by William Hazlitt
There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.
tags: Hazlitt, character, obsession, conversation, egotism, wit
I like a mind more Catholic.
Essay VII from Table Talk, 1821.
There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.
There is Major C—: he has but one idea or subject of discourse, Parliamentary Reform. Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) a very good thing, a very good idea, and a very good subject to talk about; but why should it be the only one? To hear the worthy and gallant Major resume his favourite topic, is like law-business, or a person who has a suit in Chancery going on. Nothing can be attended to, nothing can be talked of but that. Like the piece of packthread in the barrister's hands, he turns and twists it all ways, and cannot proceed a step without it. Some school-boys cannot read but in their own book: and the man of one idea cannot converse out of his own subject. Conversation it is not; but a sort of recital of the preamble of a bill. It would be well if there was any thing of character, of eccentricity in all this; but that is not the case. It is a political homily personified, a walking common-place we have to encounter and listen to. It is just as if a man was to insist on your hearing him go through the fifth chapter of the Book of Judges every time you meet. It is a tune played on a barrel-organ.
It is a common vehicle of discourse into which they get and are set down when they please, without any pains or trouble to themselves. The man has no more to do with the question which he saddles on all his hearers than you have. This is what makes the matter hopeless. If a farmer talks to you about his pigs or his poultry, or a physician about his patients, or a lawyer about his briefs, or a merchant about stock, or an author about himself, you know how to account for this — it is a common infirmity, you have a laugh at his expense, and there is no more to be said. But here is a man who goes out of his way to be absurd, and is troublesome by a romantic effort of generosity. He retorts the Latin adage upon you — Nihil humani a me alienum puto. He has got possession of a subject which is of universal and paramount interest — and on that plea may hold you by the button as long as he chooses.
Every man's house is his castle; and every man's common-place is his stronghold, from which he looks out and smiles at the dust and heat of controversy. As Cicero says of study, it follows him into the country, it stays with him at home: it sits with him at breakfast, and goes out with him to dinner. It is like a part of his dress, of the costume of his person, without which he would be at a loss what to do. If he meets you in the street, he accosts you with it as a form of salutation; if you see him at his own house, it is supposed you come upon that. If you happen to remark, "It is a fine day," it is considered as a temporary compromise of the question.
Place its veteran champion under the frozen north, and he will celebrate sweet smiling Reform: place him under the mid-day Afric suns, and he will talk of nothing but Reform — Reform so sweetly smiling and so sweetly promising for the last forty years —
Dulce ridentem Lalagen, Dulce loquentem!
A topic of this sort is an estate for life, free from all incumbrance of wit, thought, or study; you live upon it as a settled income; and others might as well think to eject you out of a capital freehold house as think to drive you out of it into the wide world of common sense and argument.
There are some who fancy the Corn Bill the root of all evil, and others who trace all the miseries of life to the practice of muffling up children in night-clothes when they sleep or travel. They will declaim by the hour together on the first, and argue themselves black in the face on the last. It is in vain that you give up the point. They persist in the debate, and begin again — "But don't you see—?"
People of the character here spoken of generally differ in their favourite notion from the rest of the world; and indeed it is the love of distinction which is mostly at the bottom of this peculiarity. Thus one person is remarkable for living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to entertain you all dinner-time with an invective against animal food. One of this self-denying class, lamenting the death of a patient whom he had augured to be in a good way as a convert to his system, at last accounted for his disappointment in a whisper — "But she ate meat privately, depend upon it."
Abernethy thinks his pill an infallible cure for all disorders. A person once complaining to his physician that he thought his mode of treatment had not answered, he assured him it was the best in the world — "and as a proof of it," says he, "I have had one gentleman, a patient with your disorder, under the same regimen for the last sixteen years!"
I have known persons whose minds were entirely taken up at all times with such questions as the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, the Restoration of the Jews, or the progress of Unitarianism. How many projectors have gone mad in good earnest from incessantly harping on one idea — the discovery of the philosopher's stone, the finding out the longitude, or paying off the national debt! The disorder at length comes to a fatal crisis; but long before this, while they were walking about and talking as usual, the derangement of the fancy, the loss of all voluntary power to control or alienate their ideas from the single subject that occupied them, was gradually taking place, and overturning the fabric of the understanding by wrenching it all on one side.
There is a conceited fellow about town who talks always and every where on this subject. He wears the Categories round his neck like a pearl-chain; he plays off the names of the primary and transcendental qualities like rings on his fingers. He talks of the Kantean system while he dances; he talks of it while he dines; he talks of it to his children, to his apprentices, to his customers. He called on me to convince me of it, and said I was only prevented from becoming a complete convert by one or two prejudices. He knows no more about it than a pike-staff.
A friend of mine, whom I met one day in the street, accosted me with more than usual vivacity, and said, "Well, we're selling, we're selling!" I thought he meant a house. "No," he said, "haven't you seen the advertisement? I mean five-and-twenty copies of the Essay." This work, a comely, capacious quarto on the most abstruse metaphysics, had occupied his sole thoughts for several years, and he concluded that I must be thinking of what he was.
Mr. Fearn was buried in the woods of Indostan. In his leisure from business and from tiger-shooting, he took it into his head to look into his own mind. Several notions had taken possession of his brain relating to mental processes which he had never heard alluded to in conversation. He took a journey to the capital of the Peninsula on purpose, bought Locke, Reid, Stewart, and Berkeley, whom he consulted with eager curiosity when he got home, but did not find what he looked for. He set to work himself; and in a few weeks sketched out a rough draught of his thoughts on bamboo paper. The eagerness of his new pursuit, together with the diseases of the climate, proved too much for his constitution. He put his metaphysics, his bamboo manuscript, into the boat with him, and as he floated down the Ganges, said to himself — "If I live, this will live: if I die, it will not be heard of."
The world, as Goldsmith said of himself, made a point of taking no notice of it. Ever since he has had nothing but disappointment and vexation — the greatest and most heart-breaking of all others — that of not being able to make yourself understood.
Mr. Owen is a man remarkable for one idea. It is that of himself and the Lanark cotton-mills. He carries this idea backwards and forwards with him from Glasgow to London, without allowing any thing for attrition, and expects to find it in the same state of purity and perfection in the latter place as at the former.
Nor Alps nor Apennines can keep him out, Nor fortified redoubt.
He comes into a room with one of these documents in his hand, with the air of a schoolmaster and a quack-doctor mixed, asks very kindly how you do, and on hearing you are still in an indifferent state of health owing to bad digestion, instantly turns round, and observes that all that will be remedied in his plan. And having said this, this expert and sweeping orator takes up his hat and walks down stairs after reading his lecture of truisms like a play-bill or an apothecary's advertisement; and should you stop him at the door to say that Mr. Southey seems somewhat favourable to his plan, he looks at you with a smile of pity at the futility of all opposition.
People who thus swell out some vapid scheme of their own into undue importance seem to me to labour under water in the head — to exhibit a huge hydrocephalus! They may be very worthy people for all that, but they are bad companions and very indifferent reasoners.
I hate to be surfeited with any thing, however sweet. I do not want to be always tied to the same question, as if there were no other in the world.
I love to talk with mariners, That come from a far countreé.
I am not for "a collusion" but "an exchange" of ideas. Do all we can to shake it off, there is always enough pedantry, egotism, and self-conceit left lurking behind: we need not seal ourselves up hermetically in these precious qualities, so as to think of nothing but our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own voice.
A well-known writer says that "a Lord is imprisoned in the Bastille of a name, and cannot enlarge himself into man" — and I have known men of genius in the same predicament.
Why must a man be for ever mouthing out his own poetry, comparing himself with Milton, passage by passage, and weighing every line in a balance of posthumous fame which he holds in his own hands? It argues a want of imagination as well as common sense. Has he no ideas but what he has put into verse; or none in common with his hearers? One of the first mathematicians and classical scholars of the day was mentioning it as a compliment to himself that a cousin of his, a girl from school, had said of him — "You know M— is a very plain good sort of a young man, but he is not any thing at all out of the common."
There are persons, who without being chargeable with the vice here spoken of, yet stand accountant for as great a sin: though not dull and monotonous, they are vivacious mannerists in their conversation, and excessive egotists. Though they run over a thousand subjects in mere gaiety of heart, their delight still flows from one idea, namely, themselves. Open the book in what page you will, there is a frontispiece of themselves staring you in the face.
Whether they talk of the town or the country, poetry or politics, it comes to much the same thing. Their rural descriptions are mere landscape back-grounds with their own portraits in an engaging attitude in front. They are not observing or enjoying the scene, but doing the honours as masters of the ceremonies to nature, and arbiters of elegance to all humanity.
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