coming forward and seating himself on the ground in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the indian jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives, nor if we were to take our whole lives to do it in. is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to miraculous? it is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever anxious application up to manhood can accomplish or make even a slight approach to. man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to little account! — to conceive of this effort of extraordinary dexterity distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless. yet it costs nothing to the performer, any more than if it were a mere mechanical deception with which he had nothing to do but to watch and laugh at the astonishment of the spectators. a single error of a hairsbreadth, of the smallest conceivable portion of time, would be fatal: the precision of the movements must be like a mathematical truth, their rapidity is like lightning. to catch four balls in succession in less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand again; to make them revolve round him at certain intervals like the planets in their spheres; to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors; to throw them behind his back and twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do if with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries; to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time with the music on the stage — there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life. it is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. it seems as if the difficulty once mastered naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort. the smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process. it is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children. some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful, such as the balancing the artificial tree and shooting a bird from each branch through a quill; though none of them have the elegance or facility of the keeping up of the brass balls. you are in pain for the result, and glad when the experiment is over; they are not accompanied with the same unmixed, unchecked delight as the former; and i would not give much to be merely astonished without being pleased at the game time. as to the swallowing of the sword, the police ought to interfere to prevent it. when i saw the indian juggler do the same things before, his feet were bare, and he had large rings on the toes, which kept turning round all the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves. — the hearing a speech in parliament drawled or stammered out by the honourable member or the noble lord; the ringing the changes on their common-places, which any one could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot, shakes not my good opinion of myself; but the seeing the indian jugglers does. it makes me ashamed of myself. i ask what there is that i can do as well as this? nothing. what have i been doing all my life? have i been idle, or have i nothing to show for all my labour and pains? or have i passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark and not finding them? is there no one thing in which i can challenge competition, that i can bring as an instance of exact perfection in which others cannot find a flaw? the utmost i can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. i can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. what abortions are these essays! what errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! how little is made out, and that little how ill! yet they are the best i can do. i endeavour to recollect all i have ever observed or thought upon a subject, and to express it as nearly as i can. instead of writing on four subjects at a time, it is as much as i can manage to keep the thread of one discourse clear and unentangled. i have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods; but the one i cannot, and the other i will not do. i am fond of arguing: yet with a good deal of pains and practice it is often as much as i can do to beat my man; though he may be an indifferent hand. a common fencer would disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. a stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reas hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere clown.26

i have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of intellectual compared to mechanical excellence, and it has always made me somewhat dissatisfied. it is a great many years since i saw richer, the famous rope-dancer, perform at sadler’s wells. he was matchless in his art, and added to his extraordinary skill exquisite ease, and unaffected, natural grace. i was at that time employed in copying a half-length picture of sir joshua reynolds’s; and it put me out of conceit with it. how ill this part was made out in the drawing! how heavy, how slovenly this other was painted! i could not help saying to myself, ‘if the rope-dancer had performed his task in this manner, leaving so many gaps and botches in his work, he would have broken his neck long ago; i should never have seen that vigorous elasticity of nerve and precision of movement!’— is it, then, so easy an undertaking (comparatively) to dance on a tight-rope? let any one who thinks so get up and try. there is the thing. it is that which at first we cannot do at all which in the end is done to such perfection. to account for this in some degree, i might observe that mechanical dexterity is confined to doing some one particular thing, which you can repeat as often as you please, in which you know whether you succeed or fail, and where the point of perfection consists in succeeding in a given undertaking. — in mechanical efforts you improve by perpetual practice, and you do so infallibly, because the object to be attained is not a matter of taste or fancy or opinion, but of actual experiment, in which you must either do the thing or not do it. if a man is put to aim at a mark with a bow and arrow, he must hit it or miss it, that’s certain. he cannot deceive himself, and go on shooting wide or falling short, and still fancy that he is making progress. no distinction between right and wrong, between true and false, is here palpable; and he must either correct his aim or persevere in his error with his eyes open, for which there is neither excuse nor temptation. if a man is learning to dance on a rope, if he does not mind what he is about he will break his neck. after that it will be in vain for him to argue that he did not make a false step. his situation is not like that of goldsmith’s pedagogue:—

in argument they own’d his wondrous skill,

and e’en though vanquish’d, he could argue still.

danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. so are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. there is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences)— neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice. if the indian juggler were to play tricks in throwing up the three case-knives, which keep their positions like the leaves of a crocus in the air, he would cut his fingers. i can make a very bad antithesis without cutting my fingers. the tact of style is more ambiguous than that of double-edged instruments. if the juggler were told that by flinging himself under the wheels of the juggernaut, when the idol issues forth on a gaudy day, he would immediately be transported into paradise, he might believe it, and nobody could disprove it. so the brahmins may say what they please on that subject, may build up dogmas and mysteries without end, and not be detected; but their ingenious countryman cannot persuade the frequenters of the olympic theatre that he performs a number of astonishing feats without actually giving proofs of what he says. — there is, then, in this sort of manual dexterity, first a gradual aptitude acquired to a given exertion of muscular power, from constant repetition, and in the next place, an exact knowledge how much is still wanting and necessary to be supplied. the obvious test is to increase the effort or nicety of the operation, and still to find it come true. the muscles ply instinctively to the dictates of habit. certain movements and impressions of the hand and eye, having been repeated together an infinite number of times, are unconsciously but unavoidable cemented into closer and closer union; the limbs require little more than to be put in motion for them to follow a regular track with ease and certainty; so that the mere intention of the will acts mathematically like touching the spring of a machine, and you come with locksley in ivanhoe, in shooting at a mark, ‘to allow for the wind.’

further, what is meant by perfection in mechanical exercises is the performing certain feats to a uniform nicety, that is, in fact, undertaking no more than you can perform. you task yourself, the limit you fix is optional, and no more than human industry and skill can attain to; but you have no abstract, independent standard of difficulty or excellence (other than the extent of your own powers). thus he who can keep up four brass balls does this to perfection; but he cannot keep up five at the same instant, and would fail every time he attempted it. that is, the mechanical performer undertakes to emulate himself, not to equal another.27 but the artist undertakes to imitate another, or to do what nature has done, and this it appears is more difficult, viz. to copy what she has set before us in the face of nature or ‘human face divine,’ entire and without a blemish, than to keep up four brass balls at the same instant, for the one is done by the power of human skill and industry, and the other never was nor will be. upon the whole, therefore, i have more respect for reynolds than i have for richer; for, happen how it will, there have been more people in the world who could dance on a rope like the one than who could paint like sir joshua. the latter was but a bungler in his profession to the other, it is true; but then he had a harder taskmaster to obey, whose will was more wayward and obscure, and whose instructions it was more difficult to practise. you can put a child apprentice to a tumbler or rope-dancer with a comfortable prospect of success, if they are but sound of wind and limb; but you cannot do the same thing in painting. the odds are a million to one. you may make indeed as many haydons and h——s as you put into that sort of machine, but not one reynolds amongst them all, with his grace, his grandeur, his blandness of gusto, ‘in tones and gestures hit,’ unless you could make the man over again. to snatch this grace beyond the reach of art is then the height of art — where fine art begins, and where mechanical skill ends. the soft suffusion of the soul, the speechless breathing eloquence, the looks ‘commercing with the skies,’ the ever-shifting forms of an eternal principle, that which is seen but for a moment, but dwells in the heart always, and is only seized as it passes by strong and secret sympathy, must be taught by nature and genius, not by rules or study. it is suggested by feeling, not by laborious microscopic inspection; in seeking for it without, we lose the harmonious clue to it within; and in aiming to grasp the substance, we let the very spirit of art evaporate. in a word, the objects of fine art are not the objects of sight, but as these last are the objects of taste and imagination, that is, as they appeal to the sense of beauty, of pleasure, and of power in the human breast, and are explained by that finer sense, and revealed in their inner structure to the eye in return. nature is also a language. objects, like words, have a meaning; and the true artist is the interpreter of this language, which he can only do by knowing its application to a thousand other objects in a thousand other situations. thus the eye is too blind a guide of itself to distinguish between the warm or cold tone of a deep-blue sky; but another sense acts as a monitor to it and does not err. the colour of the leaves in autumn would be nothing without the feeling that accompanies it; but it is that feeling that stamps them on the canvas, faded, seared, blighted, shrinking from the winter’s flaw, and makes the sight as true as touch —

and visions, as poetic eyes avow,

cling to each leaf and hang on every bough.

the more ethereal, evanescent, more refined and sublime part of art is the seeing nature through the medium of sentiment and passion, as each object is a symbol of the affections and a link in the chain of our endless being. but the unravelling this mysterious web of thought and feeling is alone in the muse’s gift, namely, in the power of that trembling sensibility which is awake to every change and every modification of its ever-varying impressions, that

thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line.

this power is indifferently called genius, imagination, feeling, taste; but the manner in which it acts upon the mind can neither be defined by abstract rules, as is the case in science, nor verified by continual, unvarying experiments, as is the case in mechanical performances. the mechanical excellence of the dutch painters in colouring and handling is that which comes the nearest in fine art to the perfection of certain manual exhibitions of skill. the truth of the effect and the facility with which it is produced are equally admirable. up to a certain point everything is faultless. the hand and eye have done their part. there is only a want of taste and genius. it is after we enter upon that enchanted ground that the human mind begins to droop and flag as in a strange road, or in a thick mist, benighted and making little way with many attempts and many failures, and that the best of us only escape with half a triumph. the undefined and the imaginary are the regions that we must pass like satan, difficult and doubtful, ‘half flying, half on foot.’ the object in sense is a positive thing, and execution comes with practice.

cleverness is a certain knack or aptitude at doing certain things, which depend more on a particular adroitness and off-hand readiness than on force or perseverance, such as making puns, making epigrams, making extempore verses, mimicking the company, mimicking a style, etc. cleverness is either liveliness and smartness, or something answering to sleight of hand, like letting a glass fall sideways off a table, or else a trick, like knowing the secret spring of a watch. accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to be learned from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of the beholder, viz. dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on. these ornamental acquirements are only proper to those who are at ease in mind and fortune. i know an individual who, if he had been born to an estate of five thousand a year, would have been the most accomplished gentleman of the age. he would have been the delight and envy of the circle in which he moved — would have graced by his manners the liberality flowing from the openness of his heart, would have laughed with the women, have argued with the men, have said good things and written agreeable ones, have taken a hand at piquet or the lead at the harpsichord, and have set and sung his own verses — nugae canorae — with tenderness and spirit; a rochester without the vice, a modern surrey! as it is, all these capabilities of excellence stand in his way. he is too versatile for a professional man, not dull enough for a political drudge, too gay to be happy, too thoughtless to be rich. he wants the enthusiasm of the poet, the severity of the prose-writer, and the application of the man of business. talent differs from genius as voluntary differs from involuntary power. ingenuity is genius in trifles; greatness is genius in undertakings of much pith and moment. a clever or ingenious man is one who can do anything well, whether it is worth doing or not; a great man is one who can do that which when done is of the highest importance make of a small city a great one. this gives one a pretty good idea of the distinction in question.

greatness is great power, producing great effects. it is not enough that a man has great power in himself; he must show it to all the world in a way that cannot be hid or gainsaid. he must fill up a certain idea in the public mind. i have no other notion of greatness than this twofold definition, great results springing from great inherent energy. the great in visible objects has relation to that which extends over space; the great in mental ones has to do with space and time. no man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. the test of greatness is the page of history. nothing can be said to be great that has a distinct limit, or that borders on something evidently greater than itself. besides, what is short-lived and pampered into mere notoriety is of a gross and vulgar quality in itself. a lord mayor is hardly a great man. a city orator or patriot of the day only show, by reaching the height of their wishes, the distance they are at from any true ambition. popularity is neither fame nor greatness. a king (as such) is not a great man. he has great power, but it is not his own. he merely wields the lever of the state, which a child, an idiot, or a madman can do. it is the office, not the man we gaze at. any one else in the same situation would be just as much an object of abject curiosity. we laugh at the country girl who having seen a king expressed her disappointment by saying, ‘why, he is only a man!’ yet, knowing this, we run to see a king as if he was something more than a man. — to display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness. to throw a barleycorn through the eye of a needle, to multiply nine figures by nine in the memory, argues definite dexterity of body and capacity of mind, but nothing comes of either. there is a surprising power at work, but the effects are not proportionate, or such as take hold of the imagination. to impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it. it must be communicated to their understandings in the shape of an increase of knowledge, or it must subdue and overawe them by subjecting their wills. admiration to be solid and lasting must be founded on proofs from which we have no means of escaping; it is neither a slight nor a voluntary gift. a mathematician who solves a profound problem, a poet who creates an image of beauty in the mind that was not there before, imparts knowledge and power to others, in which his greatness and his fame consists, and on which it reposes. jedediah buxton will be forgotten; but napier’s bones will live. lawgivers, philosophers, founders of religion, conquerors and heroes, inventors and great geniuses in arts and sciences, are great men, for they are great public benefactors, or formidable scourges to mankind. among ourselves, shakespear, newton, bacon, milton, cromwell, were great men, for they showed great power by acts and thoughts, that have not yet been consigned to oblivion. they must needs be men of lofty stature, whose shadows lengthen out to remote posterity. a great farce-writer may be a great man; for moliere was but a great farce-writer. in my mind, the author of don quixote was a great man. so have there been many others. a great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. no act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. this will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them. is not an actor then a great man, because ‘he dies and leaves the world no copy’? i must make an exception for mrs. siddons, or else give up my definition of greatness for her sake. a man at the top of his profession is not therefore a great man. he is great in his way, but that is all, unless he shows the marks of a great moving intellect, so that we trace the master-mind, and can sympathise with the springs that urge him on. the rest is but a craft or mystery. john hunter was a great man —that any one might see without the smallest skill in surgery. his style and manner showed the man. he would set about cutting up the carcass of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that michael angelo would have hewn a block of marble. lord nelson was a great naval commander; but for myself, i have not much opinion of a seafaring life. sir humphry davy is a great chemist, but i am not sure that he is a great man. i am not a bit the wiser for any of his discoveries, nor i never met with any one that was. but it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle. it is a contradiction in terms for a coxcomb to be a great man. a really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself. i have observed that certain sectaries and polemical writers have no higher compliment to pay their most shining lights than to say that “such a one was a considerable man in his day.” some new elucidation of a text sets aside the authority of the old interpretation, and a “great scholar’s memory outlives him half a century,” at the utmost. a rich man is not a great man, except to his dependents and his steward. a lord is a great man in the idea we have of his ancestry, and probably of himself, if we know nothing of him but his title. i have heard a story of two bishops, one of whom said (speaking of st. peter’s at rome) that when he first entered it, he was rather awe-struck, but that as he walked up it, his mind seemed to swell and dilate with it, and at last to fill the whole building: the other said that as he saw more of it, he appeared to himself to grow less and less every step he took, and in the end to dwindle into nothing. this was in some respects a striking picture of a great and little mind; for greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself. the one might have become a wolsey; the other was only fit to become a mendicant friar — or there might have been court reasons for making him a bishop. the french have to me a character of littleness in all about them; but they have produced three great men that belong to every country, moliere, rabelais, and montaigne.

to return from this digression, and conclude essay. a singular instance of manual dexterity was shown in the person of the late john cavanaugh, whom i have several times seen. his death was celebrated at the time in an article in the examiner newspaper (feb. 7, 1819), written apparently between jest and earnest; but as it is pat to our purpose, and falls in with my own way of considering such subjects, i shall here take leave to quote it:—

‘died at his house in burbage street, st. giles’s, john cavanagh, the famous hand fives-player. when a person dies who does any one thing better than any one else in the world, which so many others are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in society. it is not likely that any one will now see the game of fives played in its perfection for many years to come — for cavanagh is dead, and has not left his peer behind him. it may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall — there are things, indeed, that make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and throwing it away. but the game of fives is what no one despises who has ever played at it. it is the finest exercise for the body, and the best relaxation for the mind. the roman poet said that “care mounted behind the horseman and stuck to his skirts.” but this remark would not have applied to the fives-player. he who takes to playing at fives is twice young. he feels neither the past nor future “in the instant.” debts, taxes, “domestic treason, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further.” he has no other wish, no other thought, from the moment the game begins, but that of striking the ball, of placing it, of making it! this cavanagh was sure to do. whenever he touched the ball there was an end of the chase. his eye was certain, his hand fatal, his presence of mind complete. he could do what he pleased, and he always knew exactly what to do. he saw the whole game, and played it; took instant advantage of his adversary’s weakness, and recovered balls, as if by a miracle and from sudden thought, that every one gave for lost. he had equal power and skill, quickness and judgment. he could either outwit his antagonist by finesse, or beat him by main strength. sometimes, when he seemed preparing to send the ball with the full swing of his arm, he would by a slight turn of his wrist drop it within an inch of the line. in general, the ball came from his hand, as if from a racket, in a straight, horizontal line; so that it was in vain to attempt to overtake or stop it. as it was said of a great orator that he never was at a loss for a word, and for the properest word, so cavanagh always could tell the degree of force necessary to be given to a ball, and the precise direction in which it should be sent. he did his work with the greatest ease; never took more pains than was necessary; and while others were fagging themselves to death, was as cool and collected as if he had just entered the court. his style of play was as remarkable as his power of execution. he had no affectation, no trifling. he did not throw away the game to show off an attitude or try an experiment. he was a fine, sensible, manly player, who did what he could, but that was more than any one else could even affect to do. his blows were not undecided and ineffectual — lumbering like mr. wordsworth’s epic poetry, nor wavering like mr. coleridge’s lyric prose, nor short of the mark like mr. brougham’s speeches, nor wide of it like mr. canning’s wit, nor foul like the quarterly, nor let balls like the edinburgh review. cobbett and junius together would have made a cavanagh. he was the best up-hill player in the world; even when his adversary was fourteen, he would play on the same or better, and as he never flung away the game through carelessness and conceit, he never gave it through laziness or want of heart. the only peculiarity of his play was that he never volleyed, but let the balls hop; but if they rose an inch from the ground he never missed having them. there was not only nobody equal, but nobody second to him. it is supposed that he could give any other player half the game, or beat him with his left hand. his service was tremendous. he once played woodward and meredith together (two of the best players in england) in the fives-court, st. martin’s street, and made seven and twenty aces following by services alone — a thing unheard of. he another time played peru, who was considered a first-rate fives-player, a match of the best out of five games, and in the three first games, which of course decided the match, peru got only one ace. cavanagh was an irishman by birth, and a house-painter by profession. he had once laid aside his working-dress, and walked up, in his smartest clothes, to the rosemary branch to have an afternoon’s pleasure. a person accosted him, and asked him if he would have a game. so they agreed to play for half a crown a game and a bottle of cider. the first game began — it was seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, all. cavanagh won it. the next was the same. they played on, and each game was hardly contested. “there,” said the unconscious fives-player, “there was a stroke that cavanagh could not take: i never played better in my life, and yet i can’t win a game. i don’t know how it is!” however, they played on, cavanagh winning every game, and the bystanders drinking the cider and laughing all the time. in the twelfth game, when cavanagh was only four, and the stranger thirteen, a person came in and said, “what! are you here, cavanagh?” the words were no sooner pronounced than the astonished player let the hall drop from his hand, and saying, “what! have i been breaking my heart all this time to beat cavanagh?” refused to make another effort. “and yet, i give you my word,” said cavanagh, telling the story with some triumph, “i played all the while with my clenched fist.”— he used frequently to ploy matches at copenhagen house for wagers and dinners. the wall against which they play is the same that supports the kitchen-chimney, and when the wall resounded louder than usual, the cooks exclaimed, “those are the irishman’s balls,” and the joints trembled on the spit! — goldsmith consoled himself that there were places where he too was admired: and cavanagh was the admiration of all the fives-courts where he ever played. mr. powell, when he played matches in the court in st. martin’s street, used to fill his gallery at half a crown a head with amateurs and admirers of talent in whatever department it is shown. he could not have shown himself in any ground in england but he would have been immediately surrounded with inquisitive gazers, trying to find out in what part of his frame his unrivalled skill lay, as politicians wonder to see the balance of europe suspended in lord castlereagh’s face, and admire the trophies of the british navy lurking under mr. croker’s hanging brow. now cavanagh was as good-looking a man as the noble lord, and much better looking than the right hon. secretary. he had a clear, open countenance, and did not look sideways or down, like mr. murray the bookseller. he was a young fellow of sense, humour, and courage. he once had a quarrel with a waterman at hungerford stairs, and, they say, served him out in great style. in a word, there are hundreds at this day who cannot mention his name without admiration, as the best fives-player that perhaps ever lived (the greatest excellence of which they have any notion); and the noisy shout of the ring happily stood him in stead of the unheard voice of posterity! — the only person who seems to have excelled as much in another way as cavanagh did in his was the late john davies, the racket-player. it was remarked of him that he did not seem to follow the ball, but the ball seemed to follow him. give him a foot of wall, and he was sure to make the ball. the four best racket-players of that day were jack spines, jem harding, armitage, and church. davies could give any one of these two hands a time, that is, half the game, and each of these, at their best, could give the best player now in london the same odds. such are the gradations in all exertions of human skill and art. he once played four capital players together, and beat them. he was also a first-rate tennis-player and an excellent fives-player. in the fleet or king’s bench he would have stood against powell, who was reckoned the best open-ground player of his time. this last-mentioned player is at present the keeper of the fives-court, and we might recommend to him for a motto over his door, “who enters here, forgets himself, his country, and his friends.” and the best of it is, that by the calculation of the odds, none of the three are worth remembering! — cavanagh died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, which prevented him from playing for the last two or three years. this, he was often heard to say, he thought hard upon him. he was fast recovering, however, when he was suddenly carried off, to the regret of all who knew him. as mr. peel made it a qualification of the present speaker, mr. manners sutton, that he was an excellent moral character, so jack cavanagh was a zealous catholic, and could not be persuaded to eat meat on a friday, the day on which he died. we have paid this willing tribute to his memory.

let no rude hand deface it,

and his forlorn “hic jacet.”’