Chapter XX: Front Matter (20)

Much has been said and written of the importance of logic to the advancement of truth and learning, but not altogether convincingly. Its use is chiefly confined by some to being a guide to the mind when first feeling its way out of the night of ignorance and barbarism, or a curb to the wilful and restive spirit that is a rebel to reason and common sense. But the extent of the benefit in either case may be doubted; since the rude and uninstructed will not submit to artificial trammels, or get up into this _go-cart_ of the understanding, and the perverse and obstinate will jump out of it whenever their prejudices or passions are wound up to a height to make its restraints necessary. The wilful man will have his way in spite of the dictates of his reason or the evidence of his senses either. The study of logic has been compared to the getting ready and sharpening the tools with which the mind works out the truth; but all that is of value in it is more like the natural use of our hands, or resembles the mould in which truth must be cast, and which is born with us, rather than an external instrument with which it must be fashioned; for all syllogisms reduce themselves either to identical propositions, or to certain forms and relations of ideas in the understanding, which are antecedent to, and absolutely govern, our conclusions with the rules for drawing them. The mind cannot _make an instrument to make truth_, as it contrives an instrument to make a certain object; for in the latter case, the object depends upon the act and will of the mind; but in the former, the mind is passive to the impression of given objects upon it, and this depends on certain laws over which it has itself no control. Logic at best only lays down the rules and laws by which our reason operates; but it must operate according to those rules and laws equally whether they are adverted to or not, or they could not be laid down as infallible. Truth is, in a word, the shape which our ideas take in the moulds of the understanding, just as the potter’s clay derives its figure (whether round or square) from the mould in which it is cast. Thus, if we are told that one wine-glass is less than another, and that the larger wine-glass is less than a third, we know that the third wine-glass is larger than the first, without either comparing them or having any general rule to prove it by. We can no more conceive it otherwise, or do away that regular gradation and proportion between the objects so defined and characterised, than we can imagine the same thing to grow bigger and become less at the same time. Reasoning is allowed (at least by the schoolmen and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, though not by our wise sceptical moderns) to be the linking of one judgment on to two others: _this_ and _that_ being given, why then something else follows. Thus, suppose two roads to take a diverging direction, you are sure, without measuring, that the farther you go in the one, the farther you get from the other. You know that you advance: you _infer_ that you recede. Now the difficulty lies here—if the premises are the same with the conclusion, it amounts only to an identical proposition: if they are different, what is the connection between them? But in the example just given, there are two circumstances, or properties, stated at the outset of the question, _viz._—not merely the existence, but the direction, of the road; and to sustain the inference, all that seems necessary is, that both these circumstances should be borne in mind. For if the road do not continue to _diverge_, the conclusion will not hold good; and if it still continue to diverge, what is this but saying, not only that it advances, but that it advances in a direction which, by the supposition, carries it farther at every step from the former road? That is, two things are affirmed of a given object; the mind sets out with a complex proposition, and what it has to do is not to forget one half of it by the way. It would be long enough before the abstract idea of a road would imply its distance from another; but it would also be hard if a diverging road—that is, a road that recedes while it advances—did not recede. A mathematical line and its direction are not two things, like the feet of a pair of compasses—that while the line is moving one way, the direction may be going astray in another—but mutually implied and inseparably connected together in nature or the understanding—let the _realists_ or _idealists_ determine which they please. Or, as the wise man said to the daughter of King Cophetua, ‘That which is, is; for what is _that_ but _that_, and _is_ but _is_?’[58] The worst of the matter is, that the most important conclusions are not to be so easily enclosed in pews and forms of words and definitions; and that to catch the truth as it flies, is as nice a point as hedging the cuckoo: though they say that its wings have been lately clipped and a pound built for it somewhere in Westminster. Not to proceed farther in this subject, and get ‘over shoes, over boots’ in the mire of metaphysics, we shall conclude this article with what we meant to state at the commencement of it, to wit—that the commonest form of the syllogism is the worst of all, being a downright fallacy and _petitio principii_. It consists in including the individual in the species, and runs thus: ‘All men are mortal; John is a man; therefore John is mortal.’ Let any one deny this at his peril; but what is, or can be gained by such parroting? The first branch of the premises takes for granted and supposes that you already know all that you want to prove in the conclusion. For before you are entitled to assert roundly that all men are mortal, you must know this of John in particular, who is a man, which is the point you are labouring to establish; or, if you do not know this of every individual man, and of John among the rest, then you have no right to make such a sweeping general assertion, which falls to the ground of itself. Either the premises are hasty or false, and the conclusion rotten that way; or if they be sound, and proved as matter-of-fact to the extent which is pretended, then you have anticipated your conclusion, and your syllogism is pedantic and superfluous. In fact, this form of the syllogism is an unmeaning play upon words, or resolves itself into the merely probable or analogical argument, that because all other men _have died_, John, who is one of of them, _will die_ also. The inference relating to historical truth, and founded on the customary connection between cause and effect, is very different from logical proof, or the impossibility of conceiving of certain things otherwise than as inseparable. Suppose I see a row of pillars before me, and that I chuse to affirm—‘Those hundred pillars are all of white marble; the pillar directly facing me is one of the hundred; therefore that pillar is also of white marble’—would not this be arrant trifling both with my own understanding and with that of any one who had patience to hear me? But if I were to see a number of pillars resembling each other in outward appearance, and on examining all of them but one, found them of white marble and concluded that that one was of white marble too, there would be some common sense in this, but no logic. The mind, however, has a natural bias to wrap up its conclusions (of whatever kind or degree) in regular forms of words, and to deposit them in an imposing framework of demonstration; it prefers the shadow of certainty to the substance of truth and candour; and will not, if it can help it, leave a single loop-hole for doubt to creep in at. Hence the tribe of logicians, dogmatists, and verbal pretenders of all sorts.

THE LATE MR. CURRAN

_The Atlas._] [_April 26, 1829._

This celebrated wit and orator in his latter days was a little in the back-ground. He had lodgings at Brompton; and riding into town one day, and hearing two gentlemen in the Park disputing about Mathews’s Curran, he said—‘In faith, it’s the only Mr. Curran, that is ever talked of now-a-days.’ He had some qualms about certain peccadillos of his past life, and wanted to make confessors of his friends. Certainly, a monastery is no unfit retreat for those who have been led away by the thoughtless vivacity of youth, and wish to keep up the excitement by turning the tables on themselves in age. The crime and the remorse are merely the alternations of the same passionate temperament. Mr. Curran had a flash of the eye, a musical intonation of voice, such as we have never known excelled. Mr. Mathews’s imitation of him, though it had been much admired, does not come up to the original. Some of his bursts of forensic eloquence deserve to be immortal, such as that appalling expression applied to a hired spy and informer, that he ‘had been buried as a man, and was dug up a witness.’ A person like this might find language to describe the late _shots_ at Edinburgh. Mr. Curran did not shine so much in Parliament; but he sometimes succeeded admirably in turning the laugh against his opponents. He compared the situation of government after they had brought over a member of Opposition to their side, and found the renegado of no use to them, to the story of the country-gentleman who bought Punch and complained of his turning out dull company. Some of Mr. Curran’s _bon-mots_ and sallies of humour were first-rate. He sometimes indulged in poetry, in which he did not excel. His taste in it was but indifferent. He neither liked _Paradise Lost_ nor _Romeo and Juliet_. He had an ear for music, and both played and sung his native ballads delightfully. He contended that the English had no national music. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Siddons. He said of John Kemble, that, ‘he had an eye rather to _look at_ than to _look with_.’ His great passion was a love of English literature and the society of literary men. He occasionally found his account in it. Being one day in a group of philosophers, and the invention of fire being spoken of, one of the party suggested that it was from seeing a horse’s shoe strike fire; ‘and I suppose,’ said Curran triumphantly, ‘the horse-shoe was afterwards made with that fire.’

THE COURT JOURNAL—A DIALOGUE

_The Atlas._] [_June 7, 1829._

_M._—Have you seen the _Court Journal_?

_G._—No: I only read some ‘Maxims on Love,’ which I seemed to have met with in some pre-existent work.

_M._—Then you may tell C— from me it will not last three months. People of fashion do not want to read accounts of themselves, written by those who know nothing of the matter. This eternal babble about high life is an affront to every one else, and an impertinence with respect to those whom it is stupidly meant to flatter. What do those care about tiresome descriptions of satin ottomans and ormolu carvings, who are sick of seeing them from morning till night? No! they would rather read an account of Donald Bean Lean’s Highland cave, strewed with rushes, or a relation of a _row_ in a night-cellar in St. Giles’s. What they and all mankind want, is to vary the monotonous round of their existence; to go out of themselves as much as possible; and not to have their own oppressive and idle pretensions served up to them again in a hash of mawkish affectation. They read _Cobbett_—it is like an electrical shock to them, or a plunge in a cold-bath: it braces while it jars their enervated fibres. He is a sturdy, blunt yeoman: the other is a foppish footman, dressed up in cast-off finery. Or if Lord L—— is delighted with a description (not well-done) of his own house and furniture, do you suppose that Lord H——, who is his rival in gewgaws and upholstery, will not be equally uneasy at it? As to the vulgar, what they like is to see fine sights and not to hear of them. They like to get inside a fine house, to see fine things and touch them if they dare, and not to be tantalized with a vapid inventory, which does not gratify their senses, and mortifies their pride and sense of privation. The exaggerated admiration only makes the exclusion more painful: it is like a staring sign to a show which one has not money in one’s pocket to pay for seeing. Mere furniture or private property can never be a subject to interest the public: the possessor is entitled to the sole benefit of it. If there were an account in the newspaper that all this finery was burnt to ashes, then all the world would be eager to read it, saying all the time how sorry they were, and what a shocking thing it was.

_G._—Servants and country people always turn to the accidents and offences in a newspaper.

_M._—And their masters and mistresses too. Did you never read the _Newgate Calendar_?

_G._—Yes.

_M._—Well, that is not _genteel_. This is what renders the _Beggar’s Opera_ so delightful; you despise the actors in the scene, and yet the wit galls and brings down their _betters_ from their airy flight with all their borrowed plumage, so that we are put absolutely at our ease for the time with respect to our own darling pretensions. G—— was here the other evening; he said he thought the _Beggar’s Opera_ came after Shakspeare. I wonder who put that in his head; it was hardly his own discovery.

_G._—It seems neither Lord Byron nor Burke liked the _Beggar’s Opera_.

_M._—They were the losers by that opinion: but how do you account for it?

_G._—Lord Byron was a _radical_ peer, Burke an upstart plebeian; neither of them felt quite secure in the _niche_ where they had stationed themselves from the random-shots that were flying on the stage. They could not say with _Hamlet_, ‘Our withers are unwrung.’ As to Lord Byron, he might not relish the point of _Mrs. Peachum’s_ speech, ‘Married a highwayman! Why, hussey, you will be as ill-treated and as much neglected as if you had married a lord!’ Did you ever hear the story of Miss ——, when she was quite a girl, going to see Mrs. Siddons in the _Fatal Marriage_, and being taken out fainting into the lobby, and calling out, ‘Oh _Biron, Biron_!’—‘Egad!’ said the cool narrator of the story, ‘she has had enough of Byron since!’ With regard to Burke, there was a rotten core, a Serbonian bog in his understanding, in which not only Gay’s masterpiece but the whole of what modern literature, wit, and reason had done for the world, sunk and was swallowed up in a fetid abyss for ever! But I am sorry you think no better of the _Court Journal_. I was in hopes it might succeed, as a very old friend of mine has something to do with it.

_M._—Oh! but mischief must be put a stop to. This is the most nauseous _toad-eating_, and it is as awkwardly done as it is ill-meant. There is a fulsome pretence set up in one paper that rank consists in birth and blood. It is at once to neutralise all the present race of fashion. The civil wars of York and Lancaster put an end to almost all the old nobility—there are none of the Plantagenets left now. Those who go to court think themselves lucky if they can trace as far back as the Nell Gwynns and Duchess of Clevelands in Charles the Second’s days. Besides, all this prejudice about nobility and ancestry should be understood and worshipped in silence and at a distance, not thrown in the teeth of such people, as if they had nothing else to boast of. They should be told of perfections which they have not, as you praise a wit for her beauty and a fool for her wit. Your friend should read _Count Grammont_ to learn how to flatter and cajole. Does not Mr. C—— know enough from experience of the desire of lords and ladies to turn authors, and shine, not in a ballroom, but on _his_ counter?

_G._—He expects the K—— to write; nay, it was with difficulty he was dissuaded from offering a round sum.

_M._—How much, pray?

_G._—Five thousand guineas for half a page.

_M._—It would not sell a single copy. People would think it was a hoax and would not buy it. Those who believed it would not read it. Oh! there is a letter of Louis XVIII. in a late number, on the death of some lady he was attached to: it is prettily done, but it is such good English, that I suspect it can hardly be a translation or an original. If they could procure curious documents of this kind, and had a magazine of the secrets, anecdotes, and correspondence of people of high rank, undoubtedly it would answer; but this would be another edition of the _Jockey Club_, and very different from its present insipidity. Even children will not be crammed with honey.

_G._—I understand there is to be no scandal. All the great are to be supposed to be elegantly good, and to wear virtue with a grace peculiar to people of fashion.

_M._—That will at any rate be new. And then I see there are criticisms on pictures: the writer is thrown into raptures with the portraits of Lord and Lady Castlereagh. And this is followed by a drawling, pitiable account of two little Corregios, as if they were miracles and had descended from heaven—the ‘Madonna’ and ‘Mercury teaching Cupid to read.’ They are well enough, though Sir Joshua has done the same thing better. But higher praise could not be lavished on the ‘St. Jerome’ or the ‘Night at Dresden,’ or the ‘Ceiling at Parma,’ which is his best, though it has fallen into decay.

_G._—Collectors think one Corregio just as good as another; and it is to meet this feeling, probably, that the article is written.

THE LATE DR. PRIESTLEY

_The Atlas._] [_June 14, 1829._

The epithet of _the late_ could not be applied to this celebrated character in the sense in which it has been turned upon some _late_ wits and dinner-hunters as never being in time; if he had a fault, it was that of being precipitate and premature, of sitting down to the banquet which he had prepared for others before it was half-done; of seeing things with too quick and hasty a glance, of finding them in embryo, and leaving them too often in an unfinished state. This turn of his intellect had to do with his natural temper—he was impatient, somewhat peevish and irritable in little things, though not from violence or acerbity, but from seeing what was proper to be done quicker than others, and not liking to wait for an absurdity. On great and trying occasions, he was calm and resigned, having been schooled by the lessons of religion and philosophy, or, perhaps, from being, as it were, taken by surprise, and never having been accustomed to the indulgence of strong passions or violent emotions. His frame was light, fragile, neither strong nor elegant; and in going to any place, he walked on before his wife (who was a tall, powerful woman) with a primitive simplicity, or as if a certain restlessness and hurry impelled him on with a projectile force before others. His personal appearance was altogether singular and characteristic. It belonged to the class which may be called _scholastic_. His feet seemed to have been entangled in a gown, his features to have been set in a wig or taken out of a mould. There was nothing to induce you to say with the poet, that ‘his body thought’; it was merely the envelop of his mind. In his face there was a strange mixture of acuteness and obtuseness; the nose was sharp and turned up, yet rounded at the end, a keen glance, a quivering lip, yet the aspect placid and indifferent, without any of that expression which arises either from the close workings of the passions or an intercourse with the world. You discovered the prim, formal look of the Dissenter—none of the haughtiness of the churchman nor the wildness of the visionary. He was, in fact, always the student in his closet, moved in or out, as it happened, with no perceptible variation: he sat at his breakfast with a folio volume before him on one side and a note-book on the other; and if a question were asked him, answered it like an absent man. He stammered, spoke thick, and huddled his words ungracefully together. To him the whole business of life consisted in _reading and writing_; and the ordinary concerns of this world were considered as a frivolous or mechanical interruption to the more important interests of science and of a future state. Dr. PRIESTLEY might, in external appearance, have passed for a French priest, or the lay-brother of a convent: in literature, he was the Voltaire of the Unitarians. He did not, like Mr. Southey, to be sure (who has been denominated the English Voltaire,) vary from prose to poetry, or from one side of a question to another; but he took in a vast range of subjects of very opposite characters, treated them all with the same acuteness, spirit, facility, and perspicuity, and notwithstanding the intricacy and novelty of many of his speculations, it may be safely asserted that there is not an obscure sentence in all he wrote. _Those who run may read._ He wrote on history, grammar, law, politics, divinity, metaphysics, and natural philosophy—and those who perused his works fancied themselves entirely, and were in a great measure, masters of all these subjects. He was one of the very few who could make abstruse questions popular; and in this respect he was on a par with Paley with twenty times his discursiveness and subtlety. Paley’s loose casuistry, which is his strong-hold and chief attraction, he got (every word of it) from Abraham Tucker’s _Light of Nature_. A man may write fluently on a number of topics with the same pen, and that pen a very blunt one; but this was not Dr. Priestley’s case; the studies to which he devoted himself with so much success and _eclat_ required different and almost incompatible faculties. What for instance can be more distinct or more rarely combined than metaphysical refinement and a talent for experimental philosophy? The one picks up the grains, the other spins the threads of thought. Yet Dr. Priestley was certainly the best controversialist of his day, and one of the best in the language; and his chemical experiments (so curious a variety in a dissenting minister’s pursuits) laid the foundation and often nearly completed the superstructure of most of the modern discoveries in that science. This is candidly and gratefully acknowledged by the French chemists, however the _odium theologicum_ may slur over the obligation in this country, or certain fashionable lecturers may avoid the repetition of startling names. Priestley’s _Controversy with Dr. Price_ is a masterpiece not only of ingenuity, vigour, and logical clearness, but of verbal dexterity and artful evasion of difficulties, if any one need a model of this kind. His antagonist stood no chance with him in ‘the dazzling fence of argument,’ and yet Dr. Price was no mean man. We should like to have seen a tilting-bout on some point of scholastic divinity between the little Presbyterian parson and the great Goliath of modern Calvinism, Mr. Irving; he would have had his huge Caledonian boar-spear, his Patagonian club out of his hands in a twinkling with his sharp Unitarian foil. The blear-eyed demon of vulgar dogmatism and intolerance would have taken his revenge by gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes in a resistless phrenzy, and denouncing as out of the pale of Christian charity a man who placed his chief comfort in this life in his hope of the next, and who would have walked firmly and cheerfully to a stake in the fulness of his belief of the Christian revelation. Out upon these pulpit demigorgons, ‘Anthropagi and men who eat each other,’ to gratify the canine malice and inward gnawing of their morbid understandings, and worse than the infuriated savage, not contented to kill the body, would ‘cast both body and soul into hell;’ and unless they can see from their crazy thrones of spiritual pride and mountebank effrontery, the whole world cowering like one outstretched congregation in a level sea of bare heads and upturned wondering looks at their feet, prone and passive, and aghast under the thunders of their voice, the flashes of their eye—would snatch Heaven’s own bolt to convert the solid globe into a sea of fire to torture millions of their fellow-creatures in for the slightest difference of opinion from them, or dissent from the authority of a poor, writhing, agonised reptile, who works himself up in imagination by raving and blasphemy into a sort of fourth person in the Trinity, and would avenge his mortified ambition, his moonstruck-madness, and ebbing popularity as the wrongs of the MOST HIGH!—‘Nay, an you mouth, we’ll rant as well as you!’—To return to Dr. Priestley and common sense, if it be possible to get down these from the height of _melo-dramatic_ and apocalyptic orthodoxy. We do not place the subject of this notice in the first class of metaphysical reasoners either for originality or candour: but in boldness of inquiry, quickness, and elasticity of mind, and ease in making himself understood, he had no superior. He had wit too, though this was a resource to which he resorted only in extreme cases. Mr. Coleridge once threw a respectable dissenting congregation into an unwonted forgetfulness of their gravity, by reciting a description, from the pen of the transatlantic fugitive, of the manner in which the first man might set about making himself, according to the doctrine of the Atheists. Mr. Coleridge put no marks of quotation either before or after the passage, which was extremely grotesque and ludicrous; but imbibed the whole of the applause it met with in his flickering smiles and oily countenance. Dr. Priestley’s latter years were unhappily embittered by his unavailing appeals to the French philosophers in behalf of the Christian religion; and also by domestic misfortunes, to which none but a Cobbett could have alluded in terms of triumph. We see no end to the rascality of human nature; all that there is good in it is the constant butt of the base and brutal.

SECTS AND PARTIES

_The Atlas._] [_August 2, 1829._

We from our souls sincerely hate all cabals and _coteries_; and this is our chief objection to sects and parties. People who set up to judge for themselves on every question that comes before them, and quarrel with received opinions and established usages, find so little sympathy from the rest of the world that they are glad to get any one to agree with them, and with that proviso the poorest creature becomes their _Magnus Apollo_. The mind sets out indeed in search of truth and on a principle of independent inquiry; but is so little able to do without leaning on someone else for encouragement and support, that we presently see those who have separated themselves from the mere mob, and the great masses of prejudice and opinion, forming into little groups of their own and appealing to one another’s approbation, as if they had secured a monopoly of common sense and reason. Wherever two or three of this sort are gathered together, there is self-conceit in the midst of them. ‘You grant me judgment, and I grant you wit’—is the key-note from which an admirable duett, trio, or quartett of the understanding may be struck up at any time to the entire satisfaction of the parties concerned, though the bye-standers may be laughing at or execrating the unwelcome discord. The principle of all reform is this, that there is a tendency to dogmatism, to credulity and intolerance in the human mind itself, as well as in certain systems of bigotry or superstition; and until reformers are themselves aware of, and guard carefully against, the natural infirmity which besets them in common with all others, they must necessarily run into the error which they cry out against. Without this self-knowledge and circumspection, though the great wheel of vulgar prejudice and traditional authority may be stopped or slackened in its course, we shall only have a number of small ones of petulance, contradiction, and partisanship set a-going to our frequent and daily annoyance in its place: or (to vary the figure) instead of crowding into a common stage-coach or hum-drum vehicle of opinion to arrive at a conclusion, every man will be for mounting his own _velocipede_, run up against his neighbours, and exhaust his breath and agitate his limbs in vain. In Mr. Bentham’s _Book of Fallacies_ we apprehend are not to be found the crying sins of singularity, rash judgment, and self-applause. What boots it, we might ask, to get rid of tests and subscription to thirty-nine articles of orthodox belief, if, in lieu of this wholesale and comprehensive mode of exercising authority over our fellows, a DOGMA is placed upon the table at breakfast time, sits down with us to dinner, or is laid on our pillow at night, rigidly prescribing what we are to eat, drink, and how many hours we are to sleep? Or be it that the authority of Aristotle and the schoolmen is gone by, what shall the humble and serious inquirer after truth profit by it, if he still cannot say that his soul is his own for the sublime dulness of Mr. Maculloch, and the Dunciad of political economists? The imprimatur of the Star Chamber, the _cum privilegio regis_ is taken off from printed books—what does the freedom of the press or liberality of sentiment gain, if a board of _Utility_ at Charing Cross must affix its stamp, before a jest can find its way into a newspaper, or must knock a flower of speech on the head with the sledge-hammer of cynical reform? The cloven-foot, the overweening, impatient, exclusive spirit breaks out in different ways, in different times and circumstances. While men are quite ignorant and in the dark, they trust to others, and force you to do so under pain of fire and faggot:—when they have learned a little they think they know every thing, and would compel you to conform to that opinion, under pain of their impertinence, maledictions, and sarcasms, which are the modern rack and thumb-screw. The mode of torture, it must be confessed, is refined, though the intention is the same. Their ill-temper and want of toleration fall the hardest on their own side, for those who adhere to fashion and power care no more about their good or ill word, than about the short, unmelodious gruntings of any other sordid stye. But how is any poor devil who has got into their clutches to shelter himself from their malevolence and party-spite? Why, by enlisting under their banners, swearing to all that they say, and going all lengths with them. Otherwise, he is a _black sheep_ in the flock, and made a butt of by the rest. This is a self-evident process. For the fewer people any sect or party have to sympathise with them, the more entire must that sympathy be: it must be without flaw or blemish, as a set-off to the numbers on the other side; and they who set up to be wiser than all the world put together, cannot afford to acknowledge themselves wrong in any particular. You must, therefore, agree to all their sense or nonsense, allow them to be judges equally of what they do or do not understand, adopt their cant, repeat their jargon, have no notions but what they have, caricature their absurdities, make yourself obnoxious for their satisfaction, and a slave and lacquey to their opinions, humours, and convenience; or they black-ball you, send you to Coventry, and play the devil with you. Thus, for any writer in a highly enlightened and liberal morning paper, not merely to question the grand arcanum of population or the doctrine of rent, would be both great and petty treason; but it would be as much as his _place_ was worth, to suggest a hint that Mrs. Chatterley is not a fine woman and a charming actress. Fanatics and innovators formerly appealed in support of their dreams and extravagancies to inspiration and an inward light; the modern race of philosophical projectors, not having this resource, are obliged to fortify themselves in a double crust of confidence in themselves, and contempt for their predecessors and contemporaries. It is easy to suppose what a very repulsive sort of people they must be! Indeed, to remedy what was thought a hard exterior and an intolerable air of assumption on the part of the professors of the new school, a machine, it is said, has been completed in Mr. Bentham’s garden in Westminster, which turns out a very useful invention of jurisprudence, morals, logic, political economy, constitutions, and codifications, as infallibly and with as little variation as a barrel-organ plays ‘God save the King,’ or ‘Rule Britannia’:—nay, so well does it work and so little trouble or attendance does it require from the adepts, that the latter mean to sign a truce with gravity and ‘wise saws,’ some of them having entered at the bar, others being about to take orders in the church, others having got places in the India-house, and all being disposed to let the Bentham-machine shift for itself! _Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci_:—Mr. Bentham is old, and doubtless has made his will! Reformers will hardly see themselves in religious schismatics and sectarians, whom they despise. Perhaps others may be struck with the likeness. _Rational dissenters_, for example, think, because they alone profess the title, they alone possess the thing. All rational dissenters are with them wise and good. An Unitarian is another name for sense and honesty; and must it not be so, when to those of an opposite faith it is a name of enmity and reproach? But the intolerance on one side, though it accounts for, does not disprove the weakness on the other. We have heard of devotees who employ a _serious_ baker, a _serious_ tailor, a _serious_ cobbler, etc. So there are staunch reformists who would prefer a _radical_ compositor, a _radical_ stationer or bookbinder, to all others; and think little of those on their side of the question who, besides adhering to a principle, have not, in their over-zeal and contempt for their adversaries, contrived to render it offensive or ridiculous. A sound practical consistency does not satisfy the wilful restlessness of the advocates of change. They must have the piquancy of startling paradoxes, the pruriency of romantic and ticklish situations, the pomp of itinerant professors of patriotism and _placarders_ of their own _lives_, _travels_, and _opinions_. Why must a man stand up in a three-cornered hat and canonicals to bear testimony against the Christian religion, and in favour of reform? We hate all such impertinent masquerading and _double entendre_. Those who are accustomed to judge for themselves, and express their convictions at some risk and loss, are too apt to come from thinking that opinions may be right, _though_ they are singular, to conclude that they are right, _because_ they are singular. The more they differ from the world, the more convinced they are, because it flatters their self-love; and they are only quite satisfied and at their ease when they shock and disgust every one around them. They no longer consider the connexion between the conclusion and the premises, but between any idle hypothesis and their personal vanity. They cling obstinately to opinions, as they have been hastily formed; and patronize every whim that they fancy is their own. They are most confident of ‘what they are least assured;’ and will stake all they are worth on the _forlorn hope_ of their own imaginary sagacity and clearness. An _idiosyncrasy_ steals into every thing; _their_ way is best. Always regarding the world at large as an old dotard, they think any single individual in it quite beneath their notice—unless it is an _alter idem_ of the select _coterie_—neither consult you about their affairs, nor deign you an answer on your own, and have a model of perfection in their minds to which they refer all public and private transactions. There are _methodists_ in business as well as in religion, who have a peculiar happy knack in folding a letter, or in saying _How d’ye do_, who postpone the main object to some pragmatical theory or foppish punctilio, and who might take for their motto—_all for conceit or the world well lost_.

CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (1)

_The Atlas._] [_September 20, 1829._

_T._—Windham was very intimate with Gilray afterwards—or perhaps before; for he also had been on both sides.

_J._—What I object to in Hogarth is, that he was not accomplished enough even for the task he undertook. An instance occurred the other day. A servant-girl had been decoyed from her situation, and on complaint being made before the magistrate, the officers traced her to Duke’s-place, and brought her back to her friends in Wardour-Street. She was dressed up quite in the height of the fashion; and every one that went to see her, came away astonished at her perfect beauty. Could Hogarth have painted this? Yet here was a scene quite in his way. He selects what is bad in St. Giles’s, not what is best in nature. That old Mother W—— lives for ever. It was she who decoyed away Emily Coventry that sat to Sir Joshua for his _Thais_. She was a chimney-sweeper’s daughter, or something of that kind; but she was a vast beauty, and Mother W—— found her out in spite of her rags and dirt. She had a hawk’s eye for anything of this sort. I sat facing her once in an upper box at the Opera. I never saw such an expression—her look went through you.

_T._—But I suppose you looked at her again.

_J._—Fielding has tried to describe _Sophia_ as a beauty, but makes a wretched hand of it. He says first she was a beauty; and then to let you know what sort of a beauty she was, that she was like the _Venus of Medici_; then that her nose inclined to be Roman, which the _Venus de Medici’s_ does not; then that she resembled Kneller’s portrait of Lady Ranelagh, which is like neither. The truth is, he did not know what she was like; nor that he could not in words give a description of beauty, which is the painter’s province.

_T._—Coleridge used to remark that description was the vice of poetry, and allegory of painting.

_J._—Nothing can be better said. Since you told me that remark of his about _Paul and Virginia_, he has risen vastly in my estimation. Again, why does the correspondent in the Atlas take me up short for saying that ‘we laugh at a person who is rolled in the gutter?’ He observes on this, ‘if it is an accident, the laughter is silly, and not a case in point; if inflicted as a punishment for some petty injustice, we do not laugh, but rub our hands.’ So that we are to laugh in neither case. Is the ridicule merited where the cobbler, in the ‘Election Dinner,’ has smutted the face of his next neighbour? Or does the cobbler laugh the less, or will he not laugh on for ever, on this account? Has not Hogarth immortalised this piece of silliness in this disgraceful scene? Who will set limits (by the author’s _crambo_) to the length to which he lolls out his tongue, or to the portentous rolling of his eyes in a squint of ecstasy? Is the sly leer and drooping of the widow’s eyelids, or the position of the parson’s hands in the ‘Harlot’s Funeral,’ drawing as well as character and invention? Or is the fighting of the dog and the man for the bone on a perfect footing of equality (to show that hunger levels all distinctions), or the mother letting the child fall over the wall in the ‘Gin-lane,’ or the girl in the ‘Noon,’ ‘with her pie-dish tottering like her virtue, and the contents running over,’ (as I have seen it somewhere expressed,) an example of skill in drawing? It is easy to paint a face without a nose, or with a wry one; the difficulty is to make it straight. Few persons can draw a circle; any one may draw a crooked line.

_T._—But has not Hogarth hit off the exact character and expression; and is not that a proof of the painter’s hand and eye?

_J._—It may be so; but you cannot be sure of it. The correspondent of the paper laughs at the idea of Hogarth’s coming under the article of writing. He _has_ come under the article of writing. Does not the critic speak of his ‘immortal tales?’ Does Mr. Lamb expatiate on the drawing, colour, and effects of light and shade, or only on the moral and story? He has left out one half of the language of painting in the prints; and they are the better for it. Nor do I see what objection there is to the comparison of Hogarth to buffoons on the stage. For my part, I think Liston comes much nearer to Hogarth than Emery’s _Tyke_; and I am sure his _Lord Grizzle_ is just as good _in its way_ as anything can possibly be. Why then does the critic scout the comparison? Because it would be ridiculous to say, that Liston’s _Lord Grizzle_ is as fine as Mrs. Siddons’s _Lady Macbeth_; that both fulfilled their parts equally, and that neither could do more without infringing on the integrity of their characters. Yet if the dignity of the subject is to be left out of the question, Liston may be put into the scale with Mrs. Siddons just as well as Emery; but if not, then neither one nor the other can. Any one for me may say he likes _Punch and the puppet-show_ as well as the finest tragedy—I should think it honest and natural enough—but I hate putting up at a half-way house between farce and tragedy, and pretending that there is no difference in the case. Persons who have no taste for, but an aversion to whatever is great and elevated, are ashamed openly to patronise farce, lest they should be laughed at; and they, therefore, get something intermediate between that and tragedy, and set it up as the finest thing in the world, to escape ridicule and satisfy their own perverse inclination. It is necessary to set one’s face against such vulgar critics; for, like other vulgar people, if you do not keep them quite out, they will constantly encroach and turn you out of your most settled convictions with their mongrel theories.

_T._—What is the aim of all high tragedy? It is to resolve the sense of pain or suffering into the sense of _power_ by the aid of imagination, and by grandeur of conception and character. What is the object of Hogarth’s tragicomedy? To reverse this order: that is, he gives us the extremest distress in the most revolting circumstances and in connection with the most unfeeling and weakest characters, so as either to produce the utmost disgust or excite as little sympathy as possible. Why must maternal affection be displayed, and, as it were, outraged in the strength of attachment to a most brutish and worthless moon-calf of a son? The moral may be strictly true, but the mode of conveying it is no less a penance. Why must the feeling of love be exemplified in the persevering attachment of the victim of seduction to her profligate and contemptible seducer? This is essential to Hogarth’s conception of passion, that it should be at variance with its object, incongruous, and bordering on the absurd and ludicrous. Why must a fine feeling or sentiment be dragged through the kennel or stuck in the pillory before it can be tolerated in his graphic designs? There is neither unity nor grandeur. Mr. Lamb admires the expression of the losing gamester in the ‘Rake’s Progress:’ it is exactly what Liston would give in attempting such a part, and not unlike him. Why show the extreme of passion in faces unsusceptible of it, or kill the sympathy by the meanness and poverty of the associations? Mr. Lamb despises Kean’s face in _Othello_: I prefer it to any of Hogarth’s tragic faces, which are generally of the mock-heroic class.[59] The Methodist preacher in the cart with the _Idle Apprentice_ is another _Mawworm_, a fantastic figure, tossed about by the wind or the spirit, though the conception would be fine for a novel or _written_ story: the apprentice himself is a scare-crow, the sport of the mob, with whose indifference you take part, not with the sufferings of the hero, if he is supposed to have any. The whole is a game at tragic cross-purposes. The sublimity (such as it is) rests on a foundation of the squalid and scurrilous. The incongruous was Hogarth’s element, and he could not get out of his own or (what is I fear) the national character, which delights in laughing at and exulting over the defects and mishaps of others, not from any concern for them, but as a foil to its own discontented humour and conscious want of higher resources. Defoe, who was in the same age and class, had more imagination. His _Robinson Crusoe_ is in perfect keeping. He is not solitary, but solitude: from being shut out from the world, he fills the universe with himself, and his being expands to the circumference of the ocean and sky. Hogarth would have shut him up in a workhouse or a gaol, with boys hooting at him through the bars, and no escape left on the wings of the imagination or the strength of will. This may be very intense, but it is not to my taste. A disciple of this school should not go to see Madame _Pasta_ act. He would like Madame _Pesaroni_ better, for she is ugly, squat, and her voice is masculine and loud. The other, who is all harmony, would oppress and make him uneasy for want of some salvo to his self-love. Would a critic of this order like to see a tragic actress with a wooden leg? For this is Hogarth. Mr. Lamb admires _Moll Flanders_; would he marry _Moll Flanders_? There ought to be something in common in our regard for the original and the copy. A taste for the odd and eccentric eats like a canker into the mind; and if not checked, drives out all relish for the noble and consistent as stiff and pedantic. The drollery is certainly less; and if there is not some set-off in earnestness and dignity, the serious must be at a low ebb indeed, and _Hudibras_ is finer than _Paradise Lost_. It would be a proof of bad taste to like to look at a mean or ill-formed face, for the sake of laughing at it, rather than at a fine one. And so in art: the representation of brutality, coarseness, and want of capacity and feeling is surely less desirable than the representation of the opposite qualities; or it is saying that you laugh at and despise a thing for falling short of a certain excellence and perfection, and when it gains that excellence and perfection, it is no better than it was before.

_J._—You remember the drawing I showed you by Lane, after the ‘Possessed Boy’ of Domenichino? There was there infinite sensibility, infinite delicacy, agony with sweetness, beauty in the midst of distortion. You saw there that every fine feeling had passed through the painter’s mind, or he could not have expressed them; you were made to sympathise with them, and to understand and revere them as a part of your own nature. Compared with works like this, which are the pure mirrors of truth and beauty, Hogarth’s subjects are the very ‘measles’ of art—the scum and offal—it is like going on a voyage in a convict-ship, with an alternation of the same humours and the same horrors—it is a bad prospect for life.

_T._—There is some limit. The late Edinburgh murders would not bear being transferred to the canvass, though the group at Ambrose’s would make a subject for a sketch, so nice are the distinctions of taste.

_J._—The comic sets off the serious by contrast, and is a necessary relief; but how little a way does the sense of defect go towards a conception of, or power to embody the reverse! Look at Hogarth’s attempts at dignified subjects, and see how poor and feeble they are. His ‘Pool of Bethesda’ is pitiable; but in the burlesque composition, where he introduces the devil cutting away the leg of the stool on which St. Paul is preaching, he is himself again, and worthy of all imitation. The critic in the Atlas asks what I mean by originality, as if I thought it independent of any prototypes in nature? No, originality consists in seeing nature for yourself; but it does not follow that everyone can do this or is to see nature alike, or there would be nothing remarkable in it.

_T._—Crabbe is an original writer; but it is to be hoped he will have few followers. Mr. Lamb, by softening the disagreeableness of one of his tales, has taken out the sting.

_J._—Hogarth is an exception to general rules; I said so before. He is the only great comic painter; and he is so for this reason—that painting is not the mother-tongue of comedy. Would not this be allowed of sculpture? I have not seen the ‘Tam O’Shanter’; but some Scotch critics are already, I hear, for exploding the _antique_. Painting is a dry, plodding art; a bottle-nose, if you come to examine it closely, becomes a very dull affair. We _talk_ of a hump-back or a sore leg, which is enough of a good thing; the painter is obliged to give them entire, which is too much. Neither can he carry off this grossness by brilliancy of illustration, or rapidity of narrative. The eye and the mind take in a group or a succession of incidents in an instant; the hand follows lamely and slowly after, and naturally loses, in the mechanical details of each object, the surprise, odd starts, and contrasts, which are the life of comedy. Hogarth alone, by his double allusions, and by his giving motion (which is time) overcame this difficulty, or painted as if he were no painter, but set down each figure by a stroke of the pencil, or in a kind of _short-hand_ of the art, being obliged to run neither into caricature nor still-life. This extreme facility or tenaciousness (amounting to a two-fold language) was his peculiar _forte_, and that in which he was, and will remain, unrivalled. Ducrow acts romances on horseback; but it is not the best way of acting them; and few will imitate him without breaking their necks.

_T._—Do not the same remarks apply in some measure to painting history?

_J._—In some measure, they do; and therefore grand and dignified subjects are in general to be preferred to the more violent and distressing ones. Therefore Titian’s portraits are on a par with history. You who admire Titian, how you must look at Hogarth! You see they avoid the sight of blood even on the stage. In short, it is a question, whether low and disagreeable subjects are fit to be painted; and Sir Joshua, among others, did not much approve of them. It is _not_ a question whether grace and grandeur are fit subjects for painting—this alone settles the preference, and is some excuse for the author of the _Discourses_ in perhaps making it a little too exclusive. If it were true that Hogarth is universal, or contains the highest kind of excellence, no one would dispute about him. After all, a _hurdygurdy_ is neither a lute nor an organ.

CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (2)

_The Atlas._] [_November 1, 1829._

_T._—Was I not right in stating it to be an error to suppose that character is one thing, and to be judged of from a single circumstance? The simplicity of language constantly runs us into false abstractions. We call a man by one name, and forget the heap of contradictions of which he is composed. An acquaintance was wondering not long ago, how a man of sense that he mentioned could be guilty of such absurdities in practice. I answered that a man’s understanding often had no more influence over his will than if they belonged to two different persons; nor frequently so much, since we sometimes consented to be governed by advice, though we could not controul our passions if left to ourselves.