Mr. Stanley said, adverting again to the subject of conversation, it was an amusement to him to observe what impression the first introduction to general society made on a mind conversant with books, but to whom a the world was in a manner new.
"I believe," said Sir John, "that an overflowing commerce, and the excessive opulence it has introduced, though favorable to all the splendors of art and mechanic ingenuity, yet have lowered the standard of taste, and debilitated the mental energies. They are advantageous to luxury, but fatal to intellect. It has added to the brilliancy of the drawing-room itself, but deducted from that of the inhabitant. It has given perfection to our mirrors, our candelabras, our gilding, our inlaying, and our sculpture, but it has communicated a torpor to the imagination, and enervated our intellectual vigor."
"In one way," said Mr. Stanley, smiling, "luxury has been favorable to literature. From the unparalleled splendor of our printing, paper, engraving, illuminating and binding, luxury has caused more books to be purchased, while from the growth of time-absorbing dissipation, it causes fewer to be read. I believe we were much more familiar with our native poets in their former plain garb than since they have been attired in the gorgeous dress which now decorates our shelves."
"Poetry," replied Mr. Stanley, "has of late too much degenerated into personal satire, persiflage, and caricature among one class of writers, while among another it has exhibited the vagrancies of genius without the inspiration, the exuberance of fancy without the curb of judgment, and the eccentricities of invention without the restrictions of taste. The image has been strained, while the verse has been slackened. We have had pleonasm without fullness, and facility without force. Redundancy has been mistaken for plenitude, flimsiness for ease, and distortion for energy. An over desire of being natural has made the poet feeble, and the rage for being simple has sometimes made him silly. The sensibility is sickly, and the elevation vertiginous."
"To Cowper," said Sir John, "master of melody as he is, the mischief is partly attributable. Such an original must naturally have a herd of imitators. If they can not attain to his excellences, his faults are always attainable. The resemblance between the master and the scholar is found chiefly in his defects. The determined imitator of an easy writer becomes insipid; of a sublime one, absurd. Cowper's ease appeared his most imitable charm, but ease aggraved is insipidity. His occasional negligences, his disciples adopted uniformly. In Cowper, there might sometimes be carelessness in the verse, but the verse itself was sustained by the vigor of the sentiment. The imitator forgot that his strength lay in the thought; that his buoyant spirit always supported itself; that the figure, though amplified, was never distorted; the image, though bold, was never incongruous; and the illustration, though new, was never false.
"The evil, however," continued Sir John, "seems to be correcting itself. The real genius, which exists in several of this whimsical school, I trust, will at length lead them to prune their excrescences, and reform their youthful eccentricities. Their good sense will teach that the surest road to fame is to condescend to tread in the luminous track of their great precursors in the art. They will see that deviation is not always improvement; that whoever wants to be better than nature will infallibly be worse; that truth in taste is as obvious as in morals, and as certain as in mathematics. In other quarters, both the classic and the Gothic muse are emulously soaring, and I hail the restoration of genuine poetry and pure taste."
"I must not," said I, "loquacious as I have already been, dismiss the subject of conversation without remarking that I found there was one topic which seemed as uniformly avoided by common consent as if it had been banished by the interdict of absolute authority, and that some forfeiture, or at least dishonor and disgrace, were to follow it on conviction—I mean religion."
"Surely, Charles," said Sir John, "you would not convert general conversation into a divinity school, and friendly societies into debating clubs."
"Far from it," replied I, "nor do I desire that ladies and gentlemen over their tea and coffee should rehearse their articles of faith, or fill the intervals of carving and eating with introducing dogmas, or discussing controversies. I do not wish to erect the social table, which was meant for innocent relaxation, into an arena for theological combatants. I only wish, as people live so much together, that if, when out of the multitude of topics which arise in conversation, an unlucky wight happens to start a serious thought, I could see a cordial recognition of its importance; I wish I could see a disposition to pursue it, instead of a chilling silence which obliges him to draw in as if he had dropped something dangerous to the state, or inimical to the general cheerfulness, or derogatory to his own understanding. I only desire that as, without any effort on the part of the speaker, but merely from the overflowing fullness of a mind habitually occupied with one leading concern, we easily perceive that one of the company is a lawyer, another a soldier, a third a physician, I only wish that we could oftener discover from the same plenitude, so hard to conceal where it exists, that we were in a company of Christians."
"We must not expect in our day," said Mr. Stanley, "to see revive that animating picture of the prevalence of religious intercourse given by the prophet: 'Then they that feared the Lord, spake often one to another.' And yet one can not but regret that, in select society, men well informed as we know, well principled as we hope, having one common portion of being to fill, having one common faith, one common Father, one common journey to perform, one common termination to that journey, and one common object in view beyond it, should, when together, be so unwilling to advert occasionally to those great points which doubtless often occupy them in secret; that they should on the contrary adopt a sort of inverted hypocrisy, and wish to appear worse than they really are; that they should be so backward to give or to gain information, to lend or to borrow lights, in a matter in which they are all equally interested: which can not be the case in any other possible subject."