Wiliam Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating
William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating, Penguin 2005
The Fight, From The New Monthly Magazine (February 1822), reprinted by Hazlitt’s son in Literary Remains (1836).
…I found ‘the proverb’ nothing ‘musty’ in the present instance. 1
Ladies—it is to you I dedicate this description; nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of the brave. Courage and modesty are the old English virtues… 1
…that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. 2
I passed Hyde Park Corner (my Rubicon), and trusted to fortune. 4
…and I had missed everything else, by my own absurdity, in putting the will for the deed, and aiming at ends without employing means. 5
On the outside of any other coach on the 10th of December, with a Scotch mist drizzling through the cloudy moonlight air, I should have been cold, comfortless, impatient, and, no doubt, wet through; but seated on the Royal mail, I felt warm and comfortable, the air did me good, the ride did me good, I was pleased with the progress we had made, and confident that all would go well through the journey. 6
The whole art of training (I, however, learned from him) consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise, repeated alternately and without end. A yolk of an egg with a spoonful of run in it is the first thing in the morning, and then a walk of six miles till breakfast. This meal consists of a plentiful supply of solid beef or mutton with a pint of porter, and perhaps at the utmost, a couple of glasses of sherry…[he] takes now and then a chirping glass (under the rose) to console him, during a six weeks’ probation, for the absence of Mrs Hickman—an agreeable woman, with (I understand) a pretty fortune of two hundred pounds…Then follows an hour of social chat and native glee; and afterwards, to another breathing over healthy hill or dale. Back to supper, and then to bed, and up by six again… 7
An indigestion is an excellent common-place for two people that never met before. 8
Our present business was to get beds and a supper at an inn; but this was no easy task. The public-houses were full, and where you saw a light at a private house, and people poking their heads out of the casement to see what was going on, they instantly put them in and shut the window, the moment you seemed advancing with a suspicious overture for accommodation. 10
‘Confound it, man, don’t be insipid!’ Thinks I, that is a good phrase. 10
…sipping of many subjects… 12
…the old maxim, that ‘there are three things necessary to success in life—Impudence! Impudence! Impudence!’ 13
‘This is the grave-digger’ (would Tom Hickman exclaim in the moment of intoxication from gin and success, shewing his tremendous right hand), ‘this will send many of them to their long homes… 13
The grass was wet, and the ground miry, and ploughed up with multitudinous feet, except that, within the ring itself, there was a spot of virgin-green closed in and unprofaned by vulgar tread, that shone with dazzling brightness in the mid-day sun. 15
He strutted about more than became a hero, sucked oranges with a supercilious air, and threw away the skin with a toss of his head, and went up and looked at Neate, which was an act of supererogation. 16
I never saw any thing more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno. 19
…now observing the effect of a brilliant sun on the tawny meads or moss-coloured cottages, now exulting in the fight, now digressing to some topic of general and elegant literature. 21
one of them was an old gentleman with an aquiline nose, powdered hair, and a pigtail, and who looked as if he had played many a rubber at the Bath rooms. I said to myself, he is very like Mr. Windham; I wish he would enter into conversation, that I might hear what fine observations would come from those finely-turned features. 23
The Indian Jugglers, From Table-Talk (1821)
Thou canst do strange tings, but thou turnest them to little account! … It is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children. 26-7
…have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves…Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw?...What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! 28
I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of intellectual compared to mechanical excellence… 29
The obvious test is to increase the effort or nicety of the operation, and still find it come true. 30
…that which is seen but for a moment, but dwells in the heart always, and is only seized as it passes by strong and secret sympathy… 33
Accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to be learnt from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of the beholder, viz. dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on. These ornamental acquirements are only proper to those who are at ease in mind and fortune. 36
John Hunter was a great man—that any one might see without the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble. 39
I have heard a story of two bishops, one of whom said (speaking of St Peter’s at Rome) that when he first entered it, he was rather awe-struck, but that as he walked up it, his mind seemed to swell and dilate with it, and at last to fill the whole building—the other said that as he saw more of it, he appeared to himself to grow less and less every step he took, and in the end to dwindle into nothing. This was in some respects a striking picture of the great and little mind—for greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself. The one might have become a Wolsey; the other was only fit to become a Mendicant Friar… 40
On the Spirit of Monarchy, From the Liberal for Janaury, 1823. Not republished by Hazlitt.
…I think poets are Tories by nature…The love of an individual person or family, that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devouted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally Whigs. It happens agreeably enough to this maxim, that Whigs are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch. [Shenstone’s Letters, 1746] 47
The Spirit of Monarchy…is not so much a matter of state-necessity or policy, as a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in the popular feeling, which must be gratified. Man is an individual animal with narrow faculties, but infinite desires, which he is anxious to concentrate in some one object within the grasp of his imagination, and where, if he cannot be all that he wishes himself, he may at least contemplate his own pride, vanity, and passions, displayed in their most extravagant dimensions in a being no bigger and no better than himself. 47-8
The swelling bloated, self-importance of the one is the very counter-part and ultimate goal of the abject servility of the other. But both hate mankind for the same reason, because a respect for humanity is a diversion to their inordinate self-love, and the idea of the general good is a check to the gross intemperance of passion. 48
An idol is not the worse for being of coarse materials; a king should be a common-place man. Otherwise, he is superior in his own nature and not dependent on our bounty or caprice. 48
Would it not be hard upon a little girl, who is busy in dressing up a favourite doll, to pull it in pieces before her face in order to show her the bits of wood, the wool, and rags it is composed of? So it would be hard upon that great baby, the world, to take any of its idols to pieces…Her doll is her pretty little self. In its glazed eyes, its cherry cheeks, its flaxen locks, its finery and its baby-house, she has a fairy vision of her own future charms, her future triumphs, a thousand hearts led captive, and an establishment for life. Harmless illusion! 51-2
The idea of a God, beneficent and just, the invisible maker of all things, was abhorrent to their gross, material notions. No, they must have Gods of their own making, that they could see and handle, that they knew to be nothing in themselves but senseless images, and these they daubed over with the gaudy emblems of their own pride and passions, and these they lauded to the skies, and grew fierce, obscene, frantic before them, as the representatives of their sordid ignorance and barbaric vices. 54
…exchanging our honest convictions for ribbon or a garter. 56
The distinction between Whig and Tory is merely nominal: neither have their country one bit at heart. Phaw! we had forgot—Our British monarchy is a mixed, and the only perfect form of government… 57
A court is the centre of fashion; and no less so, for being the sink of luxury and vice…Virtue is thought crabbed and morose, knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly tolerated. Every thing tends naturally to personal aggrandizement and unrestrained self-will…What chance is there that monarchs should not yield to the temptations of gallantry then, when youth and beauty are as wax? What female heart can indeed withstand the attractions of a throne—the smile that melts all hearts, the air that awes rebellion, the frown that kings dread, the hand that scatters fairy wealth… 57-8
…instead of being the organ of public feeling and public opinion, is an excrescence and an anomaly in the state, a bloated mass of morbid humours and proud flesh! A constitutional king, on the other hand, is a servant of the public, a representative of the people’s wants and wishes, dispersing justice and mercy according to law. 60
…and all at once the Majesty of kingdoms bursts upon the astonished sight—his person is swelled out with all the gorgeousness of dress, and swathed in bales of silk and golden tissues… 61
A Coronation overlays and drowns all such considerations for a generation to come, and so far it serves its purpose well. It debauches the understanding of the people, and makes them the slaves of sense and show. 62-3
…all other claims are spurious, vitiated, mischievous, false—fit only for those who are sunk below contempt, or raised above opinion. 64
It is not our business to preach lectures to monarchs, but if we were at all disposed to attempt the ungracious task, we should do it in the words of an author who often addressed the ears of monarchs. / ‘A man may read a sermon’, says Jeremy Taylor, ‘the best and most passionate that man ever preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchers of kings…There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins…Ninus, the Assyrian, had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian sea; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it…[he never] worshiped the Deity…This man is dead: behold his sepulcher, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust is all my portion: the wealth with which I was blest, my enemies meeting together shall carry away, as the mad Thaydes carries a raw goat. I am gone to Hell; and when I went thither, I carried neither gold nor horse, nor a silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, am now a little heap of dust. –Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying. 66
What is the People?: Originally this, and ‘What is the People (Concluded)’ were published in three parts in the Champion for 12, 19 and 26 October 1817, then in two parts in the Yellow Dwarf for 7 and 14 March 1818. They were republished in Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819).
…you would slay the mind of a country to full up the dreary aching void with the old, obscene, driveling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like ‘a vile jelly’, that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew Samson (shorn of his strength and blind)…67
…that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre…robs us of ‘the unbought grace of life’,…makes genius its lackey and virtue its easy prey… 68
This slip of the pen in our professional retainer of legitimacy, though a libel on our own Government, is, notwithstanding, a general philosophical truth (the only one he ever hit upon), and an axiom in political mechanics, which we shall make the text of the following commentary. 71
The great and powerful, in order to be what they aspire to be, and what this gentleman would have them, perfectly independent of the will of the people, ought also to be perfectly independent of the assistance of the people. 72-3
You will find it easier to keep them a week than a month; and at the end of that time, waking from the sweet dream of Legitimacy, you may say with Caliban, ‘Why, what a fool was I to take this drunken monster for a God!’ 74
…encroachments on popular freedom and natural right, as the sea gains upon the land by swallowing it up. 77
When the English Parliament insisted on its right of taxing the Americans without their consent, it was not from an apprehension that the Americans would, by being left to themselves, lay such heavy duties on their own produce and manufactures, as would afflict the generosity of the mother-country, and put the mild paternal sentiments of Lord North to the blush. If any future King of England should keep a wistful eye on the map of that country, it would rather be to hang it up as a trophy of legitimacy, and to ‘punish the last successful example of a democratic rebellion’, than from any yearnings of fatherly goodwill to the American people, or from finding his ‘large heart’ and capacity for good government, ‘confined in too narrow room’ in the united kingdoms of Great Britain, Ireland, and Hanover. 78
On Reason and Imagination, from The Plain Speaker (1826).
I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea. There are those (even among philosophers) who, deeming that all truth is contained within certain outlines and common topics, if you proceed to add colour or relief from individuality, protest against the use of rhetoric’s as an illogical thing; and if you drop a hint of pleasure or pain as ever entering into ‘this breathing world’, raise a prodigious outcry against all appeals to the passions. 84
…because you cannot find the object of your search in their bald ‘abridgements’, tell you there is no such place, or that it is not worth inquiring after. 85
They may say that the map of a country or shire, for instance, is too large, and conveys a disproportionate idea of its relation to the whole. And we say that their map of the globe is too small, and conveys no idea of it at all…the county is bigger than the map at any rate: the representation falls short of the reality, by a million degrees…whatever does not come within those self-made limits is to be set aside as frivolous and monstrous…They cannot get them all in, of the size of life, and therefore they reduce them on a graduated scale, till they think they can. So be it, for certain necessary and general purposes, and in compliance with the infirmity of human intellect: but at other times, let us enlarge our conceptions to the dimensions of the original objects…[but] A certain proportion must be kept: we must not invert the rules of moral perspective. Logic should enrich and invigorate its decisions by the use of imagination, and guarded from abuse by the checks of the understanding. 87
The mind can conceive only one or a few things in their integrity: if it proceeds to more, it must have recourse to artificial substitutes, and judge by comparison merely. 87
…people continually find fault with the colours of style as incompatible with the truth of reasoning, but without any foundation whatever…Suppose, for instance, that in the discussions on the Slave-Trade, a description to the life was given to the horrors of the Middle Passage…till you felt in sickness of heart as one of them, could it be said that this was a prejudging of the case, that your knowing of the extent of the evil disqualified you from pronouncing sentence upon it…?...If it were a common iniquity, if it were slight and partial, or necessary, it would not have this effect; but it very properly carries away the feelings, and (if you will) overpowers the judgment…89
Rousseau was too ambitious of an exceedingly technical and scientific mode of reasoning, scarcely attainable to the mixed questions of human life, (as may be seen in his Social Contract—a work of great ability, but extreme formality and structure) and it was probable he was lead into this error in seeking to overcome his too great warmth of natural temperament and a tendency to indulge merely the impulses of passion. 98-9
Modern tragedy, in particular, is no longer like a vessel making the voyage of life, and tossed about by the winds and waves of passion, but is converted into a handsomely-constructed steam-boat, that is moved by the sole expansive power of words. Lord Byron has launched several of these ventures lately (if ventures they may be called) and may continue in the same strain as long as he pleases. 99
Man is (so to speak) an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told. 102
On the Pleasure of Hating, from The Plain Speaker, 1826
There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit…he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops—he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe—but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on, with mingled cunning, impudence, and fear. As he passes me, I life up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to get rid of the unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is gone. A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death—my philosophy had got beyond that—I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it. 104
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. 105
…there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.—Do we not see this principle at work every where? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport...a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. 105
How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon…Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe to new editions of Fox’s Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the Scotch Novels is much the same—they carry us back to the feuds, the heat-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the revenge of a barbarous age and people…106-7
…and to see Mr Irving, like a huge Titan, looking as grim and swarthy as if he had to forge tortures for all the damned! What a strange being man is! Not content with doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here, ‘upon this band and shoal of time’, where one would think there were heart-aches, pain, disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the bigoted maniac takes him to the top of the high peak of school divinity to hurl him down the yawning gulf of penal fire…it is well that the power of such persons is not co-ordinate with their wills: indeed, it is from the sense of their weakness and inability to control the opinions of others, that they thus ‘outdo termagant’ a, and endeavour to frighten them into conformity… 108
The pleasure of hating…leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. 108
Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred of the French… 109
…we hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves…I have been acquainted with two or three knots of inseparable companions, who saw each other ‘six days in the week’, that have broken up and dispersed. I have quarreled with almost all my old friends, (they might say this is owning to my bad temper, but) they have also quarreled with one another. 109
The Fight, From The New Monthly Magazine (February 1822), reprinted by Hazlitt’s son in Literary Remains (1836).
…I found ‘the proverb’ nothing ‘musty’ in the present instance. 1
Ladies—it is to you I dedicate this description; nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of the brave. Courage and modesty are the old English virtues… 1
…that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. 2
I passed Hyde Park Corner (my Rubicon), and trusted to fortune. 4
…and I had missed everything else, by my own absurdity, in putting the will for the deed, and aiming at ends without employing means. 5
On the outside of any other coach on the 10th of December, with a Scotch mist drizzling through the cloudy moonlight air, I should have been cold, comfortless, impatient, and, no doubt, wet through; but seated on the Royal mail, I felt warm and comfortable, the air did me good, the ride did me good, I was pleased with the progress we had made, and confident that all would go well through the journey. 6
The whole art of training (I, however, learned from him) consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise, repeated alternately and without end. A yolk of an egg with a spoonful of run in it is the first thing in the morning, and then a walk of six miles till breakfast. This meal consists of a plentiful supply of solid beef or mutton with a pint of porter, and perhaps at the utmost, a couple of glasses of sherry…[he] takes now and then a chirping glass (under the rose) to console him, during a six weeks’ probation, for the absence of Mrs Hickman—an agreeable woman, with (I understand) a pretty fortune of two hundred pounds…Then follows an hour of social chat and native glee; and afterwards, to another breathing over healthy hill or dale. Back to supper, and then to bed, and up by six again… 7
An indigestion is an excellent common-place for two people that never met before. 8
Our present business was to get beds and a supper at an inn; but this was no easy task. The public-houses were full, and where you saw a light at a private house, and people poking their heads out of the casement to see what was going on, they instantly put them in and shut the window, the moment you seemed advancing with a suspicious overture for accommodation. 10
‘Confound it, man, don’t be insipid!’ Thinks I, that is a good phrase. 10
…sipping of many subjects… 12
…the old maxim, that ‘there are three things necessary to success in life—Impudence! Impudence! Impudence!’ 13
‘This is the grave-digger’ (would Tom Hickman exclaim in the moment of intoxication from gin and success, shewing his tremendous right hand), ‘this will send many of them to their long homes… 13
The grass was wet, and the ground miry, and ploughed up with multitudinous feet, except that, within the ring itself, there was a spot of virgin-green closed in and unprofaned by vulgar tread, that shone with dazzling brightness in the mid-day sun. 15
He strutted about more than became a hero, sucked oranges with a supercilious air, and threw away the skin with a toss of his head, and went up and looked at Neate, which was an act of supererogation. 16
I never saw any thing more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno. 19
…now observing the effect of a brilliant sun on the tawny meads or moss-coloured cottages, now exulting in the fight, now digressing to some topic of general and elegant literature. 21
one of them was an old gentleman with an aquiline nose, powdered hair, and a pigtail, and who looked as if he had played many a rubber at the Bath rooms. I said to myself, he is very like Mr. Windham; I wish he would enter into conversation, that I might hear what fine observations would come from those finely-turned features. 23
The Indian Jugglers, From Table-Talk (1821)
Thou canst do strange tings, but thou turnest them to little account! … It is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children. 26-7
…have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves…Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw?...What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! 28
I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of intellectual compared to mechanical excellence… 29
The obvious test is to increase the effort or nicety of the operation, and still find it come true. 30
…that which is seen but for a moment, but dwells in the heart always, and is only seized as it passes by strong and secret sympathy… 33
Accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to be learnt from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of the beholder, viz. dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on. These ornamental acquirements are only proper to those who are at ease in mind and fortune. 36
John Hunter was a great man—that any one might see without the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble. 39
I have heard a story of two bishops, one of whom said (speaking of St Peter’s at Rome) that when he first entered it, he was rather awe-struck, but that as he walked up it, his mind seemed to swell and dilate with it, and at last to fill the whole building—the other said that as he saw more of it, he appeared to himself to grow less and less every step he took, and in the end to dwindle into nothing. This was in some respects a striking picture of the great and little mind—for greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself. The one might have become a Wolsey; the other was only fit to become a Mendicant Friar… 40
On the Spirit of Monarchy, From the Liberal for Janaury, 1823. Not republished by Hazlitt.
…I think poets are Tories by nature…The love of an individual person or family, that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devouted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally Whigs. It happens agreeably enough to this maxim, that Whigs are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch. [Shenstone’s Letters, 1746] 47
The Spirit of Monarchy…is not so much a matter of state-necessity or policy, as a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in the popular feeling, which must be gratified. Man is an individual animal with narrow faculties, but infinite desires, which he is anxious to concentrate in some one object within the grasp of his imagination, and where, if he cannot be all that he wishes himself, he may at least contemplate his own pride, vanity, and passions, displayed in their most extravagant dimensions in a being no bigger and no better than himself. 47-8
The swelling bloated, self-importance of the one is the very counter-part and ultimate goal of the abject servility of the other. But both hate mankind for the same reason, because a respect for humanity is a diversion to their inordinate self-love, and the idea of the general good is a check to the gross intemperance of passion. 48
An idol is not the worse for being of coarse materials; a king should be a common-place man. Otherwise, he is superior in his own nature and not dependent on our bounty or caprice. 48
Would it not be hard upon a little girl, who is busy in dressing up a favourite doll, to pull it in pieces before her face in order to show her the bits of wood, the wool, and rags it is composed of? So it would be hard upon that great baby, the world, to take any of its idols to pieces…Her doll is her pretty little self. In its glazed eyes, its cherry cheeks, its flaxen locks, its finery and its baby-house, she has a fairy vision of her own future charms, her future triumphs, a thousand hearts led captive, and an establishment for life. Harmless illusion! 51-2
The idea of a God, beneficent and just, the invisible maker of all things, was abhorrent to their gross, material notions. No, they must have Gods of their own making, that they could see and handle, that they knew to be nothing in themselves but senseless images, and these they daubed over with the gaudy emblems of their own pride and passions, and these they lauded to the skies, and grew fierce, obscene, frantic before them, as the representatives of their sordid ignorance and barbaric vices. 54
…exchanging our honest convictions for ribbon or a garter. 56
The distinction between Whig and Tory is merely nominal: neither have their country one bit at heart. Phaw! we had forgot—Our British monarchy is a mixed, and the only perfect form of government… 57
A court is the centre of fashion; and no less so, for being the sink of luxury and vice…Virtue is thought crabbed and morose, knowledge pedantic, while every sense is pampered, and every folly tolerated. Every thing tends naturally to personal aggrandizement and unrestrained self-will…What chance is there that monarchs should not yield to the temptations of gallantry then, when youth and beauty are as wax? What female heart can indeed withstand the attractions of a throne—the smile that melts all hearts, the air that awes rebellion, the frown that kings dread, the hand that scatters fairy wealth… 57-8
…instead of being the organ of public feeling and public opinion, is an excrescence and an anomaly in the state, a bloated mass of morbid humours and proud flesh! A constitutional king, on the other hand, is a servant of the public, a representative of the people’s wants and wishes, dispersing justice and mercy according to law. 60
…and all at once the Majesty of kingdoms bursts upon the astonished sight—his person is swelled out with all the gorgeousness of dress, and swathed in bales of silk and golden tissues… 61
A Coronation overlays and drowns all such considerations for a generation to come, and so far it serves its purpose well. It debauches the understanding of the people, and makes them the slaves of sense and show. 62-3
…all other claims are spurious, vitiated, mischievous, false—fit only for those who are sunk below contempt, or raised above opinion. 64
It is not our business to preach lectures to monarchs, but if we were at all disposed to attempt the ungracious task, we should do it in the words of an author who often addressed the ears of monarchs. / ‘A man may read a sermon’, says Jeremy Taylor, ‘the best and most passionate that man ever preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchers of kings…There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins…Ninus, the Assyrian, had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian sea; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it…[he never] worshiped the Deity…This man is dead: behold his sepulcher, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust is all my portion: the wealth with which I was blest, my enemies meeting together shall carry away, as the mad Thaydes carries a raw goat. I am gone to Hell; and when I went thither, I carried neither gold nor horse, nor a silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, am now a little heap of dust. –Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying. 66
What is the People?: Originally this, and ‘What is the People (Concluded)’ were published in three parts in the Champion for 12, 19 and 26 October 1817, then in two parts in the Yellow Dwarf for 7 and 14 March 1818. They were republished in Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819).
…you would slay the mind of a country to full up the dreary aching void with the old, obscene, driveling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like ‘a vile jelly’, that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew Samson (shorn of his strength and blind)…67
…that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre…robs us of ‘the unbought grace of life’,…makes genius its lackey and virtue its easy prey… 68
This slip of the pen in our professional retainer of legitimacy, though a libel on our own Government, is, notwithstanding, a general philosophical truth (the only one he ever hit upon), and an axiom in political mechanics, which we shall make the text of the following commentary. 71
The great and powerful, in order to be what they aspire to be, and what this gentleman would have them, perfectly independent of the will of the people, ought also to be perfectly independent of the assistance of the people. 72-3
You will find it easier to keep them a week than a month; and at the end of that time, waking from the sweet dream of Legitimacy, you may say with Caliban, ‘Why, what a fool was I to take this drunken monster for a God!’ 74
…encroachments on popular freedom and natural right, as the sea gains upon the land by swallowing it up. 77
When the English Parliament insisted on its right of taxing the Americans without their consent, it was not from an apprehension that the Americans would, by being left to themselves, lay such heavy duties on their own produce and manufactures, as would afflict the generosity of the mother-country, and put the mild paternal sentiments of Lord North to the blush. If any future King of England should keep a wistful eye on the map of that country, it would rather be to hang it up as a trophy of legitimacy, and to ‘punish the last successful example of a democratic rebellion’, than from any yearnings of fatherly goodwill to the American people, or from finding his ‘large heart’ and capacity for good government, ‘confined in too narrow room’ in the united kingdoms of Great Britain, Ireland, and Hanover. 78
On Reason and Imagination, from The Plain Speaker (1826).
I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea. There are those (even among philosophers) who, deeming that all truth is contained within certain outlines and common topics, if you proceed to add colour or relief from individuality, protest against the use of rhetoric’s as an illogical thing; and if you drop a hint of pleasure or pain as ever entering into ‘this breathing world’, raise a prodigious outcry against all appeals to the passions. 84
…because you cannot find the object of your search in their bald ‘abridgements’, tell you there is no such place, or that it is not worth inquiring after. 85
They may say that the map of a country or shire, for instance, is too large, and conveys a disproportionate idea of its relation to the whole. And we say that their map of the globe is too small, and conveys no idea of it at all…the county is bigger than the map at any rate: the representation falls short of the reality, by a million degrees…whatever does not come within those self-made limits is to be set aside as frivolous and monstrous…They cannot get them all in, of the size of life, and therefore they reduce them on a graduated scale, till they think they can. So be it, for certain necessary and general purposes, and in compliance with the infirmity of human intellect: but at other times, let us enlarge our conceptions to the dimensions of the original objects…[but] A certain proportion must be kept: we must not invert the rules of moral perspective. Logic should enrich and invigorate its decisions by the use of imagination, and guarded from abuse by the checks of the understanding. 87
The mind can conceive only one or a few things in their integrity: if it proceeds to more, it must have recourse to artificial substitutes, and judge by comparison merely. 87
…people continually find fault with the colours of style as incompatible with the truth of reasoning, but without any foundation whatever…Suppose, for instance, that in the discussions on the Slave-Trade, a description to the life was given to the horrors of the Middle Passage…till you felt in sickness of heart as one of them, could it be said that this was a prejudging of the case, that your knowing of the extent of the evil disqualified you from pronouncing sentence upon it…?...If it were a common iniquity, if it were slight and partial, or necessary, it would not have this effect; but it very properly carries away the feelings, and (if you will) overpowers the judgment…89
Rousseau was too ambitious of an exceedingly technical and scientific mode of reasoning, scarcely attainable to the mixed questions of human life, (as may be seen in his Social Contract—a work of great ability, but extreme formality and structure) and it was probable he was lead into this error in seeking to overcome his too great warmth of natural temperament and a tendency to indulge merely the impulses of passion. 98-9
Modern tragedy, in particular, is no longer like a vessel making the voyage of life, and tossed about by the winds and waves of passion, but is converted into a handsomely-constructed steam-boat, that is moved by the sole expansive power of words. Lord Byron has launched several of these ventures lately (if ventures they may be called) and may continue in the same strain as long as he pleases. 99
Man is (so to speak) an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told. 102
On the Pleasure of Hating, from The Plain Speaker, 1826
There is a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit…he runs with heedless, hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops—he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe—but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on, with mingled cunning, impudence, and fear. As he passes me, I life up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to get rid of the unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is gone. A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death—my philosophy had got beyond that—I bear the creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it. 104
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. 105
…there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.—Do we not see this principle at work every where? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport...a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. 105
How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon…Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe to new editions of Fox’s Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the Scotch Novels is much the same—they carry us back to the feuds, the heat-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the revenge of a barbarous age and people…106-7
…and to see Mr Irving, like a huge Titan, looking as grim and swarthy as if he had to forge tortures for all the damned! What a strange being man is! Not content with doing all he can to vex and hurt his fellows here, ‘upon this band and shoal of time’, where one would think there were heart-aches, pain, disappointment, anguish, tears, sighs, and groans enough, the bigoted maniac takes him to the top of the high peak of school divinity to hurl him down the yawning gulf of penal fire…it is well that the power of such persons is not co-ordinate with their wills: indeed, it is from the sense of their weakness and inability to control the opinions of others, that they thus ‘outdo termagant’ a, and endeavour to frighten them into conformity… 108
The pleasure of hating…leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others. 108
Does any one suppose that the love of country in an Englishman implies any friendly feeling or disposition to serve another, bearing the same name? No, it means only hatred of the French… 109
…we hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves…I have been acquainted with two or three knots of inseparable companions, who saw each other ‘six days in the week’, that have broken up and dispersed. I have quarreled with almost all my old friends, (they might say this is owning to my bad temper, but) they have also quarreled with one another. 109
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