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.