Chapter XXVI: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (13)

Fashion is an odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies. It exists only by its being participated among a certain number of persons, and its essence is destroyed by being communicated to a greater number. It is a continual struggle between ‘the great vulgar and the small’ to get the start of or keep up with each other in the race of appearances, by an adoption on the part of the one of such external and fantastic symbols as strike the attention and excite the envy or admiration of the beholder, and which are no sooner made known and exposed to public view for this purpose, than they are successfully copied by the multitude, the slavish herd of imitators, who do not wish to be behind-hand with their betters in outward show and pretensions, and which then sink, without any farther notice, into disrepute and contempt. Thus fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy innovation and restless vanity. To be old-fashioned is the greatest crime a coat or a hat can be guilty of. To look like nobody else is a sufficiently mortifying reflection; to be in danger of being mistaken for one of the rabble is worse. Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity. It is the perpetual setting up and disowning a certain standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious from its being common. It is one of the most slight and insignificant of all things. It cannot be lasting, for it depends on the constant change and shifting of its own harlequin disguises; it cannot be sterling, for, if it were, it could not depend on the breath of caprice; it must be superficial, to produce its immediate effect on the gaping crowd; and frivolous, to admit of its being assumed at pleasure by the numbers of those who affect, by being in the fashion, to be distinguished from the rest of the world. It is not any thing in itself, nor the sign of any thing but the folly and vanity of those who rely upon it as their greatest pride and ornament. It takes the firmest hold of the most flimsy and narrow minds, of those whose emptiness conceives of nothing excellent but what is thought so by others, and whose self-conceit makes them willing to confine the opinion of all excellence to themselves and those like them. That which is true or beautiful in itself, is not the less so for standing alone. That which is good for any thing, is the better for being more widely diffused. But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean, and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath—tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute. ‘The fashion of an hour old mocks the wearer.’ It is a sublimated essence of levity, caprice, vanity, extravagance, idleness, and selfishness. It thinks of nothing but not being contaminated by vulgar use, and winds and doubles like a hare, and betakes itself to the most paltry shifts to avoid being overtaken by the common hunt that are always in full chase after it. It contrives to keep up its fastidious pretensions, not by the difficulty of the attainment, but by the rapidity and evanescent nature of the changes. It is a sort of conventional badge, or understood passport into select circles, which must still be varying (like the water-mark in bank-notes) not to be counterfeited by those without the pale of fashionable society; for to make the test of admission to all the privileges of that refined and volatile atmosphere depend on any real merit or extraordinary accomplishment, would exclude too many of the pert, the dull, the ignorant, too many shallow, upstart, and self-admiring pretenders, to enable the few that passed muster to keep one another in any tolerable countenance. If it were the fashion, for instance, to be distinguished for virtue, it would be difficult to set or follow the example; but then this would confine the pretension to a small number, (not the most fashionable part of the community), and would carry a very singular air with it. Or if excellence in any art or science were made the standard of fashion, this would also effectually prevent vulgar imitation, but then it would equally prevent fashionable impertinence. There would be an obscure circle of _virtù_ as well as virtue, drawn within the established circle of fashion, a little province of a mighty empire;—the example of honesty would spread slowly, and learning would still have to boast of a respectable minority. But of what use would such uncourtly and out-of-the-way accomplishments be to the great and noble, the rich and the fair, without any of the _eclat_, the noise and nonsense which belong to that which is followed and admired by all the world alike? The real and solid will never do for the current coin, the common wear and tear of foppery, and fashion. It must be the meretricious, the showy, the outwardly fine, and intrinsically worthless—that which lies within the reach of the most indolent affectation, that which can be put on or off at the suggestion of the most wilful caprice, and for which, through all its fluctuations, no mortal reason can be given, but that it is the newest absurdity in vogue! The shape of a head-dress, whether flat or piled (curl on curl) several stories high by the help of pins and pomatum, the size of a pair of paste buckles, the quantity of gold-lace on an embroidered waistcoat, the mode of taking a pinch of snuff, or of pulling out a pocket-handkerchief, the lisping and affected pronunciation of certain words, the saying _Me’m_ for _Madam_, Lord Foppington’s _Tam and ’Paun honour_, with a regular set of visiting phrases and insipid sentiments ready sorted for the day, were what formerly distinguished the mob of fine gentlemen and ladies from the mob of their inferiors. These marks and appendages of gentility had their day, and were then discarded for others equally peremptory and unequivocal. But in all this chopping and changing, it is generally one folly that drives out another; one trifle that by its specific levity acquires a momentary and surprising ascendency over the last. There is no striking deformity of appearance or behaviour that has not been made ‘the sign of an inward and invisible grace.’ Accidental imperfections are laid hold of to hide real defects. Paint, patches, and powder, were at one time synonymous with health, cleanliness, and beauty. Obscenity, irreligion, small oaths, tippling, gaming, effeminacy in the one sex and Amazon airs in the other, any thing is the fashion while it lasts. In the reign of Charles II., the profession and practice of every species of extravagance and debauchery were looked upon as the indispensable marks of an accomplished cavalier. Since that period the court has reformed, and has had rather a rustic air. Our belles formerly overloaded themselves with dress: of late years, they have affected to go almost naked,—‘and are, when unadorned, adorned the most.’ The women having left off stays, the men have taken to wear them, if we are to believe the authentic Memoirs of the Fudge Family. The Niobe head is at present buried in the _poke_ bonnet, and the French milliners and _marchands des modes_ have proved themselves an overmatch for the Greek sculptors, in matters of taste and costume.

A very striking change has, however, taken place in dress of late years, and some progress has been made in taste and elegance, from the very circumstance, that, as fashion has extended its empire in that direction, it has lost its power. While fashion in dress included what was costly, it was confined to the wealthier classes: even this was an encroachment on the privileges of rank and birth, which for a long time were the only things that commanded or pretended to command respect, and we find Shakespear complaining that ‘the city madam bears the cost of princes on unworthy shoulders;’ but, when the appearing in the top of the mode no longer depended on the power of purchasing certain expensive articles of dress, or the right of wearing them, the rest was so obvious and easy, that any one who chose might cut as coxcombical a figure as the best. It became a matter of mere affectation on the one side, and gradually ceased to be made a matter of aristocratic assumption on the other. ‘In the grand carnival of this our age,’ among other changes this is not the least remarkable, that the monstrous pretensions to distinctions in dress have dwindled away by tacit consent, and the simplest and most graceful have been in the same request with all classes. In this respect, as well as some others, ‘the age is grown so picked, the peasant’s toe comes so near the courtier’s heel, it galls his kibe;’ a lord is hardly to be distinguished in the street from an attorney’s clerk; and a plume of feathers is no longer mistaken for the highest distinction in the land! The ideas of natural equality and the Manchester steam-engines together have, like a double battery, levelled the high towers and artificial structures of fashion in dress, and a white muslin gown is now the common costume of the mistress and the maid, instead of their wearing, as heretofore, rich silks and satins or coarse linsey-wolsey. It would be ridiculous (on a similar principle) for the courtier to take the wall of the citizen, without having a sword by his side to maintain his right of precedence; and, from the stricter notions that have prevailed of a man’s personal merit and identity, a cane dangling from his arm is the greatest extension of his figure that can be allowed to the modern _petit-maître_.

What shews the worthlessness of mere fashion is, to see how easily this vain and boasted distinction is assumed, when the restraints of decency or circumstances are once removed, by the most uninformed and commonest of the people. I know an undertaker that is the greatest prig in the streets of London, and an Aldermanbury haberdasher, that has the most military strut of any lounger in Bond-street or St. James’s. We may, at any time, raise a regiment of fops from the same number of fools, who have vanity enough to be intoxicated with the smartness of their appearance, and not sense enough to be ashamed of themselves. Every one remembers the story in Peregrine Pickle, of the strolling gipsy that he picked up in spite, had well scoured, and introduced her into genteel company, where she met with great applause, till she got into a passion by seeing a fine lady cheat at cards, rapped out a volley of oaths, and let nature get the better of art. Dress is the great secret of address. Clothes and confidence will set anybody up in the trade of modish accomplishment. Look at the two classes of well-dressed females whom we see at the play-house, in the boxes. Both are equally dressed in the height of the fashion, both are _rouged_, and wear their neck and arms bare,—both have the same conscious, haughty, theatrical air;—the same toss of the head, the same stoop in the shoulders, with all the grace that arises from a perfect freedom from embarrassment, and all the fascination that arises from a systematic disdain of formal prudery,—the same pretence and jargon of fashionable conversation,—the same mimicry of tones and phrases,—the same ‘lisping, and ambling, and painting, and nicknaming of Heaven’s creatures;’ the same every thing but real propriety of behaviour, and real refinement of sentiment. In all the externals, they are as like as the reflection in the looking-glass. The only difference between the woman of fashion and the woman of pleasure is, that the one _is_ what the other only _seems to be_; and yet, the victims of dissipation who thus rival and almost outshine women of the first quality in all the blaze, and pride, and glitter of shew and fashion, are, in general, no better than a set of raw, uneducated, inexperienced country girls, or awkward, coarse-fisted servant maids, who require no other apprenticeship or qualification to be on a level with persons of the highest distinction in society, in all the brilliancy and elegance of outward appearance, than that they have forfeited its common privileges, and every title to respect in reality. The truth is, that real virtue, beauty, or understanding, are the same, whether ‘in a high or low degree;’ and the airs and graces of pretended superiority over these which the highest classes give themselves, from mere frivolous and external accomplishments, are easily imitated, with provoking success, by the lowest, whenever they _dare_.

The two nearest things in the world are gentility and vulgarity—

‘And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’

Where there is much affectation of the one, we may be always sure of meeting with a double share of the other. Those who are conscious to themselves of any real superiority or refinement, are not particularly jealous of the adventitious marks of it. Miss Burney’s novels all turn upon this slender distinction. It is the only thing that can be said against them. It is hard to say which she has made out to be the worst; low people always aping gentility, or people in high life always avoiding vulgarity. Mr. Smith and the Brangtons were everlastingly trying to do as their fashionable acquaintances did, and these again were always endeavouring _not_ to do and say what Mr. Smith and the Brangtons did or said. What an instructive game at cross-purposes! ‘Kings are naturally lovers of low company,’ according to the observation of Mr. Burke; because their rank cannot be called into question by it, and they can only hope to find, in the opposite extreme of natural and artificial inequality, any thing to confirm them in the belief, that their personal pretensions at all answer to the ostensible superiority to which they are raised. By associating only with the worst and weakest, they persuade themselves that they are the best and wisest of mankind.

ON NICKNAMES

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_September 1818._

‘Hæ nugæ in seria ducunt.’

This is a more important subject than it seems at first sight. It is as serious in its results as it is contemptible in the means by which those results are brought about. Nicknames for the most part govern the world. The history of politics, of religion, of literature, of morals, and of private life, is too often little less than the history of nicknames. What are half the convulsions of the civilised world, the frequent overthrow of states and kingdoms, the shock and hostile encounter of mighty continents, the battles by sea and land, the intestine commotions, the feuds of the Vitelli and Orsini, of the Guelphs and Gibellines, the civil wars in England, and the League in France, the jealousies and heart-burnings of cabinets and councils, the uncharitable proscriptions of creeds and sects, Turk, Jew, Pagan, Papist and Puritan, Quaker and Methodist,—the persecutions and massacres, the burnings, tortures, imprisonments, and lingering deaths inflicted for a different profession of faith,—but so many illustrations of the power of this principle? Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and Neale’s History of the Puritans, are comments on the same text. The fires in Smithfield were fanned by nicknames, and a nickname set its seal on the unopened dungeons of the Holy Inquisition. Nicknames are the talismans and spells that collect and set in motion all the combustible part of men’s passions and prejudices, which have hitherto played so much more successful a game, and done their work so much more effectually than reason, in all the grand concerns and petty details of human life, and do not yet seem tired of the task assigned them. Nicknames are the convenient portable tools by which they simplify the process of mischief, and get through their job with the least time and trouble. These worthless, unmeaning, irritating, envenomed words of reproach are the established signs by which the different compartments of society are ticketted, labelled, and marked out for each other’s hatred and contempt. They are to be had, ready cut and dry, of all sorts and sizes, wholesale and retail, for foreign exportation or home consumption, and for all occasions in life. ‘The priest calls the lawyer a cheat, the lawyer beknaves the divine.’ The Frenchman hates the Englishman because he is an Englishman, and the Englishman hates the Frenchman for as good a reason. The Whig hates the Tory, and the Tory the Whig. The Dissenter hates the Church-of-England-man, and the Church-of-England-man hates the Dissenter, as if they were of a different species, because they have a different designation. The Mussulman calls the worshipper of the Cross ‘Christian dog,’ spits in his face, and kicks him from the pavement, by virtue of a nickname; and the Papist retorts the indignity upon the Infidel and the Jew by the same infallible rule of right. In France, they damn Shakespear in the lump, by calling him a _barbare_; and we talk of Racine’s _verbiage_ with inexpressible contempt and self-complacency. Among ourselves, an anti-Jacobin critic denounces a Jacobin poet and his friends, at a venture, ‘as infidels and fugitives, who have left their wives destitute, and their children fatherless’—whether they have wives and children or not. The unenlightened savage makes a meal of his enemy’s flesh, after reproaching him with the name of his tribe, because he is differently tattooed; and the literary cannibal cuts up the character of his opponent by the help of a nickname. The jest of all this is, that a party nickname is always a relative term, and has its counter-sign, which has just the same force and meaning, so that both must be perfectly ridiculous and insignificant. A Whig implies a Tory; there must be ‘Malcontents’ as well as ‘Malignants’; Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins; French and English. These sort of _noms des guerres_ derive all their force from their contraries. Take away the meaning of the one, and you take the sting out of the other. They could not exist but upon the strength of mutual and irreconcileable antipathies; there must be no love lost between them. What is there in the names themselves to give them a preference over each other? ‘Sound them, they do become the mouth as well; weigh them, they are as heavy; conjure with them, one will raise a spirit as soon as the other.’ If there were not fools and madmen who hated both, there could not be fools and madmen bigotted to either. I have heard an eminent character boast that he had done more to produce the late war by nicknaming Buonaparte ‘the Corsican,’ than all the state-papers and documents on the subject put together. And yet Mr. Southey asks triumphantly, ‘Is it to be supposed that it is England, _our_ England, to whom that war was owing?’ As if, in a dispute between two countries, the conclusive argument which lies in the pronoun _our_, belonged only to one of them. I like Shakespear’s version of the matter better:

‘Hath Britain all the sun that shines? day, night,
Are they not but in Britain? I’ th’ world’s volume
_Our_ Britain seems as of it, but not in it;
In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee think
There’s livers out of Britain.’

In all national disputes, it is common to appeal to the numbers on your side as decisive on the point. If every body in England thought the late war right, every body in France thought it wrong. There were ten millions on one side of the question, (or rather of the water), and thirty millions on the other side. That’s all. I remember some one arguing, in justification of our ministers interfering on that occasion, ‘That governments would not go to war for nothing;’ to which I answered, Then they could not go to war at all, for, at that rate, neither of them could be in the wrong, and yet both of them must be in the right, which was absurd. The only meaning of these vulgar nicknames and party-distinctions, where they are urged most violently and confidently, is, that others differ from you in some particular or other, (whether it be opinion, dress, clime, complexion), which you highly disapprove of, forgetting, that, by the same rule, they have the very same right to be offended at you because you differ from them. Those who have reason on their side do not make the most obstinate and furious appeals to prejudice and abusive language. I know but of one exception to this general rule, and that is, where the things that excite disgust are of such a kind that they cannot well be gone into without offence to decency and good manners; but it is equally certain in this case, that those who are most shocked at the things are not those who are most forward to apply the names. A person will not be fond of repeating a charge, or adverting to a subject, that inflicts a wound on his own feelings, even for the sake of wounding the feelings of another. A man should be very sure that he himself is not what he has always in his mouth. The greatest prudes have been often accounted the greatest hypocrites, and a satirist is at best but a suspicious character. The loudest and most unblushing invectives against vice and debauchery will as often proceed from a desire to inflame and pamper the passions of the writer, by raking into a nauseous subject, as from a wish to excite virtuous indignation against it in the public mind, or to reform the individual. To familiarise the mind to gross ideas is not the way to increase your own or the general repugnance to them. But, to return to the subject of nicknames.

The use of this figure of speech is, that it excites a strong idea without requiring any proof. It is a shorthand compendious mode of getting at a conclusion, and never troubling yourself or any body else with the formalities of reasoning or the dictates of common sense. It is superior to all evidence, for it does not rest upon any, and operates with the greatest force and certainty in proportion to the utter want of probability. Belief is only a strong impression, and the malignity or extravagance of the accusation passes for a proof of the crime. ‘Brevity is the soul of wit;’ and of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise, and of all arguments the most unanswerable. It gives _carte blanche_ to the imagination, throws the reins on the neck of the passions, and suspends the use of the understanding altogether. It does not stand upon ceremony, on the nice distinctions of right and wrong. It does not wait the slow processes of reason, or stop to unravel the web of sophistry. It takes every thing for granted that serves for nourishment for the spleen. It is instantaneous in its operations. There is nothing to interpose between the effect and it. It is passion without proof, and action without thought,—‘the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations.’ It does not, as Mr. Burke expresses it, ‘leave the will puzzled, undecided, and sceptical in the moment of action.’ It is a word and a blow.

‘Bring but a Scotsman frae his hill,
Clap in his cheek a Highland gill,
Say such is royal George’s will,
And there’s the foe,
He has nae thought but how to kill
Twa at a blow.’

The ‘No Popery’ cry, raised a little while ago, let loose all the lurking spite and prejudice which had lain rankling in the proper receptacles for them for above a century, without any knowledge of the past history of the country which had given rise to them, or any reference to their connection with present circumstances; for the knowledge of the one would have prevented the possibility of their application to the other. Facts present a tangible and definite idea to the mind, a train of causes and consequences, accounting for each other, and leading to a positive conclusion—but no farther. But a nickname is tied down to no such limited service; it is a disposable force, that is almost always perverted to mischief. It clothes itself with all the terrors of uncertain abstraction, and there is no end of the abuse to which it is liable but the cunning of those who employ, or the credulity of those who are gulled by it. It is a reserve of the ignorance, bigotry, and intolerance of weak and vulgar minds, brought up where reason fails, and always ready, at a moment’s warning, to be applied to any, the most absurd purposes. If you bring specific charges against a man, you thereby enable him to meet and repel them, if he thinks it worth his while; but a nickname baffles reply, by the very vagueness of the inferences from it, and gives increased activity to the confused, dim, and imperfect notions of dislike connected with it, from their having no settled ground to rest upon. The mind naturally irritates itself against an unknown object of fear or jealousy, and makes up for the blindness of its zeal by an excess of it. We are eager to indulge our hasty feelings to the utmost, lest, by stopping to examine, we should find that there is no excuse for them. The very consciousness of the injustice we may be doing another makes us only the more loud and bitter in our invectives against him. We keep down the admonitions of returning reason, by calling up a double portion of gratuitous and vulgar spite. The will may be said to act with most force _in vacuo_; the passions are the most ungovernable when they are blindfolded. That malignity is always the most implacable which is accompanied with a sense of weakness, because it is never satisfied of its own success or safety. A nickname carries the weight of the pride, the indolence, the cowardice, the ignorance, and the ill-nature of mankind on its side. It acts, by mechanical sympathy, on the nerves of society. Any one who is without character himself may make himself master of the reputation of another by the application of a nickname, as, if you do not mind soiling your fingers, you may always throw dirt on another. No matter how undeserved the imputation, it will stick; for, though it is sport to the bye-standers to see you bespattered, they will not stop to see you wipe out the stains. You are not heard in your own defence; it has no effect, it does not tell, excites no sensation, or it is only felt as a disappointment of their triumph over you. Their passions and prejudices are inflamed by the charge, ‘as rage with rage doth sympathise;’ by vindicating yourself, you merely bring them back to common sense, which is a very sober, mawkish state. _Give a dog a bad name, and hang him_, is a proverb. ‘A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man.’ It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe it, it still haunts our apprehensions. Let a nickname be industriously applied to our dearest friend, and let us know that it is ever so false and malicious, yet it will answer its end; it connects the person’s name and idea with an ugly association, you think of them with pain together, or it requires an effort of indignation or magnanimity on your part to disconnect them; it becomes an uneasy subject, a sore point, and you will sooner desert your friend, or join in the conspiracy against him, than be constantly forced to repel charges without truth or meaning, and have your penetration or character called in question by a rascal. Nay, such is the unaccountable construction of language and of the human mind, that the affixing the most innocent or praiseworthy appellation to any individual or set of individuals, _as a nickname_, has all the effect of the most opprobrious epithets. Thus the cant name ‘The Talents,’ was successfully applied as a stigma to the Whigs at one time; it held them up to ridicule, and made them obnoxious to public feeling, though it was notorious to every body that the Whig leaders were ‘the Talents,’ and that their adversaries nicknamed them so from real hatred and pretended derision. ‘The Party’ is now substituted for ‘the Talents,’ since success has given their own set the monstrous affectation of being men of talents; and the poor Morning Chronicle is persecuted daily as the Party as it formerly stood the brunt (innocently enough) of all the abuse and sarcasms that were showered on the Talents. Call a man short by his Christian name, as Tom or Dick such a one, or by his profession, (however respectable), as Canning pelted a noble lord with his left-off title of Doctor,—and you undo him for ever, if he has a reputation to lose. Such is the tenaciousness of spite and ill-nature, or the jealousy of public opinion, even this will be peg enough to hang doubtful inuendos, weighty dilemmas upon. ‘With so small a web as this will I catch so great a fly as Cassio.’ The public do not like to see their favourites treated with impertinent familiarity—it lowers the tone of admiration very speedily. It implies that some one stands in no great awe of their idol, and he perhaps may know as much about the matter as they do. It seems as if a man whose name, with some contemptuous abbreviation, is always dinned in the public ear, was distinguished by nothing else. By repeating a man’s name in this manner you may soon make him sick of it, and of his life too. Mr. Southey has by this time, I should suppose, a tolerable surfeit of his title of Laureate! Children do not like to be _called out of their names_. It is questioning their personal identity. A writer, who has made his vocabulary rich in nicknames, (the late Editor of the Times,) thought he had made a great acquisition to his stock, when it was pretended at one time that Bonaparte’s real name was not Napoleon but Nicholas. He congratulated himself on this discovery, as a standing jest and a lasting triumph. Yet there was nothing in the name to signify. Nicholas Poussin was an instance of a great man in the last age, and in our own times, have we not Nicholas Vansittart? The same writer has the merit of having carried this figure of speech as far as it would go. He fairly worried his readers into conviction by abuse and nicknames. People surrendered their judgments to escape the persecution of his style, and the disgust and indignation which his incessant violence and vulgarity excited, at last made you hate those who were the objects of it. _Causa causæ causa causati._ He made people sick of a subject by making them sick of his arguments. Yet he attributed the effect he produced to the eloquence of his phraseology and the force of his reasonings!

A parrot may be taught to call names; and if the person who keeps the parrot has a spite to his neighbours, he may give them a great deal of annoyance without much wit, either in the employer or the puppet. The insignificance of the instrument has nothing to do with the efficacy of the means. Hotspur would have had ‘a _starling_ taught to repeat nothing but Mortimer,’ in the ears of his enemy. Nature, it is said, has given arms to all creatures the most proper to defend themselves, and annoy others: to the lowest she has given the use of nicknames.

There are some droll instances of the effect of proper names combined with circumstances. A young student had come up to London from Cambridge, and went in the evening and planted himself in the pit of the play-house. He had not been seated long when, in one of the front boxes near him, he discovered one of his college tutors, with whom he felt an immediate and strong desire to claim acquaintance, and called out in a low and respectful voice, ‘Dr. Topping!’ The appeal was, however, ineffectual. He then repeated in a louder tone, but still in an under key, so as not to excite the attention of any one but his friend, ‘Dr. Topping!’ The Doctor took no notice. He then grew more impatient, and repeated ‘Dr. Topping, Dr. Topping!’ two or three times pretty loud, to see whether the Doctor did not or would not hear him. Still the Doctor remained immovable. The joke began at length to get round, and one or two persons, as he continued his invocations of the Doctor’s name, joined with him in them; these were reinforced by others calling out, ‘Dr. Topping! Dr. Topping!’ on all sides, so that he could no longer avoid perceiving it, and at length the whole pit rose and roared, ‘Dr. Topping!’ with loud and repeated cries, and the Doctor was forced to retire precipitately, frightened at the sound of his own name. There is sometimes an inconvenience in common as well as uncommon names. On the night that Garrick took his leave of the stage, an inveterate playgoer could not get a seat in any part of the house. At length he went up into the gallery, but found that equally full with the rest. In this extremity a thought struck him, and he called out as loud as he could, ‘Mr. Smith, you’re wanted. Your wife’s taken suddenly ill, and you must go home immediately.’ In an instant, half a dozen persons started up from different parts of the gallery to go out, and the gentleman took possession of the first place that offered. No doubt these persons would be disposed to quarrel with their names and their wives for some time after.

The calling people by their Christian or surnames is a proof of affection, as well as of hatred. They are generally the best good fellows with whom their friends take this sort of liberty. _Diminutives_ are titles of endearment. Dr. Johnson’s calling Goldsmith ‘Goldy’ did equal honour to both. It shewed the regard he had for him. This familiarity may perhaps imply a certain want of formal respect; but formal respect is not necessary to, if it is consistent with, cordial friendship. Titles of honour are the reverse of nicknames,—they convey the idea of respect as the others do of contempt, and equally mean little or nothing. Junius’s motto, _Stat nominis umbra_, is a very significant one, it might be extended farther. A striking instance of the force of names, standing by themselves, is in the respect felt towards Michael Angelo in this country. We know nothing of him but his name. It is an abstraction of fame and greatness. Our admiration of him supports itself, and our idea of his superiority seems self-evident, because it is attached to his name only. Some of our artists seem trying to puff their names into reputation from an instinctive knowledge of this principle,—by talking incessantly of themselves and doing nothing. It is not, indeed, easy to deny the merit of the works—which they do _not_ produce. Those which they have produced are very bad.

THOUGHTS ON TASTE

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_Oct. 1818._

Taste is nothing but sensibility to the different degrees and kinds of excellence in the works of art or nature. This definition will perhaps be disputed; for I am aware the general practice is to make it consist in a disposition to find fault.

A French man or woman will in general conclude their account of Voltaire’s denunciation of Shakespeare and Milton as barbarians, on the score of certain technical improprieties, with assuring you, that ‘he (Voltaire) had a great deal of taste.’ It is their phrase, _Il avait beaucoup du goût_. To which the proper answer is, that that might be; but that he did not shew it in this case; as the overlooking great and countless beauties, and being taken up only with petty or accidental blemishes, shews as little strength of understanding as it does refinement or elevation of taste. The French author, indeed, allows of Shakespeare, that ‘he had found a few pearls on his enormous dunghill.’ But there is neither truth nor proportion in this sentence, for his works are (to say the least),

‘Rich as the oozy bottom of the sea,
With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.’

Genius is the power of producing excellence: taste is the power of perceiving the excellence thus produced in its several sorts and degrees, with all their force, refinement, distinctions, and connections. In other words, taste (as it relates to the productions of art) is strictly the power of being properly affected by works of genius. It is the proportioning admiration to power, pleasure to beauty: it is entire sympathy with the finest impulses of the imagination, not antipathy, not indifference to them. The eye of taste may be said to reflect the impressions of real genius, as the even mirror reflects the objects of nature in all their clearness and lustre, instead of distorting or diminishing them;

‘Or like a gate of steel,
Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
His figure and his heat.’

To take a pride and pleasure in nothing but defects (and those perhaps of the most paltry, obvious, and mechanical kind)—in the disappointment and tarnishing of our faith in substantial excellence, in the proofs of weakness, not of power, (and this where there are endless subjects to feed the mind with wonder and increased delight through years of patient thought and fond remembrance), is not a sign of uncommon refinement, but of unaccountable perversion of taste. So, in the case of Voltaire’s hypercriticisms on Milton and Shakespeare, the most common-place and prejudiced admirer of these authors knows, as well as Voltaire can tell him, that it is a fault to make a sea-port (we will say) in Bohemia, or to introduce artillery and gunpowder in the war in Heaven. This is common to Voltaire, and the merest English reader: there is nothing in it either way. But what he differs from us in, and, as it is supposed, greatly to his advantage, and to our infinite shame and mortification, is, that this is all that he perceives, or will hear of in Milton or Shakespeare, and that he either knows, or pretends to know, nothing of that prodigal waste, or studied accumulation of grandeur, truth, and beauty, which are to be found in each of these authors. Now, I cannot think, that, to be dull and insensible to so great and such various excellence,—to have no feeling in unison with it, no latent suspicion of the treasures hid beneath our feet, and which we trample upon with ignorant scorn, to be cut off, as by a judicial blindness, from that universe of thought and imagination that shifts its wondrous pageant before us, to turn aside from the throng and splendour of airy shapes that fancy weaves for our dazzled sight, and to strut and vapour over a little pettifogging blunder in geography or chronology, which a school-boy, or a village pedagogue, would be ashamed to insist upon, is any proof of the utmost perfection of taste, but the contrary. At this rate, it makes no difference whether Shakespeare wrote his works or not, or whether the critic, who ‘damns him into everlasting redemption’ for a single slip of the pen, ever read them;—he is absolved from all knowledge, taste, or feeling, of the different excellencies, and inimitable creations of the poet’s pen—from any sympathy with the wanderings and the fate of Imogen, the beauty and tenderness of Ophelia, the thoughtful abstraction of Hamlet; his soliloquy on life may never have given him a moment’s pause, or touched his breast with one solitary reflection;—the Witches in Macbeth may ‘lay their choppy fingers upon their skinny lips’ without making any alteration in his pulse,—and Lear’s heart may break in vain for him;—he may hear no strange noises in Prospero’s island,—and the moonlight that sleeps on beds of flowers, where fairies couch in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, may never once have steeped his senses in repose. Nor will it avail Milton to ‘have built high towers in Heaven,’ nor to have brought down heaven upon earth, nor that he has made Satan rear his giant form before us, ‘majestic though in ruin,’ or decked the bridal bed of Eve with beauty, or clothed her with innocence, ‘likest heaven,’ as she ministered to Adam, and his angel guest. Our critic knows nothing of all this, of beauty or sublimity, of thought or passion, breathed in sweet or solemn sounds, with all the magic of verse ‘in tones and numbers hit;’ he lays his finger on the map, and shews you, that there is no sea-port for Shakespeare’s weather-beaten travellers to land at in Bohemia, and takes out a list of mechanical inventions, and proves that gunpowder was not known till long after Milton’s battle of the angels; and concludes, that every one who, after these profound and important discoveries, finds anything to admire in these two writers, is a person without taste, or any pretensions to it. By the same rule, a thorough-bred critic might prove that Homer was no poet, and the Odyssey a vulgar performance, because Ulysses makes a pun on the name of Noman. Or some other disciple of the same literal school might easily set aside the whole merit of Racine’s _Athalie_, or Moliere’s _Ecole des Femmes_, and pronounce these _chef d’œuvres_ of art barbarous and Gothic, because the characters in the first address one another (absurdly enough) as _Monsieur_ and _Madame_, and because the latter is written in rhyme, contrary to all classical precedent. These little false measures of criticism may be misapplied and retorted without end, and require to be eked out by national antipathy or political prejudice to give them currency and weight. Thus it was in war-time that the author of the ‘Friend’ ventured to lump all the French tragedies together as a smart collection of epigrams, and that the author of the ‘Excursion, a poem, being portion[49] of a larger poem, to be named the Recluse,’ made bold to call Voltaire a dull prose-writer—with impunity. Such pitiful quackery is a cheap way of setting up for exclusive taste and wisdom, by pretending to despise what is most generally admired, as if nothing could come up to or satisfy that ideal standard of excellence, of which the person bears about the select pattern in his own mind. ‘Not to admire any thing’ is as bad a test of wisdom as it is a rule for happiness. We sometimes meet with individuals who have formed their whole character on this maxim, and who ridiculously affect a decided and dogmatical tone of superiority over others, from an uncommon degree both of natural and artificial stupidity. They are blind to painting—deaf to music—indifferent to poetry; and they triumph in the catalogue of their defects as the fault of these arts, because they have not sense enough to perceive their own want of perception. To treat any art or science with contempt, is only to prove your own incapacity and want of taste for it: to say that what has been done best in any kind is good for nothing, is to say that the utmost exertion of human ability is not equal to the lowest, for the productions of the lowest are worth something, except by comparison with what is better. When we hear persons exclaiming that the pictures at the Marquis of Stafford’s or Mr. Angerstein’s, or those at the British Gallery, are a heap of trash, we might tell them that they betray in this a want not of taste only, but of common sense, for that these collections contain some of the finest specimens of the greatest masters, and that _that_ must be excellent in the productions of human art, beyond which human genius, in any age or country, has not been able to go. Ask these very fastidious critics what it is that they _do_ like, and you will soon find, from tracing out the objects of their secret admiration, that their pretended disdain of first-rate excellence is owing either to ignorance of the last refinements of works of genius, or envy at the general admiration which they have called forth. I have known a furious Phillippic against the faults of shining talents and established reputation subside into complacent approbation of dull mediocrity, that neither tasked the kindred sensibility of its admirer beyond its natural inertness, nor touched his self-love with a consciousness of inferiority; and that, by never attempting original beauties, and never failing, gave no opportunity to intellectual ingratitude to be plausibly revenged for the pleasure or instruction it had reluctantly received. So there are judges who cannot abide Mr. Kean, and think Mr. Young an incomparable actor, for no other reason than because he never shocks them with an idea which they had not before. The only excuse for the over-delicacy and supercilious indifference here described, is when it arises from an intimate acquaintance with, and intense admiration of, other and higher degrees of perfection and genius. A person whose mind has been worked up to a lofty pitch of enthusiasm in this way, cannot perhaps condescend to notice, or be much delighted with inferior beauties; but then neither will he dwell upon, and be preposterously offended with, slight faults. So that the ultimate and only conclusive proof of taste is even here not indifference, but enthusiasm; and before a critic can give himself airs of superiority for what he despises, he must first lay himself open to reprisals, by telling us what he admires. There we may fairly join issue with him. Without this indispensable condition of all true taste, absolute stupidity must be more than on a par with the most exquisite refinement; and the most formidable drawcansir of all would be the most impenetrable blockhead. Thus, if we know that Voltaire’s contempt of Shakespeare arose from his idolatry of Racine, this may excuse him in a national point of view; but he has no longer any advantage over us; and we must console ourselves as well as we can for Mr. Wordsworth’s not allowing us to laugh at the wit of Voltaire, by laughing now and then at the only author whom he is known to understand and admire![50]

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

_The Edinburgh Magazine._] [_July, 1819._

Instead of making a disposition to find fault a proof of taste, I would reverse the rule, and estimate every one’s pretensions to taste by the degree of their sensibility to the highest and most various excellence. An indifference to less degrees of excellence is only excusable as it arises from a knowledge and admiration of higher ones; and a readiness in the detection of faults should pass for refinement only as it is owing to a quick sense and impatient love of beauties. In a word, fine taste consists in sympathy, not in antipathy; and the rejection of what is bad is only to be accounted a virtue when it implies a preference of and attachment to what is better.