Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.

A COMMONPLACE BOOK

OF

Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.

PART I.—ETHICS AND CHARACTER. PART II.—LITERATURE AND ART.

BY MRS. JAMESON.

“Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,—à la française!”—Montaigne.

With Illustrations and Etchings.

SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.

LONDON: LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS. 1855.

v

PREFACE.

I must be allowed to say a few words in explanation of the contents of this little volume, which is truly what its name sets forth—a book of common-places, and nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have ventured to place before the public, aspired to teach, (being myself a learner in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my best to deserve the indulgence I have met with; and it would pain me if it could be supposed that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or careless.

For many years I have been accustomed to make a memorandum of any thought which might come across me—(if pen and paper were at hand), and to mark (and remark) any passage in a book which excited either a sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection of notes accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare’s Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, and various other productions, sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, withvi a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be done with the fragments which remained—without beginning, and without end—links of a hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as unconnected fragments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path, sometimes devious enough, of an “inquiring spirit,” even by

the little pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.

A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do good only in one way. It may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of sympathy and reflection; excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement; and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind, suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to be found here to higher and more productive minds. If I had not the humble hope of such a possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that creative faculty which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and world-experience into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.

The passages from books are not, strictly speaking, selected; they are not given here on any principle of choice, but simply because that by some process of assimilation they became a part of the individual mind. They “found me,”—to borrow Coleridge’s expression,—“found me in some depth of my being;” I did not “find them.”

vii

For the rest, all those passages which are marked by inverted commas must be regarded as borrowed, though I have not always been able to give my authority. All passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original or new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free discursive mind. Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which the variable winds have shaken from the tree: some ripe, some “harsh and crude.”

Wordsworth’s famous poem of “The Happy Warrior” (of which a new application will be found at page 87.), is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to have been first suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as well as to the Duke of Wellington; all which serves to illustrate my position, that the lines in question are equally applicable to any man or any woman whose moral standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.

With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be necessary to state that it was written in 1848. The first three paragraphs were inserted in the Art Journal for April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole into a comprehensive essay on “Subjects fitted for Artistic Treatment;” but this being now impossible, the fragment is given as originally written; others may think it out, and apply it better than I shall live to do.

August, 1854.

viii

ix

CONTENTS.

PART I.

Ethics and Character.

xii

Theological.

PART II.

Literature and Art.

LIST OF ETCHINGS.

PART I.

Ethics and Character.

1

Ethical Fragments.

1.

Bacon says, how wisely! that “there is often as great vanity in withdrawing and retiring men’s conceits from the world, as in obtruding them.” Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty. When I see people haunted by the idea of self,—spreading their hands before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other face, as if the world were to them like a2 French drawing-room, panelled with looking glass,—always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled modesty,—always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,—when I see all this, as I have seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,—they do well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But

to others, fame is “love disguised,” the love that answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,—if not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if those who can bring nothing or will bring nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon, call out “VANITY!”

3

2.

There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes again a vital truth.

3.

It It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article, or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.

Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it no part of his own life 4 and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)

Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Ruskin’s last volume of “The Stones of Venice” (the Sea Stories). As I do not always subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.

“We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:—divided into mere segments of men,—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points are polished—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be 5 discerned for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men,—we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit,

never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one way,—not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show them their misery; and to preach to them—if we do nothing more than preach,—is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour.” ...

“We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative; whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often working, 6 and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”

Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:

And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin calls the thinking, classes of the community.

It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are better; but even jewels and trinkets are7 sometimes to be preferred to mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.

4.

We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word “soul.” She interrupted to ask, “What is soul?”

“That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,——”

“And aches?” she added eagerly.8

5.

I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell’s Life of Johnson that “it is a theory which every one knows to be false in fact, that virtue in real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery.” I should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not false but true: that virtue does produce happiness, and vice does produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By happiness, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity. By virtue, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are predominant; the whole being is in that state of

harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse 9 of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.

And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with the absence of the benevolent propensities,—these constitute misery as a state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had 12,000l. a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends; very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreasonable exigéance with regard to things, without any high standard with regard to persons,—these made the misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.

I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this philosophy of happiness, “the philosophy of the frying-pan.” But this was like 10 the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes, something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure—is as sublime a thing as virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them.

6.

Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God’s blessed sunshine—Tristi fummo nel’ aer dolce; and in some of the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.

Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and goodness to consist in “a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfaction.”

What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has 11 become too customary to place him before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of Christ in Raphael’s Transfiguration should rather be our ideal of Him who came “to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

7.

A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially true of C——: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that “the wisdom that is from above is gentle.” He is a man who carries his bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near,12 are dark, because perversely he will not throw the light of his mind upon them.

8.

Wilhelm von humboldt says, “Old letters lose their vitality.”

Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so dangerous to keep some letters,—so wicked to burn others.

9.

A man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once, or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,—is indeed a slight thing. Now, whence13 this difference? Is not truth as dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes this distinction,—one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?

10.

It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up his arms while he prayed.

“Ce qui est moins que moi m’éteint et m’assomme; ce qui est à côté de moi m’ennuie et me fatigue. II n’y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui me soutienne et m’arrache à moi-même.”

11.

There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened through long practice of14 iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so that men’s hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live not in the heart of the writer,—only in his head.

And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,—who are never weary of holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.

Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar with evil?

12.

“Thought and theory,” said Wordsworth, “must precede all action that moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.”

15

Yes, and no. What we act has its consequences on earth. What we think, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old rhymester hath it:

The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the most expedient.

On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed the first impulse, O. G. said, “In good minds the first impulses are generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the negative,—it is the vulgar side of every thing.”