the mighty dead by mixing them up with the uncanonized living. Leave yourself a reversion in immortality, beyond the noisy clamour of the day. Do not quite lose your respect for public opinion by making it in all cases a palpable cheat, the echo of your own lungs that are hoarse with calling on the world to admire. Do not think to bully posterity, or to cozen your contemporaries. Be not always anticipating the effect of your picture on the town—think more about deserving success than commanding it. In issuing so many promissory notes upon the bank of fame, do not forget you have to pay in sterling gold. Believe that there is something in the pursuit of high art, beyond the manufacture of a paragraph or the collection of receipts at the door of an exhibition. Venerate art as art. Study the works of others, and inquire into those of nature. Gaze at beauty. Become great by great efforts, and not by pompous pretensions. Do not think the world was blind to merit before your time, nor make the reputation of great geniuses the stalking horse to your vanity. You have done enough to insure yourself attention: you have now only to do something to deserve it, and to make good all that you have aspired to do!

There is a silent and systematic assumption of superiority which is as barefaced and unprincipled an imposture as the most impudent puffing. You may, by a tacit or avowed censure on all other arts, on all works of art, on all other pretensions, tastes, talents, but your own, produce a complete ostracism in the world of intellect, and leave yourself and your own performances alone standing, a mighty monument in an universal waste and wreck of genius. By cutting away the rude block and removing the rubbish from around it, the idol may be effectually exposed to view, placed on its pedestal of pride, without any other assistance. This method is more inexcusable than the other. For there is no egotism or vanity so hateful as that which strikes at our satisfaction in every thing else, and derives its nourishment from preying, like the vampyre, on the carcase of others’ reputation. I would rather, in a word, that a man should talk for ever of himself with vapid senseless assurance, than preserve a malignant, heartless silence, when the merit of a rival is mentioned. I have seen instances of both, and can judge pretty well between them.

There is no great harm in putting forward one’s own pretensions (of whatever kind) if this does not bear a sour, malignant aspect towards others. Every one sets himself off to the best advantage he can, and tries to steal a march upon public opinion. In this sense, too, ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’ Life itself is a piece of harmless quackery. A great house over your head is of no use but to announce the great man within. Dress, equipage, title, livery-servants, are only so many quack advertisements and assumptions of the question of merit. The star that glitters at the breast would be worth nothing but as a badge of personal distinction; and the crown itself is but a symbol of the virtues, which the possessor inherits from a long line of illustrious ancestors! How much honour and honesty have been forfeited to be graced with a title or a ribbon; how much genius and worth have sunk to the grave, without an escutcheon and without an epitaph!

As men of rank and fortune keep lacqueys to reinforce their claims to self-respect, so men of genius sometimes surround themselves with a coterie of admirers to increase their reputation with the public. These proneurs, or satellites, repeat all their good things, laugh loud at all their jokes, and remember all their oracular decrees. They are their shadows and echoes. They talk of them in all companies, and bring back word of all that has been said about them. They hawk the good qualities of their patrons, as shopmen and barkers tease you to buy goods. I have no notion of this vanity at second-hand; nor can I see how this servile testimony from inferiors (‘some followers of mine own’) can be a proof of merit. It may soothe the ear; but that it should impose on the understanding, I own surprises me: yet there are persons who cannot exist without a cortege of this kind about them, in which they smiling read the opinion of the world, in the midst of all sorts of rancorous abuse and hostility, as Otho called for his mirror in the Illyrian field. One good thing is, that this evil, in some degree, cures itself; and when a man has been nearly ruined by a herd of these sycophants, he finds them leaving him, like thriftless dependents for some more eligible situation, carrying away with them all the tattle they can pick up, and some left-off suit of finery. The same proneness to adulation which made them lick the dust before one idol, makes them bow as low to the rising Sun; they are as lavish of detraction as they were prurient with praise; and the protegé and admirer of the editor of the — figures in Blackwood’s train. The man is a lacquey, and it is of little consequence whose livery he wears!

I would advise those who volunteer the office of puffing, to go the whole length of it. No half-measures will do. Lay it on thick and three-fold, or not at all. If you are once harnessed into that vehicle, it will be in vain for you to think of stopping. You must drive to the devil at once. The mighty Tamburlaine, to whose car you are yoked, cries out,

‘Holloa, you pamper’d jades of Asia, Can you not drive but twenty miles a day?’

He has you on the hip, for you have pledged your taste and judgment to his genius. Never fear but he will drive this wedge. If you are once screwed into such a machine, you must extricate yourself by main force. No hyperboles are too much: any drawback, any admiration on this side idolatry, is high treason. It is an unpardonable offence to say that the last production of your patron is not so good as the one before it; or that a performer shines more in one character than another. I remember once hearing a player declare that he never looked into any newspapers or magazines on account of the abuse that was always levelled at himself in them, though there were not less than three persons in company, who made it their business through these conduit pipes of fame to ‘cry him up to the top of the compass.’ This sort of expectation is a little exigeante!

One fashionable mode of acquiring reputation is by patronising it. This may be from various motives, real good nature, good taste, vanity, or pride. I shall only speak of the spurious ones in this place. The quack and the would-be patron are well met. The house of the latter is a sort of curiosity-shop or menagerie, where all sort of intellectual pretenders and grotesques, musical children, arithmetical prodigies, occult philosophers, lecturers, accoucheurs, apes, chemists, fiddlers, and buffoons are to be seen for the asking, and are shown to the company for nothing. The folding-doors are thrown open, and display a collection that the world cannot parallel again. There may be a few persons of common sense and established reputation, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, otherwise it is a mere scramble or lottery. The professed encourager of virtù and letters, being disappointed of the great names, sends out into the highways for the halt, the lame, and the blind, for all who pretend to distinction, defects, and obliquities, for all the disposable vanity or affectation floating on the town, in hopes that, among so many oddities, chance may bring some jewel or treasure to his door, which he may have the good fortune to appropriate in some way to his own use, or the credit of displaying to others. The art is to encourage rising genius—to bring forward doubtful and unnoticed merit. You thus get a set of novices and raw pretenders about you, whose actual productions do not interfere with your self-love, and whose future efforts may reflect credit on your singular sagacity and faculty for finding out talent in the germ; and in the next place, by having them completely in your power, you are at liberty to dismiss them whenever you will, and to supply the deficiency by a new set of wondering, unwashed faces, in a rapid succession; an ‘aiery of children,’ embryo actors, artists, poets, or philosophers. Like unfledged birds they are hatched, nursed, and fed by hand; this gives room for a vast deal of management, meddling, care, and condescending solicitude, but the instant the callow brood are fledged, they are driven from the nest, and forced to shift for themselves in the wide world. One sterling production decides the question between them and their patrons, and from that time they become the property of the public. Thus a succession of importunate, hungry, idle, over-weening candidates for fame, are encouraged by these fickle keepers, only to be betrayed, and left to starve or beg, or pine in obscurity, while the man of merit and respectability is neglected, discountenanced, and stigmatised, because he will not lend himself as a tool to this system of splendid imposition, or pamper the luxury and weaknesses of the Vulgar Great. When a young artist is too independent to subscribe to the dogmas of his superiors, or fulfils their predictions and prognostics of wonderful contingent talent too soon, so as to get out of leading strings, and lean on public opinion for partial support, exceptions are taken to his dress, dialect, or manners, and he is expelled the circle with a character for ingratitude and treachery. None can procure toleration long but those who do not contradict the opinions, or excite the jealousy of their betters. One independent step is an appeal from them to the public, their natural and hated rivals, and annuls the contract between them, which implies ostentatious countenance on the one part, and servile submission on the other. But enough of this.

The patronage of men of talent, even when it proceeds from vanity, is often carried on with a spirit of generosity and magnificence, as long as these are in difficulties and a state of dependence: but as the principle of action in this case is a love of power, the complacency in the object of friendly regard ceases with the opportunity or necessity for the same manifest display of power; and when the unfortunate protegé is just coming to land, and expects a last helping hand, he is, to his surprise, pushed back, in order that he may be saved from drowning once more. You are not hailed ashore, as you had supposed, by these kind friends, as a mutual triumph after all your struggles and their exertions in your behalf. It is a piece of presumption in you to be seen walking on terra-firma: you are required, at the risk of their friendship, to be always swimming in troubled waters, that they may have the credit of throwing out ropes, and sending out life-boats to you, without ever bringing you ashore. Your successes, your reputation, which you think would please them, as justifying their good opinion, are coldly received, and looked at askance, because they remove your dependence on them: if you are under a cloud, they do all they can to keep you there by their good-will: they are so sensible of your gratitude that they wish your obligations never to cease, and take care you shall owe no one else a good turn; and provided you are compelled or contented to remain always in poverty, obscurity, and disgrace, they will continue your very good friends and humble servants to command, to the end of the chapter. The tenure of these indentures is hard. Such persons will wilfully forfeit the gratitude created by years of friendship, by refusing to perform the last act of kindness that is likely ever to be demanded of them: will lend you money, if you have no chance of repaying them; will give you their good word, if nobody will believe it; and the only thing they do not forgive is an attempt or probability on your part, of being able to repay your obligations. There is something disinterested in all this: at least, it does not show a cowardly or mercenary disposition, but it savours too much of arrogance and arbitrary pretension. It throws a damning light on this question to consider who are mostly the subjects of the patronage of the great, and in the habit of receiving cards of invitation to splendid dinners. I confess, for one, I am not on the list; at which I do not grieve much, nor wonder at all. Authors, in general, are not in much request. Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not more frequently invited out; and he said, ‘Because great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths stopped.’ Garrick was not in this predicament: he could amuse the company in the drawing-room by imitating the great moralist and lexicographer, and make the negro boy, in the court-yard, die with laughing to see him take off the swelling airs and strut of the turkey-cock. This was clever and amusing, but it did not involve an opinion, it did not lead to a difference of sentiment, in which the owner of the house might be found in the wrong. Players, singers, dancers, are hand and glove with the great. They embellish, and have an eclat in their names, but do not come into collision. Eminent portrait-painters, again, are tolerated, because they come into personal contact with the great: and sculptors hold equality with lords when they have a certain quantity of solid marble in their workshops to answer for the solidity of their pretensions. People of fashion and property must have something to show for their patronage, something visible or tangible. A sentiment is a visionary thing; an argument may lead to dangerous consequences, and those who are likely to broach either one or the other, are not, therefore, fit for good company in general. Poets, and men of genius, who find their way there, soon find their way out. They are not of that ilk, with some exceptions. Painters who come in contact with majesty get on by servility or buffoonery, by letting themselves down in some way. Sir Joshua was never a favourite at court. He kept too much at a distance. Beechey gained a vast deal of favour by familiarity, and lost it by taking too great freedoms.[81] West ingratiated himself in the same quarter by means of practices as little creditable to himself as his august employer, namely, by playing the hypocrite, and professing sentiments the reverse of those he naturally felt. Kings (I know not how justly) have been said to be lovers of low company, and low conversation. They are also said to be fond of dirty practical jokes. If the fact is so, the reason is as follows. From the elevation of their rank, aided by pride and flattery, they look down on the rest of mankind, and would not be thought to have all their advantages for nothing. They wish to maintain the same precedence in private life that belongs to them as a matter of outward ceremony. This pretension they cannot keep up by fair means; for in wit or argument they are not superior to the common run of men. They therefore answer a repartee by a practical joke, which turns the laugh against others, and cannot be retaliated with safety. This is, they avail themselves of the privilege of their situation to take liberties, and degrade those about them, as they can only keep up the idea of their own dignity by proportionably lowering their company.

ESSAY XXXI ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER

It is astonishing, with all our opportunities and practice, how little we know of this subject. For myself, I feel that the more I learn, the less I understand it.

I remember, several years ago, a conversation in the Diligence coming from Paris, in which, on its being mentioned that a man had married his wife after thirteen years’ courtship, a fellow-countryman of mine observed, that ‘then, at least, he would be acquainted with her character;’ when a Monsieur P—, inventor and proprietor of the Invisible Girl, made answer, ‘No, not at all; for that the very next day she might turn out the very reverse of the character that she had appeared in during all the preceding time.’[82] I could not help admiring the superior sagacity of the French juggler, and it struck me then that we could never be sure when we had got at the bottom of this riddle.

There are various ways of getting at a knowledge of character—by looks, words, actions. The first of these, which seems the most superficial, is perhaps the safest, and least liable to deceive: nay, it is that which mankind, in spite of their pretending to the contrary, most generally go by. Professions pass for nothing, and actions may be counterfeited: but a man cannot help his looks. ‘Speech,’ said a celebrated wit, ‘was given to man to conceal his thoughts.’ Yet I do not know that the greatest hypocrites are the least silent. The mouth of Cromwell is pursed up in the portraits of him, as if he was afraid to trust himself with words. Lord Chesterfield advises us, if we wish to know the real sentiments of the person we are conversing with, to look in his face, for he can more easily command his words than his features. A man’s whole life may be a lie to himself and others: and yet a picture painted of him by a great artist would probably stamp his true character on the canvas, and betray the secret to posterity. Men’s opinions were divided, in their life-times, about such prominent personages as Charles V. and Ignatius Loyola, partly, no doubt, from passion and interest, but partly from contradictory evidence in their ostensible conduct: the spectator, who has ever seen their pictures by Titian, judges of them at once, and truly. I had rather leave a good portrait of myself behind me than have a fine epitaph. The face, for the most part, tells what we have thought and felt—the rest is nothing. I have a higher idea of Donne from a rude, half-effaced outline of him prefixed to his poems than from any thing he ever wrote. Cæsar’s Commentaries would not have redeemed him in my opinion, if the bust of him had resembled the Duke of —. My old friend, Fawcett, used to say, that if Sir Isaac Newton himself had lisped, he could not have thought any thing of him. So I cannot persuade myself that any one is a great man, who looks like a fool. In this I may be wrong.

First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions. A man’s look is the work of years, it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily. There is, as it has been remarked repeatedly, something in a person’s appearance at first sight which we do not like, and that gives us an odd twinge, but which is overlooked in a multiplicity of other circumstances, till the mask is taken off, and we see this lurking character verified in the plainest manner in the sequel. We are struck at first, and by chance, with what is peculiar and characteristic; also with permanent traits and general effect: this afterwards goes off in a set of unmeaning, common-place details. This sort of prima facie evidence then, shows what a man is, better than what he says or does; for it shows us the habit of his mind, which is the same under all circumstances and disguises. You will say, on the other hand, that there is no judging by appearances, as a general rule. No one, for instance, would take such a person for a very clever man, without knowing who he was. Then, ten to one, he is not; he may have got the reputation, but it is a mistake. You say, there is Mr. —, undoubtedly a person of great genius: yet, except when excited by something extraordinary, he seems half dead. He has wit at will, yet wants life and spirit. He is capable of the most generous acts, yet meanness seems to cling to every motion. He looks like a poor creature—and in truth he is one! The first impression he gives you of him answers nearly to the feeling he has of his personal identity; and this image of himself, rising from his thoughts, and shrouding his faculties, is that which sits with him in the house, walks out with him into the street, and haunts his bed-side. The best part of his existence is dull, cloudy, leaden: the flashes of light that proceed from it, or streak it here and there, may dazzle others, but do not deceive himself. Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others. Whatever good properties he may possess are, in fact, neutralised by a ‘cold rheum’ running through his veins, and taking away the zest of his pretensions, the pith and marrow of his performances. What is it to me that I can write these TABLE-TALKS? It is true I can, by a reluctant effort, rake up a parcel of half-forgotten observations, but they do not float on the surface of my mind, nor stir it with any sense of pleasure, nor even of pride. Others have more property in them than I have: they may reap the benefit, I have only had the pain. Otherwise, they are to me as if they had never existed: nor should I know that I had ever thought at all, but that I am reminded of it by the strangeness of my appearance, and my unfitness for every thing else. Look in C—’s face while he is talking. His words are such as might ‘create a soul under the ribs of death.’ His face is a blank. Which are we to consider as the true index of his mind? Pain, languor, shadowy remembrances, are the uneasy inmates there: his lips move mechanically!

There are people that we do not like, though we may have known them long, and have no fault to find with them, ‘their appearance, as we say, is so much against them.’ That is not all, if we could find it out. There is, generally, a reason for this prejudice; for nature is true to itself. They may be very good sort of people, too, in their way, but still something is the matter. There is a coldness, a selfishness, a levity, an insincerity, which we cannot fix upon any particular phrase or action, but we see it in their whole persons and deportment. One reason that we do not see it in any other way may be, that they are all the time trying to conceal this defect by every means in their power. There is, luckily, a sort of second sight in morals: we discern the lurking indications of temper and habit a long while before their palpable effects appear. I once used to meet with a person at an ordinary, a very civil, good-looking man in other respects, but with an odd look about his eyes, which I could not explain, as if he saw you under their fringed lids, and you could not see him again: this man was a common sharper. The greatest hypocrite I ever knew was a little, demure, pretty, modest-looking girl, with eyes timidly cast upon the ground, and an air soft as enchantment; the only circumstance that could lead to a suspicion of her true character was a cold, sullen, watery, glazed look about the eyes, which she bent on vacancy, as if determined to avoid all explanation with yours. I might have spied in their glittering, motionless surface, the rocks and quicksands that awaited me below! We do not feel quite at ease in the company or friendship of those who have any natural obliquity or imperfection of person. The reason is, they are not on the best terms with themselves, and are sometimes apt to play off on others the tricks that nature has played them. This, however, is a remark that, perhaps, ought not to have been made. I know a person to whom it has been objected as a disqualification for friendship, that he never shakes you cordially by the hand. I own this is a damper to sanguine and florid temperaments, who abound in these practical demonstrations and ‘compliments extern.’ The same person, who testifies the least pleasure at meeting you, is the last to quit his seat in your company, grapples with a subject in conversation right earnestly, and is, I take it, backward to give up a cause or a friend. Cold and distant in appearance, he piques himself on being the king of good haters, and a no less zealous partisan. The most phlegmatic constitutions often contain the most inflammable spirits—as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

And this is another reason that makes it difficult to judge of character. Extremes meet; and qualities display themselves by the most contradictory appearances. Any inclination, in consequence of being generally suppressed, vents itself the more violently when an opportunity presents itself: the greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief, one to the other; and we find the most reserved and indifferent tempers at the beginning of an entertainment, or an acquaintance, turn out the most communicative and cordial at the end of it. Some spirits exhaust themselves at first: others gain strength by progression. Some minds have a greater facility of throwing off impressions, are, as it were, more transparent or porous than others. Thus the French present a marked contrast to the English in this respect. A Frenchman addresses you at once with a sort of lively indifference: an Englishman is more on his guard, feels his way, and is either exceedingly reserved, or lets you into his whole confidence, which he cannot so well impart to an entire stranger. Again, a Frenchman is naturally humane: an Englishman is, I should say, only friendly by habit. His virtues and his vices cost him more than they do his more gay and volatile neighbours. An Englishman is said to speak his mind more plainly than others:—yes, if it will give you pain to hear it. He does not care whom he offends by his discourse: a foreigner generally strives to oblige in what he says. The French are accused of promising more than they perform. That may be, and yet they may perform as many good-natured acts as the English, if the latter are as averse to perform as they are to promise. Even the professions of the French may be sincere at the time, or arise out of the impulse of the moment; though their desire to serve you may be neither very violent nor very lasting. I cannot think, notwithstanding, that the French are not a serious people; nay, that they are not a more reflecting people than the common run of the English. Let those who think them merely light and mercurial, explain that enigma, their everlasting prosing tragedy. The English are considered as comparatively a slow, plodding people. If the French are quicker, they are also more plodding. See, for example, how highly finished and elaborate their works of art are! How systematic and correct they aim at being in all their productions of a graver cast! ‘If the French have a fault,’ as Yorick said, ‘it is that they are too grave.’ With wit, sense, cheerfulness, patience, good-nature and refinement of manners, all they want is imagination and sturdiness of moral principle! Such are some of the contradictions in the character of the two nations, and so little does the character of either appear to have been understood! Nothing can be more ridiculous indeed than the way in which we exaggerate each other’s vices and extenuate our own. The whole is an affair of prejudice on one side of the question, and of partiality on the other. Travellers who set out to carry back a true report of the case appear to lose not only the use of their understandings, but of their senses, the instant they set foot in a foreign land. The commonest facts and appearances are distorted, and discoloured. They go abroad with certain preconceived notions on the subject, and they make every thing answer, in reason’s spite, to their favourite theory. In addition to the difficulty of explaining customs and manners foreign to our own, there are all the obstacles of wilful prepossession thrown in the way. It is not, therefore, much to be wondered at that nations have arrived at so little knowledge of one another’s characters; and that, where the object has been to widen the breach between them, any slight differences that occur are easily blown into a blaze of fury by repeated misrepresentations, and all the exaggerations that malice or folly can invent!

This ignorance of character is not confined to foreign nations: we are ignorant of that of our own countrymen in a class a little below or above ourselves. We shall hardly pretend to pronounce magisterially on the good or bad qualities of strangers; and, at the same time, we are ignorant of those of our friends, of our kindred, and of our own. We are in all these cases either too near or too far off the object to judge of it properly.

Persons, for instance, in a higher or middle rank of life know little or nothing of the characters of those below them, as servants, country people, &c. I would lay it down in the first place as a general rule on this subject, that all uneducated people are hypocrites. Their sole business is to deceive. They conceive themselves in a state of hostility with others, and stratagems are fair in war. The inmates of the kitchen and the parlour are always (as far as respects their feeling and intentions towards each other) in Hobbes’s ‘state of nature.’ Servants and others in that line of life have nothing to exercise their spare talents for invention upon but those about them. Their superfluous electrical particles of wit and fancy are not carried off by those established and fashionable conductors, novels and romances. Their faculties are not buried in books, but all alive and stirring, erect and bristling like a cat’s back. Their coarse conversation sparkles with ‘wild wit, invention ever new.’ Their betters try all they can to set themselves up above them, and they try all they can to pull them down to their own level. They do this by getting up a little comic interlude, a daily, domestic, homely drama out of the odds and ends of the family failings, of which there is in general a pretty plentiful supply, or make up the deficiency of materials out of their own heads. They turn the qualities of their masters and mistresses inside out, and any real kindness or condescension only sets them the more against you. They are not to be taken in in that way—they will not be baulked in the spite they have to you. They only set to work with redoubled alacrity, to lessen the favour or to blacken your character. They feel themselves like a degraded caste, and cannot understand how the obligations can be all on one side, and the advantages all on the other. You cannot come to equal terms with them—they reject all such overtures as insidious and hollow—nor can you ever calculate upon their gratitude or good-will, any more than if they were so many strolling Gipsies or wild Indians. They have no fellow-feeling, they keep no faith with the more privileged classes. They are in your power, and they endeavour to be even with you by trick and cunning, by lying and chicanery. In this they have nothing to restrain them. Their whole life is a succession of shifts, excuses, and expedients. The love of truth is a principle with those only who have made it their study, who have applied themselves to the pursuit of some art or science, where the intellect is severely tasked, and learns by habit to take a pride in, and to set a just value on, the correctness of its conclusions. To have a disinterested regard to truth, the mind must have contemplated it in abstract and remote questions; whereas the ignorant and vulgar are only conversant with those things in which their own interest is concerned. All their notions are local, personal, and consequently gross and selfish. They say whatever comes uppermost—turn whatever happens to their own account—and invent any story, or give any answer that suits their purposes. Instead of being bigoted to general principles, they trump up any lie for the occasion, and the more of a thumper it is, the better they like it; the more unlooked-for it is, why, so much the more of a God-send! They have no conscience about the matter; and if you find them out in any of their manœuvres, are not ashamed of themselves, but angry with you. If you remonstrate with them, they laugh in your face. The only hold you have of them is their interest—you can but dismiss them from your employment; and service is no inheritance. If they affect any thing like decent remorse, and hope you will pass it over, all the while they are probably trying to recover the wind of you. Persons of liberal knowledge or sentiments have no kind of chance in this sort of mixed intercourse with these barbarians in civilised life. You cannot tell, by any signs or principles, what is passing in their minds. There is no common point of view between you. You have not the same topics to refer to, the same language to express yourself. Your interests, your feelings are quite distinct. You take certain things for granted as rules of action: they take nothing for granted but their own ends, pick up all their knowledge out of their own occasions, are on the watch only for what they can catch—are

‘Subtle as the fox for prey: Like warlike as the wolf, for what they eat.’

They have indeed a regard to their character, as this last may affect their livelihood or advancement, none as it is connected with a sense of propriety; and this sets their mother-wit and native talents at work upon a double file of expedients, to bilk their consciences, and salve their reputation. In short, you never know where to have them, any more than if they were of a different species of animals; and in trusting to them, you are sure to be betrayed and over-reached. You have other things to mind, they are thinking only of you, and how to turn you to advantage. Give and take is no maxim here. You can build nothing on your own moderation or on their false delicacy. After a familiar conversation with a waiter at a tavern, you overhear him calling you by some provoking nickname. If you make a present to the daughter of the house where you lodge, the mother is sure to recollect some addition to her bill. It is a running fight. In fact, there is a principle in human nature not willingly to endure the idea of a superior, a sour jacobinical disposition to wipe out the score of obligation, or efface the tinsel of external advantages—and where others have the opportunity of coming in contact with us, they generally find the means to establish a sufficiently marked degree of degrading equality. No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, is an old maxim. A new illustration of this principle occurred the other day. While Mrs. Siddons was giving her readings of Shakespear to a brilliant and admiring drawing-room, one of the servants in the hall below was saying, ‘What, I find the old lady is making as much noise as ever!’ So little is there in common between the different classes of society, and so impossible is it ever to unite the diversities of custom and knowledge which separate them.

Women, according to Mrs. Peachum, are ‘bitter bad judges’ of the characters of men; and men are not much better of theirs, if we can form any guess from their choice in marriage. Love is proverbially blind. The whole is an affair of whim and fancy. Certain it is, that the greatest favourites with the other sex are not those who are most liked or respected among their own. I never knew but one clever man who was what is called a lady’s man; and he (unfortunately for the argument) happened to be a considerable coxcomb. It was by this irresistible quality, and not by the force of his genius, that he vanquished. Women seem to doubt their own judgments in love, and to take the opinion which a man entertains of his own prowess and accomplishments for granted. The wives of poets are (for the most part) mere pieces of furniture in the room. If you speak to them of their husbands’ talents or reputation in the world, it is as if you made mention of some office that they held. It can hardly be otherwise, when the instant any subject is started or conversation arises, in which men are interested, or try one another’s strength, the women leave the room, or attend to something else. The qualities then in which men are ambitious to excel, and which ensure the applause of the world, eloquence, genius, learning, integrity, are not those which gain the favour of the fair. I must not deny, however, that wit and courage have this effect. Neither is youth or beauty the sole passport to their affections.

‘The way of woman’s will is hard to find, Harder to hit.’

Yet there is some clue to this mystery, some determining cause; for we find that the same men are universal favourites with women, as others are uniformly disliked by them. Is not the loadstone that attracts so powerfully, and in all circumstances, a strong and undisguised bias towards them, a marked attention, a conscious preference of them to every other passing object or topic? I am not sure, but I incline to think so. The successful lover is the cavalier servente of all nations. The man of gallantry behaves as if he had made an assignation with every woman he addresses. An argument immediately draws off my attention from the prettiest woman in the room. I accordingly succeed better in argument—than in love!—I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like, grave or gay, black, brown, or fair; with golden tresses or with raven locks;—and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck. We have never seen any thing to come up to our newly discovered goddess before, but she is what we have been all our lives looking for. The idol we fall down and worship is an image familiar to our minds. It has been present to our waking thoughts, it has haunted us in our dreams, like some fairy vision. Oh! thou, who, the first time I ever beheld thee, didst draw my soul into the circle of thy heavenly looks, and wave enchantment round me, do not think thy conquest less complete because it was instantaneous; for in that gentle form (as if another Imogen had entered) I saw all that I had ever loved of female grace, modesty, and sweetness!

I shall not say much of friendship as giving an insight into character, because it is often founded on mutual infirmities and prejudices. Friendships are frequently taken up on some sudden sympathy, and we see only as much as we please of one another’s characters afterwards. Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies. They cool, indeed, in time, part, and retain only a rankling grudge at past errors and oversights. Their testimony in the latter case is not quite free from suspicion.

One would think that near relations, who live constantly together, and always have done so, must be pretty well acquainted with one another’s characters. They are nearly in the dark about it. Familiarity confounds all traits of distinction: interest and prejudice take away the power of judging. We have no opinion on the subject, any more than of one another’s faces. The Penates, the household-gods, are veiled. We do not see the features of those we love, nor do we clearly distinguish their virtues or their vices. We take them as they are found in the lump:—by weight, and not by measure. We know all about the individuals, their sentiments, history, manners, words, actions, every thing: but we know all these too much as facts, as inveterate, habitual impressions, as clothed with too many associations, as sanctified with too many affections, as woven too much into the web of our hearts, to be able to pick out the different threads, to cast up the items of the debtor and creditor account, or to refer them to any general standard of right and wrong. Our impressions with respect to them are too strong, too real, too much sui generis, to be capable of a comparison with any thing but themselves. We hardly inquire whether those for whom we are thus interested, and to whom we are thus knit, are better or worse than others—the question is a kind of profanation—all we know is, they are more to us than any one else can be. Our sentiments of this kind are rooted and grow in us, and we cannot eradicate them by voluntary means. Besides, our judgments are bespoke, our interests take part with our blood. If any doubt arises, if the veil of our implicit confidence is drawn aside by any accident for a moment, the shock is too great, like that of a dislocated limb, and we recoil on our habitual impressions again. Let not that veil ever be rent entirely asunder, so that those images may be left bare of reverential awe, and lose their religion: for nothing can ever support the desolation of the heart afterwards.

The greatest misfortune that can happen among relations is a different way of bringing up, so as to set one another’s opinions and characters in an entirely new point of view. This often lets in an unwelcome day-light on the subject, and breeds schisms, coldness, and incurable heart-burnings in families. I have sometimes thought whether the progress of society and march of knowledge does not do more harm in this respect, by loosening the ties of domestic attachment, and preventing those who are most interested in, and anxious to think well of one another, from feeling a cordial sympathy and approbation of each other’s sentiments, manners, views, &c. than it does good by any real advantage to the community at large. The son, for instance, is brought up to the church, and nothing can exceed the pride and pleasure the father takes in him, while all goes on well in this favourite direction. His notions change, and he imbibes a taste for the Fine Arts. From this moment there is an end of any thing like the same unreserved communication between them. The young man may talk with enthusiasm of his ‘Rembrandts, Correggios, and stuff:’ it is all Hebrew to the elder; and whatever satisfaction he may feel in hearing of his son’s progress, or good wishes for his success, he is never reconciled to the new pursuit, he still hankers after the first object that he had set his mind upon. Again, the grandfather is a Calvinist, who never gets the better of his disappointment at his son’s going over to the Unitarian side of the question. The matter rests here, till the grandson, some years after, in the fashion of the day and ‘infinite agitation of men’s wit,’ comes to doubt certain points in the creed in which he has been brought up, and the affair is all abroad again. Here are three generations made uncomfortable and in a manner set at variance, by a veering point of theology, and the officious meddling biblical critics! Nothing, on the other hand, can be more wretched or common than that upstart pride and insolent good fortune which is ashamed of its origin; nor are there many things more awkward than the situation of rich and poor relations. Happy, much happier, are those tribes and people who are confined to the same caste and way of life from sire to son, where prejudices are transmitted like instincts, and where the same unvarying standard of opinion and refinement blends countless generations in its improgressive, everlasting mould!

Not only is there a wilful and habitual blindness in near kindred to each other’s defects, but an incapacity to judge from the quantity of materials, from the contradictoriness of the evidence. The chain of particulars is too long and massy for us to lift it or put it into the most approved ethical scales. The concrete result does not answer to any abstract theory, to any logical definition. There is black, and white, and grey, square and round—there are too many anomalies, too many redeeming points, in poor human nature, such as it actually is, for us to arrive at a smart, summary decision on it. We know too much to come to any hasty or partial conclusion. We do not pronounce upon the present act, because a hundred others rise up to contradict it. We suspend our judgments altogether, because in effect one thing unconsciously balances another; and perhaps this obstinate, pertinacious indecision would be the truest philosophy in other cases, where we dispose of the question of character easily, because we have only the smallest part of the evidence to decide upon. Real character is not one thing, but a thousand things; actual qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but rest upon their own truth and nature. The dull stupor under which we labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest opportunities of inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before we give extreme and uncharitable verdicts against those whom we only see in passing, or at a distance. If we knew them better, we should be disposed to say less about them.

In the truth of things, there are none utterly worthless, none without some drawback on their pretensions, or some alloy of imperfection. It has been observed that a familiarity with the worst characters lessens our abhorrence of them; and a wonder is often expressed that the greatest criminals look like other men. The reason is that they are like other men in many respects. If a particular individual was merely the wretch we read of, or conceive in the abstract, that is, if he was the mere personified idea of the criminal brought to the bar, he would not disappoint the spectator, but would look like what he would be—a monster! But he has other qualities, ideas, feelings, nay, probably virtues, mixed up with the most profligate habits or desperate acts. This need not lessen our abhorrence of the crime, though it does of the criminal; for it has the latter effect only by showing him to us in different points of view, in which he appears a common mortal, and not the caricature of vice we took him for, or spotted all over with infamy. I do not at the same time think this a lax or dangerous, though it is a charitable view of the subject. In my opinion, no man ever answered in his own mind (except in the agonies of conscience or of repentance, in which latter case he throws the imputation from himself in another way) to the abstract idea of a murderer. He may have killed a man in self-defence, or ‘in the trade of war,’ or to save himself from starving, or in revenge for an injury, but always ‘so as with a difference,’ or from mixed and questionable motives. The individual, in reckoning with himself, always takes into the account the considerations of time, place, and circumstance, and never makes out a case of unmitigated, unprovoked villany, of ‘pure defecated evil’ against himself. There are degrees in real crimes: we reason and moralise only by names and in classes. I should be loth, indeed, to say, that ‘whatever is, is right:’ but almost every actual choice inclines to it, with some sort of imperfect, unconscious bias. This is the reason, besides the ends of secresy, of the invention of slang terms for different acts of profligacy committed by thieves, pickpockets, &c. The common names suggest associations of disgust in the minds of others, which those who live by them do not willingly recognise, and which they wish to sink in a technical phraseology. So there is a story of a fellow who, as he was writing down his confession of a murder, stopped to ask how the word murder was spelt; this, if true, was partly because his imagination was staggered by the recollection of the thing, and partly because he shrunk from the verbal admission of it. ‘Amen stuck in his throat!’ The defence made by Eugene Aram of himself against a charge of murder, some years before, shows that he in imagination completely flung from himself the nominal crime imputed to him: he might, indeed, have staggered an old man with a blow, and buried his body in a cave, and lived ever since upon the money he found upon him, but there was ‘no malice in the case, none at all,’ as Peachum says. The very coolness, subtlety, and circumspection of his defence (as masterly a legal document as there is upon record) prove that he was guilty of the act, as much as they prove that he was unconscious of the crime.[83] In the same spirit, and I conceive with great metaphysical truth, Mr. Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, makes Ordonio (his chief character) wave the acknowledgment of his meditated guilt to his own mind, by putting into his mouth that striking soliloquy:

Say, I had lay’d a body in the sun! Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings In place of that one man. Say I had kill’d him! Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy As that one life, which being push’d aside, Made room for these unnumber’d.—ACT II. SC. II.

I am not sure, indeed, that I have not got this whole train of speculation from him; but I should not think the worse of it on that account. That gentleman, I recollect, once asked me whether I thought that the different members of a family really liked one another so well, or had so much attachment as was generally supposed: and I said that I conceived the regard they had towards each other was expressed by the word interest, rather than by any other; which he said was the true answer. I do not know that I could mend it now. Natural affection is not pleasure in one another’s company, nor admiration of one another’s qualities; but it is an intimate and deep knowledge of the things that affect those, to whom we are bound by the nearest ties, with pleasure or pain; it is an anxious, uneasy, fellow-feeling with them, a jealous watchfulness over their good name, a tender and unconquerable yearning for their good. The love, in short, we bear them, is the nearest to that we bear ourselves. Home, according to the old saying, is home, be it never so homely. We love ourselves, not according to our deserts, but our cravings after good: so we love our immediate relations in the next degree (if not, even sometimes a higher one) because we know best what they have suffered and what sits nearest to their hearts. We are implicated, in fact, in their welfare, by habit and sympathy, as we are in our own.

If our devotion to our own interests is much the same as to theirs, we are ignorant of our own characters for the same reason. We are parties too much concerned to return a fair verdict, and are too much in the secret of our own motives or situation not to be able to give a favourable turn to our actions. We exercise a liberal criticism upon ourselves, and put off the final decision to a late day. The field is large and open. Hamlet exclaims, with a noble magnanimity, ‘I count myself indifferent honest, and yet I could accuse me of such things!’ If you could prove to a man that he is a knave, it would not make much difference in his opinion, his self-love is stronger than his love of virtue. Hypocrisy is generally used as a mask to deceive the world, not to impose on ourselves: for once detect the delinquent in his knavery, and he laughs in your face or glories in his iniquity. This at least happens except where there is a contradiction in the character, and our vices are involuntary, and at variance with our convictions. One great difficulty is to distinguish ostensible motives, or such as we acknowledge to ourselves, from tacit or secret springs of action. A man changes his opinion readily, he thinks it candour: it is levity of mind. For the most part, we are stunned and stupid in judging of ourselves. We are callous by custom to our defects or excellencies, unless where vanity steps in to exaggerate or extenuate them. I cannot conceive how it is that people are in love with their own persons, or astonished at their own performances, which are but a nine days’ wonder to every one else. In general it may be laid down that we are liable to this two-fold mistake in judging of our own talents: we, in the first place, nurse the rickety bantling, we think much of that which has cost us much pains and labour, and comes against the grain; and we also set little store by what we do with most ease to ourselves, and therefore best. The works of the greatest genius are produced almost unconsciously, with an ignorance on the part of the persons themselves that they have done any thing extraordinary. Nature has done it for them. How little Shakespear seems to have thought of himself or of his fame! Yet, if ‘to know another well, were to know one’s self,’ he must have been acquainted with his own pretensions and character, ‘who knew all qualities with a learned spirit.’ His eye seems never to have been bent upon himself, but outwards upon nature. A man, who thinks highly of himself, may almost set it down that it is without reason. Milton, notwithstanding, appears to have had a high opinion of himself, and to have made it good. He was conscious of his powers, and great by design. Perhaps his tenaciousness, on the score of his own merit, might arise from an early habit of polemical writing, in which his pretensions were continually called to the bar of prejudice and party-spirit, and he had to plead not guilty to the indictment. Some men have died unconscious of immortality, as others have almost exhausted the sense of it in their life-times. Correggio might be mentioned as an instance of the one, Voltaire of the other.

There is nothing that helps a man in his conduct through life more than a knowledge of his own characteristic weaknesses (which, guarded against, become his strength), as there is nothing that tends more to the success of a man’s talents than his knowing the limits of his faculties, which are thus concentrated on some practicable object. One man can do but one thing. Universal pretensions end in nothing. Or, as Butler has it, too much wit requires

‘As much again to govern it.’

There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge, strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it. We find many who succeed in certain departments, and are yet melancholy and dissatisfied, because they failed in the one to which they first devoted themselves, like discarded lovers, who pine after their scornful mistress. I will conclude with observing, that authors in general overrate the extent and value of posthumous fame: for what (as it has been asked) is the amount even of Shakespear’s fame? That in that very country which boasts his genius and his birth, perhaps, scarce one person in ten has ever heard of his name, or read a syllable of his writings!

ESSAY XXXII ON THE PICTURESQUE AND IDEAL

A FRAGMENT

The natural in visible objects is whatever is ordinarily presented to the senses: the picturesque is that which stands out, and catches the attention by some striking peculiarity: the ideal is that which answers to the preconceived imagination and appetite in the mind for love and beauty. The picturesque depends chiefly on the principle of discrimination or contrast; the ideal on harmony and continuity of effect: the one surprises, the other satisfies the mind; the one starts off from a given point, the other reposes on itself; the one is determined by an excess of form, the other by a concentration of feeling.

The picturesque may be considered as something like an excrescence on the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and grotesque. Fairies and satyrs are picturesque; but they are scarcely ideal. They are an extreme and unique conception of a certain thing, but not of what the mind delights in, or broods fondly over. The image created by the artist’s hand is not moulded and fashioned by the love of good and yearning after grace and beauty, but rather the contrary: that is, they are idea deformity, not ideal beauty. Rubens was perhaps the most picturesque of painters; but he was almost the least ideal. So Rembrandt was (out of sight) the most picturesque of colourists; as Correggio was the most ideal. In other words, his composition of light and shade is more a whole, more in unison, more blended into the same harmonious feeling than Rembrandt’s, who staggers by contrast, but does not soothe by gradation. Correggio’s forms, indeed, had a picturesque air; for they often incline (even when most beautiful) to the quaintness of caricature. Vandyke, I think, was at once the least picturesque and least ideal of all the great painters. He was purely natural, and neither selected from outward forms nor added any thing from his own mind. He owes every thing to perfect truth, clearness, and transparency; and though his productions certainly arrest the eye, and strike in a room full of pictures, it is from the contrast they present to other pictures, and from being stripped quite naked of all artificial advantages. They strike almost as a piece of white paper would, hung up in the same situation.—I began with saying that whatever stands out from a given line, and as it were projects upon the eye, is picturesque; and this holds true (comparatively) in form and colour. A rough terrier-dog, with the hair bristled and matted together, is picturesque. As we say, there is a decided character in it, a marked determination to an extreme point. A shock-dog is odd and disagreeable, but there is nothing picturesque in its appearance: it is a mere mass of flimsy confusion. A goat with projecting horns and pendent beard is a picturesque animal: a sheep is not. A horse is only picturesque from opposition of colour; as in Mr. Northcote’s study of Gadshill, where the white horse’s head coming against the dark scowling face of the man makes as fine a contrast as can be imagined. An old stump of a tree with rugged bark, and one or two straggling branches, a little stunted hedge-row line, marking the boundary of the horizon, a stubble-field, a winding path, a rock seen against the sky, are picturesque, because they have all of them prominence and a distinctive character of their own. They are not objects (to borrow Shakespear’s phrase) ‘of no mark or likelihood.’ A country may be beautiful, romantic, or sublime, without being picturesque. The Lakes in the North of England are not picturesque, though certainly the most interesting sight in this country. To be a subject for painting, a prospect must present sharp striking points of view or singular forms, or one object must relieve and set off another. There must be distinct stages and salient points for the eye to rest upon or start from, in its progress over the expanse before it. The distance of a landscape will oftentimes look flat or heavy, that the trunk of a tree or a ruin in the foreground would immediately throw into perspective and turn to air. Rembrandt’s landscapes are the least picturesque in the world, except from the strait lines and sharp angles, the deep incision and dragging of his pencil, like a harrow over the ground, and the broad contrast of earth and sky. Earth, in his copies, is rough and hairy; and Pan has struck his hoof against it!—A camel is a picturesque ornament in a landscape or history-piece. This is not merely from its romantic and oriental character; for an elephant has not the same effect, and if introduced as a necessary appendage, is also an unwieldy incumbrance. A negro’s head in a group is picturesque from contrast: so are the spots on a panther’s hide. This was the principle that Paul Veronese went upon, who said the rule for composition was black upon white, and white upon black. He was a pretty good judge. His celebrated picture of the Marriage of Cana is in all likelihood the completest piece of workmanship extant in the art. When I saw it, it nearly covered one side of a large room in the Louvre (being itself forty feet by twenty)—and it seemed as if that side of the apartment was thrown open, and you looked out at the open sky, at buildings, marble pillars, galleries with people in them, emperors, female slaves, Turks, negroes, musicians, all the famous painters of the time, the tables loaded with viands, goblets, and dogs under them—a sparkling, overwhelming confusion, a bright, unexpected reality—the only fault you could find was that no miracle was going on in the faces of the spectators: the only miracle there was the picture itself! A French gentleman, who showed me this ‘triumph of painting’ (as it has been called), perceiving I was struck with it, observed, ‘My wife admires it exceedingly for the facility of the execution.’ I took this proof of sympathy for a compliment. It is said that when Humboldt, the celebrated traveller and naturalist, was introduced to Buonaparte, the Emperor addressed him in these words—‘Vous aimez, la botanique, Monsieur’—and on the other’s replying in the affirmative, added—‘Et ma femme aussi!’ This has been found fault with as a piece of brutality and insolence in the great man by bigoted critics, who do not know what a thing it is to get a Frenchwoman to agree with them in any point. For my part, I took the observation as it was meant, and it did not put me out of conceit with myself or the picture that Madame M— liked it as well as Monsieur l’Anglois. Certainly, there could be no harm in that. By the side of it happened to be hung two allegorical pictures of Rubens (and in such matters he too was ‘no baby[84]’)—I don’t remember what the figures were, but the texture seemed of wool or cotton. The texture of the Paul Veronese was not wool or cotton, but stuff, jewels, flesh, marble, air, whatever composed the essence of the varied subjects, in endless relief and truth of handling. If the Fleming had seen his two allegories hanging where they did, he would, without a question, have wished them far enough.

I imagine that Rubens’s landscapes are picturesque: Claude’s are ideal. Rubens is always in extremes: Claude in the middle. Rubens carries some one peculiar quality or feature of nature to the utmost verge of probability: Claude balances and harmonises different forms and masses with laboured delicacy, so that nothing falls short, no one thing overpowers another. Rainbows, showers, partial gleams of sunshine, moonlight, are the means with which Rubens produces his most gorgeous and enchanting effects: there are neither rainbows, nor showers, nor sudden bursts of sunshine, nor glittering moon-beams in Claude. He is all softness and proportion; the other is all spirit and brilliant excess. The two sides (for example) of one of Claude’s landscapes balance one another, as in a scale of beauty: in Rubens the several objects are grouped and thrown together with capricious wantonness. Claude has more repose: Rubens more gaiety and extravagance. And here it might be asked, Is a rainbow a picturesque or an ideal object? It seems to me to be both. It is an accident in nature; but it is an inmate of the fancy. It startles and surprises the sense, but it soothes and tranquillises the spirit. It makes the eye glisten to behold it, but the mind turns to it long after it has faded from its place in the sky. It has both properties then of giving an extraordinary impulse to the mind by the singularity of its appearance, and of riveting the imagination by its intense beauty. I may just notice here in passing, that I think the effect of moonlight is treated in an ideal manner in the well-known line in Shakespear—

‘See how the moonlight sleeps upon yon bank!’

The image is heightened by the exquisiteness of the expression beyond its natural beauty, and it seems as if there could be no end to the delight taken in it.—A number of sheep coming to a pool of water to drink, with shady trees in the back-ground, the rest of the flock following them, and the shepherd and his dog left carelessly behind, is surely the ideal in landscape-composition, if the ideal has its source in the interest excited by a subject, in its power of drawing the affections after it linked in a golden chain, and in the desire of the mind to dwell on it for ever. The ideal, in a word, is the height of the pleasing, that which satisfies and accords with the inmost longing of the soul: the picturesque is merely a sharper and bolder impression of reality. A morning mist drawing a slender veil over all objects is at once picturesque and ideal: for it in the first place excites immediate surprise and admiration, and in the next a wish for it to continue, and a fear lest it should be too soon dissipated. Is the Cupid riding on a lion in the ceiling at Whitehall, and urging him with a spear over a precipice, with only clouds and sky beyond, most picturesque or ideal? It has every effect of startling contrast and situation, and yet inspires breathless expectation and wonder for the event. Rembrandt’s Jacob’s Dream, again, is both—fearful to the eye, but realising that loftiest vision of the soul. Take two faces in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the Judas and the St. John; the one is all strength, repulsive character, the other is all divine grace and mild sensibility. The individual, the characteristic in painting, is that which is in a marked manner—the ideal is that which we wish any thing to be, and to contemplate without measure and without end. The first is truth, the last is good. The one appeals to the sense and understanding, the other to the will and the affections. The truly beautiful and grand attracts the mind to it by instinctive harmony, is absorbed in it, and nothing can ever part them afterwards. Look at a Madonna of Raphael’s: what gives the ideal character to the expression,—the insatiable purpose of the soul, or its measureless content in the object of its contemplation? A portrait of Vandyke’s is mere indifference and still-life in the comparison: it has not in it the principle of growing and still unsatisfied desire. In the ideal there is no fixed stint or limit but the limit of possibility: it is the infinite with respect to human capacities and wishes. Love is for this reason an ideal passion. We give to it our all of hope, of fear, of present enjoyment, and stake our last chance of happiness wilfully and desperately upon it. A good authority puts into the mouth of one of his heroines—

‘My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep!’—

How many fair catechumens will there be found in all ages to repeat as much after Shakespear’s Juliet!

ESSAY XXXIII ON THE FEAR OF DEATH

‘And our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom?

When Bickerstaff wrote his Essays, I knew nothing of the subjects of them: nay, much later, and but the other day, as it were, in the beginning of the reign of George III. when Goldsmith, Johnson, Burke, used to meet at the Globe, when Garrick was in his glory, and Reynolds was over head and ears with his portraits, and Sterne brought out the volumes of Tristram Shandy year by year, it was without consulting me: I had not the slightest intimation of what was going on: the debates in the House of Commons on the American war, or the firing at Bunker’s hill, disturbed not me: yet I thought this no evil—I neither ate, drank, nor was merry, yet I did not complain: I had not then looked out into this breathing world, yet I was well; and the world did quite as well without me as I did without it! Why then should I make all this outcry about parting with it, and being no worse off than I was before? There is nothing in the recollection that at a certain time we were not come into the world, that ‘the gorge rises at’—why should we revolt at the idea that we must one day go out of it? To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea. It is rather a relief and disburthening of the mind: it seems to have been holiday-time with us then: we were not called to appear upon the stage of life, to wear robes or tatters, to laugh or cry, be hooted or applauded; we had lain perdus all this while, snug, out of harm’s way; and had slept out our thousands of centuries without wanting to be waked up; at peace and free from care, in a long nonage, in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of infancy, wrapped in the softest and finest dust. And the worst that we dread is, after a short, fretful, feverish being, after vain hopes, and idle fears, to sink to final repose again, and forget the troubled dream of life!... Ye armed men, knights templars, that sleep in the stone aisles of that old Temple church, where all is silent above, and where a deeper silence reigns below (not broken by the pealing organ), are ye not contented where ye lie? Or would you come out of your long homes to go to the Holy War? Or do ye complain that pain no longer visits you, that sickness has done its worst, that you have paid the last debt to nature, that you hear no more of the thickening phalanx of the foe, or your lady’s waning love; and that while this ball of earth rolls its eternal round, no sound shall ever pierce through to disturb your lasting repose, fixed as the marble over your tombs, breathless as the grave that holds you! And thou, oh! thou, to whom my heart turns, and will turn while it has feeling left, who didst love in vain, and whose first was thy last sigh, wilt not thou too rest in peace (or wilt thou cry to me complaining from thy clay-cold bed) when that sad heart is no longer sad, and that sorrow is dead which thou wert only called into the world to feel!

It is certain that there is nothing in the idea of a pre-existent state that excites our longing like the prospect of a posthumous existence. We are satisfied to have begun life when we did; we have no ambition to have set out on our journey sooner; and feel that we have had quite enough to do to battle our way through since. We cannot say,

‘The wars we well remember of King Nine, Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’

Neither have we any wish: we are contented to read of them in story, and to stand and gaze at the vast sea of time that separates us from them. It was early days then: the world was not well-aired enough for us: we have no inclination to have been up and stirring. We do not consider the six thousand years of the world before we were born as so much time lost to us: we are perfectly indifferent about the matter. We do not grieve and lament that we did not happen to be in time to see the grand mask and pageant of human life going on in all that period; though we are mortified at being obliged to quit our stand before the rest of the procession passes.

It may be suggested in explanation of this difference, that we know from various records and traditions what happened in the time of Queen Anne, or even in the reigns of the Assyrian monarchs: but that we have no means of ascertaining what is to happen hereafter but by awaiting the event, and that our eagerness and curiosity are sharpened in proportion as we are in the dark about it. This is not at all the case; for at that rate we should be constantly wishing to make a voyage of discovery to Greenland or to the Moon, neither of which we have, in general, the least desire to do. Neither, in truth, have we any particular solicitude to pry into the secrets of futurity, but as a pretext for prolonging our own existence. It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence, any more than to have been alive a hundred or a thousand years ago: but the thing lies here, that we would all of us wish the present moment to last for ever. We would be as we are, and would have the world remain just as it is, to please us.

‘The present eye catches the present object’—

to have and to hold while it may; and abhors, on any terms, to have it torn from us, and nothing left in its room. It is the pang of parting, the unloosing our grasp, the breaking asunder some strong tie, the leaving some cherished purpose unfulfilled, that creates the repugnance to go, and ‘makes calamity of so long life,’ as it often is.

—‘Oh! thou strong heart! There’s such a covenant ’twixt the world and thee, They’re loth to break!’

The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle. Simply to be does not ‘content man’s natural desire:’ we long to be in a certain time, place, and circumstance. We would much rather be now, ‘on this bank and shoal of time,’ than have our choice of any future period, than take a slice of fifty or sixty years out of the Millennium, for instance. This shows that our attachment is not confined either to being or to well-being; but that we have an inveterate prejudice in favour of our immediate existence, such as it is. The mountaineer will not leave his rock, nor the savage his hut; neither are we willing to give up our present mode of life, with all its advantages and disadvantages, for any other that could be substituted for it. No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves. There are some persons of that reach of soul that they would like to live two hundred and fifty years hence, to see to what height of empire America will have grown up in that period, or whether the English constitution will last so long. These are points beyond me. But I confess I should like to live to see the downfall of the Bourbons. That is a vital question with me; and I shall like it the better, the sooner it happens!

No young man ever thinks he shall die. He may believe that others will, or assent to the doctrine that ‘all men are mortal’ as an abstract proposition, but he is far enough from bringing it home to himself individually.[85] Youth, buoyant activity, and animal spirits, hold absolute antipathy with old age as well as with death; nor have we, in the hey-day of life, any more than in the thoughtlessness of childhood, the remotest conception how

‘This sensible warm motion can become A kneaded clod’—

nor how sanguine, florid health and vigour, shall ‘turn to withered, weak, and grey.’ Or if in a moment of idle speculation we indulge in this notion of the close of life as a theory, it is amazing at what a distance it seems; what a long, leisurely interval there is between; what a contrast its slow and solemn approach affords to our present gay dreams of existence! We eye the farthest verge of the horizon, and think what a way we shall have to look back upon, ere we arrive at our journey’s end; and without our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. The two divisions of our lives have melted into each other: the extreme points close and meet with none of that romantic interval stretching out between them, that we had reckoned upon; and for the rich, melancholy, solemn hues of age, ‘the sear, the yellow leaf,’ the deepening shadows of an autumnal evening, we only feel a dank, cold mist, encircling all objects, after the spirit of youth is fled. There is no inducement to look forward; and what is worse, little interest in looking back to what has become so trite and common. The pleasures of our existence have worn themselves out, are ‘gone into the wastes of time,’ or have turned their indifferent side to us: the pains by their repeated blows have worn us out, and have left us neither spirit nor inclination to encounter them again in retrospect. We do not want to rip up old grievances, nor to renew our youth like the phœnix, nor to live our lives twice over. Once is enough. As the tree falls, so let it lie. Shut up the book and close the account once for all!

It has been thought by some that life is like the exploring of a passage that grows narrower and darker the farther we advance, without a possibility of ever turning back, and where we are stifled for want of breath at last. For myself, I do not complain of the greater thickness of the atmosphere as I approach the narrow house. I felt it more, formerly,[86] when the idea alone seemed to suppress a thousand rising hopes, and weighed upon the pulses of the blood. At present I rather feel a thinness and want of support, I stretch out my hand to some object and find none, I am too much in a world of abstraction; the naked map of life is spread out before me, and in the emptiness and desolation I see Death coming to meet me. In my youth I could not behold him for the crowd of objects and feelings, and Hope stood always between us, saying—‘Never mind that old fellow!’ If I had lived indeed, I should not care to die. But I do not like a contract of pleasure broken off unfulfilled, a marriage with joy unconsummated, a promise of happiness rescinded. My public and private hopes have been left a ruin, or remain only to mock me. I would wish them to be re-edified. I should like to see some prospect of good to mankind, such as my life began with. I should like to leave some sterling work behind me. I should like to have some friendly hand to consign me to the grave. On these conditions I am ready, if not willing, to depart. I shall then write on my tomb—GRATEFUL AND CONTENTED! But I have thought and suffered too much to be willing to have thought and suffered in vain.—In looking back, it sometimes appears to me as if I had in a manner slept out my life in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where I have fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures, and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy feet, or the noises of the throng below. Waked out of this dim, twilight existence, and startled with the passing scene, I have felt a wish to descend to the world of realities, and join in the chase. But I fear too late, and that I had better return to my bookish chimeras and indolence once more! Zanetto, lascia le donne, et studia la matematica. I will think of it.

It is not wonderful that the contemplation and fear of death become more familiar to us as we approach nearer to it: that life seems to ebb with the decay of blood and youthful spirits; and that as we find every thing about us subject to chance and change, as our strength and beauty die, as our hopes and passions, our friends and our affections leave us, we begin by degrees to feel ourselves mortal!

I have never seen death but once, and that was in an infant. It is years ago. The look was calm and placid, and the face was fair and firm. It was as if a waxen image had been laid out in the coffin, and strewed with innocent flowers. It was not like death, but more like an image of life! No breath moved the lips, no pulse stirred, no sight or sound would enter those eyes or ears more. While I looked at it, I saw no pain was there; it seemed to smile at the short pang of life which was over: but I could not bear the coffin-lid to be closed—it seemed to stifle me; and still as the nettles wave in a corner of the churchyard over his little grave, the welcome breeze helps to refresh me, and ease the tightness at my breast!

An ivory or marble image, like Chantry’s monument of the two children, is contemplated with pure delight. Why do we not grieve and fret that the marble is not alive, or fancy that it has a shortness of breath? It never was alive; and it is the difficulty of making the transition from life to death, the struggle between the two in our imagination, that confounds their properties painfully together, and makes us conceive that the infant that is but just dead, still wants to breathe, to enjoy, and look about it, and is prevented by the icy hand of death, locking up its faculties and benumbing its senses; so that, if it could, it would complain of its own hard state. Perhaps religious considerations reconcile the mind to this change sooner than any others, by representing the spirit as fled to another sphere, and leaving the body behind it. So in reflecting on death generally, we mix up the idea of life with it, and thus make it the ghastly monster it is. We think how we should feel, not how the dead feel.

‘Still from the tomb the voice of nature cries; Even in our ashes live their wonted fires!’

There is an admirable passage on this subject in TUCKER’S Light of Nature Pursued, which I shall transcribe, as by much the best illustration I can offer of it.

‘The melancholy appearance of a lifeless body, the mansion provided for it to inhabit, dark, cold, close and solitary, are shocking to the imagination; but it is to the imagination only, not the understanding; for whoever consults this faculty will see at first glance, that there is nothing dismal in all these circumstances: if the corpse were kept wrapped up in a warm bed, with a roasting fire in the chamber, it would feel no comfortable warmth therefrom; were store of tapers lighted up as soon as day shuts in, it would see no objects to divert it; were it left at large it would have no liberty, nor if surrounded with company would be cheered thereby; neither are the distorted features expressions of pain, uneasiness, or distress. This every one knows, and will readily allow upon being suggested, yet still cannot behold, nor even cast a thought upon those objects without shuddering; for knowing that a living person must suffer grievously under such appearances, they become habitually formidable to the mind, and strike a mechanical horror, which is increased by the customs of the world around us.’

There is usually one pang added voluntarily and unnecessarily to the fear of death, by our affecting to compassionate the loss which others will have in us. If that were all, we might reasonably set our minds at rest. The pathetic exhortation on country tombstones, ‘Grieve not for me, my wife and children dear,’ &c. is for the most part speedily followed to the letter. We do not leave so great a void in society as we are inclined to imagine, partly to magnify our own importance, and partly to console ourselves by sympathy. Even in the same family the gap is not so great; the wound closes up sooner than we should expect. Nay, our room is not unfrequently thought better than our company. People walk along the streets the day after our deaths just as they did before, and the crowd is not diminished. While we were living, the world seemed in a manner to exist only for us, for our delight and amusement, because it contributed to them. But our hearts cease to beat, and it goes on as usual, and thinks no more about us than it did in our life-time. The million are devoid of sentiment, and care as little for you or me as if we belonged to the moon. We live the week over in the Sunday’s paper, or are decently interred in some obituary at the month’s end! It is not surprising that we are forgotten so soon after we quit this mortal stage: we are scarcely noticed, while we are on it. It is not merely that our names are not known in China—they have hardly been heard of in the next street. We are hand and glove with the universe, and think the obligation is mutual. This is an evident fallacy. If this, however, does not trouble us now, it will not hereafter. A handful of dust can have no quarrel to pick with its neighbours, or complaint to make against Providence, and might well exclaim, if it had but an understanding and a tongue, ‘Go thy ways, old world, swing round in blue ether, voluble to every age, you and I shall no more jostle!’

It is amazing how soon the rich and titled, and even some of those who have wielded great political power, are forgotten.

‘A little rule, a little sway, Is all the great and mighty have Betwixt the cradle and the grave’—

and, after its short date, they hardly leave a name behind them. ‘A great man’s memory may, at the common rate, survive him half a year.’ His heirs and successors take his titles, his power, and his wealth—all that made him considerable or courted by others; and he has left nothing else behind him either to delight or benefit the world. Posterity are not by any means so disinterested as they are supposed to be. They give their gratitude and admiration only in return for benefits conferred. They cherish the memory of those to whom they are indebted for instruction and delight; and they cherish it just in proportion to the instruction and delight they are conscious they receive. The sentiment of admiration springs immediately from this ground; and cannot be otherwise than well founded.[87]

The effeminate clinging to life as such, as a general or abstract idea, is the effect of a highly civilised and artificial state of society. Men formerly plunged into all the vicissitudes and dangers of war, or staked their all upon a single die, or some one passion, which if they could not have gratified, life became a burthen to them—now our strongest passion is to think, our chief amusement is to read new plays, new poems, new novels, and this we may do at our leisure, in perfect security, ad infinitum. If we look into the old histories and romances, before the belles-lettres neutralised human affairs and reduced passion to a state of mental equivocation, we find the heroes and heroines not setting their lives ‘at a pin’s fee,’ but rather courting opportunities of throwing them away in very wantonness of spirit. They raise their fondness for some favourite pursuit to its height, to a pitch of madness, and think no price too dear to pay for its full gratification. Every thing else is dross. They go to death as to a bridal bed, and sacrifice themselves or others without remorse at the shrine of love, of honour, of religion, or any other prevailing feeling. Romeo runs his ‘sea-sick, weary bark upon the rocks’ of death, the instant he finds himself deprived of his Juliet; and she clasps his neck in their last agonies, and follows him to the same fatal shore. One strong idea takes possession of the mind and overrules every other; and even life itself, joyless without that, becomes an object of indifference or loathing. There is at least more of imagination in such a state of things, more vigour of feeling and promptitude to act than in our lingering, languid, protracted attachment to life for its own poor sake. It is, perhaps, also better, as well as more heroical, to strike at some daring or darling object, and if we fail in that, to take the consequences manfully, than to renew the lease of a tedious, spiritless, charmless existence, merely (as Pierre says) ‘to lose it afterwards in some vile brawl’ for some worthless object. Was there not a spirit of martyrdom as well as a spice of the reckless energy of barbarism in this bold defiance of death? Had not religion something to do with it; the implicit belief in a future life, which rendered this of less value, and embodied something beyond it to the imagination; so that the rough soldier, the infatuated lover, the valorous knight, &c. could afford to throw away the present venture, and take a leap into the arms of futurity, which the modern sceptic shrinks back from, with all his boasted reason and vain philosophy, weaker than a woman! I cannot help thinking so myself; but I have endeavoured to explain this point before, and will not enlarge farther on it here.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being. Sedentary and studious men are the most apprehensive on this score. Dr. Johnson was an instance in point. A few years seemed to him soon over, compared with those sweeping contemplations on time and infinity with which he had been used to pose himself. In the still-life of a man of letters, there was no obvious reason for a change. He might sit in an arm-chair and pour out cups of tea to all eternity. Would it had been possible for him to do so! The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life. If we merely wish to continue on the scene to indulge our headstrong humours and tormenting passions, we had better begone at once: and if we only cherish a fondness for existence according to the good we derive from it, the pang we feel at parting with it will not be very severe!

End of TABLE-TALK

MR. NORTHCOTE’S CONVERSATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A., were published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826 and 1827, entitled ‘Boswell Redivivus.’ Revised and added to, they were published in volume form (8 × 5 inches) by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, London, in 1830, with a portrait of ‘James Northcote, Esq., R.A. in his 82nd Year. Engraved by T. Wright after a drawing by A. Wivell,’ and the following motto on the title-page:—

‘The precepts here of a divine old man I could recite.

ARMSTRONG.’

The volume was printed by C. Whiting, Beaufort House, Strand, and its text is that of the present issue.

CONVERSATION THE FIRST

Called on Mr. Northcote; had, as usual, an interesting conversation. Spoke of some account of Lord Byron in a newspaper, which he thought must be like. ‘The writer says, he did not wish to be thought merely a great poet. My sister asked, “What then did he wish to be thought?” Why, I’ll tell you; he wished to be something different from every body else. As to nobility, there were many others before him, so that he could not rely upon that; and then, as to poetry, there are so many wretched creatures that pretend to the name, that he looked at it with disgust: he thought himself as distinct from them as the stars in the firmament. It comes to what Sir Joshua used to say, that a man who is at the head of his profession is above it. I remember being at Cosway’s, where they were recommending some charitable institution for the relief of decayed artists; and I said I would not be of it, for it was holding out a temptation to idleness, and bringing those into the profession who were not fit for it. Some one who wanted to flatter me observed, “I wonder you should talk in this manner, who are under such obligations to the art!” I answered immediately, “If I am to take your compliment as I believe it is meant, I might answer, that it is the art that is under obligations to me, not I to it. Do you suppose that Rubens, Titian, and others were under obligations to the art—they who raised it from obscurity and made it all that it is? What would the art be without these?” The world in general, as Miss Reynolds used to say, with reference to her brother, think no more of a painter than they do of a fiddler or a dancing-master or a piano-forte-maker. And so of a poet. I have always said of that dispute about burying Lord Byron in Poet’s Corner, that he would have resisted it violently if he could have known of it. Not but there were many very eminent names there, with whom he would like to be associated; but then there were others that he would look down upon. If they had laid him there, he would have got up again. No; I’ll tell you where they should have laid him—if they had buried him with the kings in Henry VII. Chapel, he would have had no objection to that! One cannot alter the names of things, or the prejudices of the world respecting them, to suit one’s convenience. I once went with Hoppner to the hustings to vote for Horne Tooke; and when they asked me what I was, I said, a painter. At this Hoppner was very mad all the way home, and said I should have called myself a portrait-painter. I replied, the world had no time to trouble their heads about such distinctions. I afterwards asked Kemble, who agreed I was right, that he always called himself a player,’ &c.

I then observed, I had been to the play with G. and his daughter, from the last of whom I had learnt something about Lord Byron’s conversation. ‘What!’ he said, ‘the beauty-daughter?’ I said, ‘Do you think her a beauty, then?’—‘Why no, she rather thinks herself one, and yet there is something about her that would pass for such. Girls generally find out where to place themselves. She’s clever too; isn’t she?’—‘Oh! yes.’—‘What did she tell you about Lord Byron? because I am curious to know all about him.’—‘I asked her if it was true that Lord Byron was so poor a creature as H— represented him? She at first misunderstood me, and said, nothing could be meaner than he was, and gave some instances of it. I said, that was not what I meant; that I could believe any thing of that kind of him; that whatever he took in his head he would carry to extremes, regardless of every thing but the feeling of the moment; but that I could not conceive him to be in conversation, or in any other way, a flat and common-place person.[88] “Oh! no,” she said, “he was not. H— was hardly a fair judge. The other had not behaved well to him, and whenever they met, H— always began some kind of argument, and as Lord Byron could not argue, they made but a bad piece of business of it, and it ended unsatisfactorily for all parties.” I said, H— was too apt to put people to their trumps, or to force them upon doing not what they could do, but what he thought he could do. He, however, not only gave his own opinion, but said, Mr. S— could only just endure Lord Byron’s company. This seemed to me odd; for though he might be neither orator nor philosopher, yet any thing he might say or only stammer out in broken sentences, must be interesting: a glance, a gesture would be full of meaning; or he would make one look about one like the tree in Virgil, that expressed itself by groans. To this she assented, and observed—“At least S— and myself found it so; for we generally sat with him till morning. He was perhaps a little moody and reserved at first; but by touching on certain strings, he began to unbend, and gave the most extraordinary accounts of his own feelings and adventures that could be imagined. Besides, he was very handsome, and it was some satisfaction to look at a head at once so beautiful and expressive!” I repeated what H— told me, that when he and Lord Byron met in Italy, they did not know one another; he himself from having grown so thin, and Byron from having grown so fat, like a great chubby school-boy—a circumstance which shocked his lordship so much, that he took to drinking vinegar at a great rate, that he might recover the figure of the stripling God. I mentioned some things that H— had reported of Lord Byron; such as his saying, “He never cared for any thing above a day,”—which might be merely in a fit of spleen, or from the spirit of contradiction, or to avoid an imputation of sentimentality.’—‘Oh!’ said Northcote, ‘that will never do, to take things literally that are uttered in a moment of irritation. You do not express your own opinion, but one as opposite as possible to that of the person that has provoked you. You get as far from a person you have taken a pique against as you can, just as you turn off the pavement to get out of the way of a chimney-sweeper; but it is not to be supposed you prefer walking in the mud, for all that! I have often been ashamed myself of speeches I have made in that way, which have been repeated to me as good things, when all I meant was that I would say any thing sooner than agree to the nonsense or affectation I heard. You then set yourself against what you think a wrong bias in another, and are not like a wall but a buttress—as far from the right line as your antagonist; and the more absurd he is, the more so do you become. Before you attend to what any one says, you should ask, Was he talking to a fool or a wise man? No; H— would make Lord Byron tributary to him, or would make him out to be nothing. I wonder you admire him as you do, and compare him to the wits of Charles II. It isn’t writing verses or painting a picture—that, as Sir Joshua used to say, is what every body can do: but it is the doing something more than any body else can do that entitles the poet or the artist to distinction, or makes the work live. But these people shut themselves up in a little circle of their own, and fancy all the world are looking at them.’ I said, H— had been spoiled by flattery when he was young. ‘Oh! no,’ he said, ‘it was not that. Sir Joshua was not spoiled by flattery, and yet he had as much of it as any body need have; but he was looking out to see what the world said of him, or thinking what figure he should make by the side of Correggio or Vandyke, not pluming himself on being a better painter than some one in the next street, or being surprised that the people at his own table spoke in praise of his pictures. It is a little mind that is taken up with the nearest object, or puffed up with immediate notice: to do any thing great, we must look out of ourselves and see things upon a broader scale.’

I told Northcote I had promised H— I would bring him to see him; and then, said I, you would think as favourably of him as I do, and every body else that knows him. ‘But you didn’t say any thing in my praise to induce him to come?’—‘Oh! yes; I exerted all my eloquence.’—‘That wasn’t the way. You should have said I was a poor creature, perhaps amusing for half an hour or so, or curious to see like a little dried mummy in a museum: but he would not hear of your having two idols! Depend upon it, he’ll not come. Such characters only want to be surrounded with satellites or echoes: and that is one reason they never improve. True genius, as well as wisdom, is ever docile, humble, vigilant, and ready to acknowledge the merit it seeks to appropriate from every quarter. That was Fuseli’s mistake. Nothing was good enough for him, that was not a repetition of himself. So once when I told him of a very fine Vandyke, he made answer—“And what is it? A little bit of colour. I wouldn’t go across the way to see it.” On my telling this to Sir Joshua, he said—“Ay, he’ll repent it, he’ll repent it!” W— is another of those who would narrow the universe to their own standard. It is droll to see how hard you labour to prop him up too, and seem to fancy he’ll live.’—‘I think he stands a better chance than Lord Byron. He has added one original feature to our poetry, which the other has not; and this, you know, Sir, by your own rule, gives him the best title.’—‘Yes; but the little bit that he has added is not enough. None but great objects can be seen at a distance. If posterity looked at it with your eyes, they might think his poetry curious and pretty. But consider how many Sir Walter Scotts, how many Lord Byrons, how many Dr. Johnsons there will be in the next hundred years; how many reputations will rise and sink in that time; and do you imagine, amid these conflicting and important claims, such trifles as descriptions of daisies and idiot-boys (however well they may be done) will not be swept away in the tide of time, like straws and weeds by the torrent? No; the world can only keep in view the principal and most perfect productions of human ingenuity; such works as Dryden’s, Pope’s, and a few others, that from their unity, their completeness, their polish have the stamp of immortality upon them, and seem indestructible like an element of nature. There are few of these: I fear your friend W— is not one.’

I said, I thought one circumstance against him was the want of popularity in his life-time. Few people made much noise after their deaths who did not do so while they were living. Posterity could not be supposed to rake into the records of past times for the Illustrious Obscure; and only ratified or annulled the lists of great names handed down to them by the voice of common fame. Few people recovered from the neglect or obloquy of their contemporaries. The public would hardly be at the pains to try the same cause twice over, or did not like to reverse its own sentence, at least when on the unfavourable side. There was Hobbes, for instance: he had a bad name while living, and it was of no use to think at this time of day of doing him justice. While the priests and politicians were tearing him in pieces for his atheism and arbitrary principles, Mr. Locke stole his philosophy from him; and I would fain see any one restore it to the right owner. Quote the passages one by one, show that every principle of the modern metaphysical system was contained in Hobbes, and that all that succeeding writers have done was to deduce from Mr. Locke’s imperfect concessions the very consequences, ‘armed all in proof,’ that already existed in an entire and unmutilated state in his predecessor; and you shall the next day hear Mr. Locke spoken of as the father of English philosophy as currently and confidently as if not the shadow of a doubt had ever been started on the subject. Mr. Hobbes, by the boldness and comprehensiveness of his views, had shocked the prejudices and drawn down upon his head the enmity of his contemporaries: Mr. Locke, by going more cautiously to work, and only admitting as much at a time as the public mind would bear, prepared the way for the rest of Mr. Hobbes’s philosophy, and for a vast reputation for himself, which nothing can impugn. Stat nominis umbra. The world are too far off to distinguish names from things; and call Mr. Locke the first of English philosophers, as they call a star by a particular name, because others call it so. They also dislike to have their confidence in a great name destroyed, and fear, that by displacing one of their favoured idols from its niche in the Temple of Fame, they may endanger the whole building.

NORTHCOTE—‘Why, I thought Hobbes stood as high as any body. I have always heard him spoken of in that light. It is not his capacity that people dispute, but they object to his character. The world will not encourage vice, for their own sakes; and they give a casting-vote in favour of virtue. Mr. Locke was a modest, conscientious enquirer after truth, and the world had the sagacity to see this and to be willing to give him a hearing; the other, I conceive, was a bully, and a bad man into the bargain, and they did not want to be bullied into truth or to sanction licentiousness. This is unavoidable; for the desire of knowledge is but one principle of the mind. It was the same with Tom Paine. Nobody can deny that he was a very fine writer and a very sensible man; but he flew in the face of a whole generation, and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name is become a bye-word with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the pink of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man: it falls under the article of moral virtue. There are some reputations that are great, merely because they are amiable. There is Dr. Watts: look at the encomiums passed on him by Dr. Johnson; and yet to what, according to his statement, does his merit amount? Why only to this, that he did that best which none can do well, and employed his talents uniformly for the welfare of mankind. He was a good man, and the voice of the public has given him credit for being a great one. The world may be forced to do homage to great talents, but they only bow willingly to these when they are joined with benevolence and modesty; nor will they put weapons into the hands of the bold and unprincipled sophist to be turned against their own interests and wishes.’ I said, there was a great deal in the manner of bringing truth forward to influence its reception with the reader; for not only did we resent unwelcome novelties advanced with an insolent and dogmatical air; but we were even ready to give up our favourite notions, when we saw them advocated in a harsh and intolerant manner by those of our own party, sooner than submit to the pretensions of blindfold presumption. If any thing could make me a bigot, it would be the arrogance of the free-thinker; if any thing could make me a slave, it would be the sordid sneering fopperies and sweeping clauses of the liberal party. Renegadoes are generally made so, not by the overtures of their adversaries, but by disgust at the want of candour and moderation in their friends. Northcote replied—‘To be sure, there was nothing more painful than to have one’s own opinions disfigured or thrust down one’s throat by impertinence and folly; and that once when a pedantic coxcomb was crying up Raphael to the skies, he could not help saying—“If there was nothing in Raphael but what you see in him, we should not now have been talking of him!”’

CONVERSATION THE SECOND

When I called, I found Mr. Northcote painting a portrait of himself. Another stood on an easel. He asked me, which I thought most like? I said, the one he was about was the best, but not good enough. It looks like a physician or a member of parliament, but it ought to look like something more—a Cardinal or a Spanish Inquisitor! I do not think you ought to proceed in painting your own face as you do with some others—that is, by trying to improve upon it: you have only to make it like; for the more like it is, the better it will be as a picture. ‘Oh! he tried to make it like.’ I found I had got upon a wrong scent. Mr. Northcote, as an artist, was not bound to have a fine head, but he was bound to paint one. I am always a very bad courtier; and think of what strikes me, and not of the effect upon others. So I once tried to compliment a very handsome brunette, by telling her how much I admired dark beauties. ‘Oh!’ said Northcote, ‘you should have told her she was fair. She did not like black, though you did!’ After all, there is a kind of selfishness in this plain-speaking. In the present case, it set us wrong the whole morning, and I had to stay longer than usual to recover the old track. I was continually in danger of oversetting a stand with a small looking-glass, which Northcote particularly cautioned me not to touch; and every now and then he was prying into the glass by stealth, to see if the portrait was like. He had on a green velvet-cap, and looked very like Titian.

Northcote then turning round, said, ‘I wanted to ask you about a speech you made the other day: you said you thought you could have made something of portrait, but that you never could have painted history. What did you mean by that?’—‘Oh! all I meant was, that sometimes when I see a fine Titian or Rembrandt, I feel as if I could have done something of the same kind with the proper pains, but I have never the same feeling with respect to Raphael. My admiration is there utterly unmixed with emulation or regret. In fact, I see what is before me, but I have no invention.’

NORTHCOTE—‘You do not know till you try. There is not so much difference as you imagine. Portrait often runs into history, and history into portrait, without our knowing it. Expression is common to both, and that is the chief difficulty. The greatest history-painters have always been able portrait-painters. How should a man paint a thing in motion, if he cannot paint it still? But the great point is to catch the prevailing look and character: if you are master of this, you can make almost what use of it you please. If a portrait has force, it will do for history; and if history is well painted, it will do for portrait. This is what gave dignity to Sir Joshua: his portraits had always that determined air and character that you know what to think of them as if you had seen them engaged in the most decided action. So Fuseli said of Titian’s picture of Paul III. and his two nephews, “That is true history!” Many of the groups in the Vatican, by Raphael, are only collections of fine portraits. That is why West, Barry, and others pretended to despise portrait, because they could not do it, and it would only expose their want of truth and nature. No! if you can give the look, you need not fear painting history. Yet how difficult that is, and on what slight causes it depends! It is not enough that it is seen, unless it is at the same time felt. How odd it seems, that often while you are looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of expression! What a fine hand then is required to trace what the eye can scarcely be said to distinguish! So I used to contend against Sir Joshua that Raphael had triumphed over this difficulty in the Miracle of Bolsena, where he has given the internal blush of the unbelieving priest at seeing the wafer turned into blood—the colour to be sure assists, but the look of stupefaction and shame is also there in the most marked degree. Sir Joshua said it was my fancy, but I am as convinced of it as I am of my existence; and the proof is that otherwise he has done nothing. There is no story without it; but he has trusted to the expression to tell the story, instead of leaving the expression to be made out from the story. I have often observed the same thing in myself, when I have blamed any one as mildly as I could, not using any violence of language, nor indeed intending to hurt; and I have afterwards wondered at the effect; my sister has said, “You should have seen your look,” but I did not know of it myself.—I said, ‘If you had, it would have been less felt by others.’ An instance of this made me laugh not long ago. I was offended at a waiter for very ill behaviour at an inn at Calais; and while he was out of the room, I was putting on as angry a look as I could, but I found this sort of previous rehearsal to no purpose. The instant he returned into the room, I gave him a look that I felt made it unnecessary to tell him what I thought.’—‘To be sure, he would see it immediately.’—‘And don’t you think, Sir,’ I said, ‘that this explains the difficulty of fine acting, and the difference between good acting and bad—that is, between face-making or mouthing and genuine passion? To give the last, an actor must possess the highest truth of imagination, and must undergo an entire revolution of feeling. Is it wonderful that so many prefer an artificial to a natural actor, the mask to the man, the pompous pretension to the simple expression? Not at all; the wonder rather is that people in general judge so right as they do, when they have such doubtful grounds to go upon; and they would not, but they trust less to rules or reasoning than to their feelings.’

NORTHCOTE—‘You must come to that at last. The common sense of mankind (whether a good or a bad one) is the best criterion you have to appeal to. You necessarily impose upon yourself in judging of your own works. Whenever I am trying at an expression, I hang up the picture in the room and ask people what it means, and if they guess right, I think I have succeeded. You yourself see the thing as you wish it, or according to what you have been endeavouring to make it. When I was doing the figures of Argyll in prison and of his enemy who comes and finds him asleep, I had a great difficulty to encounter in conveying the expression of the last—indeed I did it from myself—I wanted to give a look of mingled remorse and admiration; and when I found that others saw this look in the sketch I had made, I left off. By going on, I might lose it again. There is a point of felicity which, whether you fall short of or have gone beyond it, can only be determined by the effect on the unprejudiced observer. You cannot be always with your picture to explain it to others: it must be left to speak for itself. Those who stand before their pictures and make fine speeches about them, do themselves a world of harm: a painter should cut out his tongue, if he wishes to succeed. His language addresses itself not to the ear, but the eye. He should stick to that as much as possible. Sometimes you hit off an effect without knowing it. Indeed the happiest results are frequently the most unconscious. Boaden was here the other day. You don’t remember Henderson, I suppose?’—‘No.’—‘He says his reading was the most perfect he ever knew. He thought himself a pretty good reader and a tolerable mimic; that he succeeded tolerably well in imitating Kemble, Mrs. Siddons, and others, but that there was something in Henderson’s reading so superior to all the rest, that he never could come any thing near it. I told him, You don’t know that: if you were to hear him now, you might think him even worse than your own imitation of him. We deceive ourselves as much with respect to the excellences of others as we do with respect to our own, by dwelling on a favourite idea. In order to judge, you should ask some one else who remembered him. I spoke to him about Kemble, whose life he has been lately writing. I said, when he sat to me for the Richard III. meeting the children, he lent me no assistance whatever in the expression I wished to give, but remained quite immoveable, as if he were sitting for an ordinary portrait. Boaden said, This was his way: he never put himself to any exertion, except in his professional character. If any one wanted to know his idea of a part or of a particular passage, his reply always was, “You must come and see me do it.”’

Northcote then spoke of the boy, as he always calls him (Master Betty). He asked if I had ever seen him act, and I said, Yes, and was one of his admirers. He answered, ‘Oh! yes, it was such a beautiful effusion of natural sensibility; and then that graceful play of the limbs in youth gave such an advantage over every one about him. Humphreys (the artist) said, “He had never seen the little Apollo off the pedestal before.” You see the same thing in the boys at Westminster-School. But no one was equal to him.’ Mr. Northcote alluded with pleasure to his unaffected manners when a boy, and mentioned as an instance of his simplicity, his saying one day, ‘If they admire me so much, what would they say to Mr. Harley?’ (a tragedian in the same strolling company with himself.) We then spoke of his acting since he was grown up. Northcote said, ‘He went to see him one night with Fuseli, in Alexander the Great, and that he observed coming out, they could get nobody to do it better.’—‘Nor so well,’ said Fuseli. A question being put, ‘Why then could he not succeed at present?’—‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘the world will never admire twice. The first surprise was excited by his being a boy; and when that was over, nothing could bring them back again to the same point, not though he had turned out a second Roscius. They had taken a surfeit of their idol, and wanted something new. Nothing he could do could astonish them so much the second time, as the youthful prodigy had done the first time; and therefore he must always appear as a foil to himself, and seem comparatively flat and insipid. Garrick kept up the fever of public admiration as long as any body; but when he returned to the stage after a short absence, no one went to see him. It was the same with Sir Joshua: latterly Romney drew all his sitters from him. So they say the Exhibition is worse every year, though it is just the same, there are the same subjects and the same painters. Admiration is a forced tribute, and to extort it from mankind (envious and ignorant as they are) they must be taken unawares.’ I remarked—‘It was the same in books; if an author was only equal to himself, he was always said to fall off. The blow to make the same impression must be doubled, because we are prepared for it. We give him the whole credit of his first successful production, because it was altogether unexpected; but if he does not rise as much above himself in the second instance, as the first was above nothing, we are disappointed and say he has fallen off, for our feelings are not equally excited.’—‘Just,’ said Northcote, ‘as in painting a portrait: people are surprised at the first sitting, and wonder to see how you have got on: but I tell them they will never see so much done again; for at first there was nothing but a blank canvas to work upon, but afterwards you have to improve upon your own design, and this at every step becomes more and more difficult. It puts me in mind of an observation of Opie’s, that it was wrong to suppose that people went on improving to the last in any art or profession: on the contrary, they put their best ideas into their first works (which they have been qualifying themselves to undertake all their lives before); and what they gain afterwards in correctness and refinement, they lose in originality and vigour.’ I assented to this as a very striking and (as I thought) sound remark. He said, ‘I wish you had known Opie: he was a very original-minded man. Mrs. Siddons used to say—“I like to meet Mr. Opie; for then I always hear something I did not know before.” I do not say that he was always right; but he always put your thoughts into a new track, that was worth following. I was very fond of Opie’s conversation; and I remember once when I was expressing my surprise at his having so little of the Cornish dialect; “Why,” he said, “the reason is, I never spoke at all till I knew you and Wolcott.” He was a true genius. Mr. — is a person of great judgment; but I do not learn so much from him. I think this is the difference between sense and genius;—a man of genius judges for himself, and you hear nothing but what is original from him: but a man of sense or with a knowledge of the world, judges as others do; and he is on this account the safest guide to follow, though not, perhaps, the most instructive companion. I recollect Miss Reynolds making nearly the same observation. She said—“I don’t know how it is; I don’t think Miss C— a very clever woman, and yet, whenever I am at a loss about any thing, I always go to consult her, and her advice is almost sure to be right.” The reason was, that this lady, instead of taking her own view of the subject (as a person of superior capacity might have been tempted to do) considered only what light others would view it in, and pronounced her decision according to the prevailing rules and maxims of the world. When old Dr. — married his housemaid, Sterne, on hearing of it, exclaimed, “Ay, I always thought him a genius, and now I’m sure of it!” The truth was (and this was what Sterne meant), that Dr. — saw a thousand virtues in this woman which nobody else did, and could give a thousand reasons for his choice, that no one about him had the wit to answer: but nature took its usual course, and the event turned out as he had been forewarned, according to the former experience of the world in such matters. His being in the wrong did not prove him to be less a genius, though it might impeach his judgment or prudence. He was, in fact, wiser, and saw more of the matter than any one of his neighbours, who might advise him to the contrary; but he was not so wise as the collective experience or common sense of mankind on the subject, which his more cautious friends merely echoed. It is only the man of genius who has any right or temptation to make a fool of himself, by setting up his own unsupported decision against that of the majority. He feels himself superior to any individual in the crowd, and therefore rashly undertakes to act in defiance of the whole mass of prejudice and opinion opposed to him. It is safe and easy to travel in a stage-coach from London to Salisbury: but it would require great strength, boldness, and sagacity to go in a straight line across the country.’

CONVERSATION THE THIRD

Northcote began by saying, ‘You don’t much like Sir Joshua, I know; but I think that is one of your prejudices. If I was to compare him with Vandyke and Titian, I should say that Vandyke’s portraits are like pictures (very perfect ones, no doubt), Sir Joshua’s like the reflection in a looking-glass, and Titian’s like the real people. There is an atmosphere of light and shade about Sir Joshua’s, which neither of the others have in the same degree, together with a vagueness that gives them a visionary and romantic character, and makes them seem like dreams or vivid recollections of persons we have seen. I never could mistake Vandyke’s for any thing but pictures, and I go up to them to examine them as such: when I see a fine Sir Joshua, I can neither suppose it to be a mere picture nor a man; and I almost involuntarily turn back to ascertain if it is not some one behind me reflected in the glass: when I see a Titian, I am riveted to it, and I can no more take my eye off from it, than if it were the very individual in the room. That,’ he said, ‘is, I think, peculiar to Titian, that you feel on your good behaviour in the presence of his keen-looking heads, as if you were before company.’ I mentioned that I thought Sir Joshua more like Rembrandt than like either Titian or Vandyke: he enveloped objects in the same brilliant haze of a previous mental conception.—‘Yes,’ he said; ‘but though Sir Joshua borrowed a great deal, he drew largely from himself: or rather, it was a strong and peculiar feeling of nature working in him and forcing its way out in spite of all impediments, and that made whatever he touched his own. In spite of his deficiency in drawing, and his want of academic rules and a proper education, you see this breaking out like a devil in all his works. It is this that has stamped him. There is a charm in his portraits, a mingled softness and force, a grasping at the end with nothing harsh or unpleasant in the means, that you will find nowhere else. He may go out of fashion for a time: but you must come back to him again, while a thousand imitators and academic triflers are forgotten. This proves him to have been a real genius. The same thing, however, made him a very bad master. He knew nothing of rules which are alone to be taught; and he could not communicate his instinctive feeling of beauty or character to others. I learnt nothing from him while I was with him: and none of his scholars (if I may except myself) ever made any figure at all. He only gave us his pictures to copy. Sir Joshua undoubtedly got his first ideas of the art from Gandy, though he lost them under Hudson; but he easily recovered them afterwards. That is a picture of Gandy’s there (pointing to a portrait of a little girl). If you look into it, you will find the same broken surface and varying outline, that was so marked a characteristic of Sir Joshua. There was nothing he hated so much as a distinct outline, as you see it in Mengs and the French school. Indeed, he ran into the opposite extreme; but it is one of the great beauties of art to show it waving and retiring, now losing and then recovering itself again, as it always does in nature, without any of that stiff, edgy appearance, which only pedants affect or admire. Gandy was never out of Devonshire: but his portraits are common there. His father was patronized by the Duke of Ormond, and one reason why the son never came out of his native county was, that when the Duke of Ormond was implicated in the rebellion to restore the Pretender in 1715, he affected to be thought too deep in his Grace’s confidence and a person of too much consequence to venture up to London, so that he chose to remain in a voluntary exile.’ I asked Northcote if he remembered the name of Stringer at the Academy, when he first came up to town. He said he did, and that he drew very well, and once put the figure for him in a better position to catch the foreshortening. He inquired if I knew any thing about him, and I said I had once vainly tried to copy a head of a youth by him admirably drawn and coloured, and in which he had attempted to give the effect of double vision by a second outline accompanying the contour of the face and features. Though the design might not be in good taste, it was executed in a way that made it next to impossible to imitate. I called on him afterwards at his house at Knutsford, where I saw some spirited comic sketches in an unfinished state,[89] and a capital female figure by Cignani. All his skill and love of art had, I found, been sacrificed to his delight in Cheshire ale and the company of country-squires. Tom Kershaw, of Manchester, used to say, that he would rather have been Dan Stringer than Sir Joshua Reynolds at twenty years of age. Kershaw, like other North-country critics, thought more of the executive power than of the æsthetical faculty; forgetting that it signifies comparatively little how well you execute a thing, if it is not worth executing.—In consequence of something that was said of the egotism of artists, he observed, ‘I am sometimes thought cold and cynical myself; but I hope it is not from any such over-weening opinion of myself. I remember once going with Wilkie to Angerstein’s, and because I stood looking and said nothing, he seemed dissatisfied, and said, “I suppose you are too much occupied with admiring, to give me your opinion?” And I answered hastily, “No, indeed! I was saying to myself, ‘And is this all that the art can do?’” But this was not, I am sure, an expression of triumph, but of mortification at the defects which I could not help observing even in the most accomplished works. I knew they were the best, but I could have wished them to be a hundred times better than they were.’

Northcote mentioned a conceited painter of the name of Edwards, who went with Romney to Rome; and when they got into the Sistine Chapel, turning round to him, said, ‘’Egad! George, we’re bit!’—He then spoke of his own journey to Rome, of the beauty of the climate, of the manners of the people, of the imposing effect of the Roman Catholic religion, of its favourableness to the fine arts, of the churches full of pictures, of the manner in which he passed his time, studying and looking into all the rooms in the Vatican: he had no fault to find with Italy, and no wish to leave it. ‘Gracious and sweet was all he saw in her!’ As he talked, he looked as if he saw the different objects pass before him, and his eye glittered with familiar recollections. He said, Raphael did not scorn to look out of himself or to be beholden to others. He took whole figures from Masaccio to enrich his designs, because all he wanted was to advance the art and ennoble human nature. After he saw Michael Angelo, he improved in freedom and breadth; and if he had lived to see Titian, he would have done all he could to avail himself of his colouring. All his works are an effusion of the sweetness and dignity of his own character. He did not know how to make a picture; but for the conduct of the fable and the development of passion and feeling (noble but full of tenderness) there is nobody like him. This is why Hogarth can never come into the lists. He does not lift us above ourselves: our curiosity may be gratified by seeing what men are, but our pride must be soothed by seeing them made better. Why else is Milton preferred to Hudibras, but because the one aggrandises our notions of human nature, and the other degrades it? Who will make any comparison between a Madona of Raphael and a drunken prostitute by Hogarth? Do we not feel more respect for an inspired Apostle than for a blackguard in the streets? Raphael points out the highest perfection of which the human form and faculties are capable, and Hogarth their lowest degradation or most wretched perversion. Look at his attempts to paint the good or beautiful, and you see how faint the impressions of these were in his mind. Yet these are what every one must wish to cherish in his own bosom, and must feel most thankful for to those who lend him the powerful assistance of their unrivalled conceptions of true grandeur and beauty. Sir Joshua strove to do this in his portraits, and this it was that raised him in public estimation; for we all wish to get rid of defects and peculiarities as much as we can. He then said of Michael Angelo, he did not wonder at the fame he had acquired. You are to consider the state of the art before his time, and that he burst through the mean and little manner even of such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Perugino and through the trammels that confined them, and gave all at once a gigantic breadth and expansion that had never been seen before, so that the world were struck with it as with a display of almost supernatural power, and have never ceased to admire since. We are not to compare it with the examples of art that have followed since, and that would never have existed but for him, but with those that preceded it. He found fault with the figure of the flying monk in the St. Peter Martyr, as fluttering and theatrical, but agreed with me in admiring this picture and in my fondness for Titian in general. He mentioned his going with Prince Hoare and Day to take leave of some fine portraits of Titian’s that hung in a dark corner of a Gallery at Naples; and as Day looked at them for the last time with tears in his eyes, he said ‘Ah! he was a fine old mouser!’—I said, I had repeated this expression (which I had heard him allude to before) somewhere in writing, and was surprised that people did not know what to make of it. Northcote said, ‘Why, that is exactly what I should have thought. There is the difference between writing and speaking. In writing, you address the average quantity of sense or information in the world; in speaking, you pick your audience, or at least know what they are prepared for, or else previously explain what you think necessary. You understand the epithet because you have seen a great number of Titian’s pictures, and know that cat-like, watchful, penetrating look he gives to all his faces, which nothing else expresses, perhaps, so well as the phrase Day made use of: but the world in general know nothing of this; all they know or believe is, that Titian is a great painter like Raphael or any other famous person. Suppose any one was to tell you, Raphael was a fine old mouser: would you not laugh at this as absurd? And yet the other is equally nonsense or incomprehensible to them. No, there is a limit, a conversational licence which you cannot carry into writing. This is one difficulty I have in writing: I do not know the point of familiarity at which I am to stop; and yet I believe I have ideas, and you say I know how to express myself in talking.’

I inquired if he remembered much of Johnson, Burke, and that set of persons? He said, Yes, a good deal, as he had often seen them. Burke came into Sir Joshua’s painting-room one day, when Northcote, who was then a young man, was sitting for one of the children in Count Ugolino. (It is the one in profile with the hand to the face.) He was introduced as a pupil of Sir Joshua’s, and, on his looking up, Mr. Burke said, ‘Then I see that Mr. Northcote is not only an artist, but has a head that would do for Titian to paint.’—Goldsmith and Burke had often violent disputes about politics; the one being a staunch Tory, and the other at that time a Whig and outrageous anti-courtier. One day he came into the room, when Goldsmith was there, full of ire and abuse against the late king, and went on in such a torrent of the most unqualified invective that Goldsmith threatened to leave the room. The other, however, persisted; and Goldsmith went out, unable to bear it any longer. So much for Mr. Burke’s pretended consistency and uniform loyalty! When Northcote first came to Sir Joshua, he wished very much to see Goldsmith; and one day Sir Joshua, on introducing him, asked why he had been so anxious to see him? ‘Because,’ said Northcote, ‘he is a notable[90] man.’ This expression, notable, in its ordinary sense, was so contrary to Goldsmith’s character, that they both burst out a-laughing very heartily. Goldsmith was two thousand pounds in debt at the time of his death, which was hastened by his chagrin and distressed circumstances: and when ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was performed, he was so choked all dinner-time that he could not swallow a mouthful. A party went from Sir Joshua’s to support it. The present title was not fixed upon till that morning. Northcote went with Ralph, Sir Joshua’s man, into the gallery, to see how it went off; and after the second act, there was no doubt of its success. Northcote says, people had a great notion of the literary parties at Sir Joshua’s. He once asked Lord B— to dine with Dr. Johnson and the rest; but though a man of rank and also of good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-’Change. Northcote remarked that he thought people of talents had their full share of admiration. He had seen young ladies of quality, Lady Marys and Lady Dorothys, peeping into a room where Mrs. Siddons was sitting, with all the same timidity and curiosity as if it were some preternatural being—he was sure more than if it had been the Queen. He then made some observations on the respect paid to rank, and said, ‘However ridiculous it might seem, it was no more than the natural expression of the highest respect in other cases. For instance, as to that of bowing out of the King’s presence backwards, would you not do the same if you were introduced to Dr. Johnson for the first time? You would contrive not to turn your back upon him, till you were out of the room.’ He said, ‘You violent politicians make more rout about royalty than it is worth: it is only the highest place, and somebody must fill it, no matter who: neither do the persons themselves think so much of it as you imagine. They are glad to get into privacy as much as they can. Nor is it a sinecure. The late King (I have been told) used often to have to sign his name to papers, and do nothing else for three hours together, till his fingers fairly ached, and then he would take a walk in the garden, and come back to repeat the same drudgery for three hours more. So, when they told Louis XV. that if he went on with his extravagance, he would bring about a Revolution and be sent over to England with a pension, he merely asked, “Do you think the pension would be a pretty good one?”’ He noticed the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, and praised them for their extreme vivacity and great insight into human nature. Once when the mob had besieged the palace, and the Cardinal was obliged to go and appease them, a brick-bat was flung at him and knocked him down, and one of the assailants presenting a bayonet at his throat, he suddenly called out, ‘Oh, you wretch! if your father could have seen you in this barbarous action, what would he have said?’ The man immediately withdrew, though, says the Cardinal, ‘I knew no more of his father than the babe unborn.’ Northcote then adverted to the talent of players for drollery and sudden shifts and expedients, and said that by living in an element of comic invention, they imbibed a portion of it. He repeated that jest of F. Reynolds, who filled up the blank in a militia paper that was sent him with the description, ‘Old, lame, and a coward;’ and another story told of Matthews, the comedian, who being left in the room with an old gentleman and a little child, and the former putting the question to it, ‘Well, my dear, which do you like best, the dog or the cat?’ by exercising his powers of ventriloquism, made the child seem to answer, ‘I don’t care a d—mn for either,’—to the utter confusion of the old gentleman, who immediately took the father to task for bringing up his son in such profaneness and total want of common humanity.

He then returned to the question of the inconsistent and unreasonable expectations of mankind as to their success in different pursuits, and answered the common complaint, ‘What a shame it was that Milton only got thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence for “Paradise Lost.”’ He said, ‘Not at all; he did not write it to get money, he had gained what he had proposed by writing it, not thirteen pounds nine shillings and sixpence, but an immortal reputation. When Dr. Johnson was asked why he was not invited out to dine as Garrick was, he answered, as if it was a triumph to him, “Because great lords and ladies don’t like to have their mouths stopped!” But who does like to have their mouths stopped? Did he, more than others? People like to be amused in general; but they did not give him the less credit for wisdom and a capacity to instruct them by his writings. In like manner, it has been said, that the King only sought one interview with Dr. Johnson; whereas, if he had been a buffoon or a sycophant, he would have asked for more. No, there was nothing to complain of: it was a compliment paid by rank to letters, and once was enough. The King was more afraid of this interview than Dr. Johnson was; and went to it as a school-boy to his task. But he did not want to have this trial repeated every day, nor was it necessary. The very jealousy of his self-love marked his respect: and if he had thought less of Dr. Johnson, he would have been more willing to risk the encounter. They had each their place to fill, and would best preserve their self-respect, and perhaps their respect for each other, by remaining in their proper sphere. So they make an outcry about the Prince leaving Sheridan to die in absolute want. He had left him long before: was he to send every day to know if he was dying? These things cannot be helped, without exacting too much of human nature.’ I agreed to this view of the subject, and said,—I did not see why literary people should repine if they met with their deserts in their own way, without expecting to get rich; but that they often got nothing for their pains but unmerited abuse and party obloquy.—‘Oh, it is not party-spite,’ said he, ‘but the envy of human nature. Do you think to distinguish yourself with impunity? Do you imagine that your superiority will be delightful to others? Or that they will not strive all they can, and to the last moment, to pull you down? I remember myself once saying to Opie, how hard it was upon the poor author or player to be hunted down for not succeeding in an innocent and laudable attempt, just as if they had committed some heinous crime! And he answered, “They have committed the greatest crime in the eyes of mankind, that of pretending to a superiority over them!” Do you think that party abuse, and the running down particular authors is any thing new? Look at the manner in which Pope and Dryden were assailed by a set of reptiles. Do you believe the modern periodicals had not their prototypes in the party-publications of that day? Depend upon it, what you take for political cabal and hostility is (nine parts in ten) private pique and malice oozing out through those authorized channels.’

We now got into a dispute about nicknames; and H—me coming in and sitting down at my elbow, my old pugnacious habit seemed to return upon me. Northcote contended, that they had always an appropriate meaning: and I said,—‘Their whole force consisted in their having absolutely none but the most vague and general.’—‘Why,’ said Northcote, ‘did my father give me the name of “Fat Jack,” but because I was lean?’ He gave an instance which I thought made against himself, of a man at Plymouth, a baker by profession, who had got the name of Tiddydoll—he could not tell how. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘it was a name without any sense or meaning.’—‘Be that as it may,’ said Northcote, ‘it almost drove him mad. The boys called after him in the street, besieged his shop-windows; even the soldiers took it up, and marched to parade, beating time with their feet, and repeating, Tiddydoll, Tiddydoll, as they passed by his door. He flew out upon them at the sound with inextinguishable fury, and was knocked down and rolled in the kennel, and got up in an agony of rage and shame, his white clothes covered all over with mud. A gentleman, a physician in the neighbourhood, one day called him in and remonstrated with him on the subject. He advised him to take no notice of his persecutors. “What,” he said, “does it signify? Suppose they were to call me Tiddydoll?”—“There,” said the man, “you called me so yourself; you only sent for me in to insult me!” and, after heaping every epithet of abuse upon him, flew out of the house in a most ungovernable passion.’ I told Northcote this was just the thing I meant. Even if a name had confessedly no meaning, by applying it constantly and by way of excellence to another, it seemed as if he must be an abstraction of insignificance: whereas, if it pointed to any positive defect or specific charge, it was at least limited to the one, and you stood a chance of repelling the other. The virtue of a nickname consisted in its being indefinable and baffling all proof or reply. When H—me was gone, Northcote extolled his proficiency in Hebrew, which astonished me not a little, as I had never heard of it. I said, he was a very excellent man, and a good specimen of the character of the old Presbyterians, who had more of the idea of an attachment to principle, and less of an obedience to fashion or convenience, from their education and tenets, than any other class of people. Northcote assented to this statement, and concluded by saying, that H—me was certainly a very good man, and had no fault but that of not being fat.

CONVERSATION THE FOURTH

Northcote said, he had been reading Kelly’s ‘Reminiscences.’ I asked what he thought of them? He said, they were the work of a well meaning man, who fancied all those about him good people, and every thing they uttered clever. I said, I recollected his singing formerly with Mrs. Crouch, and that he used to give great effect to some things of sentiment, such as ‘Oh! had I been by fate decreed,’ &c. in Love in a Village. Northcote said, he did not much like him: there was a jerk, a kind of brogue in his singing; though he had, no doubt, considerable advantages in being brought up with all the great singers and having performed on all the first stages in Italy. I said, there was no echo of all that now. ‘No,’ said Northcote, ‘nor in my time, though I was there just after him. He asked me once, many years ago, if I had heard of him in Italy, and I said no, though I excused myself by stating that I had only been at Rome, where the stage was less an object, the Pope there performing the chief part himself.’ I answered, that I meant there was no echo of the fine singing at present in Italy, music being there dead as well as painting, or reduced to mere screaming, noise and rant. ‘It is odd,’ he said, ‘how their genius seems to have left them. Every thing of that sort appears to be at present no better than it is with us in a country-town: or rather it wants the simplicity and rustic innocence, and is more like the draggle-tailed finery of a lady’s waiting-maid. They have nothing of their own: all is at second-hand. Did you see Thorwaldsen’s things while you were there? A young artist brought me all his designs the other day, as miracles that I was to wonder at and be delighted with. But I could find nothing in them but repetitions of the Antique, over and over, till I was surfeited.’ ‘He would be pleased at this.’ ‘Why, no! that is not enough: it is easy to imitate the Antique:—if you want to last, you must invent something. The other is only pouring liquors from one vessel into another, that become staler and staler every time. We are tired of the Antique; yet, at any rate, it is better than the vapid imitation of it. The world wants something new, and will have it. No matter whether it is better or worse, if there is but an infusion of new life and spirit, it will go down to posterity; otherwise, you are soon forgotten. Canova, too, is nothing for the same reason—he is only a feeble copy of the Antique; or a mixture of two things the most incompatible, that and opera-dancing. But there is Bernini; he is full of faults; he has too much of that florid, redundant, fluttering style, that was objected to Rubens; but then he has given an appearance of flesh that was never given before. The Antique always looks like marble, you never for a moment can divest yourself of the idea; but go up to a statue of Bernini’s, and it seems as if it must yield to your touch. This excellence he was the first to give, and therefore it must always remain with him. It is true, it is also in the Elgin marbles; but they were not known in his time; so that he indisputably was a genius. Then there is Michael Angelo; how utterly different from the Antique, and in some things how superior! For instance, there is his statue of Cosmo de Medici, leaning on his hand, in the chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence; I declare it has that look of reality in it, that it almost terrifies you to be near it. It has something of the same effect as the mixture of life and death that is perceivable in wax-work; though that is a bad illustration, as this last is disagreeable and mechanical, and the other is produced by a powerful and masterly conception. It was the same with Handel too: he made music speak a new language, with a pathos and a power that had never been dreamt of till his time. Is it not the same with Titian, Correggio, Raphael? These painters did not imitate one another, but were as unlike as possible, and yet were all excellent. If excellence were one thing, they must have been all wrong. Still, originality is not caprice or affectation; it is an excellence that is always to be found in nature, but has never had a place in art before. So Romney said of Sir Joshua, that there was that in his pictures which we had not been used to see in other painters, but we had seen it often enough in nature. Give this in your works, and nothing can ever rob you of the credit of it.

‘I was looking into Mandeville since I saw you (I thought I had lost it, but I found it among a parcel of old books). You may judge by that of the hold that any thing like originality takes of the world: for though there is a great deal that is questionable and liable to very strong objection, yet they will not give it up, because it is the very reverse of common-place; and they must go to that source to learn what can be said on that side of the question. Even if you receive a shock, you feel your faculties roused by it and set on the alert. Mankind do not choose to go to sleep.’—I replied, that I thought this was true, yet at the same time the world seemed to have a wonderful propensity to admire the trite and traditional. I could only account for this from a reflection of our self-love. We could few of us invent, but most of us could imitate and repeat by rote; and as we thought we could get up and ride in the same jog-trot machine of learning, we affected to look up to this elevation as the post of honour. Northcote said, ‘You are to consider that learning is of great use to society; and though it may not add to the stock, is a necessary vehicle to transmit it to others. Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountain-heads. They are only wrong in often claiming respect on a false ground, and mistaking their own province. They are so accustomed to ring the changes on words and received notions, that they lose their perception of things. I remember being struck with this at the time of the Ireland controversy:—only to think of a man like Dr. Parr going down on his knees and kissing the pretended Manuscript! It was not that he knew or cared any thing about Shakspeare (or he would not have been so imposed upon); he merely worshipped a name, as a Catholic priest worships the shrine that contains some favourite relic.’ I said, the passages in Ireland’s play that were brought forward to prove the identity, were the very thing that proved the contrary; for they were obvious parodies of celebrated passages in Shakspeare, such as that on death in Richard II.—‘And there the antic sits,’ &c. Now, Shakspeare never parodied himself; but these learned critics were only struck with the verbal coincidence, and never thought of the general character or spirit of the writer. ‘Or without that,’ said Northcote, ‘who that attended to the common sense of the question would not perceive that Shakspeare was a person who would be glad to dispose of his plays as soon as he wrote them? If it had been such a man as Sir Philip Sidney, indeed, he might have written a play at his leisure, and locked it up in some private drawer at Penshurst, where it might have been found two hundred years after: but Shakspeare had no opportunity to leave such precious hoards behind him, nor place to deposit them in. Tresham made me very mad one day at Cosway’s, by saying they had found a lock of his hair and a picture; and Caleb Whitefoord, who ought to have known better, asked me if I did not think Sheridan a judge, and that he believed in the authenticity of the Ireland papers? I said, “Do you bring him as a fair witness? He wants to fill his theatre, and would write a play himself, and swear it was Shakspeare’s. He knows better than to cry stale fish.”’

I observed, this was what made me dislike the conversation of learned or literary men. I got nothing from them but what I already knew, and hardly that: they poured the same ideas and phrases and cant of knowledge out of books into my ears, as apothecaries’ apprentices made prescriptions out of the same bottles; but there were no new drugs or simples in their materia medica. Go to a Scotch professor, and he bores you to death by an eternal rhapsody about rent and taxes, gold and paper-currency, population and capital, and the Teutonic Races—all which you have heard a thousand times before: go to a linen-draper in the city, without education but with common sense and shrewdness, and you pick up something new, because nature is inexhaustible, and he sees it from his own point of view, when not cramped and hood-winked by pedantic prejudices. A person of this character said to me the other day, in speaking of the morals of foreign nations—‘It’s all a mistake to suppose there can be such a difference, Sir: the world are, and must be moral; for when people grow up and get married, they teach their children to be moral. No man wishes to have them turn out profligate.’ I said I had never heard this before, and it seemed to me to be putting society on new rollers. Northcote agreed, it was an excellent observation. I added, this self-taught shrewdness had its weak sides too. This same person was arguing that mankind remained much the same, and always would do so. Cows and horses did not change: and why then should men? He had forgot that cows and horses do not learn to read and write.—‘Ay, that was very well too,’ said Northcote; ‘I don’t know but I agree with him rather than with you. I was thinking of the same thing the other day in looking over an old Magazine, in which there was a long debate on an Act of Parliament to license gin-drinking. The effect was quite droll. There was one person who made a most eloquent speech to point out all the dreadful consequences of allowing this practice. It would debauch the morals, ruin the health, and dissolve all the bonds of society, and leave a poor, puny, miserable, Lilliputian race, equally unfit for peace or war. You would suppose that the world was going to be at an end. Why, no! the answer would have been, the world will go on much the same as before. You attribute too much power to an Act of Parliament. Providence has not taken its measure so ill as to leave it to an Act of Parliament to continue or discontinue the species. If it depended on our wisdom and contrivances whether it should last or not, it would be at an end before twenty years! People are wrong about this; some say the world is getting better, others complain it is getting worse, when, in fact, it is just the same, and neither better nor worse.’—What a lesson, I said to myself, for our pragmatical legislators and idle projectors!

I said, I had lately been led to think of the little real progress that was made by the human mind, and how the same errors and vices revived under a different shape at different periods, from observing just the same humour in our Ultra-reformers at present, and in their predecessors in the time of John Knox. Our modern wiseacres were for banishing all the fine arts and finer affections, whatever was pleasurable and ornamental, from the Commonwealth, on the score of utility, exactly as the others did on the score of religion. The real motive in either case was nothing but a sour, envious, malignant disposition, incapable of enjoyment in itself, and averse to every appearance or tendency to it in others. Our peccant humours broke out and formed into what Milton called ‘a crust of formality’ on the surface; and while we fancied we were doing God or man good service, we were only indulging our spleen, self-opinion, and self-will, according to the fashion of the day. The existing race of free-thinkers and sophists would be mortified to find themselves the counterpart of the monks and ascetics of old; but so it was. The dislike of the Westminster Reviewers to polite literature was only the old exploded Puritanic objection to human learning. Names and modes of opinion changed, but human nature was much the same.—‘I know nothing of the persons you speak of,’ said Northcote; ‘but they must be fools if they expect to get rid of the showy and superficial, and let only the solid and useful remain. The surface is a part of nature, and will always continue so. Besides, how many useful inventions owe their existence to ornamental contrivances! If the ingenuity and industry of man were not tasked to produce luxuries, we should soon be without necessaries. We must go back to the savage state. I myself am as little prejudiced in favour of poetry as almost any one can be; but surely there are things in poetry that the world cannot afford to do without. What is of absolute necessity is only a part; and the next question is, how to occupy the remainder of our time and thoughts (not so employed) agreeably and innocently. Works of fiction and poetry are of incalculable use in this respect. If people did not read the Scotch novels, they would not read Mr. Bentham’s philosophy. There is nothing to me more disagreeable than the abstract idea of a Quaker, which falls under the same article. They object to colours; and why do they object to colours? Do we not see that Nature delights in them? Do we not see the same purpose of prodigal and ostentatious display run through all her works? Do we not find the most beautiful and dazzling colours bestowed on plants and flowers, on the plumage of birds, on fishes and shells, even to the very bottom of the sea? All this profusion of ornament, we may be sure, is not in vain. To judge otherwise is to fly in the face of Nature, and substitute an exclusive and intolerant spirit in the place of philosophy, which includes the greatest variety of man’s wants and tastes, and makes all the favourable allowances it can. The Quaker will not wear coloured clothes; though he would not have a coat to his back if men had never studied any thing but the mortification of their appetites and desires. But he takes care of his personal convenience by wearing a piece of good broad-cloth, and gratifies his vanity, not by finery, but by having it of a different cut from every body else, so that he may seem better and wiser than they. Yet this humour, too, is not without its advantages: it serves to correct the contrary absurdity. I look upon the Quaker and the fop as two sentinels placed by Nature at the two extremes of vanity and selfishness, and to guard, as it were, all the common-sense and virtue that lie between.’ I observed that these contemptible narrow-minded prejudices made me feel irritable and impatient. ‘You should not suffer that,’ said Northcote; ‘for then you will run into the contrary mistake, and lay yourself open to your antagonist. The monks, for instance, have been too hardly dealt with—not that I would defend many abuses and instances of oppression in them—but is it not as well to have bodies of men shut up in cells and monasteries, as to let them loose to make soldiers of them and to cut one another’s throats? And out of that lazy ignorance and leisure, what benefits have not sprung? It is to them we owe those beautiful specimens of Gothic architecture which can never be surpassed; many of the discoveries in medicine and in mechanics are also theirs; and, I believe, the restoration of classical learning is owing to them. Not that I would be understood to say that all or a great deal of this could not have been done without them; but their leisure, their independence, and the want of some employment to exercise their minds were the actual cause of many advantages we now enjoy; and what I mean is, that Nature is satisfied with imperfect instruments. Instead of snarling at every thing that differs from us we had better take Shakspeare’s advice, and try to find

“Tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”’

It was at this time that Mr. Northcote read to me the following letter, addressed by him to a very young lady, who earnestly desired him to write a letter to her:—

‘MY DEAR MISS K—,

‘What in the world can make you desire a letter from me? Indeed, if I was a fine Dandy of one-and-twenty, with a pair of stays properly padded and also an iron busk, and whiskers under my nose, with my hair standing upright on my head, all in the present fashion, then it might be accounted for, as I might write you a fine answer in poetry about Cupids and burning hearts, and sighs and angels and darts, such a letter as Mr. —, the poet, might write. But it is long past the time for me to sing love-songs under your window, with a guitar, and catch my death in some cold night, and so die in your service.

‘But what has a poor gray-headed old man of eighty got to say to a blooming young lady of eighteen, but to relate to her his illness and pains, and tell her that past life is little better than a dream, and that he finds that all he has been doing is only vanity. Indeed, I may console myself with the pleasure of having gained the flattering attention of a young lady of such amiable qualities as yourself, and have the honour to assure you, that I am your grateful friend and most obliged humble servant,

‘JAMES NORTHCOTE.’

‘Argyll Place, 1826.’

I said, the hardest lesson seemed to be to look beyond ourselves. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘I remember when we were young and were making remarks upon the neighbours, an old maiden aunt of ours used to say, “I wish to God you could see yourselves!” And yet, perhaps, after all, this was not very desirable. Many people pass their whole lives in a very comfortable dream, who, if they could see themselves in the glass, would start back with affright. I remember once being at the Academy, when Sir Joshua wished to propose a monument to Dr. Johnson in St. Paul’s, and West got up and said, that the King, he knew, was averse to any thing of the kind, for he had been proposing a similar monument in Westminster Abbey for a man of the greatest genius and celebrity—one whose works were in all the cabinets of the curious throughout Europe—one whose name they would all hear with the greatest respect—and then it came out, after a long preamble, that he meant Woollett, who had engraved his Death of Wolfe. I was provoked, and I could not help exclaiming—“My God! what, do you put him upon a footing with such a man as Dr. Johnson—one of the greatest philosophers and moralists that ever lived? We have thousands of engravers at any time!”—and there was such a burst of laughter at this—Dance, who was a grave gentlemanly man, laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks; and Farington used afterwards to say to me, “Why don’t you speak in the Academy, and begin with ‘My God!’ as you do sometimes?”’ I said, I had seen in a certain painter something of this humour, who once very good-naturedly showed me a Rubens he had, and observed with great nonchalance, ‘What a pity that this man wanted expression!’ I imagined Rubens to have looked round his gallery. ‘Yet,’ he continued, ‘it is the consciousness of defect, too, that often stimulates the utmost exertions. If Pope had been a fine, handsome man, would he have left those masterpieces that he has? But he knew and felt his own deformity, and therefore was determined to leave nothing undone to extend that corner of power that he possessed. He said to himself, They shall have no fault to find there. I have often thought when very good-looking young men have come here intending to draw, “What! are you going to bury yourselves in a garret?” And it has generally happened that they have given up the art before long, and married or otherwise disposed of themselves.’ I had heard an anecdote of Nelson, that, when appointed post-captain, and on going to take possession of his ship at Yarmouth, the crowd on the quay almost jostled him, and exclaimed—‘What! have they made that little insignificant fellow a captain? He will do much, to be sure!’ I thought this might have urged him to dare as he did, in order to get the better of their prejudices and his own sense of mortification. ‘No doubt,’ said Northcote, ‘personal defects or disgrace operate in this way. I knew an admiral who had got the nickname of “Dirty Dick” among the sailors, and, on his being congratulated on obtaining some desperate victory, all he said was, “I hope they’ll call me Dirty Dick no more!”—There was a Sir John Grenville or Greenfield formerly, who was appointed to convoy a fleet of merchant-ships, and had to defend them against a Spanish man-of-war, and did so with the utmost bravery and resolution, so that the convoy got safe off; but after that, he would not yield till he was struck senseless by a ball, and then the crew delivered up the vessel to the enemy, who, on coming on board and entering the cabin where he lay, were astonished to find a mere puny shrivelled spider of a man, instead of the Devil they had expected to see. He was taken on shore in Spain, and died of his wounds there; and the Spanish women afterwards used to frighten their children, by telling them “Don John of the Greenfield was coming!”’

CONVERSATION THE FIFTH

Northcote mentioned the death of poor —, who had been with him a few days before, laughing and in great spirits; and the next thing he heard was that he had put an end to himself. I asked if there was any particular reason? He said ‘No; that he had left a note upon the table, saying that his friends had forsaken him, that he knew no cause, and that he was tired of life. His patron, C—, of the Admiralty, had, it seems, set him to paint a picture of Louis the Eighteenth receiving the Order of the Garter. He had probably been teazed about that. These insipid court-subjects were destined to be fatal to artists. Poor Bird had been employed to paint a picture of Louis the Eighteenth landing at Calais, and had died of chagrin and disappointment at his failure. Who could make any thing of such a figure and such a subject? There was nothing to be done; and yet if the artist added any thing of his own, he was called to order by his would-be patrons, as falsifying what appeared to them an important event in history. It was only a person like Rubens who could succeed in such subjects by taking what licences he thought proper, and having authority enough to dictate to his advisers.’ A gentleman came in, who asked if — was likely to have succeeded in his art? Northcote answered, ‘There were several things against it. He was good-looking, good-natured, and a wit. He was accordingly asked out to dine, and caressed by those who knew him; and a young man after receiving these flattering marks of attention and enjoying the height of luxury and splendour, was not inclined to return to his painting-room, to brood over a design that would cost him infinite trouble, and the success of which was at last doubtful. Few young men of agreeable persons or conversation turned out great artists. It was easier to look in the glass than to make a dull canvas shine like a lucid mirror; and, as to talking, Sir Joshua used to say, a painter should sew up his mouth. It was only the love of distinction that produced eminence; and if a man was admired for one thing, that was enough. We only work out our way to excellence by being imprisoned in defects. It requires a long apprenticeship, great pains, and prodigious self-denial, which no man will submit to, except from necessity, or as the only chance he has of escaping from obscurity. I remember when Mr. Locke (of Norbury Park) first came over from Italy; and old Dr. Moore, who had a high opinion of him, was crying up his drawings and asked me, if I did not think he would make a great painter? I said, ‘No, never!’—‘Why not?’—‘Because he has six thousand a year.’ No one would throw away all the advantages and indulgences this ensured him, to shut himself up in a garret to pore over that which after all may expose him to contempt and ridicule. Artists, to be sure, have gone on painting after they have got rich, such as Rubens and Titian, and indeed Sir Joshua; but then it had by this time become a habit and a source of pleasure instead of a toil to them, and the honours and distinction they had acquired by it counter-balanced every other consideration. Their love of the art had become greater than their love of riches or of idleness: but at first this is not the case, and the repugnance to labour is only mastered by the absolute necessity for it. People apply to study only when they cannot help it. No one was ever known to succeed without this stimulus.’ I ventured to say that, generally speaking, no one, I believed, ever succeeded in a profession without great application; but that where there was a strong turn for any thing, a man in this sense could not help himself, and the application followed of course, and was, in fact, comparatively easy. Northcote turned short round upon me, and said, ‘Then you admit original genius? I cannot agree with you there.’ I said, ‘Waiving that, and not inquiring how the inclination comes, but early in life a fondness, a passion for a certain pursuit is imbibed; the mind is haunted by this object, it cannot rest without it (any more than the body without food), it becomes the strongest feeling we have, and then, I think, the most intense application follows naturally, just as in the case of a love of money or any other passion—the most unremitting application without this is forced and of no use; and where this original bias exists, no other motive is required.’—‘Oh! but,’ said Northcote, ‘if you had to labour on by yourself without competitors or admirers, you would soon lay down your pencil or your pen in disgust. It is the hope of shining, or the fear of being eclipsed, that urges you on. Do you think if nobody took any notice of what you did, this would not damp your ardour?’—‘Yes; after I had done anything that I thought worth notice, it might considerably: but how many minds (almost all the great ones) were formed in secresy and solitude, without knowing whether they should ever make a figure or not! All they knew was, that they liked what they were about, and gave their whole souls to it. There was Hogarth, there was Correggio: what enabled these artists to arrive at the perfection in their several ways, which afterwards gained them the attention of the world? Not the premature applause of the by-standers, but the vivid tingling delight with which the one seized upon a grotesque incident or expression—“the wrapt soul sitting in the eyes,” of the other, as he drew a saint or angel from the skies. If they had been brought forward very early, before they had served this thorough apprenticeship to their own minds (the opinion of the world apart), it might have damped or made coxcombs of them. It was the love and perception of excellence (or the favouring smile of the Muse) that in my view produced excellence and formed the man of genius. Some, like Milton, had gone on with a great work all their lives with little encouragement but the hope of posthumous fame.’—‘It is not that,’ said Northcote; ‘you cannot see so far. It is not those who have gone before you or those who are to come after you, but those who are by your side, running the same race, that make you look about you. What made Titian jealous of Tintoret? Because he stood immediately in his way, and their works were compared together. If there had been a hundred Tintorets a thousand miles off, he would not have cared about them. That is what takes off the edge and stimulus of exertion in old age: those who were our competitors in early life, whom we wished to excel or whose good opinion we were most anxious about, are gone, and have left us in a manner by ourselves, in a sort of new world, where we know and are as little known as on entering a strange country. Our ambition is cold with the ashes of those whom we feared or loved. I remember old Alderman Boydell using an expression which explained this. Once when I was in the coach with him, in reply to some compliment of mine on his success in life, he said, “Ah! there was one who would have been pleased at it; but her I have lost!” The fine coach and all the city-trappings were nothing to him without his wife, who remembered what he was and the gradations and anxious cares by which he rose to his present affluence, and was a kind of monitor to remind him of his former self and of the different vicissitudes of his fortune.’

Northcote then spoke of old Alderman Boydell with great regret, and said, ‘He was a man of sense and liberality, and a true patron of the art. His nephew, who came after him, had not the same capacity, and wanted to dictate to the artists what they were to do. N. mentioned some instance of his wanting him to paint a picture on a subject for which he was totally unfit, and figures of a size which he had never been accustomed to, and he told him “he must get somebody else to do it.”’ I said, ‘Booksellers and editors had the same infirmity, and always wanted you to express their ideas, not your own. Sir R. P— had once gone up to Coleridge, after hearing him talk in a large party, and offered him “nine guineas a sheet for his conversation!” He calculated that the “nine guineas a sheet” would be at least as strong a stimulus to his imagination as the wasting his words in a room full of company.’ NORTHCOTE: ‘Ay, he came to me once, and wished me to do a work which was to contain a history of art in all countries and from the beginning of the world. I said it would be an invaluable work if it could be done; but that there was no one alive who could do it.’

Northcote afterwards, by some transition, spoke of the characters of women, and asked my opinion. I said, ‘All my metaphysics leaned to the vulgar side of these questions: I thought there was a difference of original genius, a difference in the character of the sexes, &c. Women appeared to me to do some things better than men; and therefore I concluded they must do other things worse.’ Northcote mentioned Annibal Caracci, and said, ‘How odd it was, that in looking at any work of his, you could swear it was done by a man! Ludovico Caracci had a finer and more intellectual expression, but not the same bold and workmanlike character. There was Michael Angelo again—what woman would ever have thought of painting the figures in the Sistine chapel? There was Dryden too, what a thorough manly character there was in his style! And Pope’—[I interrupted, ‘seemed to me between a man and a woman.’]—‘It was not,’ he continued, ‘that women were not often very clever (cleverer than many men), but there was a point of excellence which they never reached. Yet the greatest pains had been taken with several. Angelica Kauffmann had been brought up from a child to the art, and had been taken by her father (in boy’s clothes) to the Academy to learn to draw; but there was an effeminate and feeble look in all her works, though not without merit. There was not the man’s hand, or what Fuseli used to call a “fist” in them; that is, something coarse and clumsy enough, perhaps, but still with strength and muscle. Even in common things, you would see a carpenter drive a nail in a way that a women never would; or if you had a suit of clothes made by a woman, they would hang quite loose about you and seem ready to fall off. Yet it is extraordinary too, said Northcote, that in what has sometimes been thought the peculiar province of men, courage and heroism, there have been women fully upon a par with any men, such as Joan of Arc and many others, who have never been surpassed as leaders in battle.’ I observed that of all the women I had ever seen or known any thing of, Mrs. Siddons struck me as the grandest. He said,—‘Oh! it is her outward form, which stamps her so completely for tragedy, no less than the mental part. Both she and her brother were cut out by Nature for a tragedy-king and queen. It is what Mrs. Hannah More has said of her, “Her’s is the afflicted!”’ I replied, that she seemed to me equally great in anger or in contempt or in any stately part as she was in grief, witness her Lady Macbeth. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that, to be sure, was a masterpiece.’ I asked what he thought of Mrs. Inchbald? He said, ‘Oh! very highly: there was no affectation in her. I once took up her Simple Story (which my sister had borrowed from the circulating library) and looking into it, I said, “My God! what have you got here?” and I never moved from the chair till I had finished it. Her Nature and Art is equally fine—the very marrow of genius.’ She seems to me, I added, like Venus writing books. ‘Yes, women have certainly been successful in writing novels; and in plays too. I think Mrs. Centlivre’s are better than Congreve’s. Their letters, too, are admirable: it is only when they put on the breeches and try to write like men, that they become pedantic and tiresome. In giving advice, too, I have often found that they excelled; and when I have been irritated by any trifling circumstance and have laid more stress upon it than it was worth, they have seen the thing in a right point of view and tamed down my asperities.’ On this I remarked, that I thought, in general, it might be said that the faculties of women were of a passive character. They judged by the simple effect upon their feelings, without inquiring into causes. Men had to act; women had the coolness and the advantages of by-standers, and were neither implicated in the theories nor passions of men. While we were proving a thing to be wrong, they would feel it to be ridiculous. I said, I thought they had more of common sense, though less of acquired capacity than men. They were freer from the absurdities of creeds and dogmas, from the virulence of party in religion and politics (by which we strove to show our sense and superiority), nor were their heads so much filled with the lumber of learned folios. I mentioned as an illustration, that when old Baxter (the celebrated casuist and nonconformist divine) first went to Kidderminster to preach, he was almost pelted by the women for maintaining from the pulpit the then fashionable and orthodox doctrine, that ‘Hell was paved with infants’ skulls.’ The theory, which the learned divine had piled up on arguments and authorities, is now exploded: the common-sense feeling on the subject, which the women of that day took up in opposition to it as a dictate of humanity, would be now thought the philosophical one. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘but this exploded doctrine was knocked down by some man, as it had been set up by one: the women would let things remain as they are, without making any progress in error or wisdom. We do best together: our strength and our weakness mutually correct each other.’ Northcote then read me from a manuscript volume lying by him, a character drawn of his deceased wife by a Dissenting Minister (a Mr. Fox, of Plymouth) which is so beautiful that I shall transcribe it here.

‘Written by Mr. John Fox, on the death of his wife, who was the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Isaac Gelling.

‘My dear wife died to my unspeakable grief, Dec. 19th, 1762. With the loss of my dear companion died all the pleasure of my life; and no wonder: I had lived with her forty years, in which time nothing happened to abate the strictness of our Friendship, or to create a coolness or indifference so common and even unregarded by many in the world. I thank God I enjoyed my full liberty, my health, such pleasures and diversions as I liked, perfect peace and competence during the time; which were all seasoned and heightened every day more or less by constant marks of friendship, most inviolable affection, and a most cheerful endeavour to make my life agreeable. Nothing disturbed me but her many and constant disorders; under all which I could see how her faithful heart was strongly attached to me. And who could stand the shock of seeing the attacks of Death upon and then her final dissolution? The consequences to me were fatal. Old age rushed upon me like an armed man: my appetite failed, my strength was gone, every amusement became flat and dull; my countenance fell, and I have nothing to do but to drag on a heavy chain for the rest of my life; which I hope a good God will enable me to do without murmuring, and in conclusion, to say with all my soul—

TE DEUM LAUDAMUS.

‘This was written on a paper blotted by tears, and stuck with wafers into the first page of the family Bible.

‘Mr. John Fox died 22d of October, 1763. He was born May 10th, 1693.’

CONVERSATION THE SIXTH

Northcote alluded to a printed story of his having hung an early picture of H—’s out of sight, and of Fuseli’s observing on the occasion—‘By G—d, you are sending him to heaven before his time!’ He said there was not the least foundation for this story; nor could there be, he not having been hanger that year. He read out of the same publication a letter from Burke to a young artist of the name of Barrow, full of excellent sense, advising him by no means to give up his profession as an engraver till he was sure he could succeed as a painter, out of idle ambition and an unfounded contempt for the humbler and more laborious walks of life. ‘I could not have thought it of him,’ said Northcote; ‘I confess he never appeared to me so great a man.’ I asked what kind of looking man he was? Northcote answered, ‘You have seen the picture? There was something I did not like; a thinness in the features, and an expression of hauteur, though mixed with condescension and the manners of a gentleman. I can’t help thinking he had a hand in the Discourses; that he gave some of the fine, graceful turns; for Sir Joshua paid a greater deference to him than to any body else, and put up with freedoms that he would only have submitted to from some peculiar obligation. Indeed, Miss Reynolds used to complain that whenever any of Burke’s poor Irish relations came over, they were all poured in upon them to dinner; but Sir Joshua never took any notice, but bore it all with the greatest patience and tranquillity. To be sure, there was another reason: he expected Burke to write his Life, and for this he would have paid almost any price. This was what made him submit to the intrusions of Boswell, to the insipidity of Malone, and to the magisterial dictation of Burke: he made sure that out of these three one would certainly write his Life, and ensure him immortality that way. He thought no more of the person who actually did write it afterwards than he would have suspected his dog of writing it. Indeed, I wish he could have known; for it would have been of some advantage to me, and he might have left me something not to dwell on his defects; though he was as free from them as any man; but you can make any one ridiculous with whom you live on terms of intimacy.

‘I remember an instance of this that happened with respect to old Mr. M— whom you must have heard me speak of, and who was esteemed an idol by Burke, Dr. Johnson, and many others. Sir Joshua wanted to reprint his Sermons and prefix a Life to them, and asked me to get together any particulars I could learn of him. So I gave him a manuscript account of Mr. M—, written by an old school-fellow of his (Mr. Fox, a dissenting minister in the West of England); after which I heard no more of the Life. Mr. M— was in fact a man of extraordinary talents and great eloquence; and by representing in a manner the High-Church notions both of Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua (for both were inclined the same way) they came to consider him as a sort of miracle of virtue and wisdom. There was, however, something in Mr. Fox’s plain account that would strike Sir Joshua, for he had an eye for nature; and he would at once perceive it was nearer the truth than Dr. Johnson’s pompous character of him, which was proper only for a tombstone—it was like one of Kneller’s portraits,—it would do for any body! That,’ said Northcote, ‘is old Mr. M—’s definition of beauty, which Sir Joshua has adopted in the Discourses—that it is the medium of form. For what is a handsome nose? A long nose is not a handsome nose; neither is a short nose a handsome one: it must then be one that is neither long nor short, but in the middle between both. Even Burke bowed to his authority; and Sir Joshua thought him the wisest man he ever knew. Once when Sir Joshua was expressing his impatience of some innovation, and I said, “At that rate, the Christian Religion could never have been established.” “Oh!” he said, “Mr. M— has answered that!” which seemed to satisfy him.’

I made some remark that I wondered he did not come up to London, though the same feeling seemed to belong to other clever men born in Devonshire (as Gandy) whose ambition was confined to their native county, so that there must be some charm in the place. ‘You are to consider,’ he replied, ‘it is almost a peninsula, so that there is no thorough-fare, and people are therefore more stationary in one spot. It is for this reason they necessarily intermarry among themselves, and you can trace the genealogies of families for centuries back; whereas in other places, and particularly here in London, where every thing of that kind is jumbled together, you never know who any man’s grandfather was. There are country-squires and plain gentry down in that part of the world, who have occupied the same estates long before the Conquest (as the Suckbitches in particular,—not a very sounding name) and who look down upon the Courtneys and others as upstarts. Certainly, Devonshire for its extent has produced a number of eminent men, Sir Joshua, the Mudges, Dunning, Gay, Lord Chancellor King, Raleigh, Drake, and Sir Richard Granville in Queen Elizabeth’s time, who made that gallant defence in an engagement with the Spanish fleet, and was the ancestor of Pope’s Lord Lansdowne, “What Muse for Granville will refuse to sing, &c.” Foster, the celebrated preacher, was also, I believe, from the West of England. He first became popular from the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke stopping in the porch of his chapel in the Old Jewry, out of a shower of rain; and thinking he might as well hear what was going on, he went in, and was so well pleased that he sent all the great folks to hear him, and he was run after as much as Irving has been in our time. An old fellow-student from the country, going to wait on him at his house in London, found a Shakspeare on the window-seat; and remarking the circumstance with some surprise as out of the usual course of clerical studies, the other apologised by saying that he wished to know something of the world, that his situation and habits precluded him from the common opportunities, and that he found no way of supplying the deficiency so agreeable or effectual as looking into a volume of Shakspeare. Pope has immortalised him in the well-known lines:—

‘Let modest Foster, if he will, excel Ten Metropolitans in preaching well!’

Dr. Mudge, the son of Mr. Zachary Mudge, who was a physician, was an intimate friend of my father’s, and I remember him perfectly well. He was one of the most delightful persons I ever knew. Every one was enchanted with his society. It was not wit that he possessed, but such perfect cheerfulness and good-humour, that it was like health coming into the room. He was a most agreeable companion, quite natural and unaffected. His reading was the most beautiful I have ever heard. I remember his once reading Moore’s fable of the Female Seducers with such feeling and sweetness that every one was delighted, and Dr. Mudge himself was so much affected that he burst into tears in the middle of it. The family are still respectable, but derive their chief lustre from the first two founders, like clouds that reflect the sun’s rays, after he has sunk below the horizon, but in time turn grey and are lost in obscurity!’

I asked Northcote if he had ever happened to meet with a letter of Warburton’s in answer to one of Dr. Doddridge’s, complimenting the author of the Divine Legation of Moses on the evident zeal and earnestness with which he wrote—to which the latter candidly replied, that he wrote with great haste and unwillingness; that he never sat down to compose till the printer’s boy was waiting at the door for the manuscript, and that he should never write at all but as a relief to a morbid lowness of spirits, and to drive away uneasy thoughts that often assailed him.[91] ‘That indeed,’ observed Northcote, ‘gives a different turn to the statement; I thought at first it was only the common coquetry both of authors and artists, to be supposed to do what excites the admiration of others with the greatest ease and indifference, and almost without knowing what they are about. If what surprises you costs them nothing, the wonder is so much increased. When Michael Angelo proposed to fortify his native city, Florence, and he was desired to keep to his painting and sculpture, he answered, that those were his recreations, but what he really understood was architecture. That is what Sir Joshua considers as the praise of Rubens, that he seemed to make a play-thing of the art. In fact, the work is never complete unless it has this appearance: and therefore Sir Joshua has laid himself open to criticism, in saying that ‘a picture must not only be done well, it must seem to have been done easily.’ It cannot be said to be done well, unless it has this look. That is the fault of those laboured and timid productions of the modern French and Italian schools; they are the result of such a tedious, petty, mechanical process, that it is as difficult for you to admire as it has been for the artist to execute them. Whereas, when a work seems stamped on the canvas by a blow, you are taken by surprise; and your admiration is as instantaneous and electrical as the impulse of genius which has caused it. I have seen a whole-length portrait by Velasquez, that seemed done while the colours were yet wet; every thing was touched in, as it were, by a wish; there was such a power that it thrilled through your whole frame, and you felt as if you could take up the brush and do any thing. It is this sense of power and freedom which delights and communicates its own inspiration, just as the opposite drudgery and attention to details is painful and disheartening. There was a little picture of one of the Infants of Spain on horseback, also by Velasquez, which Mr. Agar had,[92] and with which Gainsborough was so transported, that he said in a fit of bravado to the servant who showed it, “Tell your master I will give him a thousand pounds for that picture.” Mr. Agar began to consider what pictures he could purchase with the money if he parted with this, and at last, having made up his mind, sent Gainsborough word he might have the picture; who not at all expecting this result, was a good deal confused, and declared, however he might admire it, he could not afford to give so large a sum for it.’

CONVERSATION THE SEVENTH

Northcote complained of being unwell, though he said he could hardly expect it to be otherwise at his age. He must think of making up the accounts of his life, such as it had been, though he added (checking himself) that he ought not to say that, for he had had his share of good as well as others. He had been reading in Boccaccio, where it was frequently observed, that ‘such a one departed this wretched life at such a time;’—so that in Boccaccio’s time they complained of the wretchedness of life as much as we do. He alluded to an expression of Coleridge’s, which he had seen quoted in a newspaper, and which he thought very fine, ‘That an old Gothic cathedral always seemed to him like a petrified religion!’ Some one asked, Why does he not go and turn Black Monk? Because, I said, he never does anything that he should do. ‘There are some things,’ said N., ‘with respect to which I am in the same state that a blind man is as to colours. Homer is one of these. I am utterly in the dark about it. I can make nothing of his heroes or his Gods. Whether this is owing to my not knowing the language or to a change of manners, I cannot say.’ He was here interrupted by the entrance of the beautiful Mrs. G—, beautiful even in years. She said she had brought him a book to look at. She could not stop, for she had a lady waiting for her below, but she would call in some morning and have a long chat. After she was gone, I remarked how handsome she still was; and he said, ‘I don’t know why she is so kind as to come, except that I am the last link in the chain that connects her with all those she most esteemed when she was young, Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith—and remind her of the most delightful period of her life.’ I said, Not only so, but you remember what she was at twenty; and you thus bring back to her the triumphs of her youth—that pride of beauty which must be the more fondly cherished as it has no external vouchers, and lives chiefly in the bosom of its once lovely possessor. In her, however, the Graces had triumphed over time; she was one of Ninon de l’Enclos’ people, of the list of the Immortals. I could almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room, looking round with complacency. ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘that is what Sir Joshua used to mention as the severest test of beauty—it was not then skin-deep only. She had gone through all the stages, and had lent a grace to each. There are beauties that are old in a year. Take away the bloom and freshness of youth, and there is no trace of what they were. Their beauty is not grounded in first principles. Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features.’ I observed, it was the same in the mind as in the body. There were persons of premature ability who soon ran to seed, and others who made no figure till they were advanced in life. I had known several who were very clever at seventeen or eighteen, but who had turned out nothing afterwards. ‘That is what my father used to say, that at that time of life the effervescence and intoxication of youth did a great deal, but that we must wait till the gaiety and dance of the animal spirits had subsided to see what people really were. It is wonderful’ (said Northcote, reverting to the former subject) ‘what a charm there is in those early associations, in whatever recals that first dawn and outset of life. Jack-the-Giant-Killer is the first book I ever read, and I cannot describe the pleasure it gives me even now. I cannot look into it without my eyes filling with tears. I do not know what it is (whether good or bad), but it is to me, from early impressions, the most heroic of performances. I remember once not having money to buy it, and I transcribed it all out with my own hand. This is what I was going to say about Homer. I cannot help thinking that one cause of the high admiration in which it is held is its being the first book that is put into the hands of young people at school: it is the first spell which opens to them the enchantments of the unreal world. Had I been bred a scholar, I dare say Homer would have been my Jack-the-Giant-Killer!—There is an innocence and simplicity in that early age which makes every thing relating to it delightful. It seems to me that it is the absence of all affectation or even of consciousness, that constitutes the perfection of nature or art. That is what makes it so interesting to see girls and boys dancing at school—there is such natural gaiety and freedom, such unaffected, unpretending, unknown grace. That is the true dancing, and not what you see at the Opera. And again, in the most ordinary actions of children, what an ease, what a playfulness, what flames of beauty do they throw out without being in the smallest degree aware of it! I have sometimes thought it a pity there should be such a precious essence, and that those who possess it should be quite ignorant of it: yet if they knew it, that alone would kill it! The whole depends on the utter absence of all egotism, of the remotest reflection upon self. It is the same in works of art—the simplest are the best. That is what makes me hate those stuffed characters that are so full of themselves that I think they cannot have much else in them. A man who admires himself prevents me from admiring him, just as by praising himself he stops my mouth; though the vulgar take their cue from a man’s opinion of himself, and admire none but coxcombs and pedants. This is the best excuse for impudence and quackery, that the world will not be gained without it. The true favourites of Nature, however, have their eyes turned towards the Goddess, instead of looking at themselves in the glass. There is no pretence or assumption about them. It seems difficult indeed for any one who is the object of attention to others not to be thinking of himself: but the greatest men have always been the most free from this bias, the weakest have been the soonest puffed up by self-conceit. If you had asked Correggio why he painted as he did, he would have answered, “Because he could not help it.” Look at Dryden’s verses, which he wrote just like a school-boy who brings up his task without knowing whether he shall be rewarded or flogged for it. Do you suppose he wrote the description of Cymon for any other reason than because he could not help it, or that he had any more power to stop himself in his headlong career than the mountain-torrent? Or turn to Shakspeare, who evidently does not know the value, the dreadful value (as I may say) of the expressions he uses. Genius gathers up its beauties, like the child, without knowing whether they are weeds or flowers: those productions that are destined to give forth an everlasting odour, grow up without labour or design.’

Mr. P— came in, and complimenting Northcote on a large picture he was about, the latter said, It was his last great work: he was getting too old for such extensive undertakings. His friend replied, that Titian went on painting till near a hundred. ‘Aye,’ said Northcote, ‘but he had the Devil to help him, and I have never been able to retain him in my service. It is a dreadful thing to see an immense blank canvas spread out before you to commit sins upon.’ Something was said of the Academy, and P— made answer, ‘I know your admiration of corporate bodies.’ N. said, ‘They were no worse than others; they all began well and ended ill. When the Academy first began, one would suppose that the Members were so many angels sent from heaven to fill the different situations, and that was the reason why it began: now the difficulty was to find any body fit for them, and the deficiency was supplied by interest, intrigue, and cabal. Not that I object to the individuals neither. As Swift said, I like Jack, Tom, and Harry very well by themselves; but altogether, they are not to be endured. We see the effect of people acting in concert in animals (for men are only a more vicious sort of animals): a single dog will let you kick and cuff him as you please, and will submit to any treatment; but if you meet a pack of hounds, they will set upon you and tear you to pieces with the greatest impudence.’ P.: ‘The same complaint was made of the Academy in Barry’s time, which is now thirty or forty years ago.’[93] NORTHCOTE: ‘Oh! yes, they very soon degenerated. It is the same in all human institutions. The thing is, there has been no way found yet to keep the Devil out. It will be a curious thing to see whether that experiment of the American Government will last. If it does, it will be the first instance of the kind.’ P.: ‘I should think not. There is something very complicated and mysterious in the mode of their Elections, which I am given to understand are managed in an under-hand manner by the leaders of parties; and besides, in all governments the great desideratum is to combine activity with a freedom from selfish passions. But it unfortunately happens that in human life, the selfish passions are the strongest and most active; and on this rock society seems to split. There is a certain period in a man’s life when he is at his best (when he combines the activity of youth with the experience of manhood), after which he declines; and perhaps it may be the same with states. Things are not best in the beginning or at the end, but in the middle, which is but a point.’ NORTHCOTE: ‘Nothing stands still; it therefore either grows better or worse. When a thing has reached its utmost perfection, it then borders on excess; and excess leads to ruin and decay.’

Lord G. had bought a picture of Northcote’s: an allusion was made to his enormous and increasing wealth. Northcote said he could be little the better for it. After a certain point, it became a mere nominal distinction. He only thought of that which passed through his hands and fell under his immediate notice. He knew no more of the rest than you or I did: he was merely perplexed by it. This was what often made persons in his situation tenacious of the most trifling sums, for this was the only positive or tangible wealth they had: the remote contingency was like a thing in the clouds, or mountains of silver and gold seen in the distant horizon. It was the same with Nollekens: he died worth £200,000: but the money he had accumulated at his banker’s was out of his reach and contemplation—out of sight, out of mind—he was only muddling about with what he had in his hands, and lived like a beggar in actual fear of want. P. said, he was an odd little man, but he believed clever in his profession. Northcote assented, and observed ‘he was an instance of what might be done by concentrating the attention on a single object. If you collect the rays of the sun in a focus, you could set any object on fire. Great talents were often dissipated to no purpose: but time and patience conquered every thing. Without them, you could do nothing. So Giardini, when asked how long it would take to learn to play on the fiddle, answered—“Twelve hours a-day for twenty years together.” A few great geniuses may trifle with the arts, like Rubens; but in general nothing can be more fatal than to suppose one’s-self a great genius.’ P. observed, that in common business those who gave up their whole time and thoughts to any pursuit generally succeeded in it, though far from bright men: and we often found those who had acquired a name for some one excellence, people of moderate capacity in other respects. After Mr. P. was gone, Northcote said he was one of the persons of the soundest judgment he had ever known, and like Mr. P. H. the least liable to be imposed upon by appearances. Northcote made the remark that he thought it improper in any one to refuse lending a favourite picture for public exhibition, as it seemed not exclusively to belong to one person. A jewel of this value belongs rather to the public than to the individual. Consider the multitudes you deprive of an advantage they cannot receive again: the idle of amusement, the studious of instruction and improvement. I said, this kind of indifference to the wishes of the public was sending the world to Coventry! We then spoke of a celebrated courtier, of whom I said I was willing to believe every thing that was amiable, though I had some difficulty, while thinking of him, to keep the valet out of my head. NORTHCOTE: ‘He has certainly endeavoured to behave well; but there is no altering character. I myself might have been a courtier if I could have cringed and held my tongue; but I could no more exist in that element than a fish out of water. At one time I knew Lord R. and Lord H. S—, who were intimate with the Prince and recommended my pictures to him. Sir Joshua once asked me, “What do you know of the Prince of —, that he so often speaks to me about you?” I remember I made him laugh by my answer, for I said, “Oh! he knows nothing of me, nor I of him—it’s only his bragging!”—“Well,” said he, “that is spoken like a King!”‘... It was to-day I asked leave to write down one or two of these Conversations: he said ‘I might, if I thought it worth while; but I do assure you that you overrate them. You have not lived enough in society to be a judge. What is new to you, you think will seem so to others. To be sure, there is one thing, I have had the advantage of having lived in good society myself. I not only passed a great deal of my younger days in the company of Reynolds, Johnson, and that circle, but I was brought up among the Mudges, of whom Sir Joshua (who was certainly used to the most brilliant society of the metropolis) thought so highly, that he had them at his house for weeks, and even sometimes gave up his own bed-room to receive them. Yet they were not thought superior to several other persons at Plymouth, who were distinguished, some for their satirical wit, others for their delightful fancy, others for their information or sound sense, and with all of whom my father was familiar when I was a boy. Really after what I recollect of these, some of the present people appear to me mere wretched pretenders, muttering out their own emptiness.’ I said, We had a specimen of Lord Byron’s Conversations. NORTHCOTE.—‘Yes; but he was a tyrant, and a person of that disposition never learns any thing, because he will only associate with inferiors. If, however, you think you can make any thing of it and can keep clear of personalities, I have no objection to your trying; only I think after the first attempt, you will give it up as turning out quite differently from what you expected.’

CONVERSATION THE EIGHTH

Northcote spoke again of Sir Joshua, and said, he was in some degree ignorant of what might be called the grammatical part of the art, or scholarship of academic skill; but he made up for it by an eye for nature, or rather by a feeling of harmony and beauty. Dance (he that was afterwards Sir Nathaniel Holland) drew the figure well, gave a strong likeness and a certain studied air to his portraits; yet they were so stiff and forced that they seemed as if put into a vice. Sir Joshua, with the defect of proportion and drawing, threw his figures into such natural and graceful attitudes, that they might be taken for the very people sitting or standing there. An arm might be too long or too short, but from the apparent ease of the position he had chosen, it looked like a real arm and neither too long nor too short. The mechanical measurements might be wrong: the general conception of nature and character was right; and this, which he felt most strongly himself, he conveyed in a corresponding degree to the spectator. Nature is not one thing, but a variety of things, considered under different points of view; and he who seizes forcibly and happily on any one of these, does enough for fame. He will be the most popular artist, who gives that view with which the world in general sympathise. A merely professional reputation is not very extensive, nor will it last long. W—, who prided himself on his drawing, had no idea of any thing but a certain rigid outline, never considering the use of the limbs in moving, the effects of light and shade, &c. so that his figures, even the best of them, look as if cut out of wood. Therefore no one now goes to see them: while Sir Joshua’s are as much sought after as ever, from their answering to a feeling in the mind, though deficient as literal representations of external nature. Speaking of artists who were said, in the cant of connoisseurship, to be jealous of their outline, he said, ‘Rembrandt was not one of these. He took good care to lose it as fast as he could.’ Northcote then spoke of the breadth of Titian, and observed, that though particularly in his early pictures, he had finished highly and copied every thing from nature, this never interfered with the general effect, there was no confusion or littleness: he threw such a broad light on the objects, that every thing was seen in connection with the masses and in its place. He then mentioned some pictures of his own, some of them painted forty years ago, that had lately sold very well at a sale at Plymouth: he was much gratified at this, and said it was almost like looking out of the grave to see how one’s reputation got on.

Northcote told an anecdote of Sir George B—, to show the credulity of mankind. When a young man, he put an advertisement in the papers to say that a Mynheer —, just come over from Germany, had found out a method of taking a likeness much superior to any other by the person’s looking into a mirror and having the glass heated so as to bake the impression. He stated this wonderful artist to live at a perfumer’s shop in Bond-street, opposite to an hotel where he lodged, and amused himself the next day to see the numbers of people who flocked to have their likenesses taken in this surprising manner. At last, he went over himself to ask for Monsieur —, and was driven out of the shop by the perfumer in a rage, who said there was no Monsieur — nor Monsieur Devil lived there. At another time Sir G. was going in a coach to a tavern with a party of gay young men. The waiter came to the coach-door with a light, and as he was holding this up to the others, those who had already got out went round, and getting in at the opposite coach-door came out again, so that there seemed to be no end of the procession, and the waiter ran into the house, frightened out of his wits. The same story is told of Swift and four clergymen dressed in canonicals.

Speaking of titles, Northcote said, ‘It was strange what blunders were often made in this way. R—, (the engraver) had stuck Lord John Boringdon under his print after Sir Joshua—it should be John Lord Boringdon—and he calls the Earl of Carlisle Lord Carlisle—Lord Carlisle denotes only a Baron. I was once dining at Sir John Leicester’s, and a gentleman who was there was expressing his wonder what connection a Prince of Denmark and a Duke of Gloucester could have with Queen Anne, that prints of them should be inserted in a history that he had just purchased of her reign. No other, I said, than that one of them was her son, and the other her husband. The boy died when he was eleven years old of a fever caught at a ball dancing, or he would have succeeded to the throne. He was a very promising youth, though that indeed is what is said of all princes. Queen Anne took his death greatly to heart, and that was the reason why she never would appoint a successor. She wished her brother to come in, rather than the present family. That makes me wonder, after thrones have been overturned and kingdoms torn asunder to keep the Catholics out, to see the pains that are now taken to bring them in. It was this that made the late King say it was inconsistent with his Coronation-oath. Not that I object to tolerate any religion (even the Jewish), but they are the only one that will not tolerate any other. They are such devils (what with their cunning, their numbers, and their zeal), that if they once get a footing, they will never rest till they get the whole power into their hands. It was but the other day that the Jesuits nearly overturned the empire of China; and if they were obliged to make laws and take the utmost precautions against their crafty encroachments, shall we open a door to them, who have only just escaped out of their hands?’ I said, I had thrown a radical reformer into a violent passion lately by maintaining that the Pope and Cardinals of Rome were a set of as good-looking men as so many Protestant Bishops or Methodist parsons, and that the Italians were the only people who seemed to have any faith in their religion as an object of imagination or feeling. My opponent grew almost black in the face, while inveighing against the enormous absurdity of transubstantiation; it was in vain I pleaded the beauty, innocence, and cheerfulness of the peasant-girls near Rome, who believed in this dreadful superstition, and who thought me damned and would probably have been glad to see me burnt at a stake as a heretic. At length I said, that I thought reason and truth very excellent things in themselves; and that when I saw the rest of the world grow as fond of them as they were of absurdity and superstition, I should be entirely of his way of thinking; but I liked an interest in something (a wafer or a crucifix) better than an interest in nothing. What have philosophers gained by unloosing their hold of the ideal world, but to be hooted at and pelted by the rabble, and envied and vilified by one another for want of a common bond of union and interest between them? I just now met the son of an old literary friend in the street, who seemed disposed to cut me for some hereditary pique, jealousy, or mistrust. Suppose his father and I had been Catholic priests (saving the bar-sinister) how different would have been my reception! He is short-sighted indeed; but had I been a Cardinal, he would have seen me fast enough: the costume alone would have assisted him. Where there is no frame-work of respectability founded on the esprit de corps and on public opinion cemented into a prejudice, the jarring pretensions of individuals fall into a chaos of elementary particles, neutralising each other by mutual antipathy, and soon become the sport and laughter of the multitude. Where the whole is referred to intrinsic, real merit, this creates a standard of conceit, egotism, and envy in every one’s own mind, lowering the class, not raising the individual. A Catholic priest walking along the street is looked up to as a link in the chain let down from heaven: a poet or philosopher is looked down upon as a poor creature, deprived of certain advantages, and with very questionable pretensions in other respects. Abstract intellect requires the weight of the other world to be thrown into the scale, to make it a match for the prejudices, vulgarity, ignorance, and selfishness of this! ‘You are right,’ said Northcote. ‘It was Archimedes who said he could move the earth if he had a place to fix his levers on: the priests have always found this purchase in the skies. After all, we have not much reason to complain, if they give us so splendid a reversion to look forward to. That is what I said to G— when he had been trying to unsettle the opinions of a young artist whom I knew. Why should you wish to turn him out of one house, till you have provided another for him? Besides, what do you know of the matter more than he does? His nonsense is as good as your nonsense, when both are equally in the dark. As to what your friend said of the follies of the Catholics, I do not think that the Protestants can pretend to be quite free from them. So when a chaplain of Lord Bath’s was teazing a Popish clergyman to know how he could make up his mind to admit that absurdity of Transubstantiation, the other made answer, “Why, I’ll tell you: when I was young, I was taught to swallow Adam’s Apple; and since that, I have found no difficulty with any thing else!” We may say what we will of the Catholic religion; but it is more easy to abuse than to overturn it. I have for myself no objection to it but its insatiable ambition, and its being such a dreadful engine of power. It is its very perfection as a system of profound policy and moral influence, that renders it so formidable. Indeed, I have been sometimes suspected of a leaning to it myself; and when Godwin wrote his Life of Chaucer, he was said to have turned Papist from his making use of something I had said to him about confession. I don’t know but unfair advantages may be taken of it for state-purposes; but I cannot help thinking it is of signal benefit in the regulation of private life. If servants have cheated or lied or done any thing wrong, they are obliged to tell it to the priest, which makes them bear it in mind, and then a certain penance is assigned which they must go through, though they do not like it. All this acts as a timely check, which is better than letting them go on till their vices get head, and then hanging them! The Great indeed may buy themselves off (as where are they not privileged?) but this certainly does not apply to the community at large. I remember our saying to that old man (a Dominican friar) whose picture you see there, that we wished he could be made a Royal Confessor; to which he replied, that he would not for the world be Confessor to a King, because it would prevent him from the conscientious discharge of his duty. In former times, in truth, the traffic in indulgences was carried to great lengths; and this it was that broke up the system and gave a handle to the Protestants. The excellence of the scheme produced the power, and then the power led to the abuse of it. Infidel Popes went the farthest in extending the privileges of the Church; and being held back by no scruples of faith or conscience, nearly ruined it. When some pious ecclesiastic was insisting to Leo X. on the necessity of reforming certain scandalous abuses, he pointed to a crucifix and said, “Behold the fate of a reformer! The system, as it is, is good enough for us!” They have taken the morality of the Gospel and engrafted upon it a system of superstition and priestcraft; but still perhaps the former prevails over the latter. Even that duty of humanity to animals is beautifully provided for; for on St. Antony’s day, the patron of animals, the horses, &c. pass under a certain arch, and the priest sprinkles the Holy Water over them, so that they are virtually taken under the protection of the church. We think we have a right to treat them any how, because they have no souls. The Roman Catholic is not a barbarous religion; and it is also much milder than it was. This is a necessary consequence of the state of things. When three Englishmen were presented to Benedict XIV. (Lambertini) who was a man of wit and letters, he observed to them smiling, “I know that you must look upon our religion as false and spurious, but I suppose you will have no objection to receive the blessing of an old man!” When Fuseli and I were there, an Englishman of the name of Brown had taken the pains to convert a Roman artist: the Englishman was sent from Rome, and the student was taken to the Inquisition, where he was shown the hooks in the wall and the instruments of torture used in former times, reprimanded, and soon after dismissed.’ I asked Northcote whereabouts the Inquisition was? He said, ‘In a street behind the Vatican.’ He and Mr. Prince Hoare once took shelter in the portico out of a violent shower of rain, and considered it a great piece of inhumanity to be turned out into the street. He then noticed a curious mistake in Mrs. Radcliffe’s ITALIAN, where some one is brought from Naples to the Inquisition, and made to enter Rome through the Porta di Popolo, and then the other streets on the English side of Rome are described with great formality, which is as if any one was described as coming by the coach from Exeter, and after entering at Whitechapel, proceeding through Cheapside and the Strand to Charing Cross. Northcote related a story told him by Nollekens of a singular instance of the effects of passion that he saw in the Trastevere, the oldest and most disorderly part of Rome.[94] Two women were quarrelling, when having used the most opprobrious language, one of them drew a knife from her bosom, and tried to plunge it into her rival’s breast, but missing her blow and the other retiring to a short distance and laughing at her, in a fit of impotent rage she struck it into her own bosom. Her passion had been worked up to an uncontrolable pitch, and being disappointed of its first object, must find vent somewhere. I remarked it was what we did every day of our lives in a less degree, according to the vulgar proverb of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face!

Northcote then returned to the subject of the sale of his pictures. He said it was a satisfaction, though a melancholy one, to think that one’s works might fetch more after one’s death than during one’s life-time. He had once shewn Farington a landscape of Wilson’s, for which a gentleman had given three hundred guineas at the first word; and Farington said he remembered Wilson’s painting it, and how delighted he was when he got thirty pounds for it. Barrett rode in his coach, while Wilson nearly starved and was obliged to borrow ten pounds to go and die in Wales: yet he used to say that his pictures would be admired, when the name of Barrett was forgotten. Northcote said he also thought it a great hardship upon authors, that copyright should be restricted to a few years, instead of being continued for the benefit of the family, as in the case of Hudibras, Paradise Lost, and other works, by which booksellers made fortunes every year, though the descendants of the authors were still living in obscurity and distress. I said that in France a successful drama brought something to the author or his heirs every time it was acted. Northcote seemed to approve of this, and remarked that he always thought it very hard upon Richardson, just at the time he had brought out his Pamela or Clarissa, to have it pirated by an Irish bookseller through a treacherous servant whom he kept in his shop, and thus to lose all the profits of his immortal labours.

CONVERSATION THE NINTH

Northcote remarked to-day that artists were more particular than authors as to character—the latter did not seem to care whom they associated with. He, N—, was disposed to attribute this to greater refinement of moral perception in his own profession. I said I thought it was owing to authors being more upon the town than painters, who were dependent upon particular individuals and in a manner accountable to them for the persons they might be seen in company with or might occasionally bring into contact with them. For instance, I said I thought H— was wrong in asking me to his Private Day, where I might meet with Lord M—, who was so loyal a man that he affected not to know that such a person as Admiral Blake had ever existed. On the same principle this Noble Critic was blind to the merit of Milton, in whom he could see nothing, though Mr. Pitt had been at the pains to repeat several fine passages to him. N— said, ‘It’s extraordinary how particular the world sometimes are, and what prejudices they take up against people, even where there is no objection to character, merely on the score of opinion. There is G—, who is a very good man; yet when Mr. H— and myself wished to introduce him at the house of a lady who lives in a round of society, and has a strong tinge of the blue-stocking, she would not hear of it. The sound of the name seemed to terrify her. It was his writings she was afraid of. Even Cosway made a difficulty too.’

I replied—‘I should not have expected this of him, who was as great a visionary and as violent a politician as any body could be.’

NORTHCOTE—‘It passed off in Cosway as whim. He was one of those butterfly characters that nobody minded: so that his opinion went for nothing: but it would not do to bring any one else there, whose opinion might be more regarded and equally unpalatable. G—’s case is particularly hard in this respect: he is a profligate in theory, and a bigot in conduct. He does not seem at all to practise what he preaches, though this does not appear to avail him any thing.’—‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he writes, against himself. He has written against matrimony, and has been twice married. He has scouted all the common-place duties, and yet is a good husband and a kind father. He is a strange composition of contrary qualities. He is a cold formalist, and full of ardour and enthusiasm of mind; dealing in magnificent projects and petty cavils; naturally dull, and brilliant by dint of study; pedantic and playful; a dry logician and a writer of romances.’

‘You describe him,’ said N—, ‘as I remember Baretti once did Sir Joshua Reynolds at his own table, saying to him, “You are extravagant and mean, generous and selfish, envious and candid, proud and humble, a genius and a mere ordinary mortal at the same time.” I may not remember his exact words, but that was their effect. The fact was, Sir Joshua was a mixed character, like the rest of mankind in that respect; but knew his own failings, and was on his guard to keep them back as much as possible, though the defects would break out sometimes.’ ‘G—, on the contrary,’ I said, ‘is aiming to let his out and to magnify them into virtues in a kind of hot-bed of speculation. He is shocking on paper and tame in reality.’

‘How is that?’ said Northcote.

‘Why, I think it is easy enough to be accounted for; he is naturally a cold speculative character, and indulges in certain metaphysical extravagances as an agreeable exercise for the imagination, which alarm persons of a grosser temperament, but to which he attaches no practical consequences whatever. So it has been asked how some very immoral or irreligious writers, such as Helveticus and others, have been remarked to be men of good moral character? and I think the answer is the same. Persons of a studious, phlegmatic disposition can with impunity give a license to their thoughts, which they are under no temptation to reduce into practice. The sting is taken out of evil by their constitutional indifference, and they look on virtue and vice as little more than words without meaning or the black and white pieces of the chess-board, in combining which the same skill and ingenuity may be shewn. More depraved and combustible temperaments are warned of the danger of any latitude of opinion by their very proneness to mischief, and are forced by a secret consciousness to impose the utmost restraint both upon themselves and others. The greatest prudes are not always supposed to be the greatest enemies to pleasure. Besides, authors are very much confined by habit to a life of study and speculation, sow their wild oats in their books, and unless where their passions are very strong indeed, take their swing in theory and conform in practice to the ordinary rules and examples of the world.’

Northcote said, ‘Certainly people are tenacious of appearances in proportion to the depravity of manners, as we may see in the simplicity of country-places. To be sure, a rake like Hodge in Love in a Village gets amongst them now and then; but in general they do many gross things without the least notion of impropriety, as if vice were a thing they had no more to do with than children.’ He then mentioned an instance of some young country-people who had to sleep on the floor in the same room and they parted the men from the women by some sacks of corn, which served for a line of demarcation and an inviolable partition between them. I told N— a story of a countrywoman who coming to an inn in the West of England wanted a bed; and being told they had none to spare, still persisted till the landlady said in a joke, ‘I tell you, good woman, I have none, unless you can prevail with the ostler to give you half of his.’—‘Well,’ said she, ‘if he is a sober, prudent man, I should not mind.’

Something was then said of the manners of people abroad, who sometimes managed to unite an absence of mauvaise honte with what could hardly be construed into an ignorance of vice. The Princess Borghese (Buonaparte’s sister) who was no saint, sat to Canova for a model, and being asked, ‘If she did not feel a little uncomfortable,’ answered, ‘No, there was a fire in the room.’

‘Custom,’ said N—, ‘makes a wonderful difference in taking off the sharpness of the first inflammable impression. People for instance were mightily shocked when they first heard that the boys at the Academy drew from a living model. But the effect almost immediately wears off with them. It is exactly like copying from a statue. The stillness, the artificial light, the attention to what they are about, the publicity even, draws off any idle thoughts, and they regard the figure and point out its defects or beauties, precisely as if it were of clay or marble.’ I said I had perceived this effect myself, that the anxiety to copy the object before one deadened every other feeling; but as this drew to a close, the figure seemed almost like something coming to life again, and that this was a very critical minute. He said, he found the students sometimes watched the women out, though they were not of a very attractive appearance, as none but those who were past their prime would sit in this way: they looked upon it as an additional disgrace to what their profession imposed upon them, and as something unnatural. One in particular (he remembered) always came in a mask. Several of the young men in his time had however been lured into a course of dissipation and ruined by such connexions; one in particular, a young fellow of great promise but affected, and who thought that profligacy was a part of genius. I said, It was the easiest part. This was an advantage foreign art had over ours. A battered courtesan sat for Sir Joshua’s Iphigene; innocent girls sat for Canova’s Graces, as I had been informed.

Northcote asked, if I had sent my son to school? I said, I thought of the Charter-House, if I could compass it. I liked those old established places where learning grew for hundreds of years, better than any new-fangled experiments or modern seminaries. He inquired if I had ever thought of putting him to school on the Continent; to which I answered, No, for I wished him to have an idea of home, before I took him abroad; by beginning in the contrary method, I thought I deprived him both of the habitual attachment to the one and of the romantic pleasure in the other. N— observed there were very fine schools at Rome in his time, one was an Italian, and another a Spanish College, at the last of which they acted plays of Voltaire’s, such as Zara, Mahomet, &c. at some of which he had been present. The hall that served for the theatre was beautifully decorated; and just as the curtain was about to draw up, a hatch-way was opened and showered down play-bills on their heads with the names of the actors; such a part being by a Spanish Grandee of the first class, another by a Spanish Grandee of the second class, and they were covered with jewels of the highest value. Several Cardinals were also present (who did not attend the public theatres) and it was easy to gain admittance from the attention always shewn to strangers. N— then spoke of the courtesy and decorum of the Roman clergy in terms of warm praise, and said he thought it in a great measure owing to the conclave being composed of dignitaries of all nations, Spanish, German, Italian, which merged individual asperities and national prejudices in a spirit of general philanthropy and mutual forbearance. I said I had never met with a look from a Catholic priest (from the highest to the lowest) that seemed to reproach me with being a tramontane. This absence of all impertinence was to me the first of virtues. He repeated, I have no fault to find with Italy. There may be vice in Rome, as in all great capitals (though I did not see it)—but in Parma and the remoter towns, they seem all like one great and exemplary family. Their kindness to strangers was remarkable. He said he had himself travelled all the way from Lyons to Genoa, and from Genoa to Rome without speaking a word of the language and in the power of a single person without meeting with the smallest indignity; and everywhere, both at the inns and on the road, every attention was paid to his feelings, and pains taken to alleviate the uncomfortableness of his situation. Set a Frenchman down in England to go from London to York in the same circumstances, and see what treatment he will be exposed to. He recollected a person of the name of Gogain who had been educated in France and could not speak English—on landing, he held out half-a-guinea to pay the boatman who had rowed him only about twenty yards from the vessel, which the fellow put in his pocket and left him without a single farthing. Abroad, he would have been had before the magistrate for such a thing, and probably sent to the galleys. There is a qualifying property in nature that makes most things equal. In England they cannot drag you out of your bed to a scaffold, or take an estate from you without some reason assigned: but as the law prevents any flagrant acts of injustice, so it makes it more difficult to obtain redress. ‘We pay,’ continued Northcote, ‘for every advantage we possess by the loss of some other. Poor Goblet, the other day, after making himself a drudge to Nollekens all his life, with difficulty recovered eight hundred pounds compensation; and though he was clearly entitled, by the will, to the models which the sculptor left behind him, he was afraid to risk the law expenses, and gave it up.’ Some person had been remarking, that every one had a right to leave his property to whom he pleased. ‘Not,’ said N—, ‘when he has promised it to another.’ I asked if Mr. — was not the same person I had once seen come into his painting-room, in a rusty black coat and brown worsted stockings, very much with the air of a man who carries a pistol in an inside pocket? He said, ‘It might be: he was a dull man, but a great scholar—one of those described in the epigram:—

Oh! ho, quoth Time to Thomas Heame, Whatever I forget, you learn.’

We then alluded to an attack of Cobbett’s on some spruce legacy-hunter, quoted in the last Sunday’s Examiner; and N— spoke in raptures of the power in Cobbett’s writings, and asked me if I had ever seen him. I said, I had for a short time; that he called rogue and scoundrel at every second word in the coolest way imaginable, and went on just the same in a room as on paper.

I returned to what N— lately said of his travels in Italy, and asked if there were fine Titians at Genoa or Naples. ‘Oh, yes!’ he said, ‘heaps at the latter place. Titian had painted them for one of the Farnese family; and when the second son succeeded the eldest as King of Spain, the youngest, who was Prince of Parma, went to Naples, and took them with him. There is that fine one (which you have heard me speak of) of Paul III. and his two natural sons or nephews, as they were called. My God! what a look it has! The old man is sitting in his chair, and looking up to one of the sons, with his hands grasping the arm-chair, and his long spider fingers, and seems to say (as plain as words can speak), “You wretch! what do you want now?”—while the young fellow is advancing with an humble hypocritical air. It is true history, as Fuseli said, and indeed it turned out so; for the son (or nephew) was afterwards thrown out of the palace-windows by the mob, and torn to pieces by them.’ In speaking of the different degrees of information abroad, he remarked, ‘One of the persons where I lodged at Rome did not even know the family name of the reigning Pope, and only spoke of him as the Papa; another person, who was also my landlady, knew all their history, and could tell me the names of the Cardinals from my describing their coats of arms to her.’

N— related an anecdote of Mr. Moore (brother of the general), who was on board an English frigate in the American war, and coming in sight of another vessel which did not answer their signals, they expected an action, when the Captain called his men together, and addressed them in the following manner:—‘You dirty, ill-looking blackguards! do you suppose I can agree to deliver up such a set of scarecrows as you as prisoners to that smart, frippery Frenchman? I can’t think of such a thing. No! by G—d, you must fight till not a man of you is left, for I should be ashamed of owning such a ragamuffin crew!’ This was received with loud shouts and assurances of victory, but the vessel turned out to be an English one.

I asked if he had seen the American novels, in one of which (the Pilot) there was an excellent description of an American privateer expecting the approach of an English man-of-war in a thick fog, when some one saw what appeared to be a bright cloud rising over the fog, but it proved to be the topsail of a seventy-four. N— thought this was striking, but had not seen the book. ‘Was it one of I—’s?’ Oh! no, he is a mere trifler—a filigree man—an English littérateur at second-hand; but the Pilot gave a true and unvarnished picture of American character and manners. The storm, the fight, the whole account of the ship’s crew, and in particular of an old boatswain, were done to the life—every thing

Suffered a sea-change Into something new and strange.

On land he did not do so well. The fault of American literature (when not a mere vapid imitation of ours) was, that it ran too much into dry, minute, literal description; or if it made an effort to rise above this ground of matter-of-fact, it was forced and exaggerated, ‘horrors accumulating on horror’s head.’ They had no natural imagination. This was likely to be the case in a new country like America, where there were no dim traces of the past—no venerable monuments—no romantic associations; where all (except the physical) remained to be created, and where fiction, if they attempted it, would take as preposterous and extravagant a shape as their local descriptions were jejune and servile. Cooper’s novels and Brown’s romances (something on the model of Godwin’s) were the two extremes.

Some remark was made on the failure of a great bookseller, and on the supposition that now we should find out the author of the Scotch novels. ‘Aye,’ said N—, ‘we shall find more than one.’ I said, I thought not; to say nothing of the beauties, the peculiarities of style and grammar in every page proved them to be by the same hand. Nobody else could write so well—or so ill, in point of mere negligence. N— said, ‘It was a pity he should fling away a fortune twice. There were some people who could not keep money when they had got it. It was a kind of incontinence of the purse. Zoffani did the same thing. He made a fortune in England by his pictures, which he soon got rid of, and another in India, which went the same way.’

We somehow got from Sir Walter to the Queen’s trial, and the scenes at Brandenburg House. I said they were a strong illustration of that instinct of servility—that hankering after rank and power, which appeared to me to be the base part of human nature. Here were all the patriots and Jacobins of London and Westminster, who scorned and hated the King, going to pay their homage to the Queen, and ready to worship the very rags of royalty. The wives and daughters of popular caricaturists and of forgotten demagogues were ready to pull caps in the presence-chamber for precedence, till they were parted by Mr. Alderman Wood. Every fool must go to kiss hands; ‘our maid’s aunt of Brentford’ must sip loyalty from the Queen’s hand! That was the true court to which they were admitted: the instant there was the smallest opening, all must rush in, tag-rag and bobtail. All the fierceness of independence and all the bristling prejudices of popular jealousy were smoothed down in a moment by the velvet touch of the Queen’s hand! No matter what else she was (whether her cause were right or wrong)—it was the mock-equality with sovereign rank, the acting in a farce of state, that was the secret charm. That was what drove them mad. The world must have something to admire; and the more worthless and stupid their idol is, the better, provided it is fine: for it equally flatters their appetite for wonder, and hurts their self-love less. This is the reason why people formerly were so fond of idols: they fell down and worshipped them, and made others do the same, for theatrical effect; while, all the while, they knew they were but wood and stone painted over. We in modern times have got from the dead to the living idol, and bow to hereditary imbecility. The less of genius and virtue, the greater our self-complacency. We do not care how high the elevation, so that it is wholly undeserved. True greatness excites our envy; mere rank, our unqualified respect. That is the reason of our antipathy to new-made dynasties, and of our acquiescence in old-established despotism. We think we could sit upon a throne, if we had had the good luck to be born to one; but we feel that we have neither talent nor courage to raise ourselves to one. If any one does, he seems to have got the start of us; and we are glad to pull him back again. I remember Mr. R—, of Liverpool (a very excellent man, and a good patriot,) saying, many years ago, in reference to Buonaparte and George III., that ‘the superiority of rank was quite enough for him, without the intellectual superiority.’ That is what has made so many renegadoes and furious Anti-Buonapartists among our poets and politicians, because he got before them in the race of power. N— ‘And the same thing made you stick to him, because you thought he was your fellow! It is wonderful how much of our virtues, as well as of our vices, is referable to self. Did you ever read Rochefoucault?’—Yes. ‘And don’t you think he is right?’ In a great measure: but I like Mandeville better. He goes more into his subject. ‘Oh! he is a devil. There is a description of a clergyman’s hand he has given, which I have always had in my eye whenever I have had to paint a fine gentleman’s hand. I thought him too metaphysical, but it is long since I read him. His book was burnt by the common hangman; was it not?’ Yes; but he did not at all like this circumstance, and is always recurring to it.—‘No one can like this kind of condemnation, because every sensible man knows he is not a judge in his own cause; and besides, is conscious, if the verdict were on the other side, how ready he would be to catch at it as decisive in his favour.’ I said, it was amusing to see the way in which he fell upon Steele, Shaftesbury, and other amiable writers, and the terror you were in for your favourites, just as when a hawk is hovering over and going to pounce upon some of the more harmless feathered tribe. He added, ‘It was surprising how Swift had escaped with so little censure; but the Gulliver’s Travels passed off as a story-book, and you might say in verse what you would be pelted for in plain prose.—The same thing you have observed in politics may be observed in religion too. You see the anxiety to divide and bring nearer to our own level. The Creator of the universe is too high an object for us to approach; the Catholics therefore have introduced the Virgin Mary and a host of saints, with whom their votaries feel more at their ease and on a par. The real object of worship is kept almost out of sight. Dignum the singer (who is a Catholic) was arguing on this subject with some one, who wanted to convert him, and he replied in his own defence—“If you had a favour to ask of some great person, would you not first apply to a common friend to intercede for you?”’ In some part of the foregoing conversation, N— remarked that ‘West used to say, you could always tell the highest nobility at court, from their profound humility to the King: the others kept at a distance, and did not seem to care about it. The more the former raised the highest person, the more they raised themselves who were next in point of rank. They had a greater interest in the question; and the King would have a greater jealousy of them than of others. When B— was painting the Queen, with whom he used to be quite familiar, he was one day surprised, when the Prince-Regent came into the room, to see the profound homage and dignified respect with which he approached her. “Good God!” said he to himself, “here is the second person in the kingdom comes into the room in this manner, while I have been using the greatest freedoms!” To be sure! that was the very reason: the second person in the kingdom wished to invest the first with all possible respect, so much of which was naturally reflected back upon himself. B— had nothing to lose or gain in this game of royal ceremony, and was accordingly treated as a cypher.’

CONVERSATION THE TENTH

Northcote shewed me a printed circular from the Academy, with blanks to be filled up by Academicians, recommending young students to draw. One of these related to an assurance as to the moral character of the candidate; Northcote said, ‘What can I know about that? This zeal for morality begins with inviting me to tell a lie. I know whether he can draw or not, because he brings me specimens of his drawings; but what am I to know of the moral character of a person I have never seen before? Or what business have the Academy to inquire into it? I suppose they are not afraid he will steal the Farnese Hercules; and as to idleness and debauchery, he will not be cured of these by cutting him off from the pursuit of a study on which he has set his mind, and in which he has a fair chance to succeed. I told one of them, with as grave a face as I could, that, as to his moral character, he must go to his god-fathers and god-mothers for that. He answered very simply, that they were a great way off, and that he had nobody to appeal to but his apothecary! The Academy is not an institution for the suppression of vice, but for the encouragement of the Fine Arts. Why then go out of their way to meddle with what was provided for by other means—the law and the pulpit? It would not have happened in Sir Joshua’s time,’ continued Northcote, ‘nor even in Fuseli’s: but the present men are “dressed in a little brief authority,” and they wish to make the most of it, without perceiving the limits. No good can possibly come of this busy-body spirit. The dragging morality into every thing, in season and out of season, is only giving a handle to hypocrisy, and turning virtue into a bye-word for impertinence!’

Here Northcote stopped suddenly, to ask if there was not such a word as rivulet in the language? I said it was as much a word in the language as it was a thing in itself. He replied, it was not to be found in Johnson; the word was riveret there. I thought this must be in some of the new editions; Dr. Johnson would have knocked any body down, who had used the word riveret. It put me in mind of a story of Y— the actor, who being asked how he was, made answer that he had been indisposed for some days with a feveret. The same person, speaking of the impossibility of escaping from too great publicity, related an anecdote of his being once in a remote part of the Highlands, and seeing an old gentleman fishing, he went up to inquire some particulars as to the mode of catching the salmon at what are called ‘salmon-leaps.’—The old gentleman began his reply—‘Why, Mr. Y—,’ at which the actor started back in great surprise. ‘Good God!’ said Northcote, ‘did he consider this as a matter of wonder, that, after shewing himself on a stage for a number of years, people should know his face? If an artist or an author were recognised in that manner, it might be a proof of celebrity, because it would shew that they had been sought for; but an actor is so much seen in public, that it is no wonder he is known by all the world. I once went with Opie in the stage-coach to Exeter; and when we parted; he to go on to Cornwall and I to Plymouth, there was a young gentleman in the coach who asked me, “Who it was that I had been conversing with?” I said it was Mr. Opie, the painter; at which he expressed the greatest surprise, and was exceedingly concerned to think he had not known it before. I did not tell him who I was, to see if my name would electrify him in the same manner. That brings to my mind the story I perhaps may have told you before, of a Mr. A— and Dr. Pennick of the Museum. They got into some quarrel at the theatre; and the former presenting his card, said with great pomposity, “My name is A—, Sir;” to which the other answered, “I hear it, Sir, and am not terrified!”’ I asked if this was the A— who fought the duel with F—. He said he could not tell, but he was our ambassador to some of the petty German States.

A country-gentleman came in, who complimented Northcote on his pictures of animals and birds, which I knew he would not like. He muttered something when he was gone, in allusion to the proverb of giving snuff to a cat. Afterwards, a miniature-painter brought some copies he had made of a portrait of a young lady by Northcote. They were really very well, and we learned he was to have five guineas for the larger size, and two for the smaller ones. I could now account for the humility and shabby appearance of the artist. He paid his court better than his rustic predecessor; for being asked by Northcote if the portrait of the young lady was approved? he said the mother had told him, before she engaged him to copy it, that ‘it was one of the loveliest pictures (that was her expression) that had ever been seen!’ This praise was better relished than that of his dogs and parrots.

I took notice to Northcote that the man had a very good head; but that he put me in mind of the state and pretensions of the art before artists wrote Esquire after their names. He said, Yes, he was like Andrew Taffi, or some of those in Vasari. I observed how little he was paid for what he really did so well; to which Northcote merely replied, ‘In all things that are not necessary, those in the second class must always be miserably paid. Copying pictures is like plain-work among women, it is what any body can do, and, therefore, nothing but a bare living is to be got by it.’ He added, that the young lady, whose portrait her family was so anxious to have copied, was dead, and this was a kind of diversion to their grief. It was a very natural mode of softening it down; it was still recurring to the object of their regret, and yet dwelling on it in an agreeable point of view. ‘The wife of General H—, (he continued) many years ago, came to me to do a picture of her son, a lieutenant in the navy, who was killed in battle, but whom I had never seen. There was no picture of him to go by, but she insisted on my doing one under her direction. I attempted a profile as the easiest; and she sat behind me and sang in a soft manner to herself, and told me what I was to do. It was a wretched business, as you may suppose, being made out from description; but she would have it to be a great likeness, and brought all the family and even the servants to see it, who probably did not dare to be of a different opinion. I said to her, “What a pity it was Sir Joshua had not done a portrait of him in his life-time!” At this she expressed great contempt, and declared she would not give two-pence for all Sir Joshua’s pictures; indeed, she had one which I was very welcome to have if I chose to come for it. I lost no time in going to her house, and when I came there, she led me up into an old garret which was used as a lumber-room, and taking it carefully out of a shabby frame not worth a groat, said “There, take it, I am not sorry to get it out of the house.” I asked what it was that made her so indifferent about this picture? and she answered, “It was a likeness of a young gentleman who had been kind enough to die, by which means the estate came to the General.” She spoke in this unfeeling manner, though her own son had just died in the same circumstances; and she had had a monument made for him, and strewed flowers upon it, and made such a fuss about his death, that she would hardly have known what to do if he had come to life again!’ I asked what was her reason for disliking Reynolds’s pictures? ‘Oh! that was her ignorance, she did not know why!’

Northcote said, ‘G— called here with his daughter. I asked her about Lord Byron; she said his temper was so bad that nobody could live with him. The only way to pass the day tolerably well with him was to contradict him the first thing in the morning. I have known tempers of that kind myself; you must quarrel with them in order to be friends. If you did not conquer them, they would conquer you.’ Something was observed about Byron and Tom Paine, as to their attacks upon religion; and I said that sceptics and philosophical unbelievers appeared to me to have just as little liberality or enlargement of view as the most bigoted fanatic. They could not bear to make the least concession to the opposite side. They denied the argument that because the Scriptures were fine they were therefore of divine origin, and yet they virtually admitted it; for, not believing their truth, they thought themselves bound to maintain that they were good for nothing. I had once, I said, given great offence to a knot of persons of this description, by contending that Jacob’s Dream was finer than any thing in Shakspeare; and that Hamlet would bear no comparison with, at least, one character in the New Testament. A young poet had said on this occasion, he did not like the Bible, because there was nothing about flowers in it; and I asked him if he had forgot that passage, ‘Behold the lilies of the field,’ &c.? ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘and in the Psalms and in the book of Job, there are passages of unrivalled beauty. In the latter there is the description of the war-horse, that has been so often referred to, and of the days of Job’s prosperity; and in the Psalms, I think there is that passage, “He openeth his hands, and the earth is filled with plenteousness; he turneth away his face, and we are troubled; he hideth himself, and we are left in darkness;” or, again, how fine is that expression, “All the beasts of the forests are mine, and so are the cattle upon a thousand hills!” What an expanse, and what a grasp of the subject! Every thing is done upon so large a scale, and yet with such ease, as if seen from the highest point of view. It has mightily a look of inspiration or of being dictated by a superior intelligence. They say mere English readers cannot understand Homer, because it is a translation; but why will it not bear a translation as well as the book of Job, if it is as fine? In Shakspeare, undoubtedly, there is a prodigious variety and force of human character and passion, but he does not take us out of ourselves; he has a wonderful, almost a miraculous fellow-feeling with human nature in every possible way, but that is all. Macbeth is full of sublimity, but the sublimity is that of the earth, it does not reach to heaven. It is a still stronger objection that is made to Hogarth; he, too, gave the incidents and characters of human life with infinite truth and ability; but then it was in the lowest forms of all, and he could not rise even to common dignity or beauty. There is a faculty that enlarges and beautifies objects, even beyond nature. It is for this reason that we must, reluctantly perhaps, give the preference to Milton over Shakspeare; for his Paradise (to go no further) is certainly a scene of greater beauty and happiness, than was ever found on earth, though so vividly described that we easily make the transition, and transport ourselves there. It is the same difference that there is between Raphael and Michael Angelo, though Raphael, too, in many of his works merited the epithet of divine.’—I mentioned some lines from Shakspeare I had seen quoted in a translation of a French work, and applied to those who adhered to Buonaparte in his misfortunes:

—He that can endure To follow with allegiance a fallen lord, Does conquer him that did his master conquer, And earns a place i’ the story.

I said I was struck to see how finely they came in. ‘Oh!’ replied Northcote, ‘if they were Shakspeare’s, they were sure to be fine. What a power there always is in any bit brought in from him or Milton among other things! How it shines like a jewel! I think Milton reads best in this way; he is too fine for a continuance. Don’t you think Shakspeare and the writers of that day had a prodigious advantage in using phrases and combinations of style, which could not be admitted now that the language is reduced to a more precise and uniform standard, but which yet have a peculiar force and felicity when they can be justified by the privilege of age?’ He said, he had been struck with this idea lately, in reading an old translation of Boccacio (about the time of Queen Elizabeth) in which the language, though quaint, had often a beauty that could not well be conveyed in any modern translation.

He spoke of Lord Byron’s notions about Shakspeare. I said I did not care much about his opinions. Northcote replied, they were evidently capricious, and taken up in the spirit of contradiction. I said, not only so (as far as I can judge), but without any better founded ones in his own mind. They appear to me conclusions without premises or any previous process of thought or inquiry. I like old opinions with new reasons, not new opinions without any—not mere ipse dixits. He was too arrogant to assign a reason to others or to need one for himself. It was quite enough that he subscribed to any assertion, to make it clear to the world, as well as binding on his valet!

Northcote said, there were people who could not argue. Fuseli was one of these. He could throw out very brilliant and striking things; but if you at all questioned him, he could no more give an answer than a child of three years old. He had no resources, nor any corps de reserve of argument beyond his first line of battle. That was imposing and glittering enough. Neither was Lord Byron a philosopher, with all his sententiousness and force of expression. Probably one ought not to expect the two things together; for to produce a startling and immediate effect, one must keep pretty much upon the surface; and the search after truth is a very slow and obscure process.

CONVERSATION THE ELEVENTH

As soon as I went in to-day, Northcote asked me if that was my character of Shakspeare, which had been quoted in a newspaper the day before? It was so like what he had thought a thousand times that he could almost swear he had written it himself. I said no; it was from Kendall’s Letters on Ireland; though I believed I had expressed nearly the same idea in print. I had seen the passage myself, and hardly knew at first whether to be pleased or vexed at it. It was provoking to have one’s words taken out of one’s mouth as it were by another; and yet it seemed also an encouragement to reflect, that if one only threw one’s bread upon the waters, one was sure to find it again after many days. The world, if they do not listen to an observation the first time, will listen to it at second-hand from those who have a more agreeable method of insinuating it, or who do not tell them too many truths at once. N— said, he thought the account undoubtedly just, to whomever it belonged.[95] The greatest genius (such as that of Shakspeare) implied the greatest power, and this implied the greatest ease and unconsciousness of effort, or of any thing extraordinary effected. As this writer stated—‘He would as soon think of being vain of putting one foot before another, as of writing Macbeth or Hamlet.’ Or as Hudibras has expressed it, poetry was to him

—a thing no more difficile Than to a blackbird ’tis to whistle.

‘This (said he) is what I have always said of Correggio’s style, that he could not help it: it was his nature. Besides, use familiarizes us to every thing. How could Shakspeare be expected to be astonished at what he did every day? No; he was thinking either merely of the subject before him, or of gaining his bread. It is only upstarts or pretenders, who do not know what to make of their good fortune or undeserved reputation. It comes to the same thing that I have heard my brother remark with respect to my father and old Mr. Tolcher, whose picture you see there. He had a great friendship for my father and a great opinion of his integrity; and whenever he came to see him, always began with saying, “Well, honest Mr. Samuel Northcote, how do you?” This he repeated so often, and they were so used to it, that my brother said they became like words of course, and conveyed no more impression of any thing peculiar than if he had merely said, “Well, good Mr. Northcote, et cetera,” or used any common expression. So Shakspeare was accustomed to write his fine speeches till he ceased to wonder at them himself, and would have been surprised to find that you did.’

The conversation now turned on an answer in a newspaper to Canning’s assertion, that ‘Slavery was not inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity, inasmuch as it was the beauty of Christianity to accommodate itself to all conditions and circumstances.’ Did Canning mean to say, because Christianity accommodated itself to, or made the best of all situations, it did not therefore give the preference to any? Because it recommended mildness and fortitude under sufferings, did it not therefore condemn the infliction of them? Or did it not forbid injustice and cruelty in the strongest terms? This were indeed a daring calumny on its founder: it were an insolent irony. Don Quixote would not have said so. It was like the Italian banditti, who when they have cut off the ears of their victims, make them go down on their knees, and return thanks to an image of the Virgin Mary for the favour they have done them. It was because such things do exist, that Christ came to set his face against them, and to establish the maxim, ‘Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.’ If Mr. Canning will say that the masters would like to be treated as they treat their slaves, then he may say that slavery is consistent with the spirit of Christianity. No; the meaning of those maxims of forbearance and submission, which the Quakers have taken too literally, is, that you are not to drive out one devil by another; it aims at discouraging a resort to violence and anger, for if the temper it inculcates could become universal, there would be no injuries to resent. It objects against the power of the sword, but it is to substitute a power ten thousand times stronger than the sword—that which subdues and conquers the affections, and strikes at the very root and thought of evil. All that is meant by such sayings, as that if a person ‘smites us on one cheek, we are to turn to him the other,’ is, that we are to keep as clear as possible of a disposition to retaliate and exasperate injuries; or there is a Spanish proverb which explains this, that says, ‘It is he who gives the second blow that begins the quarrel.’

On my referring to what had been sometimes asserted of the inefficacy of pictures in Protestant churches, Northcote said he might be allowed to observe in favour of his own art, that though they might not strike at first from a difference in our own belief, yet they would gain upon the spectator by the force of habit. The practice of image-worship was probably an after-thought of the Papists themselves, from seeing the effects produced on the minds of the rude and ignorant by visible representations of saints and martyrs. The rulers of the church at first only thought to amuse and attract the people by pictures and statues (as they did by music and rich dresses, from which no inference was to be drawn); but when these representations of sacred subjects were once placed before the senses of an uninstructed but imaginative people, they looked at them with wonder and eagerness, till they began to think they saw them move; and then miracles were worked; and as this became a source of wealth and great resort to the several shrines and churches, every means were used to encourage the superstition and a belief in the supernatural virtues of the objects by the clergy and government. So he thought that if pictures were set up in our churches, they would by degrees inspire the mind with all the feelings of awe or interest that were necessary or proper. It was less difficult to excite enthusiasm than to keep it under due restraint. So in Italy, the higher powers did not much relish those processions of naked figures, taken from scriptural stories (such as Adam and Eve) on particular holidays, for they led to scandal and abuse; but they fell in with the humour of the rabble, and were lucrative to the lower orders of priests and friars, and the Pope could not expressly discountenance them. He said we were in little danger (either from our religion or temperament) of running into those disgraceful and fanciful extremes; but should rather do every thing in our power to avoid the opposite error of a dry and repulsive asceticism. We could not give too much encouragement to the fine arts.

Our talk of to-day concluded by his saying, that he often blamed himself for uttering what might be thought harsh things; and that on mentioning this once to Kemble, and saying it sometimes kept him from sleep after he had been out in company, Kemble had replied, ‘Oh! you need not trouble yourself so much about them: others never think of them afterwards!’

CONVERSATION THE TWELFTH

Northcote was painting from a little girl when I went in. B— was there. Something was said of a portrait of Dunning by Sir Joshua (an unfinished head), and B— observed, ‘Ah! my good friend, if you and I had known at that time what those things would fetch, we might have made our fortunes now. By laying out a few pounds on the loose sketches and sweepings of the lumber-room, we might have made as many hundreds.’ ‘Yes,’ said Northcote, ‘it was thought they would soon be forgot, and they went for nothing on that account: but they are more sought after than ever, because those imperfect hints and studies seem to bring one more in contact with the artist, and explain the process of his mind in the several stages. A finished work is, in a manner, detached from and independent of its author, like a child that can go alone: in the other case, it seems to be still in progress, and to await his hand to finish it; or we supply the absence of well-known excellences out of our own imagination, so that we have a two-fold property in it.’

Northcote read something out of a newspaper about the Suffolk-street Exhibition, in which his own name was mentioned, and M—’s, the landscape-painter. B— said, his pictures were a trick—a streak of red, and then a streak of blue. But, said Northcote, there is some merit in finding out a new trick. I ventured to hint, that the receipt for his was, clouds upon mountains, and mountains upon clouds—that there was number and quantity, but neither form nor colour. He appeared to me an instance of a total want of imagination; he mistook the character of the feelings associated with every thing, and I mentioned as an instance his Adam and Eve, which had been much admired, but which was a panoramic view of the map of Asia, instead of a representation of our first parents in Paradise.

After B— was gone, we spoke of X—. I regretted his want of delicacy towards the public as well as towards his private friends. I did not think he had failed so much from want of capacity, as from attempting to bully the public into a premature or overstrained admiration of him, instead of gaining ground upon them by improving on himself; and he now felt the ill effects of the re-action of this injudicious proceeding. He had no real love of his art, and therefore did not apply or give his whole mind sedulously to it; and was more bent on bespeaking notoriety beforehand by puffs and announcements of his works, than on giving them that degree of perfection which would ensure lasting reputation. No one would ever attain the highest excellence, who had so little nervous sensibility as to take credit for it (either with himself or others) without being at the trouble of producing it. It was securing the reward in the first instance; and afterwards, it would be too much to expect the necessary exertion or sacrifices. Unlimited credit was as dangerous to success in art as in business. ‘And yet he still finds dupes,’ said Northcote; to which I replied, it was impossible to resist him, as long as you kept on terms with him: any difference of opinion or reluctance on your part made no impression on him, and unless you quarrelled with him downright, you must do as he wished you.—‘And how then,’ said Northcote, ‘do you think it possible for a person of this hard unyielding disposition to be a painter, where every thing depends on seizing the nicest inflections of feeling and the most evanescent shades of beauty?

‘No, I’ll tell you why he cannot be a painter. He has not virtue enough. No one can give out to others what he has not in himself, and there is nothing in his mind to delight or captivate the world. I will not deny the mechanical dexterity, but he fails in the mental part. There was Sir Peter Lely: he is full of defects; but he was the fine gentleman of his age, and you see this character stamped on every one of his works;—even his errors prove it; and this is one of those things that the world receive with gratitude. Sir Joshua again was not without his faults: he had not grandeur, but he was a man of a mild, bland, amiable character; and this predominant feeling appears so strongly in his works, that you cannot mistake it; and this is what makes them so delightful to look at, and constitutes their charm to others, even without their being conscious of it. There was such a look of nature too. I remember once going through a suite of rooms where they were shewing me several fine Vandykes; and we came to one where there were some children, by Sir Joshua, seen through a door—it was like looking at the reality, they were so full of life—the branches of the trees waved over their heads, and the fresh air seemed to play on their cheeks—I soon forgot Vandyke!

‘So, in the famous St. Jerome of Correggio, Garrick used to say, that the Saint resembled a Satyr, and that the child was like a monkey; but then there is such a look of life in the last, it dazzles you with spirit and vivacity; you can hardly believe but it will move or fly;—indeed, Sir Joshua took his Puck from it, only a little varied in the attitude.’ I said I had seen it not long ago, and that it had remarkably the look of a spirit or a faery or preternatural being, though neither beautiful nor dignified. I remarked to Northcote, that I had never sufficiently relished Correggio; that I had tried several times to work myself up to the proper degree of admiration, but that I always fell back again into my former state of lukewarmness and scepticism; though I could not help allowing, that what he did, he appeared to me to do with more feeling than any body else; that I could conceive Raphael or even Titian to have represented objects from mere natural capacity (as we see them in a looking-glass) without being absolutely wound up in them, but that I could fancy Correggio’s pencil to thrill with sensibility: he brooded over the idea of grace or beauty in his mind till the sense grew faint with it; and like a lover or a devotee, he carried his enthusiasm to the brink of extravagance and affectation, so enamoured was he of his art! Northcote assented to this as a just criticism, and said, ‘That is why his works must live: but X— is a hardened egotist, devoted to nothing but himself!’ Northcote then asked about —, and if she was handsome? I said she might sit for the portrait of Rebecca in Ivanhoe!

He then turned the conversation to Brambletye-House. He thought the writer had failed in Charles II. and Rochester. Indeed, it was a daring attempt to make bons mots for two such characters. The wit must be sharp and fine indeed, that would do to put into their mouths: even Sir Walter might tremble to undertake it! He had made Milton speak too: this was almost as dangerous an attempt as for Milton to put words into the mouth of the Deity. The great difficulty was to know where to stop, and not to trespass on forbidden ground. Cervantes was one of the boldest and most original inventors; yet he had never ventured beyond his depth. He had in the person of his hero really represented the maxims of benevolence and generosity inculcated by the Christian religion: that was a law to him; and by his fine conception of the subject, he had miraculously succeeded. Shakspeare alone could be said in his grotesque creations to be above all law. Richardson had succeeded admirably in Clarissa, because he had a certain rule to go by or certain things to avoid, for a perfect woman was a negative character; but he had failed in Sir Charles Grandison, and made him a lump of odious affectation, because a perfect man is not a negative, but a positive character; and in aiming at faultlessness, he had produced only the most vapid effeminacy. After all, Brambletye-House was about as good as the Rejected Addresses. There was very little difference between a parody and an imitation. The defects and peculiarities are equally seized upon in either case.

He did not know how Sir Walter would take it. To have imitators seemed at first a compliment, yet no one liked it. You could not put Fuseli in a greater passion than by calling Maria Cosway an imitator of his. Nothing made Sir Joshua so mad, as Miss Reynolds’s portraits, which were an exact imitation of all his defects. Indeed, she was obliged to keep them out of his way. He said, ‘They made every body else laugh, and himself cry.’ It is that which makes every one dread a mimic. Your self-love is alarmed, without being so easily reassured. You know there is a difference, but it is not great enough to make you feel quite at ease. The line of demarcation between the true and the spurious is not sufficiently broad and palpable. The copy you see is vile or indifferent; and the original, you suspect (but for your partiality to yourself) is not perhaps much better.

This is what I have often felt in looking at the drawings of the students at the Academy, or when young artists have brought their first crude attempts for my opinion. The glaring defects, the abortive efforts have almost disgusted me with the profession. Good G—d! I have said, is this what the art is made up of? How do I know that my own productions may not appear in the same light to others? Whereas the seeing the finest specimens of art, instead of disheartening, gives me courage to proceed: one cannot be wrong in treading in the same footsteps, and to fall short of them is no disgrace, while the faintest reflection of their excellence is glorious. It was this that made Correggio cry out on seeing Raphael’s works, ‘I also am a painter’: he felt a kindred spirit in his own breast.—I said, I recollected when I was formerly trying to paint, nothing gave me the horrors so much as passing the old battered portraits at the doors of brokers’ shops, with the morning-sun flaring full upon them. I was generally inclined to prolong my walk, and put off painting for that day; but the sight of a fine picture had a contrary effect, and I went back and set to work with redoubled ardour.

Northcote happened to speak of a gentleman married to one of the —, of whom a friend had said, laughing, ‘There’s a man that’s in love with his own wife!’ He mentioned the beautiful Lady F— P—, and said her hair, which was in great quantities and very fine, was remarkable for having a single lock different from all the rest, which he supposed she cherished as a beauty. I told him I had not long ago seen the hair of Lucretia Borgia, of Milton, Buonaparte, and Dr. Johnson, all folded up in the same paper. It had belonged to Lord Byron. Northcote replied, one could not be sure of that; it was easy to get a lock of hair, and call it by any name one pleased. In some cases, however, one might rely on its being the same. Mrs. G— had certainly a lock of Goldsmith’s hair, for she and her sister (Miss Horneck) had wished to have some remembrance of him after his death; and though the coffin was nailed up, it was opened again at their request (such was the regard Goldsmith was known to have for them!), and a lock of his hair was cut off, which Mrs. G— still has. Northcote said, Goldsmith’s death was the severest blow Sir Joshua ever received—he did not paint all that day! It was proposed to make a grand funeral for him, but Reynolds objected to this, as it would be over in a day, and said it would be better to lay by the money to erect a monument to him in Westminster Abbey; and he went himself and chose the spot. Goldsmith had begun another novel, of which he read the first chapter to the Miss Hornecks a little before his death. Northcote asked, what I thought of the Vicar of Wakefield? And I answered, What every body else did. He said there was that mixture of the ludicrous and the pathetic running through it, which particularly delighted him: it gave a stronger resemblance to nature. He thought this justified Shakspeare in mingling up farce and tragedy together: life itself was a tragi-comedy. Instead of being pure, every thing was chequered. If you went to an execution, you would perhaps see an apple-woman in the greatest distress, because her stall was overturned, at which you could not help smiling. We then spoke of ‘Retaliation,’ and praised the character of Burke in particular as a masterpiece. Nothing that he had ever said or done but what was foretold in it; nor was he painted as the principal figure in the foreground with the partiality of a friend, or as the great man of the day, but with a back-ground of history, showing both what he was and what he might have been. Northcote repeated some lines from the ‘Traveller,’ which were distinguished by a beautiful transparency, by simplicity and originality. He confirmed Boswell’s account of Goldsmith, as being about the middle height, rather clumsy, and tawdry in his dress.

A gentleman came in who had just shown his good taste in purchasing three pictures of Northcote, one a head of Sir Joshua by himself, and the other two by Northcote, a whole-length portrait of an Italian girl, and a copy of Omai, the South-Sea Chief. I could hear the artist in the outer room expressing some scruples as to the consistency of his parting with one of them which he had brought from abroad, according to the strict letter of his Custom-House oath—an objection which the purchaser, a Member of Parliament, over-ruled by assuring him that ‘the peculiar case could not be contemplated by the spirit of the act.’ Northcote also expressed some regret at the separation from pictures that had become old friends. He however comforted himself that they would now find a respectable asylum, which was better than being knocked about in garrets and auction-rooms, as they would inevitably be at his death. ‘You may at least depend upon it,’ said Mr. — ‘that they will not be sold again for many generations!’ This view into futurity brought back to my mind the time when I had first known these pictures: since then, my life was flown, and with it the hope of fame as an artist (with which I had once regarded them), and I felt a momentary pang. Northcote took me out into the other room, when his friend was gone, to look at them; and on my expressing my admiration of the portrait of the Italian lady, he said she was the mother of Madame Bellochi, and was still living; that he had painted it at Rome about the year 1780; that her family was originally Greek, and that he had known her, her daughter, her mother, and grandmother. She and a sister who was with her, were at that time full of the most charming gaiety and innocence. The old woman used to sit upon the ground without moving or speaking, with her arm over her head, and exactly like a bundle of old clothes. Alas! thought I, what are we but a heap of clay resting upon the earth, and ready to crumble again into dust and ashes!

CONVERSATION THE THIRTEENTH

Northcote spoke about the failure of some print-sellers. He said, ‘He did not wonder at it; it was a just punishment of their presumption and ignorance. They went into an Exhibition, looked round them, fixed upon some contemptible performance, and without knowing any thing about the matter or consulting any body, ordered two or three thousand pounds’ worth of prints from it, merely out of purse-proud insolence, and because the money burnt in their pockets. Such people fancied that the more money they laid out, the more they must get; so that extravagance became (by the turn their vanity gave to it) another name for thrift.’ Having spoken of a living artist’s pictures as mere portraits that were interesting to no one except the people who sat for them, he remarked, ‘There was always something in the meanest face that a great artist could take advantage of. That was the merit of Sir Joshua, who contrived to throw a certain air and character even over ugliness and folly, that disarmed criticism and made you wonder how he did it. This, at least, is the case with his portraits; for though he made his beggars look like heroes, he sometimes, in attempting history, made his heroes look like beggars. Grandi, the Italian colour-grinder, sat to him for King Henry VI. in the Death of Cardinal Beaufort, and he looks not much better than a train-bearer or one in a low and mean station: if he had sat to him for his portrait, he would have made him look like a king! That was what made Fuseli observe in joke that “Grandi never held up his head after Sir Joshua painted him in his Cardinal Beaufort!” But the pictures I speak of are poor dry fac-similes (in a little timid manner and with an attempt at drapery) of imbecile creatures, whose appearance is a satire on themselves and mankind. Neither can I conceive why L— should be sent over to paint Charles X. A French artist said to me on that occasion, ‘We have very fine portrait-painters in Paris, Sir!’... The poor engraver would be the greatest sufferer by these expensive prints. Tradespeople now-a-days did not look at the thing with an eye to business, but ruined themselves and others by setting up for would-be patrons and judges of the art.

‘Some demon whisper’d, Visto, have a taste!’

I said I thought L—’s pictures might do very well as mirrors for personal vanity to contemplate itself in (as you looked in the glass to see how you were dressed), but that it was a mistake to suppose they would interest any one else or were addressed to the world at large. They were private, not public property. They never caught the eye in a shop window; but were (as it appeared to me) a kind of lithographic painting, or thin, meagre outlines without the depth and richness of the art. I mentioned to Northcote the pleasure I had formerly taken in a little print of Gadshill from a sketch of his own, which I used at one time to pass a certain shop-window on purpose to look at. He said, ‘It was impossible to tell beforehand what would hit the public. You might as well pretend to say what ticket would turn up a prize in the lottery. It was not chance neither, but some unforeseen coincidence between the subject and the prevailing taste, that you could not possibly be a judge of. I had once painted two pictures; one of a Fortune-teller (a boy with a monkey), and another called ‘The Visit to the Grandmother;’ and Raphael Smith came to me and wanted to engrave them, being willing to give a handsome sum for the first, but only to do the last as an experiment. He sold ten times as many of the last as of the first, and told me that there were not less than five different impressions done of it in Paris; and once when I went to his house to get one to complete a set of engravings after my designs, they asked me six guineas for a proof-impression! This was too much, but I was delighted that I could not afford to pay for my own work, from the value that was set upon it!’—I said, people were much alarmed at the late failures, and thought there would be a ‘blow-up,’ in the vulgar phrase.—‘Surely you can’t suppose so? A blow-up! Yes, of adventurers and upstarts, but not of the country, if they mean that. This is like the man who thought that gin-drinking would put an end to the world. Oh! no—the country will go on just as before, bating the distress to individuals. You may form an idea on the subject if you ever go to look at the effects of a fire the day after: you see nothing but smoke and ruins and bare walls, and think the damage can never be repaired; but if you pass by the same way a week after, you will find the houses all built up just as they were before or even better than ever! No, there is the same wealth, the same industry and ingenuity in the country as there was before; and till you destroy that, you cannot destroy the country. These temporary distresses are only like disorders in the body, that carry off its bad and superfluous humours.

‘My neighbour Mr. Rowe, the bookseller, informed me the other day that Signora Cecilia Davies frequently came to his shop, and always inquired after me. Did you ever hear of her?’ No never! ‘She must be very old now. Fifty years ago, in the time of Garrick, she made a vast sensation. All England rang with her name. I do assure you, that in this respect Madame Catalani was not more talked of. Afterwards she had retired to Florence, and was the Prima Donna there, when Storace first came out. This was at the time when Mr. Hoare and myself were in Italy; and I remember we went to call upon her. She had then in a great measure fallen off, but she was still very much admired. What a strange thing a reputation of this kind is, that the person herself survives, and sees the meteors of fashion rise and fall one after another, while she remains totally disregarded as if there had been no such person, yet thinking all the while that she was better than any of them! I have hardly heard her name mentioned in the last thirty years, though in her time she was quite as famous as any one since.’ I said, an Opera-reputation was after all but a kind of Private Theatricals and confined to a small circle, compared with that of the regular stage, which all the world were judges of and took an interest in. It was but the echo of a sound, or like the blaze of phosphorus that did not communicate to the surrounding objects. It belonged to a fashionable coterie, rather than to the public, and might easily die away at the end of the season. I then observed I was more affected by the fate of players than by that of any other class of people. They seemed to me more to be pitied than any body—the contrast was so great between the glare, the noise, and intoxication of their first success, and the mortifications and neglect of their declining years. They were made drunk with popular applause; and when this stimulus was withdrawn, must feel the insignificance of ordinary life particularly vapid and distressing. There were no sots like the sots of vanity. There were no traces left of what they had been, any more than of a forgotten dream; and they had no consolation but in their own conceit, which, when it was without other vouchers, was a very uneasy comforter. I had seen some actors who had been favourites in my youth and ‘cried up in the top of the compass,’ treated, from having grown old and infirm, with the utmost indignity and almost hooted from the stage. I had seen poor — come forward under these circumstances to stammer out an apology with the tears in his eyes (which almost brought them into mine) to a set of apprentice-boys and box-lobby loungers, who neither knew nor cared what a fine performer and a fine gentleman he was thought twenty years ago. Players were so far particularly unfortunate. The theatrical public have a very short memory. Every four or five years there is a new audience, who know nothing but of what they have before their eyes, and who pronounce summarily upon this, without any regard to past obligations or past services, and with whom the veterans of the stage stand a bad chance indeed, as their former triumphs are entirely forgotten, while they appear as living vouchers against themselves. ‘Do you remember,’ said Northcote, ‘Sheridan’s beautiful lines on the subject in his Monody on Garrick?’ I said, I did; and that it was probably the reading them early that had impressed this feeling so strongly on my mind. Northcote then remarked, ‘I think a great beauty is most to be pitied. She completely outlives herself. She has been used to the most bewitching homage, to have the highest court paid and the most flattering things said to her by all those who approach her, and to be received with looks of delight and surprise wherever she comes; and she afterwards not only finds herself deprived of all this and reduced to a cypher, but sees it all transferred to another, who has become the reigning toast and beauty of the day in her stead. It must be a most violent shock. It is like a king who is dethroned and reduced to serve as a page in his own palace. I remember once being struck with seeing the Duchess of —, the same that Sir Joshua painted, and who was a miracle of beauty when she was young, and followed by crowds wherever she went—I was coming out of Mrs. W—’s; and on the landing-place, there was she standing by herself, and calling over the bannister for her servant to come to her. If she had been as she once was, a thousand admirers would have flown to her assistance; but her face was painted over like a mask, and there was hardly any appearance of life left but the restless motion of her eyes. I was really hurt.’ I answered, the late Queen had much the same painful look that he described—her face highly rouged, and her eyes rolling in her head like an automaton, but she had not the mortification of having ever been a great beauty. ‘There was a Miss —, too,’ Northcote added, ‘who was a celebrated beauty when she was a girl, and who also sat to Sir Joshua. I saw her not long ago and she was grown as coarse and vulgar as possible; she was like an apple-woman or would do to keep the Three Tuns. The change must be very mortifying. To be sure, there is one thing, it comes on by degrees. The ravages of the small-pox must formerly have been a dreadful blow!’ He said, literary men or men of talent in general were the best off in this respect. The reputation they acquired was not only lasting, but gradually grew stronger, if it was deserved. I agreed they were seldom spoiled by flattery, and had no reason to complain after they were dead. ‘Nor while they are living,’ said N—, ‘if it is not their own fault.’ He mentioned an instance of a trial about an engraving where he, West, and others had to appear, and of the respect that was shown them. Erskine after flourishing away, made an attempt to puzzle Stothard by drawing two angles on a piece of paper, an acute and an obtuse one, and asking, ‘Do you mean to say these two are alike?’ ‘Yes, I do,’ was the answer. ‘I see,’ said Erskine, turning round, ‘there is nothing to be got by angling here!’ West was then called upon to give his evidence, and there was immediately a lane made for him to come forward, and a stillness that you could hear a pin drop. The Judge (Lord Kenyon) then addressed him, ‘Sir Benjamin, we shall be glad to hear your opinion!’ Mr. West answered, ‘He had never received the honour of a title from his Majesty;’ and proceeded to explain the difference between the two engravings which were charged with being copies the one of the other, with such clearness and knowledge of the art, though in general he was a bad speaker, that Lord Kenyon said when he had done, ‘I suppose, gentlemen, you are perfectly satisfied—I perceive there is much more in this than I had any idea of, and am sorry I did not make it more my study when I was young!’ I remarked that I believed corporations of art or letters might meet with a certain attention; but it was the stragglers and candidates that were knocked about with very little ceremony. Talent or merit only wanted a frame of some sort or other to set it off to advantage. Those of my way of thinking were ‘bitter bad judges’ on this point. A Tory scribe who treated mankind as rabble and canaille, was regarded by them in return as a fine gentleman: a reformer like myself, who stood up for liberty and equality, was taken at his word by the very journeymen that set up his paragraphs, and could not get a civil answer from the meanest shop-boy in the employ of those on his own side of the question. N— laughed and said, I irritated myself too much about such things. He said it was one of Sir Joshua’s maxims that the art of life consisted in not being overset by trifles. We should look at the bottom of the account, not at each individual item in it, and see how the balance stands at the end of the year. We should be satisfied if the path of life is clear before us, and not fret at the straws or pebbles that lie in our way. What you have to look to is whether you can get what you write printed, and whether the public will read it, and not to busy yourself with the remarks of shop-boys or printers’ devils. They can do you neither harm nor good. The impertinence of mankind is a thing that no one can guard against.

CONVERSATION THE FOURTEENTH

Northcote shewed me a poem with engravings of Dartmoor, which were too fine by half. I said I supposed Dartmoor would look more gay and smiling after having been thus illustrated, like a dull author who has been praised by a Reviewer. I had once been nearly benighted there and was delighted to get to the inn at Ashburton. ‘That,’ said N—, ‘is the only good of such places that you are glad to escape from them, and look back to them with a pleasing horror ever after. Commend me to the Valdarno or Vallambrosa, where you are never weary of new charms, and which you quit with a sigh of regret. I have, however, told my young friend who sent me the poem, that he has shown his genius in creating beauties where there were none, and extracting enthusiasm from rocks and quagmires. After that, he may write a very interesting poem on Kamschatka!’ He then spoke of the Panorama of the North Pole which had been lately exhibited, of the ice-bergs, the seals lying asleep on the shore, and the strange twilight as well worth seeing. He said, it would be curious to know the effect, if they could get to the Pole itself, though it must be impossible: the veins, he should suppose, would burst, and the vessel itself go to pieces from the extreme cold. I asked if he had ever read an account of twelve men who had been left all the winter in Greenland, and of the dreadful shifts to which they were reduced? He said, he had not.—They were obliged to build two booths of wood one within the other; and if they had to go into the outer one during the severity of the weather, unless they used great precaution, their hands were blistered by whatever they took hold of as if it had been red-hot iron. The most interesting part was the account of their waiting for the return of light at the approach of spring, and the delight with which they first saw the sun shining on the tops of the frozen mountains. N— said, ‘This is the great advantage of descriptions of extraordinary situations by uninformed men: Nature as it were holds the pen for them; they give you what is most striking in the circumstances, and there is nothing to draw off the attention from the strong and actual impression, so that it is the next thing to the reality. G— was here the other day, and I showed him the note from my bookseller about the Fables, with which you were so much pleased, but he saw nothing in it. I then said G— is not one of those who look attentively at nature or draw much from that source. Yet the rest is but like building castles in the air, if it is not founded in observation and experience. Or it is like the enchanted money in the Arabian Nights, which turned to dry leaves when you came to make use of it. It is ingenious and amusing, and so far it is well to be amused when you can; but you learn nothing from the fine hypothesis you have been reading, which is only a better sort of dream, bright and vague and utterly inapplicable to the purposes of common life. G— does not appeal to nature, but to art and execution. There is another thing (which it seems harsh and presumptuous to say, but) he appears to me not always to perceive the difference between right and wrong. There are many others in the same predicament, though not such splendid examples of it. He is satisfied to make out a plausible case, to give the pros and cons like a lawyer; but he has no instinctive bias or feeling one way or other, except as he can give a studied reason for it. Common sense is out of the question: such people despise common sense, and the quarrel between them is a mutual one. Caleb Williams, notwithstanding, is a decidedly original work: the rest are the sweepings of his study. That is but one thing, to be sure; but no one does more than one thing. Northcote said that Sir Joshua used to say that no one produced more than six original things. I always said it was wrong to fix upon this number—five out of the six would be found upon examination to be repetitions of the first. A man can no more produce six original works than he can be six individuals at once. Whatever is the strong and prevailing bent of his genius, he will stamp upon some master-work; and what he does else, will be only the same thing over again, a little better or a little worse; or if he goes out of his way in search of variety and to avoid himself, he will merely become a common-place man or an imitator of others. You see this plainly enough in Cervantes—that he has exhausted himself in the Don Quixote. He has put his whole strength into it: his other works are no better than what other people could write. If there is any exception, it is Shakspeare: he seems to have had the faculty of dividing himself into a number of persons. His writings stand out from every thing else, and from one another. Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff are striking and original characters; but they die a natural death at the end of the fifth act, and no more come to life again than the people themselves would. He is not reduced to repeat himself or revive former inventions under feigned names. This is peculiar to him; still it is to be considered that plays are short works and only allow room for the expression of a part. But in a work of the extent of Don Quixote, the writer had scope to bring in all he wanted; and indeed there is no point of excellence which he has not touched from the highest courtly grace and most romantic enthusiasm down to the lowest ribaldry and rustic ignorance, yet carried off with such an air that you wish nothing away, and do not see what can be added to it. Every bit is perfect; and the author has evidently given his whole mind to it. That is why I believe that the Scotch Novels are the production of several hands. Some parts are careless, others straggling: it is only where there is an opening for effect that the master-hand comes in, and in general he leaves his work for others to get on with it. But in Don Quixote there is not a single line that you may not swear belongs to Cervantes.’—I inquired if he had read WOODSTOCK? He answered, No, he had not been able to get it. I said, I had been obliged to pay five shillings for the loan of it at a regular bookseller’s shop (I could not procure it at the circulating libraries), and that from the understood feeling about Sir Walter no objection was made to this proposal, which would in ordinary cases have been construed into an affront. I had well nigh repented my bargain, but there were one or two scenes that repaid me (though none equal to his best,) and in general it was very indifferent. The plot turned chiefly on English Ghost-scenes, a very mechanical sort of phantoms who dealt in practical jokes and personal annoyances, turning beds upside down and sousing you all over with water, instead of supernatural and visionary horrors. It was very bad indeed, but might be intended to contrast the literal, matter-of-fact imagination of the Southron with the loftier impulses of Highland superstition. Charles II. was not spared, and was brought in admirably (when in disguise) as a raw, awkward Scotch lad, Master Kerneguy. Cromwell was made a fine, bluff, overbearing blackguard, who exercised a personal superiority wherever he came, but was put in situations which I thought wholly out of character, and for which I apprehended there was no warrant in the history of the times. They were therefore so far improper. A romance-writer might take an incident and work it out according to his fancy or might build an imaginary superstructure on the ground of history, but he had no right to transpose the facts. For instance, he had made Cromwell act as his own tip-staff and go to Woodstock to take Charles II. in person. To be sure, he had made him display considerable firmness and courage in the execution of this errand (as Lavender might in being the first to enter a window to secure a desperate robber)—but the plan itself, to say nothing of the immediate danger, was contrary to Cromwell’s dignity as well as policy. Instead of wishing to seize Charles with his own hand, he would naturally keep as far aloof from such a scene as he could, and be desirous to have it understood that he was anxious to shed as little more blood as possible. Besides, he had higher objects in view, and would, I should think, care not much more about Charles than about Master Kerneguy. He would be glad to let him get away. In another place, he had made Cromwell start back in the utmost terror at seeing a picture of Charles I. and act all the phrenzy of Macbeth over again at the sight of Banquo’s ghost. This I should also suppose to be quite out of character in a person of Cromwell’s prosaic, determined habits to fear a painted devil. ‘No,’ said N—, ‘that is not the way he would look at it; it is seeing only a part: but Cromwell was a greater philosopher than to act so. The other story is more probable of his visiting the dead body of Charles in a mask, and exclaiming in great agitation as he left the room, Cruel necessity! Yet even this is not sufficiently authenticated. No; he knew that it was come to this, that it was gone too far for either party to turn back, and that it must be final with one of them. The only question was whether he should give himself up as the victim, and so render all that had been done useless, or exact the penalty from what he thought the offending party. It was like a battle which must end fatally either way, and no one thought of lamenting, because he was not on the losing side. In a great public quarrel there was no room for these domestic and personal regards: all you had to do was to consider well the justice of the cause, before you appealed to the sword. Would Charles I. if he had been victorious, have started at the sight of a picture of Cromwell? Yet Cromwell was as much of a man as he, and as firm as the other was obstinate.’ Northcote said, he wished he could remember the subject of a dispute he had with G— to see if I did not think he had the best of it. I replied, I should be more curious to hear something in which G— was right, for he generally made it a rule to be in the wrong when speaking of any thing. I mentioned having once had a very smart debate with him about a young lady, of whom I had been speaking as very much like her aunt, a celebrated authoress, and as what the latter, I conceived, might have been at her time of life. G— said, when Miss — did any thing like Evelina or Cecilia, he should then believe she was as clever as Madame d’Arblay. I asked him whether he did not think Miss Burney was as clever before she wrote those novels as she was after; or whether in general an author wrote a successful work for being clever, or was clever because he had written a successful work! Northcote laughed and said, ‘That was so like G—.’ I observed that it arose out of his bigoted admiration of literature, so that he could see no merit in any thing else; nor trust to any evidence of talent but what was printed. It was much the same fallacy that had sometimes struck me in the divines, who deduced original sin from Adam’s eating the apple, and not his eating the apple from original sin or a previous inclination to do something, that he should not. Northcote remarked, that speaking of Evelina put him in mind of what Opie had once told him, that when Dr. Johnson sat to him for his picture, on his first coming to town, he asked him if it was true that he had sat up all night to read Miss Burney’s new novel, as it had been reported? And he made answer, ‘I never read it through at all, though I don’t wish this to be known.’ Sir Joshua also pretended to have read it through at a sitting, though it appeared to him (Northcote) affectation in them both, who were thorough-paced men of the world, and hackneyed in literature, to pretend to be so delighted with the performance of a girl, in which they could find neither instruction nor any great amusement, except from the partiality of friendship. So Johnson cried up Savage, because they had slept on bulks when they were young; and lest he should be degraded into a vagabond by the association, had elevated the other into a genius. Such prevarication or tampering with his own convictions was not consistent with the strict and formal tone of morality which he assumed on other and sometimes very trifling occasions, such as correcting Mrs. Thrale for saying that a bird flew in at the door, instead of the window. I said, Savage, in my mind, was one of those writers (like Chatterton) whose vices and misfortunes the world made a set-off to their genius, because glad to connect these ideas together. They were only severe upon those who attacked their prejudices or their consequence. Northcote replied, ‘Savage the architect was here the other day, and asked me why I had abused his name-sake, and called him an impostor. I answered, I had heard that character of him from a person in an obscure rank of life, who had known him a little before his death.’ Northcote proceeded: ‘People in that class are better judges than poets and moralists, who explain away every thing by fine words and doubtful theories. The mob are generally right in their summary judgments upon offenders. A man is seldom ducked or pumped upon or roughly handled by them, unless he has deserved it. You see that in the galleries at the play-house. They never let any thing pass that is immoral; and they are even fastidious judges of wit. I remember there was some gross expression in Goldsmith’s comedy the first night it came out; and there was a great uproar in the gallery, and it was obliged to be suppressed. Though rude and vulgar themselves, they do not like vulgarity on the stage; they come there to be taught manners.’ I said, they paid more attention than any body else; and after the curtain drew up (though somewhat noisy before) were the best-behaved part of the audience, unless something went wrong. As the common people sought for refinement as a treat, people in high life were fond of grossness and ribaldry as a relief to their overstrained affectation of gentility. I could account in no other way for their being amused with the wretched slang in certain magazines and newspapers. I asked Northcote if he had seen the third series of —? He had not. I said they were like the composition of a footman, and I believed greatly admired in the upper circles, who were glad to see an author arrange a side-board for them over again with servile alacrity. He said, ‘They delight in low, coarse buffoonery, because it sets off their own superiority: whereas the rabble resent it when obtruded upon them, because they think it is meant against themselves. They require the utmost elegance and propriety for their money: as the showman says in Goldsmith’s comedy—“My bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes, Water parted from the Sea, or the minuet in Ariadne!”’

Northcote then alluded to a new novel he had been reading. He said he never read a book so full of words; which seemed ridiculous enough to say, for a book was necessarily composed of words, but here there was nothing else but words, to a degree that was surprising. Yet he believed it was sought after, and indeed he could not get it at the common library. ‘You are to consider, there must be books for all tastes and all ages. You may despise it, but the world do not. There are books for children till the time they are six years of age, such as Jack-the-Giant-Killer, the Seven Champions of Christendom, Guy of Warwick and others.[96] From that to twelve they like to read the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and then Fielding’s Novels and Don Quixote: from twenty to thirty books of poetry, Milton, Pope, Shakspeare: and from thirty history and philosophy—what suits us then will serve us for the rest of our lives. For boarding-school girls Thomson’s Seasons has an immense attraction, though I never could read it. Some people cannot get beyond a newspaper or a geographical dictionary. What I mean to infer is that we ought not to condemn too hastily, for a work may be approved by the public, though it does not exactly hit our taste; nay, those may seem beauties to others which seem faults to us. Why else do we pride ourselves on the superiority of our judgment, if we are not more advanced in this respect than the majority of readers? But our very fastidiousness should teach us toleration. You have said very well of this novel, that it is a mixture of genteel and romantic affectation. One objection to the excessive rhodomontade which abounds in it is that you can learn nothing from such extravagant fictions:—they are like nothing in the known world. I remember once speaking to Richardson (Sheridan’s friend) about Shakspeare’s want of morality, and he replied—“What! Shakspeare not moral? He is the most moral of all writers, because he is the most natural!” And in this he was right: for though Shakspeare did not intend to be moral, yet he could not be otherwise as long as he adhered to the path of nature. Morality only teaches us our duty by showing us the natural consequences of our actions; and the poet does the same while he continues to give us faithful and affecting pictures of human life—rewarding the good and punishing the bad. So far truth and virtue are one. But that kind of poetry which has not its foundation in nature, and is only calculated to shock and surprise, tends to unhinge our notions of morality and of every thing else in the ordinary course of Providence.’

Something being said of an artist who had attempted to revive the great style in our times, and the question being put, whether Michael Angelo and Raphael, had they lived now, would not have accommodated themselves to the modern practice, I said, it appeared to me that (whether this was the case or not) they could not have done what they did without the aid of circumstances; that for an artist to raise himself above all surrounding opinions, customs, and institutions by a mere effort of the will, was affectation and folly, like attempting to fly in the air; and that, though great genius might exist without the opportunities favourable to its development, yet it must draw its nourishment from circumstances, and suck in inspiration from its native air. There was Hogarth—he was surely a genius; still the manners of his age were necessary to him: teeming as his works were with life, character, and spirit, they would have been poor and vapid without the night-cellars of St. Giles’s, the drawing-rooms of St. James’s! Would he in any circumstances have been a Raphael or a Phidias? I think not. But had he been twenty times a Raphael or a Phidias, I am quite sure it would never have appeared in the circumstances in which he was placed. Two things are necessary to all great works and great excellence, the mind of the individual and the mind of the age or country co-operating with his own genius. The last brings out the first, but the first does not imply or supersede the last. Pictures for Protestant churches are a contradiction in terms, where they are not objects of worship but of idle curiosity:—where there is not the adoration, the enthusiasm in the spectator, how can it exist in the artist? The spark of genius is only kindled into a flame by sympathy.—Northcote spoke highly of Vanbrugh and of the calm superiority with which he bore the attacks of Swift, Pope, and that set who made a point of decrying all who did not belong to their party. He said Burke and Sir Joshua thought his architecture far from contemptible; and his comedies were certainly first-rate. Richards (the scene-painter) had told him, the players thought the Provoked Husband the best acting play on the stage; and Godwin said the City-Wives’ Confederacy (taken from an indifferent French play) was the best written one. I ventured to add, that the Trip to Scarborough (altered but not improved by Sheridan) was not inferior to either of the others. I should doubt whether the direction given at Sir Tunbelly’s castle on the arrival of Young Fashion—‘Let loose the grey-hound, and lock up Miss Hoyden!’—would be in Sheridan’s version, who, like most of his countrymen, had a prodigious ambition of elegance. Northcote observed, that talking of this put him in mind of a droll speech that was made when the officers got up a play on board the vessel that went lately to find out the North-West passage:—one of the sailors, who was admiring the performance, and saying how clever it was, was interrupted by the boatswain, who exclaimed—‘Clever! did you say? I call it philosophy, by G—d!’ He asked, if he had ever mentioned to me that anecdote of Lord Mansfield, who, when an old woman was brought before him as a witch, and was charged, among other improbable things, with walking through the air, attended coolly to the evidence, and then dismissed the complaint by saying, ‘My opinion is that this good woman be suffered to return home, and whether she shall do this, walking on the ground or riding through the air, must be left entirely to her own pleasure, for there is nothing contrary to the laws of England in either!’ I mentioned a very fine dancer at the Opera (Mademoiselle Brocard) with whom I was much delighted; and Northcote observed that where there was grace and beauty accompanying the bodily movements, it was very hard to deny the mental refinement or the merit of this art. He could not see why that which was so difficult to do, and which gave so much pleasure to others, was to be despised. He remembered seeing some young people at Parma (though merely in a country-dance) exhibit a degree of perfection in their movements that seemed to be inspired by the very genius of grace and gaiety. Miss Reynolds used to say that perfection was much the same in everything—nobody could assign the limits. I said authors alone were privileged to suppose that all excellence was confined to words. Till I was twenty I thought there was nothing in the world but books: when I began to paint I found there were two things, both difficult to do and worth doing; and I concluded from that time there might be fifty. At least I was willing to allow every one his own choice. I recollect a certain poet saying ‘he should like to ham-string those fellows at the Opera’—I suppose because the Great would rather see them dance than read Kehama. Whatever can be done in such a manner that you can fancy a God to do it, must have something in its nature divine. The ancients had assigned Gods to dancing as well as to music and poetry, to the different attributes and perfections both of body and mind; and perhaps the plurality of the heathen deities was favourable to a liberality of taste and opinion. NORTHCOTE: ‘The most wretched scribbler looks down upon the greatest painter as a mere mechanic: but who would compare Lord Byron with Titian?’

CONVERSATION THE FIFTEENTH

I went to Northcote in the evening to consult about his Fables. He was downstairs in the parlour, and talked much as usual: but the difference of the accompaniments, the sitting down, the preparations for tea, the carpet and furniture, and a little fat lap-dog interfered with old associations and took something from the charm of his conversation. He spoke of a Mr. Laird who had been employed to see his Life of Sir Joshua through the press, and whom he went to call upon in an upper story in Peterborough-Court, Fleet-street, where he was surrounded by his books, his implements of writing, a hand-organ, and his coffee-pots; and he said he envied him this retreat more than any palace he had ever happened to enter. Northcote was not very well, and repeated his complaints. I said I thought the air (now summer was coming on) would do him more good than physic. His apothecary had been describing the dissection of the elephant, which had just been killed at Exeter ‘Change. It appeared that instead of the oil which usually is found in the joints of animals, the interstices were in this case filled up with a substance resembling a kind of white paint. This Northcote considered as a curious instance of the wise contrivance of nature in the adaptation of means to ends; for even in pieces of artificial mechanism, though they use oil to lubricate the springs and wheels of clocks and other common-sized instruments, yet in very large and heavy ones, such as steam-engines, &c. they are obliged to use grease, pitch, and other more solid substances, to prevent the friction. If they could dissect a flea, what a fine, evanescent fluid would be found to lubricate its slender joints and assist its light movements! Northcote said the bookseller wished to keep the original copy of the Fables to bind up as a literary curiosity. I objected to this proceeding as unfair. There were several slips of the pen and slovenlinesses of style (for which I did not think him at all accountable, since an artist wrote with his left hand, and painted with his right) and I did not see why these accidental inadvertences, arising from diffidence and want of practice, should be as it were enshrined and brought against him. He said, ‘Mr. P— H— tasked me the hardest in what I wrote in the Artist. He pointed out where I was wrong, and sent it back to me to correct it. After all, what I did there was thought the best!’ I said Mr. H— was too fastidious, and spoiled what he did from a wish to have it perfect. He dreaded that a shadow of objection should be brought against any thing he advanced, so that his opinions at last amounted to a kind of genteel truisms. One must risk something in order to do any thing. I observed that this was remarkable in so clever a man; but it seemed as if there were some fatality by which the most lively and whimsical writers, if they went out of their own eccentric path and attempted to be serious, became exceedingly grave and even insipid. His farces were certainly very spirited and original: NO SONG NO SUPPER was the first play I had ever seen, and I felt grateful to him for this. Northcote agreed that it was very delightful; and said there was a volume of it when he first read it to them one night at Mrs. Rundle’s, and that the players cut it down a good deal and supplied a number of things. There was a great piece of work to alter the songs for Madame Storace, who played in it and who could not pronounce half the English terminations. MY GRANDMOTHER, too, was a laughable idea, very ingeniously executed; and some of the songs in this had an equal portion of elegance and drollery, such as that in particular—

For alas! long before I was born, My fair one had died of old age!

Still some of his warmest admirers were hurt at their being farces—if they had been comedies, they would have been satisfied, for nothing could be greater than their success. They were the next to O’Keefe’s, who in that line was the English Moliere.

Northcote asked if I remembered the bringing out of any of O’Keefe’s? I answered, No. He said ‘It had the oddest effect imaginable—at one moment they seemed on the point of being damned, and the next moment you were convulsed with laughter. Edwin was inimitable in some of them. He was one of those actors, it is true, who carried a great deal off the stage with him, that he would willingly have left behind, and so far could not help himself. But his awkward, shambling figure in Bowkitt the dancing-master, was enough to make one die with laughing. He was also unrivalled in Lingo, where he was admirably supported by Mrs. Wells in Cowslip, when she prefers “a roast duck” to all the birds in the Heathen Mythology—and in Peeping Tom, where he merely puts his head out, the faces that he made threw the audience into a roar.’ I said, I remembered no further back than B—, who used to delight me excessively in Lenitive in the Prize, when I was a boy. Northcote said, he was an imitator of Edwin, but at a considerable distance. He was a good-natured, agreeable man; and the audience were delighted with him, because he was evidently delighted with them. In some respects he was a caricaturist: for instance, in Lenitive he stuck his pigtail on end, which he had no right to do, for no one had ever done it but himself. I said Liston appeared to me to have more comic humour than any one in my time, though he was not properly an actor. Northcote asked if he was not low-spirited; and told the story (I suspect an old one) of his consulting a physician on the state of his health, who recommended him to go and see Liston. I said he was grave and prosing, but I did not know there was any thing the matter with him, though I had seen him walking along the street the other day with his face as fixed as if had a lock-jaw, a book in his hand, looking neither to the right nor the left, and very much like his own Lord Duberly. I did not see why he and Matthews should both of them be so hipped, except from their having the player’s melancholy, arising from their not seeing six hundred faces on the broad grin before them at all other times as well as when they were acting. He was, however, exceedingly unaffected, and remarkably candid in judging of other actors. He always spoke in the highest terms of Munden, whom I considered as overdoing his parts.[97] Northcote said, ‘Munden was excellent but an artificial actor. You should have seen Weston,’ he continued. ‘It was impossible, from looking at him, for any one to say that he was acting. You would suppose they had gone out and found the actual character they wanted, and brought him upon the stage without his knowing it. Even when they interrupted him with peals of laughter and applause, he looked about him as if he was not at all conscious of having any thing to do with it, and then went on as before. In Scrub, Dr. Last, and other parts of that kind, he was perfection itself. Garrick would never attempt Abel Drugger after him. There was something peculiar in his face; for I knew an old school-fellow of his who told me he used to produce the same effect when a boy, and when the master asked what was the matter, his companions would make answer—‘Weston looked at me, Sir!’ Yet he came out in tragedy, as indeed they all did! Northcote inquired if I had seen Garrick? I answered, ‘No—I could not very well, as he died the same year I was born!’ I mentioned having lately met with a striking instance of genealogical taste in a family, the grandfather of which thought nothing of Garrick, the father thought nothing of Mrs. Siddons, and the daughter could make nothing of the Scotch Novels, but admired Mr. Theodore Hook’s ‘SAYINGS AND DOINGS!’

Northcote then returned to the subject of his book and said, ‘Sir Richard Phillips once wished me to do a very magnificent work indeed on the subject of art. He was like Curil, who had a number of fine title-pages, if any one could have written books to answer them. He came here once with Godwin to shew me a picture which they had just discovered of Chaucer, and which was to embellish Godwin’s Life of him. I told them it was certainly no picture of Chaucer, nor was any such picture painted at that time.’ I said, Godwin had got a portrait about a year ago which he wished me to suppose was a likeness of President Bradshaw: I saw no reason for his thinking so, but that in that case it would be worth a hundred pounds to him! Northcote expressed a curiosity to have seen it, as he knew the descendants of the family at Plymouth. He remembered one of them, an old lady of the name of Wilcox, who used to walk about in Gibson’s-Field near the town, so prim and starched, holding up her fan spread out like a peacock’s tail with such an air, on account of her supposed relationship to one of the Regicides! They paid, however (in the vulgar opinion) for this distinction; for others of them bled to death at the nose, or died of the bursting of a blood-vessel, which their wise neighbours did not fail to consider as a judgment upon them.

Speaking of Dr. M—, he said, he had such a feeling of beauty in his heart, that it made angels of every one around him. To check a person who was running on against another, he once said, ‘You should not speak in that manner, for you lead me to suppose you have the bad qualities you are so prone to dwell upon in others.’—A transition was here made to Lord Byron, who used to tell a story of a little red-haired girl, who, when countesses and ladies of fashion were leaving the room where he was in crowds (to cut him after his quarrel with his wife) stopped short near a table against which he was leaning, gave him a familiar nod, and said, ‘You should have married me, and then this would not have happened to you!’ A question being started whether Dr. M— was handsome, Northcote answered, ‘I could see no beauty in him as to his outward person, but there was an angelic sweetness of disposition that spread its influence over his whole conversation and manner. He had not wit, but a fine romantic enthusiasm which deceived himself and enchanted others. I remember once his describing a picture by Rosa de Tivoli (at Saltram) of Two Bulls fighting, and he gave such an account of their rage and manner of tearing up the ground that I could not rest till we went over to see it—when we came there, it was nothing but a coarse daub like what might be expected from the painter: but he had made the rest out of a vivid imagination. So my father told him a story of a bull-bait he had seen in which the bull had run so furiously at the dog that he broke the chain and pitched upon his head and was killed. Soon after, he came and told us the same story as an incident he himself had witnessed. He did not mean to deceive, but the image had made such an impression on his fancy, that he believed it to be one that he had himself been an eye-witness of.’ I was much amused with this account and I offered to get him a copy of a whimsical production, of which a new edition had been printed. I also recommended to him the Spanish Rogue, as a fine mixture of drollery and grave moralizing. He spoke of Lazarillo de Tormes and of the Cheats of Scapin, the last of which he rated rather low. The work was written by Scarron, whose widow, the famous Madame de Maintenon, afterwards became mistress to Louis XIV.

PART THE SECOND

CONVERSATION THE SIXTEENTH

N.—That is your diffidence, which I can’t help thinking you carry too far. For any one of real strength, you are the humblest person I ever knew.

H.—It is owing to pride.

N.—You deny you have invention too. But it is want of practice. Your ideas run on before your executive power. It is a common case. There was Ramsay, of whom Sir Joshua used to say that he was the most sensible among all the painters of his time; but he has left little to show it. His manner was dry and timid. He stopped short in the middle of his work, because he knew exactly how much it wanted. Now and then we find hints and sketches which show what he might have been, if his hand had been equal to his conceptions. I have seen a picture of his of the Queen, soon after she was married—a profile, and slightly done; but it was a paragon of elegance. She had a fan in her hand: Lord! how she held that fan! It was weak in execution and ordinary in features—all I can say of it is, that it was the farthest possible removed from everything like vulgarity. A professor might despise it; but in the mental part, I have never seen any thing of Vandyke’s equal to it. I could have looked at it forever. I showed it to J—n; and he, I believe, came into my opinion of it. I don’t know where it is now; but I saw in it enough to convince me that Sir Joshua was right in what he said of Ramsay’s great superiority. His own picture of the King, which is at the Academy, is a finer composition and shows greater boldness and mastery of hand; but I should find it difficult to produce any thing of Sir Joshua’s that conveys an idea of more grace and delicacy than the one I have mentioned. Reynolds would have finished it better: the other was afraid of spoiling what he had done, and so left it a mere outline. He was frightened before he was hurt.

H.—Taste and even genius is but a misfortune, without a correspondent degree of manual dexterity or power of language to make it manifest.

N.—W— was here the other day. I believe you met him going out. He came, he said, to ask me about the famous people of the last age, Johnson, Burke, &c. (as I was almost the only person left who remembered them), and was curious to know what figure Sir Walter Scott would have made among them.

H.—That is so like a North-Briton—‘to make assurance doubly sure,’ and to procure a signature to an acknowledged reputation as if it were a receipt for the delivery of a bale of goods.

N.—I told him it was not for me to pronounce upon such men as Sir Walter Scott: they came before another tribunal. They were of that height that they were seen by all the world, and must stand or fall by the verdict of posterity. It signified little what any individual thought in such cases, it being equally an impertinence to set one’s self against or to add one’s testimony to the public voice; but as far as I could judge, I told him, that Sir Walter would have stood his ground in any company: neither Burke nor Johnson nor any of their admirers would have been disposed or able to set aside his pretensions. These men were not looked upon in their day as they are at present: Johnson had his Lexiphanes, and Goldsmith was laughed at—their merits were to the full as much called in question, nay, more so, than those of the Author of Waverley have ever been, who has been singularly fortunate in himself or in lighting upon a barren age: but because their names have since become established, and as it were sacred, we think they were always so; and W— wanted me, as a competent witness and as having seen both parties, to affix the same seal to his countryman’s reputation, which it is not in the power of the whole of the present generation to do, much less of any single person in it. No, we must wait for this! Time alone can give the final stamp: no living reputation can ever be of the same value or quality as posthumous fame. We must throw lofty objects to a distance in order to judge of them: if we are standing close under the Monument, it looks higher than St. Paul’s. Posterity has this advantage over us-not that they are really wiser, but they see the proportions better from being placed further off. For instance, I liked Sir Walter, because he had an easy, unaffected manner, and was ready to converse on all subjects alike. He was not like your friends, the L— poets, who talk about nothing but their own poetry. If, on the contrary, he had been stiff and pedantic, I should, perhaps, have been inclined to think less highly of the author from not liking the man; so that we can never judge fairly of men’s abilities till we are no longer liable to come in contact with their persons. Friends are as little to be trusted as enemies: favour or prejudice makes the votes in either case more or less suspected; though ‘the vital signs that a name shall live’ are in some instances so strong, that we can hardly refuse to put faith in them, and I think this is one. I was much pleased with Sir Walter, and I believe he expressed a favourable opinion of me. I said to him, ‘I admire the way in which you begin your novels. You set out so abruptly, that you quite surprise me. I can’t at all tell what’s coming.’—‘No!’ says Sir Walter, ‘nor I neither.’ I then told him, that when I first read Waverley, I said it was no novel: nobody could invent like that. Either he had heard the story related by one of the surviving parties, or he had found the materials in a manuscript concealed in some old chest: to which he replied, ‘You’re not so far out of the way in thinking so.’ You don’t know him, do you? He’d be a pattern to you. Oh! he has a very fine manner. You would learn to rub off some of your asperities. But you admire him, I believe.

H.—Yes; on this side of idolatry and Toryism.

N.—That is your prejudice.

H.—Nay, it rather shows my liberality, if I am a devoted enthusiast, notwithstanding. There are two things I admire in Sir Walter, his capacity and his simplicity; which indeed I am apt to think are much the same. The more ideas a man has of other things, the less he is taken up with the idea of himself. Every one gives the same account of the author of Waverley in this respect. When he was in Paris, and went to Galignani’s, he sat down in an outer room to look at some book he wanted to see: none of the clerks had the least suspicion who it was: when it was found out, the place was in a commotion. Cooper, the American, was in Paris at the same time: his looks and manners seemed to announce a much greater man. He strutted through the streets with a very consequential air; and in company held up his head, screwed up his features, and placed himself on a sort of pedestal to be observed and admired, as if he never relaxed in the assumption nor wished it to be forgotten by others, that he was the American Sir Walter Scott. The real one never troubled himself about the matter. Why should he? He might safely leave that question to others. Indeed, by what I am told, he carries his indifference too far: it amounts to an implied contempt for the public, and misprision of treason against the commonwealth of letters. He thinks nothing of his works, although ‘all Europe rings with them from side to side.’—If so, he has been severely punished for his infirmity.

N.—Though you do not know Sir Walter Scott, I think I have heard you say you have seen him.

H.—Yes, he put me in mind of Cobbett, with his florid face and scarlet gown, which were just like the other’s red face and scarlet waistcoat. The one is like an English farmer, the other like a Scotch laird. Both are large, robust men, with great strength and composure of features; but I saw nothing of the ideal character in the romance-writer, any more than I looked for it in the politician.

N.—Indeed! But you have a vast opinion of Cobbett too, haven’t you? Oh! he’s a giant! He has such prodigious strength; he tears up a subject by the roots. Did you ever read his Grammar? Or see his attack on Mrs. —? It was like a hawk pouncing on a wren. I should be terribly afraid to get into his hands. And then his homely, familiar way of writing—it is not from necessity or vulgarity, but to show his contempt for aristocratic pride and arrogance. He only has a kitchen-garden; he could have a flower-garden too if he chose. Peter Pindar said his style was like the Horse-Guards, only one story above the ground, while Junius’s had all the airy elegance of Whitehall: but he could raise his style just as high as he pleased; though he does not want to sacrifice strength to elegance. He knows better what he is about.

H.—I don’t think he’ll set up for a fine gentleman in a hurry, though he has for a Member of Parliament; and I fancy he would make no better figure in the one than the other. He appeared to me, when I once saw him, exactly what I expected: in Sir Walter I looked in vain for a million of fine things! I could only explain it to myself in this way, that there was a degree of capacity in that huge double forehead of his, that superseded all effort, made every thing come intuitively and almost mechanically, as if it were merely transcribing what was already written, and by the very facility with which the highest beauty and excellence was produced, left few traces of it in the expression of the countenance, and hardly any sense of it in the mind of the author. Expression only comes into the face as we are at a loss for words, or have a difficulty in bringing forward our ideas; but we may repeat the finest things by rote without any change of look or manner. It is only when the powers are tasked, when the moulds of thought are full, that the effect or the wear-and-tear of the mind appears on the surface. So, in general, writers of the greatest imagination and range of ideas, and who might be said to have all nature obedient to their call, seem to have been most careless of their fame and regardless of their works. They treat their productions not as children, but as ‘bastards of their art;’ whereas those who are more confined in their scope of intellect and wedded to some one theory or predominant fancy, have been found to feel a proportionable fondness for the offspring of their brain, and have thus excited a deeper interest in it in the minds of others. We set a value on things as they have cost us dear: the very limitation of our faculties or exclusiveness of our feelings compels us to concentrate all our enthusiasm on a favourite subject; and strange as it may sound, in order to inspire a perfect sympathy in others or to form a school, men must themselves be egotists! Milton has had fewer readers and admirers, but I suspect more devoted and bigotted ones, than ever Shakspeare had: Sir Walter Scott has attracted more universal attention than any writer of our time, but you may speak against him with less danger of making personal enemies than if you attack Lord Byron. Even Wordsworth has half a dozen followers, who set him up above everybody else from a common idiosyncrasy of feeling and the singleness of the elements of which his excellence is composed. Before we can take an author entirely to our bosoms, he must be another self; and he cannot be this, if he is ‘not one, but all mankind’s epitome.’ It was this which gave such an effect to Rousseau’s writings, that he stamped his own character and the image of his self-love on the public mind—there it is, and there it will remain in spite of every thing. Had he possessed more comprehension of thought or feeling, it would have only have diverted him from his object. But it was the excess of his egotism and his utter blindness to every thing else, that found a corresponding sympathy in the conscious feelings of every human breast, and shattered to pieces the pride of rank and circumstance by the pride of internal worth or upstart pretension. When Rousseau stood behind the chair of the master of the château of —, and smiled to hear the company dispute about the meaning of the motto of the arms of the family, which he alone knew, and stumbled as he handed the glass of wine to his young mistress, and fancied she coloured at being waited upon by so learned a young footman—then was first kindled that spark which can never be quenched, then was formed the germ of that strong conviction of the disparity between the badge on his shoulder and the aspirations of his soul—the determination, in short, that external situation and advantages are but the mask, and that the mind is the man—armed with which, impenetrable, incorrigible, he went forth conquering and to conquer, and overthrew the monarchy of France and the hierarchies of the earth. Till then, birth and wealth and power were all in all, though but the frame-work or crust that envelopes the man; and what there was in the man himself was never asked, or was scorned and forgot. And while all was dark and grovelling within, while knowledge either did not exist or was confined to a few, while material power and advantages were every thing, this was naturally to be expected. But with the increase and diffusion of knowledge, this state of things must sooner or later cease; and Rousseau was the first who held the torch (lighted at the never-dying fire in his own bosom) to the hidden chambers of the mind of man—like another Prometheus, breathed into his nostrils the breath of a new and intellectual life, enraging the Gods of the earth, and made him feel what is due to himself and his fellows. Before, physical force was every thing: henceforward, mind, thought, feeling was a new element—a fourth estate in society. What! shall a man have read Dante and Ariosto, and be none the better for it? Shall he be still judged of only by his coat, the number of his servants in livery, the house over his head? While poverty meant ignorance, that was necessarily the case; but the world of books overturns the world of things, and establishes a new balance of power and scale of estimation. Shall we think only rank and pedigree divine, when we have music, poetry, and painting within us? Tut! we have read Old Mortality; and shall it be asked whether we have done so in a garret or a palace, in a carriage or on foot? Or knowing them, shall we not revere the mighty heirs of fame, and respect ourselves for knowing and honouring them? This is the true march of intellect, and not the erection of Mechanics’ Institutions, or the printing of two-penny trash, according to my notion of the matter, though I have nothing to say against them neither.

N.—I thought you never would have done; however, you have come to the ground at last. After this rhapsody, I must inform you that Rousseau is a character more detestable to me than I have power of language to express:—an aristocrat filled with all their worst vices, pride, ambition, conceit and gross affectation: and though endowed with some ability, yet not sufficient ever to make him know right from wrong: witness his novel of Eloisa. His name brings to my mind all the gloomy horrors of a mob-government, which attempted from their ignorance to banish truth and justice from the world. I see you place Sir Walter above Lord Byron. The question is not which keeps longest on the wing, but which soars highest: and I cannot help thinking there are essences in Lord Byron that are not to be surpassed. He is on a par with Dryden. All the other modern poets appear to me vulgar in the comparison. As a lady who comes here said, there is such an air of nobility in what he writes. Then there is such a power in the style, expressions almost like Shakspeare—‘And looked round on them with their wolfish eyes.’

H.—The expression is in Shakspeare, somewhere in Lear.

N.—The line I repeated is in Don Juan. I do not mean to vindicate the immorality or misanthropy in that poem—perhaps his lameness was to blame for this defect—but surely no one can deny the force, the spirit of it; and there is such a fund of drollery mixed up with the serious part. Nobody understood the tragi-comedy of poetry so well. People find fault with this mixture in general, because it is not well managed; there is a comic story and a tragic story going on at the same time, without their having any thing to do with one another. But in Lord Byron they are brought together, just as they are in nature. In like manner, if you go to an execution at the very moment when the criminal is going to be turned off, and all eyes are fixed upon him, an old apple-woman and her stall are overturned, and all the spectators fall a-laughing. In real life the most ludicrous incidents border on the most affecting and shocking. How fine that is of the cask of butter in the storm! Some critics have objected to it as turning the whole into burlesque; on the contrary, it is that which stamps the character of the scene more than any thing else. What did the people in the boat care about the rainbow, which he has described in such vivid colours; or even about their fellow-passengers who were thrown overboard, when they only wanted to eat them? No, it was the loss of the firkin of butter that affected them more than all the rest; and it is the mention of this circumstance that adds a hardened levity and a sort of ghastly horror to the scene. It shows the master-hand—there is such a boldness and sagacity and superiority to ordinary rules in it! I agree, however, in your admiration of the Waverley Novels: they are very fine. As I told the author, he and Cervantes have raised the idea of human nature, not as Richardson has attempted, by affectation and a false varnish, but by bringing out what there is really fine in it under a cloud of disadvantages. Have you seen the last?

H.—No.

N.—There is a character of a common smith or armourer in it, which, in spite of a number of weaknesses and in the most ludicrous situations, is made quite heroical by the tenderness and humanity it displays. It is his best, but I had not read it when I saw him. No; all that can be said against Sir Walter is, that he has never made a whole. There is an infinite number of delightful incidents and characters, but they are disjointed and scattered. This is one of Fielding’s merits: his novels are regular compositions, with what the ancients called a beginning, a middle, and an end: every circumstance is foreseen and provided for, and the conclusion of the story turns round as it were to meet the beginning. Gil Blas is very clever, but it is only a succession of chapters. Tom Jones is a masterpiece, as far as regards the conduct of the fable.

H.—Do you know the reason? Fielding had a hooked nose, the long chin. It is that introverted physiognomy that binds and concentrates.

N.—But Sir Walter has not a hooked nose, but one that denotes kindness and ingenuity. Mrs. Abington had the pug-nose, who was the perfection of comic archness and vivacity: a hooked nose is my aversion.

CONVERSATION THE SEVENTEENTH

N.—I sometimes get into scrapes that way by contradicting people before I have well considered the subject, and I often wonder how I get out of them so well as I do. I remember once meeting with Sir — —, who was talking about Milton; and as I have a natural aversion to a coxcomb, I differed from what he said, without being at all prepared with any arguments in support of my opinion.

H.—But you had time enough to think of them afterwards.

N.—I got through with it somehow or other. It is the very risk you run in such cases that puts you on the alert and gives you spirit to extricate yourself from it. If you had full leisure to deliberate and to make out your defence beforehand, you perhaps could not do it so well as on the spur of the occasion. The surprise and flutter of the animal spirits gives the alarm to any little wit we possess, and puts it into a state of immediate requisition.

H.—Besides, it is always easiest to defend a paradox or an opinion you don’t care seriously about. I would sooner (as a matter of choice) take the wrong side than the right in any argument. If you have a thorough conviction on any point and good grounds for it, you have studied it long, and the real reasons have sunk into the mind; so that what you can recal of them at a sudden pinch, seems unsatisfactory and disproportionate to the confidence of your belief and to the magisterial tone you are disposed to assume. Even truth is a matter of habit and professorship. Reason and knowledge, when at their height, return into a kind of instinct. We understand the grammar of a foreign language best, though we do not speak it so well. But if you take up an opinion at a venture, then you lay hold of whatever excuse comes within your reach, instead of searching about for and bewildering yourself with the true reasons; and the odds are that the arguments thus got up are as good as those opposed to them. In fact, the more sophistical and superficial an objection to a received or well-considered opinion is, the more we are staggered and teazed by it; and the next thing is to lose our temper, when we become an easy prey to a cool and disingenuous adversary. I would much rather (as the safest side) insist on Milton’s pedantry than on his sublimity, supposing I were not in the company of very good judges. A single stiff or obscure line would outweigh a whole book of solemn grandeur in the mere flippant encounter of the wits, and, in general, the truth and justice of the cause you espouse is rather an incumbrance than an assistance; or it is like heavy armour which few have strength to wield. Any thing short of complete triumph on the right side is defeat: any hole picked or flaw detected in an argument which we are holding earnestly and conscientiously, is sufficient to raise the laugh against us. This is the greatest advantage which folly and knavery have. We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong; and as all the world would be thought to have some reason on their side, they are glad of any loop-hole or pretext to escape from the dogmatism and tyranny we would set up over them. Absolute submission requires absolute proofs. Without some such drawback, the world might become too wise and too good, at least according to every man’s private prescription. In this sense ridicule is the test of truth; that is, the levity and indifference on one side balances the formality and presumption on the other.

N.—Horne Tooke used to play with his antagonists in the way you speak of. He constantly threw Fuseli into a rage and made him a laughing-stock, by asking him to explain the commonest things, and often what Fuseli understood much better than he did. But in general, I think it is less an indifference to truth than the fear of finding yourself in the wrong, that carries you through when you take up any opinion from caprice or the spirit of contradiction. Danger almost always produces courage and presence of mind. The faculties are called forth with the occasion. You see men of very ordinary characters, placed in extraordinary circumstances, act like men of capacity. The late King of France was thought weak and imbecile, till he was thrown into the most trying situations; and then he shewed sense and even eloquence which no one had ever suspected. Events supplied the want of genius and energy; the external impressions were so strong, that the dullest or most indolent must have been roused by them. Indeed the wise man is perhaps more liable to err in such extreme cases by setting up his own preconceptions and self-will against circumstances, than the common-place character who yields to necessity and is passive under existing exigencies. It is this which makes kings and ministers equal to their situations. They may be very poor creatures in themselves; but the importance of the part they have to act and the magnitude of their responsibility inspire them with a factitious and official elevation of view. Few people are found totally unfit for high station, and it is lucky that it is so. Perhaps men of genius and imagination are the least adapted to get into the state go-cart; Buonaparte, we see, with all his talent, only drove to the devil. When Richard II. was quite a youth, and he went to suppress the rebellion of Wat Tyler in Smithfield, and the latter was killed, his followers drew their bows and were about to take vengeance on the young king, when he stepped forward and said that ‘now as their leader was dead, he would be their leader.’ This instantly disarmed their rage, and they received him with acclamations. He had no other course left; the peril he was in made him see his place of safety. Courage has a wonderful effect: this makes mad people so terrible, that they have no fear. Even wild beasts or a mob (which is much the same thing) will hardly dare to attack you if you show no fear of them. I have heard Lord Exmouth (Sir Edward Pellew) say that once when he was out with his ship at sea and there was a mutiny on board and no chance of escape, he learned (from a spy he had among them) the moment when the ring-leaders were assembled and about to execute their design of putting the captain and all the officers to death, when taking a pistol in each hand, he went down into the cock-pit into the midst of them; and threatening to shoot the first man that stirred, took them every one prisoners. If he had betrayed the least fear or any of them had raised a hand, he must have been instantly sacrificed. But he was bolder than any individual in the group, and by this circumstance had the ascendancy over the whole put together. A similar act of courage is related of Peter the Great, who singly entered the haunt of some conspirators, and striking down the leader with a blow on the face, spread consternation amongst the assassins, who were terrified by his fearlessness.

(A book of prints was brought in, containing Views of Edinburgh.)

N.—It is curious to what perfection these things are brought, and how cheap they are. It is that which makes them sell and ensures the fortune of those who publish them. Great fortunes are made out of small profits, which allow all the world to become purchasers. That is the reason the Colosseum will hardly answer. There never was an example of an exhibition in England answering at a crown a-piece. People look twice at their money before they will part with it, if it be more than they are accustomed to pay. It becomes a question, and perhaps a few stragglers go; whereas they ought to go in a stream and as a matter of course. If people have to pay a little more than usual, though a mere trifle, they consider it in the light of an imposition, and resent it as such; if the price be a little under the mark, they think they have saved so much money, and snap at it as a bargain. The publishers of the work on Edinburgh are the same who brought out the Views of London; and it is said, the success of that undertaking enabled them to buy up Lackington’s business. E— the architect, I am told, suggested the plan, but declined a share that was offered him in it, because he said nothing that he had been engaged in had ever succeeded. The event would not belie the notion of his own ill-luck. It is singular on what slight turns good or ill fortune depends. Lackington (I understood from the person who brought the Edinburgh Views here) died worth near half a million: nobody could tell how he had made it. At thirty he was not worth a shilling. The great difficulty is in the first hundred pounds.

H.—It is sympathy with the mass of mankind, and finding out from yourself what is they want and must have.

N.—It seems a good deal owing to the most minute circumstances. A difference of sixpence in the price will make all the difference in the sale of a book. Sometimes a work lies on the shelf for a time, and then runs like wild-fire. There was Drelincourt on Death, which is a fortune in itself; it hung on hand; nobody read it, till Defoe put a ghost-story into it, and it has been a stock-book ever since. It is the same in prints. A catching subject or name will make one thing an universal favourite, while another of ten times the merit is never noticed. I have known this happen to myself in more than one instance. This is the provoking part in W—l and some other painters, who, taking advantage of the externals and accidents of their art, have run away with nearly all the popularity of their time. Jack T— was here the other day to say that W— and his friends complained bitterly of the things I said about him. I replied that I had only spoken of him as an artist, which I was at liberty to do; and that if he were offended, I would recommend to him to read the story of Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland, who came to the king with a complaint, that whenever she met Nell Gwyn in the street, the latter put her head out of the coach and made mouths at her. ‘Well then,’says Charles II. ‘the next time you meet Nelly and she repeats the offence, do you make mouths at her again!’ So if Mr. W—l is hurt at my saying things of him, all he has to do is to say things of me in return.

H.—I confess, I never liked W—1. It was one of the errors of my youth that I did not think him equal to Raphael and Rubens united, as Payne Knight contended: and I have fought many a battle with numbers (if not odds) against me on that point.

N.—Then you must have the satisfaction of seeing a change of opinion at present.

H.—Pardon me, I have not that satisfaction; I have only a double annoyance from it. It is no consolation to me that an individual was overrated by the folly of the public formerly, and that he suffers from their injustice and fickleness at present. It is no satisfaction to me that poor I—g is reduced to his primitive congregation, and that the stream of coronet-coaches no longer rolls down Holborn or Oxford-street to his chapel. They ought never to have done so, or they ought to continue to do so. The world (whatever in their petulance and profligacy they may think) have no right to intoxicate poor human nature with the full tide of popular applause, and then to drive it to despair for the want of it. There are no words to express the cruelty, the weakness, the shamelessness of such conduct, which resembles that of the little girl who dresses up her doll in the most extravagant finery, and then in mere wantonness strips it naked to its wool and bits of wood again—with this difference that the doll has no feeling, whereas the world’s idols are wholly sensitive.

(Of some one who preferred appearances to realities.)

N.—I can understand the character, because it is exactly the reverse of what I should do and feel. It is like dressing out of one’s sphere, or any other species of affectation and imposture. I cannot bear to be taken for any thing but what I am. It is like what the country-people call ‘having a halfpenny head and a farthing tail.’ That is what makes me mad when people sometimes come and pay their court to me by saying—‘Bless me! how sagacious you look! What a penetrating countenance! ‘No, I say, that is but the title-page—what is there in the book? Your dwelling so much on the exterior seems to imply that the inside does not correspond to it. Don’t let me look wise and be foolish, but let me be wise though I am taken for a fool! Any thing else is quackery: it is as if there was no real excellence in the world, but in opinion. I used to blame Sir Joshua for this: he sometimes wanted to get Collins’s earth, but did not like to have it known. Then there were certain oils that he made a great fuss and mystery about. I have said to myself, surely there is something deeper and nobler in the art that does not depend on all this trick and handicraft. Give Titian and a common painter the same materials and tools to work with, and then see the difference between them. This is all that is worth contending for. If Sir Joshua had had no other advantage than the using Collins’s earth and some particular sort of megilp, we should not now have been talking about him. When W— was here the other day, he asked about Mengs and his school; and when I told him what I thought, he said, ‘Is that your own opinion, or did you take it from Sir Joshua?’ I answered, that if I admired Sir Joshua, it was because there was something congenial in our tastes, and not because I was his pupil. I saw his faults, and differed with him often enough. If I have any bias, it is the other way, to take fancies into my head and run into singularity and cavils. In what I said to you about Ramsay’s picture of the Queen, for instance, I don’t know that any one ever thought so before, or that any one else would agree with me. It might be set down as mere whim and caprice; but I can’t help it, if it is so. All I know is, that such is my feeling about it, which I can no more part with than I can part with my own existence. It is the same in other things, as in music. There was an awkward composer at the Opera many years ago, of the name of Boccarelli; what he did was stupid enough in general, but I remember he sung an air one day at Cosway’s, which they said Shield had transferred into the Flitch of Bacon. I cannot describe the effect it had upon me—it seemed as if it wound into my very soul—I would give any thing to hear it sung again. So I could have listened to Dignum’s singing the lines out of Shakspeare—‘Come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands’—a hundred times over. But I am not sure that others would be affected in the same manner by it: there may be some quaint association of ideas in the case. But at least, if I am wrong, the folly is my own.

H.—There is no danger of the sort, except from affectation, which I am sure is not your case. All the real taste and feeling in the world is made up of what people take in their heads in this manner. Even if you were right only once in five times in these hazardous experiments and shrewd guesses, that would be a fifth part of the truth; whereas, if you merely repeated after others by rote or waited to have all the world on your side, there could be absolutely nothing gained at all. If any one had come in and had expressed the same idea of Ramsay’s portrait of the Queen, this would doubtless be a confirmation of your opinion, like two persons finding out a likeness; but suppose W— had gone away with your opinion in his pocket, and had spread it about everywhere what a fine painter Ramsay was, I do not see how this would have strengthened your conclusion; nay, perhaps the people whom he got as converts would entirely mistake the meaning, and come to you with the very reverse of what you had said as a prodigious discovery. This is the way in which these unanimous verdicts are commonly obtained. You might say that Ramsay was not a fine painter, but a man of real genius. The world, not comprehending the distinction, would merely come to the gross conclusion, that he was both one and the other. Thus even truth is vulgarly debased into common-place and nonsense. So that it is not simply as Mr. Locke observed—‘That there are not so many wrong opinions in the world as is generally imagined, for most people have no opinion at all, but take up with those of others or with mere hearsay and echoes;’ but these echoes are often false ones and no more like the original idea than the rhyming echoes in Hudibras or than Slender’s Mum and Budget.

N.—But don’t you think the contrary extreme would be just as bad, if every one set up to judge for himself and every question was split into an endless variety of opinions?

H.—I do not see that this would follow. If persons who are sincere and free to inquire differ widely on any subject, it is because it is beyond their reach, and there is no satisfactory evidence one way or the other. Supposing a thing to be doubtful, why should it not be left so? But men’s passions and interests, when brought into play, are most tenacious on these points where their understandings afford them least light. Those doctrines are established which need propping up, as men place beams against falling houses. It does not require an act of parliament to persuade mathematicians to agree with Euclid, or painters to admire Raphael.

N.—And don’t you think this the best rule for the rest of the world to go by?

H.—Yes; but not if the doctors themselves differed: then it would be necessary to clench the nail with a few smart strokes of bigotry and intolerance. What admits of proof, men agree in, if they have no interest to the contrary; what they differ about in spite of all that can be said, is matter of taste or conjecture.

CONVERSATION THE EIGHTEENTH

N.—Opie, I remember, used to argue, that there were as many different sorts of taste as genius. He said, ‘If I am engaged in a picture, and endeavour to do it according to the suggestions of my employers, I do not understand exactly what they want, nor they what I can do, and I please no one: but if I do it according to my own notions, I belong to a class, and if I am able to satisfy myself, I please that class.’ You did not know Opie? You would have admired him greatly. I do not speak of him as an artist, but as a man of sense and observation. He paid me the compliment of saying, ‘that we should have been the best friends in the world, if we had not been rivals.’ I think he had more of this feeling than I had; perhaps, because I had most vanity. We sometimes got into foolish altercations. I recollect once in particular, at a banker’s in the city, we took up the whole of dinner-time with a ridiculous controversy about Milton and Shakspeare; I am sure we neither of us had the least notion which was right—and when I was heartily ashamed of it, a foolish citizen who was present, added to my confusion by saying—‘Lord! What would I give to hear two such men as you talk every day!’ This quite humbled me: I was ready to sink with vexation: I could have resolved never to open my mouth again. But I can’t help thinking W— was wrong in supposing I borrow every thing from others. It is not my character. I never could learn my lesson at school. My copy was hardly legible; but if there was a prize to be obtained or my father was to see it, then I could write a very fine hand with all the usual flourishes. What I know of history (and something about heraldry) has been gathered up when I had to enquire into the subject for a picture: if it had been set me as a task, I should have forgotten it immediately. In the same way, when Boydell came and proposed a subject for a picture to me, and pointed out the capabilities, I always said I could make nothing of it: but as soon as he was gone and I was left to myself, the whole then seemed to unfold itself naturally. I never could study the rules of composition or make sketches and drawings beforehand; in this, probably running into the opposite error to that of the modern Italian painters, whom Fuseli reproaches with spending their whole lives in preparation. I must begin at once or I can do nothing. When I set about the ‘Wat Tyler,’ I was frightened at it: it was the largest work I had ever undertaken: there were to be horses and armour and buildings and several groups in it: when I looked at it, the canvas seemed ready to fall upon me. But I had committed myself and could not escape; disgrace was behind me—and every step I made in advance, was so much positively gained. If I had staid to make a number of designs and try different experiments, I never should have had the courage to go on. Half the things that people do not succeed in, are through fear of making the attempt. Like the recruit in Farquhar’s comedy, you grow wondrous bold, when you have once taken ‘list-money.’ When you must do a thing, you feel in some measure that you can do it. You have only to commit yourself beyond retreat. It is like the soldier going into battle or a player first appearing on the stage—the worst is over when they arrive upon the scene of action.

H.—I found nearly the same thing that you describe when I first began to write for the newspapers. I had not till then been in the habit of writing at all, or had been a long time about it; but I perceived that with the necessity, the fluency came. Something I did, took; and I was called upon to do a number of things all at once. I was in the middle of the stream, and must sink or swim. I had, for instance, often a theatrical criticism to write after midnight, which appeared the next morning. There was no fault found with it—at least, it was as good as if I had had to do it for a weekly paper. I only did it at once, and recollected all I had to say on the spot, because I could not put it off for three days, when perhaps I should have forgotten the best part of it. Besides, when one is pressed for time, one saves it. I might set down nearly all I had to say in my mind, while the play was going on. I know I did not feel at a loss for matter—the difficulty was to compress and write it out fast enough. When you are tied to time, you can come to time. I conceive in like manner more wonder is expressed at extempore speaking, than it is entitled to. Not to mention that the same well-known topics continually recur, and that the speakers may con their extempore speeches over beforehand and merely watch their opportunity to slide them in dexterously into the grand procession of the debate: a man when once on his legs must say something, and this is the utmost that a public speaker generally says. If he has any thing good to say, he can recollect it just as well at once as in a week’s literary leisure, as well standing up as sitting down, except from habit. We are not surprised at a man’s telling us his thoughts across a table: why should we be so at his doing the same thing, when mounted on one? But he excites more attention: that gives him a double motive. A man’s getting up to make a speech in public will not give him a command of words or thoughts if he is without them; but he may be delivered of all the brilliancy or wisdom he actually possesses, in a longer or a shorter space, according to the occasion. The circumstance of the time is optional; necessity, if it be not the mother of invention, supplies us with the memory of all we know.

N.—(after a pause)—There is no end of the bigotry and prejudice in the world; one can only shrug one’s shoulders and submit to it. Have you seen the copies they have got down at the club-house in Pall-mall of the groups of horses from the Elgin marbles? Lord! how inferior they are to Rubens’s! So stiff, and poor, and dry, compared to his magnificent spirit and bold luxuriance! I should not know them to be horses; they are as much like any thing else. I was at Somerset-house the other day. They talk of the Dutch painters; why, there are pictures there of interiors and other subjects of familiar life, that throw all the boasted chef-d’œuvres of the Dutch school to an immeasurable distance. I do not speak of history, which has not been fairly tried; but in all for which there has been encouragement, no nation can go beyond us. We have resources and a richness of capacity equal to any undertaking.

H.—Do you recollect any in particular that you admired at the Exhibition?

N.—No, I do not remember the names; but it was a general sense of excellence and truth of imitation of natural objects. As to lofty history, our religion scarcely allows it. The Italians had no more genius for painting nor a greater love of pictures than we; but the church was the foster-mother of the fine arts; being the most politic and powerful establishment in the world, they laid their hands on all that could allure and impress the minds of the people—music, painting, architecture, ceremonies; and this produced a succession of great artists and noble works, till the churches were filled, and then they ceased. The genius of Italian art was nothing but the genius of Popery. God forbid we should purchase success at the same price! Every thing at Rome is like a picture—is calculated for show. I remember walking through one of the bye-streets near the Vatican, where I met some procession in which the Pope was; and all at once I saw a number of the most beautiful Arabian horses curvetting and throwing out their long tails, like a vision or a part of a romance. We should here get one or two at most. All our holiday pageants, even the Coronation, are low Bartlemy-fair exhibitions compared with what you see at Rome. And then to see the Pope give the benediction at St. Peter’s, raising himself up and spreading out his hands in the form of a cross, with an energy and dignity as if he was giving a blessing to the whole world! No, it is not enough to see Popery in order to hate it—it must be felt too. A poor man going through one of the narrow streets where a similar procession was passing, was fiercely attacked by a soldier of the Swiss Guards, and ordered to stand back. The man said he could retire no further, for he was close against the wall. ‘Get back, you and the wall too!’ was the answer of haughty servility and mild despotism. It is this spirit peeping out that makes one dread the fairest outside appearances; and with this spirit, and the power and determination it implies to delude and lead the multitude blindfold with every lure to their imagination and their senses, I will answer for the production of finer historical and scripture-pieces in this country (let us be as far north as we will) than we have yet seen.

H.—You do not think, then, that we are naturally a dry, sour, Protestant set? Is not the air of Ireland Popish, and that of Scotland Presbyterian?

N.—No: though you may have it so if you please. K— has been wanting my two copies of —, though I do not think he will bid high enough to induce me to part with them. I am in this respect like Opie, who had an original by Sir Joshua that he much valued, and he used to say, ‘I don’t know what I should do in that case, but I hope to G—d nobody will offer me 500_l._ for it!’ It is curious, this very picture sold for 500l. the other day. So it is that real merit creeps on, and is sure to find its level. The ‘Holy Family’ sold among Lord Gwydir’s pictures for 1,900_l._

H.—Is that fine?

N.—Oh yes! it’s certainly fine. It wants the air of history, but it has a rich colour and great simplicity and innocence. It is not equal to the ‘Snake in the Grass,’ which Mr. Peel gave 1,600 guineas for. That was his forte: nothing is wanting there.

A Stranger.—I thought Sir Joshua’s colours did not stand?

N.—That is true of some of them: he tried experiments, and had no knowledge of chemistry, and bought colours of Jews: but I speak of them as they came from the easel. As he left them and intended them to be, no pictures in the world would stand by the side of them. Colour seemed to exist substantively in his mind. You see this still in those that have not faded—in his latter works especially, which were also his best; and this, with character and a certain sweetness, must always make his works invaluable. You come to this at last—what you find in any one that you can get nowhere else. If you have this about you, you need not be afraid of time. Gainsborough had the saving grace of originality; and you cannot put him down for that reason. With all their faults, and the evident want of an early study and knowledge of the art, his pictures fetch more every time they are brought to the hammer. I don’t know what it was that his ‘View of the Mall in St. James’s Park’ sold for not long ago. I remember Mr. P. H. coming to me, and saying what an exquisite picture Gainsborough had painted of the Park. You would suppose it would be stiff and formal with the straight rows of trees and people sitting on benches—it is all in motion, and in a flutter like a lady’s fan. Watteau is not half so airy. His picture of young lord — was a masterpiece—there was such a look of natural gentility. You must recollect his ‘Girl feeding pigs:’ the expression and truth of nature were never surpassed. Sir Joshua was struck with it, though he said he ought to have made her a beauty.

H.—Perhaps it was as well to make sure of one thing at a time. I remember being once driven by a shower of rain for shelter into a picture dealer’s shop in Oxford-street, where there stood on the floor a copy of Gainsborough’s ‘Shepherd-boy’ with the thunder-storm coming on. What a truth and beauty was there! He stands with his hands clasped, looking up with a mixture of timidity and resignation, eying a magpie chattering over his head, while the wind is rustling in the branches. It was like a vision breathed on the canvas. I have been fond of Gainsborough ever since.

N.—Oh! that was an essence: but it was only a copy you saw? The picture was finer than his ‘Woodman,’ which has a little false glitter and attempt at theatrical effect; but the other is innocence itself. Gainsborough was a natural gentleman; and with all his simplicity he had wit too. An eminent counsellor once attempted to puzzle him on some trial about the originality of a picture by saying, ‘I observe you lay great stress on the phrase, the painter’s eye; what do you mean by that?’ ‘The painter’s eye,’ answered Gainsborough, ‘is to him what the lawyer’s tongue is to you.’ Sir Joshua was not fond of Wilson, and said at one of the Academy dinners, ‘Yes, Gainsborough is certainly the best landscape-painter of the day.’ ‘No,’ replied Wilson, who overheard him, ‘but he is the best portrait-painter.’ This was a sufficient testimony in Gainsborough’s favour.

H.—He did not make himself agreeable at Buckingham-house, any more than Sir Joshua, who kept a certain distance and wished to appear as a gentleman; they wanted a buffoon whom they might be familiar with at first, and insult the moment he overstepped the mark, or as soon as they grew tired of him. Their favourites must be like pet lap-dogs or monkeys.

N.—C— went to court the other day after a long absence. He was very graciously received, notwithstanding. The K— held out his hand for him to kiss; he recollected himself in time to perceive the object. He was struck with the manner in which the great people looked towards the King, and the utter insignificance of every thing else; ‘and then,’ said C—, ‘as soon as they are out of the palace, they get into their carriages, and ride over you with all the fierceness and insolence imaginable.’ West used to say you could tell the highest nobility at court by their being the most abject. This was policy, for the most powerful would be most apt to excite jealousy in the sovereign; and by showing an extreme respect, they thought to prevent the possibility of encroachment or insult. Garrick complained that when he went to read before the court, not a look or a murmur testified approbation; there was a profound stillness—every one only watched to see what the King thought. It was like reading to a set of wax-work figures: he who had been accustomed to the applause of thousands, could not bear this assembly of mutes. Marchant went to the late King about a cameo, who was offended at his saying the face must be done in full and not as a profile; ‘then,’ said the patron, ‘I’ll get somebody else to do it.’ Coming out at the door, one of the pages asked the artist, ‘Why do you contradict the K—? He is not used to be contradicted!’ This is intelligible in an absolute despotism, where the will of the sovereign is law, and where he can cut off your head if he pleases; but is it not strange in a free country?

H.—It is placing an ordinary mortal on the top of a pyramid, and kneeling at the bottom of it to the ‘highest and mightiest.’ It is a trick of human reason surpassing the grossness of the brute.

CONVERSATION THE NINETEENTH

H.—Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it. It is a sign the two things are not very far asunder.

N.—Yes; Mr. — used to say, that just before the women in his time left off hoops, they looked like bats. Going on from one affectation to another, they at last wore them close under their arms, so that they resembled wings growing out from their shoulders; and having reached the top of the absurdity, they then threw them aside all at once. If long waists are the fashion one season, they are exploded the next; as soon as the court adopts any particular mode, the city follows the example, and as soon as the city takes it up, the court lays it down. The whole is caricature and masquerade. Nature only is left out; for that is either common, or what is fine in it would not always be found on the fashionable side of the question. It may be the fashion to paint or not to paint; but if it were the fashion to have a fine complexion, many fashionable people must go without one, and many unfashionable ones would be at the height of it. Deformity is as often the fashion as beauty, yet the world in general see no other beauty than fashion, and their vanity or interest or complaisance bribes their understanding to disbelieve even their senses. If cleanliness is the fashion, then cleanliness is admired; if dirt, hair-powder, and pomatum are the fashion, then dirt, hair-powder, and pomatum are admired just as much, if not more, from their being disagreeable.

H.—The secret is, that fashion is imitating in certain things that are in our power and that are nearly indifferent in themselves, those who possess certain other advantages that are not in our power, and which the possessors are as little disposed to part with as they are eager to obtrude them upon the notice of others by every external symbol at their immediate controul. We think the cut of a coat fine, because it is worn by a man with ten thousand a-year, with a fine house, and a fine carriage: as we cannot get the ten thousand a-year, the house, or the carriage, we get what we can—the cut of the fine gentleman’s coat, and thus are in the fashion. But as we get it, he gets rid of it, which shows that he cares nothing about it; but he keeps his ten thousand a-year, his fine house, and his fine carriage. A rich man wears gold-buckles to show that he is rich: a coxcomb gets gilt ones to look like the rich man, and as soon as the gold ones prove nothing, the rich man leaves them off. So it is with all the real advantages that fashionable people possess. Say that they have more grace, good manners, and refinement than the rabble; but these do not change every moment at the nod of fashion. Speaking correctly is not proper to one class more than another: if the fashionable, to distinguish themselves from the vulgar, affect a peculiar tone or set of phrases, this is mere slang. The difference between grace and awkwardness is the same one year after another. This is the meaning of natural politeness. It is a perception of and attention to the feelings of others, which is the same thing, whether it is neglected by the Great or practised by the vulgar. The barrier between refinement and grossness cannot be arbitrarily effaced. Nothing changes but what depends on the shallow affectation and assumption of superiority: real excellence can never become vulgar. So Pope says in his elegant way—

Virtue may choose the high or low degree, ’Tis just the same to virtue and to me; Dwell in a monk or light upon a king, She’s still the same belov’d, contented thing. Vice is undone if she forgets her birth, And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.

Pope’s verse is not admired, because it was once the fashion: it will be admired, let the fashion change how it will.

N.—When Sir Joshua Reynolds wanted to learn what real grace was, he studied it in the attitudes of children, not in the school of the dancing-master, or in the empty strut or mawkish languor of fashion. A young painter asked me the other day whether I thought that Guido was not chargeable with affectation? I told him that I thought not, or in a very trifling degree. I could not deny that Guido sometimes bordered on and reminded me of it; or that there was that which in any body else might be really so, but that in him it seemed only an extreme natural gentility. He puts his figures into attitudes that are a little too courtly and studied, but he probably could not help it.

H.—It was rather the excess of a quality or feeling in his mind, than the aiming to supply the defect of one.

N.—Yes; there is no suspicion of what he is doing. The odious part of affectation is when there is an evident design to impose on you with counterfeit pretensions. So in another point that might be objected to him, the impropriety of his naked figures, no mortal can steer clearer of it than he does. They may be strictly said to be clothed with their own delicacy and beauty. There is the ‘Venus attired by the Graces:’ what other painter durst attempt it? They are to be all beauties, all naked; yet he has escaped as if by miracle—none but the most vicious can find fault with it—the very beauty, elegance, and grace keep down instead of exciting improper ideas. And then again, the ‘Andromeda chained to the rock’—both are, I believe, in the drawing-room at Windsor: but there is no possible offence to be taken at them, nothing to shock the most timid or innocent, because there was no particle of grossness in the painter’s mind. I have seen pictures by others muffled up to the chin, that had twenty times as much vice in them. It is wonderful how the cause is seen in the effect. So we find it in Richardson. Clarissa is a story in the midst of temptation; but he comes clear and triumphant out of that ordeal, because his own imagination is not contaminated by it. If there had been the least hint of an immoral tendency, the slightest indication of a wish to inflame the passions, it would have been all over with him. The intention always will peep out—you do not communicate a disease if you are not infected with it yourself. Albano’s nymphs and goddesses seem waiting for admirers: Guido’s are protected with a veil of innocence and modesty. Titian would have given them an air of Venetian courtesans: Raphael would have made them look something more than mortal: neither would have done what Guido has effected, who has conquered the difficulty by the pure force of feminine softness and delicacy.

H.—I am glad to hear you speak so of Guido. I was beginning, before I went abroad, to have a ‘sneaking contempt’ for him as insipid and monotonous, from seeing the same everlasting repetitions of Cleopatras and Madonnas: but I returned a convert to his merits. I saw many indifferent pictures attributed to great masters; but wherever I saw a Guido, I found elegance and beauty that answered to the ‘silver’ sound of his name. The mind lives on a round of names; and it is a great point gained not to have one of these snatched from us by a sight of their works. As to the display of the naked figure in works of art, the case to me seems clear: it is only when there is nothing but the naked figure that it is offensive. In proportion as the beauty or perfection of the imitation rises, the indecency vanishes. You look at it then with an eye to art, just as the anatomist examines the human figure with a view to science. Other ideas are introduced. J. —, of Edinburgh, had a large, sprawling Danae hanging over the chimney-piece of his office, where he received Scotch parsons and their wives on law-business: he thought it a triumph over Presbyterian prudery and prejudice, and a sort of chivalrous answer to the imputed barbarism of the North. It was certainly a paradox in taste, a breach of manners. He asked me if I objected to it because it was naked? ‘No,’ I said, ‘but because it is ugly: you can only have put it there because it is naked, and that alone shows a felonious intent. Had there been either beauty or expression, it would have conducted off the objectionable part. As it is, I don’t see how you can answer it to the kirk-sessions.’

N.—I remember Sir W. W— employed Sir Joshua and Dance, who was a very eminent designer, to ornament a music-room which he had built. Sir Joshua on this occasion painted his St. Cecilia, which he made very fine at first, but afterwards spoiled it; and Dance chose the subject of Orpheus. When I asked Miss Reynolds what she thought of it, she said she had no doubt of its being clever and well done, but that it looked ‘like a naked man.’ This answer was conclusive against it; for if the inspiration of the character had been given, you would have overlooked the want of clothes. The nakedness only strikes and offends the eye in the barrenness of other matter. It is the same in the drama. Mere grossness or ribaldry is intolerable; but you often find in the old comedy that the wit and ingenuity (as well as custom) carry off what otherwise could not be borne. The laughter prevents the blush. So an expression seems gross in one person’s mouth, which in another passes off with perfect innocence. The reason is, there is something in the manner that gives a quite different construction to what is said. Have you seen the Alcides, the two foreigners who perform such prodigious feats of strength at the theatre, but with very little clothing on? They say the people hardly know what to make of it. They should not be too sure that this is any proof of their taste or virtue.

H.—I recollect a remark of Coleridge’s on the conclusion of the story of Paul and Virginia by Bernardin St. Pierre. Just before the shipwreck, and when nothing else can save the heroine from perishing, an athletic figure comes forward stripped, but with perfect respect, and offers to swim with her to the shore; but instead of accepting his proposal, she turns away with affected alarm. This, Coleridge said, was a proof of the prevailing tone of French depravity, and not of virgin innocence. A really modest girl in such circumstances would not have thought of any scruple.

N.—It is the want of imagination or of an insight into nature in ordinary writers; they do not know how to place themselves in the situations they describe. Whatever feeling or passion is uppermost, fills the mind and drives out every other. If you were confined in a vault, and thought you saw a ghost, you would rush out, though a lion was at the entrance. On the other hand, if you were pursued by a lion, you would take refuge in a charnel-house, though it was full of spirits, and would disregard the dead bones and putrid relics about you. Both passions may be equally strong; the question is, which is roused first. But it is few who can get to the fountain-head, the secret springs of Nature. Shakspeare did it always; and Sir Walter Scott frequently. G— says he always was pleased with my conversation, before you broached that opinion; but I do not see how that can be, for he always contradicts and thwarts me. When two people are constantly crossing one another on the road, they cannot be very good company. You agree to what I say, and often explain or add to it, which encourages me to go on.

H.—I believe G— is sincere in what he says, for he has frequently expressed the same opinion to me.

N.—That might be so, though he took great care not to let me know it. People would often more willingly speak well of you behind your back than to your face; they are afraid either of shocking your modesty or gratifying your vanity. That was the case with —. If he ever was struck with any thing I did, he made a point not to let me see it: he treated it lightly, and said it was very well.

H.—I do not think G—’s differing with you was any proof of his opinion. Like most authors, he has something of the schoolmaster about him, and wishes to keep up an air of authority. What you say may be very well for a learner; but he is the oracle. You must not set up for yourself; and to keep you in due subordination, he catechises and contradicts from mere habit.

N.—Human nature is always the same. It was so with Johnson and Goldsmith. They would allow no one to have any merit but themselves. The very attempt was a piece of presumption, and a trespass upon their privileged rights. I remember a poem that came out, and that was sent to Sir Joshua: his servant, Ralph, had instructions to bring it in just after dinner. Goldsmith presently got hold of it, and seemed thrown into a rage before he had read a line of it. He then said, ‘What wretched stuff is here! what c—rsed nonsense that is!’ and kept all the while marking the passages with his thumb-nail, as if he would cut them in pieces. At last, Sir Joshua, who was provoked, interfered, and said, ‘Nay, don’t spoil my book, however.’ Dr. Johnson looked down on the rest of the world as pigmies; he smiled at the very idea that any one should set up for a fine writer but himself. They never admitted C— as one of the set; Sir Joshua did not invite him to dinner. If he had been in the room, Goldsmith would have flown out of it as if a dragon had been there. I remember Garrick once saying, ‘D—n his dishclout face; his plays would never do if it were not for my patching them up and acting in them.’ Another time, he took a poem of C—’s, and read it backwards to turn it into ridicule. Yet some of his pieces keep possession of the stage, so that there must be something in them.

H.—Perhaps he was later than they, and they considered him as an interloper on that account.

N.—No; there was a prejudice against him: he did not somehow fall into the train. It was the same with Vanbrugh in Pope’s time. They made a jest of him, and endeavoured to annoy him in every possible way; he was a black sheep for no reason in the world, except that he was cleverer than they; that is, could build houses and write verses at the same time. They laughed at his architecture; yet it is certain that it is quite original, and at least a question whether it is not beautiful as well as new. He was the first who sunk the window-frames within the walls of houses—they projected before: he did it as a beauty, but it has been since adopted by act of parliament to prevent fire. Some gentleman was asking me about the imposing style of architecture with which Vanbrugh had decorated the top of Blenheim-house; he had mistaken the chimneys for an order of architecture, so that what is an eye-sore in all other buildings, Vanbrugh has had the art to convert into an ornament. And then his wit! Think what a comedy is the Provoked Husband! What a scope and comprehension in the display of manners from the highest to the lowest! It was easier to write an epigram on Brother Van than such a play as this. I once asked Richards, the scene-painter, who was perfectly used to the stage, and acquainted with all the actors, what he considered as the best play in the language? And he answered, without hesitation, The Journey to London.

H.—Lord Foppington is also his, if he wanted supporters. He was in the same situation as Rousseau with respect to the wits of his time, who traces all his misfortunes and the jealousy that pursued him through life to the success of the Devin du Village. He said Diderot and the rest could have forgiven his popularity as an author, but they could not bear his writing an opera.

N.—If you belong to a set, you must either lead or follow; you cannot maintain your independence. Beattie did very well with the great folks in my time, because he looked up to them, and he excited no uneasy sense of competition. Indeed, he managed so well that Sir Joshua flattered him and his book in return in the most effectual manner. In his allegorical portrait of the doctor, he introduced the angel of truth chasing away the demons of falsehood and impiety, who bore an obvious resemblance to Hume and Voltaire. This brought out Goldsmith’s fine reproof of his friend, who said that ‘Sir Joshua might be ashamed of debasing a genius like Voltaire before a man like Beattie, whose works would be forgotten in a few years, while Voltaire’s fame would last for ever!’ Sir J. R. took the design of this picture from one of a similar subject by Tintoret, now in the Royal Collection in Kensington Palace. He said he had no intention of the sort: Hume was a broad-backed clumsy figure, not very like; but I know he meant Voltaire, for I saw a French medal of him lying about in the room. Mrs. Beattie also came up with her husband to London. I recollect her asking for ‘a little paurter’ in her broad Scotch way. It is like Cibber’s seeing Queen Anne at Nottingham when he was a boy, and all he could remember about her was her asking him to give her ‘a glass of wine and water.’ She was an ordinary character, and belonged to the class of good sort of people. So the Margravine of Bareuth describes the Duchess of Kendal, who was mistress to George I. to be a quiet inoffensive character, who would do neither good nor harm to any body. Did you ever read her Memoirs? Lord! what an account she gives of the state of manners at the old court of Prussia, and of the brutal despotism and cruelty of the king! She was his daughter, and he used to strike her, and drag her by the hair of her head, and leave her with her face bleeding, and often senseless, on the floor for the smallest trifles; and he treated her brother, afterwards Frederic II. (and to whom she was much attached) no better. That might in part account for the hardness of his character at a later period.

H.—I suppose Prussia was at that time a mere petty state or sort of bye-court, so that what they did was pretty much done in a corner, and they were not afraid of being talked of by the rest of Europe.

N.—No; it was quite an absolute monarchy with all the pomp and pretensions of sovereignty. Frederick (the father) was going, on some occasion when he was displeased with him, to strike our ambassador; but this conduct was resented and put a stop to. The Queen (sister to George II. and who was imprisoned so long on a suspicion of conjugal infidelity) appears to have been a violent-spirited woman, and also weak. George I. could never learn to speak English, and his successor, George II., spoke it badly, and neither ever felt themselves at home in this country; and they were always going over to Hanover, where they found themselves lords and masters, while here, though they had been raised so much higher, their dignity never sat easy upon them. They did not know what to make of their new situation.

[Northcote here read me a letter I had heard him speak of relative to a distinguished character mentioned in a former Conversation.]

‘_A Letter to Mr. Northcote in London from his Brother at Plymouth, giving an account of a Shipwreck._

‘Plymouth, Jan. 28, 1796.

‘We have had a terrible succession of stormy weather of late. Tuesday, immediately after dinner, I went to the Hoe to see the Dutton East Indiaman, full of troops, upon the rocks, directly under the flag-staff of the citadel. She had been out seven weeks on her passage to the West Indies as a transport, with 400 troops on board, besides women and the ship’s-crew; and had been just driven back by distress of weather, with a great number of sick on board. You cannot conceive any thing so horrible as the appearance of things altogether, which I beheld when I first arrived on the spot. The ship was stuck on sunken rocks, somewhat inclining to one side, and without a mast or the bowsprit standing; and her decks covered with the soldiers as thick as they could possibly stand by one another, with the sea breaking in a most horrible manner all around them; and what still added to the melancholy grandeur of the scene was the distress-guns which were fired now and then directly over our head from the Citadel.

‘When I first came to the spot, I found that they had by some means got a rope with one end of it fixed to the ship, and the other was held by the people on shore, by which means they could yield as the ship swung. Upon this rope they had got a ring, which they could by means of two smaller ropes draw forwards and backwards from the ship to the shore: to this ring they had fixed a loop, which each man put under his arm; and by this means, and holding by the ring with his hands, he supported himself, hanging to the ring, while he was drawn to the shore by the people there; and in this manner I saw a great many drawn on shore. But this proved a tedious work; and though I looked at them for a long time, yet the numbers on the deck were not apparently diminished; besides, from the motion which the ship had by rolling on the rocks, it was not possible to keep the rope equally stretched, and from this cause, as well as from the sudden rising of the waves, you would at one moment see a poor wretch hanging ten or twenty feet above the water, and the next you would lose sight of him in the foam of a wave, though some escaped better.

‘But this was not a scheme which the women and many of the sick could avail themselves of.

‘I observed with some admiration the behaviour of a Captain of a man-of-war, who seemed interested in the highest degree for the safety of these poor wretches. He exerted himself uncommonly, and directed others what to do on shore, and endeavoured in vain with a large speaking-trumpet to make himself heard by those on board: but finding that nothing could be heard but the roaring of the wind and sea, he offered any body five guineas instantly who would suffer himself to be drawn on board with instructions to them what to do. And when he found that nobody would accept his offer, he gave an instance of the highest heroism: for he fixed the rope about himself and gave the signal to be drawn on board. He had his uniform coat on and his sword hanging at his side. I have not room to describe the particulars; but there was something grand and interesting in the thing: for as soon as they had pulled him into the wreck, he was received with three vast shouts by the people on board; and these were immediately echoed by those who lined the shore, the garrison-walls and lower batteries. The first thing he did was to rig out two other ropes like the first: which I saw him most active in doing with his own hands. This quickened the matter a good deal, and by this time two large open row-boats were arrived from the Dock-yard, and a sloop had with difficulty worked out from Plymouth-pool. He then became active in getting out the women and the sick, who were with difficulty got into the open boats, and by them carried off to the sloop, which kept off for fear of being stove against the ship or thrown upon the rocks. He suffered but one boat to approach the ship at a time, and stood with his drawn sword to prevent too many rushing into the boat. After he had seen all the people out of the ship to about ten or fifteen, he fixed himself to the rope as before and was drawn ashore, where he was again received with shouts. Upon my enquiry who this gallant officer was, I was informed that it was Sir Edward Pellew, whom I had heard the highest character of before, both for bravery and mercy.

‘The soldiers were falling into disorder when Sir Edward went on board. Many of them were drunk, having broke into the cabin and got at the liquor. I saw him beating one with the flat of his broad-sword, in order to make him give up a bundle he had made up of plunder. They had but just time to save the men, before the ship was nearly under water. I observed a poor goat and a dog amongst the crowd, when the people were somewhat thinned away. I saw the goat marching about with much unconcern; but the dog showed evident anxiety, for I saw him stretching himself out at one of the port-holes, standing partly upon the port and partly upon a gun, and looking earnestly towards the shore, where I suppose he knew his master was. All these perished soon after, as the ship was washed all over as the sea rose—she is now in pieces.’

CONVERSATION THE TWENTIETH

N.—Have you seen the Life of Sir Joshua just published?

H.—No.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us