The Pleasures of the Dull

1874

Tormented by the pains of thinking, I have often envied the placid peace of those who cannot think at all. How delightful it must be, I have said to myself, to be able to hold the most utterly contradictory views on all things, divine and human, without the faintest suspicion as to their inconsistency, or any logical horror of inconsistency itself! Women, with occasional exceptions, are not much troubled by such inconsistencies. Are they, therefore, less happy than men? How soothing it must be to be hopelessly incapable of syllogisms! What pangs is not a mind spared that refuses to admit that if A is B, and C is A, therefore C is also B! What admirable wives and mothers and daughters there are, and what praiseworthy country parsons too, to whom all this bepuzzlement about A, B, and C, is as unintelligible as a conjurer's gibberish! Supposing it were suddenly proved that all our astronomers are wrong, and that the sun really goes round the earth, what horrible agonies should we thinking people endure who believe in mathematics and the multiplication-table, and what a hideous skepticism would darken the rest of our lives! Yet the unthinking multitude would be unmoved by a single painful thought, and would dress, dine, digest, and sleep as unconcernedly as if Copernicus and Newton had never existed.

Then, again, there is that enviable capacity for enjoying many things which in my unfortunate state of culture, I do detest. I never walk through an old house, filled with eighteenth-century furniture, without envying the simplicity and credulity of my ancestors. How easily must that generation have been pleased which saw beauty in those spindle-legged chairs and tables, and which could plaster up a Gothic roof or screen, and paint some venerable oak-carving a pale-blue color, and find itself refreshed by the effect! There are limits, indeed, to one's envy of the non-culture — I will not call it the barbarism — of the past. By no possible effort of sympathy can I wish to feel as those felt who delighted to contemplate King George IV., in his tight coat and silk stockings, sitting upon his royal sofa, with arm outstretched, as depicted by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

As to the amount of happiness connected with the mutabilities of ladies' dress, on the other hand, my thoughts are much exercised. Does it, or does it not, add to the enjoyment of one's whole life to be able to be equally delighted with a mass of false hair of reddish hue at the back of one's head, and a mass of false hair, made white with powder, on the top of one's head, and a head without any false hair at all? Take the whole amount of rapture which one has ever experienced from the contemplation of the Venus of Milo, and consider whether it is equal, in the long-run, to the daily self-complacency of the simple soul that is conscious of being always clothed as fashion demands, whether fashion prescribes four-and- twenty inches or three yards as the diameter of her gown. I go, perhaps, to a gayly-dressed evening gathering, where every woman, whether old or young, is decolletee, in varying degrees of exposure. What necks do I see! What shoulders! What complexions! Yet are not those smiling creatures happy, whose skins are as nearly as possible the same color as their dresses? Is the enjoyment of that amiable female marred by the thought that she has clothed herself in a hue which brings out most forcibly the sad fact that time is beginning its ravages upon her face and aims? And are women generally to be pitied because they are for the most part unaware of the fact that good-looking arms are not common, and that arms which are not good-looking had better be encased in some pleasant-looking sleeves than paraded before the public gaze? These are difficult questions for him to settle who speculates on the advantages of the culture of today. — Cornhill.

Comment: Do you have any idea what this poor unfortunate person is talking about?