X. Envy is the ruling passion of mankind. The explanation is obvious. As we are of infinitely more importance in our own eyes than all the world beside, the chief bent and study of the mind is directed to impress others with this self-evident but disputed distinction, and to arm ourselves with the exclusive signatures and credentials of our superiority, and to hate and stifle all that stands in the way of, or obscures, our absurd pretensions. Each individual looks upon himself in the light of a dethroned monarch, and the rest of the world as his rebellious subjects and runaway slaves, who withhold the homage that is his natural due, and burst the chains of opinion he would impose upon them: the madman in Hogarth (sooth to say), with his crown of straw and wooden sceptre, is but a type and common-place emblem of every-day life.
XI. It has been made a subject of regret that in forty or fifty years’ time (if we go on as we have done) no one will read Fielding. What a falling off! Already, if you thoughtlessly lend Joseph Andrews to a respectable family, you find it returned upon your hands as an improper book. To be sure, people read ‘Don Juan’; but that is in verse. The worst is, that this senseless fastidiousness is more owing to an affectation of gentility than to a disgust at vice. It is not the scenes that are described at an alehouse, but the alehouse at which they take place that gives the mortal stab to taste and refinement. One comfort is, that the manners and characters which are objected to as low in Fielding have in a great measure disappeared or taken another shape; and this at least is one good effect of all excellent satire—that it destroys ‘the very food whereon it lives.’ The generality of readers, who only seek for the representation of existing models, must therefore, after a time, seek in vain for this obvious verisimilitude in the most powerful and popular works of the kind; and will be either disgusted or at a loss to understand the application. People of sense and imagination, who look beyond the surface or the passing folly of the day, will always read Tom Jones.
XII. There is a set of critics and philosophers who have never read anything but what has appeared within the last ten years, and to whom every mode of expression or turn of thought extending beyond that period has a very odd effect. They cannot comprehend how people used such out-of-the-way phrases in the time of Shakspeare; the style of Addison would not do now—even Junius, they think, would make but a shabby thread-bare figure in the columns of a modern newspaper—all the riches that the language has acquired in the course of time, all the idiomatic resources arising from study or accident, are utterly discarded—sink under-ground: and all that is admired by the weak or sought after by the vain, is a thin surface of idle affectation and glossy innovations. Even spelling and pronunciation have undergone such changes within a short time, that Pope and Swift require a little modernizing to accommodate them to ‘ears polite;’ and that a bluestocking belle would be puzzled in reciting Dryden’s sounding verse with its occasional barbarous, old-fashioned accenting, if it were the custom to read Dryden aloud in those serene, morning circles. There is no class more liable to set up this narrow superficial standard, than people of fashion, in their horror of what is vulgar and ignorance of what really is so; they have a jargon of their own, but scout whatever does not fall in with it as Gothic and outré; the English phrases handed down from the last age they think come east of Temple-bar, and they perform a sedulous quarantine against them. The Times, having found it so written in some outlandish depêche of the Marquis of Wellesley’s, chose as a mark of the haute literature, to spell dispatch with an e, and for a long time he was held for a novice or an affected and absolute writer who spelt it otherwise. The Globe, with its characteristic good sense and sturdiness of spirit has restored the old English spelling in defiance of scandal. Some persons who were growing jealous that the author of Waverley had eclipsed their favourite luminaries may make themselves easy; he himself is on the wane with those whose opinions ebb and flow with the ‘inconstant moon’ of fashion, and has given way (if Mr. Colburn’s advertisements speak true, ‘than which what’s truer?’) to a set of titled nonentities. Nothing solid is to go down, or that is likely to last three months; instead of the standing dishes of old English literature we are to take up with the nicknacks and whipt syllabubs of modern taste; are to be occupied with a stream of titlepages, extracts, and specimens, like passing figures in a camera obscura, and are to be puzzled in a mob of new books as in the mob of new faces in what was formerly the narrow part of the Strand.
XIII. Never pity people because they are ill-used. They only wait the opportunity to use others just as ill. Hate the oppression and prevent the evil if you can; but do not fancy there is any virtue in being oppressed, or any love lost between the parties. The unfortunate are not a jot more amiable than their neighbours, though they give themselves out so, and our pity takes part with those who have disarmed our envy.
XIV. The human mind seems to improve, because it is continually in progress. But as it moves forward to new acquisitions and trophies, it loses its hold on those which formerly were its chief boast and employment. Men are better chemists than they were, but worse divines; they read the newspapers, it is true, but neglect the classics. Everything has its turn. Neither is error extirpated so much as it takes a new form and puts on a more artful disguise. Folly shifts its ground, but finds its level: absurdity is never left without a subterfuge. The dupes of dreams and omens in former times, are now the converts to graver and more solemn pieces of quackery. The race of the sanguine, the visionary, and the credulous, of those who believe what they wish, or what excites their wonder, in preference to what they know, or can have rationally explained, will never wear out; and they only transfer their innate love of the marvellous from old and exploded chimeras to fashionable theories, and the terra incognita of modern science.
XV. It is a curious speculation to take a modern belle, or some accomplished female acquaintance, and conceive what her great-great-grandmother was like, some centuries ago. Who was the Mrs. —— of the year 200? We have some standard of grace and elegance among eastern nations 3000 years ago, because we read accounts of them in history; but we have no more notion of, or faith in, our own ancestors than if we had never had any. We cut the connexion with the Druids and the Heptarchy; and cannot fancy ourselves (by any transformation) inmates of caves and woods, or feeders on acorns and sloes. We seem engrafted on that low stem—a bright, airy, and insolent excrescence.
XVI. There is this advantage in painting, if there were no other, that it is the truest and most self-evident kind of history. It shows that there were people long ago, and also what they were, not in a book darkly, but face to face. It is not the half-formed clay, the old-fashioned dress, as we might conceive; but the living lineaments, the breathing expression. You look at a picture by Vandyke, and there see as in an enchanted mirror, an English woman of quality two hundred years ago, sitting in unconscious state with her child playing at her feet, and with all the dove-like innocence of look, the grace and refinement that it is possible for virtue and breeding to bestow. It is enough to make us proud of our nature and our countrywomen; and dissipates at once the idle, upstart prejudice that all before our time was sordid and scarce civilised. If our progress does not appear so great as our presumption has suggested, what does it signify? With such models kept in view, our chief object ought to be not to degenerate; and though the future prospect is less gaudy and imposing, the retrospect opens a larger and brighter vista of excellence.
XVII. I am by education and conviction inclined to republicanism and puritanism. In America they have both; but I confess I feel a little staggered in the practical efficacy and saving grace of first principles, when I ask myself, ‘Can they throughout the United States, from Boston to Baltimore, produce a single head like one of Titian’s Venetian nobles, nurtured in all the pride of aristocracy and all the blindness of popery?’ Of all the branches of political economy, the human face is perhaps the best criterion of value.
COMMON SENSE
The Atlas.] [October 11, 1829.