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Characteristics as an excellent little work, because it has no
cabalistic name in the title-page, and swears ‘there is a first-rate
article of forty pages in the last number of the Edinburgh from
Jeffrey’s own hand,’ though when he learns against his will that it is
mine, he devotes three successive numbers of the Literary Gazette
to abuse ‘that strange article in the last number of the Edinburgh
Review.’ Others who had not this advantage have fallen a sacrifice to
the obloquy attached to the suspicion of doubting, or of being
acquainted with any one who is known to doubt, the divinity of
kings. Poor Keats paid the forfeit of this lezè majesté with his health
and life. What, though his Verses were like the breath of spring, and
many of his thoughts like flowers—would this, with the circle of
critics that beset a throne, lessen the crime of their having been
praised in the Examiner? The lively and most agreeable Editor of
that paper has in like manner been driven from his country and his
friends who delighted in him, for no other reason than having
written the Story of Rimini, and asserted ten years ago, ‘that the
most accomplished prince in Europe was an Adonis of fifty!’
‘Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse!’

I look out of my window and see that a shower has just fallen: the
fields look green after it, and a rosy cloud hangs over the brow of the
hill; a lily expands its petals in the moisture, dressed in its lovely
green and white; a shepherd-boy has just brought some pieces of turf
with daisies and grass for his young mistress to make a bed for her
sky-lark, not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn—my
cloudy thoughts draw off, the storm of angry politics has blown over
—Mr. Blackwood, I am yours—Mr. Croker, my service to you—Mr. T.
Moore, I am alive and well—Really, it is wonderful how little the
worse I am for fifteen years’ wear and tear, how I come upon my legs
again on the ground of truth and nature, and ‘look abroad into
universality,’ forgetting that there is any such person as myself in the
world!
I have let this passage stand (however critical) because it may
serve as a practical illustration to show what authors really think of
themselves when put upon the defensive—(I confess, the subject has
nothing to do with the title at the head of the Essay!)—and as a
warning to those who may reckon upon their fair portion of
popularity as the reward of the exercise of an independent spirit and
such talents as they possess. It sometimes seems at first sight as if
the low scurrility and jargon of abuse by which it is attempted to
overlay all common sense and decency by a tissue of lies and
nicknames, everlastingly repeated and applied indiscriminately to all
those who are not of the regular government-party, was peculiar to
the present time, and the anomalous growth of modern criticism; but
if we look back, we shall find the same system acted upon, as often as
power, prejudice, dulness, and spite found their account in playing
the game into one another’s hands—in decrying popular efforts, and
in giving currency to every species of base metal that had their own
conventional stamp upon it. The names of Pope and Dryden were
assailed with daily and unsparing abuse—the epithet A. P. E. was
levelled at the sacred head of the former—and if even men like these,
having to deal with the consciousness of their own infirmities and
the insolence and spurns of wanton enmity, must have found it hard
to possess their souls in patience, any living writer amidst such
contradictory evidence can scarcely expect to retain much calm,
steady conviction of his own merits, or build himself a secure
reversion in immortality.
However one may in a fit of spleen and impatience turn round and
assert one’s claims in the face of low-bred, hireling malice, I will here
repeat what I set out with saying, that there never yet was a man of
sense and proper spirit, who would not decline rather than court a
comparison with any of those names, whose reputation he really
emulates—who would not be sorry to suppose that any of the great
heirs of memory had as many foibles as he knows himself to possess
—and who would not shrink from including himself or being
included by others in the same praise, that was offered to long-
established and universally acknowledged merit, as a kind of
profanation. Those who are ready to fancy themselves Raphaels and
Homers are very inferior men indeed—they have not even an idea of
the mighty names that ‘they take in vain.’ They are as deficient in
pride as in modesty, and have not so much as served an
apprenticeship to a true and honourable ambition. They mistake a
momentary popularity for lasting renown, and a sanguine
temperament for the inspirations of genius. The love of fame is too
high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities—
it is a solitary abstraction, the secret sigh of the soul—
‘It is all one as we should love
A bright particular star, and think to wed it.’

A name ‘fast-anchored in the deep abyss of time’ is like a star

twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and
sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should
contemplate our translation to the skies. If we are not contented with
this feeling on the subject, we shall never sit in Cassiopeia’s chair,
nor will our names, studding Ariadne’s crown or streaming with
Berenice’s locks, ever make
‘the face of heaven so bright,
That birds shall sing, and think it were not night.’

Those who are in love only with noise and show, instead of devoting
themselves to a life of study, had better hire a booth at Bartlemy-
Fair, or march at the head of a recruiting regiment with drums
beating and colours flying!
It has been urged, that however little we may be disposed to
indulge the reflection at other times or out of mere self-complacency,
yet the mind cannot help being conscious of the effort required for
any great work while it is about it, of
‘The high endeavour and the glad success.’

I grant that there is a sense of power in such cases, with the

exception before stated; but then this very effort and state of
excitement engrosses the mind at the time, and leaves it listless and
exhausted afterwards. The energy we exert, or the high state of
enjoyment we feel, puts us out of conceit with ourselves at other
times: compared to what we are in the act of composition, we seem
dull, common-place people, generally speaking; and what we have
been able to perform is rather matter of wonder than of self-
congratulation to us. The stimulus of writing is like the stimulus of
intoxication, with which we can hardly sympathise in our sober
moments, when we are no longer under the inspiration of the
demon, or when the virtue is gone out of us. While we are engaged in
any work, we are thinking of the subject, and cannot stop to admire
ourselves; and when it is done, we look at it with comparative
indifference. I will venture to say, that no one but a pedant ever read
his own works regularly through. They are not his—they are become
mere words, waste-paper, and have none of the glow, the creative
enthusiasm, the vehemence, and natural spirit with which he wrote
them. When we have once committed our thoughts to paper, written
them fairly out, and seen that they are right in the printing, if we are
in our right wits, we have done with them for ever. I sometimes try to
read an article I have written in some magazine or review—(for when
they are bound up in a volume, I dread the very sight of them)—but
stop after a sentence or two, and never recur to the task. I know
pretty well what I have to say on the subject, and do not want to go to
school to myself. It is the worst instance of the bis repetita crambe in
the world. I do not think that even painters have much delight in
looking at their works after they are done. While they are in progress,
there is a great degree of satisfaction in considering what has been
done, or what is still to do—but this is hope, is reverie, and ceases
with the completion of our efforts. I should not imagine Raphael or
Correggio would have much pleasure in looking at their former
works, though they might recollect the pleasure they had had in
painting them; they might spy defects in them (for the idea of
unattainable perfection still keeps pace with our actual approaches to
it), and fancy that they were not worthy of immortality. The greatest
portrait-painter the world ever saw used to write under his pictures,
‘Titianus faciebat,’ signifying that they were imperfect; and in his
letter to Charles V. accompanying one of his most admired works, he
only spoke of the time he had been about it. Annibal Caracci boasted
that he could do like Titian and Correggio, and, like most boasters,
was wrong. (See his spirited Letter to his cousin Ludovico, on seeing
the pictures at Parma.)
The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading, while we are young.
I have had as much of this pleasure as perhaps any one. As I grow
older, it fades; or else, the stronger stimulus of writing takes off the
edge of it. At present, I have neither time nor inclination for it: yet I
should like to devote a year’s entire leisure to a course of the English
Novelists; and perhaps clap on that old sly knave, Sir Walter, to the
end of the list. It is astonishing how I used formerly to relish the style
of certain authors, at a time when I myself despaired of ever writing a
single line. Probably this was the reason. It is not in mental as in
natural ascent—intellectual objects seem higher when we survey
them from below, than when we look down from any given elevation
above the common level. My three favourite writers about the time I
speak of were Burke, Junius, and Rousseau. I was never weary of
admiring and wondering at the felicities of the style, the turns of
expression, the refinements of thought and sentiment: I laid the
book down to find out the secret of so much strength and beauty, and
took it up again in despair, to read on and admire. So I passed whole
days, months, and I may add, years; and have only this to say now,
that as my life began, so I could wish that it may end. The last time I
tasted this luxury in its full perfection was one day after a sultry day’s
walk in summer between Farnham and Alton. I was fairly tired out; I
walked into an inn-yard (I think at the latter place); I was shown by
the waiter to what looked at first like common out-houses at the
other end of it, but they turned out to be a suite of rooms, probably a
hundred years old—the one I entered opened into an old-fashioned
garden, embellished with beds of larkspur and a leaden Mercury; it
was wainscoted, and there was a grave-looking, dark-coloured
portrait of Charles II. hanging up over the tiled chimney-piece. I had
‘Love for Love’ in my pocket, and began to read; coffee was brought
in in a silver coffee-pot; the cream, the bread and butter, every thing
was excellent, and the flavour of Congreve’s style prevailed over all. I
prolonged the entertainment till a late hour, and relished this divine
comedy better even than when I used to see it played by Miss Mellon,
as Miss Prue; Bob Palmer, as Tattle; and Bannister, as honest Ben.
This circumstance happened just five years ago, and it seems like
yesterday. If I count my life so by lustres, it will soon glide away; yet I
shall not have to repine, if, while it lasts, it is enriched with a few
such recollections!
 ESSAY XIII
ON THE PLEASURE OF HATING
There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room
where I sit (not the one which has been so well allegorised in the
admirable Lines to a Spider, but another of the same edifying breed)
—he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly
towards me, he stops—he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a
loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe—but as I
do not start up and seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would
upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on,
with mingled cunning, impudence, and fear. As he passes me, I lift
up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to get rid of the
unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is gone.
A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have
crushed the little reptile to death—my philosophy has got beyond
that—I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it.
The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion of it. We
learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of
humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and
imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external
demonstration, the brute violence, but cannot part with the essence
or principle of hostility. We do not tread upon the poor little animal
in question (that seems barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with
a sort of mystic horror and superstitious loathing. It will ask another
hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking to cure us of the
prejudice, and make us feel towards this ill-omened tribe with
something of ‘the milk of human kindness,’ instead of their own
shyness and venom.
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies:
without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought
and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by
the jarring interests, the unruly passions of men. The white streak in
our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making
all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon
the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it
weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a
hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse,
but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of
satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit.
Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little
indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.—Do
we not see this principle at work every where? Animals torment and
worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: every
one reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper, as the cream of
the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator
by no means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have it so,
but it diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our
passions, rather than with our understandings. Men assemble in
crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if there
were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr. Burke
observes, the theatre would be left empty. A strange cur in a village,
an idiot, a crazy woman, are set upon and baited by the whole
community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public benefits.
How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the
people of England in breath, and supply them with nick-names to
vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but
we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and
we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to give up
our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute
the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other! It is not the
quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we are anxious
about: we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind
seems to abhor a vacuum as much as ever matter was supposed to
do. Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of
intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no
longer allows us to carry our vindictive and headstrong humours into
effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old
bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination.
We burn Guy Faux in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and
maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a
festival in every village in England once a year. Protestants and
Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe
to new editions of Fox’s Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the
success of the Scotch Novels is much the same—they carry us back to
the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and
the revenge of a barbarous age and people—to the rooted prejudices
and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion,
and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. We feel the
full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. As we read,
we throw aside the trammels of civilisation, the flimsy veil of
humanity. ‘Off, you lendings!’ The wild beast resumes its sway within
us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep
and rushes on the chase in fancy, the heart rouses itself in its native
lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to
freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses. Every one has his full
swing, or goes to the Devil his own way. Here are no Jeremy
Bentham Panopticons, none of Mr. Owen’s impassable
Parallelograms, (Rob Roy would have spurned and poured a
thousand curses on them), no long calculations of self-interest—the
will takes its instant way to its object; as the mountain-torrent flings
itself over the precipice, the greatest possible good of each individual
consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbour: that is
charming, and finds a sure and sympathetic chord in every breast! So
Mr. Irving, the celebrated preacher, has rekindled the old, original,
almost exploded hell-fire in the aisles of the Caledonian Chapel, as
they introduce the real water of the New River at Sadler’s Wells, to
the delight and astonishment of his fair audience. ’Tis pretty, though
a plague, to sit and peep into the pit of Tophet, to play at snap-
dragon with flames and brimstone (it gives a smart electrical shock,
a lively fillip to delicate constitutions), and to see Mr. Irving, like a
huge Titan, looking as grim and swarthy as if he had to forge tortures
for all the damned! What a strange being man is! Not content with
doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here, ‘upon this bank and
shoal of time,’ where one would think there were heart-aches, pain,
disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the
bigoted maniac takes him to the top of the high peak of school
divinity to hurl him down the yawning gulf of penal fire; his
speculative malice asks eternity to wreak its infinite spite in, and
calls on the Almighty to execute its relentless doom! The cannibals
burn their enemies and eat them, in good-fellowship with one
another: meek Christian divines cast those who differ from them but
a hair’s-breadth, body and soul, into hell-fire, for the glory of God
and the good of his creatures! It is well that the power of such
persons is not co-ordinate with their wills: indeed, it is from the
sense of their weakness and inability to control the opinions of
others, that they thus ‘outdo termagant,’ and endeavour to frighten
them into conformity by big words and monstrous denunciations.
The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the
heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes
patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into
other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of
censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness
over the actions and motives of others. What have the different sects,
creeds, doctrines in religion been but so many pretexts set up for
men to wrangle, to quarrel, to tear one another in pieces about, like a
target as a mark to shoot at? Does any one suppose that the love of
country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition
to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred
to the French, or the inhabitants of any other country that we happen
to be at war with for the time. Does the love of virtue denote any wish
to discover or amend our own faults? No, but it atones for an
obstinate adherence to our own vices by the most virulent
intolerance to human frailties. This principle is of a most universal
application. It extends to good as well as evil: if it makes us hate
folly, it makes us no less dissatisfied with distinguished merit. If it
inclines us to resent the wrongs of others, it impels us to be as
impatient of their prosperity. We revenge injuries: we repay benefits
with ingratitude. Even our strongest partialities and likings soon take
this turn. ‘That which was luscious as locusts, anon becomes bitter as
coloquintida;’ and love and friendship melt in their own fires. We
hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last
we come to hate ourselves.
I have observed that few of those, whom I have formerly known
most intimate, continue on the same friendly footing, or combine the
steadiness with the warmth of attachment. I have been acquainted
with two or three knots of inseparable companions, who saw each
other ‘six days in the week,’ that have broken up and dispersed. I
have quarrelled with almost all my old friends, (they might say this is
owing to my bad temper, but) they have also quarrelled with one
another. What is become of ‘that set of whist-players,’ celebrated by
Elia in his notable Epistle to Robert Southey, Esq. (and now I think
of it—that I myself have celebrated in this very volume) ‘that for so
many years called Admiral Burney friend?’ They are scattered, like
last year’s snow. Some of them are dead—or gone to live at a distance
—or pass one another in the street like strangers; or if they stop to
speak, do it as coolly and try to cut one another as soon as possible.
Some of us have grown rich—others poor. Some have got places
under Government—others a niche in the Quarterly Review. Some of
us have dearly earned a name in the world; whilst others remain in
their original privacy. We despise the one; and envy and are glad to
mortify the other. Times are changed; we cannot revive our old
feelings; and we avoid the sight and are uneasy in the presence of
those, who remind us of our infirmity, and put us upon an effort at
seeming cordiality, which embarrasses ourselves and does not
impose upon our quondam associates. Old friendships are like meats
served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach
turns against them. Either constant intercourse and familiarity breed
weariness and contempt; or if we meet again after an interval of
absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too
foolish for us; and we wonder we did not find this out before. We are
disconcerted and kept in a state of continual alarm by the wit of one,
or tired to death of the dullness of another. The good things of the
first (besides leaving stings behind them) by repetition grow stale,
and lose their startling effect; and the insipidity of the last becomes
intolerable. The most amusing or instructive companion is at best
like a favourite volume, that we wish after a time to lay upon the
shelf; but as our friends are not willing to be laid there, this produces
a misunderstanding and ill-blood between us.—Or if the zeal and
integrity of friendship is not abated, or its career interrupted by any
obstacle arising out of its own nature, we look out for other subjects
of complaint and sources of dissatisfaction. We begin to criticise each
other’s dress, looks, and general character. ‘Such a one is a pleasant
fellow, but it is a pity he sits so late!’ Another fails to keep his
appointments, and that is a sore that never heals. We get acquainted
with some fashionable young men or with a mistress, and wish to
introduce our friend; but he is awkward and a sloven, the interview
does not answer, and this throws cold water on our intercourse. Or
he makes himself obnoxious to opinion—and we shrink from our
own convictions on the subject as an excuse for not defending him.
All or any of these causes mount up in time to a ground of coolness
or irritation—and at last they break out into open violence as the only
amends we can make ourselves for suppressing them so long, or the
readiest means of banishing recollections of former kindness, so little
compatible with our present feelings. We may try to tamper with the
wounds or patch up the carcase of departed friendship, but the one
will hardly bear the handling, and the other is not worth the trouble
of embalming! The only way to be reconciled to old friends is to part
with them for good: at a distance we may chance to be thrown back
(in a waking dream) upon old times and old feelings: or at any rate,
we should not think of renewing our intimacy, till we have fairly spit
our spite, or said, thought, and felt all the ill we can of each other. Or
if we can pick a quarrel with some one else, and make him the scape-
goat, this is an excellent contrivance to heal a broken bone. I think I
must be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that
magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told him a piece of his mind!—I
don’t know what it is that attaches me to H—— so much, except that
he and I, whenever we meet, sit in judgment on another set of old
friends, and ‘carve them as a dish fit for the Gods.’ There was L—— H
——, John Scott, Mrs. ——, whose dark raven locks made a
picturesque back-ground to our discourse, B——, who is grown fat,
and is, they say, married, R——; these had all separated long ago, and
their foibles are the common link that holds us together. We do not
affect to condole or whine over their follies; we enjoy, we laugh at
them till we are ready to burst our sides, ‘sans intermission, for
hours by the dial.’ We serve up a course of anecdotes, traits, master-
strokes of character, and cut and hack at them till we are weary.
Perhaps some of them are even with us. For my own part, as I once
said, I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk
about. ‘Then,’ said Mrs. ——, ‘you will never cease to be a
philanthropist!’ Those in question were some of the choice-spirits of
the age, not ‘fellows of no mark or likelihood;’ and we so far did them
justice: but it is well they did not hear what we sometimes said of
them. I care little what any one says of me, particularly behind my
back, and in the way of critical and analytical discussion—it is looks
of dislike and scorn, that I answer with the worst venom of my pen.
The expression of the face wounds me more than the expressions of
the tongue. If I have in one instance mistaken this expression, or
resorted to this remedy where I ought not, I am sorry for it. But the
face was too fine over which it mantled, and I am too old to have
misunderstood it!... I sometimes go up to ——‘s; and as often as I do,
resolve never to go again. I do not find the old homely welcome. The
ghost of friendship meets me at the door, and sits with me all dinner-
time. They have got a set of fine notions and new acquaintance.
Allusions to past occurrences are thought trivial, nor is it always safe
to touch upon more general subjects. M. does not begin as he
formerly did every five minutes, ‘Fawcett used to say,’ &c. That topic
is something worn. The girls are grown up, and have a thousand
accomplishments. I perceive there is a jealousy on both sides. They
think I give myself airs, and I fancy the same of them. Every time I
am asked, ‘If I do not think Mr. Washington Irvine a very fine
writer?’ I shall not go again till I receive an invitation for Christmas-
day in company with Mr. Liston. The only intimacy I never found to
flinch or fade was a purely intellectual one. There was none of the
cant of candour in it, none of the whine of mawkish sensibility. Our
mutual acquaintance were considered merely as subjects of
conversation and knowledge, not at all of affection. We regarded
them no more in our experiments than ‘mice in an air-pump:’ or like
malefactors, they were regularly cut down and given over to the
dissecting-knife. We spared neither friend nor foe. We sacrificed
human infirmities at the shrine of truth. The skeletons of character
might be seen, after the juice was extracted, dangling in the air like
flies in cobwebs: or they were kept for future inspection in some
refined acid. The demonstration was as beautiful as it was new.
There is no surfeiting on gall: nothing keeps so well as a decoction of
spleen. We grow tired of every thing but turning others into ridicule,
and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
We take a dislike to our favourite books, after a time, for the same
reason. We cannot read the same works for ever. Our honey-moon,
even though we wed the Muse, must come to an end; and is followed
by indifference, if not by disgust. There are some works, those indeed
that produce the most striking effect at first by novelty and boldness
of outline, that will not bear reading twice: others of a less
extravagant character, and that excite and repay attention by a
greater nicety of details, have hardly interest enough to keep alive
our continued enthusiasm. The popularity of the most successful
writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is
made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and
by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw
after them:—we as little like to have to drag others from their
unmerited obscurity, lest we should be exposed to the charge of
affectation and singularity of taste. There is nothing to be said
respecting an author that all the world have made up their minds
about: it is a thankless as well as hopeless task to recommend one
that nobody has ever heard of. To cry up Shakespeare as the God of
our idolatry, seems like a vulgar, national prejudice: to take down a
volume of Chaucer, or Spenser, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Ford,
or Marlowe, has very much the look of pedantry and egotism. I
confess it makes me hate the very name of Fame and Genius when
works like these are ‘gone into the wastes of time,’ while each
successive generation of fools is busily employed in reading the trash
of the day, and women of fashion gravely join with their waiting-
maids in discussing the preference between Paradise Lost and Mr.
Moore’s Loves of the Angels. I was pleased the other day on going
into a shop to ask, ‘If they had any of the Scotch Novels?’ to be told
—‘That they had just sent out the last, Sir Andrew Wylie!’—Mr. Galt
will also be pleased with this answer! The reputation of some books
is raw and unaired: that of others is worm-eaten and mouldy. Why
fix our affections on that which we cannot bring ourselves to have
faith in, or which others have long ceased to trouble themselves
about? I am half afraid to look into Tom Jones, lest it should not
answer my expectations at this time of day; and if it did not, I should
certainly be disposed to fling it into the fire, and never look into
another novel while I lived. But surely, it may be said, there are some
works, that, like nature, can never grow old; and that must always
touch the imagination and passions alike! Or there are passages that
seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust
the sentiments of love and admiration they excite: they become
favourites, and we are fond of them to a sort of dotage. Here is one:
 ‘——Sitting in my window
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a God,
I thought (but it was you), enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you: never was a man
Thrust from a sheepcote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I; you left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you for ever. I did hear you talk
Far above singing!’

A passage like this indeed leaves a taste on the palate like nectar,
and we seem in reading it to sit with the Gods at their golden tables:
but if we repeat it often in ordinary moods, it loses its flavour,
becomes vapid, ‘the wine of poetry is drank, and but the lees remain.’
Or, on the other hand, if we call in the aid of extraordinary
circumstances to set it off to advantage, as the reciting it to a friend,
or after having our feelings excited by a long walk in some romantic
situation, or while we
‘——play with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair’—

we afterwards miss the accompanying circumstances, and instead of

transferring the recollection of them to the favourable side, regret
what we have lost, and strive in vain to bring back ‘the irrevocable
hour’—wondering in some instances how we survive it, and at the
melancholy blank that is left behind! The pleasure rises to its height
in some moment of calm solitude or intoxicating sympathy, declines
ever after, and from the comparison and a conscious falling-off,
leaves rather a sense of satiety and irksomeness behind it.... ‘Is it the
same in pictures?’ I confess it is, with all but those from Titian’s
hand. I don’t know why, but an air breathes from his landscapes,
pure, refreshing as if it came from other years; there is a look in his
faces that never passes away. I saw one the other day. Amidst the
heartless desolation and glittering finery of Fonthill, there is a port-
folio of the Dresden Gallery. It opens, and a young female head looks
from it; a child, yet woman grown; with an air of rustic innocence
and the graces of a princess, her eyes like those of doves, the lips
about to open, a smile of pleasure dimpling the whole face, the jewels
sparkling in her crisped hair, her youthful shape compressed in a
rich antique dress, as the bursting leaves contain the April buds!
Why do I not call up this image of gentle sweetness, and place it as a
perpetual barrier between mischance and me?—It is because
pleasure asks a greater effort of the mind to support it than pain; and
we turn, after a little idle dalliance, from what we love to what we
hate!
As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for
they have deceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing
to believe, that genius was not a bawd—that virtue was not a mask—
that liberty was not a name—that love had its seat in the human
heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the
dictionary, or if I had never heard them. They are become to my ears
a mockery and a dream. Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I
see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings
to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join
with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public
opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward
Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had
it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to
mischief, ‘to every good work reprobate.’ I have seen all that had
been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and intellect of men,
‘of whom the world was not worthy,’ and that promised a proud
opening to truth and good through the vista of future years, undone
by one man, with just glimmering of understanding enough to feel
that he was a king, but not to comprehend how he could be king of a
free people! I have seen this triumph celebrated by poets, the friends
of my youth and the friends of man, but who were carried away by
the infuriate tide that, setting in from a throne, bore down every
distinction of right reason before it; and I have seen all those who did
not join in applauding this insult and outrage on humanity
proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a bye-word
of), so that it has become an understood thing that no one can live by
his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those talents
and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his fellow-
man. ‘This was some time a mystery: but the time gives evidence of
it.’ The echoes of liberty had awakened once more in Spain, and the
morning of human hope dawned again: but that dawn has been
overcast by the foul breath of bigotry, and those reviving sounds
stifled by fresh cries from the time-rent towers of the Inquisition—
man yielding (as it is fit he should) first to brute force, but more to
the innate perversity and dastard spirit of his own nature, which
leaves no room for farther hope or disappointment. And England,
that arch-reformer, that heroic deliverer, that mouther about liberty
and tool of power, stands gaping by, not feeling the blight and
mildew coming over it, nor its very bones crack and turn to a paste
under the grasp and circling folds of this new monster, Legitimacy!
In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly,
and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter,
and merit is trodden under foot? How often is ‘the rose plucked from
the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!’ What chance
is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its
continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of
human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice,
want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards
others and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all
excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in
my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and
calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance;
the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate
and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated
and despised the world enough.[16]
 ESSAY XIV
ON DR. SPURZHEIM’S THEORY
It appears to me that the truth of physiognomy (if we allow it)
overturns the science of craniology. For instance, the system of Drs.
Gall and Spurzheim supposes that every bump of protuberance on
the skull is necessarily produced by an extraordinary protrusion of
the brain or increase of the organ of perception immediately
underneath it. Now behind a great part of the face we have no brain,
and can have no such organs existing and accounting for the external
phenomena; and yet here are projections or ramifications of bones,
muscles, &c. which are allowed by these reasoners and most other
persons to indicate character and intellect just as surely as the new-
discovered organs of craniology. If then these projections or
modifications of the countenance have such force and meaning
where there is no brain underneath to account for them, is it not
clear that in other cases the theory which assumes that such
projections can only be caused by an extraordinary pressure of the
brain, and of the appropriate local organ within, is in itself an
obvious fallacy and contradiction? The long prudent chin, the
scornful nose (naso adunco), the good-natured mouth, are
proverbial in physiognomy, but are totally excluded from the organic
system. I mentioned this objection once to Dr. Spurzheim personally,
but he only replied—‘We have treated of physiognomy in our larger
work!’ I was not satisfied with this answer.
I am utterly ignorant of the anatomical and physiological part of
this question, and only propose to point out a few errors or defects in
his system, which appear on the author’s own showing, in the
manner of marginal notes on the work. I would observe, by the bye,
that the style and manner of the writer are not such as to induce the
reader to place a very implicit reliance on his authority; and in a
subject, which is so much an occult science, a terra incognita in the
world of observation, depending on the traveller’s report, authority is
a good deal. The craniologist may make fools of his disciples at
pleasure, unless he is an honest man. They have no check upon him.
The face is as ‘a book where men may read strange matters:’ it is
open to every one: the language of expression is as it were a kind of
mother-tongue, in which every one acquires more or less tact, so that
his own practical judgment forms a test to confirm or contradict the
interpretation which is given of it. But the skull, on which Drs. Gall
and Spurzheim have laid their hands for the discovery of so many
important and undeniable truths, nobody else knows any thing
about, except as they are pleased to tell us. It is concealed from
ordinary observation by a covering of hair, and we must go by
hearsay. We may indeed examine one or two individual instances,
and grope out our way to truth in the dark; but there can be no
habitual conclusion formed, no broad light of experience thrown
upon the subject. The unbeliever in the fashionable system may well
exclaim—
‘Oh! let me perish in the face of day!’

The only opportunity for fairly studying this question was at the
period when people wore artificial hair; for then any well-disposed
person had only to pull off his wig, and show you his mind.[17] But the
hair is a sort of natural mask to the head. The craniologist indeed
‘draws the curtain, and shows the picture:’ but if there is the least
want of good faith in him, the science is all abroad again.
Unfortunately for the credit due to his system, Dr. Spurzheim (or his
predecessor, Dr. Gall, who got up the facts) has very much the air of
a German quack-doctor. He is, so to speak it, the Baron Munchausen
of marvellous metaphysics. His object is to astonish the reader into
belief, as jugglers make clowns gape and swallow whatever they
please. He fabricates wonders with easy assurance, and deals in men
‘whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, and the
anthropophagi, that each other eat.’ He readily admits whatever suits
his purpose, and magisterially doubts whatever makes against it. He
has a cant of credulity mixed up with the cant of scepticism—things
not easily reconciled, except by a very deliberate effort indeed. There
is something gross and fulsome in all this, that has tended to bring
discredit on a system, which after all has probably some foundation
in nature, but which is here overloaded with exaggerated and
dogmatical assertions, warranted for facts. We doubt the whole,
when we know a part to be false, and withhold our assent from a
creed, the great apostle of which wants modesty, candour, and self-
knowledge! Another thing to be considered, and in truth the great
stumbling-block in the way of nearly the whole of this system, is this,
that the principle of thought and feeling in man is one, whereas the
present doctrine supposes it to be many. The mind is one, or it is
infinite. If there is not some single, superintending faculty or
conscious power to which all subordinate organic impressions are
referred as to a centre, and which decides and reacts upon them all,
then there is no end of particular organs, and there must be not only
an organ for poetry, but an organ for poetry of every sort and size,
and so of all the rest. This will be seen more at large when we come
to details; but at present I wish to lay it down as a corner-stone or
fundamental principle in the argument.
Of the way in which Dr. Spurzheim clears the ground before him,
and disarms the incredulity of the reader by a string of undeniable or
equivocal propositions blended together, the following may serve as
a specimen.
‘The doctrine, that every thing is provided with its own properties,
was from time to time checked by metaphysicians and scholastic
divines; but by degrees it gained ground, and the maxim that matter
is inert was entirely refuted. Natural philosophers discovered
corporeal properties, the laws of attraction and repulsion, of
chemical affinity, of fermentation, and even of organization. They
considered the phenomena of vegetables as the production of
material qualities—as properties of matter. Glisson attributed to
matter a particular activity, and to the animal fibre a specific
irritability. De Gorter acknowledged in vegetable life something more
than pure mechanism. Winter and Zups proved that the phenomena
of vegetable life ought to be ascribed only to irritability. Of this,
several phenomena of flowers and leaves indicate a great degree. The
hop and French-bean twine round rods which are planted near them.
The tendrils of vines curl round poles or the branches of
neighbouring trees. The ivy climbs the oak, and adheres to its sides,
&c. Now it would be absurd to pretend that the organization of
animals is entirely destitute of properties: therefore Frederick
Hoffman took it for the basis of his system, that the human body, like
all other bodies, is endowed with material properties.’ Page 56.
 ‘Here be truths,’ but dashed and brewed with lies’ or doubtful
points. Yet they pass all together without discrimination or selection.
There is a simplicity in many of the propositions amounting to a sort
of bonhomie. There is an over-measure of candour and plainness. A
man who gravely informs you, as an important philosophical
discovery, that ‘the tendrils of vines curl round poles,’ and that ‘the
human body is endowed with material properties,’ may escape
without the imputation of intending to delude the unwary. But these
kind of innocent pretences are like shoeing-horns to draw on the
hardest consequences. By the serious offer of this meat for babes,
you are prepared to swallow a horse-drench of parboiled paradoxes.
You are thrown off your guard into a state of good-natured surprise,
by the utter want of all meaning; and our craniologist catches his
wondering disciples in a trap of truisms. Instances might be
multiplied from this part of the work, where the writer is occupied in
getting up the plot, and lulling asleep any suspicion, or feeling of
petulance in the mind of the public. Just after, he says—
‘In former times there were philosophers who thought that the
soul forms its own body; but if this be the case, an ill-formed body
never could be endowed with a good soul. All the natural influence of
generation, nutrition, climate, education, &c. would therefore be
inexplicable. Hence, it is much more reasonable to think that the
soul, in this life, is only confined in the body, and makes use of its
respective instruments, which entirely depend on the laws of the
organization. In blindness, the soul is not mutilated, but it cannot
perceive light without eyes, &c.’ with other matters of like pith and
moment. The author’s style is interlarded with too many hences and
therefores; neither do his inferences hang well together. They are ill-
cemented. He announces instead of demonstrating; and jumps at a
conclusion in a heavy, awkward way. He constantly assumes the
point in dispute, or makes a difficulty on one side of a question a
decisive proof of the opposite view of it. What credit can be attached
to him in matters of fact or theory where he must have it almost all
his own way, when he presumes so much on the gullibility of his
readers in common argument? ‘If these things are done in the green
tree, what shall be done in the dry?’—Once more:
‘No one will endeavour to prove that the five senses are the
production of our will: their laws are determined by nature.
Therefore as soon as an animal meets with the food destined for it,
its smell and taste declare in favour of it. Thus it is not astonishing
that a kid, taken from the uterus of its mother, preferred broom-tops
to other vegetables which were presented to it. And Richerand is
wrong in saying—“If such a fact have any reality, we should be forced
to admit that an animal may possess a foreknowledge of what is
proper for it; and that, independently of any impressions which may
be afterwards received by the senses, it is capable, from the moment
of birth, of choosing, that is, of comparing and judging of what is
presented to it.” The hog likewise eats the acorn the first time he
finds it. Animals however have, on that account, no need of any
previous exercise, of any innate idea, of any comparison or reflection.
The relations between the external world and the five senses are
determined by creation. We cannot see as red that which is yellow,
nor as great that which is little. How should animals have any idea of
what they have not felt?’ Page 59.
This is what might be termed the inclusive style in argument. It is
impossible to distinguish the premises from the conclusion. We have
facts for arguments, and arguments for facts. He plays off a
phantasmagoria of illustrations as proofs, like Sir Epicure Mammon
in the Alchemist. It is like being in a round-about at a fair, or skating,
or flying. It is not easy to make out even the terms of the question, so
completely are they overlaid and involved one in the other, and that,
as it should seem, purposely, or from a habit of confounding the
plainest things. To proceed, however, to something more material. In
treating of innate faculties, Dr. Spurzheim runs the following career,
which will throw considerable light on the vagueness and
contradictoriness of his general mode of reasoning.
‘Now it is beyond doubt, that all the instinctive aptitudes and
inclinations of animals are innate. Is it not evident that the faculties
by which the spider makes its web, the honeybee its cell, the beaver
its hut, the bird its nest, &c. are inherent in the nature of these
animals? When the young duck or tortoise runs towards the water as
soon as hatched, when the bird brushes the worm with its bill, when
the monkey, before he eats the may-bug, bites off its head, &c. all
these and similar dispositions are conducive to the preservation of
the animals; but they are not at all acquired.’
 If by acquired, be meant that these last acts do not arise out of
certain impressions made on the senses by different objects, (such as
the agreeable or disagreeable smell of food, &c.) this is by no means
either clear or acknowledged on all hands.
‘According to the same law,’ he adds, [What law?] ‘the hamster
gathers corn and grain, the dog hides his superfluous food’—[This at
any rate seems a rational act.]—‘the falcon kills the hare by driving
his beak into its neck,’ &c.
‘In the same way, all instinctive manifestations of man must be
innate. The new-born child sucks the fingers and seeks the breast, as
the puppy and calf seek the dug.’
The circumstance here indiscreetly mentioned of the child sucking
the fingers as well as the nipple, certainly does away the idea of final
causes. It shows that the child, from a particular state of irritation of
its mouth, fastens on any object calculated to allay that irritation,
whether conducive to its sustenance or not. It is difficult sometimes
to get children to take the breast. Dr. S. takes up a common
prejudice, without any qualification or inquiry, while it suits his
purpose, and lays it down without ceremony when it no longer serves
the turn. He proceeds—
‘I have mentioned above, that voluntary motion and the five
external senses, common to man and animals, are innate.
Moreover, if man and animals feel certain propensities and
sentiments with clear and distinct consciousness, we must consider
these faculties as innate.’—[The clear and distinct consciousness has
nothing to do with the matter.]—‘Thus, if in animals we find
examples of mutual inclination between the sexes, of maternal care
for the young, of attachment, of mutual assistance, of sociableness, of
union for life, of peaceableness, of desire to fight, of propensity to
destroy, of circumspection, of slyness, of love of flattery, of obstinacy,
&c. all these faculties must be considered as innate.’—[A finer
assumption of the question than this, or a more complete jumble of
instincts and acquired propensities together, never was made. The
author has here got hold of a figure called encroachment, and
advances accordingly!]—‘Let all these faculties be ennobled in man:
let animal instinct of propagation be changed into moral love; the
inclination of animals for their young into the virtue of maternal care
for children; animal attachment into friendship; animal
susceptibility of flattery into love of glory and ambition; the
nightingale’s melody into harmony; the bird’s nest and the beaver’s
hut into palaces and temples, &c.: these faculties are still of the same
nature, and all these phenomena are produced by faculties common
to man and animals. They are only ennobled in man by the influence
of superior qualities, which give another direction to the inferior
ones.’ Page 82.
This last passage appears to destroy his whole argument. For the
Doctor contends that every particular propensity or modification of
the mind must be innate, and have its separate organ; but if there are
‘faculties common to man and animals,’ which are ennobled or
debased by their connexion with other faculties, then we must admit
a general principle of thought and action varying according to
circumstances, and the organic system becomes nearly an
impertinence.
The following short section, entitled Innateness of the Human
Faculties, will serve to place in a tolerably striking point of view the
turn of this writer to an unmeaning, quackish sort of common-place
reasoning.
‘Finally, man is endowed with faculties which are peculiar to him.
Now it is to be investigated, whether the faculties which distinguish
man from animals, and which constitute his human character, are
innate. It must be answered, that all the faculties of man are given by
creation, and that human nature is as determinate as that of every
other being. Thus, though we see that man compares his sensations
and ideas, inquires into the causes of phenomena, draws
consequences and discovers laws and general principles; that he
measures distances and times, and crosses the sea from one end to
another; that he acknowledges culpability and worthiness; that he
bears a monitor in his own breast, and raises his mind to the idea
and adoration of God:—yet all these faculties result neither from
accidental influence from without, nor from his own will. How
indeed could the Creator abandon man in the greatest and most
important occupations, and give him up to chance? No!’ Page 83.
No, indeed; but there is a difference between chance and a number
of bumps on the head. One would think that all this, being common
to the same being, proceeded from a general faculty manifesting
itself in different ways, and not from a parcel of petty faculties