As a lady present seemed now to get uneasy at the turn the conversation had taken, we rose up to go. The morning broke with that dim, dubious light by which Giotto, Cimabue, and Ghirlandaio must have seen to paint their earliest works; and we parted to meet again and renew similar topics at night, the next night, and the night after that, till that night overspread Europe which saw no dawn. The same event, in truth, broke up our little Congress that broke up the great one. But that was to meet again: our deliberations have never been resumed.
ON THE CONVERSATION OF LORDS
The New Monthly Magazine.] [April, 1826.
‘An infinite deal of nothing,’—Shakspeare.
The conversation of Lords is very different from that of authors. Mounted on horseback, they stick at nothing in the chace, and clear every obstacle with flying leaps, while we poor devils have no chance of keeping up with them with our clouten shoes and long hunting-poles. They have all the benefit of education, society, confidence, they read books, purchase pictures, breed horses, learn to ride, dance, and fence, look after their estates, travel abroad:—authors have none of these advantages, or inlets of knowledge, to assist them, except one, reading; and this is still more impoverished and clouded by the painful exercise of their own thoughts. The knowledge of the Great has a character of wealth and property in it, like the stores of the rich merchant or manufacturer, who lays his hands on all within his reach: the understanding of the student is like the workshop of the mechanic, who has nothing but what he himself creates. How difficult is the production, how small the display in the one case compared to the other! Most of Correggio’s designs are contained in one small room at Parma: how different from the extent and variety of some hereditary and princely collections!
The human mind has a trick (probably a very natural and consoling one) of striking a balance between the favours of wisdom and of fortune, and of making one thing a gratuitous and convenient foil to another. Whether this is owing to envy or to a love of justice, I will not say: but whichever it is owing to, I must own I do not think it well founded. A scholar is without money: therefore (to make the odds even) we argue (not very wisely) that a rich man must be without ideas. This does not follow. ‘The wish is father to that thought;’ and the thought is a spurious one. We might as well pretend, that because a man has the advantage of us in height, he is not strong or in good health; or because a woman is handsome, she is not at the same time young, accomplished and well-bred. Our fastidious self-love or our rustic prejudices may revolt at the accumulation of advantages in others; but we must learn to submit to the mortifying truth, which every day’s experience points out, with what grace we may. There were those who grudged to Lord Byron the name of a poet because he was of noble birth; as he himself could not endure the praises bestowed upon Wordsworth, whom he considered as a clown. He carried this weakness so far, that he even seemed to regard it as a piece of presumption in Shakspeare to be preferred before him as a dramatic author, and contended that Milton’s writing an epic poem and the ‘Answer to Salmasius’ was entirely owing to vanity—so little did he relish the superiority of the old blind schoolmaster. So it is that one party would arrogate every advantage to themselves, while those on the other side would detract from all in their rivals that they do not themselves possess. Some will not have the statue painted: others can see no beauty in the clay-model!
The man of rank and fortune, besides his chance for the common or (now and then) an uncommon share of wit and understanding, has it in his power to avail himself of every thing that is to be taught of art and science; he has tutors and valets at his beck; he may master the dead languages, he must acquire the modern ones; he moves in the highest circles, and may descend to the lowest; the paths of pleasure, of ambition, of knowledge, are open to him; he may devote himself to a particular study, or skim the cream of all; he may read books or men or things, as he finds most convenient or agreeable; he is not forced to confine his attention to some one dry uninteresting pursuit; he has a single hobby, or half a dozen; he is not distracted by care, by poverty and want of leisure; he has every opportunity and facility afforded him for acquiring various accomplishments of body or mind, and every encouragement, from confidence and success, for making an imposing display of them; he may laugh with the gay, jest with the witty, argue with the wise; he has been in courts, in colleges, and camps, is familiar with playhouses and taverns, with the riding-house and the dissecting-room, has been present at or taken part in the debates of both Houses of Parliament, was in the O. P. row, and is deep in the Fancy, understands the broadsword exercise, is a connoisseur in regimentals, plays the whole game at whist, is a tolerable proficient at backgammon, drives four in hand, skates, rows, swims, shoots; knows the different sorts of game and modes of agriculture in the different counties of England, the manufactures and commerce of the different towns, the politics of Europe, the campaigns in Spain, has the Gazette, the newspapers, and reviews at his fingers’ ends, has visited the finest scenes of Nature and beheld the choicest works of Art, and is in society where he is continually hearing or talking of all these things; and yet we are surprised to find that a person so circumstanced and qualified has any ideas to communicate or words to express himself, and is not, as by patent and prescription he was bound to be, a mere well-dressed fop of fashion or a booby lord! It would be less remarkable if a poor author, who has none of this giddy range and scope of information, who pores over the page till it fades from his sight, and refines upon his style till the words stick in his throat, should be dull as a beetle and mute as a fish, instead of spontaneously pouring out a volume of wit and wisdom on every subject that can be started.
An author lives out of the world, or mixes chiefly with those of his own class; which renders him pedantic and pragmatical, or gives him a reserved, hesitating, and interdicted manner. A lord or gentleman-commoner goes into the world, and this imparts that fluency, spirit, and freshness to his conversation, which arises from the circulation of ideas and from the greater animation and excitement of unrestrained intercourse. An author’s tongue is tied for want of somebody to speak to: his ideas rust and become obscured, from not being brought out in company and exposed to the gaze of instant admiration. A lord has always some one at hand on whom he can ‘bestow his tediousness,’ and grows voluble, copious, inexhaustible in consequence: his wit is polished, and the flowers of his oratory expanded by his smiling commerce with the world, like the figures in tapestry, that after being thrust into a corner and folded up in closets, are displayed on festival and gala-days. Again, the man of fashion and fortune reduces many of those arts and mysteries to practice, of which the scholar gains all his knowledge from books and vague description. Will not the rules of architecture find a readier reception and sink deeper into the mind of the proprietor of a noble mansion, or of him who means to build one, than of the half-starved occupier of a garret? Will not the political economist’s insight into Mr. Ricardo’s doctrine of Rent, or Mr. Malthus’s theory of Population, be vastly quickened by the circumstance of his possessing a large landed estate and having to pay enormous poor-rates? And in general is it not self-evident that a man’s knowledge of the true interests of the country will be enlarged just in proportion to the stake he has in it? A person may have read accounts of different cities and the customs of different nations: but will this give him the same accurate idea of the situation of celebrated places, of the aspect and manners of the inhabitants, or the same lively impulse and ardour and fund of striking particulars in expatiating upon them, as if he had run over half the countries of Europe, for no other purpose than to satisfy his own curiosity, and excite that of others on his return? I many years ago looked into the Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Treatise on Horsemanship’; all I remember of it is some quaint cuts of the Duke and his riding-master introduced to illustrate the lessons. Had I myself possessed a stud of Arabian coursers, with grooms and a master of the horse to assist me in reducing these precepts to practice, they would have made a stronger impression on my mind; and what interested myself from vanity or habit, I could have made interesting to others. I am sure I could have learnt to ride the Great Horse, and do twenty other things, in the time I have employed in endeavouring to make something out of nothing, or in conning the same problem fifty times over, as monks count over their beads! I have occasionally in my life bought a few prints, and hung them up in my room with great satisfaction; but is it to be supposed possible, from this casual circumstance, that I should compete in taste or in the knowledge of virtù with a peer of the realm, who has in his possession the costly designs, or a wealthy commoner, who has spent half his fortune in learning to distinguish copies from originals? ‘A question not to be asked!’ Nor is it likely that the having dipped into the Memoirs of Count Grammont, or of Lady Vane in Peregrine Pickle, should enable any one to sustain a conversation on subjects of love and gallantry with the same ease, grace, brilliancy, and spirit as the having been engaged in a hundred adventures of one’s own, or heard the scandal and tittle-tattle of fashionable life for the last thirty years canvassed a hundred times. Books may be manufactured from other books by some dull, mechanical process: it is conversation and the access to the best society that alone fit us for society; or ‘the act and practic part of life must be the mistress to our theorique,’ before we can hope to shine in mixed company, or bend our previous knowledge to ordinary and familiar uses out of that plaster-cast mould which is as brittle as it is formal!
There is another thing which tends to produce the same effect, viz. that lords and gentlemen seldom trouble themselves about the knotty and uninviting parts of a subject: they leave it to ‘the dregs of earth’ to drain the cup or find the bottom. They are attracted by the frothy and sparkling. If a question puzzles them, or is not likely to amuse others, they leave it to its fate, or to those whose business it is to contend with difficulty, and to pursue truth for its own sake. They string together as many available, off-hand topics as they can procure for love or money; and aided by a good person or address, sport them with very considerable effect at the next rout or party they go to. They do not bore you with pedantry, or tease you with sophistry. Their conversation is not made up of moot-points or choke-pears. They do not willingly forego ‘the feast of reason or the flow of soul’ to grub up some solitary truth or dig for hid treasure. They are amateurs, not professors; the patrons, not the drudges of knowledge. An author loses half his life, and stultifies his faculties, in hopes to find out something which perhaps neither he nor any one else can ever find out. For this he neglects half a hundred acquirements, half a hundred accomplishments. Aut Cæsar aut nihil. He is proud of the discovery or of the fond pursuit of one truth—a lord is vain of a thousand ostentatious common-places. If the latter ever devotes himself to some crabbed study, or sets about finding out the longitude, he is then to be looked upon as a humorist if he fails—a genius if he succeeds—and no longer belongs to the class I have been speaking of.
Perhaps a multiplicity of attainments and pursuits is not very favourable to their selectness; as a local and personal acquaintance with objects of imagination takes away from, instead of adding to, their romantic interest. Familiarity is said to breed contempt; or at any rate, the being brought into contact with places, persons, or things that we have hitherto only heard or read of, removes a certain aerial delicious veil of refinement from them, and strikes at that ideal abstraction, which is the charm and boast of a life conversant chiefly among books. The huddling a number of tastes and studies together tends to degrade and vulgarise each, and to give a crude, unconcocted, dissipated turn to the mind. Instead of stuffing it full of gross, palpable, immediate objects of excitement, a wiser plan would be to leave something in reserve, something hovering in airy space to draw our attention out of ourselves, to excite hope, curiosity, wonder, and never to satisfy it. The great art is not to throw a glare of light upon all objects, or to lay the whole extended landscape bare at one view; but so to manage as to see the more amiable side of things, and through the narrow vistas and loop-holes of retreat,