Upton Sinclair - "The Metropolis"

John Greenleaf Whittier - "Personal Sketches and Tributes, Part 2, From Volume VI.,"

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Table Talk, Essays on Men and Manners

W >> William Hazlitt >> Table Talk, Essays on Men and Manners




Those joys are lodg'd beyond the reach of fate.

It is not, however, attempted to be denied that though the future is
nothing at present, and has no immediate interest while we are speaking,
yet it is of the utmost consequence in itself, and of the utmost
interest to the individual, because it will have a real existence, and
we have an idea of it as existing in time to come. Well, then, the past
also has no real existence; the actual sensation and the interest
belonging to it are both fled; but it _has had_ a real existence, and we
can still call up a vivid recollection of it as having once been; and
therefore, by parity of reasoning, it is not a thing perfectly
insignificant in itself, nor wholly indifferent to the mind whether it
ever was or not. Oh no! Far from it! Let us not rashly quit our hold
upon the past, when perhaps there may be little else left to bind us to
existence. Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or
miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been
one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a
dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure
fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and the
records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender
regret to that which was at one time to me my all, when I revive the
glowing image of some bright reality,

The thoughts of which can never from my heart?

Do I then muse on nothing, do I bend my eyes on nothing, when I turn
back in fancy to 'those suns and skies so pure' that lighted up my early
path? Is it to think of nothing, to set an idle value upon nothing, to
think of all that has happened to me, an of all that can ever interest
me? Or, to use the language of a fine poet (who is himself among my
earliest and not least painful recollections)--

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever vanish'd from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r--

yet am I mocked with a lie when I venture to think of it? Or do I not
drink in and breathe again the air of heavenly truth when I but 'retrace
its footsteps, and its skirts far off adore'? I cannot say with the same
poet--

And see how dark the backward stream,
A little moment past so smiling--

for it is the past that gives me most delight and most assurance of
reality. What to me constitutes the great charm of the _Confessions_ of
Rousseau is their turning so much upon this feeling. He seems to gather
up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a
precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the
bead-roll that he tells over and piously worships; he makes a rosary of
the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years. When he
begins the last of the _Reveries of a Solitary Walker_, 'Il y a
aujourd'hui, jour des Paques Fleuris, cinquante ans depuis que j'ai
premier vu Madame Warens,' what a yearning of the soul is implied in
that short sentence! Was all that had happened to him, all that he had
thought and felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted nothing?
Was that long, dim, faded retrospect of years happy or miserable--a
blank that was not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint within him
in trying to grasp all that had once filled it and that had since
vanished, because it was not a prospect into futurity? Was he wrong in
finding more to interest him in it than in the next fifty years--which
he did not live to see? Or if he had, what then? Would they have been
worth thinking of, compared with the times of his youth, of his first
meeting with Madame Warens, with those times which he has traced with
such truth and pure delight 'in our heart's tables'? When 'all the life
of life was flown,' was he not to live the first and best part of it
over again, and once more be all that he then was?--Ye woods that crown
the clear lone brow of Norman Court, why do I revisit ye so oft, and
feel a soothing consciousness of your presence, but that your high tops
waving in the wind recall to me the hours and years that are for ever
fled; that ye renew in ceaseless murmurs the story of long-cherished
hopes and bitter disappointment; that in your solitudes and tangled
wilds I can wander and lose myself as I wander on and am lost in the
solitude of my own heart; and that as your rustling branches give the
loud blast to the waste below--borne on the thoughts of other years, I
can look down with patient anguish at the cheerless desolation which I
feel within! Without that face pale as the primrose with hyacinthine
locks, for ever shunning and for ever haunting me, mocking my waking
thoughts as in a dream; without that smile which my heart could never
turn to scorn; without those eyes dark with their own lustre, still bent
on mine, and drawing the soul into their liquid mazes like a sea of
love; without that name trembling in fancy's ear; without that form
gliding before me like Oread or Dryad in fabled groves, what should I
do? how pass away the listless, leaden-footed hours? Then wave, wave
on, ye woods of Tuderley, and lift your high tops in the air; my sighs
and vows uttered by our mystic voice breathe into me my former being,
and enable me to bear the thing I am!--The objects that we have known in
better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our
affections, and give us strength to await our future lot. The future is
like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view; the
past is alive and stirring with objects, bright or solemn, and of
unfading interest. What is it in fact that we recur to oftenest? What
subjects do we think or talk of? Not the ignorant future, but the
well-stored past. Othello, the Moor of Venice, amused himself and his
hearers at the house of Signor Brabantio by 'running through the story
of his life even from his boyish days'; and oft 'beguiled them of their
tears, when he did speak of some disastrous stroke which his youth
suffered.' This plan of ingratiating himself would not have answered if
the past had been, like the contents of an old almanac, of no use but to
be thrown aside and forgotten. What a blank, for instance, does the
history of the world for the next six thousand years present to the
mind, compared with that of the last! All that strikes the imagination
or excites any interest in the mighty scene is _what has been_![2]

***

Neither in itself, then, nor as a subject of general contemplation, has
the future any advantage over the past. But with respect to our grosser
passions and pursuits it has. As far as regards the appeal to the
understanding or the imagination, the past is just as good, as real, of
as much intrinsic and ostensible value as the future; but there is
another principle in the human mind, the principle of action or will;
and of this the past has no hold, the future engrosses it entirely to
itself. It is this strong lever of the affections that gives so
powerful a bias to our sentiments on this subject, and violently
transposes the natural order of our associations. We regret the
pleasures we have lost, and eagerly anticipate those which are to come:
we dwell with satisfaction on the evils from which we have escaped
(_Posthaec meminisse iuvabit_)--and dread future pain. The good that is
past is in this sense like money that is spent, which is of no further
use, and about which we give ourselves little concern. The good we
expect is like a store yet untouched, and in the enjoyment of which we
promise ourselves infinite gratification. What has happened to us we
think of no consequence: what is to happen to us, of the greatest. Why
so? Simply because the one is still in our power, and the other
not--because the efforts of the will to bring any object to pass or to
prevent it strengthen our attachment or aversion to that object--because
the pains and attention bestowed upon anything add to our interest in
it--and because the habitual and earnest pursuit of any end redoubles
the ardour of our expectations, and converts the speculative and
indolent satisfaction we might otherwise feel in it into real passion.
Our regrets, anxiety, and wishes are thrown away upon the past; but the
insisting on the importance of the future is of the utmost use in aiding
our resolutions and stimulating our exertions. If the future were no
more amenable to our wills than the past; if our precautions, our
sanguine schemes, our hopes and fears were of as little avail in the one
case as the other; if we could neither soften our minds to pleasure, nor
steel our fortitude to the resistance of pain beforehand; if all objects
drifted along by us like straws or pieces of wood in a river, the will
being purely passive, and as little able to avert the future as to
arrest the past, we should in that case be equally indifferent to both;
that is, we should consider each as they affected the thoughts and
imagination with certain sentiments of approbation or regret, but
without the importunity of action, the irritation of the will, throwing
the whole weight of passion and prejudice into one scale, and leaving
the other quite empty. While the blow is coming, we prepare to meet it,
we think to ward off or break its force, we arm ourselves with patience
to endure what cannot be avoided, we agitate ourselves with fifty
needless alarms about it; but when the blow is struck, the pang is over,
the struggle is no longer necessary, and we cease to harass or torment
ourselves about it more than we can help. It is not that the one
belongs to the future and the other to time past; but that the one is a
subject of action, of uneasy apprehension, of strong passion, and that
the other has passed wholly out of the sphere of action into the region
of

Calm contemplation and majestic pains.[3]

It would not give a man more concern to know that he should be put to
the rack a year hence, than to recollect that he had been put to it a
year ago, but that he hopes to avoid the one, whereas he must sit down
patiently under the consciousness of the other. In this hope he wears
himself out in vain struggles with fate, and puts himself to the rack of
his imagination every day he has to live in the meanwhile. When the
event is so remote or so independent of the will as to set aside the
necessity of immediate action, or to baffle all attempts to defeat it,
it gives us little more disturbance or emotion than if it had already
taken place, or were something to happen in another state of being, or
to an indifferent person. Criminals are observed to grow more anxious
as their trial approaches; but after their sentence is passed, they
become tolerably resigned, and generally sleep sound the night before
its execution.

It in some measure confirms this theory, that men attach more or less
importance to past and future events according as they are more or less
engaged in action and the busy scenes of life. Those who have a fortune
to make, or are in pursuit of rank and power, think little of the past,
for it does not contribute greatly to their views: those who have
nothing to do but to think, take nearly the same interest in the past as
in the future. The contemplation of the one is as delightful and real
as that of the other. The season of hope has an end; but the
remembrance of it is left. The past still lives in the memory of those
who have leisure to look back upon the way that they have trod, and can
from it 'catch-glimpses that may make them less forlorn.' The
turbulence of action, and uneasiness of desire, must point to the
future: it is only in the quiet innocence of shepherds, in the
simplicity of pastoral ages, that a tomb was found with this
inscription--'I ALSO WAS AN ARCADIAN!'

Though I by no means think that our habitual attachment to life is in
exact proportion to the value of the gift, yet I am not one of those
splenetic persons who affect to think it of no value at all. _Que peu
de chose est la vie humaine_, is an exclamation in the mouths of
moralists and philosophers, to which I cannot agree. It is little, it
is short, it is not worth having, if we take the last hour, and leave
out all that has gone before, which has been one way of looking at the
subject. Such calculators seem to say that life is nothing when it is
over, and that may in their sense be true. If the old rule--_Respice
finem_--were to be made absolute, and no one could be pronounced
fortunate till the day of his death, there are few among us whose
existence would, upon those conditions, be much to be envied. But this
is not a fair view of the case. A man's life is his whole life, not the
last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable,
and not a _little matter_, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains.
To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannuated
desires or forgetful indifference is about as reasonable as to say, a
man never was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he
is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend
on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged
of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor
last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two--not our
exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do, feel, and think
while there--that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it.
Indeed it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human
life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory
and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another,
the hours, months, years spent in one fond pursuit after another; that
it is, in a word, the length of our common journey and the quantity of
events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual
perception, make it slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in
its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing!
It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to
hold its striking groups, its endless subjects! It is light as vanity,
and yet if all its weary moments, if all its head and heart aches were
compressed into one, what fortitude would not be overwhelmed with the
blow! What a huge heap, a 'huge, dumb heap,' of wishes, thoughts,
feelings, anxious cares, soothing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is
composed of! How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and
intense, often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or
reading, for instance! How many such days are there in a year, how many
years in a long life, still occupied with something interesting, still
recalling some old impression, still recurring to some difficult
question and making progress in it, every step accompanied with a sense
of power, and every moment conscious of 'the high endeavour or the glad
success'; for the mind seizes only on that which keeps it employed, and
is wound up to a certain pitch of pleasurable excitement or lively
solicitude, by the necessity of its own nature. The division of the map
of life into its component parts is beautifully made by King Henry
VI.:--

Oh God! methinks it were a happy life
To be no better than a homely swain,
To sit upon a hill as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run
How many make the hour full complete,
How many hours bring about the day,
How many days will finish up the year,
How many years a mortal man may live:
When this is known, then to divide the times;
So many hours must I tend my flock,
So many hours must I take my rest,
So many hours must I contemplate,
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young,
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean,
So many months ere I shall shear the fleece:
So many minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years
Past over to the end they were created,
Would bring grey hairs unto a quiet grave.

I myself am neither a king nor a shepherd: books have been my fleecy
charge, and my thoughts have been my subjects. But these have found me
sufficient employment at the time, and enough to think of for the time
to come.

The passions contract and warp the natural progress of life. They
paralyse all of it that is not devoted to their tyranny and caprice.
This makes the difference between the laughing innocence of childhood,
the pleasantness of youth, and the crabbedness of age. A load of cares
lies like a weight of guilt upon the mind: so that a man of business
often has all the air, the distraction and restlessness and hurry of
feeling of a criminal. A knowledge of the world takes away the freedom
and simplicity of thought as effectually as the contagion of its
example. The artlessness and candour of our early years are open to all
impressions alike, because the mind is not clogged and preoccupied with
other objects. Our pleasures and our pains come single, make room for
one another, and the spring of the mind is fresh and unbroken, its
aspect clear and unsullied. Hence 'the tear forgot as soon as shed, the
sunshine of the breast.' But as we advance farther, the will gets
greater head. We form violent antipathies and indulge exclusive
preferences. We make up our minds to some one thing, and if we cannot
have that, will have nothing. We are wedded to opinion, to fancy, to
prejudice; which destroys the soundness of our judgments, and the
serenity and buoyancy of our feelings. The chain of habit coils itself
round the heart, like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it. It grows rigid
and callous; and for the softness and elasticity of childhood, full of
proud flesh and obstinate tumours. The violence and perversity of our
passions come in more and more to overlay our natural sensibility and
well-grounded affections; and we screw ourselves up to aim only at those
things which are neither desirable nor practicable. Thus life passes
away in the feverish irritation of pursuit and the certainty of
disappointment. By degrees, nothing but this morbid state of feeling
satisfies us: and all common pleasures and cheap amusements are
sacrificed to the demon of ambition, avarice, or dissipation. The
machine is overwrought: the parching heat of the veins dries up and
withers the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy; and any pause, any release
from the rack of ecstasy on which we are stretched, seems more
insupportable than the pangs which we endure. We are suspended between
tormenting desires and the horrors of _ennui_. The impulse of the will,
like the wheels of a carriage going down hill, becomes too strong for
the driver, Reason, and cannot be stopped nor kept within bounds. Some
idea, some fancy, takes possession of the brain; and however ridiculous,
however distressing, however ruinous, haunts us by a sort of fascination
through life.

Not only is this principle of excessive irritability to be seen at work
in our more turbulent passions and pursuits, but even in the formal
study of arts and sciences, the same thing takes place, and undermines
the repose and happiness of life. The eagerness of pursuit overcomes
the satisfaction to result from the accomplishment. The mind is
overstrained to attain its purpose; and when it is attained, the ease
and alacrity necessary to enjoy it are gone. The irritation of action
does not cease and go down with the occasion for it; but we are first
uneasy to get to the end of our work, and then uneasy for want of
something to do. The ferment of the brain does not of itself subside
into pleasure and soft repose. Hence the disposition to strong stimuli
observable in persons of much intellectual exertion to allay and carry
off the over-excitement. The _improvisatori_ poets (it is recorded by
Spence in his _Anecdotes of Pope_) cannot sleep after an evening's
continued display of their singular and difficult art. The rhymes keep
running in their head in spite of themselves, and will not let them
rest. Mechanics and labouring people never know what to do with
themselves on a Sunday, though they return to their work with greater
spirit for the relief, and look forward to it with pleasure all the
week. Sir Joshua Reynolds was never comfortable out of his
painting-room, and died of chagrin and regret because he could not paint
on to the last moment of his life. He used to say that he could go on
retouching a picture for ever, as long as it stood on his easel; but as
soon as it was once fairly out of the house, he never wished to see it
again. An ingenious artist of our own time has been heard to declare,
that if ever the Devil got him into his clutches, he would set him to
copy his own pictures. Thus secure, self-complacent retrospect to what
is done is nothing, while the anxious, uneasy looking forward to what is
to come is everything. We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it
should retard our future progress; the indulgence of ease is fatal to
excellence; and to succeed in life, we lose the ends of being!



NOTES to ESSAY III


[1] If we take away from the _present_ the moment that Is just by and
the moment that is next to come, how much of it will be left for this
plain, practical theory to rest upon? Their solid basis of sense and
reality will reduce itself to a pin's point, a hair line, on which our
moral balance-masters will have some difficulty to maintain their
footing without falling over on either side.

[2] A treatise on the Millennium is dull; but who was ever weary of
reading the fables of the Golden Age? On my once observing I should
like to have been Claude, a person said, 'they should not, for that then
by this time it would have been all over with them.' As if it could
possibly signify when we live (save and excepting the present minute),
or as if the value of human life decreased or increased with successive
centuries. At that rate, we had better have our life still to come at
some future period, and so postpone our existence century after century
_ad infinitum_.

[3] In like manner, though we know that an event must have taken place
at a distance, long before we can hear the result, yet as long as we
remain in Ignorance of it, we irritate ourselves about it, and suffer
all the agonies of suspense, as if it was still to come; but as soon as
our uncertainty is removed, our fretful impatience vanishes, we resign
ourselves to fate, and make up our minds to what has happened as well as
we can.



ESSAY IV


ON GENIUS AND COMMON SENSE


We hear it maintained by people of more gravity than understanding, that
genius and taste are strictly reducible to rules, and that there is a
rule for everything. So far is it from being true that the finest
breath of fancy is a definable thing, that the plainest common sense is
only what Mr. Locke would have called a _mixed mode_, subject to a
particular sort of acquired and undefinable tact. It is asked, "If you
do not know the rule by which a thing is done, how can you be sure of
doing it a second time?" And the answer is, "If you do not know the
muscles by the help of which you walk, how is it you do not fall down at
every step you take?" In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide
from feeling, and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a
number of things on the mind, from which impression is true and well
founded, though you may not be able to analyse or account for it in the
several particulars. In a gesture you use, in a look you see, in a tone
you hear, you judge of the expression, propriety, and meaning from
habit, not from reason or rules; that is to say, from innumerable
instances of like gestures, looks, and tones, in innumerable other
circumstances, variously modified, which are too many and too refined to
be all distinctly recollected, but which do not therefore operate the
less powerfully upon the mind and eye of taste. Shall we say that these
impressions (the immediate stamp of nature) do not operate in a given
manner till they are classified and reduced to rules, or is not the rule
itself grounded, upon the truth and certainty of that natural operation?

How then can the distinction of the understanding as to the manner in
which they operate be necessary to their producing their due and uniform
effect upon the mind? If certain effects did not regularly arise out of
certain causes in mind as well as matter, there could be no rule given
for them: nature does not follow the rule, but suggests it. Reason is
the interpreter and critic of nature and genius, not their law-giver and
judge. He must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do
not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding, or who does
not feel and know much more than he can give a reason for. Hence the
distinction between eloquence and wisdom, between ingenuity and common
sense. A man may be dexterous and able in explaining the grounds of his
opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, because he only sees one-half
of a subject. Another may feel the whole weight of a question, nothing
relating to it may be lost upon him, and yet he may be able to give no
account of the manner in which it affects him, or to drag his reasons
from their silent lurking-places. This last will be a wise man, though
neither a logician nor rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. Johnson
in argument; that is, in assigning the specific grounds of his opinions:
Dr. Johnson was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the airy,
intuitive faculty with which he skimmed the surfaces of things, and
unconsciously formed his Opinions. Common sense is the just result of
the sum total of such unconscious impressions in the ordinary
occurrences of life, as they are treasured up in the memory, and called
out by the occasion. Genius and taste depend much upon the same
principle exercised on loftier ground and in more unusual combinations.

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