Practical Essays | Page 7

to assume a sobriety of aims that Helps might call dulness, but that many of us call the middle path.
* * * * *
[FALLACY OF PRESCRIBING TASTES.]
II. A second error against the limits of the human powers is the prescribing to persons indiscriminately, certain tastes, pursuits, and subjects of interest, on the ground that what is a spring of enjoyment to one or a few may be taken up, as a matter of course, by others with the same relish. It is, indeed, a part of happiness to have some taste, occupation, or pursuit, adequate to charm and engross us--a ruling passion, a favourite study. Accordingly, the victims of dulness and ennui are often advised to betake themselves to something of this potent character. Kingsley, in his little book on the "Wonders of the Shore," endeavoured to convert mankind at large into marine naturalists; and, some time ago, there appeared in the newspapers a letter from Carlyle, regretting that he himself had not been indoctrinated into the zoology of our waysides. I have heard a man out of health, hypochondriac, and idle, recommended to begin botany, geology, or chemistry, as a diversion of his misery. The idea is plausible and superficial. An overpowering taste for any subject--botany, zoology, antiquities, music--is properly affirmed to be born with a man. The forces of the brain must from the first incline largely to that one species of impressions, to which must be added years of engrossing pursuit. We may gaze with envy at the fervour of a botanist over his dried plants, and may wish to take up so fascinating a pursuit: we may just as easily wish to be Archimedes when he leaped out of the bath; a man cannot re-cast his brain nor re-live his life. A taste of a high order, founded on natural endowment, formed by education, and strengthened by active devotion, is also paid for by the atrophy of other tastes, pursuits, and powers. Carlyle might have contracted an interest in frogs, and spiders, and bees, and the other denizens of the wayside, but it would have been with the surrender of some other interest, the diversion of his genius out of its present channels. The strong emotions of the mind are not to be turned off and on, to this subject and to that. If you begin early with a human being, you may impress a particular direction upon the feelings, you may even cross a natural tendency, and work up a taste on a small basis of predisposition. Place any youth in the midst of artists, and you may induce a taste for art that shall at length be decided and strong. But if you were to take the same person in middle life and immure him in a laboratory, that he might become an enthusiastic chemist, the limits of human nature would probably forbid your success.
Such very strong tastes as impart a high and perennial zest to one's life are merely the special direction of a natural exuberance of feeling or emotion. A spare and thin emotional temperament will undoubtedly have preferences, likings and dislikings, but it can never supply the material for fervour or enthusiasm in anything.
The early determining of natural tastes is a subject of high practical interest. We shall only remark at present that a varied and broad groundwork of early education is the best known device for this end.
* * * * *
[RELATION OF FEELINGS TO IMAGINATION.]
III. A third error, deserving of brief comment, is a singular inversion of the relationship of the Feelings to the Imagination. It is frequently affirmed, both in criticism and in philosophy, that the Feelings depend upon, or have their basis in, the Imagination.
An able and polished writer, discussing the character of Edmund Burke, remarks: "The passions of Burke were strong; this is attributable in great measure to the intensity of the imaginative faculty". Again, Dugald Stewart, observing upon the influence of the Imagination on Happiness, says: "All that part of our happiness or misery which arises from our hopes or our fears derives its existence entirely from the power of imagination". He even goes the length of affirming that "cowardice is entirely a disease of the imagination". Another writer accounts for the intensity of the amatory sentiments in Robert Burns by the strength of his imagination.
[IMAGINATION GROUNDED IN FEELING.]
Now, I venture to affirm that this view very nearly reverses the fact. The Imagination is determined by the Feelings, and not the Feelings by the Imagination. Intensity of feeling, emotion, or passion, is the earlier fact: the intellect swayed and controlled by feeling, shaping forms to correspond with an existing emotional tone, is Imagination. It was not the imaginative faculty that gave Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and the poets generally, their great enjoyment of nature; but the