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

V >> Various >> Blackwood\'s Edinburgh Magazine Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

"Alas! alas my song is sad;
How should it not be so,
When he, who used to make me glad,
Now leaves me in my woe?
With him my love, my graciousness,
My beauty, all are vain;
I feel as if some guiltiness
Had mark'd me with its stain.

"One sweet thought still has power o'er me,
In this my heart's great need;
'Tis, that I ne'er was false to thee,
Dear friend, in word or deed:
I own that nobler virtues fill
Thy heart, love only mine;
Yet why are all thy looks so chill
Till they on others shine?

"Oh! long-loved friend, I marvel much
Thy heart is so severe,
That it will yield not to the touch
Of love and sorrow's tear.
No, no! it cannot be, that thou
Should seek another's love;
Oh! think upon our early vow,
And thou wilt faithful prove.

"Thy virtues--pride, thy lofty fame,
Assures me thou art true,
Though fairer ones than I may claim
Thy hand, and deign to sue.
But think, beloved one, that, to bless
With perfect blessing, thou
Must seek for trusting tenderness:
Remember then our vow!"

"Collectively," says our author, "women might do much to remove
the national stigma of leaving men of science and letters
neglected. But their education is seldom such as enables them to
know the great importance of science and literature to human
improvement; and they are rarely brought up to regard it as any
part of their duty to promote the interests of society. They
would not, indeed, be able directly to reward men of talent by
employment or honours, but they might make them acquainted with
those who could; at all events, mere social distinction, the
attention and approbation of our fellow creatures, is in itself
an advantage to men who seldom possess that passport to English
respect--wealth. Though learning is tacitly discouraged in women,
yet the access to every species of knowledge requisite to direct
their efforts wisely and well, is as open to them as to men. With
this power of forming the mind of the rising generation, this
influence over the opinions, the morals, and the tastes of
society, this direct power in promoting objects both of private
benevolence and national importance--with so many advantages, how
is it that women are still exposed to so many sufferings, from
dependence, oppression, mortification, and contempt? why are
their opinions yet sneered at? why is their influence rather
deprecated than sought? Is it not that they have never learnt
even the selfish policy of connecting themselves with the spirit
of moral and intellectual advancement? Is it not because their
liberty, their privileges, their power, have proceeded in many
respects, less from a spirit of justice in the other sex, or a
sense of moral fitness, than from the love of pleasure and
luxury, of which women are the best promoters?"

In England, these evils are peculiarly great; for in England they are
without compensation. It is possible to imagine such brilliant
conversation, such varied wit, such graceful manners, such apparent
gentleness, that would stifle the complaints of the moralist, and cause
the half-uttered expostulation to die away upon his lips. So we can
conceive that Arnaud and Nicole may have listened to the enchanting
discourse of Madame de Sevigne, and under an influence so irresistible,
have forborne to scan with severity the faults, glaring as they were, of
the system to which she belonged. But with us the case is
different--compare the English lady in her country-house, hospitable to
her guests, benevolent to her dependents, as a wife spotless, as a mother
most devoted, caring for all around her, dispensing education, relieving
distress, encouraging merit, the guard of innocence, the shame of guilt,
active, contented, gracious, exemplary: and see the same person in
London--her frame worn out with fatigue, her mind ulcerated with petty
mortifications, her brow clouded, her look hardened, her eye averted from
unprofitable friends, her tone harsh, her demeanour restless, her whole
being changed: and were there no higher motive, were it a question of
advantage and convenience only, were dignity, and the good opinion of
others, and consideration in the world, alone at stake, can any one
hesitate as to which situation a wife or daughter should prefer? We
should, indeed, be sorry if our demeanour in those vast crowds where
English people flock together, rather, as it would seem, to assert a
right than to gratify an inclination, were to be taken as an index of our
national character--the want of all ease and simplicity, those essential
ingredients of agreeable society, which distinguish these dreary
meetings, have been long unfortunately notorious. No nation is so careful
of the great, or so indifferent to the lesser, moralities of life as the
English; and in no country is society, indebted, perhaps, to polished
idleness for its greatest charms, more completely misunderstood. Too busy
to watch the feelings of others, and too earnest to moderate our own,
that true politeness which pays respect to age, which strives to put the
most insignificant person in company on a level with the most
considerable--virtues which our neighbours possess in an eminent
degree,--are, except in a few favoured instances, unknown among us; while
affectation, in other countries the badge of ignorance and vulgarity, is
in ours, even in its worst shape, when it borrows the mien of rudeness,
and impertinence, and effrontery, the appanage of those whose station is
most conspicuous, and whose dignity is best ascertained. There is more
good breeding in the cottage of a French peasant than in all the boudoirs
of Grosvenor Square.

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 Gout_ 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:--

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24