124 Them the glad Fauns invite, and Dryad powers First in her streets the Inachian city sees Of Juno, when she spies the unwelcome guest: There swarm'd along the coast th' impatient crew. Soon as the subtle wax has closed the sides Of Nereids; and delighting in the main, Fair Galathea follows: on a steep The Cyclops stands and calls her from the deep. Reclining midst the sovereigns of the seas Elsewhere the dread dissension might'st thou see Betwixt the two-fold race and Lapithæ. L PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT PEOPLE. Are there balance here to weigh the flesh?- Merchant of Venice. I HAVE no desire to jostle people out of their good self-opinion, or the good opinion of others, but to ascertain their real worth, to separate their vices from their virtues, and to have a little more equal dealing in our ordinary judgment of men. Steele, I think, in the Tatler, has in his brief way given an able judgment on this very subject; and Mr. Hazlitt, some years since, wrote an Essay expressly on it. Possibly little more was wanting; but two blows are always better than one; and as in a question of morality, or any other, where men's interests do not compel them to act or decide, twenty are often insufficient, the second, though infinitely weaker, have some consequence. may By a pleasant fellow, I mean a man universally accounted so for in certain moods of the mind, and in particular societies, we all answer to the description:--where opinions are all in agreement-where a mad speculation is kept in decent countenance, or one common-place seconded by another-where our prejudices are humoured, our likes and dislikes nursed and cherished, where men clap hands to the same song, and join in the same chorus, there is a nest of pleasant fellows, though they may be wise men or madmen, honest men or knaves. But the pleasant fellow I mean is equally a pleasant fellow in all companies, and on all occasions; has a spare bed in every other man's house, a knife and fork at their table, a good welcome, go when and where he will, and a good word after he is gone. There are many shades and distinctions in this class, as in all others, but these are the distinguishing features of them. Some give you a most fearful shake of the hand on meeting, and hold you by it with a sort of tremulous enjoyment, as if loth to part so soon; -have a boyish joyousness about them, that puts you constantly off your guard, and are delighted to see a friend any where, but at their own house or in jail, and therefore never subject their feelings to the latter unpleasantness. Another variety are only pleasant on fresh acquaintance, or where it serves their purpose; but this last is a contemptible, mongrel breed. A really pleasant fellow is neither a hateful, nor a contemptible one; but is generally a very unpretending person, full of an easy sympathy, active, zealous in a degree, with a quiet self-enjoyment, an enlarged humanity that includes all mankind, and woman kind too, for it knows neither distinction nor preference; taking all things pleasantly that concern him not individually, and thereby making all things pleasant; even sacrificing personal considerations, and always personal consequence and self-respect, in trifles, to the enjoyment of others; setting up no system, nor pulling down any; having no theories, no dreams, no visions, no opinions that he holds worth wrangling or disputing about; and, indeed, few opinions at all. He has always a dash more of the animal than of the intellectual about him; and is too mercurial-minded to be easily fixed, or fixed upon. He lives only in the present; for the past is immediately forgotten, because it has no farther consequence, and the future is a blank, because it has no perceptible influence. As he can he delighted with a straw, so is he depressed with its shadow; prick him and he will bleed; tickle him and he will laugh; poison him and he will die; for he has none of the fervency of imagination to carry him out of himself or beyond immediate circumstances. He is fitted neither for the goodly fellowship of the prophets, nor for the noble army of martyrs. If prophets or martyrs have ever been pleasant fellows, as some are reported, it was that from the vast height whence they looked down on the common and ordinary passion and turmoil of the world it seemed too puny and insignificant to interest or excite them. Who that is intent on an immortal life, and holds communion, even in thought, with those beatified spirits that 126 Pleasant and Unpleasant People. Immoved, Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, Though worlds Judged them perverse "their that looks on life as a needle's point more "aggra Laying aside, for the present, whatever may personally affect either, for then it is often the reverse of true, I should say, that pleasant and un'pleasant people differ most in this, that the one is without imagination, and looks to the naked reality; the other, with imagination, vates" either joy or sorrow. Unpleasant people have the larger universal husympathy and manity. This, it may be said, is contradictory, and opposed to what I have before observed of pleasant people. But if it be a contradiction, it is in human nature; and, to use an apology of Fielding's, "I am not writing a system, but a history, and am not obliged to reconcile every matter." But I think it is not a contradiction. The pleasant man sympathizes with the world in its ordinary and every day feelings; the man of more questionable temper is roused only by extraordinary circumstances. But he is then awakened to some purpose. He makes common cause with you, in sorrow or suffering; he will needs bear his share of your burthen; for if a portion will be oppressive to him, he sees you sinking under the whole. The pleasant fellow, on the contrary, measures his own shoulders and not your load; he will not lend a hand, and give the groan to your man beetle" labour; he is content that you should sit down and rest, " three [Feb but has no fancy to "bear the logs The great majority of these plea- The two subjects on which men feel most intensely, politics and religion, are shut out from the conversation of a pleasant fellow; for there is no sure common-place that will suit all sects and parties on either subject; and to hazard an opinion is to speculate with his character, and put his amiability in jeopardy. Yet these men are the soul of mixed company, because their souls are in it; and there is no unpleasant shadow either of memory or anticipation to overcast their jollity. Pleasant and unpleasant men are and alike the sport of fortune and circumstance; equally subject " to every skiey influence," but not in an equal degree. The personal suffering of the one has no foil from the greater sufferings of thousands; the other has a measure and proportion, and considers it in relation to what might be or has been; it is a touch that awakens his humanity: -a pebble does not bruize because it has fallen on him; he remembers the stoning of Stephen;-a twinge of the rheumatism is borne as one of those natural ills" that flesh is heir to," and rouses him only as he remembers the infliction of the torture and the rack, that so many human beings have been subjected to in all ages for opinion, whether of belief or unbelief. The prick of a pin is painful to the one as it affects himself; there is more sorrowing at it than at the Battle of Waterloo; to the other it is the prick of a pin. Pleasant fellows are indifferent, cold, heartless, unintellectual people; there is no engrossing passion, no : oppressive thought, no prejudice, and therefore, possibly no partiality or strong friendship; for friendship is but a partiality, founded on something real, which it tricks up into something unreal. We are none of us what our friends fondly believe. In our estimate of unpleasant people, we all give weight enough to their disagreeable and palpable defects, but are not so ready to make the just deduction from a pleasant fellow, because his are neither so obtrusive, nor so likely to affect ourselves. There would be more equality in our commendation or dispraise, and consequently more justice in the decision, if we balanced the general virtues of the one against his palpable faults, and the indifference and moral insignificance of the other against his pleasant virtues. It is in this spirit that the selfish hardness and callosity with which pleasant people shake off care and sorrow, and are made insensible to any deep or lasting passion, is mistaken so often for elasticity of spirit. It was the pleasant fellow of his time that Ben Jonson described in a very clever Epigram on "The Town's Honest Man:" You wonder who this is, and why I name Do all that 'longs to the anarchy of drink, Except the duel: can sing songs and catches, Give every one his dose of mirth: and think the Dean, in Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art, had a little of the pleasant fellow about him; and the following description will serve to show the character under other circumstances, and in more important situations, than we have yet considered it. If the dean had loved his wife but moderately, seeing all her faults clearly as he did, he must frequently have quarreled with her: if he had loved her with tenderness, he must have treated her with a degree of violence, in the hope of amending her failings: but having neither personal nor mental affection towards her, sufficiently interesting to give himself the trouble to contradict her will in any thing, he passed for one of the best husbands in the world. This is the pleasant Benedict! It is some proof with me, of the justice of these distinctions, that men's characters are essentially different in their different relations; and even where they are most anxious to be pleasant, they are rarely successful. Few of us have found our fathers pleasant fellows, although many of them, of course, were superlatively so to other people; and I hope our sons will object the same thing to us. The interest we have in our children is too great, the stake is too large, to be sported with; our hopes and fears are perpetually outrunning the occasion sion; we are the sport of possibilities, and cannot enjoy the real present, from some glimpse of an unreal future; we question how far chuck-farthing and marbles lead to the gaming-table, and our shins ache at foot-ball before the boys are kicked. All this makes strange havock with our temper-frets and irritates us-whereas, equality and indifference are the sure footing of a pleasant fellow. A man is little fitted, with a thousand such speculations on his mind, to take all things smoothly, and to be himself the centre of sociality. The turn of thought here might serve, if the occasion were fitting, to hazard a word or two on domestic education. This in brief. It is not enough that a father does on occasion "turn his solemnness out of doors; " he must keep it there. Besides, fathers are not only too " solemn," but too much with their children, and too full of thought and anxiety; they are eternally thinking for them, whereas children must think for themselves. They love to feel their own independence. If a father decide for home education, it should be where there is room enough for the boy to lose himself, or rather to lose his father; where he may get out of the reach of thought, of care, and consequently of danger, for he knows of none that is not pointed out to him. In my opinion, a father has not to try his knowledge, but his nerves, before he undertakes the education of his son; and if he can see him stagger along a parapet, swing on the rotten branch of a tree, plunge into the water "reeking hot" in the dog days, in fact, hazard limbs and life itself without a word or a hint of caution, he is not only fitted to be pedagogue in his own family, but has many requisites to make a pleasant fellow, there or any where else. But this little digression has broken in upon my sketch, which I shall now leave to be filled up by the reader's imagination. Mr. Hazlitt's character is, I think, of a good natured man. How far they have points in agreement I know not, not having read his Essay since its first publication; but good nature has reference in my view to a deeper feeling, and even to some positive virtue, which, though it may be found in, is not at all essential to, the character of a pleasant fellow. Yet even good nature itself is too profitable a virtue; it is a venture that hath most usurious return: it is not, nor is it any thing like, goodness of nature, which "I take" says Lord Bacon "to be the affecting of the Weale of Men, what the Grecians called philanthropia;" goodness of nature is, in fact, so far different from good nature, that it is the very nature that sometimes spoils a man's temper :-" that affection for the weale of men will throw a gloom over the mind, and dash a whole afternoon's pleasantness. THURMA. O LOVELY maid, though thou art all Sweet maid, with youth's fond blushes warm, Thou lovely creature, though to thee JOHN CLARE. |