Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843

But God forbid that a word should escape from us which should seem to place the amusements of society, or the charms of conversation, in competition with those stern virtues which are the guardians of an English hearth! The austere fanaticism of the Puritans, tainted with hypocrisy as it was, was preferable a thousand times to the orgies of the Regent and the Parc-aux-Cerfs. If purity and refined society be, indeed, incompatible—if the love of freedom and active enterprise necessarily exclude the grace and softness which lessen, or at least teach us to forget, the burden of existence, let us be what we are; and, indeed, it is the opinion of many, that the rant of social pleasure is the price we pay for the excellence of our political institutions. It is because before the law all men are equal, that in the world so much care is taken to show that they are different. If to this we add the mercantile habits of our countrymen, the enormous wealth which their pursuits enable them to accumulate—the great honours which are the reward of successful industry and ambition—the absurd value annexed to technical distinctions—the manner in which, in our as in all free countries, those distinctions are conferred—and a certain disposition to sneer at any chivalrous, or elevated feeling, from which few of our ladies are exempt—we shall find it easy to account for the cold, stiff, ungraceful, harsh, and mercenary habits which disfigure, to the astonishment of all foreigners, the patrician class of English society. Nothing, indeed, can be less graceful than the frivolity of an Englishman. Naturally grave, serious, contemplative, if his angry stars have endowed him with enormous wealth, he carries into the pursuit of trifles the same solemnity and perseverance which, had he been more fortunately situated, would have been employed in a professional career—he carries a certain degree of gravity into his follies and his vices; as Pope, no less keen an observer than finished a poet, observed, he

"Judicious sups, and greatly daring dines"—

devotes himself to an eternal round of puerile follies, with a pompous self-importance that would be ludicrous were it exhibited in the discharge of the noblest and most sacred duties. Plate and wine seem his religion, and a well-furnished room his morality—his dinners engross his thoughts—his field sports are a nation's care. He writes books on arm-chairs, hunts with the most ineffable self-sufficiency, and talks of his dogs and horses as Howard or Clarkson might speak of the jails they had visited, and the mourners they had set free. He commits errors with a stolid air of deliberation, which the reckless passions of boiling youth could hardly palliate, but which, when perpetrated as a title to fashion, and as a passport to society, no epithets that contempt can suggest are vehement enough to stigmatize. The Englishman's vice has a business-like air with it that is intolerable—there is no illusion, no refinement—it is coarse, direct, groveling brutality—it wears its own hideous aspect with no garnish or disguise; and how seldom, even among that sex which these volumes are intended to instruct, does the brow wreathed with roses, amid the haunts of dissipation, wear a gay, a serene, or even a contented aspect! Where all the treasures that inanimate nature can furnish are scattered in profusion—where the air is fragrant with perfume, and vocal with melody, how vainly do we look for the freshness and animation, and the simplicity and single-mindedness of buoyant and delighted youth! We feel inclined, amid this gloomy dissipation and depressing pleasure, to reverse the most beautiful passage in Euripides, and to say, that the banquet and the festival do require all the heightening of art, all the embellishments of luxury, all the illusions of song, to conceal the struggles of corroding interest, and the pangs of constant mortification.

"There" (but we quote one of the most remarkable passages in the book) "is a general aversion from the labour of thought, in all who have not had the faculties exercised while they were pliant, nor been supplied with a certain stock of elementary knowledge, essential alike to any subject of science that may be presented to their maturer years. By means of the press, many broken and ill-sustained rays pierce across the neglect or indifference of parents, to the minds of the young. Gleams of a rational spirit and enlarged feeling may often be found among the daughters of country gentlemen, whose sons are still solely devoted to sporting and party politics.

"When we think of those mighty resources we have just been adverting to, the strength all such tastes acquire by sympathy, and the observation of nature and of human life they tend to excite, we might expect they would furnish society with everlasting sources of excitement and mutual interest, that they would create a universal sympathy with genius and ability wherever it was found, and soften the repulsive austerity with which it is the nature of rank and wealth to look on humble fortunes.

"Little or nothing of all this takes place. Frivolity and insipidity are the prevailing characters of conversation; and nowhere in Europe, perhaps, does difference of fortune or station produce more unsocial and illiberal separation. Very few of those whom fortune has released from the necessity of following some laborious profession, are capable of passing their time agreeably without the assistance of company; not from a spirit of gaiety which calls on society for indulgence—not from any pleasure they take in conversation, where they are frequently languid and taciturn, but to rival each other in the luxury of the table, or, by a great variety of indescribable airs, to make others feel the pain of mortification. They meet as if 'to fight the boundaries' of their rank and fashion, and the less definite and perceptible is the line which divides them, the more punctilious is their pride. It is a great mistake to suppose that this low-minded folly is peculiar to people of rank: it is an English disease. But the higher we go in society, the wider the circle of the excluded becomes, consequently, the greater the range of human beings cast forth from the pale of sympathy; and the more contracted do the judgment, experience, and feelings of its inmates become. The lofty walls, the iron spikes that surround our villas, and the notices every where affixed 'that trespassers will be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law,' are meet emblems of the social spirit that connects the different orders of society in England. The effect of this is to produce narrow minds, or, what is worse, narrow hearts on one side, and a host of dissocial, irritable passions on the other. In each step of the scale, those beneath see chiefly the unamiable qualities of their superiors."

The disproportion of the happiness of society with its means, is a subject which calls forth all the eloquence and sagacity of this writer. Nor is this surprising; for it might startle the most sluggish indifference—the most incurious stupidity. How does it come to pass, that with us misery is the fruit of successful labour, that with us experience does not teach caution, that with us the most munificent charity is unable to check the accumulation of evil, moral and physical, with which it vainly endeavours to contend? How is it, that while the wealth of England is a proverb among nations, the distress of her labourers is a byword no less universal; that while her commerce encircles the globe, while her colonies are spread through both hemispheres, while regions hitherto unknown are but the resting-place of her never-ceasing enterprise, the producers of all this wealth, the causes of all this luxury, the instruments of all this civilization, lie down in despair to perish by hundreds, amid the miracles of triumphant industry by which they are surrounded? How happens it, that as our empire extends abroad, security diminishes at home? that as our reputation becomes more splendid, and our attitude more commanding, the fabric of our strength decays, and our social bulwarks rock from their foundations? Who can say that the skill and valour of the general who has added a province to our Indian empire—who, triumphing over obstacles hitherto insurmountable, has caused the tide of victory to flow from East to West, and make the Sepoy invincible—may not erelong be called upon to fulfil the thankless task of suppressing insurrection, and to control the kindling fury of a mistaken, it is true, but of a kindred population? Shall the day indeed come when in our streets there shall be solitude, and in our harbours be heard no sound of oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby? Is the vaunted splendour of this country to furnish a melancholy lesson of the instability of earthly power, and its fate to conclude a tale more glorious, to point a moral more affecting, than any which Tyre, or Sidon, or Carthage have furnished, to curb the insolence of prosperity, and to show the insignificance of man?

 
"Quamvis Pontica pinus,
Sylvae filia nobilis,
Jactes et genus et nomen inutile."
 

After dwelling on the supply of information which the present age enjoys, and which is quite without parallel in any former period, and pointing out the inconsistencies among us, of which, nevertheless, every day affords perpetual examples, the writer asks—

"Do these evils proceed from some moral perversity in the people? Is there some natural barrier in England against the effects of capital, industry, science, and religion; or is it not that ignorance of the laws that regulate and harmonize social existence, and of those that govern the human mind, has hitherto been extensively prevalent, and is still resisting the remedies of riper experience?

 

"But the poor and ignorant cannot educate themselves; it must be the upper classes who give them the means of improvement. In the natural laws of society, the use of a class who are independent of labour for subsistence, is, that a certain part of the community should have leisure to acquire that general knowledge which is the parent of wise institutions and pure morals. That they should have such affluence as to give weight to their example and authority, is also desirable. Government, as has already been observed, cannot act effectively against a very great preponderance of error and prejudice, but must legislate in the spirit of truths that are generally known, and in the service of interests that excite general sympathy.

"The object of this work is not to advocate particular measures, nor even to assume that every thing that is wrong is so through culpable neglect; but it is to call attention to the grievous evils, that neither legislation nor zeal and charity can counteract with effect, till the increased education of all classes assists their efforts. Something must be wanting, when such unrivalled knowledge and wealth are accompanied by such various and wide-spread evils. It is not benevolence that is deficient, for nowhere can we turn without meeting it in private, struggling against miseries too great for its power, and in public devoting abilities of the first order to the cause of humanity.

"It is the wider diffusion of knowledge we require: more heads and hands still are wanted, qualified for acting in concert, or at least acting generally on right principles. Too many persons capable of generous feeling are absorbed and corrupted by luxury and frivolity; too many waste their efforts from shallow, mistaken, and contradictory views."

Then follows a splendid description of scientific energy, the gratification which it affords, and the noble objects to which it points the way.

"In examining the prodigious resources at the command of the upper classes of English society, it is finely remarked, that 'the fine arts are the materials by which our physical and animal sensations are converted into moral perceptions.'

"Every thing in the form of matter, however coarse—the refuse and dross of more valuable materials—is resolvable, by science, into elements too subtle for our vision, and yet possessed of such potency that they effect transmutations more surprising than the fables of magic. The points that spangle the still blue vault, and make night lovely to the untaught peasant, interpreted by science, expand into worlds and systems of worlds: some so remote, that even the character of light, in which their existence is declared to us, can scarcely give full assurance of their reality—some, kindred planets which science has measured, and has told their movements, their seasons, and the length of their days. Such resemblances to our own globe are ascertained in their general laws, and such diversity in their peculiar ones, that we are led irresistibly to believe they all teem with beings, sentient and intelligent as we are, yet whose senses, and powers, and modes of existence, must be very dissimilar, and indefinitely varied. The regions of space, within the field of our vision, present us with phenomena the most incomprehensibly mysterious, and with knowledge the most accurate and demonstrable. Light, motion, form, and magnitude—the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms—have their several sciences, and each would exhaust a life to master it completely. No uneasy passion follows him who engages in such speculations, where continual pursuit is made happy by the sense of continual progress. He leaves his cares at the threshold; for when his attention is fixed, so great is the pleasure of contemplation, that it seems good to have been born for this alone.

"If we turn to the moral world, where, strange as it seems, we meet with less clearness and grandeur, yet there our deep interest in its truths supplies a different, perhaps a more powerful attraction. While we wonder and hope, the general laws of sentient existence give us glimpses of their harmony with those of inanimate nature. The latter seems assuredly made for the use of the former. The identity of benevolence with wisdom presents itself to our minds as a necessary truth, and, notwithstanding our perplexities, brings peace to our hearts. Social distinctions sink to insignificance when contemplating our place in existence, and the privilege of reading the book of nature, and sharing the thoughts and the sentiments of the distinguished among men, atones for obscurity and neglect; neither would the troubled power of a throne nor the flushing of victory repay us for the sacrifice of those pleasures."

The second volume opens with a dissertation on luxury, in which the subject is treated with the depth and perspicuity that the extracts we have already made will have prepared our readers to anticipate. Luxury is a word of relative, and therefore of ambiguous signification; it may be the test of prosperity—it may be the harbinger of decay: according to the state of society in which it prevails, its signification will, of course, be different. The effect of civilization is to increase the number of our wants. The same degree of education which, during the last century, was considered, even by the upper classes, a superfluity, is now a necessary for the middling class, and will soon become a necessary for the lowest, or all but the lowest, members of society. Most of our readers are acquainted with the story of the Highland chief who rebuked his son indignantly for making a pillow of a snowball. Sumptuary laws have always been inefficient, or efficient only for the purposes of oppression. Public morality has been their pretext—the private gratification of jealousy their aim. In republics they were intended to allay the envy of the poor—in monarchies to flatter the arrogance of the great. The first of these motives produced, as Say observes, the law Orchia at Rome, which prohibited the invitation of more than a certain number of guests. The second was the cause of an edict passed in the reign of Henry II. of France, by which the use of silken shoes and garments was confined to princes and bishops. States are ruined by the extravagance, not of their subjects, but of their rulers.

Luxury is pernicious when it is purchased at an excessive price, or when it stands in the way of advantages greater and more attainable. The worse a government is, the more effect does it produce upon the manners and habits of its subjects. The influence of a government of favourites and minions over the community, is as prodigious as it is baneful. Every innocent pleasure is a blessing. Luxury is innocent, nay, it is desirable, as far as it can contribute to health and cleanliness—to rational enjoyment; as far as it serves to prevent gross debauchery; and, as one of our poets has expressed it,

 
"When sensual pleasures cloy,
To fill the languid pause with finer joy,"
 

it should be encouraged. It does not follow, because the materials for luxury are wanted, that the bad passions and selfishness, which are its usual companions, will be wanted also. A Greenlander may display as much gluttony over his train oil and whale blubber as the most refined epicure can exhibit with the Physiologie du Goût in his hand, and with all Monsieur Ude's science at his disposal. When the gratification of our taste and senses interferes with our duty to our country, or our neighbours, or our friends—when, for the sake of their indulgence, we sacrifice our independence—or when, rather than abandon it, we neglect our duties sacred and imperative as they may be—the most favourable casuists on the side of luxury allow that it is criminal. But even when it stops far short of this scandalous excess, the habit of immoderate self-indulgence can hardly long associate in the same breast with generous, manly, and enlightened sentiments: its inevitable effect is to stifle all vigorous energy, as well as to eradicate every softer virtue. It is the parent of that satiety which is the most unspeakable of all miseries—a short satisfaction is purchased by long suffering, and the result is an addition to our stock, not of pleasure, but of pain.

The next topic to which our attention is directed is the influence of habit. Habit is thus defined:—

"Habit is the aptitude for any actions or impressions produced by frequent repetition of them."

The word impressions is used to designate affections of mind and body that are involuntary, in contradistinction to those which we can originate and control. For instance, we may choose whether or not we will enter into any particular enquiry; but when we have entered upon it, we cannot prevent the result that the evidence concerning it will produce upon our minds. A person conversant with mathematical studies can no more help believing that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side, than, if his hand had been thrust in the fire, he could help feeling heat. The remarks which follow are ingenious and profound:—

"The more amusements," continues the writer, "partake of an useful character, the more lasting they are. This is never the case with trifles; when the enjoyment is over, they leave little or nothing in the mind. They are not steps to something else, they have no connexion with other and further results, to be brought out by further endeavours. The attempt to make life a series of quickly succeeding emotions, will ever prove a miserable failure; whereas, when the chief part of our time is spent in labour, active power increases—the exertion of it becomes habit—the mind gathers strength; and emotion being husbanded, retains its freshness, and the spirits preserve their alacrity through life. It follows that the most agreeable labours are those which superadd to an object of important and lasting interest a due mixture of intermediate and somewhat diversified results. To a mechanic, making a set of chairs and tables, for example, is more agreeable than working daily at a sawpit. But nothing can deprive the industrious man (however undiversified his employment) of the advantage of having a constant and important pursuit—viz. earning the necessaries and comforts of life; and when we consider the uneasiness of a life without any steady pursuit, and how slight is the influence that such as one merely voluntary has over most men, it seems certain that, as a general rule, we do not err in representing the necessity of labour as a safeguard of happiness."

Active habits are such as action gives: passive habits are such as our condition qualifies us to receive. In emotion, however violent, we may be passive, the forgiving and the vindictive man are for a time equally passive in their emotions. It is when the vindictive man proceeds to retaliation upon an adversary that he becomes a voluntary agent. It is often difficult to analyse the ingredients of our thought, and to determine how far they are involuntary and how far they are spontaneous. Nor is this an enquiry the solution of which can ever affect the majority of mankind: it is not with such subtleties that the practice of the moralist is concerned. It is a psychological fact, which never can be repeated too often, that habit deadens impression and fortifies activity. It gives energy to that power which depends on the sanction of the will—it renders the sensations which are nearly passive every day more languid and insignificant.

"Mon sachet de fleurs," says Montaigne, "sert d'abord à mon nez; mais, après que je m'en suis servi huit jours, il ne sert plus qu'au nez des assistants." So the taste becomes accustomed to the most irritating stimulants, and is finally palsied by their continued application, yet the necessity of having recourse to these provocatives becomes daily more imperious.

 
"Crescit indulgens sibi dirus hydrops
Nec sitim pellit."
 

The tanner who lives among his hides till he is insensible to their exhalations—the surgeon who has conquered the disgust with which the objects around him must fill an ordinary individual—the sensualist, on whose jaded appetite all the resources of art and all the loveliness of nature are employed in vain—may serve as common instances of the first part of the proposition; and the astonishing facility acquired by particular men in the business with which they are conversant, are proofs no less irrefragable of the second. Can any argument be conceived which is more decisive in favour of the moral economy to which even this lower world is subject, than the undeniable fact, that virtue is fortified by exercise, and pain conquered by endurance; while vice, like the bearer of the sibyl's books, extorts every hour a greater sacrifice for less enjoyment? The passage in Mammon's speech is no less philosophically accurate than it is poetically beautiful—

 
"Out torments also may in length of time
Become our elements, these piercing fires
As soft as now severe, our temper changed
Into their temper, which must needs remove
The sensible of pain."
 

So does man pass on his way, from youth to manhood, from manhood till the shadow of death falls upon him; and while his moral and physical structure adapts itself to the incessant vicissitudes of his being, he imagines himself the same. The same in sunshine and in tempest—in the temperate and the torrid zone—in sickness and in health—in joy and sorrow—at school and in the camp or senate—still, still he is the same. His passions change, his pleasures alter; what once filled him with rapture, is now indifferent, it may be loathsome. The friends of his youth are his friends no longer—other faces are around him—other voices echo in his ears. Still he is the same—the same, when chilling experience has taught him its bitter lesson, and when life in all its glowing freshness first dawned upon his view. The same, when "vanity of vanities" is graven upon his heart—as when his youthful fancy revelled in scenes of love, of friendship, and of renown. The same, when cold, cautious, interested, suspicious, guilty—as when daring, reckless, frank, confiding, innocent. Still the dream continues, still the vision lasts, until some warning yet unknown—the tortures of disease, or the loss of the very object round which his heartstrings were entwined, anguish within, and desolation without—stir him into consciousness, and remind him of that fast approaching change which no illusion can conceal. Such is the pliability of our nature, so varied are the modes of our being; and thus, through the benevolence of Him who made us, the cause which renders our keenest pleasures transient, makes pain less acute, and death less terrible.

It follows from this, that in youth positive attainment is a matter of little moment, compared with the habits which our instructors encourage us to acquire. The fatal error which is casting a blight over our plans of education, is to look merely to the immediate result, totally disregarding the motive which has led to it, and the qualities of which it is the indication; yet, would those to whom the delicate and most responsible task of education is confided, but consider that habits of mind are formed by inward principle, and not external action, they would adopt a more rational system than that to which mediocrity owes its present triumph over us; and which bids fair to wither up, during another generation, the youth and hopes of England. Such infatuation is equal to that of the husbandman who should wish to deprive the year of its spring, and the plants of their blossoms, in hopes of a more nutritious and abundant harvest.

"The inward principle required to give habits of industry, temperance, good temper, and so forth, is the express intention of being industrious, temperate, and gentle, and regulating one's actions accordingly. But the inward principle exercised by a routine of irksome restraints, submitted to passively on no other grounds but the laws of authority, or the influence of fashion, or imposed merely as the necessary condition of childhood, may be only that of yielding to present impression. He who, in youth, yields passively to fear or force, in after life may be found to yield equally to pleasure or temper; the habit of yielding to present impressions, in the first case, prepares the mind for yielding to them in the second, without any attempt at self-control.

"The necessity of reducing the young, in the first instance, to implicit obedience, and the utility of a strict routine of duties, is not hereby disputed. The impressions arising from every species of restraint and coercion, whether from the command of another or our own reason, being almost invariably unpleasant at first, it is necessary (on the theory of habit) to weaken their force by repetition, before the principle of self-government can be expected to act. But the point insisted on is, that weakening the pain of restraint and of submission to rules, will not necessarily create an intention of adhering to the rules, when coercion ceases. An intention is a mental action, and even when excited, it is neither impossible nor uncommon that the practice of forming intentions may be accompanied by the practice of breaking them; and as the shame and remorse of so doing wear out through frequency, a character of weakness is formed."

Although we regret the omission of some observations on waste and prodigality—remarks in which the most profound knowledge of the best authorities on this subject is tempered with a strict attention to practical interest, and a minute acquaintance with the affairs of ordinary life—we proceed to the chapters on "Frivolity and Ignorance," with which, and an admirable dissertation on the authority of reason, the volume terminates. These chapters yield to none in this admirable work for utility and importance; there are three subjects on which the influence of frivolity, baneful as it always is, is most peculiarly dangerous and destructive—education, politics, and religion. On all these great points, inseparably connected as they are with human happiness and virtue, the frivolity of women may give a bias to the character of the individual, which will be traced in his career to the last moment of his existence. The author well observes that frivolity and ignorance, rather than deliberate guilt, are the causes of political error and tergiversation. If there are few persons ready to devote themselves to the good of their species, and carrying their attention beyond kindred and acquaintance, to comprise the most distant posterity and regions the most remote within the scope of their benevolence; so there are few of those monsters in selfishness, who would pursue their own petty interests when the happiness of millions is an obstacle to its gratification; but as a leaf before the eye will hide a universe, self-love limits the intellectual horizon to a compass inconceivably narrow; and the prosperity of nations, when placed in the balance with a riband or a pension, has too often kicked the beam. Professional business, and the love of detail, which is so deeply rooted in most English natures, tends also to contract the thoughts, to erect a false standard of merit, and to fill the mind with petty objects. As an instance of this, it may be remarked that Lord Somers is the only great man who, in England, has ever filled a judicial situation. So wide is the difference between present success and future reputation—so weak on all sides but one, are those who have limited themselves to one side only—so technical and engrossing are the avocations of an English lawyer. The best, if not the only remedy for this evil, is, in the words of our author, the "study of well-chosen books."