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1. Deck of Cards:

Write a Deck class to implement the functionality of a deck of cards.

/*************************************************************
* Deck.java
* Dean & Dean
*
* This class implements an ArrayList of Card objects.
*************************************************************/

import java.util.ArrayList;

public class Deck

{
private ArrayList<Card> deck = new ArrayList<Card>();

//**********************************************************

// Initialize deck with the standard 52 cards.

public Deck()
{
for (int i=1; i<=13; i++)
deck.add(new Card(i, 'C'));
for (int i=1; i<=13; i++)
deck.add(new Card(i, 'D'));
for (int i=1; i<=13; i++)
deck.add(new Card(i, 'H'));
for (int i=1; i<=13; i++)
deck.add(new Card(i, 'S'));
} // end Deck constructor

//**********************************************************

// This method removes the highest-indexed card and returns it.

public Card dealCard()

{
return deck.remove(deck.size() - 1);
} // end dealCard

//**********************************************************

// This method returns the deck's contents.

public String toString()

{
String contents = "";

for (int i=0; i<deck.size(); i++)

 {
contents += deck.get(i) + " ";
if ((i+1) % 5 == 0)
{
contents += "\n";
}
} // end for
return contents;
} // end toString
} // end Deck class
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
less in Mrs. Inchbald’s Nature and Art, where there is nothing that
can have been given in evidence but the Trial-Scene near the end,
and even that is not a legal anecdote, but a pure dramatic fiction.
Before I proceed, I may as well dwell on this point a little. The
heroine of the story, the once innocent and beautiful Hannah, is
brought by a series of misfortunes and crimes (the effect of a
misplaced attachment) to be tried for her life at the Old Bailey, and
as her Judge, her former lover and seducer, is about to pronounce
sentence upon her, she calls out in an agony—‘Oh! not from YOU!’ and
as the Hon. Mr. Norwynne proceeds to finish his solemn address,
falls in a swoon, and is taken senseless from the bar. I know nothing
in the world so affecting as this. Now if Mrs. Inchbald had merely
found this story in the Newgate-Calendar, and transplanted it into a
novel, I conceive that her merit in point of genius (not to say feeling)
would be less than if having all the other circumstances given, and
the apparatus ready, and this exclamation alone left blank, she had
filled it up from her own heart, that is, from an intense conception of
the situation of the parties, so that from the harrowing recollections
passing through the mind of the poor girl so circumstanced, this
uncontrolable gush of feeling would burst from her lips. Just such I
apprehend, generally speaking, is the amount of the difference
between the genius of Shakespear and that of Sir Walter Scott. It is
the difference between originality and the want of it, between
writing and transcribing. Almost all the finest scenes and touches,
the great master-strokes in Shakespear are such as must have
belonged to the class of invention, where the secret lay between him
and his own heart, and the power exerted is in adding to the given
materials and working something out of them: in the Author of
Waverley, not all, but the principal and characteristic beauties are
such as may and do belong to the class of compilation, that is, consist
in bringing the materials together and leaving them to produce their
own effect. Sir Walter Scott is much such a writer as the Duke of
Wellington is a General (I am prophaning a number of great names
in this article by unequal comparisons). The one gets a hundred
thousand men together, and wisely leaves it to them to fight out the
battle, for if he meddled with it, he might spoil sport: the other gets
an innumerable quantity of facts together, and lets them tell their
own story, as best they may. The facts are stubborn in the last
instance as the men are in the first, and in neither case is the broth
spoiled by the cook. This abstinence from interfering with their
resources, lest they should defeat their own success, shews great
modesty and self-knowledge in the compiler of romances and the
leader of armies, but little boldness or inventiveness of genius. We
begin to measure Shakespear’s height from the superstructure of
passion and fancy he has raised out of his subject and story, on which
too rests the triumphal arch of his fame: if we were to take away the
subject and story, the portrait and history from the Scotch Novels, no
great deal would be left worth talking about.
No one admires or delights in the Scotch Novels more than I do;
but at the same time when I hear it asserted that his mind is of the
same class with Shakespear’s, or that he imitates nature in the same
way, I confess I cannot assent to it. No two things appear to me more
different. Sir Walter is an imitator of nature and nothing more; but I
think Shakespear is infinitely more than this. The creative principle
is every where restless and redundant in Shakespear, both as it
relates to the invention of feeling and imagery; in the Author of
Waverley it lies for the most part dormant, sluggish, and unused. Sir
Walter’s mind is full of information, but the ‘o’er-informing power’
is not there. Shakespear’s spirit, like fire, shines through him: Sir
Walter’s, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects. It is true, he has
shifted the scene from Scotland into England and France, and the
manners and characters are strikingly English and French; but this
does not prove that they are not local, and that they are not
borrowed, as well as the scenery and costume, from comparatively
obvious and mechanical sources. Nobody from reading Shakespear
would know (except from the Dramatis Personæ) that Lear was an
English king. He is merely a king and a father. The ground is
common: but what a well of tears has he dug out of it! The tradition
is nothing, or a foolish one. There are no data in history to go upon;
no advantage is taken of costume, no acquaintance with geography
or architecture or dialect is necessary: but there is an old tradition,
human nature—an old temple, the human mind—and Shakespear
walks into it and looks about him with a lordly eye, and seizes on the
sacred spoils as his own. The story is a thousand or two years old,
and yet the tragedy has no smack of antiquarianism in it. I should
like very well to see Sir Walter giving us a tragedy of this kind, a huge
‘globose’ of sorrow, swinging round in mid-air, independent of time,
place, and circumstance, sustained by its own weight and motion,
and not propped up by the levers of custom, or patched up with
quaint, old-fashioned dresses, or set off by grotesque back-grounds
or rusty armour, but in which the mere paraphernalia and
accessories were left out of the question, and nothing but the soul of
passion and the pith of imagination was to be found. ‘A Dukedom to
a beggarly denier,’ he would make nothing of it. Does this prove he
has done nothing, or that he has not done the greatest things? No,
but that he is not like Shakespear. For instance, when Lear says, ‘The
little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see they bark at
me!’ there is no old Chronicle of the line of Brute, no black-letter
broadside, no tattered ballad, no vague rumour, in which this
exclamation is registered; there is nothing romantic, quaint,
mysterious in the objects introduced: the illustration is borrowed
from the commonest and most casual images in nature, and yet it is
this very circumstance that lends its extreme force to the expression
of his grief by shewing that even the lowest things in creation and the
last you would think of had in his imagination turned against him.
All nature was, as he supposed, in a conspiracy against him, and the
most trivial and insignificant creatures concerned in it were the most
striking proofs of its malignity and extent. It is the depth of passion,
however, or of the poet’s sympathy with it, that distinguishes this
character of torturing familiarity in them, invests them with
corresponding importance, and suggests them by the force of
contrast. It is not that certain images are surcharged with a
prescriptive influence over the imagination from known and existing
prejudices, so that to approach or even mention them is sure to
excite a pleasing awe and horror in the mind (the effect in this case is
mostly mechanical)—the whole sublimity of the passage is from the
weight of passion thrown into it, and this is the poet’s own doing.
This is not trick, but genius. Meg Merrilies on her death-bed says,
‘Lay my head to the East!’ Nothing can be finer or more thrilling than
this in its way; but the author has little to do with it. It is an Oriental
superstition; it is a proverbial expression; it is part of the gibberish
(sublime though it be) of her gipsey clan!—‘Nothing but his unkind
daughters could have brought him to this pass.’ This is not a cant-
phrase, nor the fragment of an old legend, nor a mysterious spell, nor
the butt-end of a wizard’s denunciation. It is the mere natural
ebullition of passion, urged nearly to madness, and that will admit
no other cause of dire misfortune but its own, which swallows up all
other griefs. The force of despair hurries the imagination over the
boundary of fact and common sense, and renders the transition
sublime; but there is no precedent or authority for it, except in the
general nature of the human mind. I think, but am not sure that Sir
Walter Scott has imitated this turn of reflection, by making Madge
Wildfire ascribe Jenny Deans’s uneasiness to the loss of her baby,
which had unsettled her own brain. Again, Lear calls on the Heavens
to take his part, for ‘they are old like him.’ Here there is nothing to
prop up the image but the strength of passion, confounding the
infirmity of age with the stability of the firmament, and equalling the
complainant, through the sense of suffering and wrong, with the
Majesty of the Highest. This finding out a parallel between the most
unlike objects, because the individual would wish to find one to
support the sense of his own misery and helplessness, is truly
Shakespearian; it is an instinctive law of our nature, and the genuine
inspiration of the Muse. Racine (but let me not anticipate) would
make him pour out three hundred verses of lamentation for his loss
of kingdom, his feebleness, and his old age, coming to the same
conclusion at the end of every third couplet, instead of making him
grasp at once at the Heavens for support. The witches in Macbeth are
traditional, preternatural personages; and there Sir Walter would
have left them after making what use of them he pleased as a sort of
Gothic machinery. Shakespear makes something more of them, and
adds to the mystery by explaining it.
‘The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,
And these are of them.’

We have their physiognomy too—

——‘and enjoin’d silence,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lip.’

And the mode of their disappearance is thus described—

‘And then they melted into thin air.’

What an idea is here conveyed of silence and vacancy! The geese of

Micklestane Muir (the country-woman and her flock of geese turned
into stone) in the Black Dwarf, are a fine and petrifying
metamorphosis; but it is the tradition of the country and no more.
Sir Walter has told us nothing farther of it than the first clown whom
we might ask concerning it. I do not blame him for that, though I
cannot give him credit for what he has not done. The poetry of the
novel is a fixture of the spot. Meg Merrilies I also allow, with all
possible good-will, to be a most romantic and astounding personage;
yet she is a little melo-dramatic. Her exits and entrances are
pantomimic, and her long red cloak, her elf-locks, the rock on which
she stands, and the white cloud behind her are, or might be made the
property of a theatre. Shakespear’s witches are nearly exploded on
the stage. Their broomsticks are left; their metaphysics are gone,
buried five editions deep in Captain Medwin’s Conversations! The
passion in Othello is made out of nothing but itself; there is no
external machinery to help it on; its highest intermediate agent is an
old-fashioned pocket-handkerchief. Yet ‘there’s magic in the web’ of
thoughts and feelings, done after the commonest pattern of human
life. The power displayed in it is that of intense passion and powerful
intellect, wielding every-day events, and imparting its force to them,
not swayed or carried along by them as in a go-cart. The splendour is
that of genius darting out its forked flame on whatever comes in its
way, and kindling and melting it in the furnace of affection, whether
it be flax or iron. The colouring, the form, the motion, the
combination of objects depend on the predisposition of the mind,
moulding nature to its own purposes; in Sir Walter the mind is as
wax to circumstances, and owns no other impress. Shakespear is a
half-worker with nature. Sir Walter is like a man who has got a
romantic spinning-jenny, which he has only to set a going, and it
does his work for him much better and faster than he can do it for
himself. He lays an embargo on ‘all appliances and means to boot,’
on history, tradition, local scenery, costume and manners, and
makes his characters chiefly up of these. Shakespear seizes only on
the ruling passion, and miraculously evolves all the rest from it. The
eagerness of desire suggests every possible event that can irritate or
thwart it, foresees all obstacles, catches at every trifle, clothes itself
with imagination, and tantalises itself with hope; ‘sees Helen’s
beauty in a brow of Egypt,’ starts at a phantom, and makes the
universe tributary to it, and the play-thing of its fancy. There is none
of this over-weening importunity of the imagination in the Author of
Waverley, he does his work well, but in another-guess manner. His
imagination is a matter-of-fact imagination. To return to Othello.
Take the celebrated dialogue in the third act. ‘’Tis common.’ There is
nothing but the writhings and contortions of the heart, probed by
affliction’s point, as the flesh shrinks under the surgeon’s knife. All
its starts and flaws are but the conflicts and misgivings of hope and
fear, in the most ordinary but trying circumstances. The ‘Not a jot,
not a jot,’ has nothing to do with any old legend or prophecy. It is
only the last poor effort of human hope, taking refuge on the lips.
When after being infected with jealousy by Iago, he retires
apparently comforted and resigned, and then without any thing
having happened in the interim, returns stung to madness, crowned
with his wrongs, and raging for revenge, the effect is like that of
poison inflaming the blood, or like fire inclosed in a furnace. The sole
principle of invention is the sympathy with the natural revulsion of
the human mind, and its involuntary transition from false security to
uncontrolable fury. The springs of mental passion are fretted and
wrought to madness, and produce this explosion in the poet’s breast.
So when Othello swears ‘By yon marble heaven,’ the epithet is
suggested by the hardness of his heart from the sense of injury: the
texture of the outward object is borrowed from that of the thoughts:
and that noble simile, ‘Like the Propontic,’ &c. seems only an echo of
the sounding tide of passion, and to roll from the same source, the
heart. The dialogue between Hubert and Arthur, and that between
Brutus and Cassius are among the finest illustrations of the same
principle, which indeed is every where predominant (perhaps to a
fault) in Shakespear. His genius is like the Nile overflowing and
enriching its banks; that of Sir Walter is like a mountain-stream
rendered interesting by the picturesqueness of the surrounding
scenery. Shakespear produces his most striking dramatic effects out
of the workings of the finest and most intense passions; Sir Walter
places his dramatis personæ in romantic situations, and subjects
them to extraordinary occurrences, and narrates the results. The one
gives us what we see and hear; the other what we are. Hamlet is not
a person whose nativity is cast, or whose death is foretold by
portents: he weaves the web of his destiny out of his own thoughts,
and a very quaint and singular one it is. We have, I think, a stronger
fellow-feeling with him than we have with Bertram or Waverley. All
men feel and think, more or less: but we are not all foundlings,
Jacobites, or astrologers. We might have been overturned with these
gentlemen in a stage-coach: we seem to have been school-fellows
with Hamlet at Wittenberg.
I will not press this argument farther, lest I should make it tedious,
and run into questions I have no intention to meddle with. All I
mean to insist upon is, that Sir Walter’s forte is in the richness and
variety of his materials, and Shakespear’s in the working them up. Sir
Walter is distinguished by the most amazing retentiveness of
memory, and vividness of conception of what would happen, be seen,
and felt by every body in given circumstances; as Shakespear is by
inventiveness of genius, by a faculty of tracing and unfolding the
most hidden yet powerful springs of action, scarce recognised by
ourselves, and by an endless and felicitous range of poetical
illustration, added to a wide scope of reading and of knowledge. One
proof of the justice of these remarks is, that whenever Sir Walter
comes to a truly dramatic situation, he declines it or fails. Thus in the
Black Dwarf, all that relates to the traditions respecting this
mysterious personage, to the superstitious stories founded on it, is
admirably done and to the life, with all the spirit and freedom of
originality: but when he comes to the last scene for which all the rest
is a preparation, and which is full of the highest interest and passion,
nothing is done; instead of an address from Sir Edward Mauley,
recounting the miseries of his whole life, and withering up his guilty
rival with the recital, the Dwarf enters with a strange rustling noise,
the opposite doors fly open, and the affrighted spectators rush out
like the figures in a pantomime. This is not dramatic, but melo-
dramatic. There is a palpable disappointment and falling-off, where
the interest had been worked up to the highest pitch of expectation.
The gratifying of this appalling curiosity and interest was all that was
not done to Sir Walter’s hand; and this he has failed to do. All that
was known about the Black Dwarf, his figure, his desolate habitation,
his unaccountable way of life, his wrongs, his bitter execrations
against intruders on his privacy, the floating and exaggerated
accounts of him, all these are given with a masterly and faithful
hand, this is matter of description and narrative: but when the true
imaginative and dramatic part comes, when the subject of this
disastrous tale is to pour out the accumulated and agonising effects
of all this series of wretchedness and torture upon his own mind, that
is, when the person is to speak from himself and to stun us with the
recoil of passion upon external agents or circumstances that have
caused it, we find that it is Sir Walter Scott and not Shakespear that
is his counsel-keeper, that the author is a novelist and not a poet. All
that is gossipped in the neighbourhood, all that is handed down in
print, all of which a drawing or an etching might be procured, is
gathered together and communicated to the public: what the heart
whispers to itself in secret, what the imagination tells in thunder, this
alone is wanting, and this is the great thing required to make good
the comparison in question. Sir Walter has not then imitated
Shakespear, but he has given us nature, such as he found and could
best describe it; and he resembles him only in this, that he thinks of
his characters and never of himself, and pours out his works with
such unconscious ease and prodigality of resources that he thinks
nothing of them, and is even greater than his own fame.
The genius of Shakespear is dramatic, that of Scott narrative or
descriptive, that of Racine is didactic. He gives, as I conceive, the
common-places of the human heart better than any one, but nothing
or very little more. He enlarges on a set of obvious sentiments and
well-known topics with considerable elegance of language and
copiousness of declamation, but there is scarcely one stroke of
original genius, nor any thing like imagination in his writings. He
strings together a number of moral reflections, and instead of
reciting them himself, puts them into the mouths of his dramatis
personæ, who talk well about their own situations and the general
relations of human life. Instead of laying bare the heart of the
sufferer with all its bleeding wounds and palpitating fibres, he puts
into his hand a common-place book, and he reads us a lecture from
this. This is not the essence of the drama, whose object and privilege
it is to give us the extreme and subtle workings of the human mind in
individual circumstances, to make us sympathise with the sufferer,
or feel as we should feel in his circumstances, not to tell the
indifferent spectator what the indifferent spectator could just as well
tell him. Tragedy is human nature tried in the crucible of affliction,
not exhibited in the vague theorems of speculation. The poet’s pen
that paints all this in words of fire and images of gold is totally
wanting in Racine. He gives neither external images nor the internal
and secret workings of the human breast. Sir Walter Scott gives the
external imagery or machinery of passion; Shakespear the soul; and
Racine the moral or argument of it. The French object to Shakespear
for his breach of the Unities, and hold up Racine as a model of
classical propriety, who makes a Greek hero address a Grecian
heroine as Madame. Yet this is not barbarous—Why? Because it is
French, and because nothing that is French can be barbarous in the
eyes of this frivolous and pedantic nation, who would prefer a peruke
of the age of Louis XIV. to a simple Greek head-dress!
 ESSAY XXX
ON DEPTH AND SUPERFICIALITY
I wish to make this Essay a sort of study of the meaning of several
words, which have at different times a good deal puzzled me. Among
these are the words, wicked, false and true, as applied to feeling; and
lastly, depth and shallowness. It may amuse the reader to see the
way in which I work out some of my conclusions under-ground,
before throwing them up on the surface.
A great but useless thinker once asked me, if I had ever known a
child of a naturally wicked disposition? and I answered, ‘Yes, that
there was one in the house with me that cried from morning to night,
for spite.’ I was laughed at for this answer, but still I do not repent it.
It appeared to me that this child took a delight in tormenting itself
and others; that the love of tyrannising over others and subjecting
them to its caprices was a full compensation for the beating it
received, that the screams it uttered soothed its peevish, turbulent
spirit, and that it had a positive pleasure in pain from the sense of
power accompanying it. His principiis nascuntur tyranni, his
carnifex animus. I was supposed to magnify and over-rate the
symptoms of the disease, and to make a childish humour into a
bugbear; but, indeed, I have no other idea of what is commonly
understood by wickedness than that perversion of the will or love of
mischief for its own sake, which constantly displays itself (though in
trifles and on a ludicrously small scale) in early childhood. I have
often been reproached with extravagance for considering things only
in their abstract principles, and with heat and ill-temper, for getting
into a passion about what no ways concerned me. If any one wishes
to see me quite calm, they may cheat me in a bargain, or tread upon
my toes; but a truth repelled, a sophism repeated, totally disconcerts
me, and I lose all patience. I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of
the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me
besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a
piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the
report of it reach me. Therefore I have made many enemies and few
friends; for the public know nothing of well-wishers, and keep a wary
eye on those that would reform them. Coleridge used to complain of
my irascibility in this respect, and not without reason. Would that he
had possessed a little of my tenaciousness and jealousy of temper;
and then, with his eloquence to paint the wrong, and acuteness to
detect it, his country and the cause of liberty might not have fallen
without a struggle! The craniologists give me the organ of local
memory, of which faculty I have not a particle, though they may say
that my frequent allusions to conversations that occurred many years
ago prove the contrary. I once spent a whole evening with Dr.
Spurzheim, and I utterly forget all that passed, except that the Doctor
waltzed before we parted! The only faculty I do possess, is that of a
certain morbid interest in things, which makes me equally remember
or anticipate by nervous analogy whatever touches it; and for this our
nostrum-mongers have no specific organ, so that I am quite left out
of their system. No wonder that I should pick a quarrel with it! It
vexes me beyond all bearing to see children kill flies for sport; for the
principle is the same as in the most deliberate and profligate acts of
cruelty they can afterwards exercise upon their fellow-creatures. And
yet I let moths burn themselves to death in the candle, for it makes
me mad; and I say it is in vain to prevent fools from rushing upon
destruction. The author of the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ (who
sees farther into such things than most people,) could not
understand why I should bring a charge of wickedness against an
infant before it could speak, merely for squalling and straining its
lungs a little. If the child had been in pain or in fear, I should have
said nothing, but it cried only to vent its passion and alarm the
house, and I saw in its frantic screams and gestures that great baby,
the world, tumbling about in its swaddling-clothes, and tormenting
itself and others for the last six thousand years! The plea of
ignorance, of folly, of grossness, or selfishness makes nothing either
way: it is the downright love of pain and mischief for the interest it
excites, and the scope it gives to an abandoned will, that is the root of
all the evil, and the original sin of human nature. There is a love of
power in the mind independent of the love of good, and this love of
power, when it comes to be opposed to the spirit of good, and is
leagued with the spirit of evil to commit it with greediness, is
wickedness. I know of no other definition of the term. A person who
does not foresee consequences is a fool: he who cheats others to
serve himself is a knave: he who is immersed in sensual pleasure is a
brute; but he alone, who has a pleasure in injuring another, or in
debasing himself, that is, who does a thing with a particular relish
because he ought not, is properly wicked. This character implies the
fiend at the bottom of it; and is mixed up pretty plentifully
(according to my philosophy) in the untoward composition of human
nature. It is this craving after what is prohibited, and the force of
contrast adding its zest to the violations of reason and propriety, that
accounts for the excesses of pride, of cruelty, and lust; and at the
same time frets and vexes the surface of life with petty evils, and
plants a canker in the bosom of our daily enjoyments. Take away the
enormities dictated by the wanton and pampered pride of human
will, glutting itself with the sacrifice of the welfare of others, or with
the desecration of its own best feelings, and also the endless
bickerings, heart-burnings, and disappointments produced by the
spirit of contradiction on a smaller scale, and the life of man would
‘spin round on its soft axle,’ unharmed and free, neither appalled by
huge crimes, nor infested by insect follies. It might, indeed, be
monotonous and insipid; but it is the hankering after mischievous
and violent excitement that leads to this result, that causes that
indifference to good and proneness to evil, which is the very thing
complained of. The griefs we suffer are for the most part of our own
seeking and making; or we incur or inflict them, not to avert other
impending evils, but to drive off ennui. There must be a spice of
mischief and wilfulness thrown into the cup of our existence to give it
its sharp taste and sparkling colour. I shall not go into a formal
argument on this subject, for fear of being tedious, nor endeavour to
enforce it by extreme cases for fear of being disgusting; but shall
content myself with some desultory and familiar illustrations of it.
I laugh at those who deny that we ever wantonly or unnecessarily
inflict pain upon others, when I see how fond we are of ingeniously
tormenting ourselves. What is sullenness in children or grown people
but revenge against ourselves? We had rather be the victims of this
absurd and headstrong feeling, than give up an inveterate purpose,
retract an error, or relax from the intensity of our will, whatever it
may cost us. A surly man is his own enemy, and knowingly sacrifices
his interest to his ill-humour, because he would at any time rather
disoblige you than serve himself, as I believe I have already shewn in
another place. The reason is, he has a natural aversion to everything
agreeable or happy—he turns with disgust from every such feeling, as
not according with the severe tone of his mind—and it is in excluding
all interchange of friendly affections or kind offices that the ruling
bias and the chief satisfaction of his life consist. Is not every country-
town supplied with its scolds and scandal-mongers? The first cannot
cease from plaguing themselves and every body about them with
their senseless clamour, because the rage of words has become by
habit and indulgence a thirst, a fever on their parched tongue; and
the others continue to make enemies by some smart hit or sly
insinuation at every third word they speak, because with every new
enemy there is an additional sense of power. One man will sooner
part with his friend than his joke, because the stimulus of saying a
good thing is irritated, instead of being repressed, by the fear of
giving offence, and by the imprudence or unfairness of the remark.
Malice often takes the garb of truth. We find a set of persons who
pride themselves on being plain-spoken people, that is, who blurt out
every thing disagreeable to your face, by way of wounding your
feelings and relieving their own, and this they call honesty. Even
among philosophers we may have noticed those who are not
contented to inform the understandings of their readers, unless they
can shock their prejudices; and among poets those who tamper with
the rotten parts of their subject, adding to their fancied pretensions
by trampling on the sense of shame. There are rigid reasoners who
will not be turned aside from following up a logical argument by any
regard to consequences, or the ‘compunctious visitings of nature,’
(such is their love of truth)—I never knew one of these scrupulous
and hard-mouthed logicians who would not falsify the facts and
distort the inference in order to arrive at a distressing and repulsive
conclusion. Such is the fascination of what releases our own will
from thraldom, and compels that of others reluctantly to submit to
terms of our dictating! We feel our own power, and disregard their
weakness and effeminacy with prodigious self-complacency. Lord
Clive, when a boy, saw a butcher passing with a calf in a cart. A
companion whom he had with him said, ‘I should not like to be that
butcher!’—‘I should not like to be that calf,’ replied the future
Governor of India, laughing at all sympathy but that with his own
sufferings. The ‘wicked’ Lord Lyttleton (as he was called) dreamt a
little before his death that he was confined in a huge subterranean
vault (the inside of this round globe) where as far as eye could see, he
could discern no living object, till at last he saw a female figure
coming towards him, and who should it turn out to be, but Mother
Brownrigg, whom of all people he most hated! That was the very
reason why he dreamt of her.
‘You ask her crime: she whipp’d two ‘prentices to death,
And hid them in the coal-hole.’
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin.

I do not know that hers is exactly a case in point; but I conceive

that in the well-known catastrophe here alluded to, words led to
blows, bad usage brought on worse from mere irritation and
opposition, and that, probably, even remorse and pity urged on to
aggravated acts of cruelty and oppression, as the only means of
drowning reflection on the past in the fury of present passion. I
believe that remorse for past offences has sometimes made the
greatest criminals, as the being unable to appease a wounded
conscience renders men desperate; and if I hear a person express
great impatience and uneasiness at some error that he is liable to, I
am tolerably sure that the conflict will end in a repetition of the
offence. If a man who got drunk over-night, repents bitterly next
morning, he will get drunk again at night; for both in his repentance
and his self-gratification he is led away by the feeling of the moment.
But this is not wickedness, but despondency and want of strength of
mind; and I only attribute wickedness to those who carry their wills
in their hands, and who wantonly and deliberately suffer them to
tyrannise over conscience, reason, and humanity, and who even draw
an additional triumph from this degrading conquest. The wars,
persecutions, and bloodshed, occasioned by religion, have generally
turned on the most trifling differences in forms and ceremonies;
which shews that it was not the vital interests of the questions that
were at stake, but that these were made a handle and pretext to
exercise cruelty and tyranny on the score of the most trivial and
doubtful points of faith. There seems to be a love of absurdity and
falsehood as well as mischief in the human mind, and the most
ridiculous as well as barbarous superstitions have on this account
been the most acceptable to it. A lie is welcome to it, for it is, as it
were, its own offspring; and it likes to believe, as well as act,
whatever it pleases, and in the pure spirit of contradiction. The old
idolatry took vast hold of the earliest ages; for to believe that a piece
of painted stone or wood was a God (in the teeth of the fact) was a
fine exercise of the imagination; and modern fanaticism thrives in
proportion to the quantity of contradictions and nonsense it pours
down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and
mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity. Credo quia
impossibile est, is the standing motto of bigotry and superstition;
that is, I believe, because to do so is a favourite act of the will, and to
do so in defiance of common sense and reason enhances the pleasure
and the merit (tenfold) of this indulgence of blind faith and
headstrong imagination. Methodism, in particular, which at once
absolves the understanding from the rules of reasoning, and the
conscience from the restraints of morality, throwing the whole
responsibility upon a vicarious righteousness and an abstract belief,
must, besides its rant, its vulgarity, and its amatory style, have a
double charm both for saints and sinners. I have also observed a sort
of fatuity, an indolence or indocility of the will to circumstances,
which I think has a considerable share in the common affairs of life. I
would willingly compound for all the mischiefs that are done me
voluntarily, if I could escape those which are done me without any
motive at all, or even with the best intentions. For instance, if I go to
a distance where I am anxious to receive an answer to my letters, I
am sure to be kept in suspense. My friends are aware of this, as also
of my impatience and irritability; and they cannot prevail on
themselves to put an end to this dramatic situation of the parties.
There is pleasure (an innocent and well-meaning one) in keeping a
friend in suspense, in not putting one’s-self out of one’s way for his ill
humours and apprehensions (though one would not for the world do
him a serious injury), as there is in dangling the finny prey at the end
of a hook, or in twirling round a cock-chaffer after sticking a pin
through him at the end of a string,—there is no malice in the case, no
deliberate cruelty, but the buzzing noise and the secret consciousness
of superiority to any annoyance or inconvenience ourselves lull the
mind into a delightful state of listless torpor and indifference. If a
letter requires an immediate answer, send it by a private hand to
save postage. If our messenger falls sick or breaks a leg and begs us
to forward it by some other means, return it him again, and insist on
its being conveyed according to its first destination. His cure may be
slow but sure. In the mean time our friend can wait. We have done
our duty in writing the letter, and are in no hurry to receive it! We
know the contents, and they are matters of perfect indifference to us.
No harm is meant by all this, but a great deal of mischief may accrue.
There is, in short, a sluggishness and untractableness about the will,
that does not easily put itself in the situation of others, and that
consults its own bias best by giving itself no trouble about them.
Human life is so far a game of cross-purposes. If we wish a thing to
be kept secret, it is sure to transpire; if we wish it to be known, not a
syllable is breathed about it. This is not meant; but it happens so
from mere simplicity and thoughtlessness. No one has ever yet seen
through all the intricate folds and delicate involutions of our self-
love, which is wrapped up in a set of smooth flimsy pretexts like
some precious jewel in covers of silver paper.
I proceed to say something of the words false and true, as applied
to moral feelings. It may be argued that this is a distinction without a
difference; for that as feelings only exist by being felt, wherever, and
in so far as they exist, they must be true, and that there can be no
falsehood or deception in the question. The distinction between true
and false pleasure, between real and seeming good, would be thus
done away with; for the reality and the appearance are here the
same. And this would be the case if our sensations were simple and
detached, and one had no influence on another. But it is in their
secret and close dependence one on another, that the distinction
here spoken of takes its rise. That then is true or pure pleasure that
has no alloy or draw-back in some other consideration; that is free
from remorse and alarm; and that will bear the soberest reflection;
because there is nothing that, upon examination, can be found acting
indirectly to check and throw a damp upon it. On the other hand, we
justly call those pleasures false and hollow, not merely which are
momentary and ready to elude our grasp, but which, even at the
time, are accompanied with such a consciousness of other
circumstances as must embitter and undermine them. For instance,
putting morality quite out of the question; is there not an undeniable
and wide difference between the gaiety and animal spirits of one who
indulges in a drunken debauch to celebrate some unexpected stroke
of good fortune, and his who does the same thing to drown care for
the loss of all he is worth? The outward objects, the immediate and
more obvious sensations are, perhaps, very much the same in the
latter case as in the former,—the rich viands, the sparkling wines, the
social merriment, the wit, the loud laughter, and the maddening
brain, but the still small voice is wanting, there is a reflection at
bottom, that however stifled and kept down, poisons and spoils all,
even by the violent effort to keep it from intruding; the mirth in the
one case is forced, in the other is natural; the one reveller is (we all
know by experience) a gay, laughing wretch, the other a happy man. I
profess to speak of human nature as I find it; and the circumstance
that any distinction I can make may be favourable to the theories of
virtue, will not prevent me from setting it down, from the fear of
being charged with cant and prejudice. Even in a case less palpable
than the one supposed, where some ‘sweet oblivious antidote’ has
been applied to the mind, and it is lulled to temporary forgetfulness
of its immediate cause of sorrow, does it therefore cease to gnaw the
heart by stealth; are no traces of it left in the careworn brow or face;
is the state of mind the same as it was; or is there the same buoyancy,
freedom, and erectness of spirit as in more prosperous
circumstances? On the contrary, it is torpid, vexed, and sad,
enfeebled or harassed, and weighed down by the corroding pressure
of care, whether it thinks of it or not. The pulse beats slow and
languid, the eye is dead; no object strikes us with the same alacrity;
the avenues to joy or content are shut; and life becomes a burthen
and a perplexing mystery. Even in sleep, we are haunted with the
broken images of distress or the mockery of bliss, and we in vain try
to still the idle tumult of the heart. The constantly tampering with
the truth, the putting off the day of reckoning, the fear of looking our
situation in the face, gives the mind a wandering and unsettled turn,
makes our waking thoughts a troubled dream, or sometimes ends in
madness, without any violent paroxysm, without any severe pang,
without any overt act, but from that silent operation of the mind
which preys internally upon itself, and works the decay of its powers
the more fatally, because we dare not give it open and avowed scope.
Do we not, in case of any untoward accident or event, know, when we
wake in the morning, that something is the matter, before we
recollect what it is? The mind no more recovers its confidence and
serenity after a staggering blow, than the haggard cheek and
sleepless eye their colour and vivacity, because we do not see them in
the glass. Is it to be supposed that there is not a firm and healthy
tone of the mind as well as of the body; or that when this has been
deranged, we do not feel pain, lassitude, and fretful impatience,
though the local cause or impression may have been withdrawn? Is
the state of the mind or of the nervous system, and its disposition or
indisposition to receive certain impressions from the remains of
others still vibrating on it, nothing? Shall we say that the laugh of a
madman is sincere; or that the wit we utter in our dreams is sterling?
We often feel uneasy at something, without being able to tell why, or
attribute it to a wrong cause. Our unconscious impressions
necessarily give a colour to, and react upon our conscious ones; and
it is only when these two sets of feeling are in accord, that our
pleasures are true and sincere; where there is a discordance and
misunderstanding in this respect, they are said (not absurdly as is
pretended) to be false and hollow. There is then a serenity of virtue, a
peace of conscience, a confidence in success, and a pride of intellect,
which subsist and are a strong source of satisfaction independently
of outward and immediate objects, as the general health of the body
gives a glow and animation to the whole frame, notwithstanding a
scratch we may have received in our little finger, and certainly very
different from a state of sickness and infirmity. The difficulty is not
so much in supposing one mental cause or phenomenon to be
affected and imperceptibly moulded by another, as in setting limits
to the everlasting ramifications of our impressions, and in defining
the obscure and intricate ways in which they communicate together.
Suppose a man to labour under an habitual indigestion. Does it not
oppress the very sun in the sky, beat down all his powers of
enjoyment, and imprison all his faculties in a living tomb? Yet he
perhaps long laboured under this disease, and felt its withering
effects, before he was aware of the cause. It was not the less real on
this account; nor did it interfere the less with the sincerity of his
other pleasures, tarnish the face of nature, and throw a gloom over
every thing. ‘He was hurt, and knew it not.’ Let the pressure be
removed, and he breathes freely again; his spirits run with a livelier
current, and he greets nature with smiles; yet the change is in him,
not in her. Do we not pass the same scenery that we have visited but
a little before, and wonder that no object appears the same, because
we have some secret cause of dissatisfaction? Let any one feel the
force of disappointed affection, and he may forget and scorn his
error, laugh and be gay to all outward appearance, but the heart is
not the less seared and blighted ever after. The splendid banquet
does not supply the loss of appetite, nor the spotless ermine cure the
itching palm, nor gold nor jewels redeem a lost name, nor pleasure
fill up the void of affection, nor passion stifle conscience. Moralists
and divines say true, when they talk of the ‘unquenchable fire, and
the worm that dies not.’ The human soul is not an invention of
priests, whatever fables they have engrafted on it; nor is there an end
of all our natural sentiments because French philosophers have not
been able to account for them!—Hume, I think, somewhere contends
that all satisfactions are equal,[64] because the cup can be no more
than full. But surely, though this is the case, one cup holds more than
another. As to mere negative satisfaction, the argument may be true.
But as to positive satisfaction or enjoyment, I see no more how this
must be equal, than how the heat of a furnace must in all cases be
equally intense. Thus, for instance, there are many things with which
we are contented, so as not to feel an uneasy desire after more, but
yet we have a much higher relish of others. We may eat a mutton-
chop without complaining, though we should consider a haunch of
venison as a greater luxury if we had it. Again, in travelling abroad,
the mind acquires a restless and vagabond habit. There is more of
hurry and novelty, but less of sincerity and certainty in our pursuits
than at home. We snatch hasty glances of a great variety of things,
but want some central point of view. After making the grand tour,
and seeing the finest sights in the world, we are glad to come back at
last to our native place and our own fireside. Our associations with it
are the most stedfast and habitual, we there feel most at home and at
our ease, we have a resting place for the sole of our foot, the flutter of
hope, anxiety, and disappointment is at an end, and whatever our
satisfactions may be, we feel most confidence in them, and have the
strongest conviction of their truth and reality. There is then a true
and a false or spurious in sentiment as well as in reasoning, and I
hope the train of thought I have here gone into may serve in some
respects as a clue to explain it.
The hardest question remains behind. What is depth, and what is
superficiality? It is easy to answer that the one is what is obvious,
familiar, and lies on the surface, and that the other is recondite and
hid at the bottom of a subject. The difficulty recurs—What is meant
by lying on the surface, or being concealed below it, in moral and
metaphysical questions? Let us try for an analogy. Depth consists
then in tracing any number of particular effects to a general
principle, or in distinguishing an unknown cause from the individual
and varying circumstances with which it is implicated, and under
which it lurks unsuspected. It is in fact resolving the concrete into
the abstract. Now this is a task of difficulty, not only because the
abstract naturally merges in the concrete, and we do not well know
how to set about separating what is thus jumbled or cemented
together in a single object, and presented under a common aspect;
but being scattered over a larger surface, and collected from a
number of undefined sources, there must be a strong feeling of its
weight and pressure, in order to dislocate it from the object and bind
it into a principle. The impression of an abstract principle is faint
and doubtful in each individual instance; it becomes powerful and
certain only by the repetition of the experiment, and by adding the
last results to our first hazardous conjectures. We thus gain a distinct
hold or clue to the demonstration, when a number of vague and
imperfect reminiscences are united and drawn out together, by
tenaciousness of memory and conscious feeling, in one continued
act. So that the depth of the understanding or reasoning in such
cases may be explained to mean, that there is a pile of implicit
distinctions analyzed from a great variety of facts and observations,
each supporting the other, and that the mind, instead of being led
away by the last or first object or detached view of the subject that
occurs, connects all these into a whole from the top to the bottom,
and by its intimate sympathy with the most obscure and random
impressions that tend to the same result, evolves a principle of
abstract truth. Two circumstances are combined in a particular
object to produce a given effect: how shall I know which is the true
cause, but by finding it in another instance? But the same effect is
produced in a third object, which is without the concomitant
circumstances of the first or second case. I must then look out for
some other latent cause in the rabble of contradictory pretensions
huddled together, which I had not noticed before, and to which I am
eventually led by finding a necessity for it. But if my memory fails
me, or I do not seize on the true character of different feelings, I shall
make little progress, or be quite thrown out in my reckoning.
Insomuch that according to the general diffusion of any element of
thought or feeling, and its floating through the mixed mass of human
affairs, do we stand in need of a greater quantity of that refined
experience I have spoken of, and of a quicker and firmer tact in
connecting or distinguishing its results. However, I must make a
reservation here. Both knowledge and sagacity are required, but
sagacity abridges and anticipates the labour of knowledge, and
sometimes jumps instinctively at a conclusion; that is, the strength
or fineness of the feeling, by association or analogy, sooner elicits the
recollection of a previous and forgotten one in different
circumstances, and the two together, by a sort of internal evidence
and collective force, stamp any proposed solution with the character
of truth or falsehood. Original strength of impression is often (in
usual questions at least) a substitute for accumulated weight of
experience; and intensity of feeling is so far synonymous with depth
of understanding. It is that which here gives us a contentious and
palpable consciousness of whatever affects it in the smallest or
remotest manner, and leaves to us the hidden springs of thought and
action through our sensibility and jealousy of whatever touches
them.—To give an illustration or two of this very abstruse subject.
Elegance is a word that means something different from ease,
grace, beauty, dignity; yet it is akin to all these; but it seems more
particularly to imply a sparkling brilliancy of effect with finish and
precision. We do not apply the term to great things; we should not
call an epic poem or a head of Jupiter elegant, but we speak of an
elegant copy of verses, an elegant head-dress, an elegant fan, an
elegant diamond brooch, or bunch of flowers. In all these cases (and
others where the same epithet is used) there is something little and
comparatively trifling in the objects and the interest they inspire. So
far I deal chiefly in examples, conjectures, and negatives. But this is
far from a definition. I think I know what personal beauty is, because
I can say in one word what I mean by it, viz. harmony of form; and
this idea seems to me to answer to all the cases to which the term
personal beauty, is ever applied. Let us see if we cannot come to
something equally definitive with respect to the other phrase.
Sparkling effect, finish, and precision, are characteristic, as I think,
of elegance, but as yet I see no reason why they should be so, any
more than why blue, red, and yellow, should form the colours of the
rainbow. I want a common idea as a link to connect them, or to serve
as a substratum for the others. Now suppose I say that elegance is
beauty, or at least the pleasurable in little things: we then have a
ground to rest upon at once. For elegance being beauty or pleasure in
little or slight impressions, precision, finish, and polished
smoothness follow from this definition as matters of course. In other
words, for a thing that is little to be beautiful, or at any rate to please,
[65]
it must have precision of outline, which in larger masses and
gigantic forms is not so indispensable. In what is small, the parts
must be finished, or they will offend. Lastly, in what is momentary
and evanescent, as in dress, fashions, &c. there must be a glossy and
sparkling effect, for brilliancy is the only virtue of novelty. That is to
say, by getting the primary conditions or essential qualities of
elegance in all circumstances whatever, we see how these branch off
into minor divisions in relation to form, details, colour, surface, &c.
and rise from a common ground of abstraction into all the variety of
consequences and examples. The Hercules is not elegant; the Venus
is simply beautiful. The French, whose ideas of beauty or grandeur
never amount to more than an elegance, have no relish for Rubens,
nor will they understand this definition.
When Sir Isaac Newton saw the apple fall, it was a very simple and
common observation, but it suggested to his mind the law that holds
the universe together. What then was the process in this case? In
general, when we see any thing fall, we have the idea of a particular
direction, of up and down associated with the motion by invariable
and every day’s experience. The earth is always (as we conceive)
under our feet, and the sky above our heads, so that according to this
local and habitual feeling, all heavy bodies must everlastingly fall in
the same direction downwards, or parallel to the upright position of
our bodies. Sir Isaac Newton by a bare effort of abstraction, or by a
grasp of mind comprehending all the possible relations of things, got
rid of this prejudice, turned the world as it were on its back, and saw
the apple fall not downwards, but simply towards the earth, so that
it would fall upwards on the same principle, if the earth were above
it, or towards it at any rate in whatever direction it lay. This highly
abstracted view of the case answered to all the phenomena of nature,
and no other did; and this view he arrived at by a vast power of
comprehension, retaining and reducing the contradictory
phenomena of the universe under one law, and counteracting and
banishing from his mind that almost invincible and instinctive
association of up and down as it relates to the position of our own
bodies and the gravitation of all others to the earth in the same
direction. From a circumscribed and partial view we make that,
which is general, particular: the great mathematician here spoken of,
from a wide and comprehensive one, made it general again, or he
perceived the essential condition or cause of a general effect, and
that which acts indispensably in all circumstances, separate from
other accidental and arbitrary ones.
I lately heard an anecdote related of an American lady (one of two
sisters) who married young and well, and had several children; her
sister, however, was married soon after herself to a richer husband,
and had a larger (if not finer) family, and after passing several years
of constant repining and wretchedness, she died at length of pure
envy. The circumstance was well known, and generally talked of.
Some one said on hearing this, that it was a thing that could only
happen in America; that it was a trait of the republican character and
institutions, where alone the principle of mutual jealousy, having no
high and distant objects to fix upon, and divert it from immediate
and private mortifications, seized upon the happiness or outward
advantages even of the nearest connexions as its natural food, and
having them constantly before its eyes, gnawed itself to death upon
them. I assented to this remark, and I confess it struck me as
shewing a deep insight into human nature. Here was a sister envying
a sister, and that not for objects that provoke strong passion, but for
common and contentional advantages, till it ends in her death. They
were also represented as good and respectable people. How then is
this extraordinary developement of an ordinary human frailty to be
accounted for? From the peculiar circumstances? These were the
country and state of society. It was in America that it happened. The
democratic level, the flatness of imagery, the absence of those
towering and artificial heights that in old and monarchical states act
as conductors to attract and carry off the splenetic humours and
rancorous hostilities of a whole people, and to make common and
petty advantages sink into perfect insignificance, were full in the
mind of the person who suggested the solution; and in this dearth of
every other mark or vent for it, it was felt intuitively, that the natural
spirit of envy and discontent would fasten upon those that were next
to it, and whose advantages, there being no great difference in point
of elevation, would gall in proportion to their proximity and repeated
recurrence. The remote and exalted advantages of birth and station
in countries where the social fabric is constructed of lofty and
unequal materials, necessarily carry the mind out of its immediate
and domestic circle; whereas, take away those objects of imaginary
spleen and moody speculation, and they leave, as the inevitable
alternative, the envy and hatred of our friends and neighbours at
every advantage we possess, as so many eye-sores and stumbling-
blocks in their way, where these selfish principles have not been
curbed or given way altogether to charity and benevolence. The fact,
as stated in itself, is an anomaly: as thus explained, by combining it
with a general state of feeling in a country, it seems to point out a
great principle in society. Now this solution would not have been
attained but for the deep impression which the operation of certain
general causes of moral character had recently made, and the
quickness with which the consequences of its removal were felt. I
might give other instances, but these will be sufficient to explain the
argument, or set others upon elucidating it more clearly.
Acuteness is depth, or sagacity in connecting individual effects
with individual causes, or vice versâ, as in stratagems of war, policy,
and a knowledge of character and the world. Comprehension is the
power of combining a vast number of particulars in some one view,
as in mechanics, or the game of chess, but without referring them to
any abstract or general principle. A common-place differs from an
abstract discourse in this, that it is trite and vague, instead of being
new and profound. It is a common-place at present to say that heavy
bodies fall by attraction. It would always have been one to say that
this falling is the effect of a law of nature, or the will of God. This is
assigning a general but not adequate cause.
The depth of passion is where it takes hold of circumstances too
remote or indifferent for notice from the force of association or
analogy, and turns the current of other passions by its own. Dramatic
power in the depth of the knowledge of the human heart, is chiefly
shewn in tracing this effect. For instance, the fondness displayed by a
mistress for a lover (as she is about to desert him for a rival) is not
mere hypocrisy or art to deceive him, but nature, or the reaction of
her pity, or parting tenderness towards a person she is about to
injure, but does not absolutely hate. Shakespear is the only dramatic
author who has laid open this reaction or involution of the passions
in a manner worth speaking of. The rest are common place
declaimers, and may be very fine poets, but not deep philosophers.—
There is a depth even in superficiality, that is, the affections cling
round obvious and familiar objects, not recondite and remote ones;
and the intense continuity of feeling thus obtained, forms the depth
of sentiment. It is that that redeems poetry and romance from the
charge of superficiality. The habitual impressions of things are, as to
feeling, the most refined ones. The painter also in his mind’s eye
penetrates beyond the surface or husk of the object, and sees into a
labyrinth of forms, an abyss of colour. My head has grown giddy in
following the windings of the drawing in Raphael, and I have gazed
on the breadth of Titian, where infinite imperceptible gradations
were blended in a common mass, as into a dazzling mirror. This idea
is more easily transferred to Rembrandt’s chiaro-scura, where the
greatest clearness and the nicest distinctions are observed in the
midst of obscurity. In a word, I suspect depth to be that strength, and
at the same time subtlety of impression, which will not suffer the
slightest indication of thought or feeling to be lost, and gives warning
of them, over whatever extent of surface they are diffused, or under
whatever disguises of circumstances they lurk.
 ESSAY XXXI
ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE
There is not any term that is oftener misapplied, or that is a
stronger instance of the abuse of language, than this same word
respectable. By a respectable man is generally meant a person whom
there is no reason for respecting, or none that we choose to name: for
if there is any good reason for the opinion we wish to express, we
naturally assign it as the ground of his respectability. If the person
whom you are desirous to characterise favourably, is distinguished
for his good-nature, you say that he is a good-natured man; if by his
zeal to serve his friends, you call him a friendly man; if by his wit or
sense, you say that he is witty or sensible; if by his honesty or
learning, you say so at once; but if he is none of these, and there is no
one quality which you can bring forward to justify the high opinion
you would be thought to entertain of him, you then take the question
for granted, and jump at a conclusion, by observing gravely, that ‘he
is a very respectable man.’ It is clear, indeed, that where we have any
striking and generally admitted reasons for respecting a man, the
most obvious way to ensure the respect of others, will be to mention
his estimable qualities; where these are wanting, the wisest course
must be to say nothing about them, but to insist on the general
inference which we have our particular reasons for drawing, only
vouching for its authenticity. If, for instance, the only motive we have
for thinking or speaking well of another is, that he gives us good
dinners, as this is not a valid reason to those who do not, like us,
partake of his hospitality, we may (without going into particulars)
content ourselves with assuring them, that he is a most respectable
man: if he is a slave to those above him, and an oppressor of those
below him, but sometimes makes us the channels of his bounty or
the tools of his caprice, it will be as well to say nothing of the matter,
but to confine ourselves to the safer generality, that he is a person of
the highest respectability: if he is a low dirty fellow, who has amassed
an immense fortune, which he does not know what to do with, the
possession of it alone will guarantee his respectability, if we say
nothing of the manner in which he has come by it, or in which he
spends it. A man may be a knave or a fool, or both (as it may happen)
and yet be a most respectable man, in the common and authorized
sense of the term, provided he saves appearances, and does not give
common fame a handle for no longer keeping up the imposture. The
best title to the character of respectability lies in the convenience of
those who echo the cheat, and in the conventional hypocrisy of the
world. Any one may lay claim to it who is willing to give himself airs
of importance, and can find means to divert others from inquiring
too strictly into his pretensions. It is a disposable commodity,—not a
part of the man, that sticks to him like his skin, but an appurtenance,
like his goods and chattels. It is meat, drink, and clothing to those
who take the benefit of it by allowing others the credit. It is the
current coin, the circulating medium, in which the factitious
intercourse of the world is carried on, the bribe which interest pays
to vanity. Respectability includes all that vague and undefinable
mass of respect floating in the world, which arises from sinister
motives in the person who pays it, and is offered to adventitious and
doubtful qualities in the person who receives it. It is spurious and
nominal; hollow and venal. To suppose that it is to be taken literally
or applied to sterling merit, would betray the greatest ignorance of
the customary use of speech. When we hear the word coupled with
the name of any individual, it would argue a degree of romantic
simplicity to imagine that it implies any one quality of head or heart,
any one excellence of body or mind, any one good action or praise-
worthy sentiment; but as soon as it is mentioned, it conjures up the
ideas of a handsome house with large acres round it, a sumptuous
table, a cellar well stocked with excellent wines, splendid furniture, a
fashionable equipage, with a long list of elegant contingencies. It is
not what a man is, but what he has, that we speak of in the
significant use of this term. He may be the poorest creature in the
world in himself, but if he is well to do, and can spare some of his
superfluities, if he can lend us his purse or his countenance upon
occasion, he then ‘buys golden opinions’ of us;—it is but fit that we
should speak well of the bridge that carries us over, and in return for
what we can get from him, we embody our servile gratitude, hopes,
and fears, in this word respectability. By it we pamper his pride, and
feed our own necessities. It must needs be a very honest uncorrupted
word that is the go-between in this disinterested kind of traffic. We
do not think of applying this word to a great poet or a great painter,
to the man of genius, or the man of virtue, for it is seldom we can
spunge upon them. It would be a solecism for any one to pretend to
the character who has a shabby coat to his back, who goes without a
dinner, or has not a good house over his head. He who has reduced
himself in the world by devoting himself to a particular study, or
adhering to a particular cause, occasions only a smile of pity or a
shrug of contempt at the mention of his name; while he who has
raised himself in it by a different course, who has become rich for
want of ideas, and powerful from want of principle, is looked up to
with silent homage, and passes for a respectable man. ‘The learned
pate ducks to the golden fool.’ We spurn at virtue and genius in rags;
and lick the dust in the presence of vice and folly in purple. When
Otway was left to starve after having produced ‘Venice Preserv’d,’
there was nothing in the phrenzied action with which he devoured
the food that choked him, to provoke the respect of the mob, who
would have hooted at him the more for knowing that he was a poet.
Spenser, kept waiting for the hundred pounds which Burleigh
grudged him ‘for a song,’ might feel the mortification of his situation;
but the statesman never felt any diminution of his Sovereign’s regard
in consequence of it. Charles the Second’s neglect of his favourite
poet Butler did not make him look less gracious in the eyes of his
courtiers, or of the wits and critics of the time. Burns’s
embarrassments, and the temptations to which he was exposed by
his situation, degraded him; but left no stigma on his patrons, who
still meet to celebrate his memory, and consult about his monument,
in the face of day. To enrich the mind of a country by works of art or
science, and leave yourself poor, is not the way for any one to rank as
respectable, at least in his life-time:—to oppress, to enslave, to cheat,
and plunder it, is a much better way. ‘The time gives evidence of it.’
But the instances are common.
Respectability means a man’s situation and success in life, not his
character or conduct. The city merchant never loses his respectability
till he becomes a bankrupt. After that, we hear no more of it or him.
The Justice of the Peace, and the Parson of the parish, the Lord and
the Squire, are allowed, by immemorial usage, to be very respectable
people, though no one ever thinks of asking why. They are a sort of
fixtures in this way. To take an example from one of them. The
Country Parson may pass his whole time, when he is not employed in
the cure of souls, in flattering his rich neighbours, and leaguing with
them to snub his poor ones, in seizing poachers, and encouraging
informers; he may be exorbitant in exacting his tithes, harsh to his
servants, the dread and bye-word of the village where he resides, and
yet all this, though it may be notorious, shall abate nothing of his
respectability. It will not hinder his patron from giving him another
living to play the petty tyrant in, or prevent him from riding over to
the Squire’s in his carriage and being well received, or from sitting on
the bench of Justices with due decorum and with clerical dignity. The
poor Curate, in the mean time, who may be a real comfort to the
bodies and minds of his parishioners, will be passed by without
notice. Parson Adams, drinking his ale in Sir Thomas Booby’s
kitchen, makes no very respectable figure; but Sir Thomas himself
was right worshipful, and his widow a person of honour!—A few such
historiographers as Fielding would put an end to the farce of
respectability, with several others like it. Peter Pounce, in the same
author, was a consummation of this character, translated into the
most vulgar English. The character of Captain Blifil, his epitaph, and
funeral sermon, are worth tomes of casuistry and patched-up
theories of moral sentiments. Pope somewhere exclaims, in his fine
indignant way,
‘What can ennoble sots, or knaves, or cowards?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.’

But this is the heraldry of poets, not of the world. In fact, the only
way for a poet now-a-days to emerge from the obscurity of poverty
and genius, is to prostitute his pen, turn literary pimp to some
borough-mongering lord, canvass for him at elections, and by this
means aspire to the same importance, and be admitted on the same
respectable footing with him as his valet, his steward, or his
practising attorney. A Jew, a stock-jobber, a war-contractor, a
successful monopolist, a Nabob, an India Director, or an African
slave-dealer, are all very respectable people in their turn. A Member
of Parliament is not only respectable, but honourable;—‘all
honourable men!’ Yet this circumstance, which implies such a world
of respect, really means nothing. To say of any one that he is a
Member of Parliament, is to say, at the same time, that he is not at all
distinguished as such. No body ever thought of telling you, that Mr.
Fox or Mr. Pitt were Members of Parliament. Such is the constant
difference between names and things.
The most mischievous and offensive use of this word has been in
politics. By respectable people (in the fashionable cant of the day) are
meant those who have not a particle of regard for any one but
themselves, who have feathered their own nests, and only want to lie
snug and warm in them. They have been set up and appealed to as
the only friends of their country and the Constitution, while in truth
they were friends to nothing but their own interest. With them all is
well, if they are well off. They are raised by their lucky stars above the
reach of the distresses of the community, and are cut off by their
situation and sentiments, from any sympathy with their kind. They
would see their country ruined before they would part with the least
of their superfluities. Pampered in luxury and their own selfish
comforts, they are proof against the calls of patriotism, and the cries
of humanity. They would not get a scratch with a pin to save the
universe. They are more affected by the overturning of a plate of
turtle-soup than by the starving of a whole county. The most
desperate characters, picked from the most necessitous and
depraved classes, are not worse judges of politics than your true,
staunch, thorough-paced ‘lives and fortunes men,’ who have what is
called a stake in the country, and see everything through the medium
of their cowardly and unprincipled hopes and fears.—London is,
perhaps, the only place in which the standard of respectability at all
varies from the standard of money. There things go as much by
appearance as by weight; and he may be said to be a respectable man
who cuts a certain figure in company by being dressed in the fashion,
and venting a number of common-place things with tolerable grace
and fluency. If a person there brings a certain share of information
and good manners into mixed society, it is not asked, when he leaves
it, whether he is rich or not. Lords and fiddlers, authors and common
councilmen, editors of newspapers and parliamentary speakers meet
together, and the difference is not so much marked as one would
suppose. To be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank
in modern literary society.
 ESSAY XXXII
ON THE JEALOUSY AND THE SPLEEN OF
PARTY
‘It is michin-malico, and means mischief.’—Hamlet.

I was sorry to find the other day, on coming to Vevey, and looking
into some English books at a library there, that Mr. Moore had taken
an opportunity, in his ‘Rhymes on the Road,’ of abusing Madame
Warens, Rousseau, and men of genius in general. It’s an ill bird, as
the proverb says. This appears to me, I confess, to be pick-thank
work, as needless as it is ill-timed, and, considering from whom it
comes, particularly unpleasant. In conclusion, he thanks God with
the Levite, that ‘he is not one of those,’ and would rather be any
thing, a worm, the meanest thing that crawls, than numbered among
those who give light and law to the world by an excess of fancy and
intellect.[66] Perhaps Posterity may take him at his word, and no more
trace be found of his ‘Rhymes’ upon the onward tide of time than of
‘the snow-falls in the river,
A moment white, then melts for ever!’

It might be some increasing consciousness of the frail tenure by

which he holds his rank among the great heirs of Fame, that urged
our Bard to pawn his reversion of immortality for an indulgent smile
of patrician approbation, as he raised his puny arm against ‘the
mighty dead,’ to lower by a flourish of his pen the aristocracy of
letters nearer to the level of the aristocracy of rank—two ideas that
keep up a perpetual see-saw in Mr. Moore’s mind like buckets in a
well, and to which he is always ready to lend a helping hand,
according as he is likely to be hoisted up, or in danger of being let
down with either of them. The mode in which our author proposes to
correct the extravagance of public opinion, and qualify the interest
taken in such persons as Rousseau and Madame de Warens, is
singular enough, and savours of the late unlucky bias of his mind:—it
is by referring us to what the well-bred people in the neighbourhood
thought of Rousseau and his pretensions a hundred years ago or
thereabouts. ‘So shall their anticipation prevent our discovery!’
‘And doubtless ’mong the grave and good
And gentle of their neighbourhood,
If known at all, they were but known
As strange, low people, low and bad,
Madame herself to footmen prone,
And her young pauper, all but mad.’

This is one way of reversing the judgment of posterity, and setting

aside the ex-post-facto evidence of taste and genius. So, after ‘all
that’s come and gone yet,’—after the anxious doubts and misgivings
of his mind as to his own destiny—after all the pains he took to form
himself in solitude and obscurity—after the slow dawn of his
faculties, and their final explosion, that like an eruption of another
Vesuvius, dazzling all men with its light, and leaving the burning lava
behind it, shook public opinion, and overturned a kingdom—after
having been ‘the gaze and shew of the time’—after having been read
by all classes, criticised, condemned, admired in every corner of
Europe—after bequeathing a name that at the end of half a century is
never repeated but with emotion as another name for genius and
misfortune—after having given us an interest in his feelings as in our
own, and drawn the veil of lofty imagination or of pensive regret over
all that relates to his own being, so that we go a pilgrimage to the
places where he lived, and recall the names he loved with tender
affection (worshipping at the shrines where his fires were first
kindled, and where the purple light of love still lingers—‘Elysian
beauty, melancholy grace!’)—after all this, and more, instead of
taking the opinion which one half of the world have formed of
Rousseau with eager emulation, and the other have been forced to
admit in spite of themselves, we are to be sent back by Mr. Moore’s
eaves-dropping Muse to what the people in the neighbourhood
thought of him (if ever they thought of him at all) before he had
shewn any one proof of what he was, as the fairer test of truth and
candour, and as coming nearer to the standard of greatness, that is,
of something asked to dine out, existing in the author’s own mind.
‘This, this is the unkindest cut of all.’
Mr. Moore takes the inference which he chuses to attribute to the
neighbouring gentry concerning ‘the pauper lad,’ namely, that ‘he
was mad’ because he was poor, and flings it to the passengers out of a
landau and four as the true version of his character by the
fashionable and local authorities of the time. He need not have gone
out of his way to Charmettes merely to drag the reputations of Jean
Jacques and his mistress after him, chained to the car of aristocracy,
as ‘people low and bad,’ on the strength of his enervated sympathy
with the genteel conjectures of the day as to what and who they were
—we have better and more authentic evidence. What would he say if
this method of neutralising the voice of the public were applied to
himself, or to his friend Mr. Chantry; if we were to deny that the one
ever rode in an open carriage tête-à-tête with a lord, because his
father stood behind a counter, or were to ask the sculptor’s
customers when he drove a milk-cart what we are to think of his bust
of Sir Walter? It will never do. It is the peculiar hardship of genius
not to be recognised with the first breath it draws—often not to be
admitted even during its life-time—to make its way slow and late,
through good report and evil report, ‘through clouds of detraction, of
envy and lies’—to have to contend with the injustice of fortune, with
the prejudices of the world,
‘Rash judgments and the sneers of selfish men’—

to be shamed by personal defects, to pine in obscurity, to be the butt

of pride, the jest of fools, the bye-word of ignorance and malice—to
carry on a ceaseless warfare between the consciousness of inward
worth and the slights and neglect of others, and to hope only for its
reward in the grave and in the undying voice of fame:—and when, as
in the present instance, that end has been marvellously attained and
a final sentence has been passed, would any one but Mr. Moore wish
to shrink from it, to revive the injustice of fortune and the world, and
to abide by the idle conjectures of a fashionable cotêrie empannelled
on the spot, who would come to the same shallow conclusion
whether the individual in question were an idiot or a God? There is a
degree of gratuitous impertinence and frivolous servility in all this
not easily to be accounted for or forgiven.
There is something more particularly offensive in the cant about
‘people low and bad’ applied to the intimacy between Rousseau and
Madame Warens, inasmuch as the volume containing this nice strain
of morality is dedicated to Lord Byron, who was at that very time
living on the very same sentimental terms with an Italian lady of
rank, and whose Memoirs Mr. Moore has since thought himself
called upon to suppress, out of regard to his Lordship’s character and
to that of his friends, most of whom were not ‘low people.’ Is it
quality, not charity, that with Mr. Moore covers all sorts of slips!
‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore;
Let Greatness own her, and she’s mean no more!’

What also makes the dead-set at the heroine of the ‘Confessions’

seem the harder measure, is, that it is preceded by an effusion to
Mary Magdalen in the devotional style of Madame Guyon, half
amatory, half pious, but so tender and rapturous that it dissolves
Canova’s marble in tears, and heaves a sigh from Guido’s canvas. The
melting pathos that trickles down one page is frozen up into the most
rigid morality, and hangs like an icicle upon the next. Here Thomas
Little smiles and weeps in ecstacy; there Thomas Brown (not ‘the
younger,’ but the elder surely) frowns disapprobation, and meditates
dislike. Why, it may be asked, does Mr. Moore’s insect-Muse always
hover round this alluring subject, ‘now in glimmer and now in
gloom’—now basking in the warmth, now writhing with the smart—
now licking his lips at it, now making wry faces—but always
fidgetting and fluttering about the same gaudy, luscious topic, either
in flimsy raptures or trumpery horrors? I hate, for my own part, this
alternation of meretricious rhapsodies and methodistical cant,
though the one generally ends in the other. One would imagine that
the author of ‘Rhymes on the Road’ had lived too much in the world,
and understood the tone of good society too well to link the phrases
‘people low and bad’ together as synonymous. But the crossing the
Alps has, I believe, given some of our fashionables a shivering-fit of
morality, as the sight of Mont Blanc convinced our author of the
Being of a God[67]—they are seized with an amiable horror and
remorse for the vices of others (of course so much worse than their
own,) so that several of our blue-stockings have got the blue-devils,
and Mr. Moore, as the Squire of Dames, chimes in with the cue that
is given him. The panic, however, is not universal. He must have
heard of the romping, the languishing, the masquerading, the
intriguing, and the Platonic attachments of English ladies of the
highest quality and Italian Opera-singers. He must know what
Italian manners are—what they were a hundred years ago, at
Florence or at Turin,[68] better than I can tell him. Not a word does he
hint on the subject. No: the elevation and splendour of the examples
dazzle him; the extent of the evil overpowers him; and he chooses to
make Madame Warens the scape-goat of his little budget of
querulous casuistry, as if her errors and irregularities were to be set
down to the account of the genius of Rousseau and of modern
philosophy, instead of being the result of the example of the
privileged class to which she belonged, and of the licentiousness of
the age and country in which she lived. She appears to have been a
handsome, well-bred, fascinating, condescending demirep of that
day, like any of the author’s fashionable acquaintances in the
present, but the eloquence of her youthful protegè has embalmed her
memory, and thrown the illusion of fancied perfections and of
hallowed regrets over her frailties; and it is this that Mr. Moore
cannot excuse, and that draws down upon her his pointed hostility of
attack, and rouses all the venom of his moral indignation. Why does
he not, in like manner, pick a quarrel with that celebrated monument
in the Pere la Chaise, brought there
‘From Paraclete’s white walls and silver springs;’

or why does he not leave a lampoon, instead of an elegy, on Laura’s

tomb? The reason is, he dare not. The cant of morality is not here
strong enough to stem the opposing current of the cant of sentiment,
to which he by turns commits the success of his votive rhymes.
Not content with stripping off the false colours from the frail fair
(one of whose crimes it is not to have been young) the poet makes a
‘swan-like end,’ and falls foul of men of genius, fancy, and sentiment
in general, as impostors and mountebanks, who feel the least
themselves of what they describe and make others feel. I beg leave to
enter my flat and peremptory protest against this view of the matter,
as an impossibility. I am not absolutely blind to the weak sides of
authors, poets, and philosophers (for ‘’tis my vice to spy into abuses’)
but that they are not generally in earnest in what they write, that they
are not the dupes of their own imaginations and feelings, before they
turn the heads of the world at large, is what I must utterly deny. So