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twg_000012929800 | Ape Lincoln himself! There is no doubt much to be said for our long-heeled friends, whether with or without a hypocampus major. I am not very certain that we compliment them in the best taste when the handsomest thing we can say of them is, that they are very like ourselves! It is our human mode, however, of expressing admiration, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929801 | and resembles the exclamation of the Oberland peasant on seeing a pretty girl, How handsome shed be if she only had a _gotre!_ THE RULE NISI. A great many sea-captains discourage the use of life-preservers and floating-belts on board ships of war, on the simple ground that men should not be taught to rely for their safety on anything but | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929802 | what conduces to save the ship. Let there be but one thought, one effort, say they, and let that be for the common safety. If they be right--and I suspect they are--we have made a famous blunder by our late legislation about divorce. Of all the crafts that ever were launched, marriage is one from which fewest facilities of desertion | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929803 | should be provided. Romanism makes very few mistakes in worldly matters. There is no feature of that Church so remarkable as its deep study and thorough acquaintance with all the moods and wants and wishes of humanity. Whatever its demerits, one cannot but admit that no other religion ever approached it in intimacy with the human heart in all its | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929804 | emotions and in all its strivings, whether for good or evil. Rome declares against all breach of the marriage tie. The Church, with a spirit of concession it knows how to carry through all its dealings, modifies, softens, assuages, but never severs conjugalism. It makes the tie occasionally a slip-knot, but it never cuts the string, and I strongly suspect | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929805 | that it is wise in its legislation. For a great many years we gave the policy that amount of imitation we are wont to accord to Romanist practices; that is, we follow them in part--we adopt the coat, but, to show that we are not mere imitators, we cut off one of the skirts; and if we do not make | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929806 | the garment more graceful, we at least consult our dignity, and that is something. We made divorce the privilege of men rich enough to come to Parliament for relief; we did with the question what some one proposed we should do with poisons--make them so costly that only wealthy men should be able to afford the luxury of suicide. So | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929807 | long as men believed that divorce was immoral, I dont think any one complained that it should be limited to persons in affluence. We are a lord-loving race, we English, and are quite ready to concede that our superiors should have more vices than ourselves, just as they have more horses and more pheasants; and we deemed it nothing odd | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929808 | or strange that he, whose right it was to walk into the House of Peers, should walk out of matrimony when it suited him. Who knows?--perhaps we were flattered by the thought that great folk so far conceded to a vulgar prejudice as to marry at all. Perhaps we hailed their entrance into conjugalism as we are wont to do | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929809 | their appearance at a circus or a public garden--a graceful acknowledgment that they occasionally felt something like ourselves: at all events, we liked it, and we showed we liked it by the zeal with which we read those descriptions in newspapers of marriages in high life, and the delight with which we talked to each other of people we never | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929810 | saw, nor probably ever should see. It was not too much, therefore, to concede to them this privilege of escape. It was very condescending of them to come to the play at all; we had no right to insist that they should sit out the whole performance. By degrees, however, what with rich cotton-lords, and cheap cyclopaedias, and penny trains, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929811 | and popular lectures, there got up a sort of impression--it was mere impression for a long time--that great folk had more than their share of the puddings plums; and agitators began to bestir themselves. What were the privileges of the higher classes which would sit most gracefully on their inferiors? Naturally we bethought us of their vices. It was not | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929812 | always so easy to adopt my lords urbanity, his unassuming dignity, his well-bred ease; but one might reasonably aspire to be as wicked. Sabbath-breaking had long since ceased to be the privilege of the better classes, and so mens minds reverted to the question of divorce. Let us get rid of our wives! cried they; who knows but the day | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929813 | may come when we shall kill woodcocks? Now the law, in making divorce a very costly process, had simply desired to secure its infrequency. It was not really meant to be a rich mans privilege. What was sought for was to oppose as many obstacles as could be found, to throw in as many rocks as possible into the channel, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929814 | so that only he who was intently bent on navigating the stream would ever have the energy to clear the passage. Nobody ever dreamed of making it an open roadstead. In point of fact, the oft-boasted equality before the law is a myth. The penalty which a labourer could endure without hardship might break my lords heart; and in the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929815 | very case before us of divorce, nothing can possibly be more variable than the estimate formed of the divorced individuals, according to the class of society they move in. What would be a levity here, would be a serious immorality there; and a little lower down again, a mere domestic arrangement, slightly more decorous and a shade more legal than | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929816 | the old system of the halter and the public sale. It was declared, however, that this relief--that is the popular phrase in such matters--should be extended to the poor man. It was decided that the privilege to get rid of a wife was, as Mr Gladstone says of the electoral right, the inalienable claim of a freeman, and the only | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929817 | course was to lower the franchise. Let us own, too, we were ashamed, as we had good right to be ashamed, of our old _crim. con._ law. Foreigners, especially Frenchmen, had rung the changes on our coarse venality and corruption; and we had come to perceive--it took some time, though--that moneyed damages were scarcely the appropriate remedy for injured honour. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929818 | Last of all, free-trade notions had turned all our heads: we were for getting rid of all restrictions on every side; and we went about repeating to each other those wise saws about buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, and having whatever we wanted, and doing whatever we liked with our own. We are, there is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929819 | no denying it, a nation of shopkeepers; and the spirit of trade can be tracked through every relation of our lives. It is commerce gives the tone to all our dealings; and we have carried its enactments into the most sacred of all our institutions, and imparted a limited liability even to marriage. Cheapness became the desideratum of our age, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929820 | We insisted on cheap gloves and shoes and wine and ribbons, and why not cheap divorces? Philosophers tell us that the alternate action of the seasons is one of the purest and most enduring of all sources of enjoyment; that perpetual summer or spring would weary and depress; but in the ever-changing aspect of nature, and in the stimulation which | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929821 | diversity excites, we find an unfailing gratification. If, therefore, it be pleasant to be married, it may also be agreeable to be unmarried. It takes some time, however, before society accommodates itself to these new notions. The newly divorced, be it man or woman, comes into the world like a patient after the smallpox--you are not quite certain whether the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929822 | period of contagion is past, or if it be perfectly safe to go up and talk to him. In fact, you delay doing so till some strong-minded friend or other goes boldly forward and shakes the convalescent by the hand. Even still there will be timid people who know perhaps that their delicacy of constitution renders them peculiarly sensitive, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929823 | who will keep aloof after all. Of course, these and similar prejudices will give way to time. We have our Probate Court; and the phrase _co-respondent_ is now familiar as a household word. Now, however tempting the theme, I am not going to inquire whether we have done wisely or the reverse by this piece of legislation; whether, by instilling | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929824 | certain precepts of self-control, a larger spirit of accommodation, and a more conciliatory disposition generally, we might have removed some of the difficulties without the heroic remedy of the decree _nisi_; whether, in fact, it might not have been better to teach people to swim, or even float, rather than make this great issue of cheap life-belts. I am so | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929825 | practical that I rather address myself to profit by what is, than endeavour by any change to make it better. We live in a statistical age. We are eternally inquiring who it is wants this, who consumes that, who goes to such a place, who is liable to this or that malady. Classification is a passion with us; and we | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929826 | have bulky volumes to teach us what sorts of people have chest affections, what are most prone to stomachic diseases, who have ophthalmia, and who the gout. We are also instructed as to the kind of persons most disposed to insanity, and we have a copious list of occupations given us which more or less incline those who profess them | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929827 | to derangement. Even the Civil-Service Examiners have contributed their share to this mass of entertaining knowledge, and shown from what parts of the kingdom bad spellers habitually come, what counties are celebrated for cacography, and in what districts etymology is an unknown thing. Would it not, then, be a most interesting and instructive statistic that would give us a tabular | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929828 | view of divorce, showing in what classes frailty chiefly prevailed, with the relative sexes, and also a glimpse at the ages? Imagine what a light the statement would throw on the morality of classes, and what an incalculable benefit to parents in the choice of a career for their children! For instance, no sensible father would select a life of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929829 | out-door exposure for a weak-chested son, or make a sailor of one with an incurable sea-sickness. In the same way would he be guided by the character of his children as to the perils certain careers would expose them to. A passing glance at the lists of divorce shows us that no promovent--it is a delicate title, and I like | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929830 | it--no promovent figures oftener than a civil engineer. Now, how instructive to inquire why! What is there in embankments and earthworks and culverts that should dispose the wife of him who makes them to infidelity? Why should a tunnel only lead to domestic treachery? why must a cutting sever the heart that designs it? I do not know; I cannot | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929831 | even guess. My ingenuity stands stockstill at the question, and I can only re-echo, Why? Next amongst the predisposed come schoolmasters, plasterers, &c. What unseen thread runs through the woof of these natures, apparently so little alike? It is the boast of modern science to settle much that once was puzzling, and reconcile to a system what formerly appeared discordant. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929832 | How I wish some great Babbage-like intellect would bestir itself in this inquiry. Surely ethical questions are as well worthy of investigation as purely physical or mechanical ones, and yet we ignore them most ignominiously. We think no expense too great to test an Armstrong or a Whitworth gun; we spend thousands to ascertain how far it will carry, what | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929833 | destructive force it possesses, and how long it will resist explosion;--why not appoint a commission of this nature on conjugate; why not ascertain, if we can, what is the weak point in matrimony, and why are explosions so frequent? Is the cast system a bad one, and must we pronounce welding a failure? or, last of all, however wounding to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929834 | our national vanity, do they understand these things better in France? ON CLIMBING BOYS. With the common fate of all things human, it is said that every career and walk in life has some one peculiar disparagement--something that, attaching to the duties of the station as a sort of special grievance, serves to show that none of us, no matter | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929835 | how favoured, are to imagine there can be any lot exempted from its share of troubles. Ask the soldier, the sailor, the parson, the doctor, the lawyer, or the actor, and each will give you a friendly warning to adopt any other career than his own. In most cases the _quid amarum_, the one bitter drop, is to be found | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929836 | in the career itself, something that belongs to that one craft or calling; just as the white-lead colic, for instance, is the fatal malady of painters. There are, however, a few rare cases in which the detracting element attaches itself to the followers and not to the profession, as though it would seem there was a something in the daily | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929837 | working of that peculiar craft which warped the minds and coerced the natures of men to be different from what temperament and character should have made of them. The two classes which most prominently exhibit what I mean are somewhat socially separated, but they have a number of small analogies in common. They are Sweeps and Statesmen! It would be | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929838 | tempting--but I resist the temptation--to show how many points of resemblance unite them--how each works in the dark, in a small, narrow, confined sphere, without view or outlet; how the tendency of each is to scratch his way upwards and gain the top, caring wonderfully little how black and dirty the process has made him. One might even go farther, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929839 | and mark how, when indolence or weariness suggested sloth, the stimulus of a little fire underneath, whether a few lighted straws or a Birmingham mass-meeting, was sure to quicken progress and excite activity. Again, I make this statement on the faith of Lord Shaftesbury, who pronounced it before their Lordships in the Upper House:--It is no uncommon thing to buy | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929840 | and sell them. There is a regular traffic in them; and through the agency of certain women, not the models of their sex, you can get any quantity of them you want. Last of all, on the same high authority, we are told of their perfect inutility, since there is nothing that they do could not be better done by | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929841 | a machine. I resist, as I say, all temptations of this kind, and simply address myself to the one point of similarity between them which illustrates the theory with which I have started--and now to state this as formally as I am able. Let me declare that in all the varied employments of life I have never met with men | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929842 | who have the same dread of their possible successors as sweeps and statesmen. The whole aim and object of each is directed, first of all, to keep those who do their work as little as possible, well knowing that the time will come when these small creatures will find the space too confined for them, and set up for themselves. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929843 | A volume might be written on the subtle artifices adopted to keep them little--the browbeatings, the insults, the crushing cruelties, the spare diet intermixed with occasional stimulants, the irregular hours, and the heat and confinement of the sphere they work in. Still, nature is stronger than all these crafty contrivances. The little sweep will grow into the big sweep, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929844 | the small under-sec. will scratch his way up to the Cabinet I will not impose on my reader the burden of carrying along with him this double load. I will address myself simply to one of these careers--the Statesmans. It is a strange but a most unquestionable fact, that no other class of men are so ill-disposed to those who | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929845 | are the most likely to succeed them--not of an Opposition, for that would be natural enough, but of their own party, of their own colour, of their own rearing. Let us be just: when a man has long enjoyed place, power, and pre-eminence, dispensed honours and pensions and patronage, it is not a small trial to discover that one of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929846 | those little creatures he has made--whose first scraper and brush he himself paid for--I cant get rid of the sweep out of my head--will turn insolently on him and declare that he will no longer remain a subordinate, but go and set up for himself. This is excessively hard, and might try the temper of a man even without a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929847 | fit of the gout. It is exactly what has just happened; an apprentice, called Gladstone, having made a sort of connection in Manchester and Birmingham, a district abounding in tall chimneys, has given warning to his master Pam that he will not sweep any longer. He is a bold, aspiring sort of lad, and he is not satisfied with saying--as | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929848 | many others have done--that he is getting too broad-shouldered for his work; but he declares that the chimneys for the future must be all made bigger and the flues wider, just because he likes climbing, and doesnt mean to abandon it. There is no doubt of it. Manchester and Stockport and Birmingham have put this in his head. Their great | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929849 | smelting-houses and steam-power factories require big chimneys; and being an overbearing set of self-made vulgar fellows, they say they ought to be a law to all England. You dont want to make cotton-twist, or broad-gauge iron; so much the worse for you. It is the grandest object of humanity. Providence created men to manufacture printed cottons and cheap penknives. We | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929850 | of Manchester understand what our American friends call manifest destiny; we know and feel ours will be--to rule England. Once let us only introduce big chimneys, and youll see if you wont take to spinning-jennies and mules and treddles; and theres that climbing boy Gladstone declares hell not leave the business, but go up, no matter how dirty the flue, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929851 | the day we want him. Some shrewd folk, who see farther into the millstone than their neighbours, have hinted that this same boy is of a crotchety, intriguing type, full of his own ingenuity, and enamoured of his own subtlety; so that make the chimney how great you will, hell not go up it, but scratch out another flue for | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929852 | himself, and come out, heaven knows where or how. Indeed, they tell that on one occasion of an alarm of fire in the house--caused by a pantry-boy called Russell burning some wasterpaper instead of going up the chimney as he was ordered--this same Will began to tell how the Greeks had no chimneys, and a mass of antiquarian rubbish of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929853 | the same kind, so that his master, losing patience, exclaimed, Of all plagues in the world he knew of none to compare with these climbing boys! LINGUISTS There are two classes of people not a little thought of, and even caressed, in society, and for whom I have ever felt a very humble estimate--the men who play all manner of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929854 | games, and the men who speak several languages. I begin with the latter, and declare that, after a somewhat varied experience of life, I never met a linguist that was above a third-rate man; and I go farther, and aver, that I never chanced upon a really able man who had the talent for languages. I am well aware that | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929855 | it sounds something little short of a heresy to make this declaration. It is enough to make the blood of Civil-Service Commissioners run cold to hear it. It sounds illiberal--and, worse, it seems illogical. Why should any intellectual development imply deficiency? Why should an acquirement argue a defect? I answer, I dont know--any more than I know why sanguineous people | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929856 | are hot-tempered, and leuco-phlegmatic ones are more brooding in their wrath. If--for I do not ask to be anything higher than empirical--if I find that parsimonious people have generally thin noses, and that the snub is associated with the spendthrift, I never trouble myself with the demonstration, but I hug the fact, and endeavour to apply it. In the same | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929857 | spirit, if I hear a man in a salon change from French to German and thence diverge into Italian and Spanish, with possibly a brief excursion into something Scandinavian or Sclav--at home in each and all--I would no more think of associating him in my mind with anything responsible in station or commanding in intellect, than I should think of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929858 | connecting the servant that announced me with the last brilliant paper in the Quarterly. No man with a strongly-marked identity--and no really able man ever existed without such--can subordinate that identity so far as to put on the foreigner; and without this he never can attain that mastery of a foreign language that makes the linguist. To be able to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929859 | repeat conventionalities--bringing them in at the telling moment, adjusting phrases to emergencies, as a joiner adapts the pieces of wood to his carpentry--may be, and is, a very neat and a very dexterous performance, but it is scarcely the exercise to which a large capacity will address itself. Imitation must be, in one sense or other, the stronghold of the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929860 | linguist--imitation of expression, of style, of accent, of cadence, of tone. The linguist must not merely master grammar, but he must manage gutturals. The mimicry must go farther: in simulating expression it must affect the sentiment. You are not merely borrowing the clothes, but you are pretending to put on the feelings, the thoughts, the prejudices of the wearer. Now, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929861 | what man with a strong nature can merge himself so entirely in his fictitious being as not to burst the seams and tear the lining of a garment that only impedes the free action of his limbs, and actually threatens the very extinction of his respiration? It is not merely by their greater adaptiveness that women are better linguists than | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929862 | men; it is by their more delicate organisation, their more subdued identity, and their less obstreperous temperaments, which are consequently less egotistical, less redolent of the one individual self. And what is it that makes the men of mark or note, the cognate signs of human algebra, but these same characteristics; not always good, not always pleasant, not always genial, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929863 | but always associated with something that declares preeminence, and pronounces their owner to be a representative man? When Lord Ward replied to Prince Schwartzenbergs flippant remark on the bad French of English diplomatists by the apology, that we had not enjoyed the advantage of having our capital cities so often occupied by French troops as some of our neighbours, he | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929864 | uttered not merely a smart epigram but a great philosophical truth. It was not alone that we had not possessed the opportunity to pick up an accent, but that we had not subordinated our minds and habits to French modes and ways of thought, and that the tone and temper of the French people had not been beaten into us | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929865 | by the roll of a French drum. One may buy an accomplishment too dearly. It is possible to pay too much even for a Parisian pronunciation! Not only have I never found a linguist a man of eminence, but I have never seen a linguist who talked well. Fluent they are, of course, like the Stecknadel gun of the Prussians, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929866 | they can fire without cessation, but, like the same weapon, they are comparatively aimless. It is a _feu roulant_, with plenty of noise and some smoke, but very few casualties announce the success. The greatest linguist of modern Europe, Mezzofanti, was a most inferior man. Of the countries whose dialect he spoke to perfection, he knew nothing. An old dictionary | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929867 | would have been to the full as companionable. I find it very hard not to be personal just now, and give a list--it would be a long one--of all the tiresome people I know, who talk four, five, some of them six modern languages perfectly. It is only with an effort I abstain from mentioning the names of some well-known | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929868 | men who are the charming people at Borne and Vienna every winter, and each summer are the delight of Ems, of Berlin, and of Ischl. What tyrants these fellows are, too, over the men who have not got their gift of tongues! how they out-talk them and overbear them! with what an insolent confidence they fall back upon the petty | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929869 | superiority of their fluency, and lord it over those who are immeasurably their masters! Just as Blondin might run along the rigging of a three-decker, and pretend that his agility entitled him to command a squadron! Nothing, besides, is more imposing than the mock eloquence of good French. The language in itself is so adaptive, it is so felicitous, it | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929870 | abounds in such innumerable pleasant little analogies, such nice conceits and suggestive drolleries, that he who acquires these has at will a whole armoury of attack and defence. It actually requires years of habit to accustom us to a display that we come at last to discover implies no brilliancy whatever in him who exhibits, though it argues immense resources | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929871 | in the treasury from which he derives this wealth. I have known scores of delightful talkers--Frenchmen--who had no other charm than what their language lent them. They were neither profound, nor cultivated, nor witty--some were not even shrewd or acute; but all were pleasant--pleasant in the use of a conversational medium, of which the world has not the equal--a language | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929872 | that has its set form of expression for every social eventuality, and that hits to a nicety every contingency of the salon; for it is no more the language of natural people than the essence of the perfumers shop is the odour of a field flower. It is pre-eminently the medium of people who talk with tall glasses before them, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929873 | and an incense of truffles around them, and well-dressed women--clever and witty, and not over-scrupulous in their opinions--for their company. Then, French is unapproachable; English would be totally unsuited to the occasion, and German even more so. There is a flavour of sauer kraut about that unhappy tongue that would vulgarise a Queen if she talked it. To attain, therefore, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929874 | the turns and tricks of this language--for it is a Chinese puzzle in its involvements--what a life must a man have led! What terms he must have put in at cafs and restaurants! What seasons at small theatres--tripots and worse! What nights at bals-masqus, Chateaux des Fleurs, and Cadrans rouges et bleus! What doubtful company he must have often kept! | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929875 | What company a little more than doubtful occasionally! What iniquities of French romance must he have read, with all the cardinal virtues arrayed as the evil destinies of humanity, and every wickedness paraded as that natural expansion of the heart which alone raises man above the condition of the brute! I ask, if proficiency must imply profligacy, would you not | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929876 | rather find a man break down in his verbs than in his virtue? Would you not prefer a little inaccuracy in his declensions to a total forgetfulness of the decalogue? And, lastly of all, what man of real eminence could have masqueraded--for it is masquerading--for years in this motley, and come out, after all, with even a rag of his | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929877 | identity? Many people would scruple to play at cards with a stranger whose mode of dealing and general manipulation of the pack bespoke daily familiarity with the play-table. They would infer that he was a regular and professional gambler. In the very same way, and for the selfsame reason, would I carefully avoid any close intimacy with the Englishman of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929878 | fluent French, well knowing he could not have graduated in that perfection save at a certain price. But it is not at the moral aspect of the question I desire particularly to look. I assert--and I repeat my assertion--that these talkers of many tongues are poor creatures. There is no initiative in them--they suggest nothing--they are vendors of second-hand wares, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929879 | and are not always even good selectors of what they sell. It is only in narrative that they are at all endurable. They can _raconter_, certainly; and so long as they go from salon to salon repeating in set phrase some little misadventure or accident of the day, they are amusing; but this is not conversation, and they do not | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929880 | converse. Every time a man acquires a new language, is he a new man? is supposed to have been a saying of Charles V.--a sentiment that, if he uttered it, means more of sarcasm than of praise; for it is the very putting off a mans identity that establishes his weakness. All real force of character excludes dualism. Every eminent, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929881 | every able man has a certain integrity in his nature that rejects this plasticity. It is a very common habit, particularly with newspaper writers, to ascribe skill in languages, and occasionally in games, to distinguished people. It was but the other day we were told that Garibaldi spoke ten languages fluently. Now Garibaldi is not really master of two. He | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929882 | speaks French tolerably; and his native language is not Italian, but a patois-Genoese. Cavour was called a linguist with almost as little truth; but people repeat the story, just as they repeat that Napoleon I. was a great chess-player. If his statecraft and his strategy had been on a par with his chess, we should never have heard of Tilsit | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929883 | or Wagram. Lord Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington, and George Canning, each of whom administered our foreign policy with no small share of success, were not linguists; and as to Charles Fox, he has left a French sentence on record that will last even as long as his own great name. I do not want to decry the study of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929884 | languages; I simply desire to affirm that linguists--and through all I have said I mean colloquial linguists--are for the most part poor creatures, not otherwise distinguished than by the gift of tongues; and I want to protest against the undue pre-eminence accorded to the possessors of a small accomplishment, and the readiness with which the world, especially the world of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929885 | society, awards homage to an acquirement in which a boarding-school Miss can surpass Lord Brougham. I mean to say a word or two about those who have skill in games; but as they are of a higher order of intelligence, Ill wait till I have got fresh wind ere I treat of _them_. THE OLD CONJURORS AND THE NEW. As | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929886 | there are few better tests of the general health of an individual than in the things he imagines to be injurious to him, so there is no surer evidence of the delicate condition of a State than in the character of those who are assumed to be dangerous to it. Now, after all that has been said of Rome and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929887 | the corruptions of Roman government, I do not know anything so decidedly damnatory as the fact, to which allusion was lately made in Parliament, that the Papal Government had ordered Mr Home, the spiritualist, to quit the city and the States of his Holiness, and not to return to them. In what condition, I would ask, must a country be | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929888 | when such a man is regarded as dangerous? and in what aspect of his character does the danger consist? Do we want ghosts or spirits to reveal to us any more of the iniquities of that State than we already know? Is there a detail of its corrupt administration that the press of Europe has not spread broadcast over the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929889 | world? What could Mr Home and all his spirits tell us of peculation, theft, subornation, bigotry, and oppression, that the least observant traveller has not brought home with him? And then, as to the man himself, how puerile it is to give him this importance! The solitary bit of cleverness about him is his statement that he has no control | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929890 | whatever over the spirits that attend him. Asking him not to summon them, is pretty like asking Mr Windham not to send for his creditors. They come pretty much as they like, and probably their visits are about equally profitable. In this respect Home belongs to a very low order of his art. When Bosco promises to make a bouquet | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929891 | out of a mouse-trap, or Houdin engages to concoct a batter-pudding in your hat, each keeps his word. There is no subterfuge about the temper the spirits may happen to be in, or of their willingness or unwillingness to present themselves. The thing is done, and we see it--or we think we see it, which comes much to the same. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929892 | With this provision of escape Mr Home secures himself against all failure. Should, for instance, the audience prove to be of a more discriminating and observant character than he liked or anticipated, and the exhibition in consequence be rendered critical, all he had to do was, to aver that the spirits would not come; it was no breakdown on _his_ | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929893 | part Homer was sulky, or Dante was hipped, or Lord Bacon was indisposed to meet company, and there was the end of it. You were invited to meet celebrities, but it was theirs to say if they would present themselves. On the other hand, when the proper element of credulity offered--when the sance was comprised of the select few, emotional, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929894 | sensitive, and hysterical as they ought to be--when the nervous lady sat beside the timid gentleman, and neuralgia confronted confirmed dyspepsia--the artist could afford to be daring, and might venture on flights that astounded even himself. What limit is there, besides, to contagional sympathy? Look at the crowded theatre, with its many-minded spectators, and see how one impulse, communicated occasionally | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929895 | by a hireling, will set the whole mass in a ferment of enthusiastic delight. Mark, too, how the smile, that plays like an eddy on a lake, deepens into a laugh, and is caught up by another and another, till the whole storm breaks out in a hearty ocean of merriment. These, if you like, are spirits; but the great | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929896 | masters of them are not men like Mr Home--they have ever been, and still are, of a very different order. Shakespeare and Molire and Cervantes knew something of the mode to summon these imps, and could make them come at their bidding besides. Was it--to come back to what I started with--was it in any spirit of rivalry that the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929897 | Papal Government drove Mr Home out of Home? Was it that, assuming to have a monopoly in the wares he dealt in, they would not stand a contraband trade? If so, their ground is at least defensible; for what chance of attraction would there be for the winking Virgin in competition with him who could make a young lady ascend | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929898 | to the ceiling, and come slowly down like a parachute!--a spiritual fact I have heard from witnesses who really, so far as character went, might challenge any incredulity. If the Cardinals were jealous of the Conjuror, the thing is intelligible enough, and one must feel a certain degree of sympathy with the old-established firm that had spent such enormous sums, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000012929899 | and made such stupendous preparations, when a pretender like this could come into competition with them, without any other properties than could be carried conveniently about him. But let us be practical The Popes Government demanded of Mr Home that he should have no dealings with the Evil One during his stay at Rome. Now, I ask, what should we | 60 | gutenberg |
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