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 THE LATE DR. PRIESTLEY

The Atlas.]
[June 14, 1829.

The epithet of the late could not be applied to this celebrated

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

The Atlas.]
[August 2, 1829.

We from our souls sincerely hate all cabals and coteries; and this is
our chief objection to sects and parties. People who set up to judge
for themselves on every question that comes before them, and
quarrel with received opinions and established usages, find so little
sympathy from the rest of the world that they are glad to get any one
to agree with them, and with that proviso the poorest creature
becomes their Magnus Apollo. The mind sets out indeed in search of
truth and on a principle of independent inquiry; but is so little able
to do without leaning on someone else for encouragement and
support, that we presently see those who have separated themselves
from the mere mob, and the great masses of prejudice and opinion,
forming into little groups of their own and appealing to one another’s
approbation, as if they had secured a monopoly of common sense
and reason. Wherever two or three of this sort are gathered together,
there is self-conceit in the midst of them. ‘You grant me judgment,
and I grant you wit’—is the key-note from which an admirable duett,
trio, or quartett of the understanding may be struck up at any time to
the entire satisfaction of the parties concerned, though the bye-
standers may be laughing at or execrating the unwelcome discord.
The principle of all reform is this, that there is a tendency to
dogmatism, to credulity and intolerance in the human mind itself, as
well as in certain systems of bigotry or superstition; and until
reformers are themselves aware of, and guard carefully against, the
natural infirmity which besets them in common with all others, they
must necessarily run into the error which they cry out against.
Without this self-knowledge and circumspection, though the great
wheel of vulgar prejudice and traditional authority may be stopped
or slackened in its course, we shall only have a number of small ones
of petulance, contradiction, and partisanship set a-going to our
frequent and daily annoyance in its place: or (to vary the figure)
instead of crowding into a common stage-coach or hum-drum
vehicle of opinion to arrive at a conclusion, every man will be for
mounting his own velocipede, run up against his neighbours, and
exhaust his breath and agitate his limbs in vain. In Mr. Bentham’s
Book of Fallacies we apprehend are not to be found the crying sins of
singularity, rash judgment, and self-applause. What boots it, we
might ask, to get rid of tests and subscription to thirty-nine articles
of orthodox belief, if, in lieu of this wholesale and comprehensive
mode of exercising authority over our fellows, a Dogma is placed
upon the table at breakfast time, sits down with us to dinner, or is
laid on our pillow at night, rigidly prescribing what we are to eat,
drink, and how many hours we are to sleep? Or be it that the
authority of Aristotle and the schoolmen is gone by, what shall the
humble and serious inquirer after truth profit by it, if he still cannot
say that his soul is his own for the sublime dulness of Mr. Maculloch,
and the Dunciad of political economists? The imprimatur of the Star
Chamber, the cum privilegio regis is taken off from printed books—
what does the freedom of the press or liberality of sentiment gain, if
a board of Utility at Charing Cross must affix its stamp, before a jest
can find its way into a newspaper, or must knock a flower of speech
on the head with the sledge-hammer of cynical reform? The cloven-
foot, the overweening, impatient, exclusive spirit breaks out in
different ways, in different times and circumstances. While men are
quite ignorant and in the dark, they trust to others, and force you to
do so under pain of fire and faggot:—when they have learned a little
they think they know every thing, and would compel you to conform
to that opinion, under pain of their impertinence, maledictions, and
sarcasms, which are the modern rack and thumb-screw. The mode of
torture, it must be confessed, is refined, though the intention is the
same. Their ill-temper and want of toleration fall the hardest on their
own side, for those who adhere to fashion and power care no more
about their good or ill word, than about the short, unmelodious
gruntings of any other sordid stye. But how is any poor devil who has
got into their clutches to shelter himself from their malevolence and
party-spite? Why, by enlisting under their banners, swearing to all
that they say, and going all lengths with them. Otherwise, he is a
black sheep in the flock, and made a butt of by the rest. This is a self-
evident process. For the fewer people any sect or party have to
sympathise with them, the more entire must that sympathy be: it
must be without flaw or blemish, as a set-off to the numbers on the
other side; and they who set up to be wiser than all the world put
together, cannot afford to acknowledge themselves wrong in any
particular. You must, therefore, agree to all their sense or nonsense,
allow them to be judges equally of what they do or do not
understand, adopt their cant, repeat their jargon, have no notions
but what they have, caricature their absurdities, make yourself
obnoxious for their satisfaction, and a slave and lacquey to their
opinions, humours, and convenience; or they black-ball you, send
you to Coventry, and play the devil with you. Thus, for any writer in a
highly enlightened and liberal morning paper, not merely to question
the grand arcanum of population or the doctrine of rent, would be
both great and petty treason; but it would be as much as his place
was worth, to suggest a hint that Mrs. Chatterley is not a fine woman
and a charming actress. Fanatics and innovators formerly appealed
in support of their dreams and extravagancies to inspiration and an
inward light; the modern race of philosophical projectors, not having
this resource, are obliged to fortify themselves in a double crust of
confidence in themselves, and contempt for their predecessors and
contemporaries. It is easy to suppose what a very repulsive sort of
people they must be! Indeed, to remedy what was thought a hard
exterior and an intolerable air of assumption on the part of the
professors of the new school, a machine, it is said, has been
completed in Mr. Bentham’s garden in Westminster, which turns out
a very useful invention of jurisprudence, morals, logic, political
economy, constitutions, and codifications, as infallibly and with as
little variation as a barrel-organ plays ‘God save the King,’ or ‘Rule
Britannia’:—nay, so well does it work and so little trouble or
attendance does it require from the adepts, that the latter mean to
sign a truce with gravity and ‘wise saws,’ some of them having
entered at the bar, others being about to take orders in the church,
others having got places in the India-house, and all being disposed to
let the Bentham-machine shift for itself! Omne tulit punctum qui
miscuit utile dulci:—Mr. Bentham is old, and doubtless has made his
will! Reformers will hardly see themselves in religious schismatics
and sectarians, whom they despise. Perhaps others may be struck
with the likeness. Rational dissenters, for example, think, because
they alone profess the title, they alone possess the thing. All rational
dissenters are with them wise and good. An Unitarian is another
name for sense and honesty; and must it not be so, when to those of
an opposite faith it is a name of enmity and reproach? But the
intolerance on one side, though it accounts for, does not disprove the
weakness on the other. We have heard of devotees who employ a
serious baker, a serious tailor, a serious cobbler, etc. So there are
staunch reformists who would prefer a radical compositor, a radical
stationer or bookbinder, to all others; and think little of those on
their side of the question who, besides adhering to a principle, have
not, in their over-zeal and contempt for their adversaries, contrived
to render it offensive or ridiculous. A sound practical consistency
does not satisfy the wilful restlessness of the advocates of change.
They must have the piquancy of startling paradoxes, the pruriency of
romantic and ticklish situations, the pomp of itinerant professors of
patriotism and placarders of their own lives, travels, and opinions.
Why must a man stand up in a three-cornered hat and canonicals to
bear testimony against the Christian religion, and in favour of
reform? We hate all such impertinent masquerading and double
entendre. Those who are accustomed to judge for themselves, and
express their convictions at some risk and loss, are too apt to come
from thinking that opinions may be right, though they are singular,
to conclude that they are right, because they are singular. The more
they differ from the world, the more convinced they are, because it
flatters their self-love; and they are only quite satisfied and at their
ease when they shock and disgust every one around them. They no
longer consider the connexion between the conclusion and the
premises, but between any idle hypothesis and their personal vanity.
They cling obstinately to opinions, as they have been hastily formed;
and patronize every whim that they fancy is their own. They are most
confident of ‘what they are least assured;’ and will stake all they are
worth on the forlorn hope of their own imaginary sagacity and
clearness. An idiosyncrasy steals into every thing; their way is best.
Always regarding the world at large as an old dotard, they think any
single individual in it quite beneath their notice—unless it is an alter
idem of the select coterie—neither consult you about their affairs,
nor deign you an answer on your own, and have a model of
perfection in their minds to which they refer all public and private
transactions. There are methodists in business as well as in religion,
who have a peculiar happy knack in folding a letter, or in saying How
d’ye do, who postpone the main object to some pragmatical theory or
foppish punctilio, and who might take for their motto—all for conceit
or the world well lost.
 CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (1)

The Atlas.]
[September 20, 1829.

T.—Windham was very intimate with Gilray afterwards—or

perhaps before; for he also had been on both sides.
J.—What I object to in Hogarth is, that he was not accomplished
enough even for the task he undertook. An instance occurred the
other day. A servant-girl had been decoyed from her situation, and
on complaint being made before the magistrate, the officers traced
her to Duke’s-place, and brought her back to her friends in Wardour-
Street. She was dressed up quite in the height of the fashion; and
every one that went to see her, came away astonished at her perfect
beauty. Could Hogarth have painted this? Yet here was a scene quite
in his way. He selects what is bad in St. Giles’s, not what is best in
nature. That old Mother W—— lives for ever. It was she who decoyed
away Emily Coventry that sat to Sir Joshua for his Thais. She was a
chimney-sweeper’s daughter, or something of that kind; but she was
a vast beauty, and Mother W—— found her out in spite of her rags
and dirt. She had a hawk’s eye for anything of this sort. I sat facing
her once in an upper box at the Opera. I never saw such an
expression—her look went through you.
T.—But I suppose you looked at her again.
J.—Fielding has tried to describe Sophia as a beauty, but makes a
wretched hand of it. He says first she was a beauty; and then to let
you know what sort of a beauty she was, that she was like the Venus
of Medici; then that her nose inclined to be Roman, which the Venus
de Medici’s does not; then that she resembled Kneller’s portrait of
Lady Ranelagh, which is like neither. The truth is, he did not know
what she was like; nor that he could not in words give a description
of beauty, which is the painter’s province.
T.—Coleridge used to remark that description was the vice of
poetry, and allegory of painting.
J.—Nothing can be better said. Since you told me that remark of
his about Paul and Virginia, he has risen vastly in my estimation.
Again, why does the correspondent in the Atlas take me up short for
saying that ‘we laugh at a person who is rolled in the gutter?’ He
observes on this, ‘if it is an accident, the laughter is silly, and not a
case in point; if inflicted as a punishment for some petty injustice, we
do not laugh, but rub our hands.’ So that we are to laugh in neither
case. Is the ridicule merited where the cobbler, in the ‘Election
Dinner,’ has smutted the face of his next neighbour? Or does the
cobbler laugh the less, or will he not laugh on for ever, on this
account? Has not Hogarth immortalised this piece of silliness in this
disgraceful scene? Who will set limits (by the author’s crambo) to the
length to which he lolls out his tongue, or to the portentous rolling of
his eyes in a squint of ecstasy? Is the sly leer and drooping of the
widow’s eyelids, or the position of the parson’s hands in the ‘Harlot’s
Funeral,’ drawing as well as character and invention? Or is the
fighting of the dog and the man for the bone on a perfect footing of
equality (to show that hunger levels all distinctions), or the mother
letting the child fall over the wall in the ‘Gin-lane,’ or the girl in the
‘Noon,’ ‘with her pie-dish tottering like her virtue, and the contents
running over,’ (as I have seen it somewhere expressed,) an example
of skill in drawing? It is easy to paint a face without a nose, or with a
wry one; the difficulty is to make it straight. Few persons can draw a
circle; any one may draw a crooked line.
T.—But has not Hogarth hit off the exact character and expression;
and is not that a proof of the painter’s hand and eye?
J.—It may be so; but you cannot be sure of it. The correspondent of
the paper laughs at the idea of Hogarth’s coming under the article of
writing. He has come under the article of writing. Does not the critic
speak of his ‘immortal tales?’ Does Mr. Lamb expatiate on the
drawing, colour, and effects of light and shade, or only on the moral
and story? He has left out one half of the language of painting in the
prints; and they are the better for it. Nor do I see what objection
there is to the comparison of Hogarth to buffoons on the stage. For
my part, I think Liston comes much nearer to Hogarth than Emery’s
Tyke; and I am sure his Lord Grizzle is just as good in its way as
anything can possibly be. Why then does the critic scout the
comparison? Because it would be ridiculous to say, that Liston’s Lord
Grizzle is as fine as Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth; that both fulfilled
their parts equally, and that neither could do more without
infringing on the integrity of their characters. Yet if the dignity of the
subject is to be left out of the question, Liston may be put into the
scale with Mrs. Siddons just as well as Emery; but if not, then neither
one nor the other can. Any one for me may say he likes Punch and
the puppet-show as well as the finest tragedy—I should think it
honest and natural enough—but I hate putting up at a half-way
house between farce and tragedy, and pretending that there is no
difference in the case. Persons who have no taste for, but an aversion
to whatever is great and elevated, are ashamed openly to patronise
farce, lest they should be laughed at; and they, therefore, get
something intermediate between that and tragedy, and set it up as
the finest thing in the world, to escape ridicule and satisfy their own
perverse inclination. It is necessary to set one’s face against such
vulgar critics; for, like other vulgar people, if you do not keep them
quite out, they will constantly encroach and turn you out of your
most settled convictions with their mongrel theories.
T.—What is the aim of all high tragedy? It is to resolve the sense of
pain or suffering into the sense of power by the aid of imagination,
and by grandeur of conception and character. What is the object of
Hogarth’s tragicomedy? To reverse this order: that is, he gives us the
extremest distress in the most revolting circumstances and in
connection with the most unfeeling and weakest characters, so as
either to produce the utmost disgust or excite as little sympathy as
possible. Why must maternal affection be displayed, and, as it were,
outraged in the strength of attachment to a most brutish and
worthless moon-calf of a son? The moral may be strictly true, but the
mode of conveying it is no less a penance. Why must the feeling of
love be exemplified in the persevering attachment of the victim of
seduction to her profligate and contemptible seducer? This is
essential to Hogarth’s conception of passion, that it should be at
variance with its object, incongruous, and bordering on the absurd
and ludicrous. Why must a fine feeling or sentiment be dragged
through the kennel or stuck in the pillory before it can be tolerated in
his graphic designs? There is neither unity nor grandeur. Mr. Lamb
admires the expression of the losing gamester in the ‘Rake’s
Progress:’ it is exactly what Liston would give in attempting such a
part, and not unlike him. Why show the extreme of passion in faces
unsusceptible of it, or kill the sympathy by the meanness and poverty
of the associations? Mr. Lamb despises Kean’s face in Othello: I
prefer it to any of Hogarth’s tragic faces, which are generally of the
mock-heroic class.[59] The Methodist preacher in the cart with the
Idle Apprentice is another Mawworm, a fantastic figure, tossed
about by the wind or the spirit, though the conception would be fine
for a novel or written story: the apprentice himself is a scare-crow,
the sport of the mob, with whose indifference you take part, not with
the sufferings of the hero, if he is supposed to have any. The whole is
a game at tragic cross-purposes. The sublimity (such as it is) rests on
a foundation of the squalid and scurrilous. The incongruous was
Hogarth’s element, and he could not get out of his own or (what is I
fear) the national character, which delights in laughing at and
exulting over the defects and mishaps of others, not from any
concern for them, but as a foil to its own discontented humour and
conscious want of higher resources. Defoe, who was in the same age
and class, had more imagination. His Robinson Crusoe is in perfect
keeping. He is not solitary, but solitude: from being shut out from
the world, he fills the universe with himself, and his being expands to
the circumference of the ocean and sky. Hogarth would have shut
him up in a workhouse or a gaol, with boys hooting at him through
the bars, and no escape left on the wings of the imagination or the
strength of will. This may be very intense, but it is not to my taste. A
disciple of this school should not go to see Madame Pasta act. He
would like Madame Pesaroni better, for she is ugly, squat, and her
voice is masculine and loud. The other, who is all harmony, would
oppress and make him uneasy for want of some salvo to his self-love.
Would a critic of this order like to see a tragic actress with a wooden
leg? For this is Hogarth. Mr. Lamb admires Moll Flanders; would he
marry Moll Flanders? There ought to be something in common in
our regard for the original and the copy. A taste for the odd and
eccentric eats like a canker into the mind; and if not checked, drives
out all relish for the noble and consistent as stiff and pedantic. The
drollery is certainly less; and if there is not some set-off in
earnestness and dignity, the serious must be at a low ebb indeed, and
Hudibras is finer than Paradise Lost. It would be a proof of bad taste
to like to look at a mean or ill-formed face, for the sake of laughing at
it, rather than at a fine one. And so in art: the representation of
brutality, coarseness, and want of capacity and feeling is surely less
desirable than the representation of the opposite qualities; or it is
saying that you laugh at and despise a thing for falling short of a
certain excellence and perfection, and when it gains that excellence
and perfection, it is no better than it was before.
J.—You remember the drawing I showed you by Lane, after the
‘Possessed Boy’ of Domenichino? There was there infinite sensibility,
infinite delicacy, agony with sweetness, beauty in the midst of
distortion. You saw there that every fine feeling had passed through
the painter’s mind, or he could not have expressed them; you were
made to sympathise with them, and to understand and revere them
as a part of your own nature. Compared with works like this, which
are the pure mirrors of truth and beauty, Hogarth’s subjects are the
very ‘measles’ of art—the scum and offal—it is like going on a voyage
in a convict-ship, with an alternation of the same humours and the
same horrors—it is a bad prospect for life.
T.—There is some limit. The late Edinburgh murders would not
bear being transferred to the canvass, though the group at Ambrose’s
would make a subject for a sketch, so nice are the distinctions of
taste.
J.—The comic sets off the serious by contrast, and is a necessary
relief; but how little a way does the sense of defect go towards a
conception of, or power to embody the reverse! Look at Hogarth’s
attempts at dignified subjects, and see how poor and feeble they are.
His ‘Pool of Bethesda’ is pitiable; but in the burlesque composition,
where he introduces the devil cutting away the leg of the stool on
which St. Paul is preaching, he is himself again, and worthy of all
imitation. The critic in the Atlas asks what I mean by originality, as if
I thought it independent of any prototypes in nature? No, originality
consists in seeing nature for yourself; but it does not follow that
everyone can do this or is to see nature alike, or there would be
nothing remarkable in it.
T.—Crabbe is an original writer; but it is to be hoped he will have
few followers. Mr. Lamb, by softening the disagreeableness of one of
his tales, has taken out the sting.
 J.—Hogarth is an exception to general rules; I said so before. He is
the only great comic painter; and he is so for this reason—that
painting is not the mother-tongue of comedy. Would not this be
allowed of sculpture? I have not seen the ‘Tam O’Shanter’; but some
Scotch critics are already, I hear, for exploding the antique. Painting
is a dry, plodding art; a bottle-nose, if you come to examine it closely,
becomes a very dull affair. We talk of a hump-back or a sore leg,
which is enough of a good thing; the painter is obliged to give them
entire, which is too much. Neither can he carry off this grossness by
brilliancy of illustration, or rapidity of narrative. The eye and the
mind take in a group or a succession of incidents in an instant; the
hand follows lamely and slowly after, and naturally loses, in the
mechanical details of each object, the surprise, odd starts, and
contrasts, which are the life of comedy. Hogarth alone, by his double
allusions, and by his giving motion (which is time) overcame this
difficulty, or painted as if he were no painter, but set down each
figure by a stroke of the pencil, or in a kind of short-hand of the art,
being obliged to run neither into caricature nor still-life. This
extreme facility or tenaciousness (amounting to a two-fold language)
was his peculiar forte, and that in which he was, and will remain,
unrivalled. Ducrow acts romances on horseback; but it is not the best
way of acting them; and few will imitate him without breaking their
necks.
T.—Do not the same remarks apply in some measure to painting
history?
J.—In some measure, they do; and therefore grand and dignified
subjects are in general to be preferred to the more violent and
distressing ones. Therefore Titian’s portraits are on a par with
history. You who admire Titian, how you must look at Hogarth! You
see they avoid the sight of blood even on the stage. In short, it is a
question, whether low and disagreeable subjects are fit to be painted;
and Sir Joshua, among others, did not much approve of them. It is
not a question whether grace and grandeur are fit subjects for
painting—this alone settles the preference, and is some excuse for
the author of the Discourses in perhaps making it a little too
exclusive. If it were true that Hogarth is universal, or contains the
highest kind of excellence, no one would dispute about him. After all,
a hurdygurdy is neither a lute nor an organ.
 CONVERSATIONS AS GOOD AS REAL (2)

The Atlas.]
[November 1, 1829.

T.—Was I not right in stating it to be an error to suppose that

character is one thing, and to be judged of from a single
circumstance? The simplicity of language constantly runs us into
false abstractions. We call a man by one name, and forget the heap of
contradictions of which he is composed. An acquaintance was
wondering not long ago, how a man of sense that he mentioned could
be guilty of such absurdities in practice. I answered that a man’s
understanding often had no more influence over his will than if they
belonged to two different persons; nor frequently so much, since we
sometimes consented to be governed by advice, though we could not
controul our passions if left to ourselves.
J.—That is very true; but I do not see why you should express so
much eagerness about it, as if your life depended on it.
T.—Nor I neither: I was not aware that I did so.
J.—You lay too much stress on these speculative opinions and
abstruse distinctions. You fancy it is the love of truth: it is quite as
much the pride of understanding. Are you as ready to be convinced
yourself as you are bent on convincing others? You and those like
you pretend to benefit mankind by discovering something new; but
you can find out nothing that has not been invented and forgotten a
hundred times. The world turns round just the same, in spite of the
chirping of all the grasshoppers or squabbles of all the philosophers
upon it. I told G. so the other day, who did not much like it—I said he
gave a power of creation to the human mind, which did not belong to
it. Even Shakspeare, who was so original and saw so deeply into the
springs of nature, created nothing: he only brought forward what
existed before. I said, ‘You may observe and combine, but you can
add nothing—neither a colour to the rainbow, nor a note to music,
nor a faculty to the mind. And it’s well that you cannot; for my belief
is, that if you could create the smallest thing, the world would not
last three months, so little are you to be trusted with power.’ G.
retorted by a charge of misanthropy; and I asked him who were those
dignifiers of the species to whom he wished me to look up with so
much awe and reverence. He answered, somewhat to my surprise,
Burke, Fox, and Sheridan. I expected he would have named Lord
Bacon, or some of those. I was not much staggered by his authorities.
T.—I did not know G. was so parliamentary: he might, while he
was about it, have mentioned the three last speakers of the House of
Commons, Lord Colchester, Lord Sidmouth, and Mr. Onslow.
J.—He should have gone farther off: it is distance that hides
defects and magnifies. So it is with that prejudice of classical
learning. You lock up names in an obsolete language, and they
become sacred. I do not wish to speak against a classical education; it
refines and softens, I grant; and I see the want of it in Cobbett, and
others, who may be regarded as upstarts in letters. But surely it often
gives a false estimate of men and things. Every one brought up in
colleges, and drugged with Latin and Greek for a number of years,
firmly believes that there have been about five people in the world,
and that they are dead. All that actually exists, he holds to be
nothing. The world about him is a phantasmagoria: he considers it a
personal affront that any one should have common sense, or be able
to find his way along the street, without looking for it in Plato or
Aristotle. The classical standard turns shadows into realities and
realities into shadows. A man of sense is trying to get the better of
this early prejudice all his life; and hardly succeeds, after infinite
mortification, at last. The dunces and pedants are the best off; they
never suspect that there is any wisdom in the world but that of the
ancients, of which they are the depositaries.
T.—I do not think G. goes that length; but he only exists in his
passion for books and for literary fame. You cannot shock him more
than by questioning any established reputation.
J.—Yes, he conceives himself to be a free-thinker, and yet is a bigot
in his way.
 T.—Men will have some idol, some mythology of their own—the dii
majores or minores—something that they think greater than
themselves, or that they would wish to resemble; and G. would be as
angry at a sceptic on the subject of Burke’s style, as a Catholic would
be at a heretic who denied the virtues and miracles of his patron
saint.
 TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR

The Atlas]
[September 27 and October 4,
1829.

I. There is no flattery so gross or extravagant but it will be

acceptable. It leaves some sting of pleasure behind, since its very
excess seems to imply that there must be some foundation for it. Tell
the ugliest person in the world that he is the handsomest, the
greatest fool that he is a wit, and he will believe and thank you. There
is a possibility at least that you may be sincere. Even the sycophant’s
ironical laugh turns to a smile of self-complacency at our own
fancied perfections.
II. There is no abuse so foul or unprovoked but some part of it will
stick. Ill words break the charm of good deeds. Call a man names all
the year round, and at the end of the year (for no other reason) his
best friends will not care to mention his name. It is no pleasant
reflection that a man has been accused, however unjustly, of a folly
or a crime. We involuntarily associate words with things; and the
imagination retains an unfavourable impression long after the
understanding is disabused. Or if we repel the charge and resent the
injustice, this is making a toil of a pleasure, and our cowardice and
indolence soon take part with the malice of mankind. The assailants
are always the more courageous party. It degrades a man even to be
subjected to undeserved reproach, for it seems as if without some
flaw or blemish no one would dare to attack him; so that the viler
and more unprincipled the abuse, the lower it sinks, not him who
offers, but him who is the object of it, in general estimation. If we see
a man covered with mud we avoid him without expressing the cause.
The favourites of the public, like Cæsar’s wife, must not be suspected;
and it is enough if we admire and bear witness to the superiority of
another under the most favourable circumstances—to do this in spite
of secret calumny and vulgar clamour is a pitch of generosity which
the world has not arrived at.
III. A certain manner makes more conquests than either wit or
beauty. Suppose a woman to have a graceful ease of deportment, and
a mild self-possession pervading every look and tone of voice; this
exercises an immediate influence on a person of an opposite and
irritable temperament—it calms and enchants him at once. It is like
soft music entering the room—from that time he can only breathe in
her presence, and to be torn from her is to be torn from himself for
ever.
IV. Fame and popularity are disparate quantities, having no
common measure. A poet or painter now living may be as great as
any poet or painter that ever did live; and if he be so, he will be so
thought of by future ages, but he cannot by the present. Persons of
overweening vanity and short-sighted ambition, who would forestall
the meed of fame, show themselves unworthy of it, for they reduce it
to a level with the reputation they have already earned. They should
surely leave something to look forward to. It is weighing dross
against gold—comparing a meteor with the polar star. Lord Byron’s
narrowness or presumption in this respect was remarkable. What!
did he not hope to live two hundred years himself, that he should say
it was merely a fashion to admire Milton and Shakspeare as it was
the fashion to admire him? Those who compare Sir Walter Scott with
Shakspeare do not know what they are doing. They may blunt the
feeling with which we regard Shakspeare as an old and tried friend,
though they cannot transfer it to Sir Walter Scott, who is, after all,
but a new and dazzling acquaintance. To argue that there is no
difference in the circumstances is not to put the author of ‘Waverley’
into actual possession of the reversion of fame, but to say that he
shall never enjoy it, since it is no better than a chimera and an
illusion. It is striking at the foundation of true and lasting renown,
and overturning with impatient and thoughtless hands the proud
pre-eminence, the golden seats and blest abodes which the
predestined heirs of immortality wait for beyond the tomb. The
living are merely candidates (more or less successful) for popular
applause, the dead are a religion, or they are nothing.