THE ROUND TABLE (continued 4)

How shall I part, and whither wander down

Into a lower world, to this obscure

And wild? how shall we breathe in other air

Less pure, accustom’d to immortal fruits?’

This is the lamentation of Eve on being driven out of Paradise. Adam’s reflections are in a different strain, and still finer. After expressing his submission to the will of his Maker, he says:

‘This most afflicts me, that departing hence

As from his face I shall be hid, depriv’d

His blessed countenance; here I could frequent

With worship place by place where he vouchsaf’d

Presence divine, and to my sons relate,

On this mount he appeared, under this tree

Stood visible, among these pines his voice

I heard, here with him at this fountain talk’d:

So many grateful altars I would rear

Of grassy turf, and pile up every stone

Of lustre from the brook, in memory

Or monument to ages, and thereon

Offer sweet-smelling gums and fruits and flow’rs:

In yonder nether world where shall I seek

His bright appearances or footstep trace?

For though I fled him angry, yet recall’d

To life prolong’d and promis’d race, I now

Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts

Of glory, and far off his steps adore.’

W. H.

No. 29.] OBSERVATIONS ON MR. WORDSWORTH’S POEM THE EXCURSION [Aug. 21, 28, 1814.

The poem of The Excursion resembles that part of the country in which the scene is laid. It has the same vastness and magnificence, with the same nakedness and confusion. It has the same overwhelming, oppressive power. It excites or recalls the same sensations which those who have traversed that wonderful scenery must have felt. We are surrounded with the constant sense and superstitious 112awe of the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of nature, on which, from the beginning of time, the hand of man has made no impression. Here are no dotted lines, no hedge-row beauties, no box-tree borders, no gravel walks, no square mechanic inclosures; all is left loose and irregular in the rude chaos of aboriginal nature. The boundaries of hill and valley are the poet’s only geography, where we wander with him incessantly over deep beds of moss and waving fern, amidst the troops of red-deer and wild animals. Such is the severe simplicity of Mr. Wordsworth’s taste, that we doubt whether he would not reject a druidical temple, or time-hallowed ruin as too modern and artificial for his purpose. He only familiarises himself or his readers with a stone, covered with lichens, which has slept in the same spot of ground from the creation of the world, or with the rocky fissure between two mountains caused by thunder, or with a cavern scooped out by the sea. His mind is, as it were, coëval with the primary forms of things; his imagination holds immediately from nature, and ‘owes no allegiance’ but ‘to the elements.’

The Excursion may be considered as a philosophical pastoral poem,—as a scholastic romance. It is less a poem on the country, than on the love of the country. It is not so much a description of natural objects, as of the feelings associated with them; not an account of the manners of rural life, but the result of the poet’s reflections on it. He does not present the reader with a lively succession of images or incidents, but paints the outgoings of his own heart, the shapings of his own fancy. He may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real subject. His understanding broods over that which is ‘without form and void,’ and ‘makes it pregnant.’ He sees all things in himself. He hardly ever avails himself of remarkable objects or situations, but, in general, rejects them as interfering with the workings of his own mind, as disturbing the smooth, deep, majestic current of his own feelings. Thus his descriptions of natural scenery are not brought home distinctly to the naked eye by forms and circumstances, but every object is seen through the medium of innumerable recollections, is clothed with the haze of imagination like a glittering vapour, is obscured with the excess of glory, has the shadowy brightness of a waking dream. The image is lost in the sentiment, as sound in the multiplication of echoes.

‘And visions, as prophetic eyes avow,

Hang on each leaf, and cling to every bough.’

In describing human nature, Mr. Wordsworth equally shuns the common ‘vantage-grounds of popular story, of striking incident, or 113fatal catastrophe, as cheap and vulgar modes of producing an effect. He scans the human race as the naturalist measures the earth’s zone, without attending to the picturesque points of view, the abrupt inequalities of surface. He contemplates the passions and habits of men, not in their extremes, but in their first elements; their follies and vices, not at their height, with all their embossed evils upon their heads, but as lurking in embryo,—the seeds of the disorder inwoven with our very constitution. He only sympathises with those simple forms of feeling, which mingle at once with his own identity, or with the stream of general humanity. To him the great and the small are the same; the near and the remote; what appears, and what only is. The general and the permanent, like the Platonic ideas, are his only realities. All accidental varieties and individual contrasts are lost in an endless continuity of feeling, like drops of water in the ocean-stream! An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing. Even the dialogues introduced in the present volume are soliloquies of the same character, taking different views of the subject. The recluse, the pastor, and the pedlar, are three persons in one poet. We ourselves disapprove of these ‘interlocutions between Lucius and Caius’ as impertinent babbling, where there is no dramatic distinction of character. But the evident scope and tendency of Mr. Wordsworth’s mind is the reverse of dramatic. It resists all change of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle, machinery, and pantomime of the stage, or of real life,—whatever might relieve, or relax, or change the direction of its own activity, jealous of all competition. The power of his mind preys upon itself. It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe. He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought. His imagination lends life and feeling only to ‘the bare trees and mountains bare’; peoples the viewless tracts of air, and converses with the silent clouds!

We could have wished that our author had given to his work the form of a didactic poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and description, which sometimes hinders the progress and effect of the general reasoning, and which, instead of being inwoven with the text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at the end of the volume. Mr. Wordsworth, indeed, says finely, and perhaps as truly as finely:

‘Exchange the shepherd’s frock of native grey

For robes with regal purple tinged; convert

The crook into a sceptre; give the pomp

Of circumstance; and here the tragic Muse

Shall find apt subjects for her highest art.

114Amid the groves, beneath the shadowy hills,

The generations are prepared; the pangs,

The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife

Of poor humanity’s afflicted will

Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.’

But he immediately declines availing himself of these resources of the rustic moralist: for the priest, who officiates as ‘the sad historian of the pensive plain’ says in reply:

‘Our system is not fashioned to preclude

That sympathy which you for others ask:

And I could tell, not travelling for my theme

Beyond the limits of these humble graves,

Of strange disasters; but I pass them by,

Loth to disturb what Heaven hath hushed to peace.’

There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind an evident repugnance to admit anything that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet,—a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect,—a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject. Where, however, he has a subject presented to him, ‘such as the meeting soul may pierce,’ and to which he does not grudge to lend the aid of his fine genius, his powers of description and fancy seem to be little inferior to those of his classical predecessor, Akenside. Among several others which we might select we give the following passage, describing the religion of ancient Greece:

‘In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretch’d

On the soft grass through half a summer’s day,

With music lulled his indolent repose:

And in some fit of weariness, if he,

When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear

A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds

Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetch’d,

Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,

A beardless youth, who touched a golden lute,

And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.

The nightly hunter, lifting up his eyes

Towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart

Called on the lovely wanderer, who bestowed

That timely light, to share his joyous sport:

And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs

Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,

(Nor unaccompanied with tuneful notes

By echo multiplied from rock or cave),

Swept in the storm of chase, as moon and stars

Glance rapidly along the clouded heavens,

115When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked

His thirst from rill, or gushing fount, and thanked

The Naiad. Sun beams, upon distant hills

Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,

Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed

Into fleet Oreads, sporting visibly.

The zephyrs fanning as they passed their wings

Lacked not for love fair objects, whom they wooed

With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,

Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,

From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth

In the low vale, or on steep mountain side:

And sometimes intermixed with stirring horns

Of the live deer, or goat’s depending beard;

These were the lurking satyrs, a wild brood

Of gamesome Deities! or Pan himself,

The simple shepherd’s awe-inspiring God.’

The foregoing is one of a succession of splendid passages equally enriched with philosophy and poetry, tracing the fictions of Eastern mythology to the immediate intercourse of the imagination with Nature, and to the habitual propensity of the human mind to endow the outward forms of being with life and conscious motion. With this expansive and animating principle, Mr. Wordsworth has forcibly, but somewhat severely, contrasted the cold, narrow, lifeless spirit of modern philosophy:

‘How, shall our great discoverers obtain

From sense and reason less than these obtained,

Though far misled? Shall men for whom our age

Unbaffled powers of vision hath prepared,

To explore the world without and world within,

Be joyless as the blind? Ambitious souls—

Whom earth at this late season hath produced

To regulate the moving spheres, and weigh

The planets in the hollow of their hand;

And they who rather dive than soar, whose pains

Have solved the elements, or analysed

The thinking principle—shall they in fact

Prove a degraded race? And what avails

Renown, if their presumption make them such?

Inquire of ancient wisdom; go, demand

Of mighty nature, if ’twas ever meant

That we should pry far off, yet be unraised;

That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,

Viewing all objects unremittingly

In disconnection dead and spiritless;

And still dividing and dividing still

116Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied

With the perverse attempt, while littleness

May yet become more little; waging thus

An impious warfare with the very life

Of our own souls! And if indeed there be

An all-pervading spirit, upon whom

Our dark foundations rest, could he design,

That this magnificent effect of power,

The earth we tread, the sky which we behold

By day, and all the pomp which night reveals,

That these—and that superior mystery,

Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,

And the dread soul within it—should exist

Only to be examined, pondered, searched,

Probed, vexed, and criticised—to be prized

No more than as a mirror that reflects

To proud Self-love her own intelligence?’

From the chemists and metaphysicians our author turns to the laughing sage of France, Voltaire. ‘Poor gentleman, it fares no better with him, for he’s a wit.’ We cannot, however, agree with Mr. Wordsworth that Candide is dull. It is, if our author pleases, ‘the production of a scoffer’s pen,’ or it is any thing but dull. It may not be proper in a grave, discreet, orthodox, promising young divine, who studies his opinions in the contraction or distension of his patron’s brow, to allow any merit to a work like Candide; but we conceive that it would have been more manly in Mr. Wordsworth, nor do we think it would have hurt the cause he espouses, if he had blotted out the epithet, after it had peevishly escaped him. Whatsoever savours of a little, narrow, inquisitorial spirit, does not sit well on a poet and a man of genius. The prejudices of a philosopher are not natural. There is a frankness and sincerity of opinion, which is a paramount obligation in all questions of intellect, though it may not govern the decisions of the spiritual courts, who may, however, be safely left to take care of their own interests. There is a plain directness and simplicity of understanding, which is the only security against the evils of levity, on the one hand, or of hypocrisy on the other. A speculative bigot is a solecism in the intellectual world. We can assure Mr. Wordsworth, that we should not have bestowed so much serious consideration on a single voluntary perversion of language, but that our respect for his character makes us jealous of his smallest faults!

With regard to his general philippic against the contractedness and egotism of philosophical pursuits, we only object to its not being carried further. We shall not affirm with Rousseau (his authority 117would perhaps have little weight with Mr. Wordsworth)—‘Tout homme reflechi est mechant‘; but we conceive that the same reasoning which Mr. Wordsworth applies so eloquently and justly to the natural philosopher and metaphysician may be extended to the moralist, the divine, the politician, the orator, the artist, and even the poet. And why so? Because wherever an intense activity is given to any one faculty, it necessarily prevents the due and natural exercise of others. Hence all those professions or pursuits, where the mind is exclusively occupied with the ideas of things as they exist in the imagination or understanding, as they call for the exercise of intellectual activity, and not as they are connected with practical good or evil, must check the genial expansion of the moral sentiments and social affections; must lead to a cold and dry abstraction, as they are found to suspend the animal functions, and relax the bodily frame. Hence the complaint of the want of natural sensibility and constitutional warmth of attachment in those persons who have been devoted to the pursuit of any art or science,—of their restless morbidity of temperament, and indifference to every thing that does not furnish an occasion for the display of their mental superiority and the gratification of their vanity. The philosophical poet himself, perhaps, owes some of his love of nature to the opportunity it affords him of analyzing his own feelings, and contemplating his own powers,—of making every object about him a whole length mirror to reflect his favourite thoughts, and of looking down on the frailties of others in undisturbed leisure, and from a more dignified height.

One of the most interesting parts of this work is that in which the author treats of the French Revolution, and of the feelings connected with it, in ingenuous minds, in its commencement and its progress. The solitary,^[60] who, by domestic calamities and disappointments, had been cut off from society, and almost from himself, gives the following account of the manner in which he was roused from his melancholy:

‘From that abstraction I was roused—and how?

Even as a thoughtful shepherd by a flash

Of lightning, startled in a gloomy cave

Of these wild hills. For, lo! the dread Bastile,

With all the chambers in its horrid towers,

Fell to the ground: by violence o’erthrown

Of indignation; and with shouts that drowned

The crash it made in falling! From the wreck

A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise,

The appointed seat of equitable law

118And mild paternal sway. The potent shock

I felt; the transformation I perceived,

As marvellously seized as in that moment,

When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld

Glory—beyond all glory ever seen,

Dazzling the soul! Meanwhile prophetic harps

In every grove were ringing, “War shall cease:

Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured?

Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers, to deck

The tree of liberty!”—My heart rebounded:

My melancholy voice the chorus joined.

Thus was I reconverted to the world;

Society became my glittering bride,

And airy hopes my children. From the depths

Of natural passion seemingly escaped,

My soul diffused itself in wide embrace

Of institutions and the forms of things.

——If with noise

And acclamation, crowds in open air

Expressed the tumult of their minds, my voice

There mingled, heard or not. And in still groves,

Where wild enthusiasts tuned a pensive lay

Of thanks and expectation, in accord

With their belief, I sang Saturnian rule

Returned—a progeny of golden years

Permitted to descend, and bless mankind.

. . . . .

Scorn and contempt forbid me to proceed!

But history, time’s slavish scribe, will tell

How rapidly the zealots of the cause

Disbanded—or in hostile ranks appeared:

Some, tired of honest service; these outdone,

Disgusted, therefore, or appalled by aims

Of fiercer zealots. So confusion reigned,

And the more faithful were compelled to exclaim,

As Brutus did to virtue, “Liberty,

I worshipped thee, and find thee but a shade!”

Such recantation had for me no charm,

Nor would I bend to it.’

The subject is afterwards resumed, with the same magnanimity and philosophical firmness:

——‘For that other loss,

The loss of confidence in social man,

By the unexpected transports of our age

Carried so high, that every thought which looked

Beyond the temporal destiny of the kind—

To many seemed superfluous; as no cause

For such exalted confidence could e’er

119Exist; so, none is now for such despair.

The two extremes are equally remote

From truth and reason; do not, then, confound

One with the other, but reject them both;

And choose the middle point, whereon to build

Sound expectations. This doth he advise

Who shared at first the illusion. At this day,

When a Tartarian darkness overspreads

The groaning nations; when the impious rule,

By will or by established ordinance,

Their own dire agents, and constrain the good

To acts which they abhor; though I bewail

This triumph, yet the pity of my heart

Prevents me not from owning that the law,

By which mankind now suffers, is most just.

For by superior energies; more strict

Affiance in each other; faith more firm

In their unhallowed principles, the bad

Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,

The vacillating, inconsistent good.’

In the application of these memorable lines, we should, perhaps, differ a little from Mr. Wordsworth; nor can we indulge with him in the fond conclusion afterwards hinted at, that one day our triumph, the triumph of humanity and liberty, may be complete. For this purpose, we think several things necessary which are impossible. It is a consummation which cannot happen till the nature of things is changed, till the many become as united as the one, till romantic generosity shall be as common as gross selfishness, till reason shall have acquired the obstinate blindness of prejudice, till the love of power and of change shall no longer goad man on to restless action, till passion and will, hope and fear, love and hatred, and the objects proper to excite them, that is, alternate good and evil, shall no longer sway the bosoms and businesses of men. All things move, not in progress, but in a ceaseless round; our strength lies in our weakness; our virtues are built on our vices; our faculties are as limited as our being; nor can we lift man above his nature more than above the earth he treads. But though we cannot weave over again the airy, unsubstantial dream, which reason and experience have dispelled,

‘What though the radiance, which was once so bright,

Be now for ever taken from our sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower’:—

yet we will never cease, nor be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which 120the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with our own; when France called her children to partake her equal blessings beneath her laughing skies; when the stranger was met in all her villages with dance and festive songs, in celebration of a new and golden era; and when, to the retired and contemplative student, the prospects of human happiness and glory were seen ascending like the steps of Jacob’s ladder, in bright and never-ending succession. The dawn of that day was suddenly overcast; that season of hope is past; it is fled with the other dreams of our youth, which we cannot recal, but has left behind it traces, which are not to be effaced by Birth-day and Thanks-giving odes, or the chaunting of Te Deums in all the churches of Christendom. To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously and wilfully blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less what we owe—hatred and scorn as lasting!

No. 30.] THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED [Oct. 2, 1814.

Mr. Wordsworth’s writings exhibit all the internal power, without the external form of poetry. He has scarcely any of the pomp and decoration and scenic effect of poetry: no gorgeous palaces nor solemn temples awe the imagination; no cities rise ‘with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned’; we meet with no knights pricked forth on airy steeds; no hair-breadth ‘scapes and perilous accidents by flood or field. Either from the predominant habit of his mind not requiring the stimulus of outward impressions, or from the want of an imagination teeming with various forms, he takes the common every-day events and objects of nature, or rather seeks those that are the most simple and barren of effect; but he adds to them a weight of interest from the resources of his own mind, which makes the most insignificant things serious and even formidable. All other interests are absorbed in the deeper interest of his own thoughts, and find the same level. His mind magnifies the littleness of his subject, and raises its meanness; lends it his strength, and clothes it with borrowed grandeur. With him, a mole-hill, covered with wild thyme, assumes the importance of ‘the great vision of the guarded mount’: a puddle is filled with preternatural faces, and agitated with the fiercest storms of passion.

The extreme simplicity which some persons have objected to in Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, is to be found only in the subject and the style: the sentiments are subtle and profound. In the latter respect, his poetry is as much above the common standard or capacity, as in the other it is below it. His poems bear a distant resemblance to some 121of Rembrandt’s landscapes, who, more than any other painter, created the medium through which he saw nature, and out of the stump of an old tree, a break in the sky, and a bit of water, could produce an effect almost miraculous.

Mr. Wordsworth’s poems in general are the history of a refined and contemplative mind, conversant only with itself and nature. An intense feeling of the associations of this kind is the peculiar and characteristic feature of all his productions. He has described the love of nature better than any other poet. This sentiment, inly felt in all its force, and sometimes carried to an excess, is the source both of his strength and of his weakness. However we may sympathise with Mr. Wordsworth in his attachment to groves and fields, we cannot extend the same admiration to their inhabitants, or to the manners of country life in general. We go along with him, while he is the subject of his own narrative, but we take leave of him when he makes pedlars and ploughmen his heroes and the interpreters of his sentiments. It is, we think, getting into low company, and company, besides, that we do not like. We take Mr. Wordsworth himself for a great poet, a fine moralist, and a deep philosopher; but if he insists on introducing us to a friend of his, a parish clerk, or the barber of the village, who is as wise as himself, we must be excused if we draw back with some little want of cordial faith. We are satisfied with the friendship which subsisted between Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews. The author himself lets out occasional hints that all is not as it should be amongst these northern Arcadians. Though, in general, he professes to soften the harsher features of rustic vice, he has given us one picture of depraved and inveterate selfishness, which we apprehend could only be found among the inhabitants of these boasted mountain districts. The account of one of his heroines concludes as follows:

‘A sudden illness seiz’d her in the strength

Of life’s autumnal season. Shall I tell

How on her bed of death the matron lay,

To Providence submissive, so she thought;

But fretted, vexed, and wrought upon—almost

To anger, by the malady that griped

Her prostrate frame with unrelaxing power,

As the fierce eagle fastens on the lamb.

She prayed, she moaned—her husband’s sister watched

Her dreary pillow, waited on her needs;

And yet the very sound of that kind foot

Was anguish to her ears! “And must she rule

Sole mistress of this house when I am gone?

Sit by my fire—possess what I possessed—

122Tend what I tended—calling it her own!”

Enough;—I fear too much. Of nobler feeling

Take this example:—One autumnal evening,

While she was yet in prime of health and strength,

I well remember, while I passed her door,

Musing with loitering step, and upward eye

Turned tow’rds the planet Jupiter, that hung

Above the centre of the vale, a voice

Roused me, her voice;—it said, “That glorious star

In its untroubled element will shine

As now it shines, when we are laid in earth,

And safe from all our sorrows.” She is safe,

And her uncharitable acts, I trust,

And harsh unkindnesses, are all forgiven;

Though, in this vale, remembered with deep awe!’

We think it is pushing our love of the admiration of natural objects a good deal too far, to make it a set-off against a story like the preceding.

All country people hate each other. They have so little comfort, that they envy their neighbours the smallest pleasure or advantage, and nearly grudge themselves the necessaries of life. From not being accustomed to enjoyment, they become hardened and averse to it—stupid, for want of thought—selfish, for want of society. There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there is, they will not let you have it. They had rather injure themselves than oblige any one else. Their common mode of life is a system of wretchedness and self-denial, like what we read of among barbarous tribes. You live out of the world. You cannot get your tea and sugar without sending to the next town for it: you pay double, and have it of the worst quality. The small-beer is sure to be sour—the milk skimmed—the meat bad, or spoiled in the cooking. You cannot do a single thing you like; you cannot walk out or sit at home, or write or read, or think or look as if you did, without being subject to impertinent curiosity. The apothecary annoys you with his complaisance; the parson with his superciliousness. If you are poor, you are despised; if you are rich, you are feared and hated. If you do any one a favour, the whole neighbourhood is up in arms; the clamour is like that of a rookery; and the person himself, it is ten to one, laughs at you for your pains, and takes the first opportunity of shewing you that he labours under no uneasy sense of obligation. There is a perpetual round of mischief-making and backbiting for want of any better amusement. There are no shops, no taverns, no theatres, no opera, no concerts, no pictures, no public-buildings, no crowded streets, no noise of coaches, or of courts of law,—neither courtiers nor 123courtesans, no literary parties, no fashionable routs, no society, no books, or knowledge of books. Vanity and luxury are the civilisers of the world, and sweeteners of human life. Without objects either of pleasure or action, it grows harsh and crabbed: the mind becomes stagnant, the affections callous, and the eye dull. Man left to himself soon degenerates into a very disagreeable person. Ignorance is always bad enough; but rustic ignorance is intolerable. Aristotle has observed, that tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity. If so, a company of tragedians should be established at the public expence, in every village or hundred, as a better mode of education than either Bell’s or Lancaster’s. The benefits of knowledge are never so well understood as from seeing the effects of ignorance, in their naked, undisguised state, upon the common country people. Their selfishness and insensibility are perhaps less owing to the hardships and privations, which make them, like people out at sea in a boat, ready to devour one another, than to their having no idea of anything beyond themselves and their immediate sphere of action. They have no knowledge of, and consequently can take no interest in, anything which is not an object of their senses, and of their daily pursuits. They hate all strangers, and have generally a nickname for the inhabitants of the next village. The two young noblemen in Guzman d’Alfarache, who went to visit their mistresses only a league out of Madrid, were set upon by the peasants, who came round them calling out, ‘A wolf.’ Those who have no enlarged or liberal ideas, can have no disinterested or generous sentiments. Persons who are in the habit of reading novels and romances, are compelled to take a deep interest in, and to have their affections strongly excited by, fictitious characters and imaginary situations; their thoughts and feelings are constantly carried out of themselves, to persons they never saw, and things that never existed: history enlarges the mind, by familiarising us with the great vicissitudes of human affairs, and the catastrophes of states and kingdoms; the study of morals accustoms us to refer our actions to a general standard of right and wrong; and abstract reasoning, in general, strengthens the love of truth, and produces an inflexibility of principle which cannot stoop to low trick and cunning. Books, in Lord Bacon’s phrase, are ‘a discipline of humanity.’ Country people have none of these advantages, nor any others to supply the place of them. Having no circulating libraries to exhaust their love of the marvellous, they amuse themselves with fancying the disasters and disgraces of their particular acquaintance. Having no hump-backed Richard to excite their wonder and abhorrence, they make themselves a bugbear of their own, out of the first obnoxious person they can lay their hands on. Not having the 124fictitious distresses and gigantic crimes of poetry to stimulate their imagination and their passions, they vent their whole stock of spleen, malice, and invention, on their friends and next-door neighbours. They get up a little pastoral drama at home, with fancied events, but real characters. All their spare time is spent in manufacturing and propagating the lie for the day, which does its office, and expires. The next day is spent in the same manner. It is thus that they embellish the simplicity of rural life! The common people in civilised countries are a kind of domesticated savages. They have not the wild imagination, the passions, the fierce energies, or dreadful vicissitudes of the savage tribes, nor have they the leisure, the indolent enjoyments and romantic superstitions, which belonged to the pastoral life in milder climates, and more remote periods of society. They are taken out of a state of nature, without being put in possession of the refinements of art. The customs and institutions of society cramp their imaginations without giving them knowledge. If the inhabitants of the mountainous districts described by Mr. Wordsworth are less gross and sensual than others, they are more selfish. Their egotism becomes more concentrated, as they are more insulated, and their purposes more inveterate, as they have less competition to struggle with. The weight of matter which surrounds them, crushes the finer sympathies. Their minds become hard and cold, like the rocks which they cultivate. The immensity of their mountains makes the human form appear little and insignificant. Men are seen crawling between Heaven and earth, like insects to their graves. Nor do they regard one another more than flies on a wall. Their physiognomy expresses the materialism of their character, which has only one principle—rigid self-will. They move on with their eyes and foreheads fixed, looking neither to the right nor to the left, with a heavy slouch in their gait, and seeming as if nothing would divert them from their path. We do not admire this plodding pertinacity, always directed to the main chance. There is nothing which excites so little sympathy in our minds, as exclusive selfishness. If our theory is wrong, at least it is taken from pretty close observation, and is, we think, confirmed by Mr. Wordsworth’s own account.

Of the stories contained in the latter part of the volume, we like that of the Whig and Jacobite friends, and of the good knight, Sir Alfred Irthing, the best. The last reminded us of a fine sketch of a similar character in the beautiful poem of Hart Leap Well. To conclude,—if the skill with which the poet had chosen his materials had been equal to the power which he has undeniably exerted over them, if the objects (whether persons or things) which he makes use of as the vehicle of his sentiments, had been such as to convey 125them in all their depth and force, then the production before us might indeed ‘have proved a monument,’ as he himself wishes it, worthy of the author, and of his country. Whether, as it is, this very original and powerful performance may not rather remain like one of those stupendous but half-finished structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel that it would be presumptuous in us to determine.

No. 31.] CHARACTER OF THE LATE MR. PITT^[61]

The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and preserved, in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral excellence, and as having carried the attainments of eloquence and wisdom as far as human abilities could go. This he did (strange as it may appear) by a negation (together with the common virtues) of the common vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every other talent that might interfere with the only ones which he possessed in a supreme degree, and which, indeed, may be made to include the appearance of all others,—an artful use of words, and a certain dexterity of logical arrangement. In these alone his power consisted; and the defect of all other qualities, which usually constitute greatness, contributed to the more complete success of these. Having no strong feelings, no distinct perceptions,—his mind having no link, as it were, to connect it with the world of external nature, every subject presented to him nothing more than a tabula rasa, on which he was at liberty to lay whatever colouring of language he pleased; having no general principles, no comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of thinking, no system of action, there was nothing to hinder him from pursuing any particular purpose by any means that offered; having never any plan, he could not be convicted of inconsistency, and his own pride and obstinacy were the only rules of his conduct. Without insight into human nature, without sympathy with the passions of men, or apprehension of their real designs, he seemed perfectly insensible to the consequences of things, and would believe nothing till it actually happened. The fog and haze in which he saw every thing communicated itself to others; and the total indistinctness and uncertainty of his own ideas tended to confound the perceptions of his hearers more effectually than the most 126ingenious misrepresentation could have done. Indeed, in defending his conduct, he never seemed to consider himself as at all responsible for the success of his measures, or to suppose that future events were in our own power; but that, as the best-laid schemes might fail, and there was no providing against all possible contingencies, this was sufficient excuse for our plunging at once into any dangerous or absurd enterprise without the least regard to consequences. His reserved logic confined itself solely to the possible and the impossible, and he appeared to regard the probable and improbable, the only foundation of moral prudence or political wisdom, as beneath the notice of a profound statesman; as if the pride of the human intellect were concerned in never entrusting itself with subjects, where it may be compelled to acknowledge its weakness. Nothing could ever drive him out of his dull forms, and naked generalities; which, as they are susceptible neither of degree nor variation, are therefore equally applicable to every emergency that can happen: and in the most critical aspect of affairs, he saw nothing but the same flimsy web of remote possibilities and metaphysical uncertainty. In his mind, the wholesome pulp of practical wisdom and salutary advice was immediately converted into the dry chaff and husks of a miserable logic. From his manner of reasoning, he seemed not to have believed that the truth of his statements depended on the reality of the facts, but that the facts themselves depended on the order in which he arranged them in words: you would not suppose him to be agitating a serious question, which had real grounds to go upon, but to be declaiming upon an imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the schools. He never set himself to examine the force of the objections that were brought against him, or attempted to defend his measures upon clear, solid grounds of his own; but constantly contented himself with first gravely stating the logical form, or dilemma to which the question reduced itself; and then, after having declared his opinion, proceeded to amuse his hearers by a series of rhetorical common-places, connected together in grave, sonorous, and elaborately constructed periods, without ever shewing their real application to the subject in dispute. Thus, if any member of the opposition disapproved of any measure, and enforced his objections by pointing out the many evils with which it was fraught, or the difficulties attending its execution, his only answer was, ‘that it was true there might be inconveniences attending the measure proposed, but we were to remember, that every expedient that could be devised might be said to be nothing more than a choice of difficulties, and that all that human prudence could do, was to consider on which side the advantages lay; that, for his part, he conceived that the present measure was attended with more 127advantages and fewer disadvantages than any other that could be adopted; that it we were diverted from our object by every appearance of difficulty, the wheels of government would be clogged by endless delays and imaginary grievances; that most of the objections made to the measure appeared to him to be trivial, others of them unfounded and improbable; or that, if a scheme, free from all these objections, could be proposed, it might, after all, prove inefficient; while, in the meantime, a material object remained unprovided for, or the opportunity of action was lost.’ This mode of reasoning is admirably described by Hobbes, in speaking of the writings of some of the schoolmen, of whom he says that ‘they had learned the trick of imposing what they list upon their readers, and declining the force of true reason by verbal forks, that is, distinctions, which signify nothing, but serve only to astonish the multitude of ignorant men.’ That what we have here stated comprehends the whole force of his mind, which consisted solely in this evasive dexterity and perplexing formality, assisted by a copiousness of words and common-place topics, will, we think, be evident to any one who carefully looks over his speeches, undazzled by the reputation or personal influence of the speaker. It will be in vain to look in them for any of the common proofs of human genius or wisdom. He has not left behind him a single memorable saying,—not one profound maxim,—one solid observation,—one forcible description,—one beautiful thought,—one humorous picture,—one affecting sentiment. He has made no addition whatever to the stock of human knowledge. He did not possess any one of those faculties which contribute to the instruction and delight of mankind,—depth of understanding, imagination, sensibility, wit, vivacity, clear and solid judgment. But it may be asked, If these qualities are not to be found in him, where are we to look for them? and we may be required to point out instances of them. We shall answer then, that he had none of the abstract, legislative wisdom, refined sagacity, or rich, impetuous, high-wrought imagination of Burke; the manly eloquence, exact knowledge, vehemence, and natural simplicity of Fox; the ease, brilliancy, and acuteness of Sheridan. It is not merely that he had not all these qualities in the degree that they were severally possessed by his rivals, but he had not any of them in any remarkable degree. His reasoning is a technical arrangement of unmeaning common-places, his eloquence rhetorical, his style monotonous and artificial. If he could pretend to any one excellence more than another, it was to taste in composition. There is certainly nothing low, nothing puerile, nothing far-fetched or abrupt in his speeches; there is a kind of faultless regularity pervading them throughout; but in the confined, 128formal, passive mode of eloquence which he adopted, it seemed rather more difficult to commit errors than to avoid them. A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way. However, habit, joined to the peculiar mechanical memory which he possessed, carried this correctness to a degree which, in an extemporaneous speaker, was almost miraculous; he, perhaps, hardly ever uttered a sentence that was not perfectly regular and connected. In this respect, he not only had the advantage over his own contemporaries, but perhaps no one that ever lived equalled him in this singular faculty. But for this, he would always have passed for a common man; and to this the constant sameness, and, if we may so say, vulgarity of his ideas, must have contributed not a little, as there was nothing to distract his mind from this one object of his unintermitted attention; and as, even in his choice of words, he never aimed at any thing more than a certain general propriety and stately uniformity of style. His talents were exactly fitted for the situation in which he was placed; where it was his business not to overcome others, but to avoid being overcome. He was able to baffle opposition, not from strength or firmness, but from the evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his resistance, which gave no hold to the rude grasp of his opponents: no force could bind the loose phantom, and his mind (though ‘not matchless, and his pride humbled by such rebuke’) soon rose from defeat unhurt,

‘And in its liquid texture, mortal wound

Receiv’d no more than can the fluid air.’

No. 32.] ON RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY [Oct. 9, 1814.

Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretences to both. In the latter case, it makes them hypocrites to themselves as well as others. Religion is, in grosser minds, an enemy to self-knowledge. The consciousness of the presence of an all-powerful Being, who is both the witness and judge of every thought, word, and action, where it does not produce its proper effect, forces the religious man to practise every mode of deceit upon himself with respect to his real character and motives; for it is only by being wilfully blind to his own faults, that he can suppose they will escape the eye of Omniscience. Consequently, the whole business of a religious man’s life, if it does not conform to the strict line of his duty, may be said to be to gloss over his errors to himself, and to invent a thousand shifts and palliations, in 129order to hoodwink the Almighty. While he is sensible of his own delinquency, he knows that it cannot escape the penetration of his invisible Judge; and the distant penalty annexed to every offence, though not sufficient to make him desist from the commission of it, will not suffer him to rest easy, till he has made some compromise with his own conscience as to his motives for committing it. As far as relates to this world, a cunning knave may take a pride in the imposition he practises upon others; and, instead of striving to conceal his true character from himself, may chuckle with inward satisfaction at the folly of those who are not wise enough to detect it. ‘But ’tis not so above.’ This shallow, skin-deep hypocrisy will not serve the turn of the religious devotee, who is ‘compelled to give in evidence against himself,’ and who must first become the dupe of his own imposture, before he can flatter himself with the hope of concealment, as children hide their eyes with their hands, and fancy that no one can see them. Religious people often pray very heartily for the forgiveness of a ‘multitude of trespasses and sins,’ as a mark of their humility, but we never knew them admit any one fault in particular, or acknowledge themselves in the wrong in any instance whatever. The natural jealousy of self-love is in them heightened by the fear of damnation, and they plead Not Guilty to every charge brought against them, with all the conscious terrors of a criminal at the bar. It is for this reason that the greatest hypocrites in the world are religious hypocrites.

This quality, as it has been sometimes found united with the clerical character, is known by the name of Priestcraft. The Ministers of Religion are perhaps more liable to this vice than any other class of people. They are obliged to assume a greater degree of sanctity, though they have it not, and to screw themselves up to an unnatural pitch of severity and self-denial. They must keep a constant guard over themselves, have an eye always to their own persons, never relax in their gravity, nor give the least scope to their inclinations. A single slip, if discovered, may be fatal to them. Their influence and superiority depend on their pretensions to virtue and piety; and they are tempted to draw liberally on the funds of credulity and ignorance allotted for their convenient support. All this cannot be very friendly to downright simplicity of character. Besides, they are so accustomed to inveigh against the vices of others, that they naturally forget that they have any of their own to correct. They see vice as an object always out of themselves, with which they have no other concern than to denounce and stigmatise it. They are only reminded of it in the third person. They as naturally associate sin and its consequences with their flocks as a pedagogue associates a 130false concord and flogging with his scholars. If we may so express it, they serve as conductors to the lightning of divine indignation, and have only to point the thunders of the law at others. They identify themselves with that perfect system of faith and morals, of which they are the professed teachers, and regard any imputation on their conduct as an indirect attack on the function to which they belong, or as compromising the authority under which they act. It is only the head of the Popish church who assumes the title of God’s Vicegerent upon Earth; but the feeling is nearly common to all the oracular interpreters of the will of Heaven—from the successor of St. Peter down to the simple, unassuming Quaker, who, disclaiming the imposing authority of title and office, yet fancies himself the immediate organ of a preternatural impulse, and affects to speak only as the spirit moves him.

There is another way in which the formal profession of religion aids hypocrisy, by erecting a secret tribunal, to which those who affect a more than ordinary share of it can (in case of need) appeal from the judgments of men. The religious impostor, reduced to his last shift, and having no other way left to avoid the most ‘open and apparent shame,’ rejects the fallible decisions of the world, and thanks God that there is one who knows the heart. He is amenable to a higher jurisdiction, and while all is well with Heaven, he can pity the errors, and smile at the malice of his enemies! Whatever cuts men off from their dependence on common opinion or obvious appearances, must open a door to evasion and cunning, by setting up a standard of right and wrong in every one’s own breast, of the truth of which nobody can judge but the person himself. There are some fine instances in the old plays and novels (the best commentaries on human nature) of the effect of this principle, in giving the last finishing to the character of duplicity. Miss Harris, in Fielding’s Amelia, is one of the most striking. Molière’s Tartuffe is another instance of the facility with which religion may be perverted to the purposes of the most flagrant hypocrisy. It is an impenetrable fastness, to which this worthy person, like so many others, retires without the fear of pursuit. It is an additional disguise, in which he wraps himself up like a cloak. It is a stalking-horse, which is ready on all occasions,—an invisible conscience, which goes about with him,—his good genius, that becomes surety for him in all difficulties,—swears to the purity of his motives,—extricates him out of the most desperate circumstances,—baffles detection, and furnishes a plea to which there is no answer.

The same sort of reasoning will account for the old remark, that persons who are stigmatised as non-conformists to the established 131religion, Jews, Presbyterians, etc., are more disposed to this vice than their neighbours. They are inured to the contempt of the world, and steeled against its prejudices: and the same indifference which fortifies them against the unjust censures of mankind, may be converted, as occasion requires, into a screen for the most pitiful conduct. They have no cordial sympathy with others, and, therefore, no sincerity in their intercourse with them. It is the necessity of concealment, in the first instance, that produces, and is, in some measure, an excuse for, the habit of hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, as it is connected with cowardice, seems to imply weakness of body or want of spirit. The impudence and insensibility which belong to it, ought to suppose robustness of constitution. There is certainly a very successful and formidable class of sturdy, jolly, able-bodied hypocrites, the Friar Johns of the profession. Raphael has represented Elymas the Sorcerer, with a hard iron visage, and large uncouth figure, made up of bones and muscles; as one not troubled with weak nerves or idle scruples—as one who repelled all sympathy with others—who was not to be jostled out of his course by their censures or suspicions—and who could break with ease through the cobweb snares which he had laid for the credulity of others, without being once entangled in his own delusions. His outward form betrays the hard, unimaginative, self-willed understanding of the sorcerer.

A.

No. 33.] ON THE LITERARY CHARACTER [Oct. 28, 1813.

The following remarks are prefixed to the account of Baron Grimm’s Correspondence in a late number of a celebrated Journal:-

‘There is nothing more exactly painted in these graphical volumes, than the character of M. Grimm himself; and the beauty of it is, that, as there is nothing either natural or peculiar about it, it may stand for the character of all the wits and philosophers he frequented. He had more wit, perhaps, and more sound sense and information, than the greatest part of the society in which he lived; but the leading traits belong to the whole class, and to all classes, indeed, in similar situations, in every part of the world. Whenever there is a very large assemblage of persons who have no other occupation but to amuse themselves, there will infallibly be generated acuteness of intellect, refinement of manners, and good taste in conversation; and, with the same certainty, all profound thought, and all serious affection, will be discarded from their society.

‘The multitude of persons and things that force themselves on the 132attention in such a scene, and the rapidity with which they succeed each other, and pass away, prevent any one from making a deep or permanent impression; and the mind, having never been tasked to any course of application, and long habituated to this lively succession and variety of objects, comes at last to require the excitement of perpetual change, and to find a multiplicity of friends as indispensable as a multiplicity of amusements. Thus the characteristics of large and polished society come almost inevitably to be, wit and heartlessness—acuteness and perpetual derision. The same impatience of uniformity, and passion for variety, which give so much grace to their conversation, by excluding all tediousness and pertinacious wrangling, make them incapable of dwelling for many minutes on the feelings and concerns of any one individual; while the constant pursuit of little gratifications, and the weak dread of all uneasy sensations, render them equally averse from serious sympathy and deep thought.

‘The whole style and tone of this publication affords the most striking illustration of these general remarks. From one end of it to the other, it is a display of the most complete heartlessness, and the most uninterrupted levity. It chronicles the deaths of half the author’s acquaintance, and makes jests upon them all; and is much more serious in discussing the merits of an opera-dancer, than in considering the evidence for the being of a God, or the first foundations of morality. Nothing, indeed, can be more just or conclusive than the remark that is forced from M. Grimm himself, upon the utter carelessness, and instant oblivion, that followed the death of one of the most distinguished, active, and amiable members of his coterie: “Tant il est vrai que ce que nous appelons la société, est ce qu’il y a de plus léger, plus ingrat, et de plus frivole au monde!”’

These remarks, though shrewd and sensible in themselves, apply rather to the character of M. Grimm and his friends as men of the world, after their initiation into the refined society of Paris and the great world, than as mere men of letters. There is, however, a character which every man of letters has before he comes into society, and which he carries into the world with him, which we shall here attempt to describe.

The weaknesses and vices that arise from a constant intercourse with books, are in certain respects the same with those which arise from daily intercourse with the world; yet each has a character and operation of its own, which may either counteract or aggravate the tendency of the other. The same dissipation of mind, the same listlessness, languor, and indifference, may be produced by both, but they are produced in different ways, and exhibit very different appearances. The defects of the literary character proceed, not from 133frivolity and voluptuous indolence, but from the overstrained exertion of the faculties, from abstraction and refinement. A man without talents or education might mingle in the same society, might give in to all the gaiety and foppery of the age, might see the same ‘multiplicity of persons and things,’ but would not become a wit and a philosopher for all that. As far as the change of actual objects, the real variety and dissipation goes, there is no difference between M. Grimm and a courtier of Francis I.—between the consummate philosopher and the giddy girl—between Paris, amidst the barbaric refinements of the middle of the eighteenth century, and any other metropolis at any other period. It is in the ideal change of objects, in the intellectual dissipation of literature and of literary society, that we are to seek for the difference. The very same languor and listlessness which, in fashionable life, are owing to the rapid ‘succession of persons and things,’ may be found, and even in a more intense degree, in the most recluse student, who has no knowledge whatever of the great world, who has never been present at the sallies of a petit souper, or complimented a lady on presenting her with a bouquet. It is the province of literature to anticipate the dissipation of real objects, and to increase it. It creates a fictitious restlessness and craving after variety, by creating a fictitious world around us, and by hurrying us, not only through all the mimic scenes of life, but by plunging us into the endless labyrinths of imagination. Thus the common indifference produced by the distraction of successive amusements, is superseded by a general indifference to surrounding objects, to real persons and things, occasioned by the disparity between the world of our imagination and that without us. The scenes of real life are not got up in the same style of magnificence; they want dramatic illusion and effect. The high-wrought feelings require all the concomitant and romantic circumstances which fancy can bring together to satisfy them, and cannot find them in any given object. M. Grimm was not, by his own account, born a lover; but even supposing him to have been, in gallantry of temper, a very Amadis, would it have been necessary that the enthusiasm of a philosopher and a man of genius should have run the gauntlet of all the bonnes fortunes of Paris to evaporate into insensibility and indifference? Would not a Clarissa, a new Eloise, a Cassandra, or a Berenice, have produced the same mortifying effects on a person of his great critical and acumen and virtù? Where, O where would he find the rocks of Meillerie in the precincts of the Palais Royal, or on what lips would Julia’s kisses grow? Who, after wandering with Angelica, or having seen the heavenly face of Una, might not meet with impunity a whole circle of literary ladies? Cowley’s mistresses reigned by turns in the 134poet’s fancy, and the beauties of King Charles II. perplex the eye in the preference of their charms as much now as they ever did. One trifling coquette only drives out another; but Raphael’s Galatea kills the whole race of pertness and vulgarity at once. After ranging in dizzy mazes, through the regions of imaginary beauty, the mind sinks down, breathless and exhausted, on the earth. In common minds, indifference is produced by mixing with the world. Authors and artists bring it into the world with them. The disappointment of the ideal enthusiast is indeed greatest at first, and he grows reconciled to his situation by degrees; whereas the mere man of the world becomes more dissatisfied and fastidious, and more of a misanthrope, the longer he lives.

It is much the same in friendships founded on literary motives. Literary men are not attached to the persons of their friends, but to their minds. They look upon them in the same light as on the books in their library, and read them till they are tired. In casual acquaintances friendship grows out of habit. Mutual kindnesses beget mutual attachment; and numberless little local occurrences in the course of a long intimacy, furnish agreeable topics of recollection, and are almost the only sources of conversation among such persons. They have an immediate pleasure in each other’s company. But in literature nothing of this kind takes place. Petty and local circumstances are beneath the dignity of philosophy. Nothing will go down but wit or wisdom. The mind is kept in a perpetual state of violent exertion and expectation, and as there cannot always be a fresh supply of stimulus to excite it, as the same remarks or the same bon mots come to be often repeated, or others so like them, that we can easily anticipate the effect, and are no longer surprised into admiration, we begin to relax in the frequency of our visits, and the heartiness of our welcome. When we are tired of a book we can lay it down, but we cannot so easily put our friends on the shelf when we grow weary of their society. The necessity of keeping up appearances, therefore, adds to the dissatisfaction on both sides, and at length irritates indifference into contempt.

By the help of arts and science, everything finds an ideal level. Ideas assume the place of realities, and realities sink into nothing. Actual events and objects produce little or no effect on the mind, when it has been long accustomed to draw its strongest interest from constant contemplation. It is necessary that it should, as it were, recollect itself—that it should call out its internal resources, and refine upon its own feelings—place the object at a distance, and embellish it at pleasure. By degrees all things are made to serve as hints, and occasions for the exercise of intellectual activity. It was on this 135principle that the sentimental Frenchman left his Mistress, in order that he might think of her. Cicero ceased to mourn for the loss of his daughter, when he recollected how fine an opportunity it would afford him to write an eulogy to her memory; and Mr. Shandy lamented over the death of Master Bobby much in the same manner. The insensibility of Authors, etc., to domestic and private calamities has been often carried to a ludicrous excess, but it is less than it appears to be. The genius of philosophy is not yet quite understood. For instance, the man who might seem at the moment undisturbed by the death of a wife or mistress, would perhaps never walk out on a fine evening as long as he lived, without recollecting her; and a disappointment in love that ‘heaves no sigh and sheds no tear,’ may penetrate to the heart, and remain fixed there ever after. Hæret lateri lethalis arundo. The blow is felt only by reflection, the rebound is fatal. Our feelings become more ideal; the impression of the moment is less violent, but the effect is more general and permanent. Those whom we love best, take nearly the same rank in our estimation as the heroine of a favourite novel! Indeed, after all, compared with the genuine feelings of nature, ‘clad in flesh and blood,’ with real passions and affections, conversant about real objects, the life of a mere man of letters and sentiment appears to be at best but a living death; a dim twilight existence: a sort of wandering about in an Elysian fields of our own making; a refined, spiritual, disembodied state, like that of the ghosts of Homer’s heroes, who, we are told, would gladly have exchanged situations with the meanest peasant upon earth!^[62]

The moral character of men of letters depends very much upon the same principles. All actions are seen through that general medium which reduces them to individual insignificance. Nothing fills or engrosses the mind—nothing seems of sufficient importance to interfere with our present inclination. Prejudices, as well as attachments, lose their hold upon us, and we palter with our duties as we please. Moral obligations, by being perpetually refined upon, and discussed, lose their force and efficacy, become mere dry distinctions of the understanding,

‘Play round the head, but never reach the heart.’

Opposite reasons and consequences balance one another, while appetite 136or interest turns the scale. Hence the severe sarcasm of Rousseau, ‘Tout homme reflechi est mechant.’ In fact, it must be confessed, that, as all things produce their extremes, so excessive refinement tends to produce equal grossness. The tenuity of our intellectual desires leaves a void in the mind which requires to be filled up by coarser gratification, and that of the senses is always at hand. They alone always retain their strength. There is not a greater mistake than the common supposition, that intellectual pleasures are capable of endless repetition, and physical ones not so. The one, indeed, may be spread out over a greater surface, they may be dwelt upon and kept in mind at will, and for that very reason they wear out, and pall by comparison, and require perpetual variety. Whereas the physical gratification only occupies us at the moment, is, as it were, absorbed in itself, and forgotten as soon as it is over, and when it returns is as good as new. No one could ever read the same book for any length of time without being tired of it, but a man is never tired of his meals, however little variety his table may have to boast. This reasoning is equally true of all persons who have given much of their time to study and abstracted speculations. Grossness and sensuality have been marked with no less triumph in the religious devotee than in the professed philosopher. The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature; and the good Canon in Gil Blas might be opposed with effect to some of the portraits in M. Grimm’s Correspondence.

T. T.

No. 34.] ON COMMON-PLACE CRITICS [Nov. 24, 1816.

‘Nor can I think what thoughts they can conceive.’

We have already given some account of common-place people; we shall in this number attempt a description of another class of the community, who may be called (by way of distinction) common-place critics. The former are a set of people who have no opinions of their own, and do not pretend to have any; the latter are a set of people who have no opinions of their own, but who affect to have one upon every subject you can mention. The former are a very honest, good sort of people, who are contented to pass for what they are; the latter are a very pragmatical, troublesome sort of people, who would pass for what they are not, and try to put off their common-place notions in all companies and on all subjects, as something of their own. They are of both species, the grave and the gay; and it is hard to say which is the most tiresome.

A common-place critic has something to say upon every occasion, 137and he always tells you either what is not true, or what you knew before, or what is not worth knowing. He is a person who thinks by proxy, and talks by rote. He differs with you, not because he thinks you are in the wrong, but because he thinks somebody else will think so. Nay, it would be well if he stopped here; but he will undertake to misrepresent you by anticipation, lest others should misunderstand you, and will set you right, not only in opinions which you have, but in those which you may be supposed to have. Thus, if you say that Bottom the weaver is a character that has not had justice done to it, he shakes his head, is afraid you will be thought extravagant, and wonders you should think the Midsummer Night’s Dream the finest of all Shakspeare’s plays. He judges of matters of taste and reasoning as he does of dress and fashion, by the prevailing tone of good company; and you would as soon persuade him to give up any sentiment that is current there, as to wear the hind part of his coat before. By the best company, of which he is perpetually talking, he means persons who live on their own estates, and other people’s ideas. By the opinion of the world, to which he pays and expects you to pay great deference, he means that of a little circle of his own, where he hears and is heard. Again, good sense is a phrase constantly in his mouth, by which he does not mean his own sense or that of anybody else, but the opinions of a number of persons who have agreed to take their opinions on trust from others. If any one observes that there is something better than common sense, viz., uncommon sense, he thinks this a bad joke. If you object to the opinions of the majority, as often arising from ignorance or prejudice, he appeals from them to the sensible and well-informed; and if you say there may be other persons as sensible and well informed as himself and his friends, he smiles at your presumption. If you attempt to prove anything to him, it is in vain, for he is not thinking of what you say, but of what will be thought of it. The stronger your reasons, the more incorrigible he thinks you; and he looks upon any attempt to expose his gratuitous assumptions as the wandering of a disordered imagination. His notions are like plaster figures cast in a mould, as brittle as they are hollow; but they will break before you can make them give way. In fact, he is the representative of a large part of the community, the shallow, the vain, and indolent, of those who have time to talk, and are not bound to think: and he considers any deviation from the select forms of common-place, or the accredited language of conventional impertinence, as compromising the authority under which he acts in his diplomatic capacity. It is wonderful how this class of people agree with one another; how they herd together in all their opinions; what a tact they have for 138folly; what an instinct for absurdity; what a sympathy in sentiment; how they find one another out by infallible signs, like Freemasons! The secret of this unanimity and strict accord is, that not any one of them ever admits any opinion that can cost the least effort of mind in arriving at, or of courage in declaring it. Folly is as consistent with itself as wisdom: there is a certain level of thought and sentiment, which the weakest minds, as well as the strongest, find out as best adapted to them; and you as regularly come to the same conclusions, by looking no farther than the surface, as if you dug to the centre of the earth! You know beforehand what a critic of this class will say on almost every subject the first time he sees you, the next time, the time after that, and so on to the end of the chapter. The following list of his opinions may be relied on:—It is pretty certain that before you have been in the room with him ten minutes, he will give you to understand that Shakspeare was a great but irregular genius. Again, he thinks it a question whether any one of his plays, if brought out now for the first time, would succeed. He thinks that Macbeth would be the most likely, from the music which has been since introduced into it. He has some doubts as to the superiority of the French School over us in tragedy, and observes, that Hume and Adam Smith were both of that opinion. He thinks Milton’s pedantry a great blemish in his writings, and that Paradise Lost has many prosaic passages in it. He conceives that genius does not always imply taste, and that wit and judgment are very different faculties. He considers Dr. Johnson as a great critic and moralist, and that his Dictionary was a work of prodigious erudition and vast industry; but that some of the anecdotes of him in Boswell are trifling. He conceives that Mr. Locke was a very original and profound thinker. He thinks Gibbon’s style vigorous but florid. He wonders that the author of Junius was never found out. He thinks Pope’s translation of the Iliad an improvement on the simplicity of the original, which was necessary to fit it to the taste of modern readers. He thinks there is a great deal of grossness in the old comedies; and that there has been a great improvement in the morals of the higher classes since the reign of Charles II. He thinks the reign of Queen Anne the golden period of our literature, but that, upon the whole, we have no English writer equal to Voltaire. He speaks of Boccacio as a very licentious writer, and thinks the wit in Rabelais quite extravagant, though he never read either of them. He cannot get through Spenser’s Fairy Queen, and pronounces all allegorical poetry tedious. He prefers Smollett to Fielding, and discovers more knowledge of the world in Gil Blas than in Don Quixote. Richardson he thinks very minute and tedious. He thinks the French Revolution has done a great 139deal of harm to the cause of liberty; and blames Buonaparte for being so ambitious. He reads the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and thinks as they do. He is shy of having an opinion on a new actor or a new singer; for the public do not always agree with the newspapers. He thinks that the moderns have great advantages over the ancients in many respects. He thinks Jeremy Bentham a greater man than Aristotle. He can see no reason why artists of the present day should not paint as well as Raphael or Titian. For instance, he thinks there is something very elegant and classical in Mr. Westall’s drawings. He has no doubt that Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Lectures were written by Burke. He considers Horne Tooke’s account of the conjunction That very ingenious, and holds that no writer can be called elegant who uses the present for the subjunctive mood, who says If it is for If it be. He thinks Hogarth a great master of low, comic humour; and Cobbett a coarse, vulgar writer. He often talks of men of liberal education, and men without education, as if that made much difference. He judges of people by their pretensions; and pays attention to their opinions according to their dress and rank in life. If he meets with a fool, he does not find him out; and if he meets with any one wiser than himself, he does not know what to make of him. He thinks that manners are of great consequence to the common intercourse of life. He thinks it difficult to prove the existence of any such thing as original genius, or to fix a general standard of taste. He does not think it possible to define what wit is. In religion, his opinions are liberal. He considers all enthusiasm as a degree of madness, particularly to be guarded against by young minds; and believes that truth lies in the middle, between the extremes of right and wrong. He thinks that the object of poetry is to please; and that astronomy is a very pleasing and useful study. He thinks all this, and a great deal more, that amounts to nothing. We wonder we have remembered one half of it—

‘For true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.’

Though he has an aversion to all new ideas, he likes all new plans and matters-of-fact: the new Schools for All, the Penitentiary, the new Bedlam, the new Steam-Boats, the Gas-Lights, the new Patent Blacking; every thing of that sort but the Bible Society. The Society for the Suppression of Vice he thinks a great nuisance, as every honest man must.

In a word, a common-place critic is the pedant of polite conversation. He refers to the opinion of Lord M. or Lady G. with the same air of significance that the learned pedant does to the authority 140of Cicero or Virgil; retails the wisdom of the day, as the anecdote-monger does the wit; and carries about with him the sentiments of people of a certain respectability in life, as the dancing-master does their air, or their valets their clothes.

Z.

No. 35.] ON THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION [Nov. 10, 1816.

The Catalogue Raisonné of the pictures lately exhibited at the British Institution is worthy of notice, both as it is understood to be a declaration of the views of the Royal Academy, and as it contains some erroneous notions with respect to art prevalent in this country. It sets out with the following passages:—

‘The first resolution ever framed by the noblemen and gentlemen who met to establish the British Institution, consists of the following sentence, viz.:

‘“The object of the establishment is to facilitate, by a Public Exhibition, the Sale of the productions of British artists.”

‘Now, if the Directors had not felt quite certain as to the result of the present Exhibition, (of the Flemish School), if they had not perfectly satisfied themselves, that, instead of affording any, even the least means of promoting unfair and invidious comparisons, it would produce abundant matter for exaltation to the living Artist, can we possibly imagine they, the foster-parents of British Art, would ever have suffered such a display to have taken place? Certainly not. If they had not foreseen and fully provided against all such injurious results, by the deep and masterly manœuvre alluded to in our former remarks, is it conceivable that the Directors would have acted in a way so counter, so diametrically in opposition to this their fundamental and leading principle? No, No! It is a position which all sense of respect for their consistency will not suffer us to admit, which all feelings of respect for their views forbid us to allow.

‘Is it at all to be wondered at, that, in an Exhibition such as this, where nothing like a patriotic desire to uphold the arts of their country can possibly have place in the minds of the Directors, we should attribute to them the desire of holding up the old Masters to derision, inasmuch as good policy would allow? Is it to be wondered at, that, when the Directors have the three-fold prospect, by so doing, of estranging the silly and ignorant Collector from his false and senseless infatuation for the Black Masters, of turning his unjust preference from Foreign to British Art, and, by affording the living painters a just encouragement, teach them to feel that becoming confidence in their 141powers, which an acknowledgment of their merits entitles them to? Is it to be wondered at, we say, that a little duplicity should have been practised upon this occasion, that some of our ill-advised Collectors and second-rate picture Amateurs should have been singled out as sheep for the sacrifice, and thus ingeniously made to pay unwilling homage to the talents of their countrymen, through that very medium by which they had previously been induced to depreciate them?’—‘If, in our wish to please the Directors, we should, without mercy, damn all that deserves damning, and effectually hide our admiration for those pieces and passages which are truly entitled to admiration, it must be placed entirely to that patriotic sympathy, which we feel in common with the Directors, of holding up to the public, as the first and great object, THE PATRONAGE OF MODERN ART.’

Once more:

‘Who does not perceive (except those whose eyes are not made for seeing more than they are told by others) that Vandyke’s portraits, by the brilliant colour of the velvet hangings, are made to look as if they had been newly fetched home from the clear-starcher, with a double portion of blue in their ruffs? Who does not see, that the angelic females in Rubens’s pictures (particularly in that of the Brazen Serpent) labour under a fit of the bile, twice as severe as they would do, if they were not suffering on red velvet? Who does not see, from the same cause, that the landscapes by the same Master are converted into brown studies, and that Rembrandt’s ladies and gentlemen of fashion look as if they had been on duty for the whole of last week in the Prince Regent’s new sewer? And who, that has any penetration, that has any gratitude, does not see, in seeing all this, the anxious and benevolent solicitude of the Directors to keep the old masters under?’

So, then, this Writer would think it a matter of lively gratitude, and of exultation in the breasts of living Artists, if the Directors, ‘in their anxious and benevolent desire to keep the old Masters under,’ had contrived to make Vandyke’s pictures look like starch and blue: if they had converted Rubens’s pictures into brown studies, or a fit of the bile; or had dragged Rembrandt’s through the Prince Regent’s new sewers. It would have been a great gain, a great triumph to the Academy and to the Art, to have nothing left of all the pleasure or admiration which those painters had hitherto imparted to the world, to find all the excellences which their works had been supposed to possess, and all respect for them in the minds of the public destroyed, and converted into sudden loathing and disgust. This is, according to the Catalogue-writer and his friends, a consummation devoutly to be wished for themselves and for the Art. All that is taken from 142the old Masters is so much added to the moderns; the marring of Art is the making of the Academy. This is the kind of patronage and promotion of the Fine Arts on which he insists as necessary to keep up the reputation of living Artists, and to ensure the sale of their works. There is nothing then in common between the merits of the old Masters and the doubtful claims of the new: those are not ‘the scale by which we can ascend to the love’ of these. The excellences of the latter are of their own making and of their own seeing; we must take their own word for them; and not only so, but we must sacrifice all established principles and all established reputation to their upstart pretensions, because, if the old pictures are not totally worthless, their own can be good for nothing. The only chance, therefore, for the moderns, if the Catalogue-writer is to be believed, is to decry all the chef-d’œuvres of the Art, and to hold up all the great names in it to derision. If the public once get to relish the style of the old Masters, they will no longer tolerate theirs. But so long as the old Masters can be kept under, the coloured caricatures of the moderns, like Mrs. Peachum’s coloured handkerchiefs, ‘will be of sure sale at their warehouse at Redriff.’ The Catalogue-writer thinks it necessary, in order to raise the Art in this country, to depreciate all Art in all other times and countries. He thinks that the way to excite an enthusiastic admiration of genius in the public is by setting the example of a vulgar and malignant hatred of it in himself. He thinks to inspire a lofty spirit of emulation in the rising generation, by shutting his eyes to the excellences of all the finest models, or by pouring out upon them the overflowings of his gall and envy, to disfigure them in the eyes of others; so that they may see nothing in Raphael, in Titian, in Rubens, in Rembrandt, in Vandyke, in Claude Lorraine, in Leonardo da Vinci, but the low wit and dirty imagination of a paltry scribbler; and come away from the greatest monuments of human capacity, without one feeling of excellence in art, or of beauty or grandeur in nature. Nay, he would persuade us that this is a great public and private benefit, viz., that there is no such thing as excellence, as genius, as true fame, except what he and his anonymous associates arrogate to themselves, with all the profit and credit of this degradation of genius, this ruin of Art, this obloquy and contempt heaped on great and unrivalled reputation. He thinks it a likely mode of producing confidence in the existence and value of Art, to prove that there never was any such thing, till the last annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy. He would encourage a disinterested love of Art, and a liberal patronage of it in the great and opulent, by shewing that the living Artists have no regard, but the most sovereign and reckless contempt for it, except as it can be made a 143temporary stalking-horse to their pride and avarice. The writer may have a patriotic sympathy with the sale of modern works of Art, but we do not see what sympathy there can be between the buyers and sellers of these works, except in the love of the Art itself. When we find that these patriotic persons would destroy the Art itself to promote the sale of their pictures, we know what to say to them. We are obliged to the zeal of our critic for having set this matter in so clear a light. The public will feel little sympathy with a body of Artists who disclaim all sympathy with all other Artists. They will doubt their pretensions to genius who have no feeling of respect for it in others; they will consider them as bastards, not children of the Art, who would destroy their parent. The public will hardly consent, when the proposition is put to them in this tangible shape, to give up the cause of liberal art and of every liberal sentiment connected with it, and enter, with their eyes open, into a pettifogging cabal to keep the old Masters under, or hold their names up to derision ‘as good sport,’ merely to gratify the selfish importunity of a gang of sturdy beggars, who demand public encouragement and support, with a claim of settlement in one hand, and a forged certificate of merit in the other. They can only deserve well of the public by deserving well of the Art. Have we taken these men from the plough, from the counter, from the shop-board, from the tap-room and the stable-door, to raise them to fortune, to rank, and distinction in life, for the sake of Art, to give them a chance of doing something in Art like what had been done before them, of promoting and refining the public taste, of setting before them the great models of Art, and by a pure love of truth and beauty, and by patient and disinterested aspirations after it, of rising to the highest excellence, and of making themselves ‘a name great above all names’; and do they now turn round upon us, and because they have neglected these high objects of their true calling for pitiful cabals and filling their pockets, insist that we shall league with them in crushing the progress of Art, and the respect attached to all its great efforts? There is no other country in the world in which such a piece of impudent quackery could be put forward with impunity, and still less in which it could be put forward in the garb of patriotism. This is the effect of our gross island manners. The Catalogue-writer carries his bear-garden notions of this virtue into the Fine Arts, and would set about destroying Dutch or Italian pictures as he would Dutch shipping or Italian liberty. He goes up to the Rembrandts with the same swaggering Jack-tar airs as he would to a battery of nine-pounders, and snaps his fingers at Raphael as he would at the French. Yet he talks big about the Elgin Marbles, because Mr. Payne Knight has made a slip on that subject; though, 144to be consistent, he ought to be for pounding them in a mortar, should get his friend the Incendiary to set fire to the room building for them at the British Museum, or should get Mr. Soane to build it. Patriotism and the Fine Arts have nothing to do with one another—because patriotism relates to exclusive advantages, and the advantages of the Fine Arts are not exclusive, but communicable. The physical property of one country cannot be shared without loss by another: the physical force of one country may destroy that of another. These, therefore, are objects of national jealousy and fear of encroachment: for the interests or rights of different countries may be compromised in them. But it is not so in the Fine Arts, which depend upon taste and knowledge. We do not consume the works of Art as articles of food, of clothing, or fuel; but we brood over their idea, which is accessible to all, and may be multiplied without end, ‘with riches fineless.’ Patriotism is ‘beastly; subtle as the fox for prey; like warlike as the wolf for what it eats’; but Art is ideal, and therefore liberal. The knowledge or perfection of Art in one age or country is the cause of its existence or perfection in another. Art is the cause of art in other men. Works of genius done by a Dutchman are the cause of genius in an Englishman—are the cause of taste in an Englishman. The patronage of foreign Art is, not to prevent, but to promote Art in England. It does not prevent, but promote taste in England. Art subsists by communication, not by exclusion. The light of art, like that of nature, shines on all alike; and its benefit, like that of the sun, is in being seen and felt. The spirit of art is not the spirit of trade: it is not a question between the grower or consumer of some perishable and personal commodity: but it is a question between human genius and human taste, how much the one can produce for the benefit of mankind, and how much the other can enjoy. It is ‘the link of peaceful commerce ‘twixt dividable shores.’ To take from it this character is to take from it its best privilege, its humanity. Would any one, except our Catalogue-virtuoso, think of destroying or concealing the monuments of Art in past ages, as inconsistent with the progress of taste and civilisation in the present? Would any one find fault with the introduction of the works of Raphael into this country, as if their being done by an Italian confined the benefit to a foreign country, when all the benefit, all the great and lasting benefit, (except the purchase-money, the lasting burden of the Catalogue, and the great test of the value of Art in the opinion of the writer), is instantly communicated to all eyes that behold, and all hearts that can feel them? It is many years ago since we first saw the prints of the Cartoons hung round the parlour of a little inn on the great north road. We were then very young, 145and had not been initiated into the principles of taste and refinement of the Catalogue Raisonné. We had heard of the fame of the Cartoons, but this was the first time that we had ever been admitted face to face into the presence of those divine works. ‘How were we then uplifted!’ Prophets and Apostles stood before us, and the Saviour of the Christian world, with his attributes of faith and power; miracles were working on the walls; the hand of Raphael was there, and as his pencil traced the lines, we saw god-like spirits and lofty shapes descend and walk visibly the earth, but as if their thoughts still lifted them above the earth. There was that figure of St. Paul, pointing with noble fervour to ‘temples not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ and that finer one of Christ in the boat, whose whole figure seems sustained by meekness and love, and that of the same person, surrounded by the disciples, like a flock of sheep listening to the music of some divine shepherd. We knew not how enough to admire them. If from this transport and delight there arose in our breasts a wish, a deep aspiration of mingled hope and fear, to be able one day to do something like them, that hope has long since vanished; but not with it the love of Art, nor delight in works of Art, nor admiration of the genius which produces them, nor respect for fame which rewards and crowns them! Did we suspect that in this feeling of enthusiasm for the works of Raphael we were deficient in patriotic sympathy, or that, in spreading it as far as we could, we did an injury to our country or to living Art? The very feeling shewed that there was no such distinction in Art, that her benefits were common, that the power of genius, like the spirit of the world, is everywhere alike present. And would the harpies of criticism try to extinguish this common benefit to their country from a pretended exclusive attachment to their countrymen? Would they rob their country of Raphael to set up the credit of their professional little-goes and E. O. tables—‘cutpurses of the Art, that from the shelf the precious diadem stole, and put it in their pockets’? Tired of exposing such folly, we walked out the other day, and saw a bright cloud resting on the bosom of the blue expanse, which reminded us of what we had seen in some picture in the Louvre. We were suddenly roused from our reverie, by recollecting that till we had answered this catchpenny publication we had no right, without being liable to a charge of disaffection to our country or treachery to the Art, to look at nature, or to think of any thing like it in Art, not of British growth and manufacture!

146

No. 36.] THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED [Nov. 10, 17, 1816.

The Catalogue-writer nicknames the Flemish painters ‘the Black Masters.’ Either this means that the works of Rubens and Vandyke were originally black pictures, that is, deeply shadowed like those of Rembrandt, which is false, there being no painter who used so little shadow as Vandyke, or so much colour as Rubens; or it must mean that their pictures have turned darker with time, that is, that the art itself is a black art. Is this a triumph for the Academy? Is the defect and decay of Art a subject of exultation to the national genius? Then there is no hope (in this country at least) ‘that a great man’s memory may outlive him half a year!’ Do they calculate that the decomposition and gradual disappearance of the standard works of Art will quicken the demand, and facilitate the sale of modern pictures? Have they no hope of immortality themselves, that they are glad to see the inevitable dissolution of all that has long flourished in splendour and in honour? They are pleased to find, that at the end of near two hundred years, the pictures of Vandyke and Rubens have suffered half as much from time as those of their late President have done in thirty or forty, or their own in the last ten or twelve years. So that the glory of painting is that it does not last for ever: it is this which puts the ancients and the moderns on a level. They hail with undisguised satisfaction the approaches of the slow mouldering hand of time in those works which have lasted longest, not anticipating the premature fate of their own. Such is their short-sighted ambition. A picture is with them like the frame it is in, as good as new; and the best picture, that which was last painted. They make the weak side of Art the test of its excellence; and though a modern picture of two years standing is hardly fit to be seen, from the general ignorance of the painter in the mechanical as well as other parts of the Art, yet they are sure at any time to get the start of Rubens or Vandyke, by painting a picture against the day of exhibition. We even question whether they would wish to make their own pictures last if they could, and whether they would not destroy their own works as well as those of others, (like chalk figures on the floors), to have new ones bespoke the next day. The Flemish pictures then, except those of Rembrandt, were not originally black; they have not faded in proportion to the length of time they have been painted. All that comes then of the nickname in the Catalogue is, that the pictures of the old Masters have lasted longer than those of the present members of the Royal Academy, and that the latter, it is to be 147presumed, do not wish their works to last so long, lest they should be called the Black Masters. With respect to Rembrandt, this epitaph may be literally true. But, we would ask, whether the style of chiaroscuro, in which Rembrandt painted, is not one fine view of nature and of art? Whether any other painter carried it to the same height of perfection as he did? Whether any other painter ever joined the same depth of shadow with the same clearness? Whether his tones were not as fine as they were true? Whether a more thorough master of his art ever lived? Whether he deserved for this to be nicknamed by the Writer of the Catalogue, or to have his works ‘kept under, or himself held up to derision,’ by the Patrons and Directors of the British Institution for the support and encouragement of the Fine Arts?