Image science iconology visual culture

and media aesthetics Mitchell

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/image-science-iconology-visual-culture-and-media-ae
sthetics-mitchell/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Image operations visual media and political conflict

Eder

https://textbookfull.com/product/image-operations-visual-media-
and-political-conflict-eder/

Sound and Image Aesthetics and Practices Sound Design

1st Edition Andrew Knight-Hill (Editor)

https://textbookfull.com/product/sound-and-image-aesthetics-and-
practices-sound-design-1st-edition-andrew-knight-hill-editor/

Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture, and Technology

10th Edition Joseph Straubhaar

https://textbookfull.com/product/media-now-understanding-media-
culture-and-technology-10th-edition-joseph-straubhaar/

Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture, and Technology

10th Edition Joseph Straubhaar

https://textbookfull.com/product/media-now-understanding-media-
culture-and-technology-10th-edition-joseph-straubhaar-2/
The Visual Story Creating the Visual Structure of Film
TV and Digital Media 3rd Edition Block

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-visual-story-creating-the-
visual-structure-of-film-tv-and-digital-media-3rd-edition-block/

The Visual Imperative Creating a Visual Culture of Data

Discovery 1st Edition Ryan

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-visual-imperative-creating-
a-visual-culture-of-data-discovery-1st-edition-ryan/

Imaging Identity: Text, Mediality and Contemporary

Visual Culture Johannes Riquet

https://textbookfull.com/product/imaging-identity-text-mediality-
and-contemporary-visual-culture-johannes-riquet/

Intimate Relationships in Cinema Literature and Visual

Culture A. Schwenkenbecher

https://textbookfull.com/product/intimate-relationships-in-
cinema-literature-and-visual-culture-a-schwenkenbecher/

Double Negative The Black Image and Popular Culture

Racquel Gates

https://textbookfull.com/product/double-negative-the-black-image-
and-popular-culture-racquel-gates/
Image Science
 IMAGE
I CO NO L O G Y,
V I S UAL C U LT UR E , A ND
M E D I A AE S T HE T ICS

W. J. T. Mitchell SCIENCE

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London
W. J. T. MIT C H E L L is the Gaylord Donnelley
Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art
History at the University of Chicago and editor of
Critical Inquiry.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226- 23133- 4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226- 23150- 1 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226231501.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchell, W. J. T. (William John Thomas), 1942–

author.
Image science : iconology, visual culture, and
media aesthetics / W. J. T. Mitchell.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-226-23133-4 (cloth : alkaline paper)
ISBN 978-0-226-23150-1 (ebook)
1. Image (Philosophy). 2. Pictures—
Philosophy. 3. Visual communication—
Philosophy. 4. Mass media—Philosophy. I. Title.
B105.I47M58 2015
701'.8—dc23 2015010449

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Michael Camille and the Laocoön Group Becky Chandler
Elizabeth Helsinger
Robert Nelson
Margaret Olin
Linda Seidel
Joel Snyder
Martha Ward
 CO NTE NTS

List of Illustrations ix
Preface: Figures and Grounds xi
Acknowledgments xiii

PAR T O NE: FIG U R E S

1 Art History on the Edge: Iconology, Media, and Visual Culture 3

2 Four Fundamental Concepts of Image Science 13
3 Image Science 23
4 Image X Text 39
5 Realism and the Digital Image 49
6 Migrating Images: Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry 65
7 The Future of the Image: Rancière’s Road Not Taken 79
8 World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture 93

PAR T TWO : GRO U N D S

9 Media Aesthetics 111

10 There Are No Visual Media 125
11 Back to the Drawing Board: Architecture, Sculpture, and the Digital
Image 137
12 Foundational Sites and Occupied Spaces 153
13 Border Wars: Translation and Convergence in Politics and Media 167
14 Art X Environment 181
15 The Historical Uncanny: Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the
War on Terror 195
16 The Spectacle Today: A Response to Retort 207

Coda: For a Sweet Science of Images 219

Index 227
 I LLU STR AT ION S

Figures
0.1 Edgar Rubin, “Rubin’s Vase” (1921) x
1.1 Book of Hours (Rouen) (ca. 1500– 1510) 2
2.1 The “Duck-Rabbit” (1892) 12
3.1 Steven Spielberg, still from Jurassic Park (1993) 22
4.1 René Magritte, This Is Not a Pipe (1929) 38
4.2 Image/text square of opposition 41
4.3 Image/text square of opposition (elaborated) 41
4.4 Ferdinand de Saussure, “Linguistic Sign” (1916) 45
5.1 Allan Sekula, Welder’s booth in bankrupt Todd Shipyard (1991) 48
6.1 Harry Bliss, “Well, actually, they are written in stone” (1999) 66
7.1 Lascaux Caves (ancient) 78
8.1 William Blake, The Book of Urizen (1794) 92
8.2 William Blake, Europe: a Prophecy (1794) 96
8.3 William Blake, The Song of Los (1795) 96
9.1 Ferdinand de Saussure, “Linguistic Sign” (1916) 110
10.1 René Descartes, Optics (seventeenth century) 124
11.1 Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, “The Origin of Drawing” (1819) 136
11.2 Antony Gormley, Interior (1991) 149
11.3 Antony Gormley, Sovereign State I (1993) 150
11.4 Antony Gormley, Float II (1992) 150
12.1 Mahmud Hams, “Egyptian protesters carry an obelisk” (2012) 152
12.2 Edgar Rubin, “Rubin’s Vase” (multiplied) 159
13.1 “Border line between British and Russian sectors” (1947) 166
14.1 Nicolas Poussin, The Plague at Ashdod (1630) 180
14.2 Mahmud Hams, “Gaza City Morgue” (2009) 190
14.3 Nicolas Poussin, The Plague at Ashdod (detail) 190
15.1 Forkscrew Graphics, “iRaq/iPod” (2004) 196
16.1 J. R. Eyerman, “Audience at a 3D Movie” (ca. 1950s) 206

Tables
4.1 Triads of aesthetics and semiotics 46
9.1 Triads of aesthetics and semiotics (elaborated) 122
0.1 Edgar Rubin, “Rubin’s Vase” (1921).
One vase/two faces.
PREFACE
Figures and Grounds

A distinction is drawn by arranging a boundary with separate sides so that a point

on one side cannot reach the other side without crossing the boundary.
GEO RGE S PENC ER - B ROW N, Laws of Form (1969)

There is an Outside spread Without, & an Outside spread Within

Beyond the Outline of Identity both ways, which meet in One . . .
WILLIA M BLA KE, Jerusalem (1804)

We Germans have no lack of systematic books.

G. E . LES S ING, Laocoon: On the Limitsof Poetry and Painting (1766)

“How to begin without having begun, since one needs a distinction in

order to begin.” The answer, for philosopher Niklas Luhmann, is a simple
imperative: “draw a distinction.”1 This remark might be taken as the fun-
damental mantra of modern systems theory, as important to contempo-
rary social and natural sciences as the Cartesian cogito, “I think, therefore
I am,” was to early modern science. But it is also a foundational moment
for iconology, the science of images. An iconologist is bound to notice
the figurative expression hidden in the notion of drawing a distinction,
and then to insist on taking it literally, as a visual, graphic operation. The
philosopher or sociologist might say it means merely to make a distinction,
to provide a verbal definition that distinguishes one thing from another—
truth from falsehood, good from evil, clarity from obscurity, here from
there— especially when the two things might otherwise be confused:
art and life, meaning and significance, expression and imitation. In any
case, the iconologist’s attention is drawn to drawing, to the inscription of
a boundary, the marking of a form in space, the contrast between a thing
and the environment in which it is located. In short, the delineation of
figure from ground.
Of course, drawing a distinction between figure and ground is only

1. Art as a Social System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 31.
xii : PR EFACE

the beginning. In systems theory, that distinction marks the boundary

between a system and its environment or between a form and the medium
in which the form appears. It inevitably draws attention to three things:
(1) the boundary between an inside and an outside that constitutes a figure
or form in a space; (2) the frame or support in or on which an image and
its surrounding space make their appearance; (3) the outline that curves
in upon itself, drawing the beholder into a vortex that reverses the loca-
tions of figure and ground. Thus, what was marked becomes unmarked,
and the previously unmarked suddenly emerges as remarkable: the vase
disappears to reveal two faces, or vice versa.
From the standpoint of image science, then, systems theory ceases to
be abstract. It takes on a body and locates that body somewhere. It be-
comes visible, graphic, and even palpable. And it puts into question its
own Cartesian moment of drawing because, after all, is drawing really all
there is to images? What about color? Doesn’t color obey a different logic,
one that spills over boundaries, shades into an infinite spectrum of infini-
tesimal differentiations and vague indeterminacies? Is it not the ultimate
ground out of which every figure must emerge? And isn’t color precisely
the phenomenon that defies the fundamental gesture of systems theory,
insofar as every distinction that is drawn between one hue, one tonality,
and another generates an intermediate possibility, a mixture of the two
colors being distinguished, the gray zone of the everyday?
The following essays, written unsystematically over the last decade in
response to a variety of occasions, display a certain adherence to these
basic gestures and limitations of systems theory. The essays are gathered
here as a diptych, part 1 focusing on figures, part 2 on grounds. The first
eight essays deal with the nature of images, from the ways in which they
breach the disciplinary borders of art history, to their potential as scientific
objects, to their centrality in questions of language, social and emotional
life, realism and truth- claims, technology and life- forms, and, finally, in
the notion of world pictures, or “the world as picture,” as Martin Heidegger
put it.2 The second eight essays focus on the media in which images ap-
pear, the sites and spaces where they live, and the frameworks of tempo-
rality and spectacle that frame them in a history of the present.

2. “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, trans.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 129: “world picture, when under-
stood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived
and grasped as picture.”
ACKNOWLED GMEN T S

I could go on at great length acknowledging the numerous friends and col-

leagues who have inspired these essays. Most were written in response to a
question or a challenge, and I have tried to specify all of those in the notes
to each chapter. But there is also one long-overdue debt that the book as
a whole tries to address, and that is to a small group of colleagues at the
University of Chicago that brought art history, literature, and philosophy
into dialogue almost thirty years ago. It called itself the Laocoön Group,
naming itself after the late classical sculptural group, and the crucial book
of G. E. Lessing that provided us with an exemplary synthesis of critical
theory across the arts. Lessing’s Laocoön: On the Limits of Poetry and Paint-
ing, a capstone of Enlightenment aesthetics, was deliberately and proudly
unsystematic, much like our motley group of scholars. It is to that group
that this book is dedicated, especially to its most brilliant member, the late
Michael Camille. The first chapter, “Art History on the Edge,” is in effect
an explanation of this dedication, a naming of names, and a genealogy of
image science as I have experienced and understood it.
Many individuals contributed advice, counsel, and comfort as these
essays were being written (and rewritten). As always, Joel Snyder and Alan
Thomas have been crucial in saving me from errors and raising the game.
Lauren Berlant, Neal Curtis, Stephen Daniels, Ellen Esrock, Michael Ann
Holly, Janice Misurell Mitchell, Keith Moxey, Florence Tager, and Michael
Taussig provided timely interventions. Jacques Rancière agreed to engage
in dialogue about image theory in a way that has been endlessly produc-
tive. Nova Smith provided crucial help with permissions. And Sally Stein
was incredibly generous in allowing me to reproduce the late Allan Sekula’s
wonderful photograph.
I must also mention three institutions that have made it possible for
me to finish this book. The first is the Getty Research Institute, headed by
director Thomas Gaeghtens, which provided space, time, inspiration, and
resources in the winter and late summers of 2013 and 2014. The second is
the Clark Institute for Art History, where, under the benign gaze of director
Michael Ann Holly, the first drafts of several of these essays were written
xiv : ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

in 2008, and which gave me a precious asylum for writing in the spring
of 2013. Lastly, the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago,
headed by Dean Martha Roth, provided reliably regular leave time and
research funds that have made my life as a scholar possible.

Chapter 1, “Art History on the Edge: Iconology, Media, and Visual Culture,”
was written for “Discipline on the Edge: Michael Camille and the Shifting
Contours of Art History, 1985–2010,” a session in honor of Michael Camille
at the College Art Association’s 2010 meeting. Chapter 2, “Four Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Image Science,” first appeared in Visual Literacy, ed. James
Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008), 14–30. Chapter 3, “Image Science,”
was written for the Thyssen Lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin,
with the generous support of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; it first
appeared in Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences, ed. Bernd
Huppauf and Peter Weingart (New York: Routledge, 2007), 55–68. Chapter
4, “Image X Text,” first appeared as the introduction to The Future of Text
and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures, ed. Ofra
Amihay and Lauren Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2012), 1–14. Chapter 5, “Realism and the Digital Image,” first appeared in
Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s Photography, ed.
Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder, Lieven Gevaert Series, vol. 4 (Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2012), 12–27; it was translated into Italian by Fed-
erica Mazzara as “Realismo e imagine digitale,” in Cultura Visuale: Par-
adigmi a Confronto, ed. Roberta Coglitore (Palermo: Duepunti Edizione,
2008), 81–99, and reprinted in Travels in Intermedia: ReBlurring the Bound-
aries, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Aachen: Mellen Press, 2011; Hanover, NH:
Dartmouth College Press, 2012). A different version of chapter 6, “Migrat-
ing Images: Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry,” appeared in Migrating Images,
ed. Petra Stegmann and Peter Seel (Berlin: House of World Cultures, 2004),
14–24; it is reprinted here with permission by Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
Berlin. Chapter 7, “The Future of the Image: Rancière’s Road Not Taken,”
first appeared in “The Pictorial Turn,” a special issue of Culture, Theory,
and Critique, ed. Neal Curtis (fall 2009), reprinted in book form as The
Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis (New York: Routledge 2010), 37–48. Chap-
ter 8, “World Pictures: Globalization and Visual Culture,” first appeared
in a special issue on globalization in Neohelicon, ed. Wang Ning (34, no. 2;
December 2007); it was reprinted in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed.
Jonathan Harris (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 253–64.
In part 2, chapter 9, “Media Aesthetics,” first appeared as the foreword
to Thinking Media Aesthetics, ed. Liv Hausken (New York: Peter Lang, 2013),
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS : xv

15–28. Chapter 10, “There Are No Visual Media,” first appeared in Journal
of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257–66; it was reprinted in Media Art His-
tories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 395– 406, and
in Digital Qualitative Research Methods, ed. Bella Dicks (New York: Sage,
2012). Chapter 11, “Back to the Drawing Board: Architecture, Sculpture,
and the Digital Image,” first appeared in Architecture and the Digital Image:
Proceedings of the 2007 International Bauhaus Colloquium, ed. Jorg Gleiter
(2008), 5– 12. Chapter 12, “Foundational Sites and Occupied Spaces,” was
the keynote address for Grundungsorte, a 2012 conference convened by
the Research Group on Culture, Politics, and Space at the University of
Munich; it appeared in Grundungssorte der Moderne von St. Petersburg bis
Occupy Wall Street, ed. Maha El Sissy, trans. Sascha Pohlmann (Paderborn:
Wilhelm Fink, 2014), 23– 38. Chapter 13, “Border Wars: Translation and
Convergence in Politics and Media,” was the keynote address for the Inter-
national Conference of the English Language and Literature Association
of Korea (ELLAK), Busan, Korea, December 2012; many thanks to the or-
ganizing genius of Youngmin Kim. Chapter 14, “Art X Environment,” was
written as the keynote address for the “Art + Environment” conference at
the Nevada Museum of Art in 2008. Chapter 15, “The Historical Uncanny:
Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror,” was written for
the Kunstwerke lecture series in Berlin. And chapter 16, “The Spectacle To-
day: A Response to Retort,” first appeared in Public Culture 20, no. 3 (2008):
573–81 (© 2008, Duke University Press, all rights reserved; republished by
permission of Duke University Press); it has since been updated to the
conditions of 2013.
2.1 Anonymous, “The Duck-Rabbit” (1892). Detail from a page in Fliegende Blätter.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 ON PERSONAL IDENTITY

The Monthly Magazine.]

[January, 1828.
‘Ha! here be three of us sophisticated.’—Lear.

‘If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes!’ said the

Macedonian hero; and the cynic might have retorted the compliment
upon the prince by saying, that, ‘were he not Diogenes, he would be
Alexander!’ This is the universal exception, the invariable reservation
that our self-love makes, the utmost point at which our admiration
or envy ever arrives—to wish, if we were not ourselves, to be some
other individual. No one ever wishes to be another, instead of
himself. We may feel a desire to change places with others—to have
one man’s fortune—another’s health or strength—his wit or learning,
or accomplishments of various kinds—
‘Wishing to be like one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope:’

but we would still be our selves, to possess and enjoy all these, or we
would not give a doit for them. But, on this supposition, what in
truth should we be the better for them? It is not we, but another, that
would reap the benefit; and what do we care about that other? In
that case, the present owner might as well continue to enjoy them.
We should not be gainers by the change. If the meanest beggar who
crouches at a palace-gate, and looks up with awe and suppliant fear
to the proud inmate as he passes, could be put in possession of all the
finery, the pomp, the luxury, and wealth that he sees and envies on
the sole condition of getting rid, together with his rags and misery, of
all recollection that there ever was such a wretch as himself, he
would reject the proffered boon with scorn. He might be glad to
change situations; but he would insist on keeping his own thoughts,
to compare notes, and point the transition by the force of contrast.
He would not, on any account, forego his self-congratulation on the
unexpected accession of good fortune, and his escape from past
suffering. All that excites his cupidity, his envy, his repining or
despair, is the alternative of some great good to himself; and if, in
order to attain that object, he is to part with his own existence to take
that of another, he can feel no farther interest in it. This is the
language both of passion and reason.
Here lies ‘the rub that makes calamity of so long life:’ for it is not
barely the apprehension of the ills that ‘in that sleep of death may
come,’ but also our ignorance and indifference to the promised good,
that produces our repugnance and backwardness to quit the present
scene. No man, if he had his choice, would be the angel Gabriel to-
morrow! What is the angel Gabriel to him but a splendid vision? He
might as well have an ambition to be turned into a bright cloud, or a
particular star. The interpretation of which is, he can have no
sympathy with the angel Gabriel. Before he can be transformed into
so bright and ethereal an essence, he must necessarily ‘put off this
mortal coil’—be divested of all his old habits, passions, thoughts, and
feelings—to be endowed with other lofty and beatific attributes, of
which he has no notion; and, therefore, he would rather remain a
little longer in this mansion of clay, which, with all its flaws,
inconveniences, and perplexities, contains all that he has any real
knowledge of, or any affection for. When, indeed, he is about to quit
it in spite of himself, and has no other chance left to escape the
darkness of the tomb, he may then have no objection (making a
virtue of necessity) to put on angels’ wings, to have radiant locks, to
wear a wreath of amaranth, and thus to masquerade it in the skies.
It is an instance of the truth and beauty of the ancient mythology,
that the various transmutations it recounts are never voluntary, or of
favourable omen, but are interposed as a timely release to those who,
driven on by fate, and urged to the last extremity of fear or anguish,
are turned into a flower, a plant, an animal, a star, a precious stone,
or into some object that may inspire pity or mitigate our regret for
their misfortunes. Narcissus was transformed into a flower; Daphne
into a laurel; Arethusa into a fountain (by the favour of the gods)—
but not till no other remedy was left for their despair. It is a sort of
smiling cheat upon death, and graceful compromise with
annihilation. It is better to exist by proxy, in some softened type and
soothing allegory, than not at all—to breathe in a flower or shine in a
constellation, than to be utterly forgot; but no one would change his
natural condition (if he could help it) for that of a bird, an insect, a
beast, or a fish, however delightful their mode of existence, or
however enviable he might deem their lot compared to his own.
Their thoughts are not our thoughts—their happiness is not our
happiness; nor can we enter into it except with a passing smile of
approbation, or as a refinement of fancy. As the poet sings:—
‘What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty,
And to be lord of all the works of nature?
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky;
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature;
To taste whatever thing doth please the eye?—
Who rests not pleased with such happiness,
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness!’

This is gorgeous description and fine declamation: yet who would be

found to act upon it, even in the forming of a wish; or would not
rather be the thrall of wretchedness, than launch out (by the aid of
some magic spell) into all the delights of such a butterfly state of
existence? The French (if any people can) may be said to enjoy this
airy, heedless gaiety and unalloyed exuberance of satisfaction: yet
what Englishman would deliberately change with them? We would
sooner be miserable after our own fashion than happy after their’s. It
is not happiness, then, in the abstract, which we seek, that can be
addressed as
‘That something still that prompts th’ eternal sigh,
For which we wish to live or dare to die,—’

but a happiness suited to our taste and faculties—that has become a

part of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment—that is endeared to us by
a thousand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then,
would willingly change his country or his kind for the most plausible
pretences held out to him. The most humiliating punishment
inflicted in ancient fable is the change of sex: not that it was any
degradation in itself—but that it must occasion a total derangement
of the moral economy and confusion of the sense of personal
propriety. The thing is said to have happened, au sens contraire, in
our time. The story is to be met with in ‘very choice Italian’; and Lord
D—— tells it in very plain English!
We may often find ourselves envying the possessions of others,
and sometimes inadvertently indulging a wish to change places with
them altogether; but our self-love soon discovers some excuse to be
off the bargain we were ready to strike, and retracts ‘vows made in
haste, as violent and void.’ We might make up our minds to the
alteration in every other particular; but, when it comes to the point,
there is sure to be some trait or feature of character in the object of
our admiration to which we cannot reconcile ourselves—some
favourite quality or darling foible of our own, with which we can by
no means resolve to part. The more enviable the situation of another,
the more entirely to our taste, the more reluctant we are to leave any
part of ourselves behind that would be so fully capable of
appreciating all the exquisiteness of its new situation, or not to enter
into the possession of such an imaginary reversion of good fortune
with all our previous inclinations and sentiments. The outward
circumstances were fine: they only wanted a soul to enjoy them, and
that soul is our’s (as the costly ring wants the peerless jewel to
perfect and set it off). The humble prayer and petition to sneak into
visionary felicity by personal adoption, or the surrender of our own
personal pretensions, always ends in a daring project of usurpation,
and a determination to expel the actual proprietor, and supply his
place so much more worthily with our own identity—not bating a
single jot of it. Thus, in passing through a fine collection of pictures,
who has not envied the privilege of visiting it every day, and wished
to be the owner? But the rising sigh is soon checked, and ‘the native
hue of emulation is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,’ when
we come to ask ourselves not merely whether the owner has any taste
at all for these splendid works, and does not look upon them as so
much expensive furniture, like his chairs and tables—but whether he
has the same precise (and only true) taste that we have—whether he
has the very same favourites that we have—whether he may not be so
blind as to prefer a Vandyke to a Titian, a Ruysdael to a Claude;—
nay, whether he may not have other pursuits and avocations that
draw off his attention from the sole objects of our idolatry, and which
seem to us mere impertinences and waste of time? In that case, we at
once lose all patience, and exclaim indignantly, ‘Give us back our
taste and keep your pictures!’ It is not we who should envy them the
possession of the treasure, but they who should envy us the true and
exclusive enjoyment of it. A similar train of feeling seems to have
dictated Warton’s spirited Sonnet on visiting Wilton-House:—
‘From Pembroke’s princely dome, where mimic art
Decks with a magic hand the dazzling bowers,
Its living hues where the warm pencil pours,
And breathing forms from the rude marble start,
How to life’s humbler scene can I depart?
My breast all glowing from those gorgeous towers,
In my low cell how cheat the sullen hours?
Vain the complaint! For Fancy can impart
(To fate superior and to fortune’s power)
Whate’er adorns the stately storied-hall:
She, mid the dungeon’s solitary gloom,
Can dress the Graces in their attic pall;
Bid the green landskip’s vernal beauty bloom;
And in bright trophies clothe the twilight wall.’

One sometimes passes by a gentleman’s park, an old family-seat,

with its moss-grown ruinous paling, its ‘glades mild-opening to the
genial day,’ or embrowned with forest-trees. Here one would be glad
to spend one’s life, ‘shut up in measureless content,’ and to grow old
beneath ancestral oaks, instead of gaining a precarious, irksome, and
despised livelihood, by indulging romantic sentiments, and writing
disjointed descriptions of them. The thought has scarcely risen to the
lips, when we learn that the owner of so blissful a seclusion is a
thorough-bred fox-hunter, a preserver of the game, a brawling
electioneerer, a Tory member of parliament, a ‘no-Popery’ man!—‘I’d
sooner be a dog, and bay the moon!’ Who would be Sir Thomas
Lethbridge for his title and estate? asks one man. But would not
almost any one wish to be Sir Francis Burdett, the man of the people,
the idol of the electors of Westminster? says another. I can only
answer for myself. Respectable and honest as he is, there is
something in his white boots, and white breeches, and white coat,
and white hair, and red face, and white hat, that I cannot, by any
effort of candour, confound my personal identity with! If Mr.
Hobhouse can prevail on Sir Francis to exchange, let him do so by all
means. Perhaps they might contrive to club a soul between them!
Could I have had my will, I should have been born a lord: but one
would not be a booby lord neither. I am haunted by an odd fancy of
driving down the Great North Road in a chaise and four, about fifty
years ago, and coming to the inn at Ferry-bridge, with out-riders,
white favours, and a coronet on the panels; and then I choose my
companion in the coach. Really there is a witchcraft in all this that
makes it necessary to turn away from it, lest, in the conflict between
imagination and impossibility, I should grow feverish and light-
headed! But, on the other hand, if one was born a lord, should one
have the same idea (that every one else has) of a peeress in her own
right? Is not distance, giddy elevation, mysterious awe, an
impassable gulf, necessary to form this idea in the mind, that fine
ligament of ‘ethereal braid, sky-woven,’ that lets down heaven upon
earth, fair as enchantment, soft as Berenice’s hair, bright and
garlanded like Ariadne’s crown; and is it not better to have had this
idea all through life—to have caught but glimpses of it, to have
known it but in a dream—than to have been born a lord ten times
over, with twenty pampered menials at one’s back, and twenty
descents to boast of? It is the envy of certain privileges, the sharp
privations we have undergone, the cutting neglect we have met with
from the want of birth or title, that gives its zest to the distinction:
the thing itself may be indifferent or contemptible enough. It is the
becoming a lord that is to be desired; but he who becomes a lord in
reality is an upstart—a mere pretender, without the sterling essence;
so that, all that is of any worth in this supposed transition is purely
imaginary and impossible. Had I been a lord, I should have married
Miss ——, and my life would not have been one long-drawn sigh,
made up of sweet and bitter regret![41] Had I been a lord, I would
have been a Popish lord, and then I might also have been an honest
man:—poor, and then I might have been proud and not vulgar! Kings
are so accustomed to look down on all the rest of the world, that they
consider the condition of mortality as vile and intolerable, if stripped
of royal state, and cry out in the bitterness of their despair, ‘Give me
a crown, or a tomb!’ It should seem from this as if all mankind would
change with the first crowned head that could propose the
alternative, or that it would be only the presumption of the
supposition, or a sense of their own unworthiness, that would deter
them. Perhaps there is not a single throne that, if it was to be filled by
this sort of voluntary metempsychosis, would not remain empty.
Many would, no doubt, be glad to ‘monarchise, be feared, and kill
with looks’ in their own persons and after their own fashion: but who
would be the double of ——, or of those shadows of a shade—those
‘tenth transmitters of a foolish face’—Charles X. and Ferdinand VII.? If
monarchs have little sympathy with mankind, mankind have even
less with monarchs. They are merely to us a sort of state-puppets or
royal wax-work, which we may gaze at with superstitious wonder,
but have no wish to become; and he who should meditate such a
change must not only feel by anticipation an utter contempt for the
slough of humanity which he is prepared to cast, but must feel an
absolute void and want of attraction in those lofty and
incomprehensible sentiments which are to supply its place. With
respect to actual royalty, the spell is in a great measure broken. But,
among ancient monarchs, there is no one, I think, who envies Darius
or Xerxes. One has a different feeling with respect to Alexander or
Pyrrhus; but this is because they were great men as well as great
kings, and the soul is up in arms at the mention of their names as at
the sound of a trumpet. But as to all the rest—those ‘in the catalogue
who go for kings’—the praying, eating, drinking, dressing monarchs
of the earth, in time past or present—one would as soon think of
wishing to personate the Golden Calf, or to turn out with
Nebuchadnezzar to graze, as to be transformed into one of that
‘swinish multitude.’ There is no point of affinity. The extrinsic
circumstances are imposing: but, within, there is nothing but morbid
humours and proud flesh! Some persons might vote for
Charlemagne; and there are others who would have no objection to
be the modern Charlemagne, with all he inflicted and suffered, even
after the necromantic field of Waterloo, and the bloody wreath on the
vacant brow of his conqueror, and that fell jailer set over him by a
craven foe, that ‘glared round his soul, and mocked his closing
eyelids!’
It has been remarked, that could we at pleasure change our
situation in life, more persons would be found anxious to descend
than to ascend in the scale of society. One reason may be, that we
have it more in our power to do so; and this encourages the thought,
and makes it familiar to us. A second is, that we naturally wish to
throw off the cares of state, of fortune or business, that oppress us,
and to seek repose before we find it in the grave. A third reason is,
that, as we descend to common life, the pleasures are simple,
natural, such as all can enter into, and therefore excite a general
interest, and combine all suffrages. Of the different occupations of
life, none is beheld with a more pleasing emotion, or less aversion to
a change of our own, than that of a shepherd tending his flock: the
pastoral ages have been the envy and the theme of all succeeding
ones; and a beggar with his crutch is more closely allied than the
monarch and his crown to the associations of mirth and heart’s ease.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that our pride is too apt to
prefer grandeur to happiness; and that our passions make us envy
great vices oftener than great virtues.
The world shew their sense in nothing more than in a distrust and
aversion to those changes of situation which only tend to make the
successful candidates ridiculous, and which do not carry along with
them a mind adequate to the circumstances. The common people, in
this respect, are more shrewd and judicious than their superiors,
from feeling their own awkwardness and incapacity, and often
decline, with an instinctive modesty, the troublesome honours
intended for them. They do not overlook their original defects so
readily as others overlook their acquired advantages. It is wonderful,
therefore, that opera-singers and dancers refuse, or only condescend
as it were, to accept lords, though the latter are so often fascinated by
them. The fair performer knows (better than her unsuspecting
admirer) how little connection there is between the dazzling figure
she makes on the stage and that which she may make in private life,
and is in no hurry to convert ‘the drawing-room into a Green-room.’
The nobleman (supposing him not to be very wise) is astonished at
the miraculous powers of art in
‘The fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she;’

and thinks such a paragon must easily conform to the routine of

manners and society which every trifling woman of quality of his
acquaintance, from sixteen to sixty, goes through without effort. This
is a hasty or a wilful conclusion. Things of habit only come by habit,
and inspiration here avails nothing. A man of fortune who marries an
actress for her fine performance of tragedy, has been well compared
to the person who bought Punch. The lady is not unfrequently aware
of the inconsequentiality, and unwilling to be put on the shelf, and
hid in the nursery of some musty country-mansion. Servant girls, of
any sense and spirit, treat their masters (who make serious love to
them) with suitable contempt. What is it but a proposal to drag an
unmeaning trollop at his heels through life, to her own annoyance
and the ridicule of all his friends? No woman, I suspect, ever forgave
a man who raised her from a low condition in life (it is a perpetual
obligation and reproach); though, I believe, men often feel the most
disinterested regard for women under such circumstances. Sancho
Panza discovered no less folly in his eagerness to enter upon his new
government, than wisdom in quitting it as fast as possible. Why will
Mr. Cobbett persist in getting into Parliament? He would find
himself no longer the same man. What member of Parliament, I
should like to know, could write his Register? As a popular partisan,
he may (for aught I can say) be a match for the whole Honourable
House; but, by obtaining a seat in St. Stephen’s Chapel, he would
only be equal to a 576th part of it. It was surely a puerile ambition in
Mr. Addington to succeed Mr. Pitt as prime-minister. The situation
was only a foil to his imbecility. Gipsies have a fine faculty of evasion:
catch them who can in the same place or story twice! Take them;
teach them the comforts of civilization; confine them in warm rooms,
with thick carpets and down beds; and they will fly out of the
window-like the bird, described by Chaucer, out of its golden cage. I
maintain that there is no common language or medium of
understanding between people of education and without it—between
those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance
has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to
you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that
which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power. This
is what foiled Buonaparte in Spain and Russia. The people can only
be gained over by informing them, though they may be enslaved by
fraud or force. You say there is a common language in nature. They
see nature through their wants, while you look at it for your pleasure.
Ask a country lad if he does not like to hear the birds sing in the
spring? And he will laugh in your face. ‘What is it, then, he does
like?’—‘Good victuals and drink!’ As if you had not these too; but
because he has them not, he thinks of nothing else, and laughs at you
and your refinements, supposing you to live upon air. To those who
are deprived of every other advantage, even nature is a book sealed. I
have made this capital mistake all my life, in imagining that those
objects which lay open to all, and excited an interest merely from the
idea of them, spoke a common language to all; and that nature was a
kind of universal home, where all ages, sexes, classes met. Not so.
The vital air, the sky, the woods, the streams—all these go for
nothing, except with a favoured few. The poor are taken up with their
bodily wants—the rich, with external acquisitions: the one, with the
sense of property—the other, of its privation. Both have the same
distaste for sentiment. The genteel are the slaves of appearances—the
vulgar, of necessity; and neither has the smallest regard to true
worth, refinement, generosity. All savages are irreclaimable. I can
understand the Irish character better than the Scotch. I hate the
formal crust of circumstances and the mechanism of society. I have
been recommended, indeed, to settle down into some respectable
profession for life:—
‘Ah! why so soon the blossom tear?’

I am ‘in no haste to be venerable!’

In thinking of those one might wish to have been, many people will
exclaim, ‘Surely, you would like to have been Shakspeare?’ Would
Garrick have consented to the change? No, nor should he; for the
applause which he received, and on which he lived, was more
adapted to his genius and taste. If Garrick had agreed to be
Shakspeare, he would have made it a previous condition that he was
to be a better player. He would have insisted on taking some higher
part than Polonius or the Grave-digger. Ben Jonson and his
companions at the Mermaid would not have known their old friend
Will in his new disguise. The modern Roscius would have scouted
the halting player. He would have shrunk from the parts of the
inspired poet. If others were unlike us, we feel it as a presumption
and an impertinence to usurp their place; if they were like us, it
seems a work of supererogation. We are not to be cozened out of our
existence for nothing. It has been ingeniously urged, as an objection
to having been Milton, that ‘then we should not have had the
pleasure of reading Paradise Lost.’ Perhaps I should incline to draw
lots with Pope, but that he was deformed, and did not sufficiently
relish Milton and Shakspeare. As it is, we can enjoy his verses and
their’s too. Why, having these, need we ever be dissatisfied with
ourselves? Goldsmith is a person whom I considerably affect,
notwithstanding his blunders and his misfortunes. The author of the
Vicar of Wakefield, and of Retaliation, is one whose temper must
have had something eminently amiable, delightful, gay, and happy in
it.
‘A certain tender bloom his fame o’erspreads.’

But then I could never make up my mind to his preferring Rowe and
Dryden to the worthies of the Elizabethan age; nor could I, in like
manner, forgive Sir Joshua—whom I number among those whose
existence was marked with a white stone, and on whose tomb might
be inscribed ‘Thrice Fortunate!’—his treating Nicholas Poussin with
contempt. Differences in matters of taste and opinion are points of
honour—‘stuff o’ the conscience’—stumbling-blocks not to be got
over. Others, we easily grant, may have more wit, learning,
imagination, riches, strength, beauty, which we should be glad to
borrow of them; but that they have sounder or better views of things,
or that we should act wisely in changing in this respect, is what we
can by no means persuade ourselves. We may not be the lucky
possessors of what is best or most desirable; but our notion of what
is best and most desirable we will give up to no man by choice or
compulsion; and unless others (the greatest wits or brightest
geniuses) can come into our way of thinking, we must humbly beg
leave to remain as we are. A Calvinistic preacher would not
relinquish a single point of faith to be the Pope of Rome; nor would a
strict Unitarian acknowledge the mystery of the Holy Trinity to have
painted Raphael’s Assembly of the Just. In the range of ideal
excellence, we are distracted by variety and repelled by differences:
the imagination is fickle and fastidious, and requires a combination
of all possible qualifications, which never met. Habit alone is blind
and tenacious of the most homely advantages; and after running the
tempting round of nature, fame, and fortune, we wrap ourselves up
in our familiar recollections and humble pretensions—as the lark,
after long fluttering on sunny wing, sinks into its lowly bed!
We can have no very importunate craving, nor very great
confidence, in wishing to change characters, except with those with
whom we are intimately acquainted by their works; and having these
by us (which is all we know or covet in them), what would we have
more? We can have no more of a cat than her skin; nor of an author
than his brains. By becoming Shakspeare in reality, we cut ourselves
out of reading Milton, Pope, Dryden, and a thousand more—all of
whom we have in our possession, enjoy, and are, by turns, in the best
part of them, their thoughts, without any metamorphosis or miracle
at all. What a microcosm is our’s! What a Proteus is the human
mind! All that we know, think of, or can admire, in a manner
becomes ourselves. We are not (the meanest of us) a volume, but a
whole library! In this calculation of problematical contingencies, the
lapse of time makes no difference. One would as soon have been
Raphael as any modern artist. Twenty, thirty, or forty years of
elegant enjoyment and lofty feeling were as great a luxury in the
fifteenth as in the nineteenth century. But Raphael did not live to see
Claude, nor Titian Rembrandt. Those who found arts and sciences
are not witnesses of their accumulated results and benefits; nor in
general do they reap the meed of praise which is their due. We who
come after in some ‘laggard age,’ have more enjoyment of their fame
than they had. Who would have missed the sight of the Louvre in all
its glory to have been one of those whose works enriched it? Would it
not have been giving a certain good for an uncertain advantage? No:
I am as sure (if it is not presumption to say so) of what passed
through Raphael’s mind as of what passes through my own; and I
know the difference between seeing (though even that is a rare
privilege) and producing such perfection. At one time I was so
devoted to Rembrandt, that I think, if the Prince of Darkness had
made me the offer in some rash mood, I should have been tempted to
close with it, and should have become (in happy hour, and in
downright earnest) the great master of light and shade!
I have run myself out of my materials for this Essay, and want a
well-turned sentence or two to conclude with; like Benvenuto Cellini,
who complains that, with all the brass, tin, iron, and lead he could
muster in the house, his statue of Perseus was left imperfect, with a
dent in the heel of it. Once more then—I believe there is one
character that all the world would be glad to change with—which is
that of a favoured rival. Even hatred gives way to envy. We would be
any thing—a toad in a dungeon—to live upon her smile, which is our
all of earthly hope and happiness; nor can we, in our infatuation,
conceive that there is any difference of feeling on the subject, or that
the pressure of her hand is not in itself divine, making those to whom
such bliss is deigned like the Immortal Gods!
 APHORISMS ON MAN

The Monthly Magazine.]

[October, 1830–June, 1831.

I
Servility is a sort of bastard envy. We heap our whole stock of
involuntary adulation on a single prominent figure, to have an excuse
for withdrawing our notice from all other claims (perhaps juster and
more galling ones), and in the hope of sharing a part of the applause
as train-bearers.
 II
Admiration is catching by a certain sympathy. The vain admire the
vain; the morose are pleased with the morose; nay, the selfish and
cunning are charmed with the tricks and meanness of which they are
witnesses, and may be in turn the dupes.
 III
Vanity is no proof of conceit. A vain man often accepts of praise as
a cheap substitute for his own good opinion. He may think more
highly of another, though he would be wounded to the quick if his
own circle thought so. He knows the worthlessness and hollowness
of the flattery to which he is accustomed, but his ear is tickled with
the sound; and the effeminate in this way can no more live without
the incense of applause, than the effeminate in another can live
without perfumes or any other customary indulgence of the senses.
Such people would rather have the applause of fools than the
approbation of the wise. It is a low and shallow ambition.
 IV
It was said of some one who had contrived to make himself
popular abroad by getting into hot water, but who proved very
troublesome and ungrateful when he came home—‘We thought him a
very persecuted man in India’—the proper answer to which is, that
there are some people who are good for nothing else but to be
persecuted. They want some check to keep them in order.
 V
It is a sort of gratuitous error in high life, that the poor are
naturally thieves and beggars, just as the latter conceive that the rich
are naturally proud and hard-hearted. Give a man who is starving a
thousand a-year, and he will be no longer under a temptation to get
himself hanged by stealing a leg of mutton for his dinner; he may still
spend it in gaming, drinking, and the other vices of a gentleman, and
not in charity, about which he before made such an outcry.
 VI
Do not confer benefits in the expectation of meeting with
gratitude; and do not cease to confer them because you find those
whom you have served ungrateful. Do what you think fit and right to
please yourself; the generosity is not the less real, because it does not
meet with a correspondent return. A man should study to get
through the world as he gets through St. Giles’s—with as little
annoyance and interruption as possible from the shabbiness around
him.
 VII
Common-place advisers and men of the world, are always
pestering you to conform to their maxims and modes, just like the
barkers in Monmouth-street, who stop the passengers by entreating
them to turn in and refit at their second-hand repositories.