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Page 15
This is the difference between social and individual man. Not that
this distinction is to be considered definite, or characteristic
of one human being as compared with another; it denotes rather two
classes of agency, common in a degree to every human being. None
is exempt, indeed, from that species of influence which affects, as
it were, the surface of his being, and gives the specific outline
to his conduct. Almost all that is ostensible submits to that
legislature created by the general representation of the past
feelings of mankind--imperfect as it is from a variety of causes,
as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits.
Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power.
The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape
it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and
his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured
from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on
examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages
from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted
otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions,
derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any
external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident
of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is
cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities
which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock
continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its
odour in whatever soil it may grow.
We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all that
in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others;
and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge.
It is in the differences that it actually consists.
[1815; publ. 1840]
ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS
A FRAGMENT
The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the
death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself,
or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon
the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in
the history of the world. What was the combination of moral and
political circumstances which produced so unparalleled a progress
during that period in literature and the arts;--why that progress,
so rapid and so sustained, so soon received a check, and became
retrograde,--are problems left to the wonder and conjecture of
posterity. The wrecks and fragments of those subtle and profound
minds, like the ruins of a fine statue, obscurely suggest to us the
grandeur and perfection of the whole. Their very language--a type
of the understandings of which it was the creation and the image--in
variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and in copiousness, excels
every other language of the western world. Their sculptures are
such as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models of ideal
truth and beauty, and to which no artist of modern times can
produce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, according
to Pliny and Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; and some
even were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender music
or tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomed
to conceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who
have brought their art to the highest perfection, probably because
none of the ancient paintings have been preserved. For all the
inventive arts maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion between
each other, being no more than various expressions of one internal
power, modified by different circumstances, either of an individual,
or of society; and the paintings of that period would probably bear
the same relation as is confessedly borne by the sculptures to all
succeeding ones. Of their music we know little; but the effects
which it is said to have produced, whether they be attributed to
the skill of the composer, or the sensibility of his audience, are
far more powerful than any which we experience from the music of
our own times; and if, indeed, the melody of their compositions
were more tender and delicate, and inspiring, than the melodies of
some modern European nations, their superiority in this art must
have been something wonderful, and wholly beyond conception.
Their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so
disproportionate a rank, in the comparison. Perhaps Shakespeare, from
the variety and comprehension of his genius, is to be considered,
on the whole, as the greatest individual mind, of which we have
specimens remaining. Perhaps Dante created imaginations of greater
loveliness and energy than any that are to be found in the ancient
literature of Greece. Perhaps nothing has been discovered in the
fragments of the Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and
chivalric sensibility of Petrarch.--But, as a poet. Homer must be
acknowledged to excel Shakespeare in the truth, the harmony, the
sustained grandeur, the satisfying completeness of his images, their
exact fitness to the illustration, and to that to which they belong.
Nor could Dante, deficient in conduct, plan, nature, variety, and
temperance, have been brought into comparison with these men, but
for those fortunate isles laden with golden fruit, which alone
could tempt any one to embark in the misty ocean of his dark and
extravagant fiction.
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