608 APPENDIX

PERVICACITY OF CHARACTER

[This passage in the MS. follows i. § 245 (p. 220).]

I have seemed conceited enough in the account just given of my faculty of admiration-but have to add this fatal depreciation, that I had not the slightest power of invention.¹ My brain in this is as powerless as an animal’s.

This old want of mine, however, while it entirely destroyed my power of being an artist, made me an undisturbedly accurate observer,-not but that real artists like Turner or Carpaccio observed with greater accuracy, but they alter things to their minds and spend time in painting dreams.

The supernatural charm of wild scenery to me was a spiritual joy in the thing itself and in nothing else. I felt it on getting down to Catterick bridge in 1837² with extreme intensity, because I had been four years,-and those changeful ones,-abroad or at Oxford,³ and this was like coming home again.

In this pleasure in returning to my old thoughts and ways, let me note a point in my character which might easily be lost sight of, or even quite misinterpreted-by the tenor of my life-its pervicacity and unchangeableness.

It has so chanced that I knew little of the world while I was young, and saw a good deal of it as I got older-also a great many curious and entirely new things have happened in the world since I was twenty; also, I have always been trying to learn or discover things, and have had much leisure to do so. Hence, the figure and contents of my mind are necessarily very different now from what they were when I was twenty.

But farther, though entirely destitute of formative or poetical imagination, my practical imagination, the conception of what might be done in any matter, has always been keen and vast beyond any-so called “schemes” I ever knew;-keen in its perception of what could be done, vast in its hope and audacity in attempting to do it,-never checking itself at less than the entire logical expansion of its idea. Thus Mr. Eben^r. Elliott,-or whoever it was,-invented the notion that bread should not be taxed⁴-but I instantly expand that initial notion into the conclusive one that neither bread, drink, nor lodging should be. Mr. Rowland Hill invents the idea that letters carried cheap would bring in a good revenue to the Government;-I instantly expand that idea into the conclusive one that everything carried cheap would bring a much greater revenue to the Government, and that, when we wanted to travel ourselves, we should all be posted. It could not but follow on this habit of mind that I should plan the doing of much that I never did,-easily and remorselessly abandon a fourfold plan to take up a sevenfold one, and begin a great many merely single or double ones without carrying them-so much as to the middle, far less to an end. So that the aspect of my life to its outward beholder is of an extremely desultory force-at its best-confusedly iridescent-unexpectedly and wanderingly sparkling or extinct like a ragged bit of tinder.

¹ [Compare above, pp. 120, 304.]

² [See above, p. 218.]

³ [Not quite accurate; he was at home in 1834, abroad in 1835, at Oxford 1836-1837.]

⁴ [For a quotation from Elliott’s Corn-Law Rhymes, see Vol. XXIX. pp. 39-40.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]