NATURE AND ART. OME persons may be startled by the paradox that, with a large portion of their fellow-creatures, art itself is nature, but not in the way that the poet meant it. A reviewer who was very angry with the first series of these Essays declared that it was all crambe repetita, and that the only lessons to be learned from the Gentle Life were the old ones, "Pay your debts, don't kick your grandmother down stairs, and be kind and true to your wife, and call it leading the gentle life!" And a very good name too. Did the writer of that brilliant sarcasm ever know of a new virtue or a new truth? Do not all the essayists grind at the old truths over again? all the fragments of the mosaic? and do not we merely make a fresh arrangement of colours? But I like his idea of the gentle life, because I know that some people find even that small amount of gentleness very difficult to attain. Some persons will kick their grandmother, will not pay their butcher, and are neither kind nor true to their wives, but hunt after new theories, and are very angry when our dull old Have we not lamps give a brilliant light, and these newly-lacquered brass ones sputter and go out. I am afraid that this reviewer, from the little I saw of his work, was and is eminently an artificial man; and with him, as with others, artificiality is nature. Some love to be singular, and mince in their talk, strut in their writings, and attain something not beyond the reach of art, but quite beyond that of nature. It is only a duty with good-tempered people to forbear a little, because they must mean something by their obscurity, their glitter, their hints that all the world is wrong and that they only are right. I, for one, should be sorry to take the other horn of the dilemma. When an artificial guide, philosopher, and friend violates old moralities, and goes ahead after new ones like a flystung calf with his tail up, in all charity I suppose the poor creature thinks that he is right. There is something very charming in being natural; and yet very few people are thoroughly so. A "natural" actor always pleases, because he has the great art to conceal his art: a natural author, who says his good things quietly and without aiming at effect, will always please. That is why dear old Montaigne is still loved and appreciated, and never will tire us with his old style and old truths; and why Shakspere, who spoke straight on and out, was called Nature's darling; and that is why the false polish of affected authors tires one. There is a great genius among us whose writings we all love, and we love them because he is for the most part natural; yet now and then, in describing a storm, for instance, we see him labouring away, and piling up his thunder and getting ready his lightning in a most affected way. When he fancies he writes most beautifully he charms us the least. When he gives the reins to his genius he most pleases us. It is so all the world over. It is so with painters, singers, and dancers. So also is it with every grade of society, in public or private. M. de St. Evremond, of whom—but this is by the way-Cowper wrote "Renounce St. Evremond, and read St. Paul," said of an unnatural manner that "Affectation is a far greater enemy to the face than small-pox;" and this was in days ante-Jennerian, when physicians wrapped their patients in twenty yards of scarlet cloth to cure them of this pest; and, of course, faces beautiful by nature were cut up, seamed, scarified, and rendered sometimes hideous. So the saying was a strong one, much stronger than it can be now, but yet not half so strong as it should be. What a number of pretty, dear, good, soft, gentle faces, human and sweet, are soured, made harsh, hard, and inhuman by hollow affectation! How many a friend and fine companion becomes perked up through it! How few men dare to be natural! and if few men, how much other sex! Who wears his own true look? faces of the dead strike us as peaceful, and altered by the change? Moreover, if affectation disfigure the face, does it not also cramp our bearing, and disguise or kill the mind? And the mind is the thing. “Oh, what a noble mind was here o'erthrown!" We may have cramped limbs and a distorted spine; our noses may be broken, as was a late great author's, who was so terribly sensitive about it; and our faces may be bloodless, against which charge he also strongly protested; we may have a wen on our foreheads fewer of the Do not the as big as a tea-cup, like St. Evremond, or pass through the best part of life without a nose, like Sir William Davenant; or be blotchy, and pimply, and purple; or have an expanse of forehead equal to a prize cauliflower, as was the case with Goldsmith; or be a mere patient wreck and trunk of a man, with no legs, and with a head fastened in its position by a steel spring, like poor, heroic, vivacious Frank Smedley; or be crippled and wounded like Quevedo and Cervantes : it does not much matter what our bodies are like; men (and especially men of genius) have the privilege of being what is called ugly; but if our minds are disfigured by affectation and overgrown by conceit, why, we had better cease to be. What, after all, is this common vice? What do you call affectation, sir, madam, or miss? There are very few people free from it: few of us dare to be natural, and act in the simple, truthful way which, when seen, is so pleasing and cheering. Affectation in manner is very much like fibbing, flattering, and telling white lies in one's speech. It is assumed, sometimes almost unconsciously, for the sake of pleasing, there is little doubt of that; and he or she who is affected may call it an amiable weakness, and excuse it in ten thousand ways; but it is a sad vice after all, for it serves untruth. All the boldest and best of us hate it; and good Bishop Hall, in his Meditations (Con. 1. No. 86), puts the case against it very strongly when he says, "Affectation is the greatest enemy, both of doing well, and of good acceptance of what is done." Let us, however, concede of this assumed varnish, so often found in modern society, that, while it has something of the nature of hypocrisy, in being the sincerest homage which vice can pay to virtue, it is not yet hypocrisy, nor does it spring so much from bad principle as from bad taste. Those pretty little girls whom we meet, who mince in their talk, amble in their gait, and who love to walk with all the pretty neatness and to talk with all the virgin innocence of twelve or thirteen, when they have left their teens at least six years behind, are not, indignant and solemn reader, so wicked as they are foolish. As they are now, their aunts and mothers have been before them, and so also has a very celebrated ancestress of theirs, though not in the line direct-" a prioresse :" "That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy; Hire gretest othẽ n'as but by Seint Loy; One can see Madame Eglantine, although hundreds of years have gone by, singing in the choir, and forming her words mincingly and carefully, even as she gives God service; for affectation, when it once gets hold of us, accompanies us everywhere. And, as this gentle lady, who was so "piteous," and charitable, and gentle of heart that "She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde," no doubt fashioned her words without letting her heart speak; so, as she knelt to pray, we may be sure she set her robe, and took care that her "semely ypinched wimple " |