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—