R. What is it you so particularly object to this school? Is there any thing so very obnoxious in the doctrine of Utility, which they profess? Or in the design to bring about the greatest possible good by the most efficacious and disinterested means?
S. Disinterested enough, indeed: since their plan seems to be to sacrifice every individual comfort for the good of the whole. Can they find out no better way of making human life run smooth and pleasant, than by drying up the brain and curdling the blood? I do not want society to resemble a Living Skeleton, whatever these ‘Job’s Comforters’ may do. They are like the fox in the fable—they have no feeling themselves, and would persuade others to do without it. Take away the dulce of the poet, and I do not see what is to become of the utile. It is the common error of the human mind, of forgetting the end in the means.
R. I see you are at your Sentimentalities again. Pray, tell me, is it not their having applied this epithet to some of your favourite speculations, that has excited this sudden burst of spleen against them?
S. At least I cannot retort this phrase on those printed circulars which they throw down areas and fasten under knockers. But pass on for that. Answer me then, what is there agreeable or ornamental in human life that they do not explode with fanatic rage? What is there sordid and cynical that they do not eagerly catch at? What is there that delights others that does not disgust them. What that disgusts others with which they are not delighted? I cannot think that this is owing to philosophy, but to a sinister bias of mind; inasmuch as a marked deficiency of temper is a more obvious way of accounting for certain things than an entire superiority of understanding. The Ascetics of old thought they were doing God good service by tormenting themselves and denying others the most innocent amusements. Who doubts now that in this (armed as they were with texts and authorities and awful denunciations) they were really actuated by a morose and envious disposition, that had no capacity for enjoyment itself or felt a malicious repugnance to the idea of it in any one else? What in them took the garb of religion, with us puts on the semblance of philosophy; and instead of dooming the heedless and refractory to hell-fire or the terrors of purgatory, our modern polemics set their disciples in the stocks of Utility, or throw all the elegant arts and amiable impulses of humanity into the Limbo of Political Economy.
R. I cannot conceive what possible connection there can be between the weak and mischievous enthusiasts you speak of, and the most enlightened reasoners of the nineteenth century. They would laugh at such a comparison.
S. Self-knowledge is the last thing which I should lay to the charge of soi-disant philosophers; but a man may be a bigot without a particle of religion, a monk or an Inquisitor in a plain coat and professing the most liberal opinions.
R. You still deal, as usual, in idle sarcasms and flimsy generalities. Will you descend to particulars, and state facts before you draw inferences from them?
S. In the first place then, they are mostly Scotchmen—lineal descendants of the Covenanters and Cameronians, and inspired with the true John Knox zeal for mutilating and defacing the carved work of the sanctuary——
R. Hold, hold—this is vulgar prejudice and personality——
S. But it’s the fact, and I thought you called for facts. Do you imagine if I hear a fellow in Scotland abusing the Author of Waverley, who has five hundred hearts beating in his bosom, because there is no Religion in his works, and a fellow in Westminster doing the same thing because there is no Political Economy in them, that any thing will prevent me from supposing that this is virtually the same Scotch pedlar with his pack of Utility at his back, whether he deals in tape and stays or in drawling compilations of history and reviews?
R. I did not know you had such an affection for Sir Walter——
S. I said the Author of Waverley. Not to like him would be not to love myself or human nature, of which he has given so many interesting specimens: though for the sake of that same human nature, I have no liking to Sir Walter. Those ‘few and recent writers,’ on the contrary, who by their own account ‘have discovered the true principles of the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ are easily reconciled to the Tory and the bigot, because they here feel a certain superiority over him; but they cannot forgive the great historian of life and manners, because he has enlarged our sympathy with human happiness beyond their pragmatical limits. They are not even ‘good haters:’ for they hate not what degrades and afflicts, but what consoles and elevates the mind. Their plan is to block out human happiness wherever they see a practicable opening to it.
R. But perhaps their notions of happiness differ from yours. They think it should be regulated by the doctrine of Utility. Whatever is incompatible with this, they regard as spurious and false, and scorn all base compromises and temporary palliatives.
S. Yes; just as the religious fanatic thinks there is no salvation out of the pale of his own communion, and damns without scruple every appearance of virtue and piety beyond it. Poor David Deans! how would he have been surprised to see all his follies—his ‘right-hand defections and his left-hand compliances,’ and his contempt for human learning, blossom again in a knot of sophists and professed illuminés! Such persons are not to be treated as philosophers and metaphysicians, but as conceited sectaries and ignorant mechanics. In neither case is the intolerant and proscribing spirit a deduction of pure reason, indifferent to consequences, but the dictate of presumption, prejudice, and spiritual pride, or a strong desire in the elect to narrow the privilege of salvation to as small a circle as possible, and in ‘a few and recent writers’ to have the whole field of happiness and argument to themselves. The enthusiasts of old did all they could to strike the present existence from under our feet to give us another—to annihilate our natural affections and worldly vanities, so as to conform us to the likeness of God: the modern sciolists offer us Utopia in lieu of our actual enjoyments; for warm flesh and blood would give us a head of clay and a heart of steel, and conform us to their own likeness—‘a consummation not very devoutly to be wished!’ Where is the use of getting rid of the trammels of superstition and slavery, if we are immediately to be handed over to these new ferrets and inspectors of a Police-Philosophy; who pay domiciliary visits to the human mind, catechise an expression, impale a sentiment, put every enjoyment to the rack, leave you not a moment’s ease or respite, and imprison all the faculties in a round of cant-phrases—the Shibboleth of a party? They are far from indulging or even tolerating the strain of exulting enthusiasm expressed by Spenser:—
Without air or light, they grope their way under-ground, till they are made ‘fierce with dark keeping:’[27] their attention, confined to the same dry, hard, mechanical subjects, which they have not the power nor the will to exchange for others, frets and corrodes; and soured and disappointed, they wreak their spite and mortification on all around them.
R. I cannot but think your imagination runs away with your candour. Surely the writers you are so ready to inveigh against labour hard to correct errors and reform grievances.
S. Yes; because the one affords exercise for their vanity, and the other for their spleen. They are attracted by the odour of abuses, and regale on fancied imperfections. But do you suppose they like any thing else better than they do the Government? Are they on any better terms with their own families or friends? Do they not make the lives of every one they come near a torment to them, with their pedantic notions and captious egotism? Do they not quarrel with their neighbours, placard their opponents, supplant those on their own side of the question? Are they not equally at war with the rich and the poor? And having failed (for the present) in their project of cashiering kings, do they not give scope to their troublesome, overbearing humour, by taking upon them to snub and lecture the poor gratis? Do they not wish to extend ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ by putting a stop to population—to relieve distress by withholding charity, to remedy disease by shutting up hospitals? Is it not a part of their favourite scheme, their nostrum, their panacea, to prevent the miseries and casualties of human life by extinguishing it in the birth? Do they not exult in the thought (and revile others who do not agree to it) of plucking the crutch from the cripple, and tearing off the bandages from the agonized limb? Is it thus they would gain converts, or make an effectual stand against acknowledged abuses, by holding up a picture of the opposite side, the most sordid, squalid, harsh, and repulsive, that narrow reasoning, a want of imagination, and a profusion of bile can make it? There is not enough of evil already in the world, but we must harden our feelings against the miseries that daily, hourly, present themselves to our notice, and set our faces against every thing that promises to afford any one the least gratification or pleasure. This is their idea of a perfect commonwealth: where each member performs his part in the machine, taking care of himself, and no more concerned about his neighbours, than the iron and wood-work, the pegs and nails in a spinning-jenny. Good screw! good wedge! good ten-penny nail! Are they really in earnest, or are they bribed, partly by their interests, partly by the unfortunate bias of their minds, to play the game into the adversary’s hands? It looks like it; and the Government give them ‘good œillades’—Mr. Blackwood pats them on the back—Mr. Canning grants an interview and plays the amiable—Mr. Hobhouse keeps the peace. One of them has a place at the India-House: but then nothing is said against the India-House, though the poor and pious Old Lady sweats and almost swoons at the conversations which her walls are doomed to hear, but of which she is ashamed to complain. One triumph of the School is to throw Old Ladies into hysterics![28] The obvious (I should still hope not the intentional) effect of the Westminster tactics is to put every volunteer on the same side hors de combat, who is not a zealot of the strictest sect of those they call Political Economists; to come behind you with dastard, cold-blooded malice, and trip up the heels of those stragglers whom their friends and patrons in the Quarterly have left still standing; to strip the cause of Reform (out of seeming affection to it) of every thing like a misalliance with elegance, taste, decency, common sense, or polite literature, (as their fellow labourers in the same vineyard had previously endeavoured to do out of acknowledged hatred)—to disgust the friends of humanity, to cheer its enemies; and for the sake of indulging their unbridled dogmatism, envy and uncharitableness, to leave nothing intermediate between the Ultra-Toryism of the courtly scribes and their own Ultra-Radicalism—between the extremes of practical wrong and impracticable right. Their, our antagonists will be very well satisfied with this division of the spoil:—give them the earth, and any one who chooses may take possession of the moon for them!
R. You allude to their attacks on the Edinburgh Review?
S. And to their articles on Scott’s Novels, on Hospitals, on National Distress, on Moore’s Life of Sheridan, and on every subject of taste, feeling, or common humanity. Sheridan, in particular, is termed ‘an unsuccessful adventurer.’ How gently this Jacobin jargon will fall on ears polite! This is what they call attacking principles and sparing persons: they spare the persons indeed of men in power (who have places to give away), and attack the characters of the dead or the unsuccessful with impunity! Sheridan’s brilliant talents, his genius, his wit, his political firmness (which all but they admire) draw forth no passing tribute of admiration; his errors, his misfortunes, and his death (which all but they deplore) claim no pity. This indeed would be to understand the doctrine of Utility to very little purpose, if it did not at the first touch weed from the breast every amiable weakness and imperfect virtue which had—never taken root there. But they make up for their utter want of sympathy with the excellences or failings of others by a proportionable self-sufficiency. Sheridan, Fox, and Burke were mere tyros and school-boys in politics compared to them, who are the ‘mighty land-marks of these latter times’—ignorant of those principles of ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ which a few and recent writers have promulgated. It is one way of raising a pure and lofty enthusiasm, as to the capacities of the human mind, to scorn all that has gone before us. Rather say, this dwelling with overacted disgust on common frailties, and turning away with impatience from the brightest points of character, is ‘a discipline of humanity,’ which should be confined as much as possible to the Westminster School. Believe me, their theories and their mode of enforcing them stand in the way of reform: their philosophy is as little addressed to the head as to the heart—it is fit neither for man nor beast. It is not founded on any sympathy with the secret yearnings or higher tendencies of man’s nature, but on a rankling antipathy to whatever is already best. Its object is to offend—its glory to find out and wound the tenderest part. What is not malice, is cowardice, and not candour. They attack the weak and spare the strong, to indulge their officiousness and add to their self-importance. Nothing is said in the Westminster Review of the treatment of Mr. Buckingham by the East India Company: it might lessen the writer’s sphere of utility, as Mr. Hall goes from Leicester to Bristol to save more souls! They do not grapple with the rich to wrest his superfluities from him (in this they might be foiled) but trample on the poor (a safe and pick-thank office) and wrench his pittance from him with their logical instruments and lying arguments. Let their system succeed, as they pretend it would, and diffuse comfort and happiness around; and they would immediately turn against it as effeminate, insipid, and sickly; for their tastes and understandings are too strongly braced to endure any but the most unpalatable truths and the bitterest ingredients. Their benefits are extracted by the Cæsarean operation. Their happiness, in short, is that—which will never be; just as their receipt for a popular article in a newspaper or review, is one that will never be read. Their articles are never read, and if they are not popular, no others ought to be so. The more any flimsy stuff is read and admired, and the more service it does to the sale of a journal, so much the more does it debauch the public taste, and render it averse to their dry and solid lucubrations. This is why they complain of the patronage of my Sentimentalities as one of the sins of the Edinburgh Review; and why they themselves are determined to drench the town with the most unsavoury truths, without one drop of honey to sweeten the gall. Had they felt the least regard to the ultimate success of their principles—of ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ though giving pain might be one paramount and primary motive, they would have combined this object with something like the comfort and accommodation of their unenlightened readers.
R. I see no ground for this philippic, except in your own imagination.
S. Tell me, do they not abuse poetry, painting, music? Is it, think you, for the pain or the pleasure these things give? Or because they are without eyes, ears, imaginations? Is that an excellence in them, or the fault of these arts? Why do they treat Shakespear so cavalierly? Is there any one they would set up against him—any Sir Richard Blackmore they patronise; or do they prefer Racine, as Adam Smith did before them? Or what are we to understand?
R. I can answer for it, they do not wish to pull down Shakespear in order to set up Racine on the ruins of his reputation. They think little indeed of Racine.
S. Or of Moliere either, I suppose?
R. Not much.
S. And yet these two contributed something to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers;’ that is, to the amusement and delight of a whole nation for the last century and a half. But that goes for nothing in the system of Utility, which is satisfied with nothing short of the good of the whole. Such benefactors of the species, as Shakespear, Racine, and Moliere, who sympathised with human character and feeling in their finest and liveliest moods, can expect little favour from ‘those few and recent writers,’ who scorn the Muse, and whose philosophy is a dull antithesis to human nature. Unhappy they who lived before their time! Oh! age of Louis XIV. and of Charles II., ignorant of the Je ne sçais quoi and of the sçavoir vivre! Oh! Paris built (till now) of mud! Athens, Rome, Susa, Babylon, Palmyra—barbarous structures of a barbarous period—hide your diminished heads! Ye fens and dykes of Holland, ye mines of Mexico, what are ye worth! Oh! bridges raised, palaces adorned, cities built, fields cultivated without skill or science, how came ye to exist till now! Oh! pictures, statues, temples, altars, hearths, the poet’s verse, and solemn-breathing airs, are ye not an insult on the great principles of ‘a few and recent writers’? How came ye to exist without their leave? Oh! Arkwright, unacquainted with spinning-jennies! Oh, Sir Robert Peel, unversed in calico-printing! Oh! generation of upstarts, what good could have happened before your time? What ill can happen after it?
R. But at least you must allow the importance of first principles?
S. Much as I respect a dealer in marine stores, in old rags and iron: both the goods and the principles are generally stolen. I see advertised in the papers—‘Elements of Political Economy, by James Mill,’ and ‘Principles of Political Economy, by John Macculloch.’ Will you tell me in this case, whose are the First Principles? which is the true Simon Pure?
R. You know we make it a rule to discountenance every attempt at wit, as much as the world in general abhor a punster.
S. By your using the phrase, ‘attempts at wit,’ it would seem that you admit there is a true and a false wit; then why do you confound the distinction? Is this logical, or even politic?
R. The difference is not worth attending to.
S. Still, I suppose, you have a great deal of this quality, if you chose to exert it?
R. I fancy not much.
S. And yet you take upon you to despise it! I have sometimes thought that the great professors of the modern philosophy were hardly sincere in the contempt they express for poetry, painting, music, and the Fine Arts in general—that they were private amateurs and prodigious proficients under the rose, and, like other lovers, hid their passion as a weakness—that Mr. M—— turned a barrel-organ—that Mr. P—— warbled delightfully—that Mr. Pl—— had a manuscript tragedy by him, called ‘The Last Man,’ which he withheld from the public, not to compromise the dignity of philosophy by affording any one the smallest actual satisfaction during the term of his natural life.
R. Oh, no! you are quite mistaken in this supposition, if you are at all serious in it. So far from being proficients, or having wasted their time in these trifling pursuits, I believe not one of the persons you have named has the least taste or capacity for them, or any idea corresponding to them, except Mr. Bentham, who is fond of music, and says, with his usual bonhomie (which seems to increase with his age) that he does not see why others should not find an agreeable recreation in poetry and painting.[29]
S. You are sure this cynical humour of theirs is not affectation, at least?
R. I am quite sure of it.
S. Then I am sure it is intolerable presumption in them to think their want of taste and knowledge qualifies them to judge (ex cathedrâ) of these Arts; or is a standard by which to measure the degree of interest which others do or ought to take in them. It is the height of impertinence, mixed up with a worse principle. As to the excesses or caprices of posthumous fame, like other commodities, it soon finds its level in the market. Detur optimo is a tolerably general rule. It is not of forced or factitious growth. People would not trouble their heads about Shakespear, if he had given them no pleasure, or cry him up to the skies, if he had not first raised them there. The world are not grateful for nothing. Shakespear, it is true, had the misfortune to be born before our time, and is not one of ‘those few and recent writers,’ who monopolise all true greatness and wisdom (though not the reputation of it) to themselves. He need not, however, be treated with contumely on this account: the instance might be passed over as a solitary one. We shall have a thousand Political Economists, before we have another Shakespear.
R. Your mode of arriving at conclusions is very different, I confess, from the one to which I have been accustomed, and is too wild and desultory for me to follow it. Allow me to ask in my turn, Do you not admit Utility to be the test of morals, as Reason is the test of Utility?
S. Pray, what definition have you (in the School) of Reason and of Utility?
R. Nay, they require no definition; the meaning of both is obvious.
S. Indeed, it is easy to dogmatize without definitions, and to repeat broad assertions without understanding them. Nothing is so convenient as to begin with gravely assuming our own infallibility, and we can then utter nothing but oracles, of course.
R. What is it you understand by Reason?
S. It is your business to answer the question; but still, if you choose, I will take the onus upon myself, and interpret for you.
R. I have no objection, if you do it fairly.
S. You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion; and I do not find your friends a particular exception to the rule. Their dogmatical tone, their arrogance, their supercilious treatment of the pretensions of others, their vulgar conceit and satisfaction in their own peculiar tenets, so far from convincing me that they are right, convince me that they must be wrong (except by accident, or by mechanically parroting others); for no one ever thought for himself, or looked attentively at truth and nature, that did not feel his own insufficiency and the difficulty and delicacy of his task. Self-knowledge is the first step to wisdom. The Rational Dissenters (who took this title as a characteristic distinction, and who professed an entire superiority over prejudice and superstition of all sorts,) were as little disposed to have their opinions called in question as any people I ever knew. One of their preachers thanked God publicly for having given them a liberal religion. So your School thank God in their hearts for having given them a liberal philosophy: though what with them passes for liberal is considered by the rest of the world as very much akin to illiberality.
R. May I beseech you to come to the point at once?
S. We shall be there soon enough, without hurrying. Reason, I conceive, in the sense that you would appeal to it, may signify any one of three things, all of them insufficient as tests and standards of moral sentiment, or (if that word displeases) of moral conduct:—1. Abstract truth, as distinct from local impressions or individual partialities; 2. Calm, inflexible self-will, as distinct from passion; 3. Dry matter of fact or reality, as distinct from sentimentality or poetry.
R. Let me hear your objections; but do for once adhere to the track you have chalked out.
S. ‘Thereafter as it happens.’ You may drag your grating go-cart of crude assumptions and heavy paralogisms along your narrow iron rail-way, if you please: but let me diverge down ‘primrose paths,’ or break my neck over precipices, as I think proper.
R. Take your own course. A wilful man must have his way. You demur, if I apprehend you right, to founding moral rectitude on the mere dictates of the Understanding. This I grant to be the grand arcanum of the doctrine of Utility. I desire to know what other foundation for morals you will find so solid?
S. I know of none so flimsy. What! would you suspend all the natural and private affections on the mere logical deductions of the Understanding, and exenterate the former of all the force, tenderness, and constancy they derive from habit, local nearness or immediate sympathy, because the last are contrary to the speculative reason of the thing? I am afraid such a speculative morality will end in speculation, or in something worse. Am I to feel no more for a friend or a relative (say) than for an inhabitant of China or of the Moon, because, as a matter of argument, or setting aside their connection with me, and considered absolutely in themselves, the objects are, perhaps, of equal value? Or am I to screw myself up to feel as much for the Antipodes (or God knows who) as for my next-door neighbours, by such a forced intellectual scale? The last is impossible; and the result of the attempt will be to make the balance even by a diminution of our natural sensibility, instead of an universal and unlimited enlargement of our philosophic benevolence. The feelings cannot be made to keep pace with our bare knowledge of existence or of truth; nor can the affections be disjoined from the impressions of time, place, and circumstance, without destroying their vital principle. Yet, without the sense of pleasure and pain, I do not see what becomes of the theory of Utility, which first reduces everything to pleasure and pain, and then tramples upon and crushes these by its own sovereign will. The effect of this system is, like the touch of the torpedo, to chill and paralyse. We, notwithstanding, find persons acting upon it with exemplary coolness and self-complacency. One of these ‘subtilised savages’ informs another who drops into his shop that news is come of the death of his eldest daughter, adding, as matter of boast—‘I am the only person in the house who will eat any dinner to-day: they do not understand the doctrine of Utility!’ I perceive this illustration is not quite to your taste.
R. Is it any thing more than the old doctrine of the Stoics?
S. I thought the system had been wholly new—the notable project of a ‘few and recent writers.’ I could furnish you with another parallel passage in the Hypocrite.[30]
R. Is it not as well, on any system, to suppress the indulgence of inordinate grief and violent passion, that is as useless to the dead as it is hurtful to the living?
S. If we could indulge our affections while they run on smoothly, and discard them from our breasts the instant they fail of their objects, it might be well. But the feelings, the habitual and rooted sentiments of the soul, are not the creatures of choice or of a fanciful theory. To take the utmost possible interest in an object, and be utterly and instantaneously indifferent to the loss of it, is not exactly in the order of human nature. We may blunt or extirpate our feelings altogether with proper study and pains, by ill-humour, conceit, and affectation, but not make them the playthings of a verbal paradox. I fancy if Mr. —— had lost a hundred pounds by a bad debt, or if a lump of soot had fallen into his broth, it would have spoiled his dinner. The doctrine of Utility would not have come to his aid here. It is reserved for great and trying occasions; or serves as an excuse for not affecting grief which its professors do not feel. So much for reason against passion.
R. But if they do not possess all the softness and endearing charities of private life, they have the firmness and unflinching hardihood of patriotism and devotion to the public cause.
S. That is what I have yet to learn. They are a kind of Ishmaelites, whose hand is against others—what or who they are for (except themselves) I do not know. They do not willingly come forward into the front nor even show themselves in the rear of the battle, but are very ready to denounce and disable those who are indiscreet enough to do so. They are not for precipitating a crisis, but for laying down certain general principles, which will do posterity a world of good and themselves no harm. They are a sort of occult reformers, and patriots incognito. They get snug places under Government, and mar popular Elections—but it is to advance the good of the cause. Their theories are as whole and as sleek as their skins, but that there is a certain jejuneness and poverty in both which prevents their ever putting on a wholesome or comfortable appearance.
R. But at least you will not pretend to deny the distinction (you just now hinted at) between things of real Utility and merely fanciful interest?
S. No, I admit that distinction to the full. I only wish you and others not to mistake it.
R. I have not the slightest guess at what you mean.
S. Is there any possible view of the subject that has not been canvassed over and over again in the School? Or do you pass over all possible objections as the dreams of idle enthusiasts? Let me ask, have you not a current dislike to any thing in the shape of sentiment or sentimentality? for with you they are the same. Yet a thing and the cant about it are not the same. The cant about Utility does not destroy its essence. What do you mean by sentimentality?
R. I do not know.
S. Well: you complain, however, that things of the greatest use in reality are not always of the greatest importance in an imaginary and romantic point of view?
R. Certainly; this is the very pivot of all our well-grounded censure and dissatisfaction with poetry, novel-writing, and other things of that flimsy, unmeaning stamp.
S. It appears, then, that there are two standards of value and modes of appreciation in human life, the one practical, the other ideal,—that that which is of the greatest moment to the Understanding is often of little or none at all to the Fancy, and vice versâ. Why then force these two standards into one? Or make the Understanding judge of what belongs to the Fancy, any more than the Fancy judge of what belongs to the Understanding? Poetry would make bad mathematics, mathematics bad poetry: why jumble them together? Leave things, that are so, separate. Cuique tribuito suum.
R. I do not yet comprehend your precise drift.
S. Nay, then, you will not. It is granted that a certain thing, in itself highly useful, does not afford as much pleasure to the imagination, or excite as much interest as it ought to do, or as some other thing which is of less real and practical value. But why ought it to excite this degree of interest, if it is not its nature to do so? Why not set it down to its proper account of Utility in any philosophical estimate—let it go for what it is worth there, valeat quantum valet—and let the other less worthy and (if you will) more meretricious object be left free to produce all the sentiment and emotion it is capable of, and which the former is inadequate to, and its value be estimated accordingly!
R. Will you favour me with an illustration—with any thing like common sense?
S. A table, a chair, a fire-shovel, a Dutch-stove are useful things, but they do not excite much sentiment—they are not confessedly the poetry of human life.
R. No.
S. Why then endeavour to make them so; or in other words, to make them more than they are or can become? A lute, a sonnet, a picture, the sound of distant bells can and do excite an emotion, do appeal to the fancy and the heart (excuse this antiquated phraseology!)—why then grudge them the pleasure they give to the human mind, and which it seems, on the very face of the argument, your objects of mere downright Utility (which are not also objects of Imagination) cannot? Why must I come to your shop, though you expressly tell me you have not the article I want? Or why swear, with Lord Peter in the Tale of a Tub, that your loaf of brown bread answers all the purposes of mutton? Why deprive life of what cheers and adorns, more than of what supports it? A chair is good to sit in (as a matter of fact), a table to write on, a fire to warm one’s self by—No one disputes it; but at the same time I want something else to amuse and occupy my mind, something that stirs the breath of fancy, something that but to think of is to feel an interest in. Besides my automatic existence, I have another, a sentimental one, which must be nourished and supplied with proper food. This end the mere circumstance of practical or real Utility does not answer, and therefore is so far good for nothing.
R. But is it not to be feared that this preference should be carried to excess, and that the essential should be neglected for the frivolous?
S. I see no disposition in mankind to neglect the essential. Necessity has no choice. They pursue the mechanical mechanically, as puss places herself by the fireside, and snuffs up the warmth:—they dream over the romantic; and when their dreams are golden ones, it is pity to disturb them. There is as little danger as possible of excess here; for the interest in things merely ideal can be only in proportion to the pleasure, that is, the real benefit which attends them. A calculation of consequences may deceive, the impulses of passion may hurry us away: sentiment alone is infallible, since it centres and reposes on itself. Like mercy, ‘its quality is not strained: it droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven upon the place beneath!’—
R. You have asked me what Reason is: may I ask you what it is that constitutes Sentiment?
S. I have told you what Reason is: you should tell me what Sentiment is. Or I will give your learned professors and profound Encyclopedists, who lay down laws for the human mind without knowing any of the springs by which it acts, five years to make even a tolerable guess at what it is in objects that produces the fine flower of Sentiment, and what it is that leaves only the husk and stalk of Utility behind it.
R. They are much obliged to you, but I fancy their time is better employed.
S. What! in ringing the changes on the same cant-phrases, one after the other, in newspapers, reviews, lectures, octavo volumes, examinations, and pamphlets, and seeing no more of the matter all the while than a blind horse in a mill?
R. I have already protested against this personality. But surely you would not put fiction on a par with reality?
S. My good friend, let me give you an instance of my way of thinking on this point. I met Dignum (the singer) in the street the other day: he was humming a tune; and his eye, though quenched, was smiling. I could scarcely forbear going up to speak to him. Why so? I had seen him in the year 1792 (the first time I ever was at a play), with Suett and Miss Romanzini and some others, in No Song No Supper; and ever since, that bright vision of my childhood has played round my fancy with unabated, vivid delight. Yet the whole was fictitious, your cynic philosophers will say. I wish there were but a few realities that lasted so long, and were followed with so little disappointment. The imaginary is what we conceive to be: it is reality that tantalizes us and turns out a fiction—that is the false Florimel!
R. But the Political Economists, in directing the attention to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers,’ wish to provide for the solid comforts and amelioration of human life.
S. Yes, in a very notable way, after their fashion. I should not expect from men who are jealous of the mention of any thing like enjoyment, any great anxiety about its solid comforts. Theirs is a very comfortable theory indeed! They would starve the poor outright, reduce their wages to what is barely necessary to keep them alive, and if they cannot work, refuse them a morsel for charity. If you hint at any other remedy but ‘the grinding law of necessity’ suspended in terrorem over the poor, they are in agonies and think their victims are escaping them: if you talk of the pressure of Debt and Taxes, they regard you as a very common-place person indeed, and say they can show you cases in the reign of Edward III. where, without any reference to Debt or Taxes, the price of labour was tripled—after a plague! So full is their imagination of this desolating doctrine, that sees no hope of good but in cutting off the species, that they fly to a pestilence as a resource against all our difficulties—if we had but a pestilence, it would demonstrate all their theories!
R. Leave Political Economy to those who profess it, and come back to your mystical metaphysics. Do you not place actual sensations before sentimental refinements, and think the former the first things to be attended to in a sound moral system?
S. I place the heart in the centre of my moral system, and the senses and the understanding are its two extremities. You leave nothing but gross, material objects as the ends of pursuit, and the dry, formal calculations of the understanding as the means of ensuring them. Is this enough? Is man a mere animal, or a mere machine for philosophical experiments? All that is intermediate between these two is sentiment: I do not wonder you sometimes feel a vacuum, which you endeavour to fill up with spleen and misanthropy. Can you divest the mind of habit, memory, imagination, foresight, will? Can you make it go on physical sensations, or on abstract reason alone? Not without making it over again. As it is constituted, reflection recals what sense has once embodied; imagination weaves a thousand associations round it, time endears, regret, hope, fear, innumerable shapes of uncertain good still hover near it. I hear the sound of village bells—it ‘opens all the cells where memory slept’—I see a well-known prospect, my eyes are dim with manifold recollections. What say you? Am I only as a rational being to hear the sound, to see the object with my bodily sense? Is all the rest to be dissolved as an empty delusion, by the potent spell of unsparing philosophy? Or rather, have not a thousand real feelings and incidents hung upon these impressions, of which such dim traces and doubtful suggestions are all that is left? And is it not better that truth and nature should speak this imperfect but heart-felt language, than be entirely dumb? And should we not preserve and cherish this precious link that connects together the finer essence of our past and future being by some expressive symbol, rather than suffer all that cheers and sustains life to fall into the dregs of material sensations and blindfold ignorance? There, now, is half a definition of Sentiment: for the other half we must wait till we see the article in the Scotch Encyclopedia on the subject. To deprive man of sentiment, is to deprive him of all that is interesting to himself or others, except the present object and a routine of cant-phrases, and to turn him into a savage, an automaton, or a Political Economist. Nay more, if we are to feel or do nothing for which we cannot assign a precise reason, why we cannot so much as walk, speak, hear, or see, without the same unconscious, implicit faith—not a word, not a sentence but hangs together by a number of imperceptible links, and is a bundle of prejudices and abstractions.
R. I can make nothing of you or your arguments.
S. All I would say is, that you cannot take the measure of human nature with a pair of compasses or a slip of parchment: nor do I think it an auspicious opening to the new Political Millennium to begin with setting our faces against all that has hitherto kindled the enthusiasm, or shutting the door against all that may in future give pleasure to the world. Your Elysium resembles Dante’s Inferno—‘Who enters there must leave all hope behind!’
R. The poets have spoiled you for all rational and sober views of men and society.
S. I had rather be wrong with them, than right with some other persons that I could mention. I do not think you have shewn much tact or consecutiveness of reasoning in your defence of the system: but you have only to transcribe the trite arguments on the subject, set your own and a bookseller’s name to them, and pass off for the head of a school and one of the great lights of the age!
It is curious to consider the diversity of men’s talents, and the causes of their failure or success, which are not less numerous and contradictory than their pursuits in life. Fortune does not always smile on merit:—‘the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong’: and even where the candidate for wealth or honours succeeds, it is as often, perhaps, from the qualifications which he wants as from those which he possesses; or the eminence which he is lucky enough to attain, is owing to some faculty or acquirement, which neither he nor any body else suspected. There is a balance of power in the human mind, by which defects frequently assist in furthering our views, as superfluous excellences are converted into the nature of impediments; and again, there is a continual substitution of one talent for another, through which we mistake the appearance for the reality, and judge (by implication) of the means from the end. So a Minister of State wields the House of Commons by his manner alone; while his friends and his foes are equally at a loss to account for his influence, looking for it in vain in the matter or style of his speeches. So the air with which a celebrated barrister waved a white cambrick handkerchief passed for eloquence. So the buffoon is taken for a wit. To be thought wise, it is for the most part only necessary to seem so; and the noisy demagogue is easily translated, by the popular voice, into the orator and patriot. Qualities take their colour from those that are next them, as the cameleon borrows its hue from the nearest object; and unable otherwise to grasp the phantom of our choice or our ambition, we do well to lay violent hands on something else within our reach, which bears a general resemblance to it; and the impression of which, in proportion as the thing itself is cheap and worthless, is likely to be gross, obvious, striking, and effectual. The way to secure success, is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with any thing short of perfection, will never do any thing at all, either to please himself or others. The question is not what we ought to do, but what we can do for the best. An excess of modesty is in fact an excess of pride, and more hurtful to the individual, and less advantageous to society, than the grossest and most unblushing vanity—