Chapter XXII: Preface: It is observed by Mr. Pope, that (12)

‘We occasionally,’ you proceed, ‘discover a faint semblance of connected thinking in Mr. Hazlitt’s pages; but wherever this is the case, his reasoning is for the most part incorrect.’ This is a curious inference. ‘This faint semblance of connected thinking,’ is, it appears, when I maintain some opinion, which is ‘a sprout from some popular doctrine’; but if I push it a little farther than you were aware of, my reasoning becomes incorrect. Thus it has been a popular doctrine with some critics, (which yet you do not admit)—‘That the progress of science is unfavourable to the culture of the imagination. It is no doubt true, that the individual who devotes his labour to the investigation of abstract truth, must acquire habits of thought very different from those which the exercise of the fancy demands.’ You add in italics, ‘_the cause lies in the exclusive appropriation of his time to reasoning, and not in the logical accuracy with which he reasons_.’ Whenever I have any discovery to communicate, which I think you cannot comprehend, I will in future put it in italics, to make it equally profound and clear. It appears by you, that the incompatibility between the successful pursuit of different studies does not arise from anything incompatible in the studies themselves, but from the time devoted to each. The mind is equally incapacitated from passing from one to the other, whether they are the most opposite or the most alike. The dreams of alchemy, and the schemes of astrology, the traditional belief in the doctrine of ghosts and fairies, though made up almost entirely of imagination, self-will, superstition and romance, were not a jot more favourable to the caprices and fanciful exaggerations of poetry, either in the public mind, or in that of individuals, than the modern system which excludes (both by the logical accuracy with which it proceeds, and a constant appeal to demonstrable facts), every alloy of passion, and all exercise of the imagination. You should never put your thoughts in italics. If I were to attempt a character of verbal critics, I should be apt to say, that their habits of mind disqualify them for general reasoning or fair discussion: that they are furious about trifles, because they have nothing else to interest them; that they have no way of giving dignity to their insignificant discoveries, but by treating those who have missed them with contempt; that they are dogmatical and conceited, in proportion as they have little else to guide them in their quaint researches but caprice and accident; that the want of intellectual excitement gives birth to increasing personal irritability, and endless petty altercation. You, Sir, would make all this self-evident, by the help of italics, and say, that _the cause lies not in anything in the nature of verbal criticism, but the exclusive appropriation of their time to it_.

You next run foul of my account of the pleasure derived from tragedy. You are afraid to understand what I say on any subject, and it is not therefore likely you should ever detect what is erroneous in it. I have shewn by a reference to facts, and to the authority of Mr. Burke (whom you would rather contradict than believe me) that the objects which are supposed to please only in fiction, please in reality; that ‘if there were known to be a public execution of some state criminal in the next street, the theatre would soon be empty’—that therefore the pleasure derived from tragedy is not anything peculiar to it, as poetry or fiction; but has its ground in the common love of strong excitement. You say, I have misstated the fact, to give a false view of the question, which, according to you, is ‘why that which is painful in itself, pleases in works of fiction.’ I answer, I have shewn that this is not a fair statement of the question, by stating the fact, that what is painful in itself, pleases not the sufferer indeed, but the spectator, in reality as well as in works of fiction. The common proverb proves it—‘What is sport to one, is death to another.’

You observe, that ‘Some lines I have quoted from Chaucer, are very pleasing—

——“Emelie that fayrer was to sene
Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene,
And fresher than the May with floures newe:
For with the rose-colour strove hire hewe;
I n’ot which was the finer of hem too.”

‘But surely the beauty does not lie in the last line, though it is with this that Mr. Hazlitt is chiefly struck. “This scrupulousness” he observes, “about the literal preference, as if some question of matter of fact were at issue, is remarkable.”’

That is, I am not chiefly struck with the beauty of the last line, but with its peculiarity as characteristic of Chaucer. The beauty of the former lines might be in Spenser: the scrupulous exactness of the latter could be found nowhere but in Chaucer. I had said just before, that this poet ‘introduces a sentiment or a simile, as if it were given in upon evidence.’ I bring this simile as an instance in point, and you say I have not brought it to prove something else.

You charge me with misrepresenting Longinus, and prove that I have not. The word ἐναγώνιον signifies not as you are pleased to paraphrase it ‘vehemently energetic,’ but simply ‘full of contests.’ Must the Greek language be new-fangled, to prove that I am ignorant of it?

The only mistake you are able to point out, is a slip of the pen, which you will find to have been corrected long ago in the second edition.—Your pretending to say that Dr. Johnson was an admirer of Milton’s blank verse, is not a slip of the pen—you know he was not. There is as little sincerity in your concluding paragraph. You would ascribe what little appearance of thought there is in my writings to a confusion of images, and what appearance there is of imagination to a gaudy phraseology. If I had neither words nor ideas, I should be a profound philosopher and critic. How fond you are of reducing every one else to your own standard of excellence!

I have done what I promised. You complain of the difficulty of remembering what I write; possibly this Letter will prove an exception. There is a train of thought in your own mind, which will connect the links together: and before you again undertake to run down a writer for no other reason, than that he is of an opposite party to yourself, you will perhaps recollect that your wilful artifices and shallow cunning, though they pass undetected, will hardly screen you from your own contempt, nor, when once exposed, will the gratitude of your employers save you from public scorn.

Your conduct to me is no new thing: it is part of a system which has been regularly followed up for many years. Mr. Coleridge, in his Literary Life, has the following passage to shew the treatment which he and his friends received from your predecessor, the editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review.—‘I subjoin part of a note from the Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, in which having previously informed the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French philosophy, the writer concludes with these words—“_Since this time he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex hoc disce his friends, Lamb and Southey._” With severest truth,’ continues Mr. Coleridge, ‘it may be asserted that it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length, as in the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless, and his wife destitute! _Is it surprising that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done, adverse to a party which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious calumnies?_’

With me, I confess, the wonder does not lie there:—all I am surprised at is, that the objects of these atrocious calumnies were ever reconciled to the authors of them and their patrons. Doubtless, they had powerful arts of conversion in their hands, who could with impunity and in triumph take away by atrocious calumnies the characters of all who disdained to be their tools; and rewarded with honours, places, and pensions all those who were. It is in this manner, Sir, that some of my old friends have become your new allies and associates.—They have changed sides, not I; and the proof that I have been true to the original ground of quarrel is, that I have you against me. Your consistency is the undeniable pledge of their tergiversation. The instinct of self-interest and meanness of servility are infallible and safe; it is speculative enthusiasm and disinterested love of public good, that being the highest strain of humanity, are apt to falter, and ‘dying, make a swan-like end.’ This tendency to change was, in the case of our poetical reformists, precipitated by another cause. The spirit of poetry is, as I believe, favourable to liberty and humanity, but not when its aid is most wanted, in encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry may be described as having the range of the universe; it traverses the empyrean, and looks down on nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its element is the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of a dazzling brightness, ‘sky-tinctured,’ and the least soil upon them shews to disadvantage. Sullied, degraded as I have seen it, I shall not here insult over it, but leave it to Time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, I should do it wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’—The reason why I have not changed my principles with some of the persons here alluded to, is, that I had a natural inveteracy of understanding which did not bend to fortune or circumstances. I was not a poet, but a metaphysician; and I suspect that the conviction of an abstract principle is alone a match for the prejudices of absolute power. The love of truth is the best foundation for the love of liberty. In this sense, I might have repeated—

‘Love is not love that alteration finds:
Oh! no, it is an everfixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’

Besides, I had another reason. I owed something to truth, for she had done something for me. Early in life I had made (what I thought) a metaphysical discovery; and after that, it was too late to think of retracting. My pride forbad it: my understanding revolted at it. I could not do better than go on as I had begun. I too, worshipped at no unhallowed shrine, and served in no mean presence. I had laid my hand on the ark, and could not turn back! I have been called ‘a writer of third-rate books.’ For myself, there is no work of mine which I should rate so high, except one, which I dare say you never heard of—An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. I do not think the worse of it on that account; nor though you might not be able to understand it, could you attribute this to the gaudiness of the phraseology, nor the want of thought. I will here, Sir, explain the nature of the argument as clearly and in as few words as I can.

The object of that Essay (and I have written this Letter partly to introduce it through you to the notice of the reader) is to leave free play to the social affections, and to the cultivation of the more disinterested and generous principles of our nature, by removing a stumbling-block which has been thrown in their way, and which turns the very idea of virtue or humanity into a fable, viz. the metaphysical doctrine of the innate and necessary selfishness of the human mind. Do you understand so far? The question I propose to examine is not the practical question, how far man is more or less selfish or social in the actual sum-total of his habits and affections, nor the moral or political question, to what degree of perfection he can be advanced still further in the one, or weaned from the other; but my intention is to state and answer the previous question, whether there is, as it has been contended, a total incapacity and physical impossibility in the human mind, of feeling an interest in anything beyond itself, so that both the common feelings of compassion, natural affection, friendship, etc. and the more refined and abstracted ones of the love of justice, of country, or of kind, are, and must be a delusion, believed in only by fools, and turned to their advantage by knaves. This doctrine which has been sedulously and confidently maintained by the French and English metaphysicians of the two last centuries, by Hobbes, Mandeville, Rochefoucault, Helvetius and others, and is a principal corner-stone of what is called the modern philosophy, I think tends to, and has done a great deal of mischief, and I believe I have found out a view of the subject, which gets rid of it unanswerably and for ever, in manner and form following. I conceive, that to establish the doctrine of exclusive and absolute selfishness on a metaphysical basis, that is to say, on the original and impassable distinction of the faculties of the human mind, it is necessary to make it appear, that there is some peculiar and abstracted principle which gives it an immediate, mechanical, and irresistible interest in whatever relates to itself, and which by the same rule shuts out and is a bar to the very possibility of our feeling not an equal, but any kind or degree of interest whatever, at any moment of our lives, in the history and fate of others. This is so far from being true, that the contrary is demonstrable. Thus, Sir, My self-interest in anything signifies (by the statement) the particular manner in which whatever relates to myself affects me, so as to create an anxiety about it, and be a motive to action. Now the same word, _self_, is indifferently applied to the whole of my being, past, present, and to come; and it is supposed from the use of language and the habitual association of ideas, that this self is _one thing_ as well as one word, and my interest in it all along the same necessary, identical interest. That a man must love himself as such, seems a self-evident and simple proposition. The idea appears like an absolute truth, and resists every attempt at analysis, like an element in nature. Some persons, who formerly took the pains to read this work, imagined (do not be alarmed, Sir!) that I wanted to argue them out of their own existence, merely because I endeavoured to define the nature and meaning of this word, self; to take in pieces, by metaphysical aid, this fine illusion of the brain and forgery of language, and to shew what there is real, and what false in it. The word denotes, by common consent, three different selves, my past, my present, and my future self. Now it is taken for granted by some, and insisted upon by others, that I must have the same unavoidable interest in all these, because they are all equally myself. But that is impossible; for in truth my personal identity is founded only on my personal consciousness, and that does not extend beyond the present moment.—It must be maintained, on the other side of the question, that my past, my present, and my future self are inseparably linked together, equally identified by an intimate communion of transferable thoughts and feelings in one metaphysical principle of self-interest, before they can be equally myself, the same identical thing, to any purpose of sentiment or for any motive of action. It will easily be seen how far this is the case, and how far it is not. I have a peculiar, exclusive self-interest or sympathy (never mind the word, Sir,) with my present self, by means of sensation (or consciousness), and with my past self, by means of memory, which I have not, and cannot have with the past or present feelings or interests of others; for this reason that these faculties are exclusive, peculiar, and confined to myself. But I have no exclusive, or peculiar, or independent faculty, like sensation or memory, giving me the same absolute, unavoidable, instinctive interest in my own future sensations, and none at all in those of others. This ideal self is then nominally the same, but strictly different; composed of distinct and unequal parts; bound together by laws and principles which have no parity of relation to each other. By shewing how personal identity produces self-interest as far as it goes, we shall see exactly when and how it ceases.—If I touch a burning coal, this gives me a present sensation differing in kind and degree from any impression I can receive from the same sensation being inflicted on another: there is no communication between another’s nerves and my brain producing a correspondent jar and magnetic sympathy of frame. Again, if I have suffered a pain of this sort in time past, this leaves traces in my mind, by my continued identity with myself, or by means of memory, of a kind totally distinct from any conception I can form of the same pain inflicted a year ago (for instance) on another. These two important faculties then give me an appropriate and exclusive interest only in what happens or has happened to myself. So far as the operation of these two faculties goes, I am strictly a selfish being, I am necessarily cut off from all knowledge of or sympathy with the feelings of any one but myself. But if I am to undergo a certain pain at a future time, the next year or the next moment, however near or remote, I have no faculty impressing this feeling intuitively and with mechanical force and certainty on my mind beforehand, as my present or past impressions are stamped upon it by means of sensation and memory. I have no principle of thought or sentiment in the original conformation of my mind, projecting me forward into my future being, giving me a present unavoidable consciousness of it, and removed from all cognisance of what happens to others; I have no faculty identifying my future interests inseparably with my present feelings, and therefore I have no exclusive, mechanical and proper self-interest in them, merely because they are mine: for that which is _mine_, is that which touches me by secret springs, and in a way in which what relates to others can take no hold of me. The only faculty by which I can anticipate what is to befal myself in future, is the same common and disposable faculty in kind and in mode of operation, by which I can, I do, and must anticipate in degree, and more or less according to circumstances, the feelings and thoughts of others, and take a proportionable interest in them, viz. the Imagination. To suppose that there is a principle of self-interest in the mind, without a faculty of self-interest, is an absurdity and a contradiction. This idea of an abstract, exclusive, metaphysical self-interest in my own being generally, is taken (by a gross and blind prejudice) from the manner in which the faculties of sensation and memory affect me, and applied to a part of my being, where I have no such interest in myself, because I have no such faculty giving it me. What proves that there is no mechanical sympathy identifying my future with my present being, is, that I am for the most part, indifferent to, ignorant of what is to happen to myself hereafter. There is no presentiment in the case. If the house is about to fall on my head, this occasions no uneasiness to my self-love, unless there are circumstances to alarm my imagination beforehand. To suppose, that besides the ideal or rational interest I have in the event, I have another _real_ metaphysical interest in it, without object or consciousness, is as if I should say, that I have a particular interest in the past, without remembering it, or in the present without feeling it.—But the future is the only subject of action, that is, of a practical or rational interest at all, either of self-love or benevolence. All voluntary action, that is, all action undertaken with a view to produce a certain event or the contrary, must relate to the future. The primary, essential motive of the volition of anything must be the _idea_ of that thing, and the idea solely. For the thing itself, which is the object of desire and pursuit, is by the supposition a nonentity. It is _willed_ for that very reason, that it is supposed not to exist. If it did exist, or had existed, it would be absurd to will it to exist or not to exist; and as a thing which does not exist, but which we will to be or not to be, it is a mere fiction of the mind, and can exert no power over the thoughts, nor influence the will or the affections in any way, except through the imagination. The future, whether as it relates to myself or others, exists only in the mind; and in the mind, not by memory, not by sensation, which are exclusive and selfish faculties, but by the imagination, which is not a limited, narrow faculty, but common, discursive, and social. If my sympathy with others is not a sensible substantial mechanical interest, neither is my self-interest anything but an imaginary and ideal one, I am bound to my future interest only by the same fine links of fancy and reason, which give that of others a hold on my affections. As a voluntary agent, I am necessarily, and in the first instance, that is, in the metaphysical sense of the question, a disinterested one. I could not love myself, if I were not so formed, as to be capable of loving others. I have no solid, material, gross, actual self-interest in my own future welfare, and I therefore can only have the same airy, notional, hypothetical interest in it, which I must have in kind, though not in degree, in the pleasures and pains of others, which I get at the knowledge of and sympathise with in the same way. There is then no exclusive ground of self-interest, incompatible with sympathy, and rendering it a chimera; self-love and sympathy both rest on the same general ground of reason, of imagination, and of common sense.—It may be said, that my own future interests have a reality beyond the mere idea. So have the interests of others, and the only question is, whether the sympathy, the motive to action, is not equally imaginary in both cases. It may be said, that I shall become my future self, but that is no reason why I should take a particular interest in it till I do. If a pin pricks me in any part of my body, I am instantly apprised of it, and feel an interest in removing it; but my future self does not find any means of apprising me of its sensations, in which I can feel no interest, except from previous apprehension. Lastly, it may be said that I do feel an interest in myself and my future welfare, which I do not, and cannot feel in that of others. This I grant; but that does not prove a metaphysical antecedent self-interest, precluding the possibility of all interest in others, (for the social affections are as much a matter of fact, as the influence of self-love) but a practical self-interest, arising out of habit and circumstances, and more or less consistent with other disinterested and humane feelings, according to habit, opinion, and circumstances. I love myself better than my neighbour, for the same reason (and for no other) that I love my child better than a stranger’s—from having my thoughts more fixed upon its welfare, my time more taken up in providing for it, and from my knowing better by experience, what its wants and wishes are. People have accounted for natural affection as an innate idea, as they have for self-love. According to the metaphysical doctrine of selfishness, my own child or a stranger’s, and every one else, are equally and perfectly indifferent to me, as much as if they were mere machines. As to a paramount universal abstract notion of personal identity, impelling and overruling all my actions, thoughts, feelings, etc. to one sole object, and centre of self-interest, there is no such thing in nature. It requires almost as much pains and discipline, to make us attentive to our own real and permanent happiness, as to that of others. Is it not the constant theme of moralists and divines, that man is the sport of impulse, and the creature of habit? I would ask, whether the convivialist is deterred from indulging in his love of the bottle, by any consideration of the ruin of his health or business? Is the debauchee restrained in the career of his passions, any more by reflecting on the disgrace or probable diseases he is bringing on himself, than on the injury he does to others? It would be as hard a task to make the spendthrift prudent, as the miser generous. Man is governed by his passions, and not by his interest.—The selfish theory is founded on mixing up vulgar prejudices, and scholastic distinctions; and by being insisted on, tends to debase the mind, and not at all promote the cause of truth.

I do not think I should illustrate the foregoing reasoning so well by anything I could add on the subject, as by relating the manner in which it first struck me. I remember I had been reading a speech which Mirabaud (the author of the work, called the System of Nature) has put into the mouth of a supposed infidel at the day of Judgment; and was afterwards led on by some means or other, to consider the question, whether it could properly be said to be an act of virtue in any one to sacrifice his own final happiness to that of any other person, or number of persons, if it were possible for the one ever to be made the price of the other. Suppose it be my own case—that it were in my power to save twenty other persons, by voluntarily consenting to suffer for them, why should I not do a generous thing, and never trouble myself about what might be the consequences to myself thousands of years hence? Now the reason, I thought, why a man should prefer his own future welfare to that of others, was, that he has a necessary, or abstract interest in the one, which he cannot have in the other, and this again is the consequence of his being always the same individual, of his continued identity with himself. The distinction is this, that however insensible I may be to my own interest at any future period, yet when the time comes, I shall feel very differently about it. I shall then judge of it from the actual impression of the object, that is, truly and certainly; and as I shall still be conscious of my past feelings, and shall bitterly repent my own folly and insensibility, I ought, as a rational agent, to be determined now by what I shall then wish I had done, when I shall feel the consequences of my actions most deeply and sensibly. It is this continued consciousness of my own feelings which gives me an immediate interest in whatever relates to my future welfare, and makes me at all times accountable to myself for my own conduct. As therefore this consciousness will be renewed in me after death, if I exist again at all—But stop——As I must be conscious of my past feelings to be myself, and as this conscious being will be myself, how, if that consciousness should be transferred to some other being? How am I to know that I am not imposed upon by a false claim of identity? But that is impossible, because I shall have no other self than that which arises from this very consciousness. Why then, if so, this self may be multiplied in as many different beings as the Deity may think proper to endue with the same consciousness, which, if it can be renewed by an act of omnipotence in any one instance, may clearly be so in a hundred others. Am I to regard all these as equally myself? Am I equally interested in the fate of all? Or if I must fix upon some one of them in particular as my representative and other self, how am I to be determined in my choice?——Here then I saw an end to my speculations about absolute self-interest and personal identity. I saw plainly, that the consciousness of my own feelings, which is made the foundation of my continued interest in them, could not extend to what had never been, and might never be, that my identity with myself must be confined to the connection between my past and present being, that with respect to my future feelings and interests they could have no communication with, or influence over my present feelings and interests, merely because they were future, that I shall be hereafter affected by the recollection of my former feelings and actions, and my remorse be equally heightened by reflecting on my past folly, and late-earned wisdom, whether I am really the same thinking being, or have only the same consciousness renewed in me; but that to suppose that this remorse can re-act in the reverse order on my present feelings, or create an immediate interest in my future feelings before it exists, is an express contradiction. For, how can this pretended unity of consciousness which is only reflected from the past, which makes me so little acquainted with the future, that I cannot even tell for a moment how long it will be continued, whether it will be entirely interrupted by, or renewed in me after death, and which might be multiplied in I don’t know how many different beings, and prolonged by complicated sufferings, without my being any the wiser for it; how, I ask, can a principle of this sort transfuse my present into my future being, and make me as much a participator in what does not at all affect me as if it were actually impressed upon my senses? I cannot, therefore, have a principle of active self-interest arising out of the connexion between my future and present being, for no such connexion exists or is possible. I am what I am in spite of the future. My feelings, actions, and interests are determined by causes already existing and acting, and cannot depend on anything else, without a complete transposition of the order in which effects follow one another in nature.

In this manner, Sir, may a man learn to distinguish the limits which circumscribe his identity with himself, and the frail tenure on which he holds his fleeting existence. Here indeed, ‘on this bank and shoal of time,’ we give ourselves credit for a few years, and so far make sure of our continued identity—as far as we can see the horizon before us, while the same busy scene exists, while the same objects, passions, and pursuits engross our attention, we seem to grasp the realities of things; they are incorporated with our imagination and take hold of our affections, and we cannot doubt of our interest in them. Farther than this, we do not go with the same confidence; the indistinctness of another state of being takes away its reality, and we lose the abstract idea of self for want of objects to attach it to. But the reasoning is the same in both cases. The next year, the next hour, the next moment is but a creation of the mind; in all that we hope or fear, love or hate, in all that is nearest and dearest to us, we but mistake the strength of illusion for certainty, and follow the mimic shews of things and catch at a shadow and live in a waking dream. Everything before us exists in an ideal world. The future is a blank and dreary void, like sleep or death, till the imagination brooding over it with wings outspread, impregnates it with life and motion. The forms and colours it assumes are but the pictures reflected on the eye of fancy, the unreal mockeries of future events. The solid fabric of time and nature moves on, but the future always flies before it. The present moment stands on the brink of nothing. We cannot pass the dread abyss, or make a broad and beaten way over it, or construct a real interest in it, or identify ourselves with what is not, or have a being, sense, and motion, where there are none. Our interest in the future, our identity with it, cannot be substantial; that self which we project before us into it is like a shadow in the water, a bubble of the brain. In becoming the blind and servile drudges of self-interest, we bow down before an idol of our own making, and are spell-bound by a name. Those objects to which we are most attached, make no part of our present sensations or real existence; they are fashioned out of nothing, and rivetted to our self-love by the force of a reasoning imagination, (the privilege of our intellectual nature)—and it is the same faculty that carries us out of ourselves as well as beyond the present moment, that pictures the thoughts, passions and feelings of others to us, and interests us in them, that clothes the whole possible world with a borrowed reality, that breathes into all other forms the breath of life, and endows our sympathies with vital warmth, and diffuses the soul of morality through all the relations and sentiments of our social being.

Such, Sir, is the metaphysical discovery of which I spoke; and which I made many years ago. From that time I felt a certain weight and tightness about my heart taken off, and cheerful and confident thoughts springing up in the place of anxious fears and sad forebodings. The plant I had sown and watered with my tears, grew under my eye; and the air about it was wholesome and pleasant. For this cause it is, that I have gone on little discomposed by other things, by good or adverse fortune, by good or ill report, more hurt by public disappointments than my own, and not thrown into the hot or cold fits of a tertian ague; as the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review damps or raises the opinion of the town in my favour. I have some love of fame, of the fame of a Pascal, a Leibnitz, or a Berkeley (none at all of popularity) and would rather that a single inquirer after truth should pronounce my name, after I am dead, with the same feelings that I have thought of theirs, than be puffed in all the newspapers, and praised in all the reviews, while I am living. I myself have been a thinker; and I cannot but believe that there are and will be others, like me. If the few and scattered sparks of truth, which I have been at so much pains to collect, should still be kept alive in the minds of such persons, and not entirely die with me, I shall be satisfied.

I am, Sir,
Yours, etc.
WILLIAM HAZLITT.

End of A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD.

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Footnote 72:

See the Examiner, Feb. 9.

Footnote 73:

‘I hated my profession’ (the business of a shoemaker, to which he was
bound prentice) ‘with a perfect hatred.’ See _Mr. Gifford’s Life of
Himself prefixed to his Juvenal_. He seems to have liked few things
else better from that day to this. He tells us in the same work
(though this is hardly what I should call being ‘a good hater’) that
he did not much like his father, and was not sorry when he died. This
candid and amiable personage always overflowed with ‘the milk of human
kindness.’

Footnote 74:

‘Undoubtedly the translator of Juvenal.’

Footnote 75:

‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Mr. Gifford here seems to
exclude his band of gentlemen-pensioners, whom he pays on earth, from
bursting with obscure worth into the realms of day. It is thus that
Jacobin sentiments sprout from the commonest sympathy, and are even
unavoidable in a government critic, when the common claims of humanity
touch his pity or his self-love.

Footnote 76:

A quotation of Mr. Gifford’s from Shakespeare. Yet he reproaches me
with quoting from Shakespeare.

Footnote 77:

To Apollo.

Footnote 78:

Humanity stands as little in this author’s way as truth when his
object is to please. It was in the same spirit of unmanly adulation
that he struck at Mrs. Robinson’s lameness and ‘her crutches,’ with a
hand, that ought to have been withered in the attempt by the lightning
of public indignation and universal scorn. Mr. Sheridan once spoke of
certain politicians in his day who ‘skulked behind the throne, and
made use of the sceptre as a conductor to carry off the lightning of
national indignation which threatened to consume them.’ There are
certain small critics and poetasters who have always been trying to do
the same thing.

Footnote 79:

This word is not very choice English: the character is not English.

Footnote 80:

See the Mæviad, l. 365, etc.:—

‘I too, whose voice no claims _but truth’s e’er mov’d_,
Who long have seen thy merits, long have lov’d;
Yet lov’d in silence, lest the rout should say,
Too partial friendship tun’d the applausive lay;
Now, now, that all conspire thy name to raise,
May join the shout of unsuspected praise.’

Footnote 81:

‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten
thousand.’—SHAKSPEARE.

Footnote 82:

This character, (which has not been relished,) appeared originally in
a small pamphlet in 1806, called Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, with
a note acknowledging my obligations for the leading ideas to an
article of Mr. Coleridge’s, in the Morning Post, Feb. 1800.

Footnote 83:

This extreme tenderness, it is to be observed, is felt by a person who
in his Life of Ben Jonson, hopes that God will forgive Shakspeare for
having written his plays!

Footnote 84:

It was a phrase, (I have understood,) common in this gentleman’s
mouth, that Robespierre, by destroying the lives of thousands, saved
the lives of millions. Or, as Mr. Wordsworth has lately expressed the
same thought with a different application, ‘Carnage is the daughter of
humanity.’

Footnote 85:

You have spelt it wrong (Marocchius), on purpose for what I know.

Footnote 86:

Quoted from the _Edinburgh Review_, No. 56.

NOTES

THE ROUND TABLE

ON THE LOVE OF LIFE

This essay formed No. 3 of the Round Table series, the first two having been contributed by Leigh Hunt. To numbers 2, 3, 4 the following motto was prefixed: ‘Sociali fœdere mensa. _Milton._ A Table in a social compact joined.’

PAGE

1. _That sage._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to Bacon’s lines—

‘What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or being born, to die?’

which are taken from an epigram in the Greek Anthology.

2. ‘_The school-boy_,’ says _Addison._ See _The Spectator_, No. 93.

‘_Hope and fantastic expectations_,’ _etc._ Jeremy Taylor’s _Holy
Dying_, Chap. i. § 3, par. 4.

‘_An ounce of sweet_,’ _etc._ ‘A dram of sweete is worth a pound
of sowre.’ _The Faerie Queene_, Book I. Canto iii. 30. This
line formed the motto of Leigh Hunt’s _Indicator_.

3. ‘_And that must end us_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 145–151. In
_The Examiner_ Hazlitt publishes the following passage as a
note to this quotation: ‘Many persons have wondered how
Bonaparte was able to survive the shock of that tremendous
height of power from which he fell. But it was that very height
which still rivetted his backward gaze, and made it impossible
for him to take his eye from it, more than from a hideous
spectre. The sun of Austerlitz still rose upon his imagination,
and could not set. The huge fabric of glory which he had
raised, still “mocked his eyes with air.”[87] He who had felt
his existence so intensely could not consent to lose it!’

4. ‘_Are made desperate_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s _Excursion_, Book VI.
The following note is appended to this essay in _The Examiner_:
‘It is proper to notice that an extract from this article
formerly appeared in another publication. A series of
Criticisms on the principal English Poets will shortly be
commenced, and till concluded, will appear alternately with the
other subjects of the Round Table.’ The publication referred to
was _The Morning Chronicle_ for September 4, 1813, where, under
the heading ‘Common Places,’ the substance of the paragraph
beginning ‘The love of life is, in general, the effect,’ and
the following paragraph will be found. The plan for criticisms
of the English Poets was not adhered to. Hazlitt shortly
afterwards (1818) delivered a course of Lectures on the English
Poets which was published in the same year.

ON CLASSICAL EDUCATION

This essay formed the greater part of No. 7 of the Round Table series. The first three paragraphs are from one of Hazlitt’s ‘Common Places’ in _The Morning Chronicle_, September 25, 1813.

PAGE

4. ‘_A discipline of humanity._’ Bacon’s _Essays_, Of Marriage and
Single Life.

‘_Still green with bays_,’ _etc._ Pope’s _Essay on Criticism_,
181–188.

5. _A celebrated political writer._ Probably Cobbett, of whom
Hazlitt says in another place: ‘He is a self-taught man, and
has the faults as well as excellences of that class of persons
in their most striking and glaring excess.’ (_Table Talk_,
Character of Cobbett.)

6. ‘_The world is too much with us_,’ _etc._ Misquoted from
Wordsworth’s Sonnet.

_Falstaff’s reasoning about honour._ See _1 Henry IV._ Act V.
Scene 1.

‘_They that are whole_,’ _etc._ _St. Matthew_, ix. 12.

In _The Examiner_ this essay concluded with the following
passage: ‘We do not think a classical education proper for
women. It may pervert their minds, but it cannot elevate them.
It has been asked, Why a woman should not learn the dead
languages as well as the modern ones? For this plain reason,
that the one are still spoken, and have immediate associations
connected with them, and the other not. A woman may have a
lover who is a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a Spaniard; and it
is well to be provided against every contingency in that way.
But what possible interest can she feel in those old-fashioned
persons, the Greeks and Romans, or in what was done two
thousand years ago? A modern widow would doubtless prefer
Signor Tramezzani[88] to Æneas, and Mr. Conway would be a
formidable rival to Paris. No young lady in our days, in
conceiving an idea of Apollo, can go a step beyond the image of
her favourite poet: nor do we wonder that our old friend, the
Prince Regent, passes for a perfect Adonis in the circles of
beauty and fashion. Women in general have no ideas, except
personal ones. They are mere egotists. They have no passion for
truth, nor any love of what is purely ideal. They hate to
think, and they hate every one who seems to think of anything
but themselves. Everything is to them a perfect nonentity which
does not touch their senses, their vanity, or their interest.
Their poetry, their criticism, their politics, their morality,
and their divinity, are downright affectation. That line in
Milton is very striking—

“He for God only, she for God in him.”[89]

Such is the order of nature and providence; and we should be
sorry to see any fantastic improvements on it. Women are what
they were meant to be; and we wish for no alteration in
their bodies or their minds. They are the creatures of
the circumstances in which they are placed, of sense, of
sympathy and habit. They are exquisitely susceptible of the
passive impressions of things: but to form an idea of pure
understanding or imagination, to feel an interest in _the true_
and _the good_ beyond themselves, requires an effort of which
they are incapable. They want principle, except that which
consists in an adherence to established custom; and this is the
reason of the severe laws which have been set up as a barrier
against every infringement of decorum and propriety in women.
It has been observed by an ingenious writer of the present day,
that women want imagination. This requires explanation. They
have less of that imagination which depends on intensity of
passion, on the accumulation of ideas and feelings round one
object, on bringing all nature and all art to bear on a
particular purpose, on continuity and comprehension of mind;
but for the same reason, they have more fancy, that is greater
flexibility of mind, and can more readily vary and separate
their ideas at pleasure. The reason of that greater presence of
mind which has been remarked in women is, that they are less in
the habit of speculating on what is best to be done, and the
first suggestion is decisive. The writer of this article
confesses that he never met with any woman who could reason,
and with but one reasonable woman. There is no instance of a
woman having been a great mathematician or metaphysician or
poet or painter: but they can dance and sing and act and write
novels and fall in love, which last quality alone makes more
than angels of them. Women are no judges of the characters of
men, except _as men_. They have no real respect for men, or
they never respect them for those qualities, for which they are
respected by men. They in fact regard all such qualities as
interfering with their own pretensions, and creating a
jurisdiction different from their own. Women naturally wish to
have their favourites all to themselves, and flatter their
weaknesses to make them more dependent on their own good
opinion, which, they think, is all that they want. We have,
indeed, seen instances of men, equally respectable and amiable,
equally admired by the women and esteemed by the men, but who
have been ruined by an excess of virtues and accomplishments.’
Leigh Hunt replied to these remarks in the following number of
the Round Table series (February 19, 1815), where he makes
interesting reference to Hazlitt’s appearance and powers.

ON THE TATLER

This essay formed No. 10 of the Round Table series. The substance of it was repeated by Hazlitt in his volume of _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_ (1819). (See the Lecture on ‘The Periodical Essayists.’)

PAGE

7. ‘_The disastrous strokes which his youth suffered._’ ‘Some
distressful stroke that my youth suffered.’ _Othello_, Act I.
Scene 3.

_He dwells with a secret satisfaction._ _The Tatler_, No. 107.

_The club at the ‘Trumpet.’_ _The Tatler_, No. 132.

_The cavalcade of the justice_, _etc._ _The Tatler_, No. 86.

_The upholsterer and his companions._ See _The Tatler_, Nos. 155,
160, and 178.

_A burlesque copy of verses._ _The Tatler_, No. 238. The verses
are by Swift.

8. _Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield._ See p. 157. Betterton is
frequently mentioned in _The Tatler_. See especially No. 167.

_Mr. Penkethman and Mr. Bullock._ See _The Tatler_, No. 88, and
p. 157 of this volume.

‘_The first sprightly runnings._’ Dryden’s _Aurengzebe_, Act IV.
Scene 1.

9. _The Court of Honour._ Addison, in _The Tatler_, No. 250, created
the Court of Honour. He and Steele together wrote the later
papers (Nos. 253, 256, 259, 262, 265) in which the proceedings
of the Court are recorded.

_The Personification of Musical Instruments._ _The Spectator_,
Nos. 153 and 157.

Note. This note is by Leigh Hunt. The authorship of the anonymous
paper (_The Spectator_, No. 95) is uncertain.

_The account of the two sisters._ _The Tatler_, No. 151.

_The married lady._ _The Tatler_, No. 104.

9. _The lover and his mistress._ _The Tatler_, No. 94.

_The bridegroom._ _The Tatler_, No. 82.

_Mr. Eustace and his wife._ _The Tatler_, No. 172.

_The fine dream._ _The Tatler_, No. 117.

_Mandeville’s sarcasm._ Bernard Mandeville (_d._ 1733), author of
_The Fable of the Bees_.

_Westminster Abbey._ _The Spectator_, No. 26.

_Royal Exchange._ _The Spectator_, No. 69.

_The best criticism._ _The Spectator_, No. 226.

10. Note. _An original copy of the ‘Tatler.’_ The octavo edition of
1710–11.

ON MODERN COMEDY

This essay did not form one of the Round Table series, but was published in _The Examiner_ for August 20, 1815, under the heading ‘Theatrical Examiner.’ It was substantially repeated in the _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_ (Lecture VIII., ‘on the Comic Writers of the Last Century’), and was republished _verbatim_ in the posthumous volume entitled _Criticisms and Dramatic Essays on the English Stage_ (1851). The essay is practically a reprint of the first of two letters which Hazlitt wrote to _The Morning Chronicle_ (September 25 and October 15, 1813). The second of these letters has not been republished.

PAGE

10. ‘_Where it must live, or have no life at all._’ _Othello_, Act.
II. Scene 4.

11. ‘_See ourselves as others see us._’ Burns, ‘To a Louse.’

_Wart._ He means Shadow. See _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Scene 2.

12. _Lovelace_, _etc._ Nearly all these characters are discussed in
the _English Comic Writers_. Sparkish is in Wycherley’s
_Country Wife_, Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh’s _Relapse_,
Millamant in Congreve’s _Way of the World_, Sir Sampson Legend
in Congreve’s _Love for Love_.

_We cannot expect_, _etc._ This paragraph appeared originally in
_The Morning Chronicle_, October 15, 1813.

13. ‘_That sevenfold fence._’ ‘The seven-fold shield of Ajax cannot
keep the battery from my heart.’ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act
IV. Scene 14. This passage is taken by Hazlitt from his own
_Reply to Malthus_ (1807).

‘_Mr. Smirk, you are a brisk man._’ Foote’s _Minor_, Act II.

_Aristotle._ In the _Poetics_.

‘_Warm hearts of flesh and blood_,’ _etc._ Quoted, with omissions
and variations, from a passage in Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, ii. 101).

14. ‘_Men’s minds are parcel of their fortunes._’ _Antony and
Cleopatra_, Act III. Scene 13.

ON MR. KEAN’S IAGO

Republished with a few variations from _The Examiner_ of July 24, 1814. Hazlitt afterwards published the original article in _A View of the English Stage_ (1818), and borrowed from it in _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_ (See _ante_, pp. 206–7).

PAGE

14. _A contemporary critic._ This was Hazlitt himself who made this
criticism of Kean in an article in _The Morning Chronicle_ (May
9, 1814), reprinted in _A View of the English Stage_.

‘_Hedged in with the divinity of kings._’ From _Hamlet_, Act IV.
Scene 5.

15. _Play the dog_, _etc._ _3 Henry VI._, Act V. Scene 6.

16. ‘_His cue is villainous melancholy_,’ _etc._ _King Lear_, Act I.
Scene 2.

ON THE LOVE OF THE COUNTRY

This essay was one of a series called Common-places (No. III.) and appeared in _The Examiner_ on November 27, 1814, before the Round Table series commenced. It was not, therefore, addressed, as it purports to be, ‘to the editor of the “Round Table.”’ The greater part of it was repeated in the _Lectures on the English Poets_ (1818) at the end of Lecture V. on Thomson and Cowper.

PAGE

17. _Rousseau in his ‘Confessions.’_ Partie I. Livre III.

18. _The minstrel._ See Beattie’s _Minstrel_, Book I. st. 9.

20. ‘_A farewell sweet._’

‘If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam,’ etc.

_Paradise Lost_, II. 492.

‘_To me the meanest flower_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s Ode,
_Intimations of Immortality_.

‘_Nature did ne’er betray_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s _Lines composed
a few miles above Tintern Abbey_.

21. ‘_Or from the mountain’s sides._’ Collins’s _Ode to Evening_,
stanzas 9 and 10.

ON POSTHUMOUS FAME

This essay is not one of the Round Table series. It appeared in _The Examiner_ on May 22, 1814.

PAGE

22. ‘_Blessings be with them_’ _etc._ Wordsworth’s _Personal Talk_,
stanza 4.

‘_Nor sometimes forget_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 33 _et
seq._

Note. A part of the passage here referred to (from _The Reason of
Church Government urged against Prelacy_) is quoted by Hazlitt
in his _Lectures on the English Poets_ (on Shakspeare and
Milton).

23. ‘_Famous poets’ wit._’ See _The Faerie Queene, Verses addressed
by the author_, No. 2. ‘_Have not the poems of Homer_,’ _etc._
_The Advancement of Learning_, First Book, VIII. 6.

‘_Because on Earth_,’ _etc._ See Dante’s _Inferno_, Canto iv. Cf.
‘On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.’ _The Faerie
Queene_, Book IV. Canto ii. st. 32.

‘_Every variety of untried being._’

‘Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!’

Addison’s _Cato_, Act V. Scene 1.