THE PLAIN SPEAKER (continued 9)

——‘As if they thrill’d

Frail hearts, yet quenched not!’

One might say, with Othello, of the hand with which she holds the globe that is offered to her acceptance——

——‘This hand of yours requires

A sequester from liberty, fasting and pray’r,

Much castigation, exercise devout;

For here’s a young and melting devil here,

That commonly rebels.’

The hands of Vandyke’s portrait have the purity and coldness of marble. The colour of the face is such as might be breathed upon it by the refreshing breeze; that of the Marchioness of Guasto’s is like the glow it might imbibe from a golden sunset. The expression in the English lady springs from her duties and her affections; that of the Italian Countess inclines more to her ease and pleasures. The Marchioness of Guasto was one of three sisters, to whom, it is said, the inhabitants of Pisa proposed to pay divine honours, in the manner that beauty was worshipped by the fabulous enthusiasts of old. Her husband seems to have participated in the common infatuation, from the fanciful homage that is paid to her in this allegorical composition; and if she was at all intoxicated by the incense offered to her vanity, 283the painter must be allowed to have ‘qualified’ the expression of it ‘very craftily.’

I pass on to another female face and figure, that of the Virgin, in the beautiful picture of the Presentation in the Temple, by Guido. The expression here is ideal, and has a reference to visionary objects and feelings. It is marked by an abstraction from outward impressions, a downcast look, an elevated brow, an absorption of purpose, a stillness and resignation, that become the person and the scene in which she is engaged. The colour is pale or gone; so that purified from every grossness, dead to worldly passions, she almost seems like a statue kneeling. With knees bent, and hands uplifted, her motionless figure appears supported by a soul within, all whose thoughts, from the low ground of humility, tend heavenward. We find none of the triumphant buoyancy of health and spirit as in the Titian’s Mistress, nor the luxurious softness of the portrait of the Marchioness of Guasto, nor the flexible, tremulous sensibility, nor the anxious attention to passing circumstances, nor the familiar look of the lady by Vandyke; on the contrary, there is a complete unity and concentration of expression, the whole is wrought up and moulded into one intense feeling, but that feeling fixed on objects remote, refined, and etherial as the form of the fair supplicant. A still greater contrast to this internal, or as it were, introverted expression, is to be found in the group of female heads by the same artist, Guido, in his picture of the Flight of Paris and Helen. They are the three last heads on the left-hand side of the picture. They are thrown into every variety of attitude, as if to take the heart by surprise at every avenue. A tender warmth is suffused over their faces; their head-dresses are airy and fanciful, their complexion sparkling and glossy; their features seem to catch pleasure from every surrounding object, and to reflect it back again. Vanity, beauty, gaiety glance from their conscious looks and wreathed smiles, like the changing colours from the ring-dove’s neck. To sharpen the effect and point the moral, they are accompanied by a little negro-boy, who holds up the train of elegance, fashion, and voluptuous grace!

Guido was the ‘genteelest’ of painters; he was a poetical Vandyke. The latter could give, with inimitable and perfect skill, the airs and graces of people of fashion under their daily and habitual aspects, or as he might see them in a looking-glass. The former saw them in his ‘mind’s eye,’ and could transform them into supposed characters and imaginary situations. Still the elements were the same. Vandyke gave them with the mannerism of habit and the individual details; Guido, as they were rounded into grace and 284smoothness by the breath of fancy, and borne along by the tide of sentiment. Guido did not want the ideal faculty, though he wanted strength and variety. There is an effeminacy about his pictures, for he gave only the different modifications of beauty. It was the Goddess that inspired him, the Siren that seduced him; and whether as saint or sinner, was equally welcome to him. His creations are as frail as they are fair. They all turn on a passion for beauty, and without this support, are nothing. He could paint beauty combined with pleasure or sweetness, or grief, or devotion; but unless it were the ground-work and the primary condition of his performance, he became insipid, ridiculous, and extravagant. There is one thing to be said in his favour; he knew his own powers or followed his own inclinations; and the delicacy of his tact in general prevented him from attempting subjects uncongenial with it. He ‘trod the primrose path of dalliance,’ with equal prudence and modesty. That he is a little monotonous and tame, is all that can be said against him; and he seldom went out of his way to expose his deficiencies in a glaring point of view. He came round to subjects of beauty at last, or gave them that turn. A story is told of his having painted a very lovely head of a girl, and being asked from whom he had taken it, he replied, ‘From his old man!’ This is not unlikely. He is the only great painter (except Correggio) who appears constantly to have subjected what he saw to an imaginary standard. His Magdalens are more beautiful than sorrowful; in his Madonnas there is more of sweetness and modesty than of elevation. He makes but little difference between his heroes and his heroines; his angels are women, and his women angels! If it be said that he repeated himself too often, and has painted too many Magdalens and Madonnas, I can only say in answer, ‘Would he had painted twice as many!’ If Guido wanted compass and variety in his art, it signifies little, since what he wanted is abundantly supplied by others. He had softness, delicacy and ideal grace in a supreme degree, and his fame rests on these as the cloud on the rock. It is to the highest point of excellence in any art or department that we look back with gratitude and admiration, as it is the highest mountain-peak that we catch in the distance, and lose sight of only when it turns to air.

I know of no other difference between Raphael and Guido, than that the one was twice the man the other was. Raphael was a bolder genius, and invented according to nature: Guido only made draughts after his own disposition and character. There is a common cant of criticism which makes Titian merely a colourist. What he really wanted was invention: he had expression in the highest degree. I declare I have seen heads of his with more meaning in them than any 285of Raphael’s. But he fell short of Raphael in this, that (except in one or two instances) he could not heighten and adapt the expression that he saw to different and more striking circumstances. He gave more of what he saw than any other painter that ever lived, and in the imitative part of his art had a more universal genius than Raphael had in composition and invention. Beyond the actual and habitual look of nature, however, ‘the demon that he served’ deserted him, or became a very tame one. Vandyke gave more of the general air and manners of fashionable life than of individual character; and the subjects that he treated are neither remarkable for intellect nor passion. They are people of polished manners, and placid constitutions; and many of the very best of them are ‘stupidly good.’ Titian’s portraits, on the other hand, frequently present a much more formidable than inviting appearance. You would hardly trust yourself in a room with them. You do not bestow a cold, leisurely approbation on them, but look to see what they may be thinking of you, not without some apprehension for the result. They have not the clear smooth skins or the even pulse that Vandyke’s seem to possess. They are, for the most part, fierce, wary, voluptuous, subtle, haughty. Raphael painted Italian faces as well as Titian. But he threw into them a character of intellect rather than of temperament. In Titian the irritability takes the lead, sharpens and gives direction to the understanding. There seems to be a personal controversy between the spectator and the individual whose portrait he contemplates, which shall be master of the other. I may refer to two portraits in the Louvre, the one by Raphael, the other by Titian (Nos. 1153 and 1210), in illustration of these remarks. I do not know two finer or more characteristic specimens of these masters, each in its way. The one is of a student dressed in black, absorbed in thought, intent on some problem, with the hands crossed and leaning on a table for support, as it were to give freer scope to the labour of the brain, and though the eyes are directed towards you, it is with evident absence of mind. Not so the other portrait, No. 1210. All its faculties are collected to see what it can make of you, as if you had intruded upon it with some hostile design, it takes a defensive attitude, and shews as much vigilance as dignity. It draws itself up, as if to say, ‘Well, what do you think of me?’ and exercises a discretionary power over you. It has ‘an eye to threaten and command,’ not to be lost in idle thought, or in ruminating over some abstruse, speculative proposition. It is this intense personal character which, I think, gives the superiority to Titian’s portraits over all others, and stamps them with a living and permanent interest. Of other pictures you tire, if you have them constantly before you; of 286his, never. For other pictures have either an abstracted look and you dismiss them, when you have made up your mind on the subject as a matter of criticism; or an heroic look, and you cannot be always straining your enthusiasm; or an insipid look, and you sicken of it. But whenever you turn to look at Titian’s portraits, they appear to be looking at you; there seems to be some question pending between you, as though an intimate friend or inveterate foe were in the room with you; they exert a kind of fascinating power; and there is that exact resemblance of individual nature which is always new and always interesting, because you cannot carry away a mental abstraction of it, and you must recur to the object to revive it in its full force and integrity. I would as soon have Raphael’s or most other pictures hanging up in a Collection, that I might pay an occasional visit to them: Titian’s are the only ones that I should wish to have hanging in the same room with me for company!

Titian in his portraits appears to have understood the principle of historical design better than any body. Every part tells, and has a bearing on the whole. There is no one who has such simplicity and repose—no violence, no affectation, no attempt at forcing an effect; insomuch that by the uninitiated he is often condemned as unmeaning and insipid. A turn of the eye, a compression of the lip decides the point. He just draws the face out of its most ordinary state, and gives it the direction he would have it take; but then every part takes the same direction, and the effect of this united impression (which is absolutely momentary and all but habitual) is wonderful. It is that which makes his portraits the most natural and the most striking in the world. It may be compared to the effect of a number of small loadstones, that by acting together lift the greatest weights. Titian seized upon the lines of character in the most original and connected point of view. Thus in his celebrated portrait of Hippolito de Medici, there is a keen, sharpened expression that strikes you, like a blow from the spear that he holds in his hand. The look goes through you; yet it has no frown, no startling gesticulation, no affected penetration. It is quiet, simple, but it almost withers you. The whole face and each separate feature is cast in the same acute or wedge-like form. The forehead is high and narrow, the eye-brows raised and coming to a point in the middle, the nose straight and peaked, the mouth contracted and drawn up at the corners, the chin acute, and the two sides of the face slanting to a point. The number of acute angles which the lines of the face form, are, in fact, a net entangling the attention and subduing the will. The effect is felt at once, though it asks time and consideration to understand the cause. It is a face which you would beware of rousing into anger or hostility, 287as you would beware of setting in motion some complicated and dangerous machinery. The possessor of it, you may be sure, is no trifler. Such, indeed, was the character of the man. This is to paint true portrait and true history. So if our artist painted a mild and thoughtful expression, all the lines of the countenance were softened and relaxed. If the mouth was going to speak, the whole face was going to speak. It was the same in colour. The gradations are infinite, and yet so blended as to be imperceptible. No two tints are the same, though they produce the greatest harmony and simplicity of tone, like flesh itself. ‘If,’ said a person, pointing to the shaded side of a portrait of Titian, ‘you could turn this round to the light, you would find it would be of the same colour as the other side!’ In short, there is manifest in his portraits a greater tenaciousness and identity of impression than in those of any other painter. Form, colour, feeling, character, seemed to adhere to his eye, and to become part of himself; and his pictures, on this account, ‘leave stings’ in the minds of the spectators! There is, I grant, the same personal appeal, the same point-blank look in some of Raphael’s portraits (see those of a Princess of Arragon and of Count Castiglione, No. 1150 and 1151) as in Titian: but they want the texture of the skin and the minute individual details to stamp them with the same reality. And again, as to the uniformity of outline in the features, this principle has been acted upon and carried to excess by Kneller and other artists. The eyes, the eye-brows, the nose, the mouth, the chin, are rounded off as if they were turned in a lathe, or as a peruke-maker arranges the curls of a wig. In them it is vile and mechanical, without any reference to truth of character or nature; and instead of being pregnant with meaning and originality of expression, produces only insipidity and monotony.

Perhaps what is offered above as a key to the peculiar expression of Titian’s heads may also serve to explain the difference between painting or copying a portrait. As the perfection of his faces consists in the entire unity and coincidence of all the parts, so the difficulty of ordinary portrait-painting is to bring them to bear at all, or to piece one feature, or one day’s labour on to another. In copying, this difficulty does not occur at all. The human face is not one thing, as the vulgar suppose, nor does it remain always the same. It has infinite varieties, which the artist is obliged to notice and to reconcile, or he will make strange work. Not only the light and shade upon it do not continue for two minutes the same: the position of the head constantly varies (or if you are strict with a sitter, he grows sullen and stupid), each feature is in motion every moment, even while the artist is working at it, and in the course of a day the whole expression 288of the countenance undergoes a change, so that the expression which you gave to the forehead or eyes yesterday is totally incompatible with that which you have to give to the mouth to-day. You can only bring it back again to the same point or give it a consistent construction by an effort of imagination, or a strong feeling of character; and you must connect the features together less by the eye than by the mind. The mere setting down what you see in this medley of successive, teazing, contradictory impressions, would never do; either you must continually efface what you have done the instant before, or if you retain it, you will produce a piece of patchwork, worse than any caricature. There must be a comprehension of the whole, and in truth a moral sense (as well as a literal one) to unravel the confusion, and guide you through the labyrinth of shifting muscles and features. You must feel what this means, and dive into the hidden soul, in order to know whether that is as it ought to be; for you cannot be sure that it remains as it was. Portrait-painting is, then, painting from recollection and from a conception of character, with the object before us to assist the memory and understanding. In copying, on the contrary, one part does not run away and leave you in the lurch, while you are intent upon another. You have only to attend to what is before you, and finish it carefully a bit at a time, and you are sure that the whole will come right. One might parcel it out into squares, as in engraving, and copy one at a time, without seeing or thinking of the rest. I do not say that a conception of the whole, and a feeling of the art will not abridge the labour of copying, or produce a truer likeness; but it is the changeableness or identity of the object that chiefly constitutes the difficulty or facility of imitating it, and, in the latter case, reduces it nearly to a mechanical operation. It is the same in the imitation of still-life, where real objects have not a principle of motion in them. It is as easy to produce a fac-simile of a table or a chair as to copy a picture, because these things do not stir from their places any more than the features of a portrait stir from theirs. You may therefore bestow any given degree of minute and continued attention on finishing any given part without being afraid that when finished it will not correspond with the rest. Nay, it requires more talent to copy a fine portrait than to paint an original picture of a table or a chair, for the picture has a soul in it, and the table has not.—It has been made an objection (and I think a just one) against the extreme high-finishing of the drapery and back-grounds in portraits (to which some schools, particularly the French, are addicted), that it gives an unfinished look to the face, the most important part of the picture. A lady or a gentleman cannot sit quite so long or so still as a lay-figure, 289and if you finish up each part according to the length of time it will remain in one position, the face will seem to have been painted for the sake of the drapery, not the drapery to set off the face. There is an obvious limit to every thing, if we attend to common sense and feeling. If a carpet or a curtain will admit of being finished more than the living face, we finish them less because they excite less interest, and we are less willing to throw away our time and pains upon them. This is the unavoidable result in a natural and well regulated style of art; but what is to be said of a school where no interest is felt in any thing, where nothing is known of any object but that it is there, and where superficial and petty details which the eye can explore, and the hand execute, with persevering and systematic indifference, constitute the soul of art?

The expression is the great difficulty in history or portrait-painting, and yet it is the great clue to both. It renders forms doubly impressive from the interest and signification attached to them, and at the same time renders the imitation of them critically nice, by making any departure from the line of truth doubly sensible. Mr. Coleridge used to say, that what gave the romantic and mysterious interest to Salvator’s landscapes was their containing some implicit analogy to human or other living forms. His rocks had a latent resemblance to the outline of a human face; his trees had the distorted jagged shape of a satyr’s horns and grotesque features. I do not think this is the case; but it may serve to supply us with an illustration of the present question. Suppose a given outline to represent a human face, but to be so disguised by circumstances and little interruptions as to be mistaken for a projecting fragment of a rock in a natural scenery. As long as we conceive of this outline merely as a representation of a rock or other inanimate substance, any copy of it, however rude, will seem the same and as good as the original. Now let the disguise be removed and the general resemblance to a human face pointed out, and what before seemed perfect, will be found to be deficient in the most essential features. Let it be further understood to be a profile of a particular face that we know, and all likeness will vanish from the want of the individual expression, which can only be given by being felt. That is, the imitation of external and visible form is only correct or nearly perfect, when the information of the eye and the direction of the hand are aided and confirmed by the previous knowledge and actual feeling of character in the object represented. The more there is of character and feeling in any object, and the greater sympathy there is with it in the mind of the artist, the closer will be the affinity between the imitation and the thing imitated; as the more there is of character and expression in 290the object without a proportionable sympathy with it in the imitator, the more obvious will this defect and the imperfection of the copy become. That is, expression is the great test and measure of a genius for painting, and the fine arts. The mere imitation of still-life, however perfect, can never furnish proofs of the highest skill or talent; for there is an inner sense, a deeper intuition into nature that is never unfolded by merely mechanical objects, and which, if it were called out by a new soul being suddenly infused into an inanimate substance, would make the former unconscious representation appear crude and vapid. The eye is sharpened and the hand made more delicate in its tact,

‘While by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.’

We not only see, but feel expression, by the help of the finest of all our senses, the sense of pleasure and pain. He then is the greatest painter who can put the greatest quantity of expression into his works, for this is the nicest and most subtle object of imitation; it is that in which any defect is soonest visible, which must be able to stand the severest scrutiny, and where the power of avoiding errors, extravagance, or tameness can only be supplied by the fund of moral feeling, the strength or delicacy of the artist’s sympathy with the ideal object of his imitation. To see or imitate any given sensible object is one thing, the effect of attention and practice; but to give expression to a face is to collect its meaning from a thousand other sources, is to bring into play the observation and feeling of one’s whole life, or an infinity of knowledge bearing upon a single object in different degrees and manners, and implying a loftiness and refinement of character proportioned to the loftiness and refinement of expression delineated. Expression is of all things the least to be mistaken, and the most evanescent in its manifestations. Pope’s lines on the character of women may be addressed to the painter who undertakes to embody it.

‘Come then, the colours and the ground prepare,

Dip in the rainbow, trick it off in air;

Chuse a firm cloud, before it falls, and in it

Catch, ere it change, the Cynthia of the minute.’

It is a maxim among painters that no one can paint more than his own character, or more than he himself understands or can enter into. Nay, even in copying a head, we have some difficulty in making the features unlike our own. A person with a low forehead 291or a short chin puts a constraint on himself in painting a high forehead or a long chin. So much has sympathy to do with what is supposed to be a mere act of servile imitation!—To pursue this argument one step farther. People sometimes wonder what difficulty there can be in painting, and ask what you have to do but to set down what you see? This is true, but the difficulty is to see what is before you. This is at least as difficult as to learn any trade or language. We imagine that we see the whole of nature, because we are aware of no more than we see of it. We also suppose that any given object, a head, a hand, is one thing, because we see it at once, and call it by one name. But how little we see or know, even of the most familiar face, beyond a vague abstraction, will be evident to every one who tries to recollect distinctly all its component parts, or to draw the most rude outline of it for the first time; or who considers the variety of surface, the numberless lights and shades, the tints of the skin, every particle and pore of which varies, the forms and markings of the features, the combined expression, and all these caught (as far as common use is concerned) by a random glance, and communicated by a passing word. A student, when he first copies a head, soon comes to a stand, or is at a loss to proceed from seeing nothing more in the face than there is in his copy. After a year or two’s practice he never knows when to have done, and the longer he has been occupied in copying a face or any particular feature, sees more and more in it, that he has left undone and can never hope to do. There have been only four or five painters who could ever produce a copy of the human countenance really fit to be seen; and even of these few none was ever perfect, except in giving some single quality or partial aspect of nature, which happened to fall in with his own particular studies and the bias of his genius, as Raphael the drawing, Rembrandt the light and shade, Vandyke ease and delicacy of appearance, &c. Titian gave more than any one else, and yet he had his defects. After this, shall we say that any, the commonest and most uninstructed spectator sees the whole of nature at a single glance, and would be able to stamp a perfect representation of it on the canvass, if he could embody the image in his mind’s eye?

I have in this Essay mentioned one or two of the portraits in the Louvre that I like best. The two landscapes which I should most covet, are the one with a Rainbow by Rubens, and the Adam and Eve in Paradise by Poussin. In the first, shepherds are reposing with their flocks under the shelter of a breezy grove, the distances are of air, and the whole landscape seems just washed with the 292shower that has passed off. The Adam and Eve by Poussin is the full growth and luxuriant expansion of the principle of vegetation. It is the first lovely dawn of creation, when nature played her virgin fancies wild; when all was sweetness and freshness, and the heavens dropped fatness. It is the very ideal of landscape-painting, and of the scene it is intended to represent. It throws us back to the first ages of the world, and to the only period of perfect human bliss, which is, however, on the point of being soon disturbed.^[54] I should be contented with these four or five pictures, the Lady by Vandyke, the Titian, the Presentation in the Temple, the Rubens, and the Poussin, or even with faithful copies of them, added to the two which I have of a young Neapolitan Nobleman and of the Hippolito de Medici; and which, when I look at them, recal other times and the feelings with which they were done. It is now twenty years since I made those copies, and I hope to keep them while I live. It seems to me no longer ago than yesterday. Should the next twenty years pass as swiftly, forty years will have glided by me like a dream. By this kind of speculation I can look down as from a slippery height on the beginning, and the end of life beneath my feet, and the thought makes me dizzy!

My taste in pictures is, I believe, very different from that of rich and princely collectors. I would not give two-pence for the whole Gallery at Fonthill. I should like to have a few pictures hung round the room, that speak to me with well-known looks, that touch some string of memory—not a number of varnished, smooth, glittering gewgaws. The taste of the Great in pictures is singular, but not unaccountable. The King is said to prefer the Dutch to the Italian school of painting; and if you hint your surprise at this, you are looked upon as a very Gothic and outré sort of person. You are 293told, however, by way of consolation,—‘To be sure, there is Lord Carlisle likes an Italian picture—Mr. Holwell Carr likes an Italian picture—the Marquis of Stafford is fond of an Italian picture—Sir George Beaumont likes an Italian picture!’ These, notwithstanding, are regarded as quaint and daring exceptions to the established rule; and their preference is a species of lezè majesté in the Fine Arts, as great an eccentricity and want of fashionable etiquette, as if any gentleman or nobleman still preferred old claret to new, when the King is known to have changed his mind on this subject; or was guilty of the offence of dipping his fore-finger and thumb in the middle of a snuff-box, instead of gradually approximating the contents to the edge of the box, according to the most approved models. One would imagine that the great and exalted in station would like lofty subjects in works of art, whereas they seem to have an almost exclusive predilection for the mean and mechanical. One would think those whose word was law, would be pleased with the great and striking effects of the pencil;^[55] on the contrary, they admire nothing but the little and elaborate. They have a fondness for cabinet and furniture pictures, and a proportionable antipathy to works of genius. Even art with them must be servile, to be tolerated. Perhaps the seeming contradiction may be explained thus. Such persons are raised so high above the rest of the species, that the more violent and agitating pursuits of mankind appear to them like the turmoil of ants on a mole-hill. Nothing interests them but their own pride and self-importance. Our passions are to them an impertinence; an expression of high sentiment they rather shrink from as a ludicrous and upstart assumption of equality. They therefore like what glitters to the eye, what is smooth to the touch; but they shun, by an instinct of sovereign taste, whatever has a soul in it, or implies a reciprocity of feeling. The Gods of the earth can have no interest in any thing human; they are cut off from all sympathy with the ‘bosoms and businesses of men.’ Instead of requiring to be wound up beyond their habitual feeling of stately dignity, they wish to have the springs of overstrained pretension let down, to be relaxed with ‘trifles light as air,’ to be amused with the familiar and frivolous, and to have the world appear a scene of still-life, except as they disturb it! The little in thought and internal sentiment is a natural relief and set off to the oppressive sense of external magnificence. 294Hence kings babble and repeat they know not what. A childish dotage often accompanies the consciousness of absolute power. Repose is somewhere necessary, and the soul sleeps while the senses gloat around! Besides, the mechanical and high-finished style of art may be considered as something done to order. It is a task to be executed more or less perfectly, according to the price given, and the industry of the artist. We stand by, as it were, to see the work done, insist upon a greater degree of neatness and accuracy, and exercise a sort of petty, jealous jurisdiction over each particular. We are judges of the minuteness of the details, and though ever so nicely executed, as they give us no ideas beyond what we had before, we do not feel humbled in the comparison. The artizan scarcely rises into the artist; and the name of genius is degraded rather than exalted in his person. The performance is so far ours that we have paid for it, and the highest price is all that is necessary to produce the highest finishing. But it is not so in works of genius and imagination. Their price is above rubies. The inspiration of the Muse comes not with the fiat of a monarch, with the donation of a patron; and, therefore, the Great turn with disgust or effeminate indifference from the mighty masters of the Italian school, because such works baffle and confound their self-love, and make them feel that there is something in the mind of man which they can neither give nor take away.

‘Quam nihil ad tuum, Papiniane, ingenium!’

ESSAY XXVI ON NOVELTY AND FAMILIARITY

‘Horatio. Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.

Hamlet. ’Tis e’en so: the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.’

Shakespear represents his Grave-digger as singing while he is occupied in his usual task of flinging the skulls out of the earth with his spade. On this he takes occasion to remark, through one of his speakers, the effect of habit in blunting our sensibility to what is painful or disgusting in itself. ‘Custom hath made it a property of easiness in him.’ To which the other is made to reply in substance, that those who have the least to do have the finest feelings generally. The minds and bodies of those who are enervated by luxury and 295ease, and who have not had to encounter the wear-and-tear of life, present a soft, unresisting surface to outward impressions, and are endued with a greater degree of susceptibility to pleasure and pain. Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts, by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility, and by engrafting an acquired sense? Habit may be said in technical language to add to our irritability and lessen our sensibility, or to sharpen our active perceptions, and deaden our passive ones. Practice makes perfect—experience makes us wise. The one refers to what we have to do, the other to what we feel. I will endeavour to explain the distinction, and to give some examples in each kind.

Clowns, servants, and common labourers have, it is true, hard and coarse hands, because they are accustomed to hard and coarse employments; but mechanics, artizans, and artists of various descriptions, who are as constantly employed, though on works demanding greater skill and exactness, acquire a proportionable nicety and discrimination of tact with practice and unremitted application. A working jeweller can perceive slight distinctions of surface, and make the smallest incisions in the hardest substances from mere practice: a woollen-draper perceives the different degrees of the fineness in cloth, on the same principle; a watchmaker will insert a great bony fist, and perform the nicest operations among the springs and wheels of a complicated and curious machinery, where the soft delicate hand of a woman or a child would make nothing but blunders. Again, a blind man shews a prodigious sagacity in hearing and almost feeling objects at a distance from him. His other senses acquire an almost preternatural quickness from the necessity of recurring to them oftener, and relying on them more implicitly, in consequence of the privation of sight. The musician distinguishes tones and notes, the painter expressions and colours, from constant habit and unwearied attention, that are quite lost upon the common observer. The critic discovers beauties in a poem, the poet features in nature, that are generally overlooked by those who have not employed their imaginations or understandings on these particular studies. Whatever art or science we devote ourselves to, we grow more perfect in with time and practice. The range of our perceptions is at once enlarged and refined. But—there lies the question that must ‘give us pause’—is the pleasure increased in proportion to our habitual and critical discernment, or does not our familiarity with nature, with science, and with art, breed an indifference for those objects we are most conversant with and most masters of? I am afraid the answer, if an honest one, must be on the 296unfavourable side; and that from the moment that we can be said to understand any subject thoroughly, or can execute any art skilfully, our pleasure in it will be found to be on the decline. No doubt, that with the opening of every new inlet of ideas, there is unfolded a new source of pleasure; but this does not last much longer than the first discovery we make of this terra incognita; and with the closing up of every avenue of novelty, of curiosity, and of mystery, there is an end also of our transport, our wonder, and our delight; or it is converted into a very sober, rational, and household sort of satisfaction.

There is a craving after information, as there is after food; and it is in supplying the void, in satisfying the appetite, that the pleasure in both cases chiefly consists. When the uneasy want is removed, both the pleasure and the pain cease. So in the acquisition of knowledge or of skill, it is the transition from perplexity and helplessness, that relieves and delights us; it is the surprise occasioned by the unfolding of some new aspect of nature, that fills our eyes with tears and our hearts with joy; it is the fear of not succeeding, that makes success so welcome, and a giddy uncertainty about the extent of our acquisitions, that makes us drunk with unexpected possession. We are happy not in the total amount of our knowledge, but in the last addition we have made to it, in the removal of some obstacle, in the drawing aside of some veil, in the contrast between the obscurity of night and the brightness of the dawn. But objects are magnified in the mist and haze of confusion; the mind is most open to receive striking impressions of things in the outset of its progress. The most trivial pursuits or successes then agitate the whole brain; whereas afterwards the most important only occupy one corner of it. The facility which habit gives in admitting new ideas, or in reflecting upon old ones, renders the exercise of intellectual activity a matter of comparative insignificance; and by taking away the resistance and the difficulty, takes away the liveliness of impulse that imparts a sense of pleasure or of pain to the soul. No one reads the same book twice over with the same satisfaction. It is not that our knowledge of it is not greater the second time than the first: but our interest in it is less, because the addition we make to our knowledge the second time is very trifling, while in the first perusal it was all clear gain. Thus in youth and childhood every step is fairy-ground, because every step is an advance in knowledge and pleasure, opens new prospects, and excites new hopes, as in after-years, though we may enlarge our circle a little, and measure our way more accurately, yet in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred we only retrace our steps, and repeat the same dull round of weariness and disappointment. Knowledge 297is power; but it is not pleasure, except when it springs immediately out of ignorance and incapacity. An actor, who plays a character for the hundred and fortieth time, understands and perhaps performs it better; but does he feel the part, has he the same pleasure in it as he had the first time? The wonder is how he can go through with it at all; nor could he, were he not supported by the plaudits of the audience, who seem like new friends to him, or urged on by the fear of disgrace, to which no man is ever reconciled.

I will here take occasion to suggest what appears to me the true state of the question, whether a great actor is enabled to embody his part from feeling or from study. I think at the time from neither; but merely (or chiefly at least) from habit. But I think he must have felt the character in the first instance with all the enthusiasm of nature and genius, or he never would have distinguished himself in it. To say that the intellect alone can determine or supply the movements or the language of passion, is little short of a contradiction in terms. Substituting the head for the heart is like saying that the eye is a judge of sounds or the ear of colours. If a man in cold blood knows how another feels in a fit of passion, it is from having been in a passion himself before. Nor can the indifferent observation of the outward signs attain to the truth of nature, without the inward sympathy to impel us forward, and to tell us where to stop. Without that living criterion, we shall be either tame and mechanical, or turgid and extravagant. The study of individual models produces imitators and mannerists: the study of general principles produces pedants. It is feeling alone that makes up for the deficiencies of either mode of study; that expands the meagreness of the one, that unbends the rigidity of the other, that floats a man into the tide of popularity, and electrifies an audience. It is feeling, or it is hope and fear, joy and sorrow, love and hatred, that is the original source of the effects in nature which are brought forward on the stage; and assuredly it is a sympathy with this feeling, that must dictate the truest and most natural imitations of them. To suppose that a person altogether dead to these primary passions of the human breast can make a great actor, or feign the effects while he is entirely ignorant of the cause, is no less absurd than to suppose that I can describe a place which I never saw, or mimic a voice which I never heard, or speak a language which I never learnt. An actor void of genius and passion may be taught to strut about the stage, and mouth out his words with mock-solemnity, and give himself the airs of a great actor, but he will never be one. He may express his own emptiness and vanity, and make people stare, but he will not ‘send the hearers weeping to their beds.’ The true, original 298master-touches that go to the heart, must come from it. There is neither truth or beauty without nature. Habit may repeat the lesson that is thus learnt, just as a poet may transcribe a fine passage without being affected by it at the time; but he could not have written it in the first instance without feeling the beauty of the object he was describing, or without having been deeply impressed with it in some moment of enthusiasm. It was then that his genius was inspired, his style formed, and the foundation of his fame laid. People tell you that Sterne was hard-hearted; that the author of Waverley is a mere worldling; that Shakespear was a man without passions. Do not believe them. Their passions might have worn themselves out with constant over-excitement, so that they only knew how they formerly felt; or they might have the controul over them; or from their very compass and variety they might have kept one another in check, so that none got very much a-head, and broke out into extravagant and overt acts. But those persons must have experienced the feelings they express, and entered into the situations they describe so finely, at some period or other of their lives: the sacred source from whence the tears trickle down the cheeks of others, was once full, though it may be now dried up; and in all cases where a strong impression of truth and nature is conveyed to the minds of others, it must have previously existed in an equal or greater degree in the mind producing it. Perhaps it does not strictly follow, that

‘They best can paint them, who have felt them most.’

To do this in perfection other qualifications may be necessary: language may be wanting where the heart speaks, but that the tongue or the pen or pencil can describe the workings of nature with the highest truth and eloquence without being prompted or holding any communication with the heart, past, present, or to come, I utterly deny. When Talma, in the part of Œdipus, after the discovery of his misfortune, slowly raises his hands and joins them together over his head in an attitude of despair, I conceive it is because in the extremity of his anguish, and in the full sense of his ghastly and desolate situation, he feels a want of something as a shield or covering to protect him from the weight that is ready to fall and crush him, and he makes use of that fine and impressive action for this purpose:—not that I suppose he is affected in this manner every time he repeats it, but he never would have thought of it but from having this deep and bewildering feeling of weight and oppression, which naturally suggested it to his imagination, and at the same time assured him that it was just. Feeling is in fact the scale that weighs the truth of all original conceptions. When Mrs. Siddons played the 299part of Mrs. Beverley in the Gamester, and on Stukely’s abrupt declaration of his unprincipled passion at the moment of her husband’s imprisonment, threw into her face that noble succession of varying emotions, first seeming not to understand him, then, as her doubt is removed, rising into sudden indignation, then turning to pity, and ending in a burst of hysteric scorn and laughter, was this the effect of stratagem or forethought as a painter arranges a number of colours on his palette? No—but by placing herself amply in the situation of her heroine, and entering into all the circumstances, and feeling the dignity of insulted virtue and misfortune, that wonderful display of keen and high-wrought expressions burst from her involuntarily at the same moment, and kindled her face almost into a blaze of lightning. Yet Mrs. Siddons is sometimes accused of being cold and insensible. I do not wonder that she may seem so after exertions such as these; as the Sybils of old after their inspired prophetic fury sunk upon the ground, breathless and exhausted. But that any one can embody high thoughts and passions without having the prototypes in their own breast, is what I shall not believe upon hearsay, and what I am sure cannot be proved by argument.

It is a common complaint, that actors and actresses are dull when off the stage. I do not know that it is the case; but I own I should be surprised if it were otherwise. Many persons expect from the éclat with which they appear in certain characters to find them equally brilliant in company, not considering that the effect they produce in their artificial characters is the very circumstance that must disqualify them for producing any in ordinary cases. They who have intoxicated and maddened multitudes by their public display of talent, can rarely be supposed to feel much stimulus in entertaining one or two friends, or in being the life of a dinner-party. She who perished over-night by the dagger or the bowl as Cassandra or Cleopatra, may be allowed to sip her tea in silence, and not to be herself again, till she revives in Aspasia. A tragic tone does not become familiar conversation, and any other must come very awkwardly and reluctantly from a great tragic actress. At least, in the intervals of her professional paroxysms, she will hardly set up for a verbal critic or blue-stocking. Comic actors again have their repartees put into their mouths, and must feel considerably at a loss when their cue is taken from them. The most sensible among them are modest and silent. It is only those of second-rate pretensions who think to make up for the want of original wit by practical jokes and slang phrases. Theatrical manners are, I think, the most repulsive of all others.—Actors live on applause, and drag on a laborious artificial existence by the administration of perpetual provocatives to 300their sympathy with the public gratification—I will not call it altogether vanity in them who delight to make others laugh, any more than in us who delight to laugh with them. They have a significant phrase to express the absence of a proper sense in the audience—‘there was not a hand in the house.’ I have heard one of the most modest and meritorious of them declare, that if there was nobody else to applaud, he should like to see a dog wag his tail in approbation. There cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that singers dislike to be encored. There is often a violent opposition out of compassion, with cries of ‘shame, shame!’ when a young female debutante is about to be encored twice in a favourite air, as if it were taking a cruel advantage of her—instead of the third, she would be glad to sing it for the thirtieth time, and ‘die of an encore in operatic pain!’ The excitement of public applause at last becomes a painful habit, and either in indolent or over-active temperaments produces a corresponding craving after privacy and leisure. Mr. L—— a short time ago was in treaty for a snug little place near his friend Mr. M—— at Highgate, on which he had so set his heart, that when the bargain failed, he actually shed tears like a child. He has a right to blubber like a school-boy whenever he pleases, who almost every night of his life makes hundreds of people laugh till they forget they are no longer school-boys. I hope, if this should prove a hard winter, he will again wrap himself up in flannel and lamb’s-wool, take to his fireside, and read the English Novelists once more fairly through. Let him have these lying on his table, Hogarth’s prints hung round the room, and with his own face to boot, I defy the world to match them again! There is something very amiable and praise-worthy in the friendships of the two ingenious actors I have just alluded to: from the example of contrast and disinterestedness it affords, it puts me in mind of that of Rosinante and Dapple. These Arcadian retirements and ornamented retreats are, I suspect, tantalising and unsatisfactory resources to the favourites of the town. The constant fever of applause, and of anxiety to deserve it, which produces the wish for repose, disables them from enjoying it. Let the calenture be as strong as it will, the eye of the pit is upon them in the midst of it: the smile of the boxes, the roar of the gallery, pierces through their holly-hedges, and overthrows all their pastoral theories. Of the public as of the sex it may be said, when one has once been a candidate for their favours,

‘There is no living with them, nor without them!’

I wish the late Mr. Kemble had not written that stupid book about Richard III. and closed a proud theatrical career with a piece of literary foppery. Yet why do I wish it if it pleased him, since it 301made no alteration in my opinion respecting him? Its dry details, its little tortuous struggles after contradiction, nay, its fulsome praises of a kindred critic, Mr. Gifford (what will not a retired tragedian do for a niche in the Quarterly Review?) did not blot from my memory his stately form, his noble features, in which old Rome saw herself revived, his manly sense and plaintive tones, that were an echo to deep-fraught sentiment; nor make me forget another volume published and suppressed long before, a volume of poems addressed to Mrs. Inchbald, ‘the silver-voiced Anna.’ Both are dead. Such is the stuff of which our lives are made—bubbles that reflect the glorious features of the universe, and that glance a passing shadow, a feeble gleam, on those around them!

Mrs. Siddons was in the meridian of her reputation when I first became acquainted with the stage. She was an established veteran, when I was an unfledged novice; and, perhaps, played those scenes without emotion, which filled me, and so many others, with delight and awe. So far I had the advantage of her, and of myself too. I did not then analyse her excellences as I should now, or divide her merits into physical and intellectual advantages, or see that her majestic form rose up against misfortune in equal sublimity, an antagonist power to it—but the total impression (unquestioned, unrefined upon) overwhelmed and drowned me in a flood of tears. I was stunned and torpid after seeing her in any of her great parts. I was uneasy, and hardly myself, but I felt (more than ever) that human life was something very far from being indifferent, and I seemed to have got a key to unlock the springs of joy and sorrow in the human heart. This was no mean possession, and I availed myself of it with no sparing hand. The pleasure I anticipated at that time in witnessing her dullest performance, was certainly greater than I should have now in seeing her in the most brilliant. The very sight of her name in the play-bills in Tamerlane, or Alexander the Great, threw a light upon the day, and drew after it a long trail of Eastern glory, a joy and felicity unutterable, that has since vanished in the mists of criticism and the glitter of idle distinctions. I was in a trance, and my dreams were of mighty empires fallen, of vast burning zones, of waning time, of Persian thrones and them that sat on them, of sovereign beauty, and of victors vanquished by love. Death and Life played their pageant before me. The gates were unbarred, the folding doors of fancy were thrown open, and I saw all that mankind had been, or that I myself could conceive, pass in sudden and gorgeous review before me. No wonder that the huge, dim, disjointed vision should enchant and startle me. One reason why our first impressions are so strong and lasting is that they are whole-length ones. 302We afterwards divide and compare, and judge of things only as they differ from other things. At first we measure them from the ground, take in only the groups and masses, and are struck with the entire contrast to our former ignorance and inexperience. If we apprehend only a vague gaudy outline, this is not a disadvantage; for we fill it up with our desires and fancies, which are most potent in their capacity to create good or evil. The first glow of passion in the breast throws its radiance over the opening path of life; and it is wonderful how much of the volume of our future existence the mere title-page discloses. The results do not indeed exactly correspond with our expectations; but our passions survive their first eager ebullition and bitter disappointment, the bulk of our sensations consists of broken vows and fading recollections; and it is not astonishing that there is so near a resemblance between our earliest anticipations and our latest sigh, since we obstinately believe things to be to the last, what we at first wished to find them.

‘Hope travels through, nor quits us till we die.’

Our existence is a tissue of passion, and our successive years only present us with fainter and fainter copies of the first proof-impressions. ‘The dregs of life,’ therefore, contain very little of force or spirit which

——‘the first spritely runnings could not give.’

Imagination is, in this sense, sometimes truer than reality; for our passions being ‘compacted of imagination,’ and our desires whetted by impatience and delay, often lose some of their taste and essence with possession. So in youth we look forward to the advances of age, and feel them more strongly than when they arrive; nor is this more extraordinary than that from the height of a precipice the descent below should make us giddy, and that we should be less sensible of it when we come to the ground. Experience can teach us little, I suspect, after the first unfolding of our faculties, and the first strong excitement of outward objects. It can only add to or take away from our original impressions, and the imagination can make out the addition as largely or feel the privation as sharply as the senses. The little it can teach us, which is to moderate our chagrins and sober our expectations to the dull standard of reality, we will not learn. ‘Reason panders will;’ and if we have been disappointed forty times, we are only the more resolved that the forty-first time shall make up for all the rest, and our hope grows desperate as the chances are against it. A man who is wary, is so naturally; he who is of a sanguine and credulous disposition, will 303continue so in spite of warning; we hearken to no voice but that of our secret inclinations and native bias. Mr. Wordsworth being asked why he admired the sleep of infancy, said he thought ‘there was a grandeur in it;’ the reason of which is partly owing to the contrast of total unconsciousness to all the ills of life, and partly that it is the germ implying all the future good; an untouched, untold treasure. In the outset of life, all that is to come of it seems to press with double force upon the heart, and our yearnings after good and dread of evil are in proportion to the little we have known of either. The first ebullitions of hope and fear in the human heart lift us to heaven, or sink us to the abyss; but when served out to us in dribblets and palled by repetition, they lose their interest and effect. Or the dawn of experience, like that of day, shews the wide prospect stretched out before us, and dressed in its liveliest colours; as we proceed, we tire of the length of the way and complain of its sameness. The path of life is stripped of its freshness and beauty; and as we grow acquainted with them, we become indifferent to weal or woe.

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come; or in fancying what may have happened in real or fictitious story to others. I have had more pleasure in reading the adventures of a novel (and perhaps changing situations with the hero) than I ever had in my own. I do not think any one can feel much happier—a greater degree of heart’s ease—than I used to feel in reading Tristram Shandy, and Peregrine Pickle, and Tom Jones, and the Tatler, and Gil Blas of Santillane, and Werter, and Boccacio. It was some years after that I read the last, but his tales

‘Dallied with the innocence of love,

Like the old Time.’

The story of Frederigo Alberigi affected me as if it had been my own case, and I saw his hawk upon her perch in the clear, cold air, ‘and how fat and fair a bird she was,’ as plain as ever I saw a picture of Titian’s; and felt that I should have served her up as he did, as a banquet for his mistress, who came to visit him at his own poor farm. I could wish that Lord Byron had employed himself while in Italy in rescuing such a writer as Boccacio from unmerited obloquy, instead of making those notable discoveries, that Pope was a poet, and that Shakespear was not one! Mrs. Inchbald was always a great favourite with me. There is the true soul of woman breathing from what she writes, as much as if you heard her voice. It is as if Venus had written books. I first read her Simple Story (of all places in the world) at M——. No matter where it 304was; for it transported me out of myself. I recollect walking out to escape from one of the tenderest parts, in order to return to it again with double relish. An old crazy hand-organ was playing Robin Adair, a summer-shower dropped manna on my head, and slaked my feverish thirst of happiness. Her heroine, Miss Milner, was at my side. My dream has since been verified:—how like it was to the reality! In truth, the reality itself was but a dream. Do I not still see that ‘simple movement of her finger’ with which Madame Basil beckoned Jean Jacques to the seat at her feet, the heightened colour that tinged her profile as she sat at her work netting, the bunch of flowers in her hair? Is not the glow of youth and beauty in her cheek blended with the blushes of the roses in her hair? Do they not breathe the breath of love? And (what though the adventure was unfinished by either writer or reader) is not the blank filled up with the rare and subtle spirit of fancy, that imparts the fullness of delight to the air-drawn creations of brain? I once sat on a sunny bank in a field in which the green blades of corn waved in the fitful northern breeze, and read the letter in the New Eloise, in which St. Preux describes the Pays de Vaud. I never felt what Shakespear calls my ‘glassy essence,’ so much as then. My thoughts were pure and free. They took a tone from the objects before me, and from the simple manners of the inhabitants of mountain-scenery, so well described in the letter. The style gave me the same sensation as the drops of morning dew before they are scorched by the sun; and I thought Julia did well to praise it. I wished I could have written such a letter. That wish, enhanced by my admiration of genius and the feeling of the objects around me, was accompanied with more pleasure than if I had written fifty such letters, or had gained all the reputation of its immortal author! Of all the pictures, prints, or drawings I ever saw, none ever gave me such satisfaction as the rude etchings at the top of Rousseau’s Confessions. There is a necromantic spell in the outlines. Imagination is a witch. It is not even said anywhere that such is the case, but I had got it in my head that the rude sketches of old-fashioned houses, stone-walls, and stumps of trees represented the scenes at Annecy and Vevay, where he who relished all more sharply than others, and by his own intense aspirations after good had nearly delivered mankind from the yoke of evil, first drew the breath of hope. Here love’s golden rigol bound his brows, and here fell from it. It was the partition-wall between life and death to him, and all beyond it was a desert!...

‘And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail.’

305I used to apply this line to the distant range of hills in a paltry landscape, which however had a tender vernal tone and a dewy freshness. I could look at them till my eyes filled with tears, and my heart dissolved in faintness. Why do I recal the circumstance after a lapse of years with so much interest? Because I felt it then. Those feeble outlines were linked in my mind to the purest, fondest yearnings after good, that dim, airy space contained my little all of hope, buoyed up by charming fears; the delight with which I dwelt upon it, enhanced by my ignorance of what was in store for me, was free from mortal grossness, familiarity or disappointment, and I drank pleasure out of the bosom of the silent hills and gleaming vallies as from a cup filled to the brim with love-philtres and poisonous sweetness by the sorceress, Fancy!

Mr. Opie used to consider it as an error to suppose that an artist’s first works were necessarily crude and raw, and that he went on regularly improving on them afterwards. On the contrary, he maintained that they had the advantage of being done ‘with all his heart, and soul, and might;’ that they contained his best thoughts, those which his genius most eagerly prompted, and which he had matured and treasured up longest, from the first dawn of art and nature on his mind; and that his subsequent works were rather after-thoughts, and the leavings and make-shifts of his invention. There is a great deal of truth in this view of the matter. Poeta nascitur, non fit; that is, it is the strong character and impulse of the mind that forces out its way and stamps itself upon outward objects, not that is elicited and laboriously raised into artificial importance by contrivance and study. An improving actor, artist, or poet never becomes a great one. I have known such in my time, who were always advancing by slow and sure steps to the height of their profession; but in the mean time, some man of genius rose, and passing them, at once seized on the top-most round of ambition’s ladder, so that they still remained in the second class. A volcano does not give warning when it will break out, nor a thunder-bolt send word of its approach. Mr. Kean stamped himself the first night in Shylock; he never did any better. Mr. Kemble is the only great and truly impressive actor I remember, who rose to his stately height by the interposition of art and gradations of merit. A man of genius is sui generis—to be known, he need only to be seen—you can no more dispute whether he is one, than you can dispute whether it is a panther that is shewn you in a cage. Mrs. Siddons did not succeed the first time she appeared on the London boards, but then it was in Garrick’s time, who sent her back to the country. He startled and put her out in some part she had to play with him, by 306the amazing vividness and intrepidity of his style of acting. Yet old Dr. Chauncey who frequented Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, said that he was not himself in his latter days, that he got to play harlequin’s tricks, and was too much in the trammels of the stage, and was quite different from what he was when he came out at Goodman’s-Field’s, when he surprised the town in Richard, as if he had dropped from the clouds, and his acting was all fire and air. Mrs. Siddons was hardly satisfied with the admiration of those who had only seen her latter performances, which were distinguished chiefly by their towering height and marble outline. She has been heard to exclaim, ‘You have seen me only in Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine, and Belvidera and Jane Shore—you should have seen me when I played these characters alternately with Juliet, and Desdemona, and Calista, and the Mourning Bride, night after night, when I first came from Bath!’ If she indeed filled these parts with a beauty and tenderness equal to the sublimity of her other performances, one had only to see her in them and die! Lord Byron says, that Lady Macbeth died when Mrs. Siddons left the stage. Could not even her acting help him to understand Shakespear?—Sir Joshua Reynolds at a late period saw some portraits he had done in early life, and lamented the little progress he had made. Yet he belonged to the laborious and climbing class. No one generation improves much upon another; no one individual improves much upon himself. What we impart to others we have within us, and we have it almost from the first. The strongest insight we obtain into nature is that which we receive from the broad light thrown upon it by the sudden developement of our own faculties and feelings.

Even in science the greatest discoveries have been made at an early age. Sir Isaac Newton was not twenty when he saw the apple fall to the ground. Harvey, I believe, discovered the circulation of the blood at eighteen. Berkeley was only six and twenty when he published his Essay on Vision. Hartley’s great principle was developed in an inaugural dissertation at College. Hume wrote his Treatise on Human Nature while he was yet quite a young man. Hobbes put forth his metaphysical system very soon after he quitted the service of Lord Bacon. I believe also that Galileo, Leibnitz, and Euler commenced their career of discovery quite young; and I think it is only then, before the mind becomes set in its own opinions or the dogmas of others, that it can have vigour or elasticity to throw off the load of prejudice and seize on new and extensive combinations of things. In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop 307of water hesitates at first what direction it shall take, but afterwards follows its own course. The very oscillation of the mind in its first perilous and staggering search after truth, brings together extreme arguments and illustrations, that would never occur in a more settled and methodised state of opinion, and felicitous suggestions turn up when we are trying experiments on the understanding, of which we can have no hope when we have once made up our minds to a conclusion, and only go over the previous steps that led to it. So that the greater number of opinions we have formed, we are less capable of forming new ones, and slide into common-places, according as we have them at hand to resort to. It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information; as in the practice of art, the great thing is to retain our admiration of the beautiful in nature, together with the power to imitate it, and not, from a want of this original feeling, to be enslaved by formal rules, or dazzled by the mere difficulties of execution. Habit is necessary to give power: but with the stimulus of novelty, the love of truth and nature ceases through indolence or insensibility. Hence wisdom too commonly degenerates into prejudice; and skill into pedantry. Ask a metaphysician what subject he understands best; and he will tell you that which he knows the least about. Ask a musician to play a favourite tune, and he will select an air the most difficult of execution. If you ask an artist his opinion of a picture, he will point to some defect in perspective or anatomy. If an opera-dancer wishes to impress you with an idea of his grace and accomplishments, he will throw himself into the most distorted attitude possible. Who would not rather see a dance in the forest of Montmorenci on a summer’s evening by a hundred laughing peasant-girls and their partners, who come to this scene for several miles round, rushing through the forest-glades, as the hart panteth for the water-brooks, than all the pirouettes, pied-a-plombs, and entrechats, performed at the French Opera by the whole corps de ballet? Yet the first only just contrive to exert their heels, and not put their partners out, whilst the last perform nothing but feats of dexterity and miracles of skill—not one of which they could ever perform, if they had not lost every idea of natural grace, ease, or decorum in habitual callousness or professional vanity, or had one feeling left which prompts their rustic rivals to run through the mazes of the dance

‘With heedless haste and giddy cunning,’

308while the leaves tremble to the festive sounds of music, and the air circles in gladder currents to their joyous movements!—There was a dance in the pantomime at Covent-Garden two years ago, which I could have gone to see every night. I did go to see it every night that I could make an excuse for that purpose. It was nothing; it was childish. Yet I could not keep away from it. Some young people came out of a large twelfth-cake, dressed in full court-costume, and danced a quadrille, and then a minuet, to some divine air. Was it that it put me in mind of my school-boy days, and of the large bunch of lilac that I used to send as a present to my partner? Or of times still longer past, the court of Louis XIV. the Duke de Nemours and the Princess of Cleves? Or of the time when she who was all grace moved in measured steps before me, and wafted me into Elysium? I know not how it was; but it came over the sense with a power not to be resisted,

‘Like the sweet south,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour.’

I mention these things to shew, as I think, that pleasures are not

‘Like poppies spread,

You seize the flower, the bloom is shed,

Or like the snow, falls in the river,

A moment white—then melts for ever;

Or like the borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;

Or like the rainbow’s lovely form,

Evanishing amid the storm.’

On the contrary, I think they leave traces of themselves behind them, durable and delightful even in proportion to the regrets accompanying them, and which we relinquish only with our being. The most irreconcileable disappointments are perhaps those which arise from our obtaining all we wish.

The Opera-figurante despises the peasant-girl that dances on the green, however much happier she may be or may be thought by the first. The one can do what the other cannot. Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power; and this is one great source of self-congratulation, if not of self-satisfaction. This, however, is continually increasing, or at least renewing with our advances in skill and the conquest of difficulties; and, accordingly, there is no end of it while we live or till our faculties decay. He who undertakes to master any art or science has cut himself out work enough to last the rest of his life, and may promise himself 309all the enjoyment that is to be found in looking down with self-complacent triumph on the inferiority of others, or all the torment that there is in envying their success. There is no danger that the machine will ever stand still afterwards. Mandeville has endeavoured to shew that if it were not for envy, malice, and all uncharitableness, mankind would perish of pure chagrin and ennui; and I am not in the humour to contradict him.—The same spirit of emulation that urges us on to surpass others, supplies us with a new source of satisfaction (of something which is at least the reverse of indifference and apathy) in the indefatigable exertion of our faculties and the perception of new and minor shades of distinction. These, if not so delightful, are more subtle, and may be multiplied indefinitely. They borrow something of taste and pleasure from their first origin, till they dwindle away into mere abstractions. The exercise, whether of our minds or bodies, sharpens and gives additional alacrity to our active impressions, as the indulgence of our sensibility, whether to pleasure or pain, blunts our passive ones. The will to do, the power to think, is a progressive faculty, though not the capacity to feel. Otherwise, the business of life could not go on. If it were necessity alone that oiled the springs of society, people would grow tired and restive, they would lie down and die. But with use there comes a habit, a positive need of something to keep off the horror of vacancy. The sense of power has a sense of pleasure annexed to it, or what is practically tantamount, an impulse, an endeavour, that carries us through the most tiresome drudgery or the hardest tasks. Indolence is a part of our nature too. There is a vis inertiæ at first, a difficulty in beginning or in leaving off. I have spun out this Essay in a good measure from the dread I feel of entering upon new subjects.—Some such reasoning is necessary to account for the headstrong and incorrigible violence of the passions when the will is once implicated. So in ambition, in avarice, in the love of gaming and of drinking (where the strong stimulus is the chief excitement), there is no hope of any termination, of any pause or relaxation; but we are hurried forward, as by a fever, when all sense of pleasure is dead, and we only persevere as it were out of contradiction, and in defiance of the obstacles, the mortifications and privations we have to encounter. The resistance of the will to outward circumstances, its determination to create its own good or evil, is also a part of the same constitution of the mind. The solitary captive can make a companion of the spider that straggles into his cell, or find amusement in counting the nails in his dungeon-door; while the proud lord that placed him there feels the depth of solitude in crowded ball-rooms and hot theatres, and turns with weariness from the scenes of luxury 310and dissipation. Defoe’s romance is the finest possible exemplification of the manner in which our internal resources increase with our external wants.

Our affections are enlarged and unfolded with time and acquaintance. If we like new books, new faces, new scenes, or hanker after those we have never seen, we also like old books, old faces, old haunts,

‘Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness have grown.’

If we are repelled after a while by familiarity, or when the first gloss of novelty wears off, we are brought back from time to time by recurring recollections, and are at last wedded to them by a thousand associations. Passion is the undue irritation of the will from indulgence or opposition: imagination is the anticipation of unknown good: affection is the attachment we form to any object from its being connected with the habitual impression of numberless sources and ramifications of pleasure. The heart is the most central of all things. Our duties also (in which either our affections or our understandings are our teachers) are uniform, and must find us at our posts. If this is ever difficult at first, it is always easy in the end. The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.

Our physical pleasures (unless as they depend on imagination and opinion) undergo less alteration, and are even more lasting than any others. They return with returning appetite, and are as good as new. We do not read the same book twice two days following, but we had rather eat the same dinner two days following than go without one. Our intellectual pleasures, which are spread out over a larger surface, are variable for that very reason, that they tire by repetition, and are diminished in comparison.^[56] Our physical ones have but one condition for their duration and sincerity, viz. that they shall be unforced and natural. Our passions of a grosser kind wear out before our senses: but in ordinary cases they grow indolent and conform to habit, instead of becoming impatient and inordinate from a desire of change, as we are satisfied with more moderate bodily exercise in age or middle life than we are in youth.—Upon the whole, there are many things to prop up and reinforce our fondness for existence, after the intoxication of our first acquaintance with it 311is over; health, a walk and the appetite it creates, a book, the doing a good-natured or friendly action, are satisfactions that hold out to the last; and with these, and any others to aid us that fall harmlessly in our way, we may make a shift for a few seasons, after having exhausted the short-lived transports of an eager and enthusiastic imagination, and without being under the necessity of hanging or drowning ourselves as soon as we come to years of discretion.

ESSAY XXVII ON OLD ENGLISH WRITERS AND SPEAKERS

When I see a whole row of standard French authors piled up on a Paris book-stall, to the height of twenty or thirty volumes, shewing their mealy coats to the sun, pink, blue, and yellow, they seem to me a wall built up to keep out the intrusion of foreign letters. There is scarcely such a thing as an English book to be met with, unless, perhaps, a dusty edition of Clarissa Harlowe lurks in an obscure corner, or a volume of the Sentimental Journey perks its well-known title in your face.^[57] But there is a huge column of Voltaire’s works complete in sixty volumes, another (not so frequent) of Rousseau’s in fifty, Racine in ten volumes, Moliere in about the same number, La Fontaine, Marmontel, Gil Blas, for ever; Madame Sevigné’s Letters, Pascal, Montesquieu, Crebillon, Marivaux, with Montaigne, Rabelais, and the grand Corneille more rare; and eighteen full-sized volumes of La Harpe’s criticism, towering vain-gloriously in the midst of them, furnishing the streets of Paris with a graduated scale of merit for all the rest, and teaching the very garçons perruquiers how to measure the length of each act of each play by a stop-watch, and to ascertain whether the angles at the four corners of each classic volume are right ones. How climb over this lofty pile of taste and elegance to wander down into the bogs and wastes of English or of any other literature, ‘to this obscure and wild?’ Must they ‘on that fair mountain leave to feed, to batten on this moor?’ Or why should they? Have they not literature enough of their own, and to spare, without coming to us? Is not the public mind crammed, choaked 312with French books, pictures, statues, plays, operas, newspapers, parties, and an incessant farrago of words, so that it has not a moment left to look at home into itself, or abroad into nature? Must they cross the Channel to increase the vast stock of impertinence, to acquire foreign tastes, suppress native prejudices, and reconcile the opinions of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews? It is quite needless. There is a project at present entertained in certain circles, to give the French a taste for Shakespear. They should really begin with the English.^[58] Many of their own best authors are neglected; others, of whom new Editions have been printed, lie heavy on the booksellers’ hands. It is by an especial dispensation of Providence that languages wear out; as otherwise we should be buried alive under a load of books and knowledge. People talk of a philosophical and universal language. We have enough to do to understand our own, and to read a thousandth part (perhaps not the best) of what is written in it. It is ridiculous and monstrous vanity. We would set up a standard of general taste and of immortal renown; we would have the benefits of science and of art universal, because we suppose our own capacity to receive them unbounded; and we would have the thoughts of others never die, because we flatter ourselves that our own will last for ever; and like the frog imitating the ox in the fable, we burst in the vain attempt. Man, whatever he may think, is a very limited being; the world is a narrow circle drawn about him; the horizon limits our immediate view; immortality means a century or two. Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bound countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown. A little importation from foreign markets may be good; but the home production is the chief thing to be looked to.

‘The proper study of the French is French!’

No people can act more uniformly upon a conviction of this maxim, and in that respect I think they are much to be commended.

Mr. Lamb has lately taken it into his head to read St. Evremont, and works of that stamp. I neither praise nor blame him for it. 313He observed, that St. Evremont was a writer half-way between Montaigne and Voltaire, with a spice of the wit of the one and the sense of the other. I said I was always of opinion that there had been a great many clever people in the world, both in France and England, but I had been sometimes rebuked for it. Lamb took this as a slight reproach; for he has been a little exclusive and national in his tastes. He said that Coleridge had lately given up all his opinions respecting German literature, that all their high-flown pretensions were in his present estimate sheer cant and affectation, and that none of their works were worth any thing but Schiller’s and the early ones of Goethè. ‘What,’ I said, ‘my old friend Werter! How many battles have I had in my own mind, and compunctious visitings of criticism to stick to my old favourite, because Coleridge thought nothing of it! It is hard to find one’s-self right at last!’ I found they were of my mind with respect to the celebrated Faust—that it is a mere piece of abortive perverseness, a wilful evasion of the subject and omission of the characters; that it is written on the absurd principle that as to produce a popular and powerful effect is not a proof of the highest genius, so to produce no effect at all is an evidence of the highest poetry—and in fine, that the German play is not to be named in a day with Marlowe’s. Poor Kit! How Lord Byron would have sneered at this comparison between the boasted modern and a contemporary of Shakespear’s! Captain Medwin or his Lordship must have made a mistake in the enumeration of plays of that period still acted. There is one of Ben Jonson’s, ‘Every Man in his Humour;’ and one of Massinger’s, ‘A new Way to Pay old Debts;’ but there is none of Ford’s either acted or worth acting, except ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,’ and that would no more bear acting than Lord Byron and Goethè together could have written it.

This account of Coleridge’s vacillations of opinion on such subjects might be adduced to shew that our love for foreign literature is an acquired or rather an assumed taste; that it is, like a foreign religion, adopted for the moment, to answer a purpose or to please an idle humour; that we do not enter into the dialect of truth and nature in their works as we do in our own; and that consequently our taste for them seldom becomes a part of ourselves, that ‘grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strength,’ and only quits us when we die. Probably it is this acquaintance with, and pretended admiration of, extraneous models, that adulterates and spoils our native literature, that polishes the surface but undermines its basis, and by taking away its original simplicity, character, and force, makes it just tolerable to others, and a matter of much indifference to ourselves. When I see Lord Byron’s poems stuck all over Paris, it strikes me 314as ominous of the decline of English genius: on the contrary, when I find the Scotch Novels in still greater request, I think it augurs well for the improvement of French taste.^[59]

There was advertised not long ago in Paris an Elegy on the Death of Lord Byron, by his friend Sir Thomas More,—evidently confounding the living bard with the old statesman. It is thus the French in their light, salient way transpose every thing. The mistake is particularly ludicrous to those who have ever seen Mr. Moore, or Mr. Shee’s portrait of him in Mr. Hookham’s shop, and who chance to see Holbein’s head of Sir Thomas More in the Louvre. There is the same difference that there is between a surly English mastiff and a little lively French pug. Mr. Moore’s face is gay and smiling enough, old Sir Thomas’s is severe, not to say sour. It seems twisted awry with difficult questions, and bursting asunder with a ponderous load of meaning. Mr. Moore has nothing of this painful and puritanical cast. He floats idly and fantastically on the top of the literature of his age; his renowned and almost forgotten namesake has nearly sunk to the bottom of his. The author of Utopia was no flincher, he was a martyr to his opinions, and was burnt to death for them—the most heroic action of Mr. Moore’s life is, the having burnt the Memoirs of his friend!

The expression in Holbein’s pictures conveys a faithful but not very favourable notion of the literary character of that period. It is painful, dry, and laboured. Learning was then an ascetic, but recluse and profound. You see a weight of thought and care in the studious heads of the time of the Reformation, a sincerity, an integrity, a sanctity of purpose, like that of a formal dedication to a religious life, or the inviolability of monastic vows. They had their work to do; we reap the benefits of it. We skim the surface, and travel along the high road. They had to explore dark recesses, to dig through 315mountains, and make their way through pathless wildernesses. It is no wonder they looked grave upon it. The seriousness, indeed, amounts to an air of devotion; and it has to me something fine, manly, and old English about it. There is a heartiness and determined resolution; a willingness to contend with opposition; a superiority to ease and pleasure; some sullen pride, but no trifling vanity. They addressed themselves to study as to a duty, and were ready to ‘leave all and follow it.’ In the beginning of such an era, the difference between ignorance and learning, between what was commonly known and what was possible to be known, would appear immense; and no pains or time would be thought too great to master the difficulty. Conscious of their own deficiencies and the scanty information of those about them, they would be glad to look out for aids and support, and to put themselves apprentices to time and nature. This temper would lead them to exaggerate rather than to make light of the difficulties of their undertaking; and would call forth sacrifices in proportion. Feeling how little they knew, they would be anxious to discover all that others had known, and instead of making a display of themselves, their first object would be to dispel the mist and darkness that surrounded them. They did not cull the flowers of learning, or pluck a leaf of laurel for their own heads, but tugged at the roots and very heart of their subject, as the woodman tugs at the roots of the gnarled oak. The sense of the arduousness of their enterprise braced their courage, so that they left nothing half done. They inquired de omne scibile et quibusdam aliis. They ransacked libraries, they exhausted authorities. They acquired languages, consulted books, and decyphered manuscripts. They devoured learning, and swallowed antiquity whole, and (what is more) digested it. They read incessantly, and remembered what they read, from the zealous interest they took in it. Repletion is only bad, when it is accompanied with apathy and want of exercise. They laboured hard, and shewed great activity both of reasoning and speculation. Their fault was that they were too prone to unlock the secrets of nature with the key of learning, and often to substitute authority in the place of argument. They were also too polemical; as was but naturally to be expected in the first breaking up of established prejudices and opinions. It is curious to observe the slow progress of the human mind in loosening and getting rid of its trammels, link by link, and how it crept on its hands and feet, and with its eyes bent on the ground, out of the cave of Bigotry, making its way through one dark passage after another; those who gave up one half of an absurdity contending as strenuously for the remaining half, the lazy current of tradition stemming the tide of innovation, and making an endless 316struggle between the two. But in the dullest minds of this period there was a deference to the opinions of their leaders; an imposing sense of the importance of the subject, of the necessity of bringing all the faculties to bear upon it; a weight either of armour or of internal strength, a zeal either for or against; a head, a heart, and a hand, a holding out to the death for conscience sake, a strong spirit of proselytism—no flippancy, no indifference, no compromising, no pert shallow scepticism, but truth was supposed indissolubly knit to good, knowledge to usefulness, and the temporal and eternal welfare of mankind to hang in the balance. The pure springs of a lofty faith (so to speak) had not then descended by various gradations from their skyey regions and cloudy height, to find their level in the smooth, glittering expanse of modern philosophy, or to settle in the stagnant pool of stale hypocrisy! A learned man of that day, if he knew no better than others, at least knew all that they did. He did not come to his subject, like some dapper barrister who has never looked at his brief, and trusts to the smartness of his wit and person for the agreeable effect he means to produce, but like an old and practised counsellor, covered over with the dust and cobwebs of the law. If it was a speaker in Parliament, he came prepared to handle his subject, armed with cases and precedents, the constitution and history of Parliament from the earliest period, a knowledge of the details of business and the local interests of the country; in short, he had taken up the freedom of the House, and did not treat the question like a cosmopolite, or a writer in a Magazine. If it were a divine, he knew the Scriptures and the Fathers, and the Councils and the Commentators by heart, and thundered them in the ears of his astonished audience. Not a trim essay or a tumid oration, patronising religion by modern sophisms, but the Law and the Prophets, the chapter and the verse. If it was a philosopher, Aristotle and the Schoolmen were drawn out in battle-array against you:—if an antiquarian, the Lord bless us! There is a passage in Selden’s notes on Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, in which he elucidates some point of topography by a reference not only to Stowe and Holinshed and Camden and Saxo-Grammaticus and Dugdale and several other authors that we are acquainted with, but to twenty obscure names, that no modern reader ever heard of; and so on through the notes to a folio volume, written apparently for relaxation. Such were the intellectual amusements of our ancestors! Learning then ordinarily lay-in of folio volumes: now she litters octavos and duodecimos, and will soon, as in France, miscarry of half sheets! Poor Job Orton! why should I not record a jest of his (perhaps the only one he ever made) emblematic as it is of the living and the learning of the good old times? The 317Rev. Job Orton was a Dissenting Minister in the middle of the last century, and had grown heavy and gouty by sitting long at dinner and at his studies. He could only get down stairs at last by spreading the folio volumes of Caryl’s Commentaries upon Job on the steps and sliding down them. Surprised one day in his descent, he exclaimed, ‘You have often heard of Caryl upon Job—now you see Job upon Caryl!’ This same quaint-witted gouty old gentleman seems to have been one of those ‘superior, happy spirits,’ who slid through life on the rollers of learning, enjoying the good things of the world and laughing at them, and turning his infirmities to a livelier account than his patriarchal namesake. Reader, didst thou ever hear either of Job Orton or of Caryl on Job? I daresay not. Yet the one did not therefore slide down his theological staircase the less pleasantly; nor did the other compile his Commentaries in vain! For myself, I should like to browze on folios, and have to deal chiefly with authors that I have scarcely strength to lift, that are as solid as they are heavy, and if dull, are full of matter. It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own initials always staring one in the face: to travel out of one’s-self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters; to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page, and the camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years. In that dry desert of learning, we gather strength and patience, and a strange and insatiable thirst of knowledge. The ruined monuments of antiquity are also there, and the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks) and cool springs, and green sunny spots, and the whirlwind and the lion’s roar, and the shadow of angelic wings. To those who turn with supercilious disgust from the ponderous tomes of scholastic learning, who never felt the witchery of the Talmuds and the Cabbala, of the Commentators and the Schoolmen, of texts and authorities, of types and anti-types, hieroglyphics and mysteries, dogmas and contradictions, and endless controversies and doubtful labyrinths, and quaint traditions, I would recommend the lines of Warton written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon: