Chapter XXI: Front Matter (21)

_J._—That is very true; but I do not see why you should express so much eagerness about it, as if your life depended on it.

_T._—Nor I neither: I was not aware that I did so.

_J._—You lay too much stress on these speculative opinions and abstruse distinctions. You fancy it is the love of truth: it is quite as much the pride of understanding. Are you as ready to be convinced yourself as you are bent on convincing others? You and those like you pretend to benefit mankind by discovering something new; but you can find out nothing that has not been invented and forgotten a hundred times. The world turns round just the same, in spite of the chirping of all the grasshoppers or squabbles of all the philosophers upon it. I told G. so the other day, who did not much like it—I said he gave a power of _creation_ to the human mind, which did not belong to it. Even Shakspeare, who was so original and saw so deeply into the springs of nature, created nothing: he only brought forward what existed before. I said, ‘You may observe and combine, but you can add nothing—neither a colour to the rainbow, nor a note to music, nor a faculty to the mind. And it’s well that you cannot; for my belief is, that if you could create the smallest thing, the world would not last three months, so little are you to be trusted with power.’ G. retorted by a charge of misanthropy; and I asked him who were those dignifiers of the species to whom he wished me to look up with so much awe and reverence. He answered, somewhat to my surprise, Burke, Fox, and Sheridan. I expected he would have named Lord Bacon, or some of those. I was not much staggered by his authorities.

_T._—I did not know G. was so parliamentary: he might, while he was about it, have mentioned the three last speakers of the House of Commons, Lord Colchester, Lord Sidmouth, and Mr. Onslow.

_J._—He should have gone farther off: it is distance that hides defects and magnifies. So it is with that prejudice of classical learning. You lock up names in an obsolete language, and they become sacred. I do not wish to speak against a classical education; it refines and softens, I grant; and I see the want of it in Cobbett, and others, who may be regarded as upstarts in letters. But surely it often gives a false estimate of men and things. Every one brought up in colleges, and drugged with Latin and Greek for a number of years, firmly believes _that there have been about five people in the world, and that they are dead_. All that actually exists, he holds to be nothing. The world about him is a phantasmagoria: he considers it a personal affront that any one should have common sense, or be able to find his way along the street, without looking for it in Plato or Aristotle. The classical standard turns shadows into realities and realities into shadows. A man of sense is trying to get the better of this early prejudice all his life; and hardly succeeds, after infinite mortification, at last. The dunces and pedants are the best off; they never suspect that there is any wisdom in the world but that of the ancients, of which they are the depositaries.

_T._—I do not think G. goes that length; but he only exists in his passion for books and for literary fame. You cannot shock him more than by questioning any established reputation.

_J._—Yes, he conceives himself to be a free-thinker, and yet is a bigot in his way.

_T._—Men will have some idol, some mythology of their own—the _dii majores_ or _minores_—something that they think greater than themselves, or that they would wish to resemble; and G. would be as angry at a sceptic on the subject of Burke’s style, as a Catholic would be at a heretic who denied the virtues and miracles of his patron saint.

TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR

_The Atlas_] [_September 27 and October 4, 1829._

I. There is no flattery so gross or extravagant but it will be acceptable. It leaves some sting of pleasure behind, since its very excess seems to imply that there must be some foundation for it. Tell the ugliest person in the world that he is the handsomest, the greatest fool that he is a wit, and he will believe and thank you. There is a possibility at least that you may be sincere. Even the sycophant’s ironical laugh turns to a smile of self-complacency at our own fancied perfections.

II. There is no abuse so foul or unprovoked but some part of it will _stick_. Ill words break the charm of good deeds. Call a man names all the year round, and at the end of the year (for no other reason) his best friends will not care to mention his name. It is no pleasant reflection that a man has been accused, however unjustly, of a folly or a crime. We involuntarily associate words with things; and the imagination retains an unfavourable impression long after the understanding is disabused. Or if we repel the charge and resent the injustice, this is making a toil of a pleasure, and our cowardice and indolence soon take part with the malice of mankind. The assailants are always the more courageous party. It degrades a man even to be subjected to undeserved reproach, for it seems as if without some flaw or blemish no one would dare to attack him; so that the viler and more unprincipled the abuse, the lower it sinks, not him who offers, but him who is the object of it, in general estimation. If we see a man covered with mud we avoid him without expressing the cause. The favourites of the public, like Cæsar’s wife, must not be suspected; and it is enough if we admire and bear witness to the superiority of another under the most favourable circumstances—to do this in spite of secret calumny and vulgar clamour is a pitch of generosity which the world has not arrived at.

III. A certain _manner_ makes more conquests than either wit or beauty. Suppose a woman to have a graceful ease of deportment, and a mild self-possession pervading every look and tone of voice; this exercises an immediate influence on a person of an opposite and irritable temperament—it calms and enchants him at once. It is like soft music entering the room—from that time he can only breathe in her presence, and to be torn from her is to be torn from himself for ever.

IV. Fame and popularity are _disparate_ quantities, having no common measure. A poet or painter now living may be as great as any poet or painter that ever did live; and if he be so, he will be so thought of by future ages, but he cannot by the present. Persons of overweening vanity and short-sighted ambition, who would forestall the meed of fame, show themselves unworthy of it, for they reduce it to a level with the reputation they have already earned. They should surely leave something to look forward to. It is weighing dross against gold—comparing a meteor with the polar star. Lord Byron’s narrowness or presumption in this respect was remarkable. What! did he not hope to live two hundred years himself, that he should say it was merely a fashion to admire Milton and Shakspeare as it was the fashion to admire him? Those who compare Sir Walter Scott with Shakspeare do not know what they are doing. They may blunt the feeling with which we regard Shakspeare as an old and tried friend, though they cannot transfer it to Sir Walter Scott, who is, after all, but a new and dazzling acquaintance. To argue that there is no difference in the circumstances is not to put the author of ‘Waverley’ into actual possession of the reversion of fame, but to say that he shall never enjoy it, since it is no better than a chimera and an illusion. It is striking at the foundation of true and lasting renown, and overturning with impatient and thoughtless hands the proud pre-eminence, the golden seats and blest abodes which the predestined heirs of immortality wait for beyond the tomb. The living are merely candidates (more or less successful) for popular applause, the _dead_ are a religion, or they are nothing.

V. Persons who tell an artist that he is equal to Claude, or a writer that he is as great as Bacon, do not add to the satisfaction of their hearers, but pay themselves a left-handed compliment, by supposing that their judgment is equivalent to the suffrage of posterity.

VI. A French artist advised young beginners against being too fond of a variety of colours, which might do very well on a smaller scale, but when they came to paint a large picture they would find they had soon lavished all their resources. So superficial writers may deck out their barren round of _common-places_ in the finest phrases imaginable; but those who are accustomed to _work out_ a subject by dint of study, must not use up their whole stock of eloquence at once, they must bring forward their most appropriate expressions as they approach nearer to the truth, and raise their style with their thoughts. A good general keeps his reserve, the _élite_ of his troops, to charge at the critical moment.

VII. ‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’ It is singular that we are so often loth to begin what gives us great satisfaction in the progress, and what, after we have once begun it, we are as loth to leave off. The reason is, that the imagination is not excited till the first step is taken or the first blow is struck. Before we begin a certain task, we have little notion how we shall set about it, or how we shall proceed: it is like attempting something of which we have no knowledge, and which we feel we are incapable of doing. It is no wonder, therefore, that a strong repugnance accompanies this seeming inaptitude: it is having to _make bricks without straw_. But after the first effort is over, and we have turned our minds to the subject, one thing suggests another, our ideas pour in faster than we can use them, and we launch into the stream which bears us on with ease and pleasure to ourselves. The painter who did not like to mix his colours or begin on a new canvas in the morning, sees the light close in upon him with unwilling eyes; and the essayist, though gravelled for a thought, or at a loss for words at the outset of his labours, winds up with alacrity and spirit.

VIII. Conversation is like a game at tennis, or any other game of skill. A person shines in one company who makes no figure in another—just as a tolerably good cricketer, who might be an acquisition to a country club, would have his wicket struck down at the first bowl at _Lord’s-ground_. The same person is frequently dull at one time and brilliant at another: sometimes those who are most silent at the beginning of an entertainment are most loquacious at the end. There is a _run in the luck_ both in cards and conversation. Some people are good speakers but bad hearers: these are put out, unless they have all the talk to themselves. Some are best in a _tête-à-tête_; others in a mixed company. Some persons talk well on a set subject, who can hardly answer a common question, still less pay a compliment or make a _repartee_. Conversation may be divided into the _personal_ or the _didactic_: the one resembles the style of a lecture, the other that of a comedy. There are as many who fail in conversation from aiming at too high a standard of excellence, and wishing only to utter oracles or _jeux-d’esprit_, as there are who expose themselves from having no standard at all, and saying whatever comes into their heads. Pedants and gossips compose the largest class. Numbers talk on without paying any attention to the effect they produce upon their audience: some few take no part in the discourse but by assenting to everything that is said, and these are not the worst companions in the world. An outcry is sometimes raised against dull people, as if it were any fault of theirs. The most brilliant performers very soon grow dull, and we like people to begin as they end. There is then no disappointment nor false excitement. The great ingredient in society is good-will. He who is pleased with what he himself has to say, and listens in his turn with patience and good-humour, is wise and witty enough for us. We do not covet those parties where one wit dares not go, because another is expected. How delectable must the encounter of such pretenders be to one another! How edifying to the bye-standers!

IX. It was well said by Mr. Coleridge, that people never improve by contradiction, but by _agreeing to differ_. If you discuss a question amicably you may gain a clear insight into it; if you dispute about it you only throw dust in one another’s eyes. In all angry or violent controversy, your object is not to learn wisdom, but to prove your adversary a fool; and in this respect, it must be admitted, both parties usually succeed.

X. Envy is the ruling passion of mankind. The explanation is obvious. As we are of infinitely more importance in our own eyes than all the world beside, the chief bent and study of the mind is directed to impress others with this self-evident but disputed distinction, and to arm ourselves with the exclusive signatures and credentials of our superiority, and to hate and stifle all that stands in the way of, or obscures, our absurd pretensions. Each individual looks upon himself in the light of a dethroned monarch, and the rest of the world as his rebellious subjects and runaway slaves, who withhold the homage that is his natural due, and burst the chains of opinion he would impose upon them: the madman in Hogarth (sooth to say), with his crown of straw and wooden sceptre, is but a type and _common-place_ emblem of every-day life.

XI. It has been made a subject of regret that in forty or fifty years’ time (if we go on as we have done) no one will read Fielding. What a falling off! Already, if you thoughtlessly lend _Joseph Andrews_ to a respectable family, you find it returned upon your hands as an improper book. To be sure, people read ‘Don Juan’; but _that_ is in verse. The worst is, that this senseless fastidiousness is more owing to an affectation of gentility than to a disgust at vice. It is not the scenes that are described at an alehouse, but the _alehouse_ at which they take place that gives the mortal stab to taste and refinement. One comfort is, that the manners and characters which are objected to as _low_ in Fielding have in a great measure disappeared or taken another shape; and this at least is one good effect of all excellent satire—that it destroys ‘the very food whereon it lives.’ The generality of readers, who only seek for the representation of existing models, must therefore, after a time, seek in vain for this obvious verisimilitude in the most powerful and popular works of the kind; and will be either disgusted or at a loss to understand the application. People of sense and imagination, who look beyond the surface or the passing folly of the day, will always read _Tom Jones_.

XII. There is a set of critics and philosophers who have never read anything but what has appeared within the last ten years, and to whom every mode of expression or turn of thought extending beyond that period has a very odd effect. They cannot comprehend how people used such out-of-the-way phrases in the time of Shakspeare; the style of Addison would not do now—even Junius, they think, would make but a shabby _thread-bare_ figure in the columns of a modern newspaper—all the riches that the language has acquired in the course of time, all the idiomatic resources arising from study or accident, are utterly discarded—sink under-ground: and all that is admired by the weak or sought after by the vain, is a thin surface of idle affectation and glossy innovations. Even spelling and pronunciation have undergone such changes within a short time, that Pope and Swift require a little _modernizing_ to accommodate them to ‘ears polite;’ and that a _bluestocking belle_ would be puzzled in reciting Dryden’s sounding verse with its occasional barbarous, old-fashioned accenting, if it were the custom to read Dryden aloud in those serene, morning circles. There is no class more liable to set up this narrow superficial standard, than people of fashion, in their horror of what is vulgar and ignorance of what really is so; they have a jargon of their own, but scout whatever does not fall in with it as Gothic and _outré_; the English phrases handed down from the last age they think come east of Temple-bar, and they perform a sedulous quarantine against them. The _Times_, having found it so written in some outlandish _depêche_ of the Marquis of Wellesley’s, chose as a mark of the _haute literature_, to spell _dispatch_ with an _e_, and for a long time he was held for a novice or an affected and absolute writer who spelt it otherwise. The _Globe_, with its characteristic good sense and sturdiness of spirit has restored the old English spelling in defiance of scandal. Some persons who were growing jealous that the author of _Waverley_ had eclipsed their favourite luminaries may make themselves easy; he himself is on the wane with those whose opinions ebb and flow with the ‘inconstant moon’ of fashion, and has given way (if Mr. Colburn’s advertisements speak true, ‘than which what’s truer?’) to a set of titled nonentities. Nothing solid is to go down, or that is likely to last three months; instead of the standing dishes of old English literature we are to take up with the _nicknacks_ and whipt syllabubs of modern taste; are to be occupied with a stream of titlepages, extracts, and specimens, like passing figures in a _camera obscura_, and are to be puzzled in a mob of new books as in the mob of new faces in what was formerly the narrow part of the Strand.

XIII. Never pity people because they are ill-used. They only wait the opportunity to use others just as ill. Hate the oppression and prevent the evil if you can; but do not fancy there is any virtue in being oppressed, or any love lost between the parties. The unfortunate are not a jot more amiable than their neighbours, though they give themselves out so, and our pity takes part with those who have disarmed our envy.

XIV. The human mind seems to improve, because it is continually in progress. But as it moves forward to new acquisitions and trophies, it loses its hold on those which formerly were its chief boast and employment. Men are better chemists than they were, but worse divines; they read the newspapers, it is true, but neglect the classics. Everything has its turn. Neither is error extirpated so much as it takes a new form and puts on a more artful disguise. Folly shifts its ground, but finds its level: absurdity is never left without a subterfuge. The dupes of dreams and omens in former times, are now the converts to graver and more solemn pieces of quackery. The race of the sanguine, the visionary, and the credulous, of those who believe what they wish, or what excites their wonder, in preference to what they know, or can have rationally explained, will never wear out; and they only transfer their innate love of the marvellous from old and exploded chimeras to fashionable theories, and the _terra incognita_ of modern science.

XV. It is a curious speculation to take a modern _belle_, or some accomplished female acquaintance, and conceive what her great-great-grandmother was like, some centuries ago. Who was the Mrs. —— of the year 200? We have some standard of grace and elegance among eastern nations 3000 years ago, because we read accounts of them in history; but we have no more notion of, or faith in, our own ancestors than if we had never had any. We _cut the connexion_ with the Druids and the Heptarchy; and cannot fancy ourselves (by any transformation) inmates of caves and woods, or feeders on acorns and sloes. We seem _engrafted_ on that low stem—a bright, airy, and insolent excrescence.

XVI. There is this advantage in painting, if there were no other, that it is the truest and most self-evident kind of history. It shows that there were people long ago, and also _what_ they were, not in a book darkly, but face to face. It is not the half-formed clay, the old-fashioned dress, as we might conceive; but the living lineaments, the breathing expression. You look at a picture by Vandyke, and there see as in an enchanted mirror, an English woman of quality two hundred years ago, sitting in unconscious state with her child playing at her feet, and with all the dove-like innocence of look, the grace and refinement that it is possible for virtue and breeding to bestow. It is enough to make us proud of our nature and our countrywomen; and dissipates at once the idle, _upstart_ prejudice that all before our time was sordid and scarce civilised. If our progress does not appear so great as our presumption has suggested, what does it signify? With such models kept in view, our chief object ought to be not to degenerate; and though the future prospect is less gaudy and imposing, the retrospect opens a larger and brighter _vista_ of excellence.

XVII. I am by education and conviction inclined to republicanism and puritanism. In America they have both; but I confess I feel a little staggered in the practical efficacy and saving grace of _first principles_, when I ask myself, ‘Can they throughout the United States, from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head like one of Titian’s Venetian nobles, nurtured in all the pride of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery?’ Of all the branches of political economy, the human face is perhaps the best criterion of _value_.

COMMON SENSE

_The Atlas._] [_October 11, 1829._

Common sense is a rare and enviable quality. It may be truly said that ‘its price is above rubies.’ How many learned men, how many wits, how many geniuses, how many dull and ignorant people, how many cunning knaves, how many well-meaning fools are without it! How few have it, and how little do they or others know of it, except from the infallible results—for one of its first requisites is the utter absence of all pretension! The vulgar laugh at the pedant and enthusiast for the want of it, while they themselves mistake bigotry and narrow-minded notions for it. It is not one of the sciences, but has been well pronounced to be ‘fairly worth the seven.’ It is a kind of mental instinct, that feels the air of truth and propriety as the fingers feel objects of touch. It does not consist with ignorance, for we cannot pronounce on what we do not know; and on the other hand, the laying in a stock of knowledge, or mastering any art or science, seems to destroy that native simplicity, and to warp and trammel the unbiassed freedom of mind which is necessary to its receiving and giving their due weight to ordinary and casual impressions. Common sense is neither a peculiar talent nor a laborious acquirement, but may be regarded as a sound and impartial judgment operating on the daily practice of life, or on what ‘comes home to the business and bosoms of men’; combined with great attainments and speculative inquiries, it would justly earn the title of _wisdom_; but of the latter we have never known a single instance, though we have met with a few of the former; that is, we have known a number of persons who were wise in the affairs of the world and in what concerned their own interest, but none who, beyond this, and in judging of general questions, were not the dupes of some flaw of temper, of some weakness or vanity, or even striking advantage of their own. To give an example of two in illustration. A person may be an excellent scholar, a good mathematician, well versed in law and history, a first-rate chess-player, a dazzling fencer, in a word, a sort of _admirable Crichton_—you are disposed to admire or envy so many talents united—you smile to see him wanting in common sense, and getting into a dispute about a _douceur_ to a paltry police-officer, and thinking to interest all Europe and both Houses of Parliament in his success. It is true, he has law and reason on his side, has Grotius and Puffendorf and the _statutes at large_ doubled down in dog-ears for the occasion, has a vast and lively apparatus of well-arranged premises and conclusions ready to play off against his adversaries; but he does not consider that he has to deal with interest and custom, those impalpable, intangible essences, that ‘fear no discipline of human wit.’ Does he think to check-mate the police? Will he stop the mouth of a hungry tide-waiter with a syllogism? Or supersede a perquisite by the _reductio ad absurdum_? It is a want of common sense, or the not distinguishing properly between the definite and the indefinite. No one can have arrived at years of discretion without knowing or feeling that he cannot take a single step without some compromise with existing circumstances; that the path of life is intercepted with innumerable turnpike-gates, at which he must pay down the toll of his own convictions and of strict justice; that he cannot walk the streets but by tacit allowance; and that to disregard all impediments in the right line of reason and written forms is to imitate the conduct of _Commodore Trunnion_, who mistook the land for the sea, and went to be married by the wind and compass. The proofs of this occur every hour of the day—they may not be registered, they may not be remembered, but they are virtually and effectively noted down by the faculty of common sense, which does not feel its way the less surely because it proceeds often mechanically and blindly. There may be exceptions indeed to ordinary rules, on which a man may go to martyrdom and a stake (such as that of Hampden and ship-money), but these occur once in a century, and are only met with at the corners of streets by those who have an excess of logical discrimination, and have to pay a certain tax for being too clever by half. It is the fashion at present among the philosophical vulgar to decry _feeling_, both the name and the thing. It would be difficult, however, to do without it: for this word embraces all that mass of knowledge and of common sense which lies between the extremes of positive proof or demonstration and downright ignorance; and those who would pragmatically confine their own convictions or those of others to what is absolutely known and understood, would at best become scientific pedants and artificial barbarians. There are some persons who are the victims of argument; as there are others who are the slaves of minute details and matters of fact. One class will have a reason for every thing, and will admit the greatest absurdities that are formally proposed to them; the other must have facts to support every conclusion, and can never see an inch beyond their noses. The last have the _organ of individuality_ largely developed, and are proportionably deficient in common sense. Their ideas are all local and literal. To borrow the language of a great but obscure metaphysician, their minds are _epileptic_; that is, are in perpetual throes and convulsions, fasten on every object in their way not to help but to hinder their progress, and have no voluntary power to let go their hold of a particular circumstance, to grasp the whole of any question, or suspend their judgment for an instant. The fact that is before them is every thing; the rest goes for nothing. They are always at cross-purposes with themselves, for their decisions are the result of the last evidence, without any corrective or qualifier in common sense; in the hunt after proofs, they forget their principles, and gain their point, though they lose their cause.

The Scotch have much of this _matter-of-fact_ understanding, and bigotry to personal and actual statistics. They would persuade you that there is no country but Scotland, nothing but what is Scotch. Mr. Mac Alpine shifts the discourse from the metropolis, hurries rapidly over the midland counties, crosses the border, and sits down to an exordium in praise of the ‘kindly Scot.’ Charity has its home and hearth by Tweed-side, where he was born and bred, Scotch beggars were quite different from English beggars: there was none of the hard-heartedness towards them that was always shown in England. His mother, though not a rich woman, always received them kindly, and had a bag of meal out of which she always gave them something, as they went their rounds. ‘Lord! Mr. Mac Alpine!’ says Mrs. Mac Alpine, ‘other people have mothers as well as you, and there are beggars in England as well as Scotland. Why, in Yorkshire, where I was brought up, common beggars used to come round just as you describe, and my mother, who was no richer than yours, used to give them a crust of bread or broken victuals just in the same way; you make such a _fuss_ about nothing.’ Women are best to set these follies to rights:—

‘They have no figures nor no fantasies,
Which busy thought draws in the brains of men.’

If no great philosophers, they do not want common sense; and are only misled in what lies beyond their sphere of feeling and observation, by taking up the opinions of their _better halves_. The common people in like manner do not want common sense in what falls under their especial cognizance and daily practice. A country-shoemaker or plough-man understands shoemaking, and can ‘crack of ploughs and kine,’ though he knows nothing of the Catholic question. If an old woman in a country-town believes she shall be burnt at a stake, now that this question is settled, it is because she is told so by those who ought to know better, and who impose _their_ prejudices upon _her_ ignorance. Vulgar errors which are taken on trust, or are traditional, or are the blunders of ignorance on points of learning, have nothing to do with common sense, which decides only on facts and feelings which have come under its own notice. Common sense and _common-place_ are also the antipodes of each other: the one is a collection of true experiences, the other a routine of cant phrases. All affectation is the death of common sense, which requires the utmost simplicity and sincerity. Liars must be without common sense, for instead of considering what things really are, their whole time and attention are taken up in imposing false appearances on themselves and their neighbours. No conceited person can have the faculty we have been speaking of, since all objects are tinged and changed from their proper hue by the idle reflection of their fancied excellence and superiority. Great talkers are in the same predicament, for they sacrifice truth to a fine speech or sentiment, and conceal the real consequences of things from their view by a cloud of words, of empty breath. They look at nature not to study what it is, but to discover what they can say about it. Passionate people are generally thought to be devoid of judgment. They may be so, when their passions are touched to the quick; but without a certain degree of natural irritability, we do not conceive truth leaves sufficient stings in the mind, and we judge correctly of things according to the interest we take in them. No one can be a physiognomist, for example, or have an insight into character and expression, without the correspondent germs of these in his own breast. Phlegmatic C——, with all his husbandry acquirements, is but half a philosopher, half a clown. Poets, if they have not common sense, can do very well without it. What need have they to conform their ideas to the actual world, when they can create a world according to their fancy? We know of no remedy for want of tact and insight into human affairs, any more than for the defect of any other organ. _Tom Jones_ is, we think, the best horn-book for students in this way; and if the novice should rise up no wiser from its repeated perusal, at least such an employment of his time will be better than playing the fool or talking nonsense. After all, the most absurd characters are those who are so, not from a want of common sense, but who act in defiance of their better knowledge. The capricious and fickle who change every moment, the perverse who aim only at what is placed out of their reach, the obstinate who pursue a losing cause, the idle and vicious who ruin themselves and every one connected with them, do it as often with their eyes open as from blind infatuation; and it is the bias of their wills, not the deficiency of their understandings, that is in fault. The greatest fools in practice are sometimes the wisest men in theory, for they have all the advantage of their own experience and self-reflection to prompt them; and they can give the best advice to others, though they do not conceive themselves bound to follow it in their own instance. _Video meliora proboque_, etc. Their judgments may be clear and just, but their habits and affections lie all the wrong way; and it is as useless as it would be cruel to expect them to reform, since they only delight and can only exist in their darling absurdities and daily and hourly _escapades_ from common sense and reason.

THE SPIRIT OF CONTROVERSY

_The Atlas._] [_January 31, 1830._

The Spirit of Controversy has often been arraigned as the source of much bitterness and vexation, as productive of ‘envy, malice, and all uncharitableness’: and the charge, no doubt, is too well founded. But it is said to be _an ill wind that blows nobody good_; and there are few evils in life that have not some qualifying circumstance attending them. It is one of the worst consequences of this very spirit of controversy that it has led men to regard things too much in a single and exaggerated point of view. Truth is not one thing, but has many aspects and many shades of difference; it is neither all black nor all white; sees something wrong on its own side, something right in others; makes concessions to an adversary, allowances for human frailty, and is nearer akin to charity than the dealers in controversy or the declaimers against it are apt to imagine. The bigot and partisan (influenced by the very spirit he finds fault with) sees nothing in the endless disputes which have tormented and occupied men’s thoughts but an abuse of learning and a waste of time: the philosopher may still find an excuse for so bad and idle a practice. One frequent objection made to the incessant wrangling and collision of sects and parties is, _What does it all come to?_ And the answer is, _What would they have done without it?_ The pleasure of the chase, or the benefit derived from it, is not to be estimated by the value of the game after it is caught, so much as by the difficulty of starting it and the exercise afforded to the body and the excitement of the animal spirits in hunting it down: and so it is in the exercises of the mind and the pursuit of truth, which are chiefly valuable (perhaps) less for their results when discovered, than for their affording continual scope and employment to the mind in its endeavours to reach the fancied goal, without its being ever (or but seldom) able to attain it. _Regard the end_, is an ancient saying, and a good one, if it does not mean that we are to forget the _beginning_ and the _middle_. By insisting on the ultimate value of things when all is over, we may acquire the character of _grave_ men, but not of wise ones. _Passe pour cela._ If we would set up such a sort of fixed and final standard of moral truth and worth, we had better try to construct life over again, so as to make it a _punctum stans_, and not a thing in progress; for as it is, every end, before it can be realised, implies a previous imagination, a warm interest in, and an active pursuit of, itself, all which are integral and vital parts of human existence, and it is a begging of the question to say that an end is only of value in itself, and not as it draws out the living resources, and satisfies the original capacities of human nature. When the play is over, the curtain drops, and we see nothing but a green cloth; but before this, there have been five acts of brilliant scenery and high-wrought declamation, which, if we come to plain matter-of-fact and history, are still something. According to the contrary theory, nothing is real but a blank. This flatters the paradoxical pride of man, whose motto is, _all or none_. Look at that pile of school divinity! Behold where the demon of controversy lies buried! The huge tomes are mouldy and worm-eaten:—did their contents the less eat into the brain, or corrode the heart, or stir the thoughts, or fill up the void of lassitude and _ennui_ in the minds of those who wrote them? Though now laid aside and forgotten, if they had not once had a host of readers, they would never have been written; and their hard and solid bulk asked the eager tooth of curiosity and zeal to pierce through it. We laugh to see their ponderous dulness weighed in scales, and sold for waste paper. We should not laugh too soon. On the smallest difference of faith or practice discussed in them, the fate of kingdoms hung suspended; and not merely so (which was a trifle) but Heaven and Hell trembled in the balance, according to the full persuasion of our pious forefathers. Many a drop of blood flowed in the field or on the scaffold, from these tangled briars and thorns of controversy; many a man marched to a stake to bear testimony to the most frivolous and incomprehensible of their dogmas. This was an untoward consequence; but if it was an evil to be burnt at a stake, it was well and becoming to have an opinion (whether right or wrong) for which a man was willing to be burnt at a stake. Read Baxter’s _Controversial Works_: consider the flames of zeal, the tongues of fire, the heights of faith, the depths of subtlety, which they unfold, as in a darkly illuminated scroll; and then ask how much we are gainers by an utter contempt and indifference to all this? We wonder at the numberless volumes of sermons that have been written, preached, and printed on the Arian and Socinian controversies, on Calvinism and Arminianism, on surplices and stoles, on infant or adult baptism, on image-worship and the defacing of images; and we forget that it employed the preacher all the week to prepare his sermon (be the subject what it would) for the next Lord’s day, with infinite collating of texts, authorities, and arguments; that his flock were no less edified by listening to it on the following Sunday; and how many _David Deans’s_ came away convinced that they had been listening to the ‘root of the matter’! See that group collected after service-time and pouring over the gravestones in the churchyard, from whence, to the eye of faith, a light issues that points to the skies! See them disperse; and as they take different paths homeward while the evening closes in, still discoursing of the true doctrine and the glad tidings they have heard, how ‘their hearts burn within them by the way’! Then again, we should set down, among other items in the account, how the schoolboy is put to it to remember the text, and how the lazy servant-wench starts up to find herself asleep in church-time! Such is the business of human life; and we, who fancy ourselves above it, are only so much the more taken up with follies of our own. We look down in this age of reason on those controverted points and nominal distinctions which formerly kept up such ‘a coil and pudder’ in the world, as idle and ridiculous, because we are not parties to them; but if it was the _egotism_ of our predecessors that magnified them beyond all rational bounds, it is no less egotism in us who undervalue their opinions and pursuits because they are not ours; and, indeed, to leave egotism out of human nature, is ‘to leave the part of _Hamlet_ out of the play of _Hamlet_.’ Or what are we the better with our _Utilitarian Controversies_, Mr. Taylor’s discourses (delivered in canonicals) against the evidence of the Christian religion, or the changes of ministry and disagreements between the Duke of Wellington and the Duke of Newcastle?

‘Strange! that such difference should be
’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee!’

But the prevalence of religious controversy is reproached with fomenting spiritual pride and intolerance, and sowing heart-burnings, jealousies, and fears, ‘like a thick scurf o’er life;’ yet, had it not been for this, we should have been tearing one another to pieces like savages for fragments of raw flesh, or quarrelling with a herd of swine for a windfall of acorns under an oak-tree. The world has never yet done, and will never be able to do, without some apple of discord—some bone of contention—any more than courts of law can do without pleadings, or hospitals without the sick. When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest. Why need we regret the various hardships and persecutions for conscience-sake, when men only clung closer to their opinions in consequence? They loved their religion in proportion as they paid dear for it. Nothing could keep the Dissenters from going to a conventicle while it was declared an unlawful assembly, and was the highroad to a prison or the plantations—take away tests and fines, and make the road open and easy, and the sect dwindles gradually into insignificance. A thing is supposed to be worth nothing that costs nothing. Besides, there is always pretty nearly the same quantity of malice afloat in the world; though with the change of time and manners it may become a finer poison, and kill by more unseen ways. When the sword has done its worst, slander, ‘whose edge is sharper than the sword,’ steps in to keep the blood from stagnating. Instead of slow fires and paper caps fastened round the heads of the victims, we arrive at the same end by a politer way of nicknames and anonymous criticism. _Blackwood’s Magazine_ is the modern version of Fox’s _Book of Martyrs_. Discard religion and politics (the two grand topics of controversy), and people would hate each other as cordially, and torment each other as effectually about the preference to be given to Mozart or Rossini, to Malibran or Pasta. We indeed fix upon the most excellent things, as God, our country, and our King, to account for the excess of our zeal; but this depends much less upon the goodness of our cause than on the strength of our passions, and our overflowing gall and rooted antipathy to whatever stands in the way of our conceit and obstinacy. We set up an idol (as we set up a mark to shoot at) for others to bow down to, on peril of our utmost displeasure, let the value of it be what it may——

‘Of whatsoe’er descent his Godhead be,
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his servants are as bold
As if he had been born of beaten gold.’

It is, however, but fair to add, in extenuation of the evils of controversy, that if the points at issue had been quite clear, or the advantage all on one side, they would not have been so liable to be contested about. We condemn controversy, because we would have matters all our own way, and think that ours is the only side that has a title to be heard. We imagine that there is but one view of a subject that is right; and that all the rest being plainly and wilfully wrong, it is a shocking waste of speech, and a dreadful proof of prejudice and party spirit, to have a word to say in their defence. But this is a want of liberality and comprehension of mind. For in general we dispute either about things respecting which we are a good deal in the dark, and where both parties are very possibly in the wrong, and may be left to find out their mutual error; or about those points, where there is an opposition of interests and passions, and where it would be by no means safe to cut short the debate by making one party judges for the other. They must, therefore, be left to fight it out as well as they can; and, between the extremes of folly and violence, to strike a balance of common sense and even-handed justice. Every sect or party will, of course, run into extravagance and partiality; but the probability is, that there is some ground of argument, some appearance of right, to justify the grossest bigotry and intolerance. The fury of the combatants is excited because there is something to be said on the other side of the question. If men were as infallible as they suppose themselves, they would not dispute. If every novelty were well founded, truth might be discovered by a receipt; but as antiquity does not always turn out an old woman, this accounts for the _vis inertiæ_ of the mind in so often pausing and setting its face against innovation. Authority has some advantages to recommend it as well as reason, or it would long ago have been scouted. Aristocracy and democracy, monarchy and republicanism, are not all pure good or pure evil, though the abettors or antagonists of each think so, and that all the mischief arises from others entertaining any doubt about the question, and insisting on carrying their absurd theories into practice. The French and English are grossly prejudiced against each other; but still the interests of each are better taken care of under this exaggerated notion than if that vast mass of rights and pretensions, which each is struggling for, were left to the tender mercies and ruthless candour of the other side. ‘_Every man for himself and God for us all_’ is a rule that will apply here. Controversy, therefore, is a necessary evil or good (call it which you will) till all differences of opinion or interest are reconciled, and absolute certainty or perfect indifference alike takes away the possibility or the temptation to litigation and quarrels. We need be under no immediate alarm of coming to such a conclusion. There is always room for doubt, food for contention. While we are engrossed with one controversy, indeed, we think every thing else is clear; but as soon as one point is settled, we begin to cavil and start objections to that which has before been taken for gospel. The Reformers thought only of opposing the Church of Rome, and never once anticipated the schisms and animosities which arose among Protestants: the Dissenters, in carrying their point against the Church of England, did not dream of that crop of infidelity and scepticism which, to their great horror and scandal, sprung up in the following age, from their claim of free inquiry and private judgment. The _non-essentials_ of religion first came into dispute; then the essentials. Our own opinion, we fancy, is founded on a rock; the rest we regard as stubble. But no sooner is one out-work of established faith or practice demolished, than another is left a defenceless mark for the enemy, and the engines of wit and sophistry immediately begin to batter it. Thus we proceed step by step, till, passing through the several gradations of vanity and paradox, we came to doubt whether we stand on our head or our heels, alternately deny the existence of spirit and matter, maintain that black is white, call evil good and good evil, and defy any one to prove the contrary. As faith is the prop and cement that upholds society by opposing fixed principles as a barrier against the inroads of passion, so reason is the _menstruum_ which dissolves it by leaving nothing sufficiently firm or unquestioned in our opinions to withstand the current and bias of inclination. Hence the decay and ruin of states—then barbarism, sloth, and ignorance—and so we commence the circle again of building up all that it is possible to conceive out of a rude chaos, and the obscure shadowings of things, and then pulling down all that we have built up, till not a trace of it is left. Such is the effect of the ebb and flow and restless agitation of the human mind.

ENVY

_The Atlas._] [_February 14, 1830._