Chapter XIV: Front Matter (14)

Hence we may, perhaps, be able to assign one reason, why those arts which do not undertake to unfold mysteries and inculcate dogmas, generally shine out at first with full lustre, because they start from the ‘vantage ground of nature, and are not buried under the dust and rubbish of ages of perverse prejudice. Biblical critics were a long time at work to strip Popery of her finery, muffled up as she was in the formal disguises of interest, pride, and bigotry. It was like peeling off the coats of an onion, which is a work of time and patience. Titian, on the other hand, (which our protestant painters are sometimes amazed at) saw the colour of the skin at once, without any intellectual film spread over it; Raphael painted the actions and passions of men, without any indirect process, as he found them. The fine arts, such as painting, which reveals the face of nature, and poetry, which paints the heart of man, are true and unsophisticated, because they are conversant with real objects, and because they are cultivated for amusement without any further view or inference; and please by the truth of imitation only. Yet your _people of sense_, in all ages, have made a point of scouting the arts of painting, music, and poetry, as frivolous, effeminate, and worthless, as appealing to sentiment and fancy alone, and involving no useful theory or principle, because they afforded them no scope, no opportunity for _darkening knowledge_, and setting up their own blindness and frailty as the measure of abstract truth, and the standard of universal propriety. Poetry acts by sympathy with nature, that is, with the natural impulses, customs, and imaginations of men, and is, on that account, always popular, delightful, and at the same time instructive. It is nature moralizing and _idealizing_ for us; inasmuch as, by shewing us things as they are, it implicitly teaches us what they ought to be; and the grosser feelings, by passing through the strainers of this imaginary, wide-extended experience, acquire an involuntary tendency to higher objects. Shakespear was, in this sense, not only one of the greatest poets, but one of the greatest moralists that we have. Those who read him are the happier, better, and wiser for it. No one (that I know of) is the happier, better, or wiser, for reading Mr. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.[45] One thing is that nobody reads it. And the reason for one or both is the same, that he is not a poet, but a sophist, a theorist, a controversial writer in verse. He gives us, for representations of things, rhapsodies of words. He does not lend the colours of imagination and the ornaments of style to the objects of nature, but paints gaudy, flimsy, allegorical pictures on gauze, on the cobwebs of his own brain, ‘Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.’ He assumes certain doubtful speculative notions, and proceeds to prove their truth by describing them in detail as matters of fact. This mixture of fanatic zeal with poetical licentiousness is not quite the thing. The poet describes what he pleases as he pleases—if he is not tied down to certain given principles, if he is not to plead prejudice and opinion as his warrant or excuse, we are left out at sea, at the mercy of every reckless fancy-monger, who may be tempted to erect an _ipse dixit_ of his own, by the help of a few idle flourishes and extravagant epithets, into an exclusive system of morals and philosophy. The poet describes vividly and individually, so that any general results from what he writes must be from the aggregate of well-founded particulars: to embody an abstract theory, as if it were a given part of actual nature, is an impertinence and indecorum. The charm of poetry, however, depends on the union of fancy with reality, on its finding a tally in the human breast; and without this, all its tumid efforts will be less pernicious than vain and abortive. Plato shewed himself to be a person of frigid apprehension, ‘with eye severe and beard of formal cut,’ when he banished the poets from his Republic, as corrupters of morals, because they described the various passions and affections of the mind. This did not suit with that Procrustes’ bed of criticism on which he wished to stretch and lop them; but Homer’s imitations of nature have been more popular than Plato’s inversions of her; and his morality is at least as sound. The errors of nature are accidental and pardonable; those of science are systematic and incorrigible. The understanding, or reasoning faculty presumes too much over her younger sisters; and yet plays as fantastic tricks as any of them, only with more solemnity, which enhances the evil. We have partly seen what right she has, on the score of past behaviour, to set up for a strict and unerring guide. The haughtiness of her pretensions at present, ‘full of wise saws and modern instances,’ is not the most unequivocal pledge of her abandonment of her old errors. To bring down this account then from the ancients to the moderns.

People of sense, the self-conceited wise, are at all times at issue with common sense and feeling. They formerly dogmatised on speculative matters, out of the reach of common apprehension; they now dogmatise with the same headstrong self-sufficiency on practical questions, more within the province of actual inquiry and observation. In this new and more circumscribed career, they set out with exploding the sense of all those who have gone before them, as of too light and fanciful a texture. They make a clear stage of all former opinions—get rid of the _mixed modes_ of prejudice, authority, suggestion—and begin _de novo_, with reason for their rule, certainty for their guide, and the greatest possible good as a _sine qua non_. The modern Panoptic and Chrestomathic School of reformers and reconstructors of society propose to do it upon entirely mechanical and scientific principles. Nothing short of that will satisfy their scrupulous pretensions to wisdom and gravity. They proceed by the rule and compass, by logical diagrams, and with none but demonstrable conclusions, and leave all the taste, fancy, and sentiment of the thing to the admirers of Mr. Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. That work is to them a very flimsy and superficial performance, because it is rhetorical and figurative, and they judge of solidity by barrenness, of depth by dryness. Till they see a little farther into it, they will not be able to answer it, or counteract its influence; and yet that were a task of some importance to atchieve. They say that the proportions are false, because the colouring is fine, which is bad logic. If they do not like a painted statue, a florid argument, that is a matter of taste and not of reasoning. Some may conceive that the gold, the sterling bullion of thought, is the better for being wrought into rich and elegant figures; _they_ are the only people who contend that it is the worse on that account. These crude projectors give, in their new plan and elevation of society, neither ‘princes’ palaces nor poor men’s cottages,’ but a sort of log-houses and gable-ends, in which the solid contents and square dimensions are to be ascertained and parcelled out to a nicety; they employ the carpenter, joiner, and bricklayer, but will have nothing to say to the plasterer, painter, paper-hanger, upholsterer, carver and gilder, &c.; so that I am afraid, in this fastidious and luxurious age, they will hardly find tenants for their bare walls and skeletons of houses, run up in haste and by the job. Their system wants _house-warming_; it is destitute of comfort as of outside shew; it has nothing to recommend it but its poverty and nakedness. They profess to set aside and reject all compromise with the prejudices of authority, the allurements of sense, the customs of the world, and the instincts of nature. They will make a man with a quadrant, as the tailors at Laputa made a suit of clothes. They put the mind into a machine, as the potter puts a lump of clay into a mould, and out it comes in any clumsy or disagreeable shape that they would have it. They hate all grace, ornament, elegance. They are addicted to abstruse science, but sworn enemies to the fine arts. They are a kind of puritans in morals. Do you suppose that the race of the Iconoclasts is dead with the dispute in Laud’s time about image-worship? We have just the same set of moon-eyed philosophers in our days, who cannot bear to be dazzled with the sun of beauty. They are only half-alive. They can distinguish the hard edges and determinate outline of things; but are alike insensible to the stronger impulses of passion, to the finer essences of thought. Their intellectual food does not assimilate with the juices of the mind, or turn to subtle spirit, but lies a crude, undigested heap of material substance, begetting only the windy impertinence of words. They are acquainted with the form, not the power of truth; they insist on what is necessary, and never arrive at what is desirable. They refer every thing to utility, and yet banish pleasure with stoic pride and cynic slovenliness. They talk big of increasing the sum of human happiness, and yet in the mighty grasp and extension of their views, leave hardly any one source from which the smallest ray of satisfaction can be derived. They have an instinctive aversion to plays, novels, amusements of every kind; and this not so much from affectation or want of knowledge, as from sheer incapacity and want of taste. Shew one of these men of narrow comprehension a beautiful prospect, and he wonders you can take delight in what is of no use: you would hardly suppose that this very person had written a book, and was perhaps at the moment holding an argument, to prove that nothing is useful but what pleases. Speak of Shakespear, and another of the same _automatic_ school will tell you he has read him, but could find nothing in him. Point to Hogarth, and they do confess there is something in his prints, that, by contrast, throws a pleasing light on their Utopian schemes, and the future progress of society. One of these pseudo-philosophers would think it a disparagement to compare him to Aristotle: he fancies himself as great a man as Aristotle was in his day, and that the world is much wiser now than it was in the time of Aristotle. He would be glad to live the ten remaining years of his life, a year at a time at the end of the next ten centuries, to see the effect of his writings on social institutions, though posterity will know no more than his contemporaries that so great a man ever existed. So little does he know of himself or the world! Persons of his class, indeed, cautiously shut themselves up from society, and take no more notice of men than of animals; and from their ignorance of what mankind are, can tell exactly what they will be. ‘What can we reason but from what we know?’—is not their maxim. Reason with them is a mathematical force that acts with most certainty in the absence of experience, in the vacuum of pure speculation. These secure alarmists and dreaming guardians of the state are like superannuated watchmen enclosed in a sentry-box, that never hear ‘when thieves break through and steal.’ They put an oil-skin over their heads, that the dust raised by the passions and interests of the countless, ever-moving multitude, may not annoy or disturb the clearness of their vision. They build a Penitentiary, and are satisfied that Dyot-street, Bloomsbury-square, will no longer send forth its hordes of young delinquents, ‘an aerie of children,’ the embryo performers on locks and pockets for the next generation. They put men into a Panopticon, like a glass hive, to carry on all sorts of handicrafts (‘——So work the honey-bees’—) under the omnipresent eye of the inventor, and want and idleness are banished from the world. They propose to erect a Chrestomathic school, by cutting down some fine old trees on the classic ground where Milton thought and wrote, to introduce a rabble of children, who for the Greek and Latin languages, poetry, and history, that fine pabulum of useful enthusiasm, that breath of immortality infused into our youthful blood, that balm and cordial of our future years, are to be drugged with chemistry and apothecaries’ receipts, are to be taught to do every thing, and to see and feel nothing;—that the grubbing up of elegant arts and polite literature may be followed by the systematic introduction of accomplished barbarism and mechanical quackery. Such enlightened geniuses would pull down Stonehenge to build pig-sties, and would convert Westminster Abbey into a central House of Correction. It would be in vain to point to the arched windows,

‘Shedding a dim, religious light,’

to touch the deep, solemn organ-stop in their ears, to turn to the statue of Newton, to gaze upon the sculptured marble on the walls, to call back the hopes and fears that lie buried there, to cast a wistful look at Poet’s Corner (they scorn the Muse!)—all this would not stand one moment in the way of any of the schemes of these retrograde reformers; who, instead of being legislators for the world, and stewards to the intellectual inheritance of nations, are hardly fit to be parish-beadles, or pettifogging attorneys to a litigated estate! ‘Their speech bewrayeth them.’ The leader of this class of reasoners does not write to be understood, because he would make fewer converts, if he did. The language he adopts is his own—a word to the wise—a technical and conventional jargon, unintelligible to others, and conveying no idea to himself in common with the rest of mankind, purposely cut off from human sympathy and ordinary apprehension. Mr. Bentham’s writings require to be translated into a foreign tongue or his own, before they can be read at all, except by the adepts. This is not a very fair or very wise proceeding. No man who invents words arbitrarily, can be sure that he uses them conscientiously. There is no check upon him in the popular criticism exercised by the mass of readers—there is no clue to propriety in the habitual associations of his own mind. He who pretends to fit words to things, will much oftener accommodate things to words, to answer a theory. Words are a measure of truth. They ascertain (intuitively) the degrees, inflections, and powers of things in a wonderful manner; and he who voluntarily deprives himself of their assistance, does not go the way to arrive at any very nice or sure results. Language is the medium of our communication with the thoughts of others. But whoever becomes wise, becomes wise by sympathy; whoever is powerful, becomes so by making others sympathize with him. To think justly, we must understand what others mean: to know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds. There is this privilege in the use of a conventional style, as there was in that of the learned languages—a man may be as absurd as he pleases without being ridiculous. His folly and his wisdom are alike a secret to the generality. If it were possible to contrive a perfect language, consistent with itself, and answering to the complexity of human affairs, there would be some excuse for the attempt; but he who knows any thing of the nature of language, or of the complexity of human thought, knows that this is impossible. What is gained in formality, is more than lost in force, ease, and perspicuity. Mr. Bentham’s language, in short, is like his reasoning, a logical apparatus, which will work infallibly and perform wonders, taking it for granted that his principles and definitions are universally true and intelligible; but as this is not exactly the case, neither the one nor the other is of much use or authority. Thus, the maxim that ‘mankind act from calculation’ may be, in a general sense, true: but the moment you apply this maxim to subject all their actions systematically and demonstrably to reason, and to exclude passion both in common and in extreme cases, you give it a sense in which the principle is false, and in which all the inferences built upon it (many and mighty, no doubt) fall to the ground. ‘Madmen reason.’ But in what proportion does this hold good? How far does reason guide them, or their madness err? There is a difference between reason and madness in this respect; but according to Mr. Bentham, there can be none; for all men act from calculation, and equally so. ‘So runs the bond.’ Passion is liable to be restrained by reason, as drunkenness may be changed to sobriety by some strong motive: but passion is not reason, _i.e._ does not act by the same rule or law; and therefore all that follows is, that men act (according to the common-sense of the thing) either from passion or reason, from impulse or calculation, more or less, as circumstances lead. But no sweeping, metaphysical conclusion can be drawn from hence, as if reason were absolute, and passion a mere non-entity in the government of the world. People in general, or writers speculating on human actions, form wrong judgments concerning them, because they decide coolly, and at a distance, on what is done in heat and on the spur of the occasion. Man is not a machine; nor is he to be measured by mechanical rules. The decisions of abstract reason would apply to what men might do if all men were philosophers: but if all men were philosophers, there would be no need of systems of philosophy!

The race of alchemists and visionaries is not yet extinct; and, what is remarkable, we find them existing in the shape of deep logicians and enlightened legislators. They have got a menstruum for dissolving the lead and copper of society, and turning it to pure gold, as the adepts of old had a trick for finding the philosopher’s stone. The author of St. Leon has represented his hero as possessed of the _elixir vitæ_ and _aurum potabile_. The author of the Political Justice has adopted one half of this romantic fiction as a serious hypothesis, and maintains the natural immortality of man, without a figure. The truth is, that persons of the most precise and formal understandings are persons of the loosest and most extravagant imaginations. Take from them their _norma loquendi_, their literal clue, and there is no absurdity into which they will not fall with pleasure. They have no means or principle of judging of that which does not admit of absolute proof; and between this and the idlest fiction, they perceive no medium:—as those artists who take likenesses with a machine, are quite thrown out in their calculations when they have to rely on the eye or hand alone. People who are accustomed to trust to their imaginations or feelings, know how far to go, and how to keep within certain limits: those who seldom exert these faculties are all abroad, in a wide sea of speculation without rudder or compass, the instant they leave the shore of matter-of-fact or dry reasoning, and never stop short of the last absurdity. They go all lengths, or none. They laugh at poets, and are themselves lunatics. They are the dupes of all sorts of projectors and impostors. Being of a busy, meddlesome turn, they are for reducing whatever comes into their heads (and cannot be demonstrated by mood and figure to amount to a contradiction in terms) to practice. What they would scout in a fiction, they would set about realizing in sober sadness, and melt their fortunes in compassing what others consider as the amusement of an idle hour. Astolpho’s voyage to the moon in Ariosto, they criticize sharply as a quaint and ridiculous burlesque: but if any one had the face seriously to undertake such a thing, they would immediately patronize it, and defy any one to prove by a logical dilemma that the attempt was physically impossible. So, again, we find that painters and engravers, whose attention is confined and rivetted to a minute investigation of actual objects, or of visible lines and surfaces, are apt to fly out into all the extravagance and rhapsodies of the most unbridled fanaticism. Several of the most eminent are at this moment Swedenborgians, animal magnetists, &c. The mind (as it should seem), too long tied down to the evidence of sense and a number of trifling particulars, is wearied of the bondage, revolts at it, and instinctively takes refuge in the wildest schemes and most magnificent contradictions of an unlimited faith. Poets, on the contrary, who are continually throwing off the superfluities of feeling or fancy in little sportive sallies and short excursions with the Muse, do not find the want of any greater or more painful effort of thought; leave the ascent of the ‘highest Heaven of Invention’ as a holiday task to persons of more mechanical habits and turn of mind; and the characters of poet and sceptic are now often united in the same individual, as those of poet and prophet were supposed to be of old.

ESSAY XXIII
ON ANTIQUITY

There is no such thing as Antiquity in the ordinary acceptation we affix to the term. Whatever is or has been, while it is passing, must be modern. The early ages may have been barbarous in themselves; but they have become _ancient_ with the slow and silent lapse of successive generations. The ‘olden times’ are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful, from the great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar, and glossy. The Children in the Wood, and Percy’s Relics, were once recent productions; and Auld Robin Gray was, in his time, a very common-place old fellow! The wars of York and Lancaster, while they lasted, were ‘lively, audible, and full of vent,’ as fresh and lusty as the white and red roses that distinguished their different banners, though they have since became a bye-word and a solecism in history.

The sun shone in Julius Cæsar’s time just as it does now. On the roadside between Winchester and Salisbury are some remains of old Roman encampments, with their double lines of circumvallation (now turned into pasturage for sheep), which answer exactly to the descriptions of this kind in Cæsar’s Commentaries. In a dull and cloudy atmosphere, I can conceive that this is the identical spot, that the first Cæsar trod,—and figure to myself the deliberate movements and scarce perceptible march of close-embodied legions. But if the sun breaks out, making its way through dazzling, fleecy clouds, lights up the blue serene, and gilds the sombre earth, I can no longer persuade myself that it is the same scene as formerly, or transfer the actual image before me so far back. The brightness of nature is not easily reduced to the low, twilight tone of history; and the impressions of sense defeat and dissipate the faint traces of learning and tradition. It is only by an effort of reason, to which fancy is averse, that I bring myself to believe that the sun shone as bright, that the sky was as blue, and the earth as green, two thousand years ago as it is at present. How ridiculous this seems; yet so it is!

The _dark_ or middle ages, when every thing was hid in the fog and haze of confusion and ignorance, seem, to the same involuntary kind of prejudice, older and farther off, and more inaccessible to the imagination, than the brilliant and well-defined periods of Greece and Rome. A Gothic ruin appears buried in a greater depth of obscurity, to be weighed down and rendered venerable with the hoar of more distant ages, to have been longer mouldering into neglect and oblivion, to be a record and memento of events more wild and alien to our own times, than a Grecian temple.[46] Amadis de Gaul, and the seven Champions of Christendom, with me (honestly speaking) rank as contemporaries with Theseus, Pirithous, and the heroes of the fabulous ages. My imagination will stretch no farther back into the commencement of time than the first traces and rude dawn of civilization and mighty enterprise, in either case; and in attempting to force it upwards by the scale of chronology, it only recoils upon itself, and dwindles from a lofty survey of ‘the dark rearward and abyss of time,’ into a poor and puny calculation of insignificant cyphers. In like manner, I cannot go back to any time more remote and dreary than that recorded in Stow’s and Holingshed’s Chronicles, unless I turn to ‘the wars of old Assaracus and Inachus divine,’ and the gorgeous events of Eastern history, where the distance of place may be said to add to the length of time and weight of thought. That is old (in sentiment and poetry) which is decayed, shadowy, imperfect, out of date, and changed from what it was. That of which we have a distinct idea, which comes before us entire and made out in all its parts, will have a novel appearance, however old in reality,—and cannot be impressed with the romantic and superstitious character of antiquity. Those times that we can parallel with our own in civilization and knowledge, seem advanced into the same line with our own in the order of progression. The perfection of art does not look like the infancy of things. Or those times are prominent, and, as it were, confront the present age, that are raised high in the scale of polished society,—and the trophies of which stand out above the low, obscure, grovelling level of barbarism and rusticity. Thus, Rome and Athens were two cities set on a hill, that could not be hid, and that every where meet the retrospective eye of history. It is not the full-grown, articulated, thoroughly accomplished periods of the world, that we regard with the pity or reverence due to age; so much as those imperfect, unformed, uncertain periods, which seem to totter on the verge of non-existence, to shrink from the grasp of our feeble imaginations, as they crawl out of, or retire into, the womb of time, and of which our utmost assurance is to doubt whether they ever were or not!

To give some other instances of this feeling, taken at random: Whittington and his Cat, the first and favourite studies of my childhood, are, to my way of thinking, as old and reverend personages as any recorded in more authentic history. It must have been long before the invention of triple bob-majors, that Bow-bells rung out their welcome never-to-be-forgotten peal, hailing him Thrice Lord Mayor of London. Does not all we know relating to the site of old London-wall, and the first stones that were laid of this mighty metropolis, seem of a far older date (hid in the lap of ‘chaos and old night’) than the splendid and imposing details of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?—Again, the early Italian pictures of Cimabue, Giotto, and Ghirlandaio are covered with the marks of unquestionable antiquity; while the Greek statues, done a thousand years before them, shine in glossy, undiminished splendour, and flourish in immortal youth and beauty. The latter Grecian Gods, as we find them there represented, are to all appearance a race of modern fine gentlemen, who _led the life of honour_ with their favourite mistresses of mortal or immortal mould,—were gallant, graceful, well-dressed, and well-spoken; whereas the Gothic deities long after, carved in horrid wood or misshapen stone, and worshipped in dreary waste or tangled forest, belong, in the mind’s heraldry, to almost as ancient a date as those elder and discarded Gods of the Pagan mythology, Ops, and Rhea and old Saturn,—those strange anomalies of earth and cloudy spirit, born of the elements and conscious will, and clothing themselves and all things with shape and formal being. The Chronicle of Brute, in Spenser’s Fairy Queen, has a tolerable air of antiquity in it; so in the dramatic line, the Ghost of one of the old kings of Ormus, introduced as Prologue to Fulke Greville’s play of Mustapha, is reasonably far-fetched, and palpably obscure. A monk in the Popish Calendar, or even in the Canterbury Tales, is a more questionable and out-of-the-way personage than the Chiron of Achilles, or the priest in Homer. When Chaucer, in his Troilus and Cressida, makes the Trojan hero invoke the absence of light, in these two lines—

Why proffer’st thou light me for to sell?
Go sell it them that smallé seles grave!

he is guilty of an anachronism; or at least I much doubt whether there was such a profession as that of seal-engraver in the Trojan war. But the dimness of the objects and the quaintness of the allusion throw us farther back into the night of time, than the golden, glittering images of the Iliad. The Travels of Anacharsis are less obsolete at this time of day, than Coryate’s Crudities, or Fuller’s Worthies. ‘Here is some of the ancient city,’ said a Roman, taking up a handful of dust from beneath his feet. The ground we tread on is as old as the creation, though it does not seem so, except when collected into gigantic masses, or separated by gloomy solitudes from modern uses and the purposes of common life. The lone Helvellyn and the silent Andes are in thought coeval with the Globe itself, and can only perish with it. The Pyramids of Egypt are vast, sublime, old, eternal; but Stonehenge, built no doubt in a later day, satisfies my capacity for the sense of antiquity; it seems as if as much rain had drizzled on its grey, withered head, and it had watched out as many winter-nights; the hand of time is upon it, and it has sustained the burden of years upon its back, a wonder and a ponderous riddle, time out of mind, without known origin or use, baffling fable or conjecture, the credulity of the ignorant, or wise men’s search.

Thou noblest monument of Albion’s isle,
Whether by Merlin’s aid, from Scythia’s shore
To Amber’s fatal plain Pendragon bore,
Huge frame of giant hands, the mighty pile,
T’entomb his Briton’s slain by Hengist’s guile:
Or Druid priests, sprinkled with human gore,
Taught mid thy massy maze their mystic lore:
Or Danish chiefs, enrich’d with savage spoil,
To victory’s idol vast, an unhewn shrine,
Rear’d the rude heap, or in thy hallow’d ground
Repose the kings of Brutus’ genuine line;
Or here those kings in solemn state were crown’d;
Studious to trace thy wondrous origin,
We muse on many an ancient tale renown’d.
_Warton._

So it is with respect to ourselves also; it is the sense of change or decay that marks the difference between the real and apparent progress of time, both in the events of our own lives and the history of the world we live in.

Impressions of a peculiar and accidental nature, of which few traces are left, and which return seldom or never, fade in the distance, and are consigned to obscurity,—while those that belong to a given and definite class are kept up, and assume a constant and tangible form, from familiarity and habit. That which was personal to myself merely, is lost and confounded with other things, like a drop in the ocean; it was but a point at first, which by its nearness affected me, and by its removal becomes nothing; while circumstances of a general interest and abstract importance present the same distinct, well-known aspect as ever, and are durable in proportion to the extent of their influence. Our own idle feelings and foolish fancies we get tired or grow ashamed of, as their novelty wears out; ‘when we become men, we put away childish things;’ but the impressions we derive from the exercise of our higher faculties last as long as the faculties themselves. They have nothing to do with time, place, and circumstance; and are of universal applicability and recurrence. An incident in my own history, that delighted or tormented me very much at the time, I may have long since blotted from my memory,—or have great difficulty in calling to mind after a certain period; but I can never forget the first time of my seeing Mrs. Siddons act;—which is as if it happened yesterday; and the reason is because it has been something for me to think of ever since. The petty and the personal, that which appeals to our senses and our appetites, passes away with the occasion that gives it birth. The grand and the ideal, that which appeals to the imagination, can only perish with it, and remains with us, unimpaired in its lofty abstraction, from youth to age; as wherever we go, we still see the same heavenly bodies shining over our heads! An old familiar face, the house that we were brought up in, sometimes the scenes and places that we formerly knew and loved, may be changed, so that we hardly know them again; the characters in books, the faces in old pictures, the propositions in Euclid, remain the same as when they were first pointed out to us. There is a continual alternation of generation and decay in individual forms and feelings, that marks the progress of existence, and the ceaseless current of our lives, borne along with it; but this does not extend to our love of art or knowledge of nature. It seems a long time ago since some of the first events of the French Revolution; the prominent characters that figured then have been swept away and succeeded by others; yet I cannot say that this circumstance has in any way abated my hatred of tyranny, or reconciled my understanding to the fashionable doctrine of Divine Right. The sight of an old newspaper of that date would give one a fit of the spleen for half an hour; on the other hand, it must be confessed, Mr. Burke’s Reflections on this subject are as fresh and dazzling as in the year 1791; and his Letter to a Noble Lord is even now as interesting as Lord John Russell’s Letter to Mr. Wilberforce, which appeared only a few weeks back. Ephemeral politics and still-born productions are speedily consigned to oblivion; great principles and original works are a match even for time itself!

We may, by following up this train of ideas, give some account why time runs faster as our years increase. We gain by habit and experience a more determinate and settled, that is, a more uniform notion of things. We refer each particular to a given standard. Our impressions acquire the character of identical propositions. Our most striking thoughts are turned into truisms. One observation is like another, that I made formerly. The idea I have of a certain character or subject is just the same as I had ten years ago. I have learnt nothing since. There is no alteration perceptible, no advance made; so that the two points of time seem to touch and coincide. I get from the one to the other immediately by the familiarity of habit, by the undistinguishing process of abstraction. What I can recal so easily and mechanically does not seem far off; it is completely within my reach, and consequently close to me in apprehension. I have no intricate web of curious speculation to wind or unwind, to pass from one state of feeling and opinion to the other; no complicated train of associations, which place an immeasurable barrier between my knowledge or my ignorance at different epochs. There is no contrast, no repugnance to widen the interval; no new sentiment infused, like another atmosphere, to lengthen the perspective. I am but where I was. I see the object before me just as I have been accustomed to do. The ideas are written down in the brain as in the page of a book—_totidem verbis et literis_. The mind becomes _stereotyped_. By not going forward to explore new regions, or break up new grounds, we are thrown back more and more upon our past acquisitions; and this habitual recurrence increases the facility and indifference with which we make the imaginary transition. By thinking of what has been, we change places with ourselves, and transpose our personal identity at will; so as to fix the slider of our improgressive continuance at whatever point we please. This is an advantage or a disadvantage, which we have not in youth. After a certain period, we neither lose nor gain, neither add to, nor diminish our stock; up to that period we do nothing else but lose our former notions and being, and gain a new one every instant. Our life is like the birth of a new day; the dawn breaks apace, and the clouds clear away. A new world of thought and observation is opened to our search. A year makes the difference of an age. A total alteration takes place in our ideas, feelings, habits, looks. We outgrow ourselves. A separate set of objects, of the existence of which we had not a suspicion, engages and occupies our whole souls. Shapes and colours of all varieties, and of gorgeous tint, intercept our view of what we were. Life thickens. Time glows on its axle. Every revolution of the wheel gives an unsettled aspect to things. The world and its inhabitants turn round, and we forget one change of scene in another. Art woos us; science tempts us into her intricate labyrinths; each step presents unlooked-for vistas, and closes upon us our backward path. Our onward road is strange, obscure, and infinite. We are bewildered in a shadow, lost in a dream. Our perceptions have the brightness and the indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls in pieces. We go on, learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused, strange to each other and to ourselves. Our life does not hang together,—but straggling, disjointed, winds its slow length along, stretching out to the endless future—unmindful of the ignorant past. We seem many beings in one, and cast the slough of our existence daily. The birth of knowledge is the generation of time. The unfolding of our experience is long and voluminous; nor do we all at once recover from our surprise at the number of objects that distract our attention. Every new study is a separate, arduous, and insurmountable undertaking. We are lost in wonder at the magnitude, the difficulty, and the interminable prospect. We spell out the first years of our existence, like learning a lesson for the first time, where every advance is slow, doubtful, interesting; afterwards we rehearse our parts by rote, and are hardly conscious of the meaning. A very short period (from fifteen to twenty-five or thirty) includes the whole map and table of contents of human life. From that time we may be said to live our lives over again, repeat ourselves,—the same thoughts return at stated intervals, like the tunes of a barrel-organ; and the volume of the universe is no more than a form of words and book of reference.

Time in general is supposed to move faster or slower, as we attend more or less to the succession of our ideas, in the same manner as distance is increased or lessened by the greater or less variety of intervening objects. There is, however, a difference in this respect. Suspense, where the mind is engrossed with one idea, and kept from amusing itself with any other, is not only the most uncomfortable, but the most tiresome of all things. The fixing our attention on a single point makes us more sensible of the delay, and hangs an additional weight of fretful impatience on every moment of expectation. People in country-places, without employment or artificial resources, complain that time lies heavy on their hands. Its leaden pace is not occasioned by the quantity of thought, but by vacancy, and the continual languid craving after excitement. It wants spirit and vivacity to give it motion. We are on the watch to see how time goes; and it appears to lag behind, because, in the absence of objects to arrest our immediate attention, we are always getting on before it. We do not see its divisions, but we feel the galling pressure of each creeping sand that measures out our hours. Again, a rapid succession of external objects and amusements, which leave no room for reflection, and where one gratification is forgotten in the next, makes time pass quickly, as well as delightfully. We do not perceive an extent of surface, but only a succession of points. We are whirled swiftly along by the hand of dissipation, but cannot stay to look behind us. On the contrary, change of scene, travelling through a foreign country, or the meeting with a variety of striking adventures that lay hold of the imagination, and continue to haunt it in a waking dream, will make days seem weeks. From the crowd of events, the number of distinct points of view, brought into a small compass, we seem to have passed through a great length of time, when it is no such thing. In traversing a flat, barren country, the monotony of our ideas fatigues, and makes the way longer; whereas, if the prospect is diversified and picturesque, we get over the miles without counting them. In painting or writing, hours are melted almost into minutes: the mind, absorbed in the eagerness of its pursuit, forgets the time necessary to accomplish it; and, indeed, the clock often finds us employed on the same thought or part of a picture that occupied us when it struck last. It seems, then, there are several other circumstances besides the number and distinctness of our ideas, to be taken into the account in the measure of time, or in considering ‘whom time ambles withal, whom time gallops withal, and whom he stands still withal.’[47] Time wears away slowly with a man in solitary confinement; not from the number or variety of his ideas, but from their weary sameness, fretting like drops of water. The imagination may distinguish the lapse of time by the brilliant variety of its tints, and the many striking shapes it assumes; the heart feels it by the weight of sadness, and ‘grim-visaged, comfortless despair!’

I will conclude this subject with remarking, that the fancied shortness of life is aided by the apprehension of a future state. The constantly directing our hopes and fears to a higher state of being beyond the present, necessarily brings death habitually before us, and defines the narrow limits within which we hold our frail existence, as mountains bound the horizon, and unavoidably draw our attention to it. This may be one reason among others why the fear of death was a less prominent feature in ancient times than it is at present; because the thoughts of it, and of a future state, were less frequently impressed on the mind by religion and morality. The greater progress of civilization and security in modern times has also considerably to do with our practical effeminacy; for though the old Pagans were not bound to think of death as a religious duty, they never could foresee when they should be compelled to submit to it, as a natural necessity, or accident of war, &c. They viewed death, therefore, with an eye of speculative indifference and practical resolution. That the idea of annihilation did not impress them with the same horror and repugnance as it does the modern believer, or even infidel, is easily accounted for (though a writer in the Edinburgh Review thinks the question insoluble)[48] from this plain reason, _viz._ that not being taught from childhood a belief in a future state of existence as a part of the creed of their country, the supposition that there was no such state in store for them, could not shock their feelings, or confound their imagination, in the same manner as it does with us, who have been brought up in such a belief; and who live with those who deeply cherish, and would be unhappy without a full conviction of it. It is the Christian religion alone that takes us to the highest pinnacle of the Temple, to point out to us ‘the glory hereafter to be revealed,’ and that makes us shrink back with affright from the precipice of annihilation that yawns below. Those who have never entertained a hope, cannot be greatly staggered by having it struck from under their feet; those who have never been led to expect the reversion of an estate, will not be excessively disappointed at finding that the inheritance has descended to others.

ESSAY XXIV
ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING AND SPEAKING

‘Some minds are proportioned to that which may be dispatched at
once, or within a short return of time: others to that which begins
afar off, and is to be won with length of pursuit.’

LORD BACON.

It is a common observation, that few persons can be found who speak and write equally well. Not only is it obvious that the two faculties do not always go together in the same proportions: but they are not unusually in direct opposition to each other. We find that the greatest authors often make the worst company in the world; and again, some of the liveliest fellows imaginable in conversation, or extempore speaking, seem to lose all their vivacity and spirit the moment they set pen to paper. For this a greater degree of quickness or slowness of parts, education, habit, temper, turn of mind, and a variety of collateral and predisposing causes are necessary to account. The subject is at least curious, and worthy of an attempt to explain it. I shall endeavour to illustrate the difference by familiar examples rather than by analytical reasonings. The philosopher of old was not unwise, who defined motion by getting up and walking.

The great leading distinction between writing and speaking is, that more time is allowed for the one than the other: and hence different faculties are required for, and different objects attained by, each. He is properly the best speaker who can collect together the greatest number of apposite ideas at a moment’s warning: he is properly the best writer who can give utterance to the greatest quantity of valuable knowledge in the course of his whole life. The chief requisite for the one, then, appears to be quickness and facility of perception—for the other, patience of soul, and a power increasing with the difficulties it has to master. He cannot be denied to be an expert speaker, a lively companion, who is never at a loss for something to say on every occasion or subject that offers: he, by the same rule, will make a respectable writer, who, by dint of study, can find out any thing good to say upon any one point that has not been touched upon before, or who, by asking for time, can give the most complete and comprehensive view of any question. The one must be done off-hand, at a single blow: the other can only be done by a repetition of blows, by having time to think and do better. In speaking, less is required of you, if you only do it at once, with grace and spirit: in writing, you stipulate for all that you are capable of, but you have the choice of your own time and subject. You do not expect from the manufacturer the same dispatch in executing an order that you do from the shopkeeper or warehouseman. The difference of _quicker_ and _slower_, however, is not all: that is merely a difference of comparison in doing the same thing. But the writer and speaker have to do things essentially different. Besides habit, and greater or less facility, there is also a certain reach of capacity, a certain depth or shallowness, grossness or refinement of intellect, which marks out the distinction between those whose chief ambition is to shine by producing an immediate effect, or who are thrown back, by a natural bias, on the severer researches of thought and study.

We see persons of that standard or texture of mind that they can do nothing, but on the spur of the occasion: if they have time to deliberate, they are lost. There are others who have no resource, who cannot advance a step by any efforts or assistance, beyond a successful arrangement of common-places: but these they have always at command, at every body’s service. There is F——; meet him where you will in the street, he has his topic ready to discharge in the same breath with the customary forms of salutation; he is hand and glove with it; on it goes and off, and he manages it like Wart his caliver.

Hear him but reason in divinity,
And, all-admiring, with an inward wish
You would desire that he were made a prelate.
Let him but talk of any state-affair,
You’d say it had been all in all his study.
Turn him to any cause of policy,
The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter. When he speaks,
The air, a charter’d libertine, stands still—

but, ere you have time to answer him, he is off like a shot, to repeat the same rounded, fluent observations to others:—a perfect master of the sentences, a walking polemic wound up for the day, a smartly bound political pocket-book! Set the same person to write a common paragraph, and he cannot get through it for very weariness: ask him a question, ever so little out of the common road, and he stares you in the face. What does all this bustle, animation, plausibility, and command of words amount to? A lively flow of animal spirits, a good deal of confidence, a communicative turn, and a tolerably tenacious memory with respect to floating opinions and current phrases. Beyond the routine of the daily newspapers and coffeehouse criticism, such persons do not venture to think at all: or if they did, it would be so much the worse for them, for they would only be perplexed in the attempt, and would perform their part in the mechanism of society with so much the less alacrity and easy volubility.